Founded in 2007 in Switzerland, Trigami provides social media ad solutions for German-speaking markets. The company counts over 500 clients that are able to benefit from the network’s 15K bloggers for innovative ad solutions and seeded content.

As a result of this merger, Trigami will be integrated into the Ebuzzing platform, currently used by over 1500 companies. Prior to this deal, Ebuzzing was only present in France, Italy, Spain and the UK but will now include 2 German offices as well. Thus, this Wikio solution will now be available not only in Germany but also in Austria and Switzerland.

Wikio’s rapid expansion is definitely unusual for Europe. This is the company’s 7th merger in the last 18 months.

Just a few weeks later, Wikio went on to swallow up Nomao, which describes itself as a “personalized search engine”. And as if that wasn’t enough to make Europe feel like it was living the Silicon Valley life, rumors of a huge, potential 8-figure investment round surfaced. That funding is yet to be confirmed but all the news concerning Wikio over the last few months has been nothing shy of impressive.

Oh, and then Google came along.

Wikio, like many companies, has been hit by Google’s recent update of its algorithm, Panda. Panda – which is simply meant to provide less spammy search results – has reduced the visibility of a number of sites, including eHow, VideoJug and Microsoft-owned Ciao by up to 94%. For all the SEO freaks out there, you can check out some of the grim statistics here. And according to an article published in Capital, Wikio’s visibility also dropped by 91%. Ouch.

But Wikio founder and CEO, Pierre Chappaz, says he’s not scared of the big, bad Panda. And no, it’s got nothing to do with Google’s ballooning retention packages and tumbling stock prices. In fact, he published an article on his personal blog to explain exactly what Wikio would do in the face of Panda.

First off, Chappaz explains that he’s been an internet entrepreneur for the last 12 years. And as the former founder of Kelkoo, this is not the first time he’s had to deal with a change in algorithm. Plus, he’d already been concerned with being overly Google-dependent. I guess this is why he had been concentrating on building Wikio Groupe and on leveraging B2B and B2C services in parallel. But still, today’s typical internet user doesn’t go directly to the site he or she is looking for. A majority of us just type something into Google Search and never click beyond the first page of results.

And so, rather than worrying about SEO, Chappaz says the key is to concentrate on providing users with added value. For example, Wikio News tries to differentiate itself from Google News by providing additional curated content pulled from social media. Oh yeah, and there’s also the blog rankings.

But thankfully, Wikio isn’t expecting to combat Google with just that. In addition, he states that the company has had limited means and hasn’t been able to build “the service of its dreams”. (No comment on that 8-figure investment round, I guess.) He’s event had to do a bit of down-sizing with the Wikio News team recently. Sad, but true.

Still, the company counts additional services, like Overblog, Nomao, Wikio Shopping and Wikio Experts – a marketplace for freelancers. And so Chappaz states that thanks to this strategy, the company expects to make €20 million in revenue this year with 100% growth. Yeah, I guess that makes the Panda less scary – but who knows what these figures could’ve been…

Multiple sources have confirmed that they are currently in discussion with Luxemburg-based Wikio Groupe, who is in the process of securing a very large round of funding.  While no official information has been released, the 8-figure number could easily hit 9-figures in USD given the current exchange rate. That would make it one of the biggest rounds of funding to take place in Europe this year.

The company founded by Pierre Chappaz, who also founded price-comparison site Kelkoo (which went to Yahoo in 2004 for €475 million or $670 million), could be on his way to building the European internet giant everyone has been waiting for. The so-called “European equivalent of Demand Media“ currently manages 6 flagship products, including blog platform Overblog, Wikio News, Wikio Experts, Wikio Shopping, local search engine Nomao and recommendation site Ebuzzing. According to internal statistics, these 6 properties counted over 120 million monetized visits for the month of February alone.

The last half of 2010 was especially active for Wikio, who merged not only with Overblog but also Nomao. Apparently, the fusion with Overblog has proved very successful; in February Overblog reported its strongest growth in traffic to date, hitting 98 million visits for that month alone. Then, towards the end of 2010, the company announced a €4 million round of funding followed by the launch of Wikio Experts, a “content on demand” platform for publications to source freelance writers.

The 140-person company seems to be working its way towards becoming the European social internet leader. But does it make sense to call Wikio a potential Euro internet champ? For starters, there are currently 11 seasoned entrepreneurs in Wikio’s management team, incuding Fréderic Montagnon, Julien Romanetto, Bertrand Quasada, Laurent Binard and Yves Languepin (in addition to Pierre Chappaz). These entrepreneurs are not on their first startup and they’ve gone through previous acquisitions. In addition, the company is generating cash and is almost profitable; it was not seeking to raise any money after the round that it closed in December. And finally, the multiple platforms of this pan-European group are complimentary in nature and continue to hire across Europe.

Still, while the company’s investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners and TF1, Wikio is potentially lacking an A-list investor needed to take it to the top. Furthermore, the company could be criticized for being slow to integrate with social platforms like Facebook and Twitter. And it was a little late to get on tablets and mobile platforms.

Naturally, this round of funding will be very telling for the company’s future. We’ll see shortly whether the capital is provided by European investors or by American investors that are preparing to facilitate Wikio’s transatlantic development.

We contacted Wikio’s team for comments. The company’s marketing director, Frédéric Montagnon, tried to remain rather under the radar but didn’t hesitate to mention that “if there is a round of funding, it’ll be a big round do to things on a bigger scale and why not go beyond Europe…”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it’s a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that’s not too shabby.

So far, no details concerning the financial transaction have been released but we’re told that it should be up there with the likes of Exalead and Priceminister – two French companies that were acquired during the summer for roughly €135 million and €200 million respectively. As far as Wikio is concerned, the group has also been on a bit of an acquisition spree lately, buying e-reputation solution Neotia in April as well as marketing group eBuzzing in December of last year.

The new Wikio family should count some 120 employees across several European countries, including offices in Paris, London, Rome and Milan. Pierre Chappaz will direct the new team that will be reinforced by the new addition of Frédéric Montagnon, Overblog’s founder. Montagnon is also one of the co-founders of Nomao, a local competitor of TellMeWhere – who plays alongside the likes of Yelp and Qype.

For anyone who isn’t familiar with Wikio, all you really have to know is that it’s a news portal founded by Pierre Chappaz in 2005 after his previous company, Kelkoo, was acquired by Yahoo in 2004 for some 475 million euros. For acquisitions à la Française, that’s not too shabby.

So far, no details concerning the financial transaction have been released but we’re told that it should be up there with the likes of Exalead and Priceminister – two French companies that were acquired during the summer for roughly €135 million and €200 million respectively. As far as Wikio is concerned, the group has also been on a bit of an acquisition spree lately, buying e-reputation solution Neotia in April as well as marketing group eBuzzing in December of last year.

The new Wikio family should count some 120 employees across several European countries, including offices in Paris, London, Rome and Milan. Pierre Chappaz will direct the new team that will be reinforced by the new addition of Frédéric Montagnon, Overblog’s founder. Montagnon is also one of the co-founders of Nomao, a local competitor of TellMeWhere – who plays alongside the likes of Yelp and Qype.

The service, which has a slightly checkered history based on its original pay per-post model, offers an ad channel for viral videos: Bloggers sign up and blog about the video campaigns that interest them and get paid in the process. It’s part of the Wikio Group and has been operating in France and Italy since 2006.

In order to help match appropriate advertisers and set the price, Ebuzzing works with sister company Wikio, a sort of Digg/Technorati, which indexes and ranks over one million blogs and websites daily according to “social influence” and claims to be “Europe’s largest pool of influential blogs.”

Along with its video-based campaigns, Ebuzzing also offers “ethical and disclosed sponsored conversation, widget seeding and forum conversation” as another way for advertisers to reach audiences within the blogosphere and other online communities.

Ebuzzing has already trialed campaigns in Britain for brands such as Wrangler and Peugeot, while today’s official push sees the company open a UK office. In Europe as a whole, Ebuzzing says it has had over 1,000 brands use its service, including Ebay, Diesel, Mastercard, Microsoft and Toyota.

The Wikio group is led by Kelkoo founder, Pierre Chappaz. Kelkoo was sold to Yahoo! in 2004 for €475 million.

• Wikio, has published a Blog ranking that has become a reference in France (and of course, a very controversial reference as all rankings usually are). Wikio is also a platform aggregating content from various sources (blogs, media etc.). It recently announced having reached one million blogs referenced in Europe, and 20 millions unique visitors (I would say a big part of that comes from their very good SEO).
• Ebuzzing, is a platform to link brands and advertisers with bloggers. Although today they offer different kinds of campaigns, they started with a “loved-or-hated” pay per post offer, called “Billet sponsorisé” (sponsored post) in France.

Wikio and Ebuzzing had worked together for a long time, starting with the use of Wikio Blog ranking to assess the value of a blog post sold thourgh the Ebuzzing platform. It’s also because Pierre Chappaz, the co-founder of Wikio, had invested some money in Ebuzzing… Pierre Chapaz is a very well known entrepreneur in France (Founder of Kelkoo, sold to Yahoo) and blogger (he started blogging again recently after a one year break).

Reactions in France have been various but we can groupe them in 3 different categories :

• those who are happy to see the creation of a big media group dedicated to the analysis and monetization of blogs
• those who hope that Ebuzzing will become more professionnal by being part of Wikio (for campaigns and payments…)
• those who ask them about the credibility of Wikio and its ranking if they’re promoting too mush Ebuzzing campaigns

Wikio has also a European ranking of Blogs which is possibly worth checking out, although TCEurope is not listed, inexplicably.

And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service).

Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine – Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like:

Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed – everything else is ignored.

Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has some deals with large European publishers completed.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

The company recently launched English, German and Spanish versions of the site.

TechCrunch France editor Ouriel Ohayon is an investor and board member at Wikio, although we have no other conflicts with the company. Personally, I think Wikio has a lot of work to do before it can effectively compare itself to Digg, Technorati and others. This thing is no Skype.

Wikio has been live in France and Italy for a few months. They have 600,000 French users and 100,000 Italian users.

In April, TechCrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon reviewed Wikio and found it to be a very comprehensive news generating site. Ohayon became a shareholder in the company after reviewing the site. TechCrunch U.S., however, has no financial affiliation with Wikio.

Wikio is a hybrid between user-added and editorial-added news and blogs. They have an editorial staff that ranks and contributes stories but they also allow users to add and rank stories, much like Digg. User voting is balanced with editorial voting and stories are ranked accordingly. Pierre Chappaz, founder of Wikio, developed the site based on his belief that Europe needed a Digg of its own.

“Wikio is the first service of its kind in Europe,” Chappaz said. “Europe is very different than the U.S. In the U.S., you have a large diversity of information services but in Europe, we only have Google News and to a certain extent, Yahoo News. If you look at Technorati, their index is far from being comprehensive. So Wikio is to establish new information in Europe coming from blogs as well as traditional media because we don’t see any reason to put a wall between blogs and traditional media.”

Chappaz said that Wikio.com was developed for the “English-speaking” population, although a UK-version of the site is Wikio’s next project, which will index British media.

“Obviously Wikio.com’s largest market is the U.S. and I would be delighted if Wikio takes a large market share in the U.S. but our main focus is still Europe,” Chappaz said.

One of the main barriers to Wikio becoming a true pan-European service is that there is little interoperability between the countries. You can link to stories from other countries’ Wikio sites, but there is no translation service. Each country has a different ranking algorithm for its stories based on the most popular news sources within that country. So you can search each country individually for news, but you can’t search for global activity.

“It’s difficult because there is a language issue. What we will offer in Wikio in the future is a possibility to search Wikio in all countries but you still have to understand the local language,” Chappaz said.

Wikio is a really ‘web2.0′ news search engine where you can find interesting features and technology and where the role played by the user is very important. Wikio runs search on a library of sources, indexed and qualified manually, that is composed of online media (newspapers, etc..) but also edge content sites (blogs). And here is the first difference with Google News. They are covering more than 10,000 reliable sources (for France but for other country quantity will be important also) when Google News is covering only 500. Each piece of information is defined with a category (economy / high-tech) and a series of tags.

Wikio is a user managed news search engine. It watches, real time, thousands of news sources, gathers hundreds of thousands of stories every day and classifies them by their topics in a multi millions documents database. information classification is based both on its relevancy and on its members popularity who vote, discuss or even write new stories

The search algorithm is a combination of ‘logical’ and semantical requests that will enable association with other relevant words. Only Accoona is able to run search like that to our knowledge. On the technological side Wikio has also developed a tool that will convert any web source in RSS format.

Indexing the sources and building the algorithm took about one year of development.

A social search engine

Here is where Wikio will outperform other players. They integrated all sorts of web2.0 features so the user will be able to improve the relevancy of the results. They integrated for each search results the already very popular rating /comment system you can find in Digg for example. But unlike Digg (which is mainly tech-oriented although you can virtually post anything) Wikio will cover all categories of information. The user will also have the possibility to edit a news in a given category/tag and each page results is equipped with a mini-wiki ready to be edited.

You can if you wish create your own profile and store your favorite search queries always available at hand. Pierre Chappaz mentioned they would also store your search history as well as clicked and rated news.

The user interface is quite clear and in a way familiar (digg structure / search ). You can easily re-order results according to date/ popularity/ and relevancy and change in a click font size. Each search query is coming with an RSS feed you can subscribe. And one of the most interesting aspects is the automatically generated tag cloud for each query that will help you extend your search intuitively. So if you run a search on TechCrunch it will lead you to web2.0 or blogs or podcasts……

Wikio will soon include podcast search and I would love to see a picture and video search feature to make it complete.

It will open to the public in the next few weeks and will quickly extend to most European countries and USA.

The company is managed by Pierre Chappaz and has ten other employees. It is self financed but will consider a first round by the end of the year. Business model will be based on integration of sponsored links and Wikio bets on viral marketing and the quality of its product to reach critical size (could we suggest integration of sharing features, forward to a friend or even APIs to build mashups and widgets for Typepad/Wordpress).

Challenge and Assets

Will Wikio manage to become a reflex as Kelkoo, Google or Technorati did? That is the question. Wikio certainly has strong assets in Europe where competition and localization is close to non-existing (Google news is very limited and they never managed to impose Froogle vs Kelkoo) but they will have to face serious and well funded US players like Technorati, NewsVine and recently acquired NewRoo. Social news is a crowded space and Wikio will be a new feature to bookmark but we can trust Pierre Chappaz expertise in building successful stories to make it happen.

Wikio is a very ambitious project and has a strong technology with a skilled team in vertical search. This is certainly the most interesting European initiative since Skype. To be continued.

You can subscribe to the beta version here. Wikio and Pierre Chappaz blogs (in French only).