New Technology News

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Amadeus Capital Partners, the veteran UK venture capital fund — started by Hermann Hauser, one of the fathers of the UK computer industry in the 1980s — is moving up-stream with the announcement of its new fund. Amadeus had gone relatively quiet for the last year, making investments here and there. But clearly they were in the process of raising a new fund, because it has raised £33.2m ($55 million) in the first closing of the Amadeus IV Early Stage Funds. This is a first closing, and will go up to £50 million, but the fund does not plan to go beyond that because of the team size. This will be a specifically early stage fund. The timing is welcome, as other investors, such as Balderton, realise the problem of the lack of Series A funds in Europe, most recently Balderton Capital.

Amadeus IV will invest in UK companies developing disruptive technologies in high-growth sectors, including ‘big data’ analytics, cloud computing and cyber security, low-power computing and the ‘internet of things’, medical technology and digital healthcare.

As with many UK VC funds, the new fund is an Enterprise Capital Fund (ECF) supported by the government-backed British Business Bank and is Amadeus’ second ECF. The £33.2m raised to date comes from investors including corporates, trusts, foundations and high net worth individuals.

The previous Amadeus fund was only £10m and was Seed focused. Thus, Amadeus is moving up, following the upsurge in growth amongst startups.

Amadeus has been investing in early-stage since 1998. Its recent exit was OneDrum, acquired by Yammer in 2012 for an undisclosed sum, but rumored to be a big exit for the founders and the fund.

Alex van Someren, managing partner of Amadeus’ Early Stage funds, says early stage capital is very scarce in the UK and Europe, hence this move.

He told us: “All the partners in the fund have been consistently interested in early stage companies and that has been the case since I joined the fund three years ago. After this repeated commitment to early stage, Herman Hauser is nailing his colors to the mast and staying committed to this space and it’s great news for the companies he will add value to. There has been and upsurge in deals and there are great companies out there.”

He said the fund would “definitely” be doing Series A fundings up to a £1 million or “possibly larger” and will start at £250,000 for pre-revenue companies.

Amadeus has a particular willingness to do hardware deals, given its in-house experience hardware.

“We have a few sectors we are interested in: Big Data Analytics, cloud computing, cloud infrastructure, cyber security, Digital Health and hardware.”

After all, Hauser did co-found Acorn Computers, where he helped spin out ARM, designer of chips for the iPhone, amongst others. He was portrayed in a TV film, Micro Men, about the early UK computing industry.

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UK’s Amadeus Raises $55M Fund To Focus On Early Stage Cloud, Hardware Startups

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Amadeus Capital Partners, the veteran UK venture capital fund — started by Hermann Hauser , one of the fathers of the UK computer industry i...

Tag management may not seem like a particularly sexy industry, but it’s attracting plenty of money from investors — one of the companies in the field, Ensighten, is announcing that it has raised $40 million in Series B funding.

Tags help websites track data for third party services, often for marketing purposes, and tag management makes it easier for marketers to install, serve, and manage those tags. Back when Ensighten raised its $15.5 million Series A in 2012, we described it as a CDN for tags, making the process faster and more scalable by serving the right tag at the right time.

The company now says that its Agile Marketing Platform processes tag requests from 30,000 web domains representing $30 billion in annual e-commerce transactions, with customers including Microsoft, Safeway, and Wal-Mart.

“Since the Series A funding, we’ve learned that this isn’t about tag management anymore,” said CEO Joh Manion via email. “A year ago, that was what the market was ready for. We’re now seeing the market evolve from tag management to data activation, with customers demanding a platform that enables them to own, collect and act on their data in real time.”

The Series B funding comes from Insight Venture Partners. The company says it will use the money to expand its global sales and marketing efforts, and to continue product development.

Another startup in the field, Tealium, raised a $15.6 million Series C last year.

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Tag Management Company Ensighten Raises $40M More

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Tag management may not seem like a particularly sexy industry, but it’s attracting plenty of money from investors — one of the companies in ...

CloudLock, the enterprise software startup that helps customers secure cloud data, has raised $16.5 million in Series C funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners.

The new funding will be used to expand beyond the two platforms CloudLock currently covers — Salesforce.com and Google Apps. This brings the startup’s total funding to $28.2 million. CloudLock’s existing investors Cedar Fund and Ascent Venture Partners also participated in this round.

Over past few years, enterprises globally have been shifting a big chunk of their applications into the cloud. While this shift is triggered by ease of use, billing and overall lower costs of application maintenance, there are dangers of putting data in the cloud, and companies such as CloudLock are addressing this market.

According to Gartner, cloud-based security market will be worth $3.1 billion by 2015, up from $2.1 billion in 2013.

Founded in 2007 by Gil Zimmermann, a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Cedar Fund, CloudLock offers solution that goes beyond just data encryption.

“We grew our subscription base over 10x in the past 24 months, and now have 600 paying customers, covering over many millions of their employees,” said Gil.

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CloudLock Raises $16.5M Series C Led By Bessemer

4:10 AM

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CloudLock , the enterprise software startup that helps customers secure cloud data, has raised $16.5 million in Series C funding led by Bess...

Israel-based Viber, a free messaging and VoIP app, has today launched its Sticker Market for Windows Phone 8 devices with an update to Viber 4.0. This syncs up the Windows Phone 8 version of the app with Android and iOS, both of which have had access to the Sticker Market since November.

Launching access to downloadable packs of stickers was one of Viber’s earliest moves into monetization, after holding to a longtime guarantee: that voice calls and messaging will be available for free, in some capacity.

The Sticker Market offers access to free stickers, as well as paid sticker packs created by Viber and/or artists, who can sell stickers through a licensing deal with Viber.

Since launch of the market in November, Viber users have downloaded over 100 million sticker packs, though the company has not disclosed how much revenue has been generated by the market.

Competitors such as Kakao Talk, Line, and WhatsApp have been very successful in their strategy to generate revenue via stickers, so Viber’s fashionably late entrance into the space wasn’t necessarily revolutionary.

The update also brings with it a few added features, such as “seen” status after messages have been viewed, “last online” status, new notification settings and alert noises, and overall better performance out of the app.

This update also comes on the heels of the launch of Viber 4.2 for Android, which includes the ability to block numbers and send up to ten photos at once. iOS users should see this update in the near future, according to the release.

Alongside sticker sales, Viber has also experimented with premium calling to non-Viber users, a feature called Viber Out. The paid service is priced competitively against Skype in most countries, and offers a second way for Viber to leverage its 200 million users.

Viber has gained traction in developing nations, which is why a multi-platform approach is so important to the company. That said, Viber has apps for BlackBerry, Bada, Desktop, and more to ensure that any phone can use Viber’s messaging offering.

To check out the new Windows Phone version of the app, head over here and download.

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Topping 100M Sticker Pack Downloads, Viber Launches Sticker Market On WP8

3:24 AM

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Israel-based Viber , a free messaging and VoIP app, has today launched its Sticker Market for Windows Phone 8 devices with an update to Vibe...

A number of changes are afoot in the European tech media scene and it’s worth us pausing for a moment to take stock. The first item on the agenda is the news that London-based site ‘The Kernel‘, lately a ‘tabloid’ style news site about online culture, has been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Daily Dot Media (DDM), publisher of The Daily Dot, an Austin, Texas based pop/tech/culture news site.

Kernel founder and editor-in-chief Milo Yiannopoulos – a former columnist for the UK’s Telegraph newspaper – is departing forthwith, though not into a new role. He will “continue in an advisory role while pursuing new projects,” he said in a statement. He says he also plans to “take time off”.

The Kernel was owned by BERLIN42 (a major shareholder), Yiannopoulos (who owned 25% of The Kernel at the time of sale), and unnamed private angel investors. BERLIN42 operates Hy!Berlin, a German startup demo conference series which perhaps thought it might get more traditional tech coverage out of The Kernel than actually came about, though Yiannopoulos says BERLIN42 was supportive throughout.

The Kernel’s eight staff are to come under the editorial direction of the US-based operation, though we understand individual negotiations are taking place with all The Kernel’s writers. The site only recently hired a COO, Cat Navarro, but she is not staying on as part of the sale.

DDM CEO Nick White said, “The Kernel and The Daily Dot will produce hard-hitting news, features, and investigative reports from all corners of the brave new digital world.” However, no mention has been made of whether The Kernel will survive as a standalone site. Pressed on this, DDM replied that the Kernel would continue “for the immediate future” but would “ultimately be integrated into the Daily Dot Media family” in some way to be determined. In other words, The Kernel brand does not look likely to hang around.

The Kernel clams to have hit 500,000 uniques a month, with a roster of eight permanent editorial staffers in its London offices.

Typical recent Kernel headlines included:

“PREDICTING THE FUTURE WITH ASPARAGUS”

“THE BEST CARS FOR FAT PEOPLE: A DEFINITIVE GUIDE”

“THE SECRET NAZI PROPAGANDA HIDDEN IN JUSTIN BIEBER”

The Kernel was launched in at the start of 2012 by Yiannopoulos to “fix European technology journalism” – but was shuttered in early 2013 after the company was unable to pay wages.

Its latest incarnation of The Kernel came about when German venture capital vehicle BERLIN42 acquired The Kernel’s assets in early 2013 after the previous company was forced to close, after being sued by former contributors who had not been paid for their work. Yiannopoulos says he later settled the £24,000 debts personally.

The “new” Kernel had better success with stories of more mainstream appeal, such as an investigation into the sales of rape pornography ebooks on Amazon, stories picked up by BBC News and the Mail on Sunday. Although clearly this success was more editorial than commercial.

Yiannopoulos has at times been a controversial figure in the UK tech scene and appears to attract both fans and detractors in equal measure, though lately he has eschewed the tech sector for more ‘mainstream’ debates such as Gay marriage.

Speaking to the Evening Standard newspaper in London, Yiannopoulus said: “I have a dangerously short attention span. That’s not to say I was bored of The Kernel – far from it – but I only really enjoy launching and leading things.”

Elsewhere in European tech media, the scene has been changing quite a bit.

Robin Wauters, a respected former writer with TechCrunch and The Next Web, launched his own project – Tech.eu – with a number of other players in the scene. The site has mostly avoided breaking news to bring longer think-pieces to the industry and video interviews.

Meanwhile, Informilo, an editorial outfit founded by veteran journalist Jennifer L. Schenker best known for producing well-regarded magazines for numerous technology conferences, brought on board the outgoing tech editor for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Ben Rooney. Schenker and Rooney now form a team I like to call “The Kara and Walt of Europe”.

And at the same time the English language news sites covering tech regionally have grown. They include TechCity News covering the London tech scene and RudeBaguette in Paris, alongside older site like Arctic Startup in the Nordics and the many English language tech news blogs in Berlin. Even Poland now has a new English Language tech news site in the shape of Bitspiration.

As I predicted back in 2011, the tech scene in Europe deserved more and better media to cover its growth. It looks like it’s getting it.

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The Daily Dot Acquires The Kernel As Euro Tech Media Starts Motoring

12:40 AM

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A number of changes are afoot in the European tech media scene and it’s worth us pausing for a moment to take stock. The first item on the a...

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

iPhone rumors hit pretty much every week of the year, but some rise to the top -- with or without great sources. The latest bigger-screen iPhone 6 rumor comes courtesy of three authors who span the globe, writing together from Hong Kong, Taipei and San Francisco. According to "people familiar with the situation," they last week reported that two new iPhone models would be released in the second half of this year, both with larger screens than the current 4-inchers used with the iPhone 5s and 5c.

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Apple's Next iPhone: Big's In, Plastic's Out

5:39 PM

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iPhone rumors hit pretty much every week of the year, but some rise to the top -- with or without great sources. The latest bigger-screen ...

IntoNow — the second-screen app that Yahoo bought in the spring of 2011, just twelve weeks after its launch — is being shut down by its parent company. As of last week, IntoNow was taken off the Apple App Store and Google Play, and an email sent to users notified them that the app would stop working as of March 31.

For those who might have forgotten, IntoNow was one of the many second-screen TV apps that popped up in the early part of the decade, offering users the ability to “check in” to the television shows they were watching, and share their viewing habits with others on social networks that people actually used, like Facebook and Twitter.

(The idea was as preposterous then as it seems now, but thanks to the relative early success of Foursquare back in those days, eager app makers were trying to get people to check into every damn thing.)

IntoNow had at least a technological advantage over the other social TV apps out there, in that it had built-in auto content recognition (ACR) technology — which generally meant that it knew what you were watching before you did. It could, in a sense, identify what you were watching and check you into that program automatically.

That had lots of awesome implications for people who cared about stuff like advertising, because suddenly marketers could know with some certainty what shows people were watching while tooling around on their mobile phones and tablets, and hey — wouldn’t it be great if brands could serve up the same ads on the iPad that they were watching on the TV?

Consumers were understandably less enthused about that prospect, which is probably why none of the social TV apps out there have ever gone anywhere, IntoNow included.

The app itself is being shut down, but its technology lives on. Yahoo notes in a statement that apps like Yahoo Smart TV, and the new Loops feature in the Yahoo Sports iOS 7 app, will continue to leverage IntoNow’s ACR feature.

And let’s not forget probably the most important thing Yahoo got out of the acquisition was former IntoNow CEO Adam Cahan, who has been bumped up the ladder as part of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo. He’s SVP of Mobile and Emerging Products at the company, helping to manage its portfolio of mobile apps and identify hot young startups for Yahoo to acqui-hire.

Anyway, for those of you who haven’t yet given up on the whole “second-screen thing,” there’s still hope. i.TV, which acquired social TV app maker GetGlue at a fire-sale price late last year, relaunched the thing with a new name — tvtag. Consider it the circle of life, or whatever.

Yahoo statement on the shutdown below:

As part of our ongoing efforts to sharpen our focus, IntoNow will no longer be available for download in iTunes or Google Play as of January 24, 2014. Additionally, as of March 31st the IntoNow app will no longer

operate. The core IntoNow technology will live on through other products and apps, like Yahoo Smart TV and the new Loops feature in the Yahoo Sports iOS7 app.