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Posts Tagged ‘europas-awards’

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.

One perceived weakness of Spotify is its music recommendation features.

Let’s just say it’s no Last.fm, appearing to make very little use of users’ listening data to help other users discover new music.

That’s about to change, to some degree at least, as the European music streaming service rolls out an improved artist discovery feature.

Well it appeared to be signed and sealed when news leaked back in April that two icons of the UK’s tech startup world were joining forces to create a new fund to address the so-called ‘equity gap’ in Europe. But it gradually emerged that the actual name of the project would change and there were no real details, not even a web site to explain how it would work. But at last night’s Europas Awards in London, Bebo co-founder Michael Birch and Brent Hoberman (Lastminute and mydeco) announced the launch of the fund they’ve now set up together: PROfounders Capital. It’s understood that Birch, who exited from Bebo when it sold to AOL last year for $850m, is the prime investor, however they hope to double the “founder-lead” £30m fund over the next few months.

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