Twilio, developer of a VoIP API that is used by companies like eBay, Airbnb and Hulu to add voice services into their consumer apps, has been adding support for European countries as part of its expansion strategy, first the UK and then Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. Now Twilio is giving that effort a bit more muscle with the appointment of its first full-time, permanent employee outside the U.S.
James Parton is joining the company as its new European marketing director. His hiring is also effectively a jab at the carrier market that Twilio very much has the chance to really disrupt: Parton has been poached from Telefonica, the Spanish mobile powerhouse, where he has most recently been running developer marketing for Telefonica’s multi-regional API effort BlueVia, and before that for BlueVia’s more local precursor, Litmus at O2 UK. → Read More
Mozilla and Spain-based Telefonica officially announced their intentions to work together on an open web device at this year’s Mobile World Congress, but I’m not sure anyone expected the launch market Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs just announced.
According to the Brazilian blog ZTop (Google Translated here), Kovacs just recently revealed the the world’s first consumer-ready Boot to Gecko devices are expected to launch in Brazil either at the end of the year or in early 2013.
→ Read More
Another sign of the significant investment and attention going into the mobile payments market: BOKU is today announcing a significant new round of funding totaling $35 million, to be used to continue building out its payments business.
Of that amount, TechCrunch understands that $30 million will be coming from VCs and angels led by new investor NEA, with participation also from existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Dag Ventures, Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. And $5 million will be coming from a new strategic investor, the carrier Telefonica.
This brings the total amount invested in the company to $75 million. → Read More
Semiconductor chip maker Quantenna Communications has a new strategic investor on board, and her name is Telefónica.
Through its investment arm Telefónica Ventures, a division of Telefónica Digital, the Spanish broadband and telecom company has made an equity investment to gain access to the latest Quantenna technology for the deployment of video services to the home. → Read More
Semiconductor chip maker Quantenna Communications has a new strategic investor on board, and her name is Telefónica. Through its investment arm Telefónica Ventures, a division of Telefónica Digital, the Spanish broadband and telecom company has made an equity investment to gain access to the latest Quantenna technology for the deployment of video services to the home. → Read More
eBay’s mobile reach in Europe is about to expand exponentially. The e-commerce giant has just announced it first ever mobile pre-load deal with Telefonica, which will equip most smartphones and feature phones sold by the Telefonica via its O2 brand with eBay’s mobile app or a link to eBay’s mobile page pre-loaded.
The company says the deal will include most Android, Windows 7, Symbian and Bada devices sold by O2 in the UK over the next two years. Telefonica will actually work with device manufacturers to pre-install the application. → Read More
Considering the immense fragmentation that characterizes the mobile apps industry, it’s good to see decent research help us try and make sense of what’s going on in that particular part of the digital economy, one that is consistently growing in size and importance across the globe. Hence, I invite anyone with a vested interest in the mobile developer ecosystem to check out VisionMobile’s extensive research report (sponsored by Telefónica Developer Communities) on that very subject, because it’s easily one of the most profound I’ve read to date.
Dubbed Developer Economics 2010, the free research report delves into all aspects of mobile application development, across 400+ developers from around the world, segmented into eight major platforms: iOS (iPhone), Android, Symbian, BlackBerry, Java ME, Windows Phone, Flash/Flash Lite and mobile web (WAP/XHTML/CSS/Javascript). → Read More
[Spain] Is Telefonica buying Tuenti, the leading Spanish social network – or not? The subject comes up regularly in Spain.
And so it was that “Telefonica is rumored to be acquiring Tuenti for €80 million” ($104 million) was the latest rumour buzzing around Spanish blogs and Twitter timelines this weekend. The trouble is that Tuenti vehemently denies it.
Yesterday, vociferous Carlos Blanco wrote that Tuenti was in negotiations with Telefonica (with a very suggestive URL, reading something like “telefonica-buys-tuenti”). Thus setting off a veritable gossip bomb.
But in actuality Tuenti has said that it is making an announcement tomorrow morning that involves Telefonica… but it’s a relatively small commercial announcement that has nothing to do with a sale. → Read More
[Spain] Is Telefonica buying Tuenti, the leading Spanish social network – or not? The subject comes up regularly in Spain.
And so it was that “Telefonica is rumored to be acquiring Tuenti for €80 million” ($104 million) was the latest rumour buzzing around Spanish blogs and Twitter timelines this weekend. The trouble is that Tuenti vehemently denies it.
Yesterday, vociferous Carlos Blanco wrote that Tuenti was in negotiations with Telefonica (with a very suggestive URL, reading something like “telefonica-buys-tuenti”). Thus setting off a vertibal gossip bomb.
But in actuality Tuenti has said that is is making an announcement tomorrow morning that involves Telefonica… but it’s a relatively small commercial announcement that has nothing to do with a sale. → Read More
Yahoo will power search and related advertising on the ‘emocion’ portal of Telefónica España, Spain’s largest operator network, the two companies announced this morning.
The agreement builds on the mobile search partnership with O2 Germany launched in November 2009, as well as the larger agreement announced in October 2007 to provide consumers with Yahoo as the primary search service on Telefónica mobile portals in 15 European and Latin-American countries. → Read More
There appears to be a good old bidding war going on for another VoIP startup, Jajah, following yesterday’s news about the acquisition of Gizmo5 by Google, a source in Silicon Valley with knowledge of the talks informs us.
Details are scarce at the moment, but Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Telefónica Europe (O2) are said to be looking to buy the venture capital-backed company for a price ranging from $200M to $400M. We’re digging for more information. → Read More
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