T-Venture

YOOCHOOSE receives seed-financing from High-Tech Gründerfonds and T-Venture

Bonn, October 26, 2009

YOOCHOOSE GmbH located in Cologne (Germany), a spin-off from Deutsche Telekom Laboratories receives seed-financing capital from High-Tech Gründerfonds and the Connected Life and Work Fund which is managed by T-Venture. The company offers its customers a high performance recommender that enables them to significantly increase their revenues from personalized recommendations. YOOCHOOSE participates through its transaction-based licensing model from the financial value add that it creates for the customers.

In contrast to traditional solutions YOOCHOOSE recommendations can be content-overarching (e.g. videos, music, software, and games) and independent from existing shop, data mining or content management systems that have already been implemented by the customer.

With its recommender system YOOCHOOSE utilizes a unique approach, which has been the result of a research project of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories in Berlin (Germany) and Israel. The technology with a pending patent application will be used exclusively by YOOCHOOSE.

The company has been founded in February 2009 by Dr. Alkemper as CEO and M. Friedmann as CTO. Within this short period YOOCHOOSE has already attracted its first pilot customers. The seed financing by High-Tech Gründerfonds and T-Venture will allow the company to offer the state-of-the-art recommendation system to a broad spectrum e-commerce, media and publishing companies.

„Personalized recommendations currently are among the hottest topics requested by customers. With YOOCHOOSE we invest not only in a superior technology but also in highly professional team in this market,“ says Holger Heinen, senior investment manager of High-Tech Gründerfonds.

Neuhaus Partners And T-Venture invest in playnik.com

Bonn, September 30, 2009

Hamburg-based venture capital company Neuhaus Partners today announced that it was investing in the start-up company wwg worldwidegames GmbH, Hamburg, in conjunction with the Connected Life and Work Fund managed by T-Venture. Playnik.com, the browser games community portal developed by wwg worldwidegames GmbH, offers both proprietary browser games and games developed by its partners in the fast-growing massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) market. The investment of the two venture capital funds is part of a round of Series A financing amounting to a euro sum in the mid-single-digit millions. The co-investors are Holtzbrinck Ventures and High-Tech Gründerfonds, which had already invested in the company.

Playnik.com has released a wide range of browser games. With the new-generation browser games Desert Blitz, Mission Cobra, and Castle Fight, playnik.com provides not only free, long-lasting MMOG gaming fun but also other innovative social gaming features. After a single sign-on, users get access to all games on playnik.com. The player’s statistics are also included in the different games and shown to the community. Particularly popular among video gamers is the possibility of comparing oneself against others in not just one game but across games.

Harald Eisenächer, a Board member from Deutsche Telekom’s Products & Innovation segment, comments: “In Germany, online games are among the offerings with the fastest-growing fan communities on the Internet. Thanks to its portfolio of outstanding games and interesting functions for gamers, playnik.com is extremely well positioned in this market.”

wwg worldwidegames GmbH has built up one of the first communities for online gamers at playnik.com. Here, over one million users are now not only in contact through games but also join forces to reach further levels and higher rankings. “Browser games are the future,” Matthias Grychta from Neuhaus Partners predicts. “The young company has huge potential to become a major international player.” In Europe and North America, USD 1.4 billion was spent on MMOG subscriptions in 2008, including premium subscriptions of games that can otherwise be played free of charge. This figure is expected to rise to USD 2 billion by 2013 (subscription of MMOGs: Life beyond World of Warcraft, Screen Digest, 2009).

“The quality of the company speaks for itself and we are looking forward to supporting its further growth together with the new investors,” agree Sven Achter from Holtzbrinck Ventures and Björn Momsen from High-Tech Gründerfonds.

Robert Johnsson, CEO of playnik.com, is eagerly awaiting the commencement of the partnership: “Playnik.com is already represented in Europe’s most important markets; we have been able to develop North and South America as well. With the help of our investors, we can really speed up internationalization and integrate more social gaming functions as well as new games on playnik.com.”

Connected Life and Work Fund invests in Cooliris

Bonn, July 14, 2009

T-Venture today announced an investment of the Connected Life and Work Fund in Cooliris, the company advancing visual three-dimensional navigation for the increasingly media-centric Internet. The investment of the Connected Life and Work Fund is part of a 15m USD series B funding round from a group of blue chip investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, DAG Ventures and The Westly Group.

This comes alongside the introduction of its newest application, the Cooliris Wall. The amount of content on the Web continues to grow exponentially. More than 13 hours of video are added to YouTube every minute and more than 850 million photos are uploaded to Facebook every month. “The Cooliris Wall truly revolutionizes the user experience to consume the overabundance of rich media on the Web and on the mobile platforms,” said Ralf Baumann, Senior Vice President Portal at the Deutsche Telekom AG. “Very few products provide this kind of deep-rooted intuitiveness blended with an innovative business model which then drives revenues and make a world of a difference for global consumers.”

The success of Cooliris has attracted a vast array of popular and premium content publishers to syndicate their content and enable the Cooliris Embed Wall technology on their sites. Cooliris users can scan up-to-the-minute news from CNN, F.A.Z., and Boerse Online, or browse the latest sports and celebrity news from sources like Bild.de and MSN.de in Cooliris Discover. Publishers have benefited from syndicating to Cooliris because of increased views of their monetized content and additional traffic to their own site.

Cooliris has extended its presence beyond the Web. The latest version of the application now also supports desktop photos so users can show off photos to their family and friends from their own computers. Users can also carry the experience on the go; Cooliris for Mobile has already received over 800,000 downloads to date with users embracing this application on their iPhones for searching and discovering great content.

“We are delighted to have T-Venture partner with Cooliris because of their domain expertise in providing game-changing innovative products to customers around the world,” said Soujanya Bhumkar, CEO of Cooliris. “We foresee a degree of collaboration that creates real value for all of us.”

Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the Cooliris team consists of seasoned executives, engineers and entrepreneurs from companies like Adobe, Apple, eBay, Electronic Arts, Google, Microsoft, PayPal and YouTube. Cooliris has reached 13 million installs of the product, with tens of thousands downloading everyday. The latest version is available for the PC, Mac, and Linux platforms, and can be downloaded at www.cooliris.com.

Changes to the Managing Board of T-Venture

Bonn, June 26, 2009

Dr. Axel Kolb will leave the Managing Board of T-Venture as of June 30, 2009. He will be succeeded by Patrick Meisberger. Stephan Noll will become Head of the T-Mobile Venture Fund, a position previously filled by Kolb in addition to his role as Managing Director. Noll will report to Dr. Georg Schwegler, CEO of T-Venture. Katharina Hollender had been appointed as the new CFO of T-Venture on April 15, 2009.

Schwegler commented: "We greatly regret the departure of Axel Kolb, who was truly instrumental in the growth of T-Venture over the last few years, but of course wish him all the best for his new challenge. With Patrick Meisberger as Managing Director and Stephan Noll as Head of the T-Mobile Venture Fund, we have been able to fill this void adequately. The new management structure is completed with Katharina Hollender, a proven financial expert. Consequently, T-Venture is excellently positioned for dealing with the upcoming challenges. Considering the economic crisis, the portfolio is in excellent shape and the funds have sufficient financial resources for taking advantage of the opportunities that are presenting themselves.”

Axel Kolb has worked for T-Venture since August 2000, initially responsible for the Deal Flow Management department. He has run the T-Mobile Venture Fund since April 2001. He was appointed Managing Director of T-Venture effective March 1, 2005. He had previously held several executive positions at Deutsche Telekom. He will take up the new position as Senior Vice President Global Business Development at Deutsche Telekom on July 1, 2009.

Patrick Meisberger will succeed him as Managing Director at T-Venture effective July 1, 2009. He joined T-Venture as investment manager for the T-Online Venture Fund in April 2004, assuming responsibility for this fund in November 2006. He took on the additional responsibility of heading the newly-established Connected Life and Work Fund at the end of 2008. Prior to his time at T-Venture, he had been investment manager at Allianz Venture Partners.

Stephan Noll will succeed Kolb as Head of the T-Mobile Venture Fund. Noll joined T-Venture as an analyst in October 2000, moving to the T-Mobile Venture Fund as investment manager in October 2003. He has worked for the T-Mobile Venture Fund as Managing Director of T-Venture of America, Inc. in Seattle since November 2004 and he will fulfill his duties as Head of the T-Mobile Venture Fund from there. In his new role, Noll will report to Schwegler.

Katharina Hollender has been responsible for Finance on the Managing Board of T-Venture since April 15, 2009. She joined Deutsche Telekom in 1998 and was appointed Head of Finance and Controlling Board Member Support in 2000. From 2004 to 2005, she was CFO/CIO at T-Punkt Vertriebsgesellschaft, before moving to the Croatian Telecom in Zagreb as CFO. She was CFO of T-Mobile International and member of the Executive Committee from February 2007 to April 2009.

T-Online Venture Fund invests in sones GmbH

Bonn, April 2, 2009

T-Online Venture Fund today announced an investment in sones GmbH. In a second round financing, sones secured an investment of a single-digit million amount. The additional funds will be used to develop the product to market maturity.

The software company that was founded in 2007 has developed a completely new and innovative database technology. The object-oriented database can directly link the relevant information from complex unstructured data volumes, thus setting new standards in terms of scalability and performance. With this technology, problems that had been unsolvable in the past due to their sheer complexity in the areas of data storage and data analysis are now under control.

“sones impressed us with its innovative technology and its approach to question the status quo, thereby opening up completely new opportunities for data management," says Christoph Schmidt, Senior Vice President of Deutsche Telekom AG for the Personal Social Networks division.

sones is currently working on expanding its database technology, including the related file system. The first full version of the object-oriented database management system (DBMS) is expected to be available by the end of this year. Via SDK (software development kit), software developers and partners will be able to considerably influence the development and make changes to the system. sones is inviting interested software developers and potential partners to register for the preview and partner program via its website www.sones.de so they can receive the developer version free of charge and give their feedback for further development in the future. Right now a web services based tagging and recommendation system is available, and is already being used commercially. “The system can be adapted to the respective requirements in the areas of eCommerce, Social Networks and Portal/Content Solutions“, says Alexander Oelling, head of new business development at sones. In this area sones is also counting on a cooperation with software partners in order to integrate the product into the respective websites.

Mauricio Matthesius, managing director at sones: “T-Online Venture Fund recognized that our revolutionary technology can shape the future of databases and put us in the position to systematically implement this vision.”

After the investment by T-Online Venture Fund the company is looking for additional employees, mainly in the areas of software development and sales.