Posts Tagged ‘Prime Technology Ventures’

mg // 09.01.2009

Jan-Joost Rueb – eBuddy: The cards to win the game @ LeWeb08



Jan-Joost Rueb, co-founded eBuddy.com 4 ½ years ago and is now its CEO. eBuddy aggregates chat between Amazon, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook and others on the web and on mobiles offering a unified interface. As an added service to chats, eBuddy started offering ICQ in Germany. 41 people are working in eBuddy’s office in Amsterdam and the company now has over 100.000 new users every day and around 8 million users per month. With 1.5 billion banners ads on the web, worldwide advertising is crucial for eBuddy's business. According to Jan-Joost, mobile advertising will be launched in Q1 or Q2 this year. Furthermore, eBuddy has secured €5 million in its series A financing by Lowland Capital Partners and had a financing round with €6.5 million by Prime Technology Ventures. They will be reaching the last funding round in January. Jan-Joost points out: „In the beginning we were really focussed on making money, so much so that the VCs were laughing at us. Now we’re really happy we did it, since we have a healthy business.“

Jan-Joost wants to be „the biggest messenger on mobile phones worldwide“ and plans to grow by having big deals with carriers. He is positive that „in a few years every single phone will have IM on it – hopefully it’s going to be eBuddy. We have the cards to win that game, we just have to play it right!“
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vt // 14.10.2008

crowd funded music – sellaband.com – Pim Betist @ PICNIC

While the big labels get afraid of the fundamental changes the Internet and the general technological development causes them, there are some fresh ideas upcoming to revolutionize the music business enabling promising artists to get enough money to release their own album. Pim Betist, co-founder of sellaband.com, explains how anybody can become a micro-investor and fund new talents. Very frankly, Pim provides us with insights about the business model behind, which also entailed some criticisms.

The idea sounds simple, find 5.000 believers who buy one or more shares for $10 each. Once you reached $50.000 you will be the lucky one to get you album produced. The success of sellaband is impressing, 14 artists already reached the required $50.000 and have their albums produced, 12 more artists are funded and are on the way of album production. As sellaband takes an transaction fee for any money purchased and gets the interests of the stored money which is waiting to hit the $50.000 you can get an idea about the profitability of that business model. That also caught the attention of investors and that is maybe why sellabend got its $5 Million funding by Prime Technology Ventures for expanding in the US.

So it is no surprise, that there are lots of competitors on the market which also want to have a peace of the cake: forMyBand is a German variation of the same idea, at slicethepie the single investments start at $5. Justaloud.com and talentarena.de have a different approach but also enable independent music and artists to fame, both are based in Germany. A similar concept but for independent films offers indie maverick.
Also established bands use their fans to receive a pre-financing. The veteran U.K. progressive rock band Marillion could raise $725.000 by selling deluxe versions and gifts related to their new album like going to the studio with them and participating in the recording. That might also be a very cost-effective sales channel for the musicians because as their audience pays in advance they will save a lot of money for marketing and distribution.

picnic conference amsterdam The interview with Pim Betist, co-foounder of sellaband.com, was realized at PICNIC08, where creative minds from all over the world came together to share ideas and thoughts. It took place in Amsterdam, Netherlands from September 24th to 26th 2008.
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