Slow Politics. All of the crises haunting Europe today – be it “Lampedusa” or “NSA-Gate” – indicate one major problem: our governments’ democratic instruments are paralyzed by perpetual turbulence and hence unable to deal properly with the ensuing grievances.
What now? It is necessary to reinvent democracy! In this challenging moment citizen movements act as laboratories of the future. The Slow Politics conference (November 13-15) looks at the plurality of citizen movements as a greater whole and sets out to detect hidden commonalities: Only by connecting the dots does it become possible to create a counterforce to the acceleration of crises. Hire Someone Already! Google Ventures Mulls Its European Moves. As the cream of Europe’s entrepreneurs filed into the beautifully lit room at a European tech conference late in 2012, picking up their champagne as they went, a VC leaned over to Welsey Chan of Google Ventures and asked: “Why one earth are you guys sponsoring these drinks?
You don’t have any investments in Europe, do you?”. Turning to his interrogator, Chan replied: “Not yet.” Priceline’s Swallowing Of OpenTable For $2.6B Investigated For Being Too Low. Travel behemoth Priceline this morning said that it planned to gobble up restaurant booking service OpenTable for $2.6 billion in cash, news that sent OpenTable’s share price skyrocketing by nearly 50 percent to over $104 per share.
But, a little like a belch after a big meal, swiftly on the heels of that news comes another development: Former SEC attorney Willie Briscoe and securities litigation firm Powers Taylor say that they are going to investigate the deal for being priced too low. “The investigation centers on whether OpenTable’s Board of Directors is acting in the shareholders’ best interests, whether the board is properly negotiating a higher share price for the shareholders, and whether the board has employed an adequate process to review and act on the proposed transaction,” the firm writes in a statement. Priceline’s Swallowing Of OpenTable For $2.6B Investigated For Being Too Low. Priceline Buying OpenTable For $2.6 Billion In Cash. Hotel booking site Priceline has agreed to acquire reservation booking company OpenTable for $2.6 billion in cash, adding the leader in digital reservations to its portfolio, the Wall Street Journal reports.
OpenTable has over 31,000 restaurants on board its platform, and sees an average of 15 million people book reservations on its site and mobile apps per month. Priceline offered $103 per share in cash as part of the deal, which the WSJ notes is a 46 percent increase over its closing market price on Thursday. Clearly Priceline sees a lot of potential for growth in the market, and given the total size of the restaurant industry in the U.S. compared to OpenTable’s current client base, that seems likely. Last month, TripAdvisor bought Lafourchette, a Paris-based startup that offers similar services to OpenTable. Webtrekk Secures €25M From Deutsche Private Equity To Scale Analytics Platform. Can Montebourg Seduce French Startups Again? Buying what Arnaud Montebourg just said is a tough sell for French startups.
France’s minister of the economy, industrial renewal, and the digital economy delivered an optimistic speech in front of entrepreneurs, startup employees and influential people of the French tech ecosystem. In fact, it’s a total change from his previous positions. But can we believe him? At Criteo’s and BlaBlaCar’s office and without notes, Montebourg first started by declaring his love for France, the country of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, France’s creativity and more. This is usual stuff for a politician and not what people wanted to hear. Montebourg is mostly famous for killing Dailymotion’s acquisition by Yahoo, deciding who should acquire SFR and other blunders.
Instead of justifying this hard line, he stated something completely different. “We need to build bridges with California. GoDaddy Files For $100M IPO. Today GoDaddy, the popular domain and web-services company, filed its S-1 document to go public.
The company has seen quick revenue growth in recent years and massive losses measured using generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). The company’s 2013 revenue totaled $1.13 billion. The company lost $199.88 million during that period. Allianz für Venture Capital. BVK e.V.: „Allianz für Venture Capital“: Venture Capital stärken heißt Gründer fördern. Der Bundesverband Deutscher Kapitalbeteiligungsgesellschaften (BVK), BITKOM und der Bundesverband Deutscher Start-ups haben heute die gemeinsamen Empfehlungen der "Allianz für Venture Capital" vorgestellt.
Die Allianz für Venture Capital (AFVC) ist ein Zusammenschluss von 16 Organisationen, die das gemeinsame Ziel verbindet, die Rahmenbedingungen für Wagniskapitalfinanzierungen in Deutschland zu verbessern. Alternative Investing Startup Wikifolio Raises €6M For International Expansion. Alternative investing startup Wikifolio has closed a €6 million funding round led by European early stage venture fund Speedinvest.
The fresh capital will be used by the Austrian company, which I’m told broke-even in the first quarter of 2014, to expand beyond its home country and Germany. Existing shareholders VHB Ventures (Verlagsgruppe Handelsblatt), Lang & Schwarz, Michael Grabner Media, and Michael Altrichter also participated in the round, along with a number of private investors associated with Speedinvest, among them Jörg Flöck, a former Thomson Reuters executive. Offering a platform for alternative investing, Wikifolio enables traders to turn their portfolios into fully-fledged financial products, called “wikifolios”, which are then listed on the stock exchange Börse Stuttgart.