Money comes around day
Here in Germany there seems to be a little money day today. First of all, congratulations to the friends from Sevenload for having closed with Burda Digital Ventures. A great partner for Sevenload, and with mother Burda, one that truly works had to understand where the world is going! And as Nico already put it, this means that Heiko might come by Cologne a bit more often. :) Here is the official blog post.
It seems that the big media companies really want to make sure that they have their own stakes in the growing video market on the internet. It will be really interesting to see how all of this turn out. The biggest an most interesting thing with all of this is really cost, and I can only suggest reading the last posts from Cringely. The thing is that each new viewer ads costs, and if you go with a P2P system, there is a lag involved, it only works with highly popular files and the cost is really with the ISP which they will surely not like. Check out this post by Cringely to see another option: Neokast. Read the blog :)
Next up is eConozco joins OpenBC. With the acquisition of the leading spanish social network (ok, Orkut seems to be really big in Brazil with like 20 million members, … no spain, but ok… never mind) they want to push further into their internationalization.
The most interesting thing is actually Experteer. It all started with me watching the interview with Martin Weber on Gründerszene today. I can only agree with Lukasz that Holtzbrinck Ventures is one of the best, and/or most active, VCs in Germany at the moment. Truyl a great team. The interesting thing is that in the interview Martin Weber talks about Experteer (min 7:56), which they founded 6 months ago. It’s fully built on Ruby on Rails it seems (looking forward to seeing another scaling proof) and a little bit different take on the recruitment market. In Experteer you as a user pay to become member, and Headhunters and companies can pitch 60.000 EUR plus jobs to you. Interesting. Even more interesting, now Christian posts that BV Capital and Wellington Partners have invested!
Now I don’t personally know the team behind Experteer, but with the investor team now behind them, I am looking forward to seeing a good growth curve. :)
So we have Xing buying stuff, Sevenload getting big cash to extend video with Burda, and then the young Experteer getting money from the big guys. This round goes to Experteer I’d say. Looking forward to what happens next.