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Posts Tagged ‘crunch-europe’

It’s no secret TechCrunch, like all media outlets has a love hate relationship with the PR industry. Take the guy who just rang me. “Hi, my name is Rob, I want to tell you about a news story.” OH REALLY? How about you say where you are from first? But moving on…

You’ll recall the video we posted on the weekend about another tedious annoyance: The Embargo. The satirical video featured was in fact created by TechCrunch Europe Contributing Editor Steve O’Hear, (@sohear) who has form in this filmaking business, having directed a real documentary, In Search Of The Valley.

Steve is building up a nice line in these movies recreating conversations between PR professionals and bloggers/journalists. We just hope he doesn’t get snapped up by Hollywood or we’ll have to place a want ad.

Here’s Embargoes II.

Plugg, the annual conference organised by my TechCrunch colleague Robin Wauters, is due for next week on Thursday (11 March). I’ll be there along with other European tech industry pundits, bloggers, venture capitalists and many entrepreneurs, to listen to a slew of presentations by executives from Nokia, Opera Software, Index Ventures, Duval Guillaume, eBuddy and many more (full program can be seen here).

If you’d like to come too, TechCrunch Europe is pleased to offer a 25% reduction on the ticket fee for our readers – simply use promotion code plugg-25percent upon registration and you’re all set.

And if for whatever reason you’re a European startup that couldn’t make this deadline, then check out how to apply for Geek’n Rolla in London on April 20th.

Meanwhile, at Plugg, I’m most looking forward to the yearly Start-Ups Rally, an on-stage pitching competition between European startups.

The Mobile Premier Awards have announced their full programme, happily occuring at the same time as the Mobile World Congress talkfest in Barcelona. About 30,000 mobile experts will be in the city so it’s great timing. TechCrunch Europe is a media partner with the Awards and I’ll be on the jury this year judging the startups.

Besides the classic MPA in Innovation live 3-minute pitches, this year also features the winners of previous awards.

There’ll also be a special keynote from arguably the most successful startup in mobile history, Russell Buckley of Admob, which was recently aqcuired by Google for $750m.

Last summer, at the inaugural Europas Awards, we launched the TechCrunch Europe Top 100 Index of the most innovative and highest-potential European tech companies. This has been the first time anyone has tried to actually track, in a pre-defined way, early stage tech companies in Europe. We’ve now updated the Index, which is focused on mobile and web companies in the EMEA region, once more.

As you can see, there are companies that are staying in the Index, some arriving and some, alas, leaving. The companies that have made great progress in the last few months are ones that have being doing important things like generating revenue. It’s quite clear from the refreshed Index that European startups know how to make money (in particular through e-commerce, private shopping, lead-generation and games). The Silicon Valley business model of scale and user acquisition, while still a hugely important arrow in the European startups quiver, is still just part of the equation, especially in a wide European market so divided by language and regulation. Although I’d like to see more European startups thinking globally from the start, and going for growth, no-one is saying one shouldn’t have at least half an eye trained on where the business model is going to come from.

We’re hitting the 2010 GSM World Mobile Congress again.

And TechCrunch Europe will be returning to Barcelona on Feb 17 for yet another interactive and live-video-streamed session.

We’ll be featuring some of the most innovative and interesting mobile startups and investors in Europe.

You can get your tickets to the event here.
Here’s the programme for the day so far.

The momentum around local online advertising is growing, especially with the expansion of the Web to mobile devices and flowering of Geo-mobile apps which need a way to make money. Today, Citysearch is throwing its hat into the local advertising ring with teh launch of CityGrid, a set of APIs which makes all of Citysearch’s local listings content and advertising available to other Websites and mobile apps. The APIs include more than 15 million local business listings, 3 million user reviews, and access to 500,000 local advertisers looking to reach people near their places of business.

I sat down with Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti at IAC headquarters in Manhattan to get an overview of CityGrid (watch the video interview above). Citysearch itself is a 12-year-old site which Herratti has been updating, but it is not really growing much anymore and it is feeling considerable competitive pressure from Yelp and, even more so, from Google Local.

To counter that pressure, Citysearch already distributes its local listings content to about 100 sites and mobile apps with a collective reach of 100 million people (about a quarter of that is Citysearch.com). “I thought what if I took all the tools that we put together to build Citysearch and put it on a platter, an API and web services layer,” says Herratti. Specifically, he is referring to all the descriptions of local businesses, the reviews, photos, videos, hours of operation, offers, menus, metered phone numbers, merchant messages, and more. “What if I open that up to publishers big and small?” he asks. “I let them take it and enhance their experience, and get more pageviews.”

You can see elements from Citysearch listings already scattered throughout the Web. A New York City bar like The Ainsworth, for instance, will have a CitySearch page, but the same summary description and reviews will show up in a Bing search, on Local.com (with a Citysearch photo), Urbanspoon, Yellowpages.com, MerchantCircle, and so on. Other existing partners include Mapquest and mobile apps like Loopt and Buzzd.

Tons of Websites and mobile apps would love to have access to this database of content to build out their own sites and apps, and now they can via CityGrid. But much of this content is also advertising. Citysearch operates on a pay-per-action model. Local merchants can sign up to get sponsored spots in search and elsewhere, and they pay for things like every time someone clicks on their menu, a video, their own merchant description, or makes a phone call for a reservation. They are paying for leads, and the same actions trigger payments on partner sites as well. But in that case, Citysearch is splitting the ad revenue with the publisher.

Many of the ads come from other local advertising sites as well, such as Superpages, Yodel, Spafinder, and limos.com. In that case each advertising dollar is split three ways. But ever since Citysearch opened up to those 100 partners, it went from 150,000 paid listings on its own site to 500,000 across its network. “My goal is to get to one million,” says Herratti. Now that it is an open API, he might just reach that goal. Developer who sign up for the API can create local directories on a self-serve basis and will start getting paid once they meet a minimum threshold of ad impressions or actions.

While Yelp’s rise is certainly something to worry about, CitySearch’s biggest competitor is actually Google, which is driving a lot of local search to its own Local Pages and has been making a big push lately to sign up local merchants. Herratti positions CityGrid as a way fro local advertisers to reach consumers everywhere else. There is search marketing on Google and then there is the rest of the Web and mobile apps. Ironically, if you look up the Ainsworth on Google Local, the pictures and some of the reviews are also from Citysearch, but Google isn’t a paying partner (the content is made available through an older deal). It makes money off the search ads on the side.

Listen: cry me a river about Flash and multi-tasking. If Apple wants to keep multi-tasking for their own apps in an effort to prevent folks from making their OS run like Windows Mobile on a good day, be my guest. Push servers work great for always-connected applications. As for Flash, I think it’s all political.

Anyway, rant over. Those little minxes at 9to5mac found Flash running in Safari on the iPad. If you watch the video after the jump, you notice that when they browse the NYT you can see the Dining section pop up. The Dining section is usually represented by video in a Flash box.

For the past couple of days I’ve been in Turkey, absorbing the tech scene in Istanbul (tomorrow I’m in Munich, Germany, for DLD). I was invited over by the Nubridge Venture Summit which brought together a panoply of European VCs to listen to Turkish tech companies set out their wares. What emerged is a picture of a country in high growth, as this economy and its entrepreneurs latch on to the possibilities offered by the Internet and mobile platforms.

But first, let me tell you a story. Two years ago I contacted Turkey’s pre-eminent “Web 2.0″ blogger, Arda Kutsal of Webrazzi. I said let’s do a TechCrunch Europe meetup in Istanbul. Duly, a few weeks later I took a flight out, got to the hotel he mentioned and figured Arda had organised the meetup in the bar. No, said the receptionist, “It’s in the Grand Ballroom.” I headed down the hall to find about 400 people. That was the kind of thing that was going on then.

Two years on, with a packed room full of European VCs and private equity people hearing pitches from a wide range of Turkish technology companies, it’s clear the investment community is keenly interested in this market.

TechCrunch Europe is proud to announce the first tranche of events we’re planning this year. Now, before anyone gets upset that their city or event is not on this list, please be aware this is what we are putting our efforts into right now. We are working on adding more events at other times in the year. We’ve set up ticketing sites for you now so you can actually go and get early bird ticket prices right now. See below for details.

From now on, each month we’ll be doing an ‘Upcoming Event’ post covering our own upcoming events, those we’re partnering with and those we think are of particular, special interest to the tech community. To enquire about formal media partnership with TechCrunch Europe please contact our commercial partnerships and event sponsorship manager Petra(@)TwistedTree.co.uk in the first instance. To keep TechCrunch Europe informed of your upcoming event, get in touch with editorial. Also see our RSS and Twitter feed to keep up to date.

Jamendo, a community of free, legal music published with Creative Commons licenses, is actively looking to sell to or merge with another company, TechCrunch Europe has learned. Jamendo CEO Laurent Kratz has confirmed rumors that had made their way to Twitter earlier this week.

The reason is fairly simple: Jamendo is running out of money after failing to raise a follow-up round of venture capital. The startup was looking to raise 1.5 million euros (roughly $2.15 million) after securing a ’significant amount’ in Series A funding back in June 2007. The company failed to come to an agreement with Mangrove Capital Partners, its original backer, and a potential new investor.