It was exactly a year ago that news began to surface of Fujitsu’s intention to come to Europe with its Android-based smartphones. Now the Japanese company is finally coming good on those reports: on Tuesday, Fujitsu is launching its first device in Europe, marking its first “extensive foray into the smartphone market outside Japan.” → Read More
Google is facing a privacy policy probe in Europe. Last year it consolidated more than 60 separate product privacy notices into one unified policy. The move drew criticism from European privacy regulators — which last October called for Google to give users more control over their data. Today they said Google had failed to respond to their suggestions and would face fresh action. → Read More
Last August, Affectiva, developer of a new way to track facial responses to online content, raised $12 million from KPCB, Horizon and others to take its tech to a wider market. Today comes one of the fruits of that effort: the company is announcing a deal with the Ebuzzing Social video advertising platform for the company to integrate Affectiva’s Affdex facial coding software into the Ebuzzing… → Read More
We’re now about a week away from the start of the Mobile World Congress, the large, annual European mobile event put on by the GSM Association that has served as a barometer of the progress of the wireless industry. In planning out what TechCrunch will be doing and seeing during the week in Barcelona, we’ve noticed a gap: Google, and specifically its mobile OS Android, is largely absent. → Read More
Opera has been making a lot of headlines of late — with last week’s announcement of its big strategic shift to WebKit. Followed hard on the heels by the news of its $155m purchase of Skyfire. But the Norwegian software maker’s decision to abandon its own web-rendering engine in favour of WebKit, has had another, less visible impact: it has reportedly dismantled a core in-house developer team. → Read More
We’ve seen a lot of fashion tech and fashion e-commerce startups pick up steam in the form of users, revenues, and venture backing. But because content remains king, less tech-heavy sites, working in the area of amassing intelligent data, are also growing: Business of Fashion, a London-based B2B blog that chronicles the ins and outs of the fashion industry, is today announcing that it is picking… → Read More
DealAngel, the site that lets you search for hotels and compare prices based on their historic and broader market value to ensure you really are getting a good deal, has launched a private beta of its API — essentially adding a B2B element to its otherwise consumer-facing offering. It’s a move that makes quite a bit of sense, too, potentially opening up DealAngel’s data to additional use-cases… → Read More
Google’s Android platform dominates the U.K.’s smartphone landscape — powering 54 per cent of the handsets in use at the end of 2012 (Kantar’s data). But what apps are U.K. Android owners spending increasing amounts of time on? Researcher Nielsen says Android app usage during May to October 2012 flags up growth in mobile shopping and commerce. → Read More
This year we want to make it very, very obvious that TechCrunch events are open to all. In the past we’ve had startups appear from everywhere from Tokyo to Russia to Ghana, Africa. And this year we want to see a great turn-out from Europe, so we’re specifically inviting European startups to Disrupt NYC held on April 29-May 1. After-all, there’s a growing European startup scene in New York, so this… → Read More
Facebook has won a court challenge against its real names policy in Germany. Yesterday an administrative court in the North of Germany granted Facebook’s request for “suspensive effect” against a ruling made by Schleswig-Holstein’s Data Protection Commissioner that Facebook was violating German and European law. → Read More
A double-dose of details today about the normally secretive e-commerce startups incubated by the Samwer bothers-backed Rocket Internet. Silvio Berlusconi was outed as one of the key investors in Square clone Payleven; and Zalando, inspired by Zappos in the U.S., is reporting 2012 net sales of €1.15 billion and reaching breakeven in its core markets of Germany, Austria and Switzerland. → Read More
Hot on the heels of closing a “new” €40m fund, Point Nine Capital is announcing its involvement in another investment today. Together with Runa Capital, it’s leading a $2 million Series A round in Berlin-based Mambu, the SaaS for alternative finance and “micro-finance” organisations mainly in Africa and South America. Existing investor Kizoo Technology Ventures also participated. → Read More
Members of Oulu’s Starttaamo startup hub have attracted more than €10 million in angel and VC investment over the past two years — from Finnish and international investors. Add in government support, subsidies and initial capital, and the total funding stands between €20 million and €25 million, says Teemu Polo, one of the not-for-profit hub’s founders and members of the board. → Read More
Following up from its legal filing yesterday in the U.S., Google has now officially served BT with legal papers for patent infringements in its home market of the UK. While yesterday’s suit concerned enterprise services, the UK finding reveals that Google is using Motorola patents to go after BT, claiming it is making infringements in its IPTV services and its set-top boxes. Thus a legal battle… → Read More
The European Publishers Council (EPC), whose members represent the interests of publishers in 14 European countries, has responded to Google’s establishment of a €60 million fund for French publishers — saying the deal does not go far enough to address “the continuing problem of unauthorised reuse and monetisation of content”. → Read More
The race for leadership in easy e-commerce in Europe is on. Stripe, the U.S. startup that has developed a simple payments API for developers to use in apps and on the web, is preparing to make its first steps into European waters with a beta launch. And the news comes as Rocket Internet-backed rival/clone Paymill, which also offers developers an API for simple payments (at comparable… → Read More
Serial games entrepreneur and sometimes angel investor Dylan Collins has a new project, which he no doubt describes as “awesome”. Aiming to help solve the discovery problem faced by physical and digital products targeting the fickle market that is kids, the aptly named Box Of Awesome is like a free Birchbox for 13-14 year-old children, stuffed with games, music, books, and other kid-friendly… → Read More
Google today stepped up its battle to protect its patents, with the latest target a countersuit against BT, the UK incumbent telecoms carrier, along with Ipanema Technologies, which resells some of BT’s services. The suit relates to four patents that Google says are being infringed by services that BT runs over its IP network, specifically relating to its conferencing services and quality of… → Read More
Google this week fired off one of the first high-profile tests of Russia’s controversial new firewall — erected November 1, 2012 to block child porn, drugs and suicide content; but seen by critics as a route for the government to block whatever else it chooses. Google’s YouTube operation in Russia has filed an appeal against the Russian regulator for blocking YouTube content. The appeal, filed on… → Read More
Browser maker Opera plans to move to using the WebKit engine, as well as Chromium, for “most” upcoming versions of browsers for smartphones and computers. Its first WebKit product is likely to be a browser for Android — due to be previewed at the Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona later this month — with desktop and other products following. → Read More
Point Nine Capital, the Berlin-based VC that originally spun out of the investment arm of German incubator Team Europe, has announced that it has closed Point Nine Capital II, a €40 million (~$53.7m) fund focused on early-stage Internet investments of approximately €1m upwards in Europe and beyond.
Meanwhile, Team Europe’s Lukasz Gadowski and Kolja Hebenstreit are stepping down from their… → Read More
New startup conference for the ‘Baltic Rim’ TechChill Baltics took place again this year in Riga, Latvia. Following in the footsteps of the online infographics tool Infogr.am (from Latvia), the winner of the event this year is BliuBliu. This Lithuanian startup is working on a better way to learn foreign languages, which is an especially big challenge for minor languages such as Lithuanian. Grab… → Read More
Vertu, the formerly-owned-by-Nokia maker of eye-wateringly expensive, leather-clad, gem-encrusted, handmade-in-the-U.K. ‘luxury’ smartphones, has launched its first Android-powered device: the Vertu Ti. After leaving the Nokia fold, back in October, it was rumoured that Vertu planned to do what many a Nokia fan still wishes that company would do: ditch Symbian and adopt Android. → Read More
The assets sale at Nokia, the world’s former number one mobile maker, continues. After selling and leasing back its headquarters in December — injecting $230 million (€170 million) into its coffers — the company has now sold its Peltola campus in Oulu to domestic business space provider Technopolis for €30.5 million ($40.9 million). → Read More
Deskarma, which originally launched as a knowledge sharing app aimed at professionals but has since pivoted to focus on collaboration in the enterprise, has launched Coffee Who, a single-use web app to get employees talking via face-to-face meetings — over coffee, of course. It taps into a wider trend, says the London and Melbourne-based company, that will increasingly see enterprises supplement… → Read More
Azimo, the UK-based social money transfer service aiming to disrupt an industry dominated by legacy players Western Union and Moneygram, is rolling out integration with Facebook to make it easy for users of the uber-social network to send money to one another. A first for the remittance industry, claims the company, with perhaps PayPal-to-PayPal transfers coming closest. → Read More
Gruzobzor, which roughly translates to “cargo overview” in Russian, has announced that it’s raised $1 million from Runa Capital and the startup’s founders. It offers a cloud-based service targeted at the transportation industry to enable carriers, shippers and freight forwarders to share electronic documents and communicate in real-time, therefore increasing efficiency when transporting goods B2B. → Read More
Google is not currently looking to create funds to support digital publishers outside France. Google’s comments follow calls last week by the head of the European Publishers Council for Google to pay media companies across Europe for displaying their content. Earlier this month Mountain View announced a €60m fund to support French publishers but this model won’t be replicated elsewhere in… → Read More
A spot of acquisition news in Europe’s digital video distribution space. Rightster, a U.K. video distribution and monetisation startup has made its first acquisition — buying European content marketing platform and movie trailer distributor, Preview Networks, for an undisclosed sum. Rightster said the acquisition will bolster its global YouTube Multi Channel Network footprint. → Read More
Dublin and San Francisco-based Swrve, which offers an in-app direct marketing platform aimed at mobile games developers or anybody making or responsible for marketing an app, has launched SwrveTalk to enable in-app marketing messages to be sent to users on a targeted and measurable basis. It can be employed to do things like cross-promote other titles in a portfolio or to improve conversion of… → Read More
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