Atomico to invest 300 million in Europe

Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis have a big appetite for success. When they sold Skype to eBay they cashed several hundred millions, but they invested quite a substantial part in their investment vehicle Atomico.

Currently they are planning to open a new fund, but now entitely focused on European startups. The fund will have a size of 300 million euros. Atomico’s first fund consists of a lot of well-known names like LastFM, Powerreviews, Technorati, Joost and Wunderloop. Of these, LastFM was recently sold to CBS for around 280 million dollars. It seems that everything Niklas and Janus touch turns into gold. They also were involved in the file sharing program Kazaa. So, if you are a startup and need funding to make the next step I would go for Atomico. Hopefully they will like your business too

High activity in The Netherlands

It’s difficult to keep track of all merger and acquisition activity in The Netherlands. There is no common underlying trigger for the frenzy. For some it has to do with (re)focussing on their core activity, others just want to expand and others are acquired by even larger retailers. Below a short summary of all recent activity:

- The Phone House takes over Typhone, Femmefone en ICTango
- Venture Capitalist Ende & Deitmers buys 30% of Centralpoint
- Takeitnow has been bought by Aces Direct
- First Europa is up for sale
- Venture Capitalist Ende & Deitmers invests in Hyves

I will keep you all updated on any new acitivity!

Is ‘green’ a hype or there to stay?

In October last year I already wrote about CSE’s launching theme pages focused on the ‘green trend‘.

More and more comparison engines are leveraging their (costly) software to add new ‘niche’ or theme sites, like Shopgreen (from Pricegrabber) and TheFindGreen (from TheFind) [......] I expect many more of these theme sites to pop-up, but with Al Gore pushing for a better climate, for now the green trend will be the most prevailing one.

Well, it didn’t take long. The first real green and environmental conscious CSE is out, Greenzer. At the closing of Earth day Greenzer.com lauchned their public beta. Greenzer highlights some of the key green attributes for products to make the search easier and more informative. They also provide a score for a certain brand/product.

The Greenzer score is built up out of 4 elements:

• A Climate Counts score
• A Greenpeace score
• EPEAT score
• Energy Star certification

In the case of the Toshiba Tecra notebook this leads to a score of 8.6. See the image below!

Greenzer.com has a nice look-and-feel. I also believe that the ‘green’ element will attract quite a few visitors. However, they will also have to provide an excellent selection of shops. I am curious if they will also only admit ‘green’ shops. That is something that I did not see yet. Maybe something for the next release!

TakeitNow sold to Aces Direct

TakeitNow, one of the older webshops in The Netherlands, has been sold for several million euro to Aces Direct. The webshop has been up for sale for over a year as the current owner of TakeitNow (iMerge) did not see it as its core business anymore. Imerge can now fully focus their attention on internationalizing Icecat. Icecat offers an open catalogue for product information. The product data is used by shops and price comparison engines.

Microsoft acquires Farecast?

Rumors are that Microsoft has acquired Farecast for approximately $115 million. Insiders say that Farecast had multiple offers to choose from. It is unclear what Microsoft wants to do with Farecast, currently the two companies already work together on MSN Travel.

What does Farecast actually do?

Farecast offers a unique service by providing its users with intelligent airfare predictions. Founded in 2003, Farecast has since gained very healthy funding from several venture funds totaling $20.6 million. Unlike other travel companies, Farecast predicts when a user should buy a ticket based upon 175 billion points of previous airfare data. Its engine can currently predict whether airfare goes up or down up to a week into the future with a claimed success rate of 70-75%. While Farecast has a lot of competition, they claim it is the only company which can predict future prices.
The site has recently expanded to providing the best deals on hotel room as well. Results from travel search sites like ReserveTravel, Orbitz, and CheapTicket, are shown on a map with prices and other hotel information. Farecase gives deal finders an idea if a specific hotel is overpriced or a good deal by marking overpriced hotels blue and attractively-priced hotels red.

Seattle based Farecast now also says to provide predictions in Europe. I have tried to find some predictions, but I couldn’t get it to work for European destination.

Below is a graph of a trip from Las Vegas to San Fransisco:

New blidget for my blog!

It is now possible to integrate news from Eye on European E-commerce on your own website or blog, we have a blidget (yeah sorry for the slang, it’s a widget for a blog) now!

Founders Pricerunner launch TestFreaks.com

Kristofer Arwin, Magnus Wiberg and Martin Alexanderson (who previously founded the price comparison engine PriceRunner in 1999) recently founded TestFreaks.com. According to them they do the following:

TestFreaks is about aggregating all information about your favorite products. User reviews, professional reviews, prices, blog posts, forum threads, news, rumors, manufacturers descriptions and specifications, manuals, videos and more. We want you to have the best possible information about the product you are looking for. It should be fun and easy to find the best products for you. TestFreaks isn’t only about finding new products it will also be an owner’s community were you can share your experiences about your products and help others maximize the utility of the products.

TestFreaks.com is similar to what Alatest and HetBesteProduct (only in The Netherlands and currently partner of the Compare Group) are already doing. Alatest is most aggresively pushing into new territories. I personally believe most in the score of HetBesteProduct.

Pangora launches its own comparison engine

An interesting move from Pangora. They have decided to not only provide portals (and anyone willing to open a comparison engine) with a white-label solution, but also to enter the CSE market itself. Pangora is a subsidiary of Lycos. Some time ago Pangora (or actually Lycos) bought Mentasys, as Mentasys was the front-runner in mapping and matching of product content.

The fact that Pangora has decided to enter the CSE market is not really a surprise, as they had a business model that is not really sustainable in the long run. I will try to picture this below:

If you want to open a new comparison engine, you just go to Pangora. They basically can provide you with anything you need, so:
- deals with shops
- portal/comparison software (so, the website)
- mapping and matching of datafeeds to product data
- product data

The mayor drawback is that you will have to pay a 30% (or close to that number) commission to Pangora. This is probably ok if you’re just starting, but when you have gained in visitors and income you probably want your own solution. It’s just like doing match; when is it more profitable to do all this yourself? Besides, if your service is gaining in popularity, you want to stand out from the crowd, the Pangora solution is a me-too solution.

As things at Lycos and Pangora aren’t really flourishing this could be their last attempt. Moving from Munich to Karlsruhe also did not really help attaining the best people (this has been rumored, so it has not been checked by me).

Anyhow, their new site Decido is quite impressing. The usability is good and the services they provide are also quite well integrated. Now let’s see if they can also attract the visitors. They have some experience with that at Lycos, but for Pangora this must be new. As the SEO and SEM market in Germany are quite overheated (and weird in my humble opinion) I am curious if they can make it fly. A good site and content is one thing, having (happy and returning) visitors is the must crucial element for success!

Take-over wrap-up

Today Checkit, a Dutch searchengine marketing company, has been taken over by Isobar (a Aegis Media company).

Also announced today is the take-over of Indextools by Yahoo. The acquisition includes IndexTools’ Web analytics business and technology as well as its Tensa R&D Kft. subsidiary. Upon completion of the acquisition, the addition of the IndexTools’ assets is intended to expand Yahoo!’s powerful set of services designed to maximize its clients’ online marketing efforts. Read the whole press release here.

Google to improve Amazon Webservices?

It was being rumored all over the web but the news is now out… Google just launched its Google App Engine. This is an ambitious new Google project that offers a full-stack, hosted, automatically scalable web application platform consisting of Python application servers, BigTable database access and GFS data store services (source: Techcrunch).

Werner Vogels (see my post) also hinted about this in his keynote speach at the Next Web Conference. Actually Google App Engine can be seen as a direct competitor of Amazon Webservices, offering S3, EC2 and SimpleDB.

This is wat Google says about their own service:

Today we’re announcing a preview release of Google App Engine, an application-hosting tool that developers can use to build scalable web apps on top of Google’s infrastructure. The goal is to make it easier for web developers to build and scale applications, instead of focusing on system administration and maintenance.

Leveraging Google App Engine, developers can:

• Write code once and deploy. Provisioning and configuring multiple machines for web serving and data storage can be expensive and time consuming. Google App Engine makes it easier to deploy web applications by dynamically providing computing resources as they are needed. Developers write the code, and Google App Engine takes care of the rest.
• Absorb spikes in traffic. When a web app surges in popularity, the sudden increase in traffic can be overwhelming for applications of all sizes, from startups to large companies that find themselves rearchitecting their databases and entire systems several times a year. With automatic replication and load balancing, Google App Engine makes it easier to scale from one user to one million by taking advantage of Bigtable and other components of Google’s scalable infrastructure.
• Easily integrate with other Google services. It’s unnecessary and inefficient for developers to write components like authentication and e-mail from scratch for each new application. Developers using Google App Engine can make use of built-in components and Google’s broader library of APIs that provide plug-and-play functionality for simple but important features.