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 »
Local is hot, at least for Axel Springer. The German publisher is buying a local portal, meinestadt.de, as a vehicle to gain exposure for local online classified advertising. Read more at paidContent »
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 »
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 »
Tech start-up buzz is bringing Berlin to the attention of suits who broker company investments and sales. That means many more German outfits are likely to see money sloshing around, just like SoundCloud did. 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 »
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 »
European startups love to analyze their failures and look for reasons the continent finds it hard to build huge new businesses. Now a great, comprehensive piece in The Economist manages to show how the problems are deep, dangerous — and go back at least 50 years. Read more »
Details are sketchy right now, but it appears that the director of Independence Day and Godzilla is one of the partners behind a new online film portal that promises to reward users for paying attention to the trailers they watch. Read more »
The European leader for ride sharing already has four million users, and now it is gearing up to take on an American market that has no dominant competitor. With Daimler fuelling the expansion bid, it could quickly find itself ahead of the pack. Read more »
The Berlin startup hopes that a ‘big six figure’ funding round can help it provide a European take on the ‘Airbnb for childcare’ model. But will its emphasis on trust and personal screening mean success — or simply create scaling problems? Read more »
German startup PaperC adds a twist to the idea of academic textbooks by letting people purchase a single chapter — or even just a page. Now, in order to raise funding it’s not going a traditional route: it’s holding a public auction. Read more »
Papagei.tv wants to use movies and other video entertainment to help people learn new languages — and it’s doing well out of the gate, with at least €10m to extend its immersive language-training courses and a role as the official language trainer for Germany’s Olympic team. Read more »
Apple wasn’t the only loser in the ruling. It was ultimately a loss for both parties since the court also disagreed with Motorola’s previous claim that Apple’s iPad design patent was invalid. As a result, both parties have to cover court costs generated by the dispute. Read more »
A new coolant called CryoSolplus, being developed at one of Germany’s Fraunhofer institutes, aims to make electric car batteries last longer by using paraffin droplets that are three times better at absorbing heat than water. Read more »
In social TV’s second-screen dream, timing is everything. And German startup wywy has just burst out of stealth mode with an impressive set of tools for keeping broadcasters, advertisers and viewers in sync — as well as control of long-established media monitoring service Idioma. Read more »
Roku just started rolling out a firmware update to its media players that includes a translation of its user interface to Spanish and German. This comes just days after we broke the story that Roku is eyeing Germany and Span as its next foreign markets. Read more »
Amiando, the German-focused ticket sales service owned by business network Xing, has been crowing about its growth. In fact, its stats don’t actually say a lot — but they do serve as a glowing end-of-term report for the soon-to-depart company founders. Read more »
A newly-launched startup called Foundd is taking the algorithmic approach, while its Berlin neighbour Tweek.tv is going for the social angle. But why has no winner emerged in this space already? Read more »
Roku’s web developers left some hints in the code of the company’s website that suggest an expansion to Germany and Spain. What does this mean for Netflix, which has traditionally been the most popular service on Roku, and closely tied to its previous international expansions? Read more »
BMW will be the first the automaker to incorporate Nuance Communications’ new voice command and control platform into its dashboards. The German car manufacturer said today it is using Nuance’s Dragon Drive voice messaging technology in its luxury and compact sedans. Read more »
A new startup is hoping to breathe new life into the MeeGo project let loose by Nokia — just one of a rising number of companies breaking out as the Finnish mobile giant stumbles. That’s what happens when you let 40,000 people go inside two years. Read more »
The German couponing service KaufDa is the latest service from the region to set its sights on Brazil, following in the path of the Rocket Internet steamtrain Read more »
Germany’s notorious clone merchants have sold their stake in furniture operation Fashion For Home, but that still leaves them with good alternatives in the space. Whether they can produce strong players in less traditional e-commerce markets is another question. Read more »
Productivity startup 6Wunderkinder made a big noise on the Berlin scene when it launched, but it’s been quiet for a few months. Now CEO Christian Reber explains why other German startups should follow suit and focus on their product — and why he’s worried about Windows 8. Read more »
One day after Philipp Humm’s surprise resignation from T-Mobile, Vodafone announced he has joined its ranks. Humm won’t just be supervising one of Vodafone’s numerous European subsidiaries – he will take charge of eight carriers in Northern and Central Europe. Read more »
After Nokia axed development of its semi-secret Meltemi operating system, hundreds of workers in Ulm, Germany, found themselves jobless. Now they’ve set up a ‘talent and job offer’ campaign to hawk around their services. Read more »
With the online B2B payments market worth a whopping $250bn or so, Traxpay and its backers are hoping their real-time, back-office-friendly platform will give them a significant slice of the pie Read more »
Payment startups hoping to conquer Europe will be watching their backs a little more closely today, with the news that the Samwer brothers have just pulled together “double digit funding” for their Square clone. PayLeven (previously known as Zenpay) is a straight-up copy of Square: a […] Read more »
After the CEO of social gifting company Wrapp said he wanted to take on Germany’s notorious Samwer brothers, the business is finally delivering by launching in Germany and taking on the copycat kings on their home territory. Read more »
New messaging platform Moped is essentially a lightweight yet richer alternative to one of Twitter’s secondary features. But even in the increasingly crowded messaging space it might be unique enough to fly on its own. Read more »
Hollywood likes to sell its TV programming in big bundles, leaving foreign broadcasters with lots of shows too edgy for prime time audiences. So why not just take them online? That’s what Germany’s ProSiebenSat.1 has been trying this year, and the results have been promising. Read more »
The Xing-owned ticketing startup, which powers events such as Le Web, is picking up a new CEO while its co-founders use a well-earned break to plan their next venture 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 »
Why did one early investor in apparently thriving Berlin startup 6wunderkinder sell up? We’ve solved the mystery: it looks like the German public-private HTGF venture capital firm hit the limits of what it was allowed to do and decided to cash out. Read more »
Doo’s free service collects and catalogues all sorts of digital and physical documents, but the small-business crowd that could be a key customer base will have to already be using Windows 8 to take advantage. Does that make sense? Read more »
Twitter’s deal with SoundCloud to embed audio in tweets isn’t just a deal that gives the Berlin music startup a ton of exposure: it’s a signal that while Twitter may carry a threat for media companies, it could be a serious alternative to Facebook. 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 »
The company behind German Facebook clone StudiVZ has changed its name to Poolworks and decided to focus on its social network for school-age kids, IDPool. It seems there’s simply no point competing with Mark Zuckerberg’s juggernaut any more. 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 »
