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The Head Of TechStars London, Jon Bradford, Is Leaving For New Pastures
As Jon Bradford, head of TechStars London, hosts their annual Demo Day in a well-worn old cinema in East London, TechCrunch has learned that this will be his last in the role. Independent sources have confirmed that Bradford is leaving the TechStars network to pursue new opportunities, though his next move remains a mystery. Bradford gave me a “no comment” on the story today… Read More
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Grabble Closes $1.8M Angel Round For Its Tinder-like Fashion Shopping App
Various startups out there are trying to create either an Instagram or Tinder for fashion, ultimately leading the buyer towards a purchase. This is the Holy Grail and you will easily uncover a multitude of companies trying to achieve something along these lines, even though the approaches and business models vary. In Europe the main players are new-ish startups like ASAP 54 (a TechCrunch… Read More
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Reach Combines Anonymous Chat With Keyword Self-Tagging For Context
Make way for another hyper local anonymous chat app. Reach, which has just launched on iOS, has been built by an Israeli-based startup, using $250,000 in pre-seed money from friends and family to cover their development costs. The team is looking to raise a seed round as it seeks to gain traction with its spin on anon. Read More
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Geeksphone Is Getting Into Wearables — With A Sex Tracker
Spanish smartphone maker Geeksphone, perhaps best know for its partnership with Silent Circle over the pro-privacy Android fork Blackphone, is expanding from handsets into fitness wearable Read More
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Secret Media Makes Ad Blockers Useless To Display Those Sweet, Sweet Pre-Roll Video Ads
Chances are that you installed an ad blocking extension to skip YouTube’s pre-roll video ads. But now, many media companies suffer from these ad blockers and have no choice but to switch to a freemium model or find a way to shove some ads down your throat. Meet Secret Media, an advertising technology startup specialized in advertising encryption so that even the most sophisticated ad… Read More
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Entrepreneur First Hatches Latest Startups, Partners With Media Power Players
There are plenty of accelerators these days. And it’s commonly known that value created out of Y Combinator is enormous compared to the next nearest competitor in the space, often considered to be Tech Stars. So if you aren’t YC, what do you do? A couple of years ago Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck of London-based accelerator Entrepreneur First hit on a different idea. Their… Read More
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Triptease Raises $2M To Help Hotels Increase Direct Bookings
I’ve often wondered why hotels don’t do a better job at direct selling, rather than letting a plethora of travel sites and hotel booking aggregators, such as Booking.com and Expedia, cream off the top of their profits by means of affiliate revenue. Once I find a hotel I like — and one that meets my particular accessibility needs — I have little incentive to shop around… Read More
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Plumbr, The Java Performance Monitoring Startup, Picks Up Backing From Skype Co-Founder Jaan Tallinn
It would be lazy of me to call Plumbr‘s latest funding round another example of the ‘Skype mafia’ in action. But, already backed by former head of Skype Estonia, Sten Tamkivi, the Estonian startup is adding Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn to its list of backers. Read More
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WorldRemit Raises $100M To Take On Western Union In Money Transfers
WorldRemit, a UK-based startup that is going after the Western Unions and MoneyGrams of the world with a commission-beating online and mobile remittance service, has raised another $100 million — funding that it will use to continue building out its service globally, and specifically in the U.S., where it has laid down roots in Denver. The funding comes from new investor Technology… Read More
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Backed By A16Z, London-Based Money Transfer Startup TransferWise Finally Launches In The U.S.
TransferWise, the London-based “P2P” money transfer startup that recently raised a further $58 million led by Andreessen Horowitz has made good on its promise to cross the pond with a full U.S. launch. The company, which also counts Sir Richard Branson, Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Index Ventures, IA Ventures, and Seedcamp as backers, was widely expected to begin… Read More
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Raspberry Pi Sales Pass 5 Million
A round of applause for the U.K.-made Raspberry Pi microcomputer — which has just passed the 5 million sales mark, some three years after it was first launched with the over-modest goal of selling “a few thousand” Pi over its entire lifetime, as creator Eben Upton has said. How wrong can you be, and how good must that feel? Read More
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XYZE’s Smart Measuring Tape Wants To Solve The Clothes Shopping Size Problem
Italian startup XYZE (“size”) is currently crowd funding what it’s calling a smart “wearable” measuring tape. Dubbed “On”, the rather neat-looking gadget aims to help solve the clothes shopping size problem, whereby, when shopping for clothes online, the clothes you buy end up being the wrong size. Read More
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Cisco Will Invest $100 Million In French Startups
France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls announced yesterday a thorough partnership with Cisco for the coming years. Among other things, Cisco CEO John Chambers said that the company is taking tiny steps to ramp up its investments in French startups, starting by investing $100 million in multiple French startups over the coming years. There are two interesting tidbits behind today’s news. Read More
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Sparrow Flies Away, As Google Finally Pulls iOS And Mac Email Apps From Apple’s Stores
As Google sharpens the focus on its new Inbox email app, the company has quietly made another move on the email front: it appears to have pulled the Sparrow iOS and Mac apps from their respective Apple App Stores. Google, as you may remember, acquired the French startup Sparrow, including its staff, its email management apps and its technology, back in 2012. Google’s last cache of… Read More
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Social Shopping App Shopa Secures $11M Series A To Scale Internationally
So-called ‘social shopping marketplaces’ have slowly emerged as smartphone and tablet adoption has risen. The heady combination of social networks and shopping never seemed to work that well on the web, but on mobile they have proven to have more of the potential that was always promised but rarely delivered, simply because of the better user interface. One such company is… Read More
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Distribusion Wants To Make Selling Intercity Bus Tickets As Easy As Selling Flights
Similar to SilverRail, the startup that is building a platform to consolidate passenger rail ticket booking and search across Europe and beyond, newly-launched Distribusion wants to make it as easy for travel companies to sell ‘intercity’ bus tickets as it is to sell flights. Read More
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WeTransfer, Funky Dutch Cousin Of Dropbox And Box, Gets $25M To Go Large In The U.S.
WeTransfer, the Dutch cloud-based web and mobile service that lets users send files to each other that are too large to send as email attachments, has raised $25 million, the first and only round of funding raised by the Amsterdam-based startup since opening for business in 2009. As a bootstrapped company, WeTransfer has picked up 25 million monthly active users that send 70 million… Read More
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1.2B Smartphones Sold In 2014, Led By Larger Screens And Latin America
Apple is reaping the biggest rewards right now when it comes to selling its smartphones and other devices, but the overall picture for the smartphone market in the year ahead may be a little less rosy. According to the analysts at Germany-based GfK, in 2014 there were 1.2 billion smartphones sold, up 23% on the year before and crossing the billion-unit point for the first time. But… Read More
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Privately Takes An Ephemeral Sharing Pitch To Telcos
A Swiss spin-out startup from security firm Kudelski has relaunched its controlled social photo-sharing app, rebranding it as Privately. The earlier timebombing iOS app — called Secret.li — also let users share visually encrypted photos on mainstream social networks in an ephemeral way, choosing to have the photos disappear after a pre-set interval. Read More
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Julie Desk Is An Email-Based Virtual Assistant To Help You Schedule Meetings And Appointments
From the same French startup behind WePopp, an app that makes it easier for friends to plan events together, comes Julie Desk, a new ‘virtual assistant’ to handle the back-and-forth typically associated with scheduling meetings and appointments. Read More
