While in the US the visibility of women in technology startups is pretty well established, in Europe it’s suffered a little from the more general problem of the fragmented nature of the European tech scene. Things have improved slightly in recent years (at least that’s my impression, although who knows about the stats on the ground?), but it remains the case that there are far more men than women. So lifting the visibility of women in technology is no bad thing, especially if it encourages other women to pursue careers in tech startups, which are typically more about meritocratic, flat management that the traditional “IT” roles.
So it’s a welcome moment that the newly established Girls in Tech London group (@girlsintech_uk) has announced their pick of the Top 100 women in tech in Europe. → Read More
Property startup Zoopla and the A&N Media (DMGT)-owned Digital Property Group (Findaproperty / Primelocation) have formally completed their merger following approval by the UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT). The transaction, which was agreed last October, had been pending subject to clearance from the OFT which was granted in April.
The deal creates a property giant which now takes on Rightmove, currently the market leader in the UK. → Read More
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MoneySupermarket, a UK-based price comparison site for financial services, is acquiring advice site MoneySavingExpert from founder Martin Lewis, for £87 million ($133 million).
Lewis, a personal finance journalist, launched MoneySavingExpert in 2003. According to the site’s Google Analytics metrics it gets 39 million unique visitors and about 277 million page impressions a month. That makes it a powerful player and Lewis has parlayed this into books and TV shows in the UK. → Read More
Today comes news of a small but indicative acquisition in the area of daily deals: the UK-based deals aggregator Coupobox has been bought by rival site DealCollector for a song: the price was in the “lower six figures,” according to Stavros Prodromou, the founder and former CEO of the company.
The acquisition is a sign of how consolidation in the sector is hitting aggregators, too. Counting flash sales and private buying clubs with daily deals, there are an estimated 105 sites in the UK alone, with 1,400 across all of Europe, and there will likely be more companies bought or cast by the wayside going forward. ”From the consumer point of view we are currently too overloaded with daily deals,” says Prodromou.
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LeWeb has just published its agenda for its new June 19-20 event in London and it’s looking good. The theme this year is “Faster Than Real Time” and will feature a host of big names from the world of tech as well as a Startup Competition. Amongst the names will be globally known chef and food activist Jamie Oliver who has used online extensively in his healthy eating campaigns.
Joining him will be many others, including our own TechCrunch co-editors Eric Eldon and Alexia Tsotsis, as well as Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder & CEO, Instagram; Brent Hoberman, Co-Founder, PROfounders Capital; Bradley Horowitz, VP of Google; Robert Scoble; Michael Arrington, TechCrunch Founder and CrunchFund; Shervin Pishevar, Menlo Ventures; Martin Varsavsky, Fon; and numerous other big names. The full agenda has just been published here. Tickets are also on sale here.
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Some enterprise IT consolidation afoot, and a sign of the business crunch that the enterprise market has witnessed in the last year. CGI Corporation, an IT services firm based in Canada, has made an all-cash offer of $2.6 billion (£1.7 billion) to buy UK rival Logica, a deal that would create one more IT services powerhouse to rival the likes of IBM, Accenture and KPMG.
The offer represents a premium of 60 percent on Logica’s closing share price yesterday. Logica, one of Europe’s biggest IT services firms, has hit the rocks in the last year, with profit shrinking to £32.7 million ($50.6m) from £192.9 million ($299m) the year before on the back of IT cuts in the public sector, a key vertical for the company. It also laid off some 1,300 people in 2011. And margins for IT services — a challenge for all IT services companies — shrank to 2.2 percent from over eight percent in Logica’s main UK business.
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Talk about coincidence. Just earlier this week, in a post on Facebook and the possibility of buying web browsing company Opera and facial recognition company Face.com, we highlighted how a new version of Opera Mini would feature much stronger social integration — specifically aimed at the feature phone segment — both key points for Facebook. Today, Opera came good with a full release of that Opera Mini browser, Opera Mini 7 (but still has no official comment on those acquisition reports).
As expected, the new browser is aimed not at Apple and Android-based smartphones but more “basic” devices — specifically those built on Java ME, Nokia’s S60 and BlackBerry (yes, Opera categorizes RIM’s smartphone as basic). Opera is using the release to incorporate some new, key social features on a new Smart Page to increase the time spent by users on its own pages and in its browser. → Read More
ShareMyPlaylists was the first site to allow the sharing of Spotify playlists (launched 2009). It’s now relaunched its music discovery Spotify app based its 91,000 hand-curated playlists. The site competes with the record label Spotify apps like Digster (from Universal Music) and Filtr (Sony Music) but its advantage is that it allows music from all labels and allows user generated content – something the labels get nervous about. → Read More
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The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups have tried to tackle.
ShareAGift in the UK focuses on joint gift purchases, but is more an affiliate gift sales model. In the US there is WePay and PayDivvy, both of which err on the side of being deposit account providers. WePay has moved to being a B2B play, trying to woo small merchants away from PayPal. In France there is Leetchi and FriendFund in Berlin. Many have substantial backing from VCs.
Now, Payumi in the UK is poised to come out of public beta and hopes to cover all the ‘group payment’ bases and has sealed a £150,000 ($186,000) round of seed funding taking its total seed funding to £250,000. → Read More
It’s been fascinating to watch the proliferation of photo apps before and since the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook. EyeEm has a beautiful app which makes tagging images to locations ridiculously simple (plus all that filter goodness). LoopCam makes hilarious photo loops you want to share with your friends. Now SlickFlick has appeared with an iOS app to help you create fun stories around your pictures. [download from iTunes here]
The boot-strapped startup was founded by Maria Constantinescu who has been relentless in pushing her vision for the last two years and today she lands a big-brother partner in the shape of the Getty image library. → Read More
In the midst of Amazon’s recent moves to rapidly grow its content collection on Amazon Prime Instant Video, the company has also been brokering deals for another one of its video properties: European Netflix competitor LOVEFiLM. Today, the company is announcing a new multi-year deal with NBCUniversal International Television Distribution, which will offer LOVEFiLM members access to streaming titles from Universal Pictures during the second pay window.
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SkySQL plans to be something of a thorn in Oracle’s side. As you’ll recall MySQL, which as a free database platform annoyed Oracle, was sold to Sun and then Oracle bought Sun. That was supposed to keep a lid on things. Now with MySQL under its wing, Oracle plans to move those MySQL users over to Oracle databases in due course. But it can’t push things too hard due to EU competition rules in place for the next five years. So guess what? That gives SkySQL – backed previously by the former founders of MySQL – a window to come back and start re-supporting all those dedicated die-hard Sun/MySQL fans. They’re baaack…..
And to do it they’ve raised an additional €2 million in Series A funding from California Technology Ventures, LLC (CTV). This takes SkySQL’s war chest to €6 million and will mean they can expand their business supporting existing MySQL users. → Read More
Today PayPal opened up a new front in its strategy to expand its role in mobile payments, a business PayPal projects will generate it $7 billion in revenue this year. The eBay-owned payments company today launched a new retail mobile payments app for iOS and Android devices, PayPal InStore, where users can create barcodes that get scanned to deduct payments from users’ PayPal accounts. Available only in the UK, clothing chains Coast, Oasis, Warehouse, and Karen Millen are the first to sign on to the service, and PayPal tells me there are no plans to add NFC to the app any time soon.
PayPal InStore underscores some of the challenges that remain with NFC technology. Yesterday, Gartner presented a picture of a $172-billion mobile payments industry that is still largely based around older technologies like SMS and web-based payments, with newer services like NFC chips playing a very marginal role. And Juniper Research today noted that transactions made on NFC phones in North America and Western Europe will account for less than two percent of all mobile payments this year.
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Another funding announcement that underscores what big business kids’ and educational apps can be. Mindshapes, a UK-based developer of interactive learning apps, has picked up a $4 million round of funding led by Index Ventures, with Richmond Park Partners and existing investors also participating.
The news caps off an eventful couple of weeks for Mindshapes. Earlier in the month, it had launched a flagship app, Magic Town, which Mindshapes calls the first virtual world based on picture book characters. Magic Town, a highly visual app, incorporates content licensed from Hachette Group, Simon & Schuster and Penguin Group, among others, into e-learning tasks. Mindshapes is ramping up content on Magic Town quickly: it currently contains content from 70 popular picture books but aims to have 200 titles in there by year’s end.
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Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out today from the boutique French consulting firm faberNovel, which encourages us to look at the bigger picture, and why, in its words, Facebook is “the perfect startup.”
The mammoth slideshow is an annual thing for faberNovel, which picks one company to tackle each year — others have included how Amazon controls e-commerce, how Apple dominates, and what could go wrong with Google. Like those before, the one out today on Facebook is a deep-dive into the company, and it looks not just at the origins of the social network, but what sets it apart from other attempts at global social networks — and other startups. (And by the way, faberNovel sees all this drama and attention on the IPO as just “one point on a startup trajectory.” Some investors may not feel quite the same.)
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An Irish women’s charity, Women’s Aid, linked to some articles on the Irish Examiner (like this, this, and this) and thought that all was right with the world. Heck, that’s how the Internet works, right?
It turns out that according to the Irish Newspaper Licensing organization, you need to pay to link to the newspapers. And there the troubles begin.
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In the aftermath-analysis about what exactly happened in the Facebook IPO, and what it might mean for the future, here’s one side-effect to the east of Nasdaq: Vkontake, the top social network in Russia, which shares a shareholder with Facebook, Mail.ru, has decided to delay its own IPO.
The news was confirmed by the company’s CEO Pavel Durov on Twitter. In Russian, he tweeted, in answer to a Russian journalist’s question about the planned IPO date, “It’s not planned. The IPO of Facebook has destroyed the faith of a lot of private investors in social networks and the IPO of VK has now been postponed indefinitely.”
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No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.
Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services.
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We’re currently used to more drama-oriented stories coming out of Yahoo!, but that doesn’t mean business hasn’t entirely halted there. Yamli is a service which offers a smart Arabic keyboard that allows users who type in Latin characters to find -in real-time – the most accurate equivalent Arabic term. It debuted in 2007 but has become an important part of a market which serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The platform also offers services to help navigating the ‘Arabic web’.
Today Yahoo has acquired a license to use Yamli for its Arabic service, Yahoo! Maktoob, which will see it integrate Yamli’s existing technologies into a new product, “3arrebni,” or “Arabize me” in other words. → Read More
As the heat around the “Facebook Phone” story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, it transpired that Facebook was working with INQ Mobile on a smartphone. The phone duly emerged – the INQ1 – and did indeed have great Facebook integration. Even if it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit, it’s fared well enough.
Indeed, HTC has also released their own “Facebook” phone, such HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa respectively. INQ’s runs on Google’s Android operating system, but with deeper Facebook integration.
When asked about the INQ phone back in 2010, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t “some massive big thing”. But quite clearly, a phone is now firmly on the agenda. → Read More
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