Heroku, the popular cloud platform as a service company, today announced the public launch of its Europe region. Developers will now be able to deploy their services closer to their European customers, which should result in markedly reduced latency for them. The company says it has observed performance improvements of 100ms or more per request for European end users. Heroku is built on top of… → Read More
Hearsay Social, a Sequoia- and NEA-backed company that helps large organizations manage their social media presence across local branches and sales teams, is announcing that it has opened an office in London. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Steve Garrity said it is the first step in the company’s European expansion.
The new office will be led by Peter Caryotis, who previously managed… → Read More
Apple today posted Q1 earnings that indicated that — despite wider problems in the European economy, and price and device competition from Android everywhere, it continues to make advances in international markets. Apple broke out sales in Greater China — which includes the Mainland, Hong Kong and Taiwan — on its balance sheet, which were up by 67% on the same quarter last year, and 26% on the… → Read More
The U.S. government is continuing to lobby Brussels to water down plans to reform privacy legislation. The European Union’s executive and legislative bodies are in the process of reforming the region’s data protection rules — a long overdue wrangle since current legislation dates back to 1995, when Facebook was not even a gleam in 11-year-old Mark Zuckerberg’s eye. → Read More
Europe’s fight against cybercrime has a new home: the European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) will open its doors on January 11. The centre’s focus will be on illegal online activities carried out by organised crime groups — especially attacks targeting e-banking and other online financial activities, online child sexual exploitation and crimes that affect the critical infrastructure in the EU. → Read More
When we sat down with the Google Maps team a few months ago, we got an inside look at how Google makes its Maps product the best, most authoritative and reliable service in the world. Google says over 1 billion people use Maps each month.
The tools that are used internally to build the maps that we see are a mix of Google’s own data and infrastructure, as well as data from other sources and… → Read More
Pull out the ibuprofen, Redmond: it looks like the antitrust headache that bothered Microsoft for years in Europe may be coming back: the European Commission is preparing to bring charges against the company worth billions of euros because Microsoft has failed to implement an effective way of offering users alternatives to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser on Windows-powered devices, according… → Read More
Amazon introduces Cloud Drive in Italy and Spain following September’s launch in the UK, Germany and France. Cloud Drive is Amazon’s digital locker offering to complete its media offering. As the Kindle Fire is expected to launch in Europe in the coming days, Cloud Drive will allow users to store their photos, music and documents in the cloud and stream this data to a Kindle Fire or a computer. → Read More
The European Union’s Commissioner For The Digital Agenda Neelie Kroes told a conference in Brussels on Tuesday that the EU’s member nations should throw their support behind a plan to invest EU funds in 4G network expansion and improvement, in order to provide their citizens with consistent, widespread access to next-gen networks on the latest mobile devices. Apple’s iPhone and iPad both offer… → Read More
We don’t often try to get the word out about conferences put on by other blogs here at TechCrunch, but we’re about to. Because reasons. Namely: 1) We, as TechCrunch, will probably never ever ever, ever ever host a European cloud-computing conference and someone sure as heck needs to. 2) The folks at Gigaom are our friends, particularly founder, thought leader and king of the kind of industry… → Read More
99designs, the polarizing crowdsourced design marketplace, announced its first acquisition tonight, as the Accel-backed startup scooped up its European rival, 12designer, for an undisclosed amount. In the near-term, 12designer will continue to operate as a standalone site.
Since raising $35 million from Accel, 99designs has been focused on international growth, said Patrick Llewellyn, the… → Read More
In late 2010, the European Commission launched an investigation into allegations that Google was abusing its dominant position in the search engine market. Today, Joaquín Almunia, the vice president of the European Commission responsible for competition policy, sent a letter to Google chairman Eric Schmidt with an update about its finding. The Commission, writes Almunia, identified four specific… → Read More
Not even a month after news of Fab.de’s growth in Germany and Austria (revenue reaching 1.5M Euro per month), the company is today announcing its expansion across Europe. Starting now, Fab is available across 13 more European countries as an English or German-language website. In addition to the U.S., and the two markets served by Fab.de, that brings Fab to 16 countries worldwide.
The… → Read More
Russia was once known for its undying adoration for all things French back in the day, and a century and a half later you could argue that some of that spark is still hanging around. New Generation Investment, the Russian VC firm part-owned by Leonid Reiman, former Minister of Communications and Information Technologies, has announced that it would like to start investing into the startup scene in… → Read More
Make way for another VC firm in Europe: Today sees the launch of Connect Ventures, a new London based fund that will focus on seed and Series A stages in European tech companies. It’s kicking off with a €16 million ($22 million) fund, which will be dispersed in investments of between €250,000 and €1.25 million ($330k-$1.7m).
Led by co-founders Pietro Bezza and Bill Earner, Connect… → Read More
For all the benefits that come with living in Europe — sharing a unified currency, easy access to medical care — getting timely access to Amazon’s popular line of Kindle e-readers isn’t one of them.
Amazon begun rolling out their WiFi-only Kindles in a few new markets this past December and followed up by shipping their Kindle Touch to new markets as well. At long last though, digital… → Read More
Seedcamp, the European seed funding network and startup accelerator, came through San Francisco this week as part of its annual multi-city trip to the US. All 18 companies were solid — you can find the full list here — but I pulled aside five of the most compelling startups for one-on-one interviews to get a bit more insight on what they do. → Read More
The European Union says it will refer the controversial ACTA anti-piracy trade agreement to the institution’s highest court, the European Court of Justice, to check whether it complies with the EU’s fundamental rights.
EU trade chief Karel De Gucht is leading the process. He said: “We are planning to ask Europe’s highest court to assess ACTA’s compatibility with the EU’s fundamental rights and… → Read More
The Advocate General of the European Union Court of Justice, Cruz Villalón, says that national courts there should not have the ability to tell Internet Service Providers to filter their connections in order to prevent copyright infringement because such a move would conflict with the Charter of Fundamental Rights. That was a mouthful, yes. It should be noted that the Advocate General’s opinion… → Read More
Hmm, the following would seem to impugn the efficacy of anti-malware software. New stats show that nearly one-third of computer users in the European Union contracted malware in 2010 despite the fact that most of them had anti-malware software installed. John’s advice would be to “buy a Mac,” but is that really a viable solution? (Hardly.) → Read More
I have no idea why it seems to be “Europe week” for me, but here’s some more news from across the pond: Seedcamp has raised a new €3 million fund. I’m a huge fan of Seedcamp, even though I’ve given the co-founder Saul Klein a hard time about some of its winners in the past.
It is a combination of Y Combinator, a competition like TechCrunch Disrupt and a super angel, but one that aggressively… → Read More
What does it take to build a $2 billion consumer Internet company in the UK? For starters, center it around a market that’s illegal in the US. Betfair, a marketplace that matches and executes some five million wagers everyday, went public earlier this year and is valued at more than $2 billion.
It has a few things in common with the other $2 billion-plus Internet win out of Europe, Skype. While… → Read More
More on that vast, European anti-piracy raid that went down yesterday. The big news: it’s very possible that the main UK topside was taken down in the raid, which, if true, would actually be a pretty big deal—certainly a big blow to “the scene,” as it were. → Read More
A raid on file-sharing servers in the early hours of the morning has conspiracy theorists talking. The raid, which took places in various European countries including Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Sweden (among others), targeted peer-to-peer service providers. What has the tin foil hat wearers wondering is: why was one Wikileaks’ Swedish providers caught in the crossfire? Is “the… → Read More
When in doubt, write about World of Warcraft. Jinx, the geek-friendly online store, has three new t-shirts that may be of interest to you. Unfortunately, they’re Europe-only, so you’ll have to get your guild-mate from Liverpool to send ‘em to you. → Read More
So like everyone else in Europe right now, I am fascinated by the impact of the volcano in Iceland, which is spreading ash all over northern Europe and shutting down the airlines. Eyjafjallajokull is now the new in vogue swear word in Europe, if you can say it.
Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of entrepreneurs suddenly saying their travel plans were being thrown into chaos. It seems that… → Read More
More 3D broadcasts are sweeping across Europe. The next countries up are Belgium and Poland. They follow the UK and Germany—oh, and the U.S. → Read More
So we all know that drafting increases fuel efficiency. Heck, I even saw an episode of MythBusters where they proved that following a semi suicidally close will increase your mileage dramatically. Of course, drafting is dangerous, stupid, and the risk vs. reward just isn’t there. Well, what if it was? Scientists in Europe are working on a system that would make drafting safe. Get ready to ride the… → Read More
The way venture capital firms are structured makes it almost impossible for outsiders to see what’s really going on inside those 1970s lodge-like Sand Hill Road offices. It’s an industry perfectly structured for sweeping problems under the rug, and as its fundamentals have declined over the last decade, that’s just what it’s been doing. But those big, lumpy problems are getting harder and… → Read More
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