EuroCrunch

Gift Ideas Blog

2011-06-10T11:58:00.002+02:00

LemonFund has started a blog on gift ideas with a number of new deals and partners.

There's also a section where people can request gift ideas or submit gift ideas.

Websites Providing Group Gifts

2011-04-18T10:17:00.004+02:00

LemonFund has just launched a new user interface and added a group gift service.

LemonFund is a free gift registry where people can share wish lists for any occasion (for example honeymoon registry, birthday registry, babyshower registry), browse gift ideas and exchange gifts.

Other companies providing similar group gift services are Gift Project and friendfund.

Tags: EuroCrunch,

LemonFund Enters Social Commerce Fray

2011-03-12T12:28:00.003+01:00

Social commerce space saw a new entrant in 2011 in LemonFund, a wish list service that makes it easy to send and receive gifts and donation to your friends' gift funds or "lemon funds".

Users can add gifts that they would like to receive to their private wish lists from the LemonFund site or from any internet site by using a bookmarklet.

Tags: EuroCrunch, social commerce

Dutch Sharewire Taking Mobile Content Off Deck (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-11T20:58:00.000+01:00

Dutch Sharewire Taking Mobile Content Off Deck - 3-year-old mobile payments company based in the Netherlands raises €1.2M from Main Capital.

Links: Sharewire, Main Capital

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sharewire, Main Capital, VC, Venture Capital

SMSConnect renames itself to Zong (Zong.com)

2007-02-10T19:18:00.000+01:00

SMSConnect renames itself to Zong - Premium SMS and mobile application platform SMSConnect run by Geneva-based Echovox decided to change brand into a more web-2.0-ish "Zong".

Tags: EuroCrunch, Zong, Echovox, SMSConnect

Fon and BT consider tie-up for Wi-Fi broadband sharing (ITPRO)

2007-02-09T21:36:00.000+01:00

Fon and BT consider tie-up for Wi-Fi broadband sharing - BT hopes to boost its BT Fusion customer base through a partnership with Spanish FON.

Tags: EuroCrunch, FON, BT, wifi

Telfish Seeded to Enable Mobile Churn (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-08T20:36:00.000+01:00

Telfish Seeded to Enable Mobile Churn - Tariff comparison engine for the mobile telecom industry in Germany raised an undisclosed amount of early stage capital.

Telfish

Tags: EuroCrunch, telfish

Thoughts on Music (Steve Jobs)

2007-02-07T06:21:00.000+01:00

Thoughts on Music - "Much of the concern over DRM systems has arisen in European countries. Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free. For Europeans, two and a half of the big four music companies are located right in their backyard."

Tags: EuroCrunch, Apple, music, DRM, FairPlay

Plazes secures A-Round (Plazes Blog)

2007-02-05T20:52:00.000+01:00

Plazes secures A-Round - Social geo-networking company raises €2.7m from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Plazes

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google (Telegraph)

2007-02-05T05:48:00.000+01:00

Mobile giants plot secret rival to Google - European mobile carriers and Cingular claim their share of future advertising revenues from mobile search at the annual industry trade in Barcelona next week.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Google, Yahoo, mobile search, mobile, Vodafone, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, Telecom Italia, Telefonica, Hutchison Whampoa

Sqoops Takes Investment From Computec Media (alarm:clock euro)

2007-02-02T17:05:00.000+01:00

Sqoops Takes Investment From Computec Media - German casual online gaming company takes second round of financing.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sqoops, Computec Media, VC

MySQL prepares for IPO and reveals Oracle endorsement (Computer Business Review)

2007-02-01T17:33:00.000+01:00

MySQL prepares for IPO and reveals Oracle endorsement - With over 10,000 paying customers and an installed based of 10 million users, swedish MySQL AB is planning to go public before year end.

Tags: EuroCrunch, mysql, Oracle, InnoDB, ipo

Atomico From Zennstrom and Ljungman Part Of Founder Fund Trend (alarm:clock euro)

2007-01-30T15:40:00.000+01:00

Atomico From Zennstrom and Ljungman Part Of Founder Fund Trend - Skype founder's investment vehicle Atomico announced its first investment in Germany-based advertising tech company Wunderloop.

Tags: EuroCrunch, atomico, wunderloop, founder fund

Spanish start-up Whisher promises free Wi-Fi for all (CNET News.com)

2007-01-30T15:15:00.000+01:00

Spanish start-up Whisher promises free Wi-Fi for all - Whisher, financed by Swisscom and Benchmark Capital, encourages broadband sharing via WiFi. It competes among others with another Spain-based startup FON, backed by Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Whisher, fon, wifi

LinkedIn Connects to $12.8 Million (RedHerring)

2007-01-30T14:58:00.000+01:00

LinkedIn Connects to $12.8 Million - LinkedIn raises money from Bessemer Ventures and European Founders Fund to finance growth in Europe and compete with market leader Xing (formerly known as OpenBC).

Tags: EuroCrunch, linkedin, xing, openbc, social networking

Jajah dreams of a 2007 IPO (GigaOM)

2007-01-30T14:31:00.000+01:00

Jajah dreams of a 2007 IPO - Austrian-based VoIP company reported to be thinking about an IPO later this year.

Tags: EuroCrunch, jajah

Top 2006 M&As in Europe

2007-01-07T03:23:00.000+01:00

Max Bleyleben has an excellent round-up on top European M&A transactions in 2006. 8 were above $100 million.
An unusual transaction in the technology space was the leveraged buy-out of venture-backed eDreams by private equity firm TA Associates.

Tags: EuroCrunch, exit, vc, venture capital, private equity, eDreams, TA Associates

Desktop application Tag2Find to tag files

2006-12-31T14:25:00.000+01:00

Austria-based Tag2Find launched a technical overview of a desktop application for Windows XP and Windows Vista. It's a light application to tag files stored locally on a computer's hard drive à-la flickr or del.icio.us

Tags: EuroCrunch, tag2find, flickr, del.icio.us

Gmail massive outage

2006-12-14T07:58:00.000+01:00

I still can't access my Gmail account at 2am EST. It's been down for over 4 hours now.
A few other people are experiencing the same.
I just hope tomorrow morning my 800MB of emails are still there ...

Update: GMail is working fine. I had to do "Clear my private data" on Firefox to get it to work again, maybe a cached DNS problem.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Gmail, Google, Gmail outage, DNS

Le Web 3: the Aftermath

2006-12-14T02:43:00.000+01:00

What happened at LeWeb3, the conference organized by French blogger and entrepreneur Loic Le Meur ?
Last-minute panel with ex-Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Perezm and French Presidential candidates Nikolas Sarkozy and François Bayrou raised a wave of unrest across the blogosphere:

LeWeb3 Fallout. As A Speaker, I’m Not Happy
LeWeb3 is political propaganda
Loic Lemeur: Betraying 1000 attendees for his own political ambitions?
Why are they there?
Le Web 3 hacked by French politicians
Election campaign at LeWeb3
Le Web 3: The Sarkozy Show
Tom Raftery: Le Web 3 renamed Loic (pronounced Le Week)
leweb3: no politicians for the politics and blogging session
Le Web 3: old fashioned propaganda

Tom Morris is collecting more quotes on the conference.

Sam Sethi had to leave TechCrunch UK, as explained by Arrington.

Anyone has positive comments? Please send them to me.

Tags: EuroCrunch, LeWeb3

PagineGialle unveils amazing visual maps beta

2006-12-12T16:32:00.000+01:00

PagineGialle.it, the leading Italian yellow pages, recently launched a leading edge flash-powered map product online. It features 2D streets, satellite and hybrid maps à-la Google Maps, eye-bird imagery and a stunning, fast, browser-embedded 3D model complete with altitude information.

I was especially pleased by the 3D model that is faster and better than Microsoft's Live heavyweight Internet Explorer plug-in.

At the moment, only Italy is covered by high resolution satellite imagery.

Tags: EuroCrunch, pagine gialle, yellow pages, maps

Top 10 European Internet Startups to watch in 2007

2006-12-11T06:00:00.000+01:00

Here's my list of European startups to watch in 2007:

1. Sulake Corporation
Creator of the online community Habbo, it pioneered together with Linden Labs new monetization strategies for virtual worlds.

2. Last.fm
Community website for music fans that is growing into the ultimate post-filter in a long-tail media industry.

3. Blyk
Will launch in mid 2007 as the first free, ad-supported mobile carrier targeted to the youth market.

4. FON
Counting on investments from Skype, Google, Sequoia and Index, FON plans to blanket the world with user-contrubuted hotspots.

5. The Venice Project
Started by Zennstrom and Friis (founders of Skype and Kazaa), brings peer-to-peer technology to video streaming to disrupt the television industry.

6. MX Telecom
A mobile application and service provider, has seen fast-growing revenues over the past years and is well positioned to provide the infrastructure to emerging mobile 2.0 businesses.

7. WAYN
Social networking website that plans to monetize its traffic in the travel and lifestyle markets.

8. Xing
Formerly known as OpenBC, the company is the main player in European business social networking space.

9. Quintura
A new player in the visual search space, Quintura recently closed a round of financing to find its way in this lucrative but crowded space.

10. Netvibes
Emerging as a category leader in AJAX desktops and startpages, Netvibes is well positioned to become a web 2.0 success story.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Sulake, Habbo, last.fm, Blyk, FON, Google, Skype, Venice Project, MX Telecom, Quintura, Xing, OpenBC, Netvibes

Italian startup, did you mean "italian starter"?

2006-12-11T00:18:00.000+01:00

Today I read Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA Ranking (pdf, 1237 kB). Companies from UK, France, Germany, Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Turkey, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, Hungary, Latvia, Denmark, Portugal are represented.

Right, Italy is not in the list. Surprised I went on to Google to search for "Italian startup" to find some exceptions to the rule. Ironically, Google thought I mispelled my query ...

Sadly, my home country is running late in the technology and entrepreneurship race of the 21st century. Being late now means being irrelevant in 2050. If I were prime minister, this would be my top priority.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Italy, entrepreneurship,

Netherlands-based security software Consul acquired by IBM

2006-12-05T19:30:00.000+01:00

IBM acquired security software Consul, based in the Netherlands.
See IBM press release.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Consul, IBM

European entrepreneurship role models

2006-12-05T18:49:00.000+01:00

I have just come across an interesting article on Internation Herald Tribune article on how German Samwer brothers sold $320M worth of companies in the last 4 years. Their most known successful companies were online auction site Alando.de (acquired by eBay for $50M in 1999) and Jamba (acquired by Verisign for $273M in 2004).
It is a good article on european entrepreneurship.

Tags: EuroCrunch, Alando, Jamba, Verisign, eBay, Samwer