A changing of the guard at UK carrier BT : the company has announced that it will be appointing Gavin Patterson as its new CEO effective September, to replace Ian Livingston, who is taking up a role in the UK government as the Minister of State for Trade and Investment. Like Livingston, this is an internal appointment, and like Livingston, Patterson is being picked from the company’s consumer-facing division, BT Retail — which is also its biggest and most visible operation, alongside a wholesale fixed-line service, business services and its Openreach broadband network

ThousandEyes has raised $5..5 million from Sequoia Capital and angel investors for a service that pinpoints application issues between the enterprise and cloud services. The service provides a view for how apps are delivered, and determines if the problem is the SaaS provider, the enterprise environment or the Internet. It can look across the network and determine where there may be packets dropping, high latency, bandwidth issues or other problems.

Tred , which hopes to provide a service that’s like “ Uber for car test drives ,” is finally launching its service to the public. The company, which hopes to streamline the process of buying a car by bringing on-demand test drives to your home or office, will first become available in Seattle.

ScribbleLive, from Toronto-based Scribble Media , was once nearly synonymous with the term “live blogging,” but you’d be hard-pressed to find reference to that term on its site now. The company has matured and expanded considerably in the five years since its original founding, and with a new $8 million raise, it hopes to continue that maturation, to become the engine powering real-time content at media sites and other web-based properties in various industries. Scribble’s round comes from Georgian Partners, and includes Export Development Canada (EDC), Summerhill Venture Partners and Rogers Venture Partners.

Travel portal TripAdvisor continues to push ahead with its mobile and social acquisitions: today the company announced that it has acquired GateGuru , a mobile app that provides real-time information on airports, weather, and flights. Much of that is picked up from crowdsourcing, not unlike Waze — acquired by Google last week — does with road travel.

BIG DATA costs big bucks. Perhaps then, it should be no surprise to see ERN , the London-based startup that’s planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has announced that it’s raised more funding before actually managing to launch. Following a $2 million funding round raised last December, the company has added another $1.6 million in seed funding to its coffers

Netflix has announced that it will begin operating in The Netherlands later this year, further expanding its European footprint. The Netherlands, Netflix’s seventh European country, is a relatively small market for the streaming video service, but in keeping with Netflix’s more cautious approach to moving into new countries after its aggressive international expansion last year lost money

Video services provider Ooyala is setting up an R&D operations in Singapore, and is hiring researchers and data scientists for the facility. The company provides video technology to media companies and telcos, enabling them to stream their content online such as the Australian Open , or helping ESPN embed videos in tweets .It claims to have a collective viewership of about 200 million across 130 countries each month

Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms. The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom , a video-conferencing service.

Design-focused commerce company Fab has raised that round of funding we scooped a few months ago. Fab is announcing today that it has raised $150 million in the first tranche of the company’s Series D round of financing