£30,000 is the price for that tired old Web 1.0 site

How much does an old Web 1.0 startup go for these days? Well, here’s an indication. Pub listings guide BeerintheEvening.com - running since t...

Germany’s Hobnox ramps up the marketing

German video entertainment startup Hobnox is going on a big marketing drive, offering $200,000 worth of prizes and giveaways for artists that take ...

Jaiku starts to re-emerge, opens unlimited invites

Jaiku - the Finnish startup which at one point threatened Twitter to become the pre-eminent micro blogging tool before Google bought it - has now m...

Through the startup hothouse - and out the other side

Ahead of Seedcamp and TechCrunch 50, Alan Patrick from Broadsight / Broadstuff gives an insight into one of the other UK funding programs in this g...

Diary.com re-invents diaries for Generation Twitter

When the history of the Internet is one day written, as it will be, URLs will probably figure high on the list of the jewels Web companies tried to...

ITV brands Friends Reunited re-launch a success - but where are the missing 12 million?

Perhaps the era when old media companies bought new social networks is now over? Why? Because an old media company has now re-made a social network...

Collaboration web apps to beat the Credit Crunch

With the promise of a credit crunch fast approaching, people are starting to tighten their belts. The tech industry can often be one of the first t...

ProofHQ makes artwork proofing collaborative

So there have been many attempts to make it easier to collaborate over projects. You’ve got apps that will put yellow stickies onto web pages...

Are you a European startup going to TechCrunch 50?

If you’re a European startup going to TechCrunch 50 (either as a demo company, individual, or even if you’re just thinking about being ...

Learning a language the Web 2.0 way

TechCrunch UK recently ignited a debate around education startups in the UK, but it’s quite clear that the biggest Web 2.0 education market i...

The top 15 ways to get on with TechCrunch UK, and maybe other media

So as this terrible wet August / Summer ends and online battle re-commences once more, I thought I may as well have a stab at giving you some ideas...

TechCrunch UK named best Web 2.0 and business blog

TechCrunch UK has been named the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. The ComputerWe...

Hey, Hackers need friends too!

Despite a plethora of events supporting “new media” types, and even such things as Geek Dinners, the UK eco-system around “hacker...

Dear Agencies, it’s time to join the start-up party

One of the biggest problems in the UK, and I would say Ireland as well, is that digital or ‘new media’ agencies only ever decide to inc...

Please Sir, where are the education start-ups?

Silicon Avon - startups doing it ‘Bristol fashion’

In the first of a series of guest posts about the startup scene in various parts of the UK (get in touch if you’re interested in writing one)...

Aiming your startup at the US - without leaving the UK

Four guys in Edinburgh now run a site aimed entirely at the US. Even the UK section of the site appears under “International”. What hav...

Trust me, I’m a start-up

This is a guest post by David Cruickshank, co-founder of Business IT Online, the web-based suite of business software applications for small busine...

As Twitter withdraws SMS, startups rush to fill the void

Assuming the founders of Twitter are listening, then they will have been be hearing about the outcry from users outside the US (just read these com...

Twitter cuts UK SMS - there goes another business model

Twitter has killed its outbound SMS services outside of the United States, Canada or India, and with it a potentially highly lucrative business mod...

Terms of VC endearment - Forget the valuation, what’s the deal?

British, and by extension European, startups often talk heatedly about valuations. But across the pond where they’ve been doing this for many...

UK 2.0 - Why the UK can become the global hub for mobile

This is a guest post by jamescoops from the mjelly mobile internet blog.  There’s been a lot of discussion on Techcrunch UK and else...

Taking the shine off: Why blog publishing ‘failed’ in the UK (or at least didn’t create a $30m exit)

US entrepreneurs have had notable success with Blog publishing startups, in particular Jason Calacanis (Weblogs Inc sold to AOL for $25m) and more ...

Hard times in Europe may be a startup’s advantage

This guest post is written by Robleh Ali, founder of Zoinetworks. Although the Internet’s killer application - the Web - was invented in E...

Web analytics faux pas

This is a guest post by Ed Freyfogle, co-founder of property search engine Nestoria. It’s often claimed that the advantage of the internet v...

Startup in the sticks - Top 10 tips on how to be an isolated Entrepreneur in the UK

The following is a guest post by Richard Marshall, founder and CTO of Rapid Mobile Media. London may be the sprawling heavyweight centre of the bus...

The brave new world of video pitches for a startups competition

European Startups competition Seedcamp is running a video pitch competition where you can vote for a startup to go into the week-long event based o...

Should we have a TechCrunch party in Berlin at Web 2 Expo?

I have been kicking the idea around with a few people (mainly in conjunction with Andrew Scott, CEO of Rummble who knows Berlin well, and had an id...

Goole, the town a G could change

I think I’ve found my TechHub. If ever there was a former industrial town in the North of England that had an opportunity to rebrand for the ...

News in brief

• UK-based The Filter has been nominated for ‘The Industry Standard’s‘ Innovation awards, as has Alert Thingy, BBC iPlayer and a few other European...

Click to activate a charity on Everyclick

Everyclick, a search engine which monetises search results for charities and offers donation and campaign tools, is launching a new full-blown plat...

Kublax goes into closed alpha

Kublax, a hotly anticipated startup which syncs all your bank accounts, utilities, and loyalty schemes has launched an Alpha version to pre-registr...

mloovi - Feedburner for the rest of the planet?

Mloovi is a new tool which will translate RSS newsfeeds into 24 languages. It does this via Google Translate but the process is utterly seamless. Y...

Interesting events for startups

• Tomorow marks the start of Leeds’ first web festival - “LS1″ - a bunch of unconferences, keynotes and meetups that pretty much ...

Glasses Direct gets a new CEO - but will it help?

Following his announcement in March that he was moving on to become executive chairman and thus search for a new CEO, Glasses Direct founder Jamie ...

21 UK firms selected for Digital Mission to New York

You may have heard about Webmission, the trade mission of which TechCrunch UK was a part, to take 20 UK startups to network with investors and star...

Doof re-launches - but that name…

Casual social games startup doof has re-laiunched and now offers over 100 games, more social networking features, more competitions and a members c...

Government workers want social tools - but the IT dept doesn’t get it

Huddle has done a study on the interest in social networks inside government departments and found that, well, they just don’t “get it&...

iPhone Nano by Christmas? Or should the Daily Mail just be banned from Techmeme?

Back in June I wrote a freelance (just the one mind) piece for The Guardian about my old stamping ground of online media. In this case it was the A...

TechCrunch Talk and Seedcamp party - a great combination

This September TechCrunch UK will be hosting TechCrunchTalk, an afternoon of discussion and debate about the trends in European start-ups, involvin...

After a girl goes missing, is Netlog doing all it can to protect children on its site?

Netlog, which at 33 million users is possibly continental Europe’s biggest social network, could be open to criticism in the way it deals wit...

Can you engineer a technology cluster? The Irish experience

So I recently wrote about the idea of having a purpose-built/created technology cluster or building(s) in London which I whimsically called “...

This week’s top three jobs on CrunchBoard

This week’s top three jobs on CrunchBoard are: Ruby on Rails developer with an interest in sport New Media Coordinator Programmer / ninja for...

Request for guest posts over the Summer

Over the Summer I’m opening up TechCrunch UK & Ireland for some guest posts by people I think have something cool to say about startups ...

True Knowledge gets second round from original backers

Well, maybe I was wrong. Instead of True Knowledge bagging a large amount of VC funding as I thought, it’s gone back to its existing investor...

Babbel secures funding for language learning

Babbel, the Berlin-based language learning startup which we wrote about in January and which appeared at our London TechCrunch Pitch! event, has se...

Google Street View goes ahead in UK. Thanks again, Privacy International

So I should say at the outset that there is nothing wrong with the concept of privacy. But in an age of social media, people really are going to ha...

Start voice calls via Twitter? No way! Way.

Would you like to talk to your Twitter friends or set up a spontaneous conference call? Normally you’d have to agree to hook up over Skype or...

iubo launches public beta for searching your stuff

iubo, a start I wrote about in December last year, has launched its public beta. The idea is that you input all your data (contacts, photos, bookma...

Locify makes mobiles location aware

Manchester-based Locify is a project about GPS on java-enabled mobile phones which enables a web service to offer location relevant services. User...

So where are London’s existing, organic TechHubs?

It’s weird how ideas get a certain zeitgeist. Last night at around 1am I put up my idea for a TechHub - a physical cluster for startups, prob...

Why True Knowledge pisses on Cuil - Those pictures in full

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words. And the cool thing about Cuil (and when I say cool I mean “funny”), is that it ke...

Starting the campaign for The TechHub

I’ve long known about Dublin’s Digital Hub but seeing is believing, and when I was over there recently for our TechCrunch Meetup I visi...

Will Google use Jaiku to kill Twitter?

I’ve been thinking about what happened to Jaiku lately and making some enquiries. It’s amazing to think that last year people were talk...

Wahanda raises ??1.5m for socnet for spa users

Wahanda, a social network for people who use spas and other “wellness” products, has raised ??1.5 million, in large part from Ambient S...

TechCrunch Pitch! - Mini wrap-up

A quick explanation: I’m working on a fuller write-up about the first TechCrunch Pitch! event in London last night, which will appear on Tech...

Idlasso and Retaggr arrive to fight over your profile

I don’t know. You wait for a startup to come up a particular idea, then two come along at once. Identity is a big deal on the Web. But with s...

Xtract closes 7.5m Euro B round

Xtract, a web an mobile analytics company I have been tracking for a while, has closed its series B round of funding with EUR 7,5 Million ($11.74M)...

Orange World wraps up socnets

It’s time once more for that predictable roll-up of social networks onto mobile operator platforms. Orange’s new Orange World service a...

Livestation goes social - allows viewers to add channels

Microsoft-backed Livestation, the online broadcast platform which offers live 24×7 news channels in high-quality, is adding features which wil...

Mippin’s VC joins as CEO

Mippin, the free mobile media service that monetizes RSS feeds for publishers on mobiles by making the consumer experience easier, has brought in J...

O2 swamped by iPhone pre-registrations - site goes down

It appears that O2 had no idea the iPhone 3G would be this popular in the UK, because someone there didn’t add any extra bandwidth or redunda...

Google starts Street View mapping in UK. And here’s the evidence

Somewhere in Google’s picture archive of UK streets there is now a picture of a man holding up a camera, photographing the moment when Google...

Seedcamp opens up this year’s startup competition

Travelling around Europe on my TechCrunch Euro Tour one of the topics of conversation I hear almost constantly is the desire for more seed funding ...

Nimbuzz raises $15 million in second round

Word has reached me that Netherlands-based Nimbuzz, the mobile VoIP and IM startup that extends into social networks, has raised $15 million in a s...

Tripwolf launches in UK

Tripwolf today launched out of public beta and a UK site. Backed by incubator i5invest and MairDumont, Central Europe’s largest publisher of ...

TrustedPlaces and BView team up

TrustedPlaces, the local reviews social network, is partnering with BView, the business listings directory. The idea appears to be to let each site...

TechCrunch Pitch! Here it comes…

It’s just over a week until TechCrunch Pitch! in London next Thursday and the excitement is building. People have been clamouring for tickets...

TechCrunch Euro Tour - Hello, Athens

As part of the TechCrunch Euro Tour, TechCrunch and Athens’ OpenCoffee group have come together to create a TechCrunch meetup in Athens. Than...

TechCrunch Euro Tour - it’s time for the Istanbul Meetup

As I have said previously, I’m on a tour around Europe, looking for Europe’s best and brightest startups, and I’m happy to say, i...

Dublin TechCrunch Meetup!

I flew into Dublin today for our first TechCrunch meetup in Ireland (yay!), and as previously blogged, TechCrunch is hooking up with networking eve...

Live Blog: The TechCrunch BBC Debate

I’ll be live blogging the debate, and posting picture here. Stay tuned Currently handing out name tags on the door. A long-held ambition̷...

Faceparty tells critics to F*** Off, suspends entire site

Owners of the somewhat idiosyncratic FaceParty, one of the UK’s oldest social networks, appear to have had an altercation - with almost their...

BBC Mashed winners

Alas, I couldn’t make Mashed, the BBC hacker event over the weekend (largely due to wanting to see my wife and children in the breaks between...

The TechCrunch BBC debate - Are you coming?

If you are coming to the “The TechCrunch BBC Debate: A Common Platform” this Wednesday night (June 25) then please take note of these i...

TechCrunch Dublin Meetup this Thursday night

Ireland gets a startup shot in the arm this Thursday, June 26, when three (count’em 3) startup events happen in Dublin on the same day: OpenC...

Nokia kicks off the scramble for location

Nokia’s acquisition of Plazes today, the Germany location startup, will do one or both of two things. It will mean other mobile startups with...

TechCrunch UK events listings are now crowd-sourced

UPDATE: As per Nicole’s comment below, let me know if you think this group should be just UK/Ireland focused or Pan-European, and why. I̵...

Mydeo extends into enterprise video hosting

UK video hosting startup Mydeo, has launched an enterprise version of its service under the name m3 (Mydeo Media Manager). The idea is to aim the s...

TechCrunch UK on Sky News - The Associated Press debacle

Last night Sky News asked me to comment on the Associated Press move to stop sites quoting AP articles (BTW TechCrunch has now banned linking to AP...

Smarkets raises £100k seed round for ’simple’ gambling startup

Smarkets, a London-based pre-launch betting exchange focusing on making betting simpler, has raised $200k with a convertible note from five private...

VCs price True Knowledge at £20m pre-money. Is this the UK’s Powerset?

It’s fairly rare to find VCs clamouring over a startup, virtually throwing term sheets folded into paper aeroplanes through any open window t...

TechCrunch hits Dublin, 26th June

TechCrunch is hitting Dublin to create a real-world mashup with Irish tech networking event TechLudd. So I present to you “CrunchLudd, the Te...

Update on Amsterdam TechCrunch Meetup, July 22nd

Tickets for the Amsterdam TechCrunch Meetup on July 22nd, co-organised by eBuddy, are now up for grabs here (they’re free). I gather a boat m...

How to be a civil servant AND a social networker

Civil servants now have a new code of conduct for social networks, thanks to MP Tom Watson, a long-time blogger and savvy MP who just announced (on...

Update on The TechCrunch BBC Debate

Just to update you on The TechCrunch BBC Debate: A Common Platform, I can confirm that a few members of the press are now confirmed to attend, and ...

Fav.or.it: Automatic commenting for the people

Feeds and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has finally come out of the door into public beta, with a large number of new features aimed at simplifyi...

Next2Friends launches against Qik, Flixwagon, with a twist

Next2Friends, the mobile social media platform, today launches its ‘Live’ application designed to provide real-time streaming from mobile devices t...

Balderton refreshes its team

Following news last moth that George Coelho, co-founder of venture capital technology investor Balderton Capital, had joined renewables investment ...

Migoa closes €1m for Spanish property search

Spanish property search start-up, Migoa has raised over €1 million in its first round for nuroa, its property search engine for Germany and Spain. ...

Berlin Meetup - Wunderba!

TechCrunch held a Berlin Meetup yesterday. And boy, was it a blast. Nearly 30 sponsors, 300 people, fantastic venue, great after-party. Oh, and I d...

The TechCrunch BBC Debate

TechCrunch and the BBC are holding an event to rationally debate and discuss the issues around the BBC’s assets and technology, prompted by t...

TechCrunch Pitch! - The TechCrunch Summer event

TechCrunch UK will be holding a startup pitch competition on July 10th in Soho, London, entitled “TechCrunch Pitch!” The idea came abou...

O2 confirms free iPhone deal and more

I’m short of time today - covering the Being Digital conference - but my story of last night has been confirmed by O2’s release, pasted...

iPhone 3G pre-registration likely on 02 site from Tuesday

02, exclusive carrier of the iPhone in the UK and Ireland, will be launching the iPhone 3G from their Web site tomorrow, as implied by a notice pos...

Old news in an hour, but iPhone will be free on 02

I just got it confirmed from an O2 source (hat tip to Will Harris at ChannelFlip - you know why), that the UK 3G iPhone will be free on an 18 month...

TechCrunch / CrunchGear Berlin Meetup This Wednesday

I’m really looking forward to the TechCrunch / CrunchGear Meetup in Berlin this Wednesday, June 11. Organised with the excellent assistance o...

Butcher’s Bunch, the tech Podcast from Europe

After being exhorted to do so by a number of people, I’ve decided to start doing a regular podcast about the tech, startup and social media s...

Skimbit signs distribution deal with Add to Any

Skimbit, the UK startup with a social decision-making tool which is rapidly heading towards being a social bookmarking player, has launched as the ...

MyMission2 secures £150k angel funding

UK startup MyMission2, which works like a dating site to get people who want to do things matched up with people who want to help them do it, has s...

When Twitter fails, Twiddict will queue your tweets

This is cute. Twiddict is an application launching today with impeccable timing. Assuming Twitter goes down today during Apple WWDC events (an iPho...

Google’s Cities in 3D Program hits Europe

Google Cities in 3D Program, which invites local governments to share their 3D data with the public by adding a model of their city to Google Earth...

Yaika launches life-casting

Yaika! is a new lifecasting platform targeting European professional and amateur bloggers. The bootstrapped Estonian-based startup with a London pr...

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Inuk secures £9.5m second round for IPTV

Welsh broadcaster S4C and Wesley Clover have put in £9.5million of second round investment into IPTV startup Inuk Networks’ freewiretv.com product....

Goojet opens mobile service

Goojet, a French startup which is best described as a new kind of platform for mobile widgets, has come out of stealth mode to launch a full-blown ...

Seedcamp Paris - notes from our Gallic cousins

I popped over to Paris today to get a taster of the startup scene in France, and to draw some comparisons with the UK startup scene. No doubt there...

Should we have a heated debate?

I’ve had a lot of feedback in the last few days following my recent posts about the BBC. My position can be summed up thus: The BBC could do ...

HubDub launches feature to track pundit predictions

Today Scotland-based prediction market startup HubDub, launched a new feature. PunditWatch is tracking ten pundits across four categories, politics...

Are you Haikurious?

Writer and soon to be author Paul Carr - in between a recent travelogue of adventures in the US and prior to the launch of his book “Bringing...

TechCrunch Euro Tour Update

TechCrunch UK is taking the TechCrunch brand on a little road-trip (OK, plane trip) around Europe this summer and afterwards, making face-to-face c...

Founders apply electric shocks to Naked’s dead body

Naked, the UK-based social messaging startup which closed last week mere months after launch and days before it released a beta after a failed atte...

While the BBC fiddles, Britain’s innovation burns

Ok, so that might be a rather strong headline, but it was the best I could think of to describe what is currently going on. (That’s Nero fidd...

Is Twitter down? What do you think…

Checked your Twhirl client this morning? Tried hitting the home page? Just ask IsTwitterDown.com, here’s all it needs to say:

European online advertising up 40% year to £9bn

Europe’s online ad market is growing by 40% year on year across the continent, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe (releas...

Blyk’s mobile ads might be working after all

Startup MVNO Blyk, which provides a cheap mobile service to young people in return for sending them “targetted” ad messages, has launc...

Attentio takes 600k Euro investment

Brussels-based social media tracking startup Attentio, has received a 600,00 Euro investment from five new private shareholders well known in Norwe...

Dissecting Naked - When and what to publish about a failing startup

The Next Web blog - normally great - has had a slight crisis of confidence and attacked TechCrunch UK’s report on the demise of Naked. Blogge...

The Hospital’s mashup of real and virtual networks

The Hospital private members club in London is not the first place you might look for a new kind of web model. It’s a private members club, a...

Startup Roundup

Moo, which recently moved offices in London, has a new roof (see above), which doubles as a terrace. Lucky them! So in the spirit of other more min...

Netvibes CEO leaves for new project

Tariq Krim, founder and CEO of Paris-based Netvibes, is stepping down work on a “new project.” He remains on the board of the company and as a non-...

Is Google about to release an API for location?

(Update 31/5/08): TechCrunch’s Nik Cubrilovic has now taken up this baton and run with it: Google To Launch Large Scale Geo-Services —&...

Naked stripped bare - startup runs out of cash, enters liquidation

Naked, a UK-based social messaging startup, has entered administration and the assets of the company are to be liquidated. Sources say the company ...

Being Digital comp winners

I’ve managed to twist the arm of the organisers of the upcoming Being Digital conference, and those nice people at Sun Microsystems Startup E...

UnLtdWorld has some new features, and I have a suggestion

UnLtdWorld, the niche social network aimed at social entrepreneurs, is adding a few new features. Among them, the Research Lab feature (which maps ...

Phreadz: A Seesmic clone? Or a lot more?

Phreadz is a new UK-based social multimedia conversation network of video, audio and photo blogging created via the desktop or from mobile devices....

TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup Pictures

Here are the pictures I took at the TechCrunch Barcelona Meetup this week (and some more). Thanks to everyone who came and thanks also to our spons...

Pitch yourself and get to Being Digital

Update: TCUK readers can get tickets at the reduced price of £250 with this link. Being Digital is a conference on Jun 10 which will look at seven ...

Barcelona! TechCrunch meetup and Euro Tour Part Deux

I’m trying to get around Europe this summer to meet startups. Tomorrow I am at Startup2.eu, a new competition for European tech startups. I&#...

BBC’s Sound Index is good, but we won’t get the data

The BBC’s SoundIndex, currently in beta, lists the top 1,000 artists based on discussions crawled from Bebo, Last.fm, Google Groups, iTunes, ...

MinuteBox does not box clever

MinuteBox is a new site which bills itself as a market place for people to buy and sell short snippets of advice. It’s a full-on social netwo...

BookRabbit sets out to “scrobble” bookcases

This week new UK-based book social network BookRabbit sets out with a slightly different take on socialising online around books. BookRabbit is aim...

Qype launches iPhone version, but it needs more

Qype, the European reviews and ratings network in the UK, France and Germany, has launched an iPhone version unoriginally called “iQype”...

Glubble secures second $3m Angel round

UK-based Glubble, a free parental-control add-on for Firefox, has secured a $3 million funding round from existing angel investors to continue the ...

TechCrunch events in Europe and the UK

As I wrote over on TechCrunch.com, I’ll be heading out to the rest of Europe over the next few weeks, looking for and writing about the start...

Upcoming events of interest

May 15: next08, Hamburg next08 is on May 15, 2008 at the Prototyp museum in Hamburg. The main theme will be “get realtime”, taking care...

intermediads - a new take on button ads that takes the pain out of clicking

Intermediads is a new service just launched in closed beta. Developed by serial entreprenuer Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, it’s based around ...

Instopix - Visualising chat as you type

Instopix (Instant Messenger Topic Pictures) is a program, currently only for MSN users, that shows related pictures for their conversations. ItR...

Nimbuzz aims at mobile and social networks to turn the screw on Skype

We last wrote about Nimbuzz in early 2007. Then it was a free application which supported voice, presence, conference calls, and SMS messaging betw...

bview mashes up Yelp, Yell and Facebook to keep businesses honest

BView claims to be Yelp+Yell+Facebook for businesses and their customers. When I first heard that, I though “join the queue”. There are...

Powerset has a ’secret’ video

The much talked-about Powerset (at least in Silicon Valley circles),which is trying to crack the nut of natural language search, has been looked at...

Live blog - TechCrunch UK meetup

Update/Postscript: The event attracted several nice comments (below) and a couple of blog posts, as well. —- I’m sitting here outside ...

TechCrunch/Crunchgear meetup, Berlin, June 11

I’m delighted to announce that TechCrunch / CrunchGear are holding a Berlin meetup with our partner and co-organiser twidox. The “TechCrunch ...

TechCrunch UK meetup, this Friday

The sun is shining, London is officially in Summer mode, so I think it’s time we started a series of TechCrunch UK meetups. The first is tota...

Cellcrypt to encrypt mobile calls

I’m not sure if they are going to have a clause in their contract which says “No terrorist clients”, but UK startup Cellcrypt is ...

TechCrunch Dinner with Scott Rafer, CEO Lookery

UPDATE: This event is now sold out. I recently heard that Scott Rafer would be in town next week. Scott is a Silicon Valley Internet entrepreneur, ...

Global internet portal? Check.

Tuesday/Wednesday next week sees the launch of the grand-sounding World Biz Online, and my Spidey Sense is already tingling. Big London launch in ...

Pikum launches beta for friendly betting

Pikum has gone into an invite only beta. The site lets anyone create and play games called Pikums where they can see who’s better at predicti...

Pixsta’s ad network for fashion is all about image

Pixsta is a London-based startup with an image search technology which allows you to browse and search visually. Since launching trials with a hand...

Virgle.com - how Google and Virgin forgot a domain

On March 31st this year Google and Virgin announced a joint venture: to create a human settlement on Mars. Sir Richard Branson penned a passionate ...

Hobnox - quality audio and video tools

Hobnox is a video and audio tools platform in closed beta coming out of Cologne, Germany. It’s aimed - mainly - at users who’d like to ...

MySpace.com loses MySpace.co.uk on appeal

MySpace thought it was all over when it secured the MySpace.co.uk domain in February this year. A decision by Nominet’s dispute resolution service ...

Coldplay proves that free music is… popular

Last.FM has got in touch to say that since the new Coldplay single ‘Violet Hill’ was released for free on Coldplay’s website this morning, La...

Anyone else notice Lycos Europe is for sale? No, me neither

Lycos Europe, the forgotten portal site which left the tent and said “I am just going outside and may be some time” a few hundred years...

Friends Reunited relaunches, threatens several startups

The venerable FriendsReunited, one of the the oldest social networks in the UK, has relaunched as a free social network containing features which w...

Wubud - a mobile socnet on a SIM card

TechCrunch UK & Ireland has learned that Wubud will be the next venture of UK-based entrepreneur, Paul Walsh, who already runs Segala, a usabil...

Kenshoo opens UK office

Kenshoo, an Israel-HQ’d startup which automates search engine marketing techniques performed by SEM agencies, has launched a UK office, follo...

Definitely Web 2.0? Maybe.

Accosted by a man with a video camera who asks you what Web 2.0 is all about during Web 2 Expo, I had a crack a the subject in a few pithy sentence...

Every UK VC deal in 2007

I’ve decided to go the whole hog and pull out the whole of 2007’s list of VC investments in tech companies, as compiled by CalibreOne r...

Latest jobs on the CrunchBoard

In case you haven’t noticed, we are still running a special launch offer of £20 a job on CrunchBoard. Here are some of the latest jobs: Senio...

European VC investment in tech is actually going up. But Seed funding?

James Brocket of Headhunters CallibreOne has been busy compiling a great list of VC investments in tech companies (PDF). Why? Because they do a lot...

Rummble rolls out support for Fire Eagle

Rummble, the mobile and location-based ’social discovery’ tool, has added a basic integration of Yahoo’s Fire Eagle location data...

Wolpy - a simple socnet for travellers

Coming out of Europe, Wolpy is a new social network for travellers to share their travel experiences. The basic idea is to create a map of the plac...

Zattoo adds UK channels to live service

Zattoo, the live TV to PC platform, has extended its channel line-up to include BBC 1 & 2, ITV 1, Channel 4 and Channel 5 via its online stream...

Sony BMG tracks go live on We7 via advertising

Over 500,000 tracks from Sony BMG goes live on We7’s site today, following their first deal with the major label in March. Sony BMG manages act inc...

WebMission - That’s a wrap!

I’m going to have to apologise for the lack of updates on the Web Mission trip of 20 startups to San Francisco and Silicon Valley this week. ...

Launching video comments. Here we go…

So, we have launched video comments on TechCrunch UK & Ireland, integrated with Seesmic. I’m going to test this out now. Feel free to hav...

Skimbit to go on Gigya network

The Angel-backed, social decision-making tool, Skimbit has won agreement with widget distribution network Gigya to include Skimbit in their Wildfir...

Huddle puts on users as Basecamp drops prices

An ‘enterprise 2.0′ price war is looming as the UK’s Huddle starts to creep up on the incumbent in the space, Basecamp. The forme...

BBC joins OpenID, but it won’t work yet

The BBC has quietly joined the OpenID Foundation, announcing the move on its BBC Internet blog. The BBC is the first large media company to join th...

Viral feature triples HubDub’s sign-ups

HubDub, a fantasy league for designed to monetise news content better for publishers (review), has introduced the ability for users to challenge th...

DotHomes doubles US database

DotHomes, the UK-based real estate search engine which now covers the US, UK and South Africa, says it has doubled its number of nationwide real es...

Trampoline’s Dashboard cracks the enterprise social network nut

Making social networks work inside companies is a difficult nut to crack. Who wants to update their status all the time to tell everyone what they ...

Carsonified, which runs Silicon Valley-style UK events, attacks a UK startup trip to… Silicon Valley

Note: Please see update below. It’s just morning here in SF so I have just seen this post. The below is my initial response, but I have to g...

WebMission Day 2: Brunching and lunching

So day two of WebMission began with plenty of recovery time following the previous evening’s partying, which took in the tad pricey Clift Hot...

Eastern promise at TMT Ventures

Smart-up, a great blog about Central and Eastern European startups has been covering the TMT.Ventures’08 conference in Kiev. It sounds like a fasci...

WebMission Day 1: The flight

So, the WebMission trip to take 20 startups to visit Silicon Valley got off to a flying start. All 29 of our party turned up on time for the flight...

Business IT Online improves importing

UK-based small business software startup Business IT Online has released an improved import feature to complement Plaxo’s import widget, enab...

Events News 180408

Here’s a rag-tag rundown of UK/Irish/Europe events related to startups and Web 2 that might be worth checking out. Feel free to pimp more in ...

TechCrunch UK is coming to San Francisco, and bringing startups!

From Saturday through to Friday next week I’ll be accompanying 20 UK startups on a trade mission to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, dubbed ...

Facebook has a new role - fighting crime in Manchester

When Facebook was created I daresay the last thing on Mark Zuckerburg’s mind was the idea that one day it would be used to fight crime. But t...

And the winner is…

Admittedly, asking who should be the next director of future media and technology for the BBC in an online poll was a slightly flippant move. Howev...

LoveFilm merges with Amazon’s DVD rentals

In an expected move, the UK’s Office of Fair Trading has greenlighted the merger of LoveFilm and Amazon’s UK rental operations, giving ...

WorldTV partners with Qik for live video

Ireland-based WorldTV, an online TV startup which lets users mix clips from video sharing sites and their webcam, is adding interoperability with U...

Launching CrunchBase in Europe

The keen-eyed reader will have noticed that we are now adding database-style information to the ends of posts about companies. This is a widget tak...

Nsyght launches public beta for social search

Now in public Beta, I covered Nsyght back in October when it was still in early Alpha. This tiny boostrapped startup from West London wants to take...

OpenX ups sticks for LA

London-based open-source ad server startup OpenX is biting the bullet and moving to Los Angeles. In addition former Yahoo senior vice president Tim...

SellaBand wins further funding

Social music service SellaBand has won EUR3.5 million in further backing from Prime Technology Ventures, also a Dutch company. How SellaBand works ...

Lacy does London

Business Week columnist Sarah Lacy, best known for her book on the ‘new’ Silicon Valley and a recent interview with Facebook’s Ma...

aka-aki to launch English MoSo app

aka-aki, the Berlin-based mobile social network, has launched its public beta for Germany and a localised English version of the service will launc...

Covestor raises $6.5 m Series A, led by Union Square and Spark

Two A key European VC is backing a site which allows you to play the markets with your brokerage account. US-based Covestor has raised $6.5 million...

Events news

I’m going to start a roughly weekly post about upcoming events I think you should be aware of. As many of them as possible will be relevant t...

OpenSocial in London

Last Sunday was the OpenSocial hackathon at the BT Centre in London, pitched as a way for developers to learn how to get OpenSocail apps up and run...

Debatewise launches public beta of dated model

Debatewise, a UK-based startup for decision-making around any issue, has gone into public beta. They are aiming to be the “Wikipedia for deba...

SEM automator Kenshoo gets Arts Alliance funding

UK-based VC firm Arts Alliance is investing in Kenshoo which automates search engine marketing automated technologies. AA joins US VC firm Sequoia ...

The Next Web Awards winners

Winner of The Next Web startup competition was: Wakoopa Since May last year, Wakoopa will scan your drive, tell you what software you use most and...

NextWeb - Startup pitches round 4 (Day 2)

Symbaloo A new take on the personal home page with the weirdest interface you’ve ever seen. Search and discovery. Wayfinding on the Wbe. There is a...

NextWeb - Werner Vogels argues Amazon’s model matches the new world

NextWeb: Live blog: Keynote: Werner Vogels, Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Amazon.com: Presentation title: “Uncertainty”...

PutPlace secures further funding, strengthens team

Irish startup PutPlace has secured a further funding round and added to its board with a number of industry veterans. The round was a co-investment...

NextWeb - Startup pitches round 3 (Day 2)

[Live notes from The Next Web conference] Bemba This Dutch startup has a browser button plugin allowing you to share any content with your network ...

Watch Diggnation live (at The Next Web conf in Amsterdam)

Go here to watch live. TCUKTCUK

Lookery makes Euro social apps a tempting advertising offer

If you’re a European web application developer, especially for social networks, then you’ll probably be interested in this news. Looker...

NextWeb - Startup pitches round 2

NextWeb: Startup pitches round 2 Netlog Netlog are really well known in Europe but here is how they pitched it: A European social networking platfo...

NextWeb - Open widgets stand against locked-down systems?

NextWeb live blog: Khris Loux, CEO and co-founder of Web widget provider JS-Kit had a talk entitled “Web 3.0 or Web 3D?, The Decentralization, Disa...

NextWeb - Digg wants to predict better

NextWeb live blog: Keynote Discussion: Scott Rafer & Kevin Rose “Inside look at Serial Entrepreneurship” [Health warning: Live notes, excuse ty...

Twinity metaverse wins new backers

Berlin start-up Metaversum, the developer and operator of the virtual world Twinity, has won a new investor in the form of Balderton Capital. The e...

One of our VCs is missing

People join organisations, people leave organisations. But some leave and are then literally air-brushed out of history. Just take Trotsky. One min...

Fav.or.it to bring all comments back to your blog

Fav.or.it, the RSS reader and commenting aggregator in private beta, has launched what it calls a “conversation tracker,” which aggregates all your...

RecommendBox - new private social network for recommendations

RecommendBox, a new site where friends can share recommendations, launches today. The site allows friends to make recommendations and request recom...

ikordo cancels all meetings [Falco]

ikordo, a UK web application for arranging meetings between busy professionals, is to cease trading (i.e. Falco*), along with parent company Voluti...

ScribbleSheet writes its own obituary

It seems to be a day for shutting down. ScribbleSheet, a citizen journalism portal which only launched in September last year, is no more. It turn...

i-Together closes BlogFriends, mothballs Buzzspotr

UK startup i-Together last night said it was closing its Facebook application BlogFriends, an RSS feed sharing app which had attracted upwards of 2...

Webjam gaining users

I hear UK startup Webjam is bringing in some deals. Yamaha music group is using the web community platform to spearhead grassroot music eduation. A...

Last.fm expands in Germany; Plans to scrobble TV

Last.fm has apointed F. Scott Woods senior vice president and managing director for Germany. He joins Last.fm from Google where he served as Head o...

XING hits its numbers, keeps growing

XING, the German-born social network for professionals which has spread across Europe and Asia and now competes with Silicon Valley’s LinkedI...

European startups set out their pitches

The TheNextWeb conference happens in Amsterdam next week, and they’ve announced the startups that will be pitching in the startup competitio...

Guardian hires Yahoo! developer head to build platform

It’s highly significant that The Guardian newspaper has just made a major hire direct out of Yahoo! in the US to begin building some kind of ...

Top tech startups in Europe?

The Red Herring has released it list of top 100 Tech startups in Europe and they include a number of UK firms. Among the list (and I may have misse...

Zemanta launches its alpha for blogging on acid

Launching in Alpha today is Zemanta, the London-based startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant l...

Brits go online while watching TV. Duh.

I don’t know about you but if I ever watch TV I really just can’t sit there without having a laptop open. It would just be so boring ot...

Roll up, get your Olympic Torch Facebook app

Assuming you can get over China’s appalling treatment of democracy protesters in Tibet, you’re about to get the chance to win two tick...

Facebook’s not dead. It was just resting

A few weeks ago I said the recent drop in UK traffic to Facebook was not significant as it had happened over the Christmas break. According to 95% ...

3i repeats its exit from early stage, now to the FT

Nice to see the Financial Times catching up on a story I first broke in January and confirmed in February, namely that private equity house 3i is a...

Startup comp has a £1m prize

The London Technology Fund is running a competition for tech startups. Prizes include a share of up to £1m in investment funding and over £100,000 ...

IBM starts Cloud Computing Centre in Dublin

IBM is to establish what appears to be Europe’s first Cloud Computing Centre at the IBM Innovation Campus at Mulhuddart, West Dublin. Some 21...

OpenX - those 2008 priorities in full

Not long after London-based advertising software startup OpenAds spent some of its $20.5 million in VC funding on changing its name for the for the...

Intruders TV - videoing startups so you don’t have to

I really like the guys from Intruders TV. They are, to some extent, Europe’s answer to (first) PodTech and latterly FastCompany TV. I really ...

BlinkBox inks deal with FreemantleMedia

BlinkBox, the UK start-up we reviewed in October last year, has signed a deal with FremantleMedia to bring a bunch of old TV shows including Baywat...

Wikio walks out to a sticky wicket

Wikio - which has launched a UK version - is a news portal featuring a search engine scouring press sites, the blogoshere and product listings. Thi...

EU startups get plugged at Plugg

This week there was a new conference on the Web 2.0 block in Europe. Plugg saw investors and startups from across Europe come together to discuss t...

Myrl launches Web-based virtual world

Virtual worlds are all very well but they are usually closed systems which don’t integrate well with the Web, and since the Web won the platf...

It looks like Spinvox has raised £50m

Update: Reuters just confirmed the below story (which I wrote this morning, about 5 hours before Reuters), as Spinvox has now clearly put it out on...

Blogging Plugg.eu - notes from panels

For a first time conference for investors and startups, Plugg, held in the rather nice ambience of an old theatre in Brussels, is going very well....

First-time startups start to feel a chill wind

“Funding business plans from first time entrepreneurs just won’t happen anymore!” So says Robin Klein of The Accelerator Group,...

Isango raises $8 million for its ‘travel experiences’

UK travel startup Isango has raised $8 million led by Spark Ventures. Beringea contributed US$2.5m and the remaining US$1.5 million came from exist...

Getting plugged-in at Plugg

This week I will be reporting from Plugg, the European conference focusing on Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 startups on March 19th in Brussels. As well as...

Is WAYN on the block again?

Back in January I had several very good leads telling me that WAYN, the social network for travelers was in talks with AOL about a $200m sale. A te...

CloudMade raises €2.4m to supercharge open source maps

Think for a moment about about how amazing it was a few years ago to see Google Maps for the first time. Suddenly not only was mapping a fascinatin...

WeLoveLocal sells majority stake to GCap

UK local listings and networking startup WeLoveLocal has hit a payday (of sorts) via a £450,000 majority stake taken in it by radio network GCap Me...

Zemanta launches content suggestion engine soon

Launching in a couple of weeks is Zemanta, the startup which has developed a facility for Wordpress blogs to suggest contextually relevant links, p...

EU taxpayers to fund $306m Google rival. No wonder the Yanks think we’re dumb

The EU Commission is up to its usual tricks. Twenty-three European private firms led by electronics firm Thomson are about to get EUR99m ($152m) fr...

Automatic for the people: Free Wi-Fi maps

Every tech startup need to now about where the free WiFi is, right? Hell, even us journalists need somewhere to post from when out and about. So he...

Time to get a Job 2.0

The TechCrunch UK & Ireland jobs board, otherwise known as CrunchBoard, is now open for business. As TechCrunch is all about tech startups, thi...

Get a FireEagle invite while they’re hot

I have TEN Fire Eagle invites to give out to the hot new location-based application from Yahoo’s Brickhouse ’skunk works’. To get...

Get Forkd - a social network for recipes

Forkd is a new site all about recipes as the social object which users share, store and network around, mining the new vogue of niche social networ...

Bebo’s VC makes $140 million after AOL sale

(No, that’s the not the VC, that’s the Bebo founders on holiday). As part of Bebo’s sale to AOL, Balderton Capital, the VC firm t...

AOL buys Bebo for $850m in cash

Time Warner’s AOL has acquired leading social media network Bebo for $850 million in cash. It seems like a good move which will supercharge AOLR...

2007 a bumper year for tech exits - reality bites in 2008

First Capital has exclusively released to TechCrunch UK the information presented at its breakfast seminar this yesterday. The data contained makes...

Correction or a slump for startup exits? You say tomato…

You say tomay-toe, I say tomah-toe - let’s call the whole thing off! That’s the short version of what came out of a breakfast seminar f...

Web Mission 08: UK startups to visit Silicon Valley

Well, after months of planning and an application and judging process lasting several weeks, Web Mission 08, the project backed by UK Trade Invest,...

Qualcomm acquires Ireland’s Xiam for $32 million

US Telco giant Qualcomm has acquired Ireland-based Xiam Technologies for its mobile advertising targeting and personalisation technology. Qualcomm ...

Home-grown video shows on tech are almost there. But not quite.

Without access to a potential audience of millions in the US and the subsequent advertising revenues, video webcasts on this side of the pond have ...

First prosecution in the UK for harassment via Facebook

The first prosecution in the UK for harassment using Facebook will take place this month in Birmingham, where a man was being charged with harassin...

Russian government to buy YouTube clone for $15m

European News: The media division of Russian natural gas giant Gazprom - which happens to be state-owned - is to buy RuTube, a Russia-based video-s...

NewBay wins 6.5EUR million funding

Dublin-based NewBay has won a 6.5 million euro ($4.96 million) second round investment from Fidelity Ventures with participation from Balderton Cap...

Sky, ITV and Five take their fight to the (social) networks

Social media and TV are just falling in love right now. Three news items today confirm the trend. UK TV network ITV is to debut a teen show on Bebo...

Rafer joins Polldaddy

Scott Rafer, former CEO at MyBlogLog (acquired by Yahoo!), has joined Ireland-based PollDaddy as an adviser. The startup has a service that provide...

UK’s AdJug ad marketplace hooks up with German marketer

German online marketing group Tomorrow Focus is taking a 17 percent stake in London-based web ads marketplace AdJug. TF and existing investor Balde...

Garlik highlights UK government data failings

UK online identity startup Garlik is putting the UK Government under pressure with new research which shows it is continuing to fail to put in plac...

Why get wet? Stay in and watch Mobile Monday London

As anyone in London knows right now, today is not a day to be venturing outside. So, helpfully, the nice people at Mobile Monday London will tonigh...

Dopplr to calculate carbon

UK startup Dopplr - which allows you to ‘optimise’ your trips to allow more useful meetings with your social or business network thus e...

Strong European growth for Google

Stats from US search engine marketing firm Efficient Frontier shows that the European market, where Google dominates, showed very strong growth in ...

How do you actually DO a startup?

This weekend there was a flurry of discussion about how to run a start-up company, prompted by Jason Calacanis who more or less suggested that star...

Zopa launches in Japan

Social lending site Zopa is to launch in Japan, following its expansion to the US and Italy from its UK base. The site, three years old today, brin...

University replicates in Second Life. Lazy students rejoice.

Ok, it’s not strictly news about startups, but it’s still interesting that Sussex University has built a replica of its campus in Secon...

Pikum secures £2.6m in funding

Pikum, a UK-based online social gaming start-up, has secured a £2.6m investment from Virgin USA. Pikum is in stealth mode, building a platform for ...

Dailymotion hires ex-Googler as first UK MD

Kate Burns, ex Google UK director (and Google’s first ever employee outside the US), has been hired as the first UK MD for Paris-based video...

Mobile ad platform wins £2m funding

Scotland -based Rapid Mobile Media, a startup mobile ad platform, has won £2 million ($4 million) in a second round of funding from US VC firm New ...

BlinkBox overhauls site

BlinkBox, a UK startup which allows users to overlay a video clip with a personalised message, has had a site overhaul and new UI ahead of a “...

Fire Eagle launches - want an invite?

UPDATE: The invites have now gone. I have four Fire Eagle invites to the first four commenters on this post. These are also one-time invitation cod...

Apple’s SDK event today

Tune in to TechCrunch today and on CrunchGear for live coverage of Apple’s iPhone SDK event at Apple HQ in Cupertino. The event starts at 10 ...

Video: Phorm CEO rejects allegations of ‘big brother’ tracking

Yesterday I recorded a half hour video interview with Kent Ertugrul, the founder and CEO of Phorm, the AIM-listed ‘behavioural targeting̵...

TechCrunch UK & Ireland Jobs board officially open

After a period involving a few technical issues, I’m happy to report that the TechCrunch UK & Ireland jobs board, otherwise known as Crun...

7digital’s Warner deal for DRM-free tracks confirms it as the UK music startup to beat

7digital has secured the first deal to exclusively sell Warner Music’s full catalogue in the rights-free format across Europe. Customers in t...

Apple buys British iPhone patent. Who knew?

Did anyone else miss that Apple computers bought a patent for the iPhone from a British company? On 3rd March 2008, Apple Computers purchased USA p...

UnLtdWorld turns your passion into a business

In all the fluffy, feel-good hype surrounding the formal launch of UnLtdWorld, a new social network for ’social entrepreneurs’ to go fo...

Blinkx re-launches NowThen as moblogging site

Blinkx is re-launching it’s NowThen mobile picture upload social net, which has been languishing unloved for a while, into a moblogging site ...

Irish startups aim at movie downloads… via kiosk

Here’s an interesting one. Ireland-based PortoMedia is setting up kiosks that will let consumers download movies to a flash memory key or por...