Dailymotion, Europe’s biggest online video challenger to YouTube, on Thursday said it had raised $25m in a new funding round led by the French Sovereign Fund (FSI). The French strategic investments fund, which is 49 per cent owned by the government, contributed $11m to the round, with all the existing investors, Advent Venture Partners, AGF PE, Partech International and Atlas Ventures,  taking part.

Dailymotion chief executive Cedric Tournay also said the company had now hit break-even and expected to make a profit next year. The site now attracts around 60m unique users each month, up from 35m a year ago.  Although it is dwarfed by YouTube, it is doing well to survive and grow in a market where competitors like Joost and Veoh have had to retreat. Continue reading "Daily motion raises $25m to accelerate growth"

Shazam, the mobile phone music discovery service, could be on track for an IPO, with Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers taking a stake in the company. Shazam, which was the original service that allowed users to hold up their phone in a noisy bar to identify what music track was playing, has seen phenomenal growth over the last few months, reaching the 50m user milestone this week.

The company has seen rapid growth after launching the service free on the iPhone App Store in the summer of 2008. The iPhone app has been downloaded more than 10m times. Continue reading "Kleiner Perkins takes stake in Shazam"

Cisco’s $3bn bid for Tandberg has made everyone sit up and take notice of video conferencing. It is only little over a week since HP launched its new SkyRoom video conferencing product for desktop computers. HP’s Halo already competes with Cisco at the high end of the telepresence market, with elaborate camera and meeting room systems which come close to simulating real-life meetings. Now, with the Tandberg acquisition and SkyRoom, both companies are looking to serve all segments of the market from high end to mass market. Microsoft has also developed teleconferencing services similar to Cisco and HP. Continue reading "Sharper focus on video conferencing"

Opera upped its efforts in the mobile browser wars on Wednesday with the release of the next version of its Mini browser - Opera Mini 5. The new version comes with a sleek new look, and features such as speed dials and tabbed browsing.

The Norwegian browser company still enjoys the top spot in the mobile market, with 25 per cent market share according to Statcounter. This puts it still just ahead of iPhone’s Safari browser, with 22.3 per cent.

But the competition is tightening. Mozilla is working on its own mobile browser, Fennec, while Research In Motion recently bought Torch Mobile to improve its browsing capability.  Microsoft is also understood to be improving its Internet Explorer Mobile browser. Continue reading "Opera ups ante in mobile browser wars"

Kai-Fu Lee’s time as president of Google China began with controversy, as Microsoft sued the search company for poaching him, then faced a countersuit by Google. His departure was a severe blow for Microsoft’s Chinese operations, and brought out the depth of the animosity between the two companies.

Mr Lee’s impending departure from Google has also sparked debate - not least because it is still unclear exactly why he is leaving and what he is going on to do.  

Continue reading "Debate over Google China chief’s next move"

The trend for mobile phones these days is for lots of functions - internet, music, radio, social networking. Its all about being young, fun and dynamic, with mobile phone companies vying to produce the trendiest adverts usually featuring a driving dance beat and beautiful people with cool haircuts.

In this context, Sony Ericsson has come up with a surprise. On Thursday it unveiled the “Pureness”, which can only be described as the “anti-smartphone”. Continue reading "Sony Ericsson’s phone for the old and rich"

Google’s European Zeitgeist event this year has been nicknamed “the Royal one” as it was attended not only by the usual business heavyweights like Vivendi’s Jean-Bernard Lévy and Richard Branson but by Prince Charles of the UK, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Prince Philip of Spain.

The presence of royalty is not as strange as it might initially seem. Much of Zeitgeist revolves around discussions on how to save the planet, and this is a project that many otherwise under-employed European royals have embraced.

Perhaps these aristocrats also see a kindred spirit in Google, the king of the internet. Oh if only it weren’t for those tedious elected governments, those dull regulations, how much easier it would be to make the world work better. Continue reading "Googling democracy"

Despite the €1bn fine handed to Intel by the European Commission, it wasn’t all bad news for US tech companies in Europe on Wednesday. Ebay won a lawsuit in the French courts over sales of fake L’Oréal perfume on its auction site. A court specialised in trademark law ruled that Ebay was merely a host site for the sales of counterfeit goods and not a party to their sale. It also said Ebay, which has a $10m a year budget for fighting online crime, was doing all it could to combat fakes. Continue reading "Ebay wins French L’Oréal fakes lawsuit"