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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]