-
Now Sidestage Joins Gigit In The Race To Empower Bands To Get Gigs
Gigit, a platform allowing venue owners or hosts to book both well-known and up-and-coming bands for private shows, was unofficially at SXSW earlier this year after organising private shows for Path, Ashton Kutcher and Spotify. On Gigit, you pick an artist, a date, answer questions about the venue, the vibe they want etc. It then charges the host and takes a small fee from the artist. But… Read More
-
On The Importance Of Forgetting
The ongoing debate about Europe’s so-called ‘right to be forgotten’ ruling on search engines has shone a light onto a key pressure point between technology and society. Simply put the ability of digital technology to remember clashes with the human societal need to forgive and forget. Read More
-
Rocket Internet’s Easy Taxi Raises $40M Series D To Expand In Asia, Latin America
Easy Taxi, Rocket Internet’s taxi calling app, announced today that it has raised a Series D round of $40 million, led by Phenomen Ventures with participation from Tengelmann Ventures, the investment arm of German retail giant Tengelmann Group. This brings Easy Taxi’s total raised so far to $77 million as Rocket Internet seeks to establish Easy Taxi’s presence in emerging… Read More
-
TechCrunch Helsinki Meetup Sees Finland’s New Startup Generation
Finland has a rich heritage in technology. Whatever crisis of confidence the masters of Nokia had, eventually leading to its gutting by Microsoft, that long heritage has served it well, giving rise to a several generations of engineers and, increasingly, entrepreneurs. Now a new generation is emerging in Finland, emboldened by local heroes and successes. This new generation started appearing a… Read More
-
Google Granting Around Half Europe’s Search De-Index Requests — But Won’t Show Its Workings
Following a meeting between European regulators and search engines yesterday, to discuss the latter group’s implementation of a recent European Court of Justice privacy ruling, it has emerged that Google has received around 91,000 requests from Europeans to de-index personal information that is outdated or irrelevant, with requests relating to a total of around 328,000 links. Read More
-
Secret Escapes Acquires My City Venue To Add More Events To Luxury Travel Club
Secret Escapes, the UK luxury travel ‘flash sales’ site that offers members heavy discounts on luxury hotels and holidays, has quietly acquired 3 year old My City Venue to bolster the events side of its business. Read More
-
The Server Needs To Die To Save The Internet
Do we have the Internet we deserve? There’s an argument to say that yes, we absolutely do. Given web users’ general reluctance to pay for content. We are of course, paying. Just not with cold hard cash, but with our privacy — as digital business models rely on gathering and selling intel on their users to make the money to pay (the investors who paid) for the free service. Read More
-
Glow Raises $7M Series A From Notion Capital And White Star
It was only in January last year that UK startup Glow Digital Media, a social advertising platform that sells services to Facebook advertisers to grow their marketing ROI, closed a $1.3 million seed funding round. Investors in the round include Germany’s Project A Ventures and the UK’s Avonmore Developments. It’s Glow Platform product gives advertises tools to create and… Read More
-
Dropbox Gets Down To Business, Adds More Sharing Features And Search For Enterprises
Dropbox, now at 300 million users globally, says that there are 4 million businesses today using its cloud-based platform to store, distribute and share documents. But of those, only around 80,000 have opted so far to use Dropbox for Business, the company’s premium enterprise tier launched earlier this year. Today, the startup is making a move to sweeten the deal, unveiling a host of… Read More
-
PayPal Expands Its Working Capital Service To UK, Switches From Loans To Cash Advances
As payments platforms look for more ways to grow their margins and usage among businesses, they continue to push into a wider and deeper range of financial services. In one of the latest moves, eBay’s PayPal is expanding its Working Capital service to the UK. This is its first market for PayPal’s lending platform outside of the U.S., where it first launched the service in… Read More
Europe Writers
TCTV
-
Quandoo Closes $25M Growth Financing Round To Take On OpenTable
OpenTable is the main real-time reservation platform for restaurants, but it’s an old incumbent and there is plenty of opportunity out there. New startup Quandoo wants to address this area and today it’s close its Series $25m growth financing round lead by Piton Capital and affiliates. It will use this cash to extend its market Germany, Austria and Italy across Europe as well… Read More
-
Liberio Launches New eBook Publishing Platform Based On Google Drive
Liberio is a new platform (launching today out of private beta) for simple eBook creation and publishing straight from Google Drive. Liberio could be used to create anything form a eBook, magazine, school project, you name it, and from publishing to distributing the finished product. Its competitors including Leanpub and Inkling are already established, but Liberio is hoping that its approach… Read More
-
Urban Massage Rubs Shoulders With Passion Capital For Seed Round
Urban Massage, a UK startup that bears more than a little resemblance to U.S.-based Zeel after the latter pivoted to offer an on-demand, Uber-style, massage service, has raised an undisclosed seed round from London VC Passion Capital. Read More
-
Meet The UK Startup That’s Taking On Big Pharma — With Digital Medicine
Five years ago Peter Hames had chronic insomnia. Today he’s the co-founder of Big Health, a multi-million dollar VC-backed startup that’s setting out to create a new category of healthcare — under the self-defined banner of ‘digital medicine’. Read More
-
London Startup Jinn Raises $200K Seed Round For Local On-Demand Delivery App
Four months after bootstrapping a London launch, which saw its co-founders initially jumping on a scooter to deliver customer orders themselves, local on-demand delivery app Jinn has raised a modest seed round of $200,000, to be used primarily for customer acquisition. Thus far the startup says it’s doing around 1,000 orders per month, with little to no money spent on marketing. Read More
-
Bigpoint Acquires Little Worlds Studio To Place Bigger Bet On Mobile Gaming
Bigpoint, the European free-to-play online gaming company, is placing a bigger bet on mobile gaming: It’s acquired France’s Little Worlds Studio, maker of mobile titles such as Color Cross Online and Mana Crusher, in a move that will see Bigpoint establish a dedicated mobile games studio in Lyon. Read More
-
Startupbootcamp Names The Ten Startups In Its First London Fintech Program
Startupbootcamp has just announced the first cohort of ten startups that will participate in the 2014 program of its London-based fintech accelerator. The startups that have made the cut for the inaugural three-month mentoring program include teams from Europe, Africa and the US. Read More
-
Sparta Lets Sales Managers Run Sales Competitions Without The Admin Burden
Gamification could be considered a slightly passé buzzword these days. However, if there’s one area where it’s still and has always been relevant, it’s sales. Why? As Sparta co-founder and CEO James Pember says, “Sales is already a game — each rep starts the month at 0, and must ‘level-up’ to reach their targets and goals.” Read More
-
Taptalk Taps Phone Contacts To Add Friends, And A New Game Emerges
One of the issues I’ve been grappling with with the Taptalk social photos and location app, is that although it’s super simple and addictive — way more so that Snapchat I’d say — adding friends until now has been a chore. You had to literally type people’s handles in to the app. But, good news fellow Taptalkers! A new update to the Beta version of the app… Read More
-
Premium Not Freemium: iPad Game Monument Valley Passes 1M Downloads
Going against the freemium gaming grain, Monument Valley, the sumptuously designed, premium priced iPad game which launched back in April and snagged its makers an Apple Design Award at this year’s WWDC, has now passed one million downloads, TechCrunch can reveal. Read More
