It may be a holiday in the U.S. but eBay never sleeps. Today, the American e-commerce giant announced that it is buying 2dehands.be and 2ememain.be, the two biggest online classified sites in Belgium (their names mean “second hand” in Flemish and French). Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but we’re trying to find out (we’ll update as/when we learn more). → Read More
Appysnap is taking a second bite at the social gaming cherry. The first version of the photo-snapping challenge-based game for iOS launched back in 2011 before its creators decided to shutter it, having run out of money bootstrapping. Now they’re back — with a relaunched app — having attracted some external funding from Paul Nikkel, founder of Quidco, as well as putting in more of their own. → Read More
A Facebook phone isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? An Internet of Things-styled ‘Like’ counter for local businesses who want to proudly display their Facebook page metrics. Admittedly, it doesn’t quite have the same ring to it, but the Fliike, from French startup Smiirl, not only looks cool but serves an interesting purpose by providing a bridge between a venue’s virtual presence and its physical… → Read More
Europe is better positioned as a place to create Bitcoin-based startups than the US. That was the message coming out of Bitcoin London today, the first major conference in London to address startups, investors and business models of the online currency. Covering the broad sweep of businesses, technologists and institutions involved in the Bitcoin space, the conference heard that the US may have… → Read More
It’s just under five months since the announcement of TechStars London, the UK outpost of Boulder, U.S.-based uber-accelerator TechStars after it merged with Jon Bradford’s Springboard. Today TechStars London is unveiling its first cohort, giving us a glimpse at how things are shaping up post-merger. → Read More
After a month of testing, Opera’s radically new browser exits beta stage and is now available to download on Opera.com. Now based on the Chromium project, Opera 15 shares a lot of similarities with Google Chrome. The company hopes to compete on features to attract new users — but it’s not there yet. → Read More
After shuttering its platform that enabled independent chefs to sell home-cooked meals as an alternative to a traditional take-out, the UK startup is rebooting for a third time today with its own twist on the recipe kit idea, which at first glance pits it against Rocket Internet’s HelloFresh and local player Gousto. → Read More
IT spend globally — from devices through to data center investments and the services that run on them — it set to reach $3.7 trillion in 2013, but that represents shrinking growth of only 2% on 2012, as more expensive items like PCs and on-premise software continue to get pushed out by less expensive, newer things like lower-cost tablets and cloud services. Gartner, the analyst house publishing… → Read More
Another turn in the twisted life of social network Bebo, which has unfortunately gone in the direction of a downward spiral for much of the last couple of years: the site appears to have been bought back by its founder Michael Birch for $1 million. Birch originally sold the company to AOL (owners of TechCrunch) for some $850 million back in 2008, and has since been a part of the group that has… → Read More
The first phone running Mozilla’s Firefox OS phone goes on sale tomorrow in Spain. Mozilla’s nascent open web HTML 5 mobile platform has garnered considerable carrier support already, months ahead of any phones being launched, which just serves to underline the level of concern in the mobile industry about how dominant Google’s Android platform has become. → Read More
Back in February at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow a plethora of carriers pledged their support for Mozilla’s HTML-5 open web mobile platform, Firefox OS, which is hoping to shake up the low-end smartphone segment. Today, the launch date of the first commercial Firefox OS phone has been confirmed: the ZTE Open will go on sale tomorrow in Spain, on Telefonica’s Movistar network. → Read More
In a blog post published today, Seedrs, the UK site that makes it easy to invest in early-stage startups, sheds some light on what it takes to reach the required tipping point to get funded through its equity-based crowdfunding platform. → Read More
While others in the online food delivery space stumble, Delivery Hero is helping itself to some fresh financing today: the online take-out ordering service has announced $30 million in additional Series D funding, led by Phenomen Ventures with support from existing investors. The follow-on funding comes almost a year after it closed a $50 million Series D led by Kite Ventures. → Read More
Google is grappling with an ongoing antitrust case in Europe over its online search business, and if its rivals have anything to do with it, that might extend into Google’s power in the mobile sphere, too. Figures out today from Kantar Worldpanel may not help Google’s case very much. The analysts say that in the last three months, Google-powered smartphones, running Android, accounted for more… → Read More
The NSA/Prism controversy rumbles on. Today the European Parliament President Martin Schulz said there could be a severe impact on EU-US relations if the claims that the US had bugged EU offices in America and accessed computer networks turned out to be true. He’s said he’s ‘deeply worried’ about the issue and called for clarification from the US over the stories that have appeared. → Read More
Microsoft went big on pushing cloud services this week at its Build conference, but today it was dealt a blow for how it might get to market them in Europe. BSkyB, the pay-TV broadcaster part-owned by News Corp., won a judgement in the England and Wales High Court against the U.S. software giant, for infringing the “Sky” trademark. → Read More
It’s not every VC that publishes annual stats on things like deal-flow, average size of investment, average founder salary, number of exits and startups dead-pooled. But openness — within no doubt carefully crafted limits — is part of London-based Passion Capital‘s brand after it set the bar with its inaugural report last year. → Read More
The well-worn theory known as the 1% rule dictates that the number of people creating content within an Internet community represents only about 1% of the people consuming it. In other words — shock! horror! — most people consume a lot more content than they ever contribute. Reflecting a similar pattern, whereby only 25% of its users are uploading playlists versus the 75% who use the service… → Read More
The emergence of NumberFour in Berlin – which has today announced a $38m Series A round – throws up a few interesting points worth briefly dwelling on. It may be the case that we are looking at a tipping point in the European tech startup scene, which will play out over the next few years. Indeed, this business platform may be Europe’s answer to the global consumer platform created by Google and… → Read More
NumberFour, founded in 2009 by former senior Yahoo executive Marco Boerries in Berlin to re-engineer small business processes, has secured an enormous $38 million in Series A financing led by Index Ventures, specifically Mike Volpi. Volpi Participating in the round is Allen&Co, T-Venture/Deutsche Telekom, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, former Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Klaus Hommels and Lars… → Read More
Chalk up another point for the growth of apps coming out of Israel that are focused on consumers, but draw on the country’s better-known heritage for producing big data and enterprise startups. Wibbitz, a platform that draws on natural language technology, artificial intelligence and some clever algorithms to automatically translate texts into videos, is today launching a consumer-focused app. → Read More
Microsoft continues to throw money down the Windows Phone well, perhaps buoyed by signs its ongoing marketing and platform support efforts are shifting the needle a few fractions. Today more evidence — presumably — of Ballmer’s money-throwing commitment to make its smartphone OS stick: carrier Telefonica has announced it will be collaborating with Microsoft to “promote and foster sales” of WP8. → Read More
Contentful, a startup out of Berlin, is today releasing a beta of a platform that it hopes will be the future of how companies manage their content in a multi-screened world, where nearly any physical object has a shot at being a piece of “hardware.” It is also announcing a seed round of an undisclosed amount from Balderton and Zendesk backer Point Nine Capital to help further that vision. → Read More
India pushed past Japan to become the third largest global smartphone market in Q1, according to a new report by Strategy Analytics. The analyst notes it’s the first time ever that India has moved up into third place. The top two worldwide markets for smartphones remain China and the U.S. → Read More
Video — as Instagram’s recent launch, Yahoo’s would-be and actual acquisitions, and others’ new content initiatives show — is a hot property today, with more people than ever before consuming video online, and advertisers scrambling to catch that wave. While Google’s YouTube is by far the biggest player in this space, video — like the medium itself — is a moving target that will see a number… → Read More
The European data protection activists behind the Europe v Facebook (evf) campaign group, that has long been a thorn in Facebook’s side in Europe, have filed new complaints under regional data protection law targeting Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo for their alleged collaboration with the NSA’s Prism data collection program. → Read More
It looks like it may be back to the drawing board for Google on the European competitive front: hundreds of publishers and publishing trade associations today are coming out in force to ask the European Commission and its Vice President Joaquín Almunia to “reject outright” Google’s draft remedies, which Google submitted to the EC as its offer for rebalancing competition in search and other… → Read More
It’s not too often that a startup from ‘down under’ up roots to join an accelerator in Europe and then gets funded before graduating. Enter online book publishing platform 7write, which originally hails from Australia but has since relocated to the Netherlands after being accepted into accelerator Startupbootcamp’s Amsterdam program. Graduating teams don’t present until Demo day this Friday, but… → Read More
You can’t really keep a good entrepreneur from continuing to launch companies. That appears to be the case once again with Stephen Rapoport. Rapoport previously built and sold the apartment-sharing site Crashpadder to Airbnb, but has since got itchy feet once again after exiting a few months ago. And what started out as a hobby business to keep him interested before the next big thing has turned… → Read More
The latest Facebook data breach — which exposed personal contact information Facebook had harvested on 6M of its users — is a reminder that even if you’re not handing over all your contact data to Facebook, Facebook is obtaining that data anyway. And even if you’re not on Facebook yourself, your contact data likely is because it’s building a shadow profile of you by data-mining others. → Read More
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