Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are pulling together with the support of the European Investment Fund to kickstart investment in their countries – and much of the cash is likely to go to the tech startup sector. Read more »
The ex-Nokians are almost ready to reveal their MeeGo-based smartphone, but how are they planning to break into the two-horse mobile race? According to CEO Jussi Hurmola, Jolla has a plan for getting operators and other co-branding partners on board. Read more »
Following a successful first two years for the original FinTech Innovation Lab in New York, Accenture and its banking pals are trying to replicate the scheme in the world’s top financial center. Read more »
The social network has bowed to the demands of privacy regulators across the EU and axed its facial recognition features for European users. However, it plans to bring the functionality back once it’s figured out how to give its users real privacy choice. Read more »
Double Robotics’ iPad-eqipped telepresence robot is the first beneficiary of the $25m fund Grishin announced earlier this year. His cash will help Double ramp up manufacturing, which will be useful as early demand has been high. Read more »
The Finnish government has approved the technology behind a new ‘Open Ministry’ platform, which will act as a hub for citizens who want new laws voted on in the country’s parliament. But could that work elsewhere? Read more »
The Israel-based firm has set up a server farm to automatically match its social family trees with billions of historical records ranging from newspaper articles to tombstone images, and will offer its users free snippets of the matches it’s found. Read more »
The deal will see the Spanish telecoms giant bundle augmented reality tech with its advertising offerings and promote the Aurasma app to its 300 million customers. But will marketing use-cases finally make the technology fly? Read more »
Moves to allow the digitization of ‘orphan works’ and free up the metadata around 20 million cultural objects will benefit the public and could inspire a new wave of apps and web services. But the underlying motivation is fundamentally political. Read more »
The Finnish firm’s founders are moving to New York to cash in on heavy U.S. demand, they say, while also revealing the opening of a Singapore office. Read more »
The cloud-based customer service suite now has a simplified and more unified UI, and has also pulled in major funding from big names such as Index and Goldman Sachs. Read more »
Real-time bidding is now becoming a common feature on mobile ad platforms. But Germany’s Madvertise reckons its underlying targeting tech will give it the edge over rivals such as Mobclix and Smaato. Read more »
With the photo app’s new ‘Discover’ feed pulling context from an impressive variety of sources, and with monetization plans including an entry into the stock photo business, we may be seeing evolution past the focus on art filters. Read more »
Sometimes one company’s failures can provide valuable lessons for other startups. That’s definitely the case with a major strategy shift from productivity upstart 6Wunderkinder, which we can reveal. Read more »
There are a few apps out there catering to those who want limits on their social networking experience, but this one focuses entirely on the collaborative photo album angle. Read more »
DT is to allow its venture arm to purchase majority stakes for the first time, and Telefonica is setting up an international VC network. Meanwhile software giant SAP is also showing a vote of confidence in the startup scene. Read more »
People love to hate clone artists like Berlin’s endlessly cash-hungry Rocket Internet, but is this really a clear-cut debate? And where should we draw the line? Read more »
Many companies are already targeting advertisers and publishers with their interactive imagery tech, but Roombeats hopes to differentiate itself through a clear focus on advertising and by internationalizing itself from the start. Read more »
Despite the threat of new copyright laws targeting headlines and story snippets, LinkedIn rival Xing is reportedly testing out a news aggregation email service. If done right, that could help with user retention and growth. Read more »
Blaast, which puts a subscription spin on the provision of key apps to low-end phones, has signed up more carrier partners in Asia and is planning a data-frugal app for Android users in developing markets Read more »
In the great international online food delivery land-grab, Berlin-based Delivery Hero has just doubled its total amount of raised capital. According to co-CEO Fabian Siegel, that means profitability – and probably more acquisitions. Read more »
Indiegogo, which is considering letting users of its platform give equity for funding, reckons the change will mostly benefit small businesses who want to raise cash from potential local customers Read more »
After longstanding grumbling from the German capital’s tech community over its lack of recognition, the Berlin senate has launched a campaign to push the city as a startup center of note. Read more »
The company doesn’t think it’s a great idea for search engines to have to pay to reproduce headlines and story summaries in their results. But that’s nothing on the crazy earlier draft of this proposed law. Read more »
The redesigned Loopcam now plugs into Facebook’s Open Graph and allows the uploading of third-party-created animated GIFs. What’s more, the founder suggests the user base is now ‘widely’ past the six-digit mark. Read more »
It turns out you can’t conquer the whole world in one go after all. But, even if low margins have forced the Samwer brothers out of Istanbul, for now their successes are easily big enough to compensate. Read more »
Where’s the party at? That’s the question Vamos is trying to answer with an iOS app that aggregates and overlays Facebook event data on a map, for real-time and hyperlocal discovery Read more »
The ‘Airbnb for activities’ is now open to anyone who wants to offer tours and experiences anywhere in the world, and has also just rolled out more social functionality Read more »
The Swiss startup wants to exploit professional data held on Facebook, Twitter and GitHub in order to create a friendly recommendation system that doesn’t require new profiles or networks. Read more »
Never ones to rest on their laurels, the Samwer brothers have launched their copy of hot payments service Stripe, while also partnering up with the cellular carrier Millicom for a fresh push into emerging markets Read more »
Deutsche Telekom’s move into the browser-based games publishing business may vaguely gel with its broadband offerings, but it’s hard to see it as a viable replacement for the firm’s fading traditional businesses Read more »
Why buy something if you can borrow it from a friend? That’s the simple premise behind Why Own It, although the way the app works could turn it into a revenue-generator as well. Read more »
The analytics-focused social sharing platform, which allows users to share with one click to Twitter, Facebook et al, has bought a Digg clone and a Delicious clone as it gears up to take on the likes of ShareThis and AddThis Read more »
The online food-ordering firm is emblematic of a new breed of aggressively expansionist German e-commerce startup. And, according to CEO Fabian Siegel, the race is on for pretty much anywhere that’s not the U.S. Read more »
The deal gives Berlin’s 9flats its first North American base and comes with some notable benefits for iStopOver’s existing user base. But where does it leave the market? Read more »
Wahwah.fm was trying to bring personal radio into the social age, while doing it all legally. It failed – at least for now – and CEO Philipp Eibach has a very cautionary tale for startups planning to take on the music business. Read more »
The Berlin startup, which has been quietly developing its technology duirng a bootstrapped first couple of years, has gone into closed beta while revealing funding from VCs and SoundCloud and GameForge co-founders Read more »
An Indian operation copied the website of ExploreB2B so closely that the original code still showed, but backed down after little more than a challenging email. Read more »
German mobile analytics firm Adeven says that nearly two-thirds of software in iOS App Store are ‘zombies’ — thanks to a new tool that has counted 400,000 apps which get no downloads, are invisible to users and have no ranking. Read more »
The organization behind Firefox, which is in the early stages of a serious mobile push, says it wants to be ‘where new web trends are created’ — and that means the German capital, where it could link up with some of the city’s mobile app developers. Read more »
