UK politician Louise Mensch has got a ton of publicity for her new startup, Menshn — a Twitter-like messaging service that has pre-determined topics for people to talk about. But here’s the thing: it’s an idea that’s rotten from top to bottom. Read more »
What do you do when Google and Sean Parker kill your idea? Change direction. That’s what Ali Ahmed and his videochat startup Lutebox have done, switching from the idea of helping people chat about premium videos to focusing on social shopping. Read more »
It looks like the success of Angry Birds is starting to trickle down into the Finnish startup economy, with the news that Rovio chairman Kaj Hed is putting money into local e-commerce and marketing startup Kiosked. Read more »
Education startup Codecademy — which promises to help anyone learn to program with its game-like online courses — is stepping up to the international market with a $10 million round of funding from new backers including Index Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Read more »
Russian entrepreneur Oleg Tinkoff has started businesses in everything from online banking to beer. Now he’s turning his attention to the digital advertising market, with a new company backed by Goldman Sachs that hopes to cash in on the country’s rapid online growth. Read more »
Swedish investment group Kinnevik has cut its ties with Groupon, selling up its remaining stake in the daily deals company for $81.5 million — a shareholding that was valued at almost $200 million when the company went public in November. Read more »
With more than $1 billion in tickets sold through its platform, Eventbrite is on a tear — and co-founder Kevin Hartz says it’s now ready to spend some of the $50 million it raised last year on a massive global expansion. Read more »
The big noise in European startup events this week is all about LeWeb, the leading French conference set up by Loic Le Meur that’s holding its first spin-off in London. But that’s not the only thing happening across the continent over the next seven days. Read more »
Skype and Lovefilm backer Index Ventures has just added a new €350 million early stage fund to its arsenal, and now plans to use it to back dozens of companies across Europe, America and Israel over the next three years. Read more »
Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin isn’t happy being one of Russia’s most successful internet entrepreneurs: now he wants to help a new generation of robotics companies, and is launching a fund with $25 million of his own money to try and kickstart a more ambitious future. Read more »
Since coming out of beta last year, Swedish payments service iZettle has been very careful about how it has grown. The company — which, like Square, lets people take card payments through their iPhone — first launched in its home market, then the rest of the […] Read more »
Finnish kids’ virtual world Habbo is being pushed to the brink, after accusations that the site had become a haven for pedophiles led to a second investor pulling out of the business, and British retailers dropping the company’s products. Read more »
Nokia has agreed to sell luxe handset brand Vertu — which makes jewel-encrusted mobiles that cost thousands of dollars — to a private equity group. But chaos still reigns at the Finnish company, which also said it was cutting 10,000 more jobs and reshuffling its management team again. Read more »
Linus Torvalds, inventor of the Linux kernel and one of the leading lights of open source software, will share Finland’s prestigious Grand Millennium Technology Prize with a Japanese scientist, after the jury took the unprecedented move to split the $1.5m award between the two finalists. Read more »
Finnish social networking site Habbo is in hot water claims that it is not doing enough to protect its young users from sexual predators — accusations that have led one investor to pull its support for the company entirely. Read more »
Berlin startup Readmill’s iPad-based social reading app has got plenty of attention. Now it’s getting a significant update that will make it simpler and easier to use for everyone — including making it more useful for independent publishers to hook themselves in to. Read more »
Forget Quora: Swedish startup Mancx is trying to put a twist on question and answer sites by getting people to pay real money for the information they receive — and it’s just raised another $1.65m to expand. Read more »
Just months after Germany’s notorious Samwer brothers courted controversy by cloning design sales site Fab.com, they are about to close their copycat site, Bamarang, down — folding it into its more successful stablemate, WestWing. Read more »
After weeks of trying to find out why Orange mobile censored GigaOM for millions of mobile users in Britain, we finally have an answer: it’s because the company’s crude child protection blocks anything that looks like a blog by default. Read more »
The security breach that led to millions of Last.fm passwords being compromised happened at least three months ago — and remained undetected, despite the fact that the company suspected in May that it had been targeted. Read more »
Football’s Euro 2012 tournament may be distracting plenty of people from their normal lives, but there are still plenty of events taking place across the continent for anyone interested in technology and the future. We pick three to watch out for. Read more »
British mobile operators have come in for criticism recently for ‘overblocking’ — incorrectly identifying sites as adult content and censoring them from ordinary web users. After GigaOM fell foul of one network’s filters, we asked for answers. And now they’re trickling in. Read more »
First LinkedIn, then eHarmony, and now possibly Last.fm. As the number of sites falling victim to password hackers continues to grow, the questions are flooding in about how these incidents are connected, and who might be the next target. Read more »
Four years ago German Facebook clone StudiVZ rejected a buyout offer from Mark Zuckerberg. Now the evidence is mounting to suggest that the company — founded by notorious copycats the Samwer brothers — could face its critical moment. Read more »
Vodafone and O2 are joining forces in Britain to share their grid and try to roll out 4G services faster than planned. It’s being painted as a great deal for consumers — but it’s actually being driven by the actions of their rivals. Read more »
Forget virtual worlds and children’s apps: London-based startup Makielab thinks the toys of the future will be 3D printed and totally customized — and it’s raised a significant round of seed investment to start preparing to play with the big kids. Read more »
With the London Olympics just around the corner, the event’s addiction to crass sponsorship and commercial exploitation just gets worse and worse. The latest victim? Mobile network O2, which has effectively been stripped of its sponsorship of The Millennium Dome for the duration of the event. Read more »
Payday loans business Wonga has become hot property in the U.K. over the last few years — but with the prospect of a Nasdaq IPO on the cards, the company is still struggling to overcome the public’s distrust of money lenders. Read more »
Mobile companies faced with rising data use are often choosing to block or limit innovative voice and messaging apps. But that won’t solve anything — and in the long term it’s only causing the industry damage, says Andreas Bernström, CEO of VoIP service Rebtel. Read more »
Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee may mean that Britain is on an extended holiday, but there are plenty of events taking place across Europe this week for anyone who wants to know about startups, technology and the future. Here’s our pick of the best. Read more »
British mobile firms are often accused of “overblocking” — censoring the web for their users in the name of child protection. But after GigaOM was blocked, we’ve discovered first hand how dangerous bad filters can be… and how hard it is to get answers from operators. Read more »
Disruptive UK payments startup GoCardless is aiming for the big time with a new, user-friendly service called PayLinks that allows anybody to pay or collect money online in seconds — all without paying hefty transaction fees. But can they gain users’ trust? Read more »
Gig listings startup Songkick has started its expansion into broader music services, with a new feature called Tourbox that lets bands manage and promote their live dates across the web, through integrations with the likes of YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Read more »
70 years ago Bletchley Park in England was home to a team of computer pioneers who were breaking Nazi ciphers to try and win the war. This weekend, it’s playing host to a different generation of geeks as Europe’s largest mobile hack day prepares to land. Read more »
Moscow-based search engine Yandex is hoping to steal a march on international rivals with a new music subscription app for the iPhone — but it’s gambling that users will be ready to stump up cash for the service in a country where paid-for digital music is […] Read more »
The founders of micro-payment service Flattr have said they are worried that their business could be seriously damaged after Apple rejected a podcasting app that integrated with the system. Read more »
One of the world’s premier startup conferences, Paris-based LeWeb, is heading to London this month. But organizer Loic Le Meur says he was thinking about heading to San Francisco, not the UK — until the British Prime Minister made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Read more »
A flurry of reports suggest Facebook is interested in buying Israeli image recognition startup Face.com. But reports from Moscow suggest the rumor mill could be turning because Russian search engine Yandex wants to sell its stake in the firm to Mark Zuckerberg. Read more »
When a data scientist crunched enough numbers to predict that Sweden would win this weekend’s Eurovision Song Contest, he felt fairly confident. But he didn’t expect that the biggest noise would be the inaccurate prediction that Malta would do well — something he’s now apologized for. Read more »
The sun is shining across most of Europe, and the continent is swarming with events. Here’s our pick of three that you should follow this week. Read more »
