Written on August 27, 2008 – 1:50 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
A report by Dow Jones VentureSource has a pessimistic conclusion: venture capital firms have invested significantly less money in European start-ups during Q2 than during the same period last year - the amount declined with 35 percent, to $1.3 billion. They’ve invested in 167 young companies, which is 42 percent fewer than last year. This year’s Q2 was the worst since at least 2000, when VentureSource started tracking European data.
The worst sector of all? Information technology. I assume that concerns our beloved Internet industry as well. The British IT industry, former leader, had to take the hardest punch, venture investment declined with a stunning percentage of 49.
Ram Srinivasan, a venture partner with European firm Wellington Partners explained to The New York Times what’s causing the slowdown in funding: “Europeans are wary of investing in start-ups until the United States markets stabilize and economic and political uncertainty recedes”.
The US venture investment also declined, yet not as sensationally as in Europe. The investments fell with 19 percent.
I hope you like that post!
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Written on August 26, 2008 – 11:44 am Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
On December 17 we reported about a new video streaming service, called Qik. Scoble was their apostle, and The Next Web their platform to explain why homemade porn wasn’t welcome (it concerns the bible). In July Joop wrote about their open beta launch. Now it’s up to me to tell you Qik has received a “significant investment” from Netscape-pioneer Marc Andreessen and his favorite business partner Horowitz.
Andreessen has an impressive track record. He’s the co-founder and chairman of Ning (valued at $500 million) and an investor in several startups including big guys like Digg, Plazes, and Twitter. Horowitz and Andreessen were two of the most important men behind Netscape in the nineties.
Their advice and money will help Qik to firm up their position in the rapidly developing live video streaming market. Flixwagon, Floobs (interview), Kyte, Bambuser (review), and maybe Seesmic are all competitors who are addressing the same eager-to-share smartphone owners. With the Andreessen-Horowitz combo in their team and Scoble as their source of publicity, it’s definitely 2-0 for Qik versus the competition.
Written on June 20, 2008 – 7:18 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Yesterday I speculated that Seesmic raised a Series B. The news just got out, Seesmic raised 6 million dollars from Omidyar Network and Wellington Partners. Nice detail is that Loic Le Meur also took a role in the Wellington Partners team (as a Venture Partner).
Loic is happy with his The Next Web Award and 6 million dollars on the bank.
Written on June 20, 2008 – 1:54 am Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Today we went to the seesmic office to hand out a The Next Web Award in the category Web Celeb to Loic Le Meur. We did the official ceremony in the Seesmic office (check the movie).
Afterwards we had dinner in a sushi bar and Loic told us that they were about to announce big news at Seesmic.
People are guessing what it can be and Robert Scoble was particulary interested.
So what can it possibly be? What is ‘big news’ for a startup? Well that is either an acquisition, a huge partnership or a round of investment.
I believe it is to soon for seesmic to be acquired. A huge partnership could be, but big companies don’t like it that you leak this kind of information before the big press push is going out, so my guess is that they do a series B and raise another couple of millions after their first round in February.
The common consensus is that it is getting harder and harder to raise money nowadays. So to raise some extra money when it is still possible for ‘hard times to come’ sounds feasible.
Written on June 16, 2008 – 11:44 pm Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of Fleck
Germany-based Sevenload, announced at Supernova today that they secured ‘a double digit million euro’ investment from T-Venture which is a part of Deutsche Telekom.
First of all, what is Sevenload, you might think. I’m sure a lot of people have heard of the name, but when asked what the company does, it becomes more difficult. The official statement: “Sevenload is a social media platform for video, photos and interactive show formats”. In my own words, take Flickr, Youtube, Vimeo and Blip.tv, combine them into one company and you have Sevenload. Sevenload is especially well known in Germany, but with this round of funding, they’ll try to conquer the rest of the world. Starting as a sponsor of Supernova 2008, I guess this will be their first effort to enter the American market.
Sevenload also announced that they joined the “User Generated Content Principles” initiative, to protect copyright claims of content owners. This initiative is backed by big US companies like Disney, Microsoft, Fox, CBS and MySpace.
Oh, by the way, that is Ernst-Jan with a Sevenload shirt, a present for my girlfriend.
Written on June 10, 2008 – 5:40 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Almost everybody sometimes secretly fantasizes of leading completely different life. Don’t you? The people behind eRepublik probably realized this when they were building their massive online multiplayer social strategy game.
Co-founder Alexis Bonte at Menora TechTalk 2008
Players can become journalists, politicians, soldiers, nurses, or whatnot, in different countries. Most of the fantasy societies are user-generated and players can either choose to play casually or for the money. Yet they have one thing in common, the time it takes them to play the game: 14 minutes a day.
The Madrid-based start-up is in a private beta since November 2007. Private is a very broad definition, as 395,000 users are testing the service.
Till today, the service took €200,000 in angel funding. But now they’ve closed another round and received €550,000 - mainly from French venture capital fund AGF Private Equity and a large group of business angels including the founders of Lastminute, Livra and Intellego. The co-founders Alexis Bonte and George Lemnaru will use the money to expand the game.
Erepublik received a honorable mention at the Le Web Start-up Competition last December. I think that was absolutely correct, considering the impressive number of users and the stickiness of the game.
Written on May 12, 2008 – 3:38 pm Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last Tuesday co-editor Boris and Johan Schaap organized a dinner for Marc van der Chijs, a Dutch entrepreneur who co-founded China’s largest video site Tudou and the Asia division of online gaming company Spill Group. In Holland and beyond, he’s well-known as a true pioneer who represents the almost endless possibilities in China.
Marc van der Chijs, Boris, Johan Schaap & Yuri van Geest
During dinner I had an interesting conversation with him about Tudou, entrepreneurship and enormous bandwidth usage. Van der Chijs came to China because of his job with Daimler-Chrysler brought him there. Yet after a while, Van der Chijs felt the urge to do something on his own and quit his job. “I went from a car with a chauffeur to a bicycle”, he told me. “I signed up for a six-month Chinese language program and started building my first company”. Eventually he co-founded Tudou, and this is where it gets really interesting.
Tudou is one big success story as it’s world’s largest video sharing website. According to Mary Meekers latest data in Morgan Stanley’s Internet Trends Report, Tudou (35 billion minutes in January) is 40 percent bigger than YouTube (25 billion minutes). An average visitor, Van der Chijs told me, stays on the site for 47 minutes: “For the young Chinese people, it is a substitute for television”. Competition is tough though, as other major video sites like Youku and 56.com also manage to attract millions of visitors every day.
As you might know, they’ve recently raised 57 million dollars. When I asked Van der Chijs what Tudou will do with this money, he replied: “Spend it on bandwidth”. No other site has a bandwidth bill which is as high as Tudou’s. He said that he could turn Tudou into a profitable business by limiting the bandwidth usage, yet then his competition would probably catch-up. So Tudou uses the recently raised money to invest in servers and its infrastructure. “We’re talking about thousands of machines here”, said Van der Chijs. Moreover, Tudou isn’t doing a bad job with selling advertisements - preloaders and banners - and preventing unnecessary money spending - “I fly economy”.
So take this from a man who knows what he’s talking about: to stay ahead of the competition, video sites like Tudou should invest in bandwidth. And one day, one day it will most definitely pay off.
After last nights news about the €6.5 million investment in eBuddy we decided to sneak our way into the eBuddy offices this morning to see if we could find the money. We did find SOME money AND Onno Bakker (co-founder together with Jan-Joost Rueb and Paulo Taylor) of eBuddy. He told us a little bit about the investment and how they celebrated and how that felt the next day.
Check the shocked faces on the employees as we rush in and shout “Where is the money!”.
I’m glad we didn’t get shot OR arrested. Maybe we should make a series of unexpected interviews like this. Check out our earlier Michael Arrington Heist.
Written on August 27, 2008 – 1:50 pm
The worst sector of all? Information technology. I assume that concerns our beloved Internet industry as well. The British IT industry, former leader, had to take the hardest punch, venture investment declined with a stunning percentage of 49. 
Written on June 20, 2008 – 7:18 pm
Written on February 5, 2008 – 1:07 pm
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