The food delivery wars continue to heat up: today foodpanda, the Rocket Internet-incubated startup that offers a one-stop service to order food from a selection of restaurants and take-out joints to be brought to your door and now working with some 15,000 restaurants globally, is today announcing that it has picked up $20 million in funding, with participation from Rocket regular AB Kinnevik, Russia’s Phenomen Ventures as well as Rocket Internet themselves. This is not only foodpanda’s first reported round of investment, but it also looks like it might be Phenomen’s first public investment in a Rocket Internet company; the VCs have previously backed other e-commerce ventures like Fab, Hailo and OneTwoTrip, as well as the YC-incubated video company Virool.

Foodpanda’s funding follows a number of other big rounds for other Europe-based startups offering similar services. They include $50 million for Delivery Hero and $64 million for Just-Eat. The funding race is a sign of how, in this market of a lot of me-too players, getting critical mass and a technological edge over competitors will be key to longer-term survival and profit.

Rocket Internet, founded by the Samwer brothers, has emerged over the years as one of Europe’s bigger e-commerce incubators, with notable exits to companies like eBay and Groupon. But more recently the Samwers have been setting their sites on emerging markets and tapping the opportunities there. In that regard, foodpanda is no exception. Including its sub-brand hellofood, the company is now active in 27 markets — in fact, only emerging markets, with a focus in Eastern Europe, Asia, Latin America and parts of Africa. The total list is India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Morocco, Senegal, Nigeria, Russia, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Peru, Hungary, Venezuela, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Saudi Arabia.

Ralf Wenzel, the global MD, says that this funding will not only be used to expand to more countries, but also to build out the operations into more cities in those where it’s already active. “We do cover certain cities already but one of the things is to expand into new ones. For example, in Russia we have very good coverage in three cities but now we’d like to move to 17 more,” he said in an interview, adding that extra countries are also on the agenda. “We are launching in more Eastern European and Asian counties. We still see a lot of markets that will be very interesting for us.” Foodpanda claims that it is now the “market leader” in many of the countries in which it operates.

On the subject of technology investments, one of Rocket Internet’s interesting selling points is how its companies can potentially leverage some of the other assets in the portfolio to help their own growth. Wenzel notes that in the case of foodpanda this might play out in areas like customer service and logistics — using some of the same teams and backend systems that are being rolled out for other e-commerce operations in areas like fashion and other merchandize. Another might be in how payments are taken for food. Working in emerging markets, payment card penetration is not especially high, so foodpanda is trying to come up with alternative ways of helping people pay for their food that are potentially more secure than simply taking cash on delivery.

“Payment acceptance is an important topic for us, how customers pay for the food that is delivered to them,” he said. “We want to find ways of collecting payments from restaurants without too much overhead, and we also want to provide the best user expeirence for that. We have started to introduce online payments, which is also an area where we will use investment. We also have good synergies with Payleven [Rocket's Square competitor]. Although there is nothing decided yet, there is definitely a lot of potential. Fortuntately we are seeing the growth of the availability of payment options.”

While foodpanda is not transparent on its commission structure — it varies city-by-city and depends on whether the deal is with a chain or independent, Wenzel says — he does note that there are some emerging popular categories. In Russia, most order sushi, he says; while in African countries the most popular cuisine is Mexican and in Latin America it’s Indian food.

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Last month Oliver and Marc Samwer — founders of the Rocket Internet startup incubator — launched Global Founders Capital, a new €150 million ($194 million) fund aimed at any and all startups worldwide. This month one of the first startups to benefit from that will be credit scoring startup Kreditech which has raised an undisclosed amount said to be “low to mid 7 digits”. We’ve heard USD$3.5 / EUR€3 million. This is in addition to the $4M is raised at the end of last year. Kreditech is live in the Czech Republic, Spain and Poland but, according to co-founder Felix Haas, will also soon launch in Russia, Mexico, Australia, Argentinia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan with its Kredito24 brand, which is not at all dissimilar to the UK’s Wonga.

Existing investors including Munich-based Global Founders Capital, Silicon Valley-based Blumberg Capital, Berlin-based Point Nine Capital and Hamburg-based H2 Investments also participated.

Sebastian Diemer, CEO and co-founder of Kreditech and Oliver Schimek, CFO of Kreditech said in a statement they had turned down lots of offers as they are currently “profitable” but the investors bring “strategic value” and add working capital.

The company has a technology which means they don’t require any external credit bureau data in their risk model, because they do identification, fraud detection and scoring decisions based on globally available data sources such as social networks. That means they can move fast into emerging markets, says Alexander Graubner-Müller, CTO and co-founder of Kreditech. Also involved is Heiko Hubertz, Nils Henning and Amiando founder Haas.

The technology is applied in B2C for issuing online, SMS and facebook microloans in real-time and plans a global “Scoring as a Service” database that provides scoring data without technical integration or contracts to third parties.

Kreditech operates offices in Hamburg, Warsaw, Barcelona, Moscow, Prague and Kharkov and employes 25 people.

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E-commerce giant Amazon looks like it is gearing up for the latest chapter in its international expansion: an operation in Russia. According to this article in Forbes (in Russian) the company has opened its first office in the country, headed by Arkady Vitrouk. Vitrouk is the former general director of ABC-Atticus, a publishing group owned by media barron Alexander Mamut.

Forbes cites unnamed sources but notes that the appointment, and the office opening, have not been confirmed by Amazon itself. However, Vitrouk’s LinkedIn profile does confirm his as director of Kindle Content for Amazon in Russia.

It looks like right now Amazon is hiring for at least three other positions for Russia specifically for its Kindle business and the sourcing of local content: a senior product manager for Kindle content pricing, and a principal for content acquisition for Kindle Russia, and another content acquisition manager.

A visit to amazon.ru currently redirect’s to the company’s main page for Europe, with links to other countries’ local sites, including the UK, France, Spain, German and Italy. We have contacted Amazon and Vitrouk himself for more detail and will update this story as we learn more.

The news comes in the same week that Amazon announced that it would take its Appstore business international — extending it to nearly 200 countries, another sign of how the company is gearing up for more scale.

Russia is currently Europe’s largest internet market, according to a recent study from comScore, with an online audience of 61.3 million users.

That, combined with Russia’s rapidly rising middle class, has led to a boom in e-commerce. Morgan Stanley believes the Russian e-commerce market will be worth $36 billion by 2015, up from $12 billion in 2012.

Russia has been a noticeable hole in Amazon’s footprint, but that has spelled opportunity for local players, too.

Ozon — commonly called the “Amazon of Russia” — has raised $121 million in funding and has been building up a very Amazon-like business. That includes an extensive logistics network to deliver a soup-to-nuts range of goods. As we’ve pointed out before this is especially important in a country like Russia, which didn’t have an excellent pre-existing delivery infrastructure. That, and the lack of credit card penetration, has meant that companies like Ozon and fashion/home goods site KupiVIP (itself flush with $120 million of funding) have built out fleets of their own delivery trucks, with drivers who take cash on delivery for goods (KupiVIP, focusing on clothes, will even wait until the recipient tries something on, so that it can also get returned on the spot).

Like Amazon, Ozon has also been eyeing up a move into cloud services. Unlike Amazon, Ozon’s strategy has yet to include any products or services like Amazon’s Kindle operation.

This is where Amazon could come in. In another BRIC market, Brazil, Amazon has been building out a business based on its non-physical goods — Kindle books and Kindle devices.

This could be one route to how Amazon decides to tackle Russia, at least in part. In that sense, it’s interesting that the Forbes report specifically names as the head of Amazon in Russia someone whose immediate experience lies precisely in publishing, rather than e-commerce or retail, and that he’s already heading up business for the company there in that vein.

P.S. I write “at least in part,” because it turns out that it’s also hiring for other Russia-related expansion plans as well. Online fashion e-commerce site Shopbop, owned by Amazon, is seeking a marketing manager for a new rollout it is planning in Russia. Amazon has also been headhunting in Moscow for software engineers — although these would be for relocation to Seattle.

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Voddler, the Swedish film and TV streaming service that has been described as the “Spotify for video,” is going global to take on Netflix, Amazon, Vdio, BitTorrent, and the many others in this space. Live in Scandinavia since 2010, and Spain since 2012 (where all together it has picked up 1.2 million users), this week Voddler is extending its footprint to the rest of Europe and Russia; and it is adding North America, South America, Asia and the rest of the world in the coming weeks.

CEO and founder Marcus Bäcklund, who was in London today to announce the news, says that initially Voddler will be rolling out its service as a standalone, OTT product. “We have partnered with carriers in the past for VOD, and I think it’s possible to do that in the future as well here, but what we are really trying to do here is offer an indpeendent and open platform for everyone,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The core of Voddler’s platform are two services it calls LiveShelf and ViewShare, both based on a peer-to-peer, serverless architecture. LiveShelf gives users a selection of videos — current catalog numbers at 5,000, from “leading film studios, including Hollywood majors” — with they can either rent (typical price $5.22) or buy ($10), with some titles offered for free. All are viewable on all major mobile, tablet PC and TV screens.

ViewShare, meanwhile, is a service that then lets Voddler users share that content with others: those who take Voddler’s free service have a limit to how many other users can view (currently 10), while those who pay €5 ($6.50)/month extra for “Voddler Plus” get that privilege for an unlimited number of users. On top of these two services, Voddler also has some 18 patents filed for the Vnet streaming technology that is used to run the platform, and it makes a “small commission” each time a video is watched, a royalty fee from the content holder.

In its limited release to date, Voddler has seen a healthy take-up. Among its 1.2 million users, its video catalog has had 18 million streams since 2011, and it reports cumulative revenues of $3 million since launch on that activity. As Spotify has shown with its business model — and others like Rdio are also demonstrating with its Vdio video service — while media streaming services make very small (and sometimes no) margins, their power lies in scale. This is one reason why Voddler had to expand worldwide.

The other is that it simply can. Bäcklund says that its technology makes it very simple to expand geographically and efficiently, and it is now that it has managed to secure the content relationships to take the service to new markets. He calls the limited European release up to now the “proof of concept that we have now achieved.”

While 5,000 titles doesn’t sound like a significant number, he says that the number will go up as the year goes on. “We’re just finalizing agreements with our 50 content partners for this,” he says.

To date, Voddler has raised €24 million ($31 million) in VC funding from investors that include Cipio Partners and Nokia Growth Partners.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Samsung has confirmed the arrival of a new sub-brand within its Galaxy range of mobile devices: the Galaxy Mega expands its mini-tablet-sized-phone (aka phablet) portfolio by firing two new devices into the category, building on the momentum generated by its extant Galaxy Note line.

Samsung said the Mega will be available globally — “beginning May from Europe and Russia”, adding that product availability will vary  by market and roll outs will be gradual. There’s no official word on Mega pricing yet but since both devices pack dual-core chips (vs the Galaxy Note II’s quad-core chipset) it’s possible they will be a slightly more affordable than Samsung’s other phablets.

Here’s how Samsung describes Mega:

The newest addition to the GALAXY family balances an optimal viewing experience on a 6.3-inch HD screen, yet is ultra-thin and portable enough to put into a pocket or hold in one hand. The GALAXY Mega offers a mix of popular smartphone and tablet features such as an effortless user experience, a split screen, multitasking between video and other apps and more.

JK Shin, CEO of Samsung’s mobile business, added in a statement that Mega is about bringing more choice to buyers who want a portable device with a big screen. “We are aware of a great potential in the bigger screen for extensive viewing multimedia, web browsing, and more. We are excited to provide another choice to meet our consumers’ varying lifestyles, all while maintaining the high-quality features of the award-winning GALAXY series,” he said.

Samsung has climbed to a position of dominance in the smartphone market by offering a hugely diverse portfolio of devices, hitting price points from low end budget to high end flagship and everything in between — so little surprise that it’s beefing up its phablet line with Mega.

The company has also fuelled an industry wide trend for smartphone screen size inflation, following the introduction of the original Galaxy Note in 2011. That device had a 5.3 inch screen — which seemed massive at the time. But Samsung’s latest pair of phablets push out even more, adding a full extra inch in the case of the full HD device.

Design wise, Mega does not push the boat out — sharing the same look as fellow Galaxy devices, such as Samsung’s new flagship Galaxy S4 (which packs in a 5 inch pane).

Here’s the 6.3 inch Galaxy Mega:

And here’s the 5.8 inch Galaxy Mega:

On the specs side, the 6.3 inch Mega is the clear flagship of the pair — packing in a full HD screen, 4G/LTE connectivity and a 1.7GHz dual-core chip while the 5.8 inch Mega has a QHD display, HSPA+ and a 1.4GHz dual-core chip. There’s also a 1mm difference in thickness, with the flagship being 8mm thick vs 9mm for the Mega 5.8.

Full dimensions for the two devices are 167.6 x 88 x 8.0 mm and 162.6 x 82.4 x 9.0 mm. Weight is 199g and 182g respectively. Both devices have 1.5GB RAM. Memory is 8GB/16GB options for the flagship Mega, and 8GB on board the other. Both support microSD card memory expansion up to 64GB. Battery capacity is 3,200 mAh and 2,600 mAh respectively.

Each device has an 8 megapixel rear camera and a 1.9 megapixel front-facing lens. They also both run Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, skinned with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI.

Also on board is a full contingent of Samsung software services — including the likes of Sound & Shot and Drama Shot, introduced at the launch of the Galaxy S4 — plus even more new features, including:

• ‘S Travel’: Provides trip information, local guides and resources and more
• ‘Story Album’: Allows customers to create albums of daily events, keep special moments in one place using a timeline, geo-tag information and publish digital albums in hard copy
•  ‘Group Play’: Enables easy content sharing for up to 8 devices on the same Wi-Fi network.
• Samsung WatchON’: Transforms into an IR remote controller for a richer TV experience. Connect the device to your home entertainment system, and it will provide program recommendations, schedules, and even remotely control your TV.
•  ‘Samsung Link’: Easily streams photos, videos, notes, or music to your television, tablet or computer.
•  ‘S Translator’: Say or text what you need translated into the GALAXY Mega, and it will provide instant translation, using text or voice translation on applications including email, and ChatON.
• ‘ChatON’: Share what’s on your screen with friends to stay more connected.

Samsung was criticised for larding the S4 with too many software add ons, but it’s clearly not rowing back from this strategy of differentiating its Android devices with scores of its own software extras.

As with the Galaxy Note II, the new Mega devices support split screen viewing for applications including email, messages, ‘MyFiles,’ ‘S Memo’ and ‘S Planner’ — which, beyond their larger screen size, is one way Samsung differentiates its phablets from its flagship smartphones.

Back in January, analyst house IHS iSuppli predicted  smartphones with 5 inch+ screens would more than double in number this year — rising from 25.6 million in 2012, to 60.4 million in 2013, up “a notable” 136 per cent year on year.

Last fall, Samsung said channel shipments of its Galaxy Note II had pushed past five million two months after the device launched. Samsung does not break out actual sales of the Note.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The president of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) Fady Chehade told the Wall Street Journal that the organization will launch Chinese character options for top-level domains in the second half of this year. (A top-level domain is the part of the Web address after the dot, so the Chinese characters would replace the .com, .net, .org’s, etc. that you see in most Web addresses).

The roll-out is part of ICANN’s plan to introduce address endings in characters other than the Roman alphabet. Other languages in the works include Arabic, Korean, Russian, and Japanese.

The announcement marks a change in tune for ICANN, which was created in 1998 by the U.S. Department of Commerce to manage domain names. The organization has resisted previous efforts by China, Russia and other countries to control Internet addresses, and been criticized for not letting each country manage their own Internet addresses. In December at the World Conference on International Telecommunications, China was among a coalition of countries, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, that submitted a proposal to gain more sovereignty over Web addresses, which faced opposition at that time from other nations including the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Critics said that allowing different countries to manage their own Web addresses could potentially lead to charges being placed on data transmitted over international boundaries.

According to the WSJ, the language additions are “part of ICANN’s push to reduce global opposition to its regulatory power by leaving behind its U.S. roots and becoming a more international organization.” Another sign that the organization wants to work more closely with China includes the launch of an “engagement center” in Beijing to collaborate with the government on issues like URL trademarks.

Chinese characters can already be used in the main part of a Web address, but after ICANN rolls out its new changes, companies and organization will be able to add Chinese character address endings. According to ICANN, both Tencent Holdings and Sina have already applied for the extension .weibo in Roman and Chinese characters. Other major Chinese Web companies that have bid for new extensions include Alibaba Group and Qihoo 360.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rosetta Stone has just acquired Seattle-based online language-learning community Livemocha for $8.5 million in cash. Livemocha has one of the largest online language-learning communities in the world, boasting over 16 million members from over 195 different countries.

Rosetta Stone will likely use Livemocha’s cloud platform to offer its language packages online — they were once only available via disc set, with a complimentary iPad app.

Here’s what Rosetta Stone CEO and President Steve Swad had to say about it:

We are in the process of transforming Rosetta Stone to be the most dynamic and ubiquitous technology-based learning platform in the world. Our acquisition of Livemocha will help accelerate that transformation. With Livemocha and its vibrant online community on our side, Rosetta Stone will reach more people and change more lives than ever before.

Livemocha will remain in its Seattle-based offices, adding yet another arm to Rosetta Stone’s US presence which currently includes offices in Austin, TX and San Francisco.

According to the release, this acquisition will allow Rosetta Stone to “quickly migrate legacy products to a future-proof technology stack witha modern, cloud-based architecture and contemporary means of distribution.” That could very well mean low-cost or “even free” alternatives to the usually expensive Rosetta Stone packages.

Rosetta Stone also expects the Livemocha acquisition to help accelerate geographic expansion, as Livemocha’s community is quite global and has a high concentration of users in China, Russia and South America.

It’s worth noting that Livemocha has raised a total of $14 million over the course of its existence the past six years. While an acquisition is almost always good news, the company clearly exited for less than it accrued from institutional investors the past six years — and even less than the expected valuation from previous funding rounds.

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Online e-commerce giant eBay last week said that it expects to have 12% of its sales coming from BRIC countries by 2015 in an global e-commerce market that will be worth $300 billion, and here is one more step in that strategy: it is leading a $50 million, Series C investment in Snapdeal, an online marketplace in India with 20 million users. Existing backers Nexus Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and IndoUS Venture Partners also participated.

The news was first reported by Indian tech blog NextBigWhat, and we have now confirmed the details with our own sources. Snapdeal’s CEO and co-founder Kunal Bahl has declined to comment. It will make eBay a minority shareholder in the company, and this Series C investment means that Snapdeal has now raised about $102 million in funding since 2010, with the previous two investments being $12 million in January 2011, and $40 million in September 2011.

We understand that Snapdeal was not actually looking for such a big round but when it went fundraising for its Series C, but the response was more enthusiastic than it had expected, perhaps owing to the company’s currently-crazy growth, with sales growing year-on-year by abt 400% in terms of gross merchandise value. Among others that were interested was Amazon — another sign that it, too, wants to doing more in emerging markets going forward. We understand that part of the reason Snapdeal went with eBay was it was a pioneer in the marketplace business model and has been pushing hard on its international strategy.

The news will mean one further step into India for eBay: the company already has a full subsidiary in the country, eBay India, but that only has 5 million users. Ebay India recently noted in its 2012 Census that it enables transactions at the rate of about 1 per minute. That’s for smaller items like mobile accessories and beauty products.

Snapdeal, meanwhile, was first established in 2010 as a daily deals site but more recently, in 2012, moved into a marketplace model — similar to the one built out by eBay and Amazon, offering a platform for merchants to sell goods. This model has proven particularly successful in emerging markets where there are a lot of small businesses but a relatively young e-commerce landscape: a vacuum for those who come in to offer a platform to take those small businesses online — one that others like Rocket Internet are also tapping.

Some of the verticals that Snapdeal has focused on include fashion, home goods, and consumer electronics and it now has 20 million users, or about 1 in every five Indian people who are online. It’s expected that Snapdeal will generate about $400 million in sales in 2013. The company does not have any immediate plans to expand to countries outside of India, TechCrunch understands.

Overall, eBay already has a strong business outside of the U.S. In its analyst day last week, Wendy Jones, VP of geographical expansion and cross border trade, noted that 61% of its Marketplace revenue comes from non-U.S. markets.

Within that, the BRIC block of Brazil, Russia, India and China are playing a key role. Last week, eBay chose to hone in on Russia’s role there: Jones called Russia eBay’s number-one priority for expansion, partly because it now has the largest internet population in all of Europe, and partly because that population is still growing fast. For eBay in particular, Russian users bought $400 million in goods on the site in 2012, growing by 54% over 2011.

But that is also growing beyond Russia: eBay believes that 25% of total active users, and 12% of global sales will be coming from the BRIC block by 2015. Within that eBay says it wants to build out active users in BRIC and emerging markets 6.5-fold.

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Facebook users change profile picture show support for same sex marriage – As the U.S. Supreme Court met this week to address same-sex marriage, the Human Rights Campaign encouraged users to change their profile pictures to an image of a pink equal sign on a red background in support of marriage equality. Since then, the image and hundreds of variations of it have gone viral across the social network. Facebook’s data science team found that there was a 120 percent increase in profile photo changes on Tuesday after the HRC launched its campaign compared to the previous Tuesday. More stats are available in a note here.

Report: Zuckerberg gets political - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly involved in forming a political advocacy organization with other Silicon Valley executives, including Joe Green, co-founder of NationBuilder and Causes, who was Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. The group is expected to work to influence issues related to immigration, education reform and the economy. Zuckerberg has reportedly pledged as much as $20 million to support the Super PAC.

Amazon buys Goodreads – Amazon this week announced its plans to acquire Goodreads, a social reading community and book recommendation platform that integrates with Facebook’s Open Graph. The service will continue to operate under the Goodreads name and its CEO Otis Chandler. Amazon reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, which has 16 million members.

SEC approves Nasdaq compensation plan - The Securities and Exchange Commission this week approved Nasdaq OMX Group’s $62 million cash settlement to compensate investors who suffered losses because of glitches during Facebook’s initial public offering on May 18, 2012. The exchange previously proposed only $40 million in compensation, but it increased the amount following criticism that it wasn’t enough. Losses across Wall Street have been estimated between $100 million to $200 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Report uncovers how people interact with smartphones, Facebook – IDC Research released a new report this week sponsored by Facebook, which looked at user behavior on smartphones and found that users check Facebook nearly 14 times per day on average, with an average session time of more than 2 minutes. The full report, based on an online survey of 7,446 18-44 year old iPhone and Android smartphone owners in the U.S. over the course of one week in March, is available here.

Facebook COO becomes bestseller - Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” which was released March 11, took the No. 1 spot on the New York Times bestseller list among hardcover nonfiction, print and e-book nonfiction this week. “Lean In” has been on Amazon’s top 100 list of all books for more than a month.

Unity, Facebook collaborate to improve gameplay – Unity Technologies and Facebook this week launched an improved Unity experience on the social network to make it easier for developers to build high-quality game experiences across multiple platforms. Unity’s latest social network API in Unity Web Player improves fullscreen mode on Facebook and gives developers options to better integrate with the social graph.

Newsfeeder highlights most creative Facebook brand posts - The One Club this week launched Newsfeeder.com, a website that showcases creative Facebook page posts made by brands. The project involved a strategic partnership and technical assistance from Facebook Studio. Newsfeeder aims to give marketers and other professionals a place to view best-in-class creative work on Facebook.

Programmer wins second Hacker Cup title - Petr Mitrichev won $10,000 in Facebook’s Hacker Cup competition last weekend. The programmer from Russia previously won in 2011. Facebook’s Hacker Cup brings together the world’s top programmers to solve algorithmic coding challenges in three online elimination rounds. Twenty-six finalists competed at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park, Calif., last weekend.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

A new kind of tech accelerator has launched in one of the more unlikely places: the Italian Alps. TechPeaks (see what they did there?) calls itself a “People Accelerator” because individuals and teams will be able to join it without an idea but a desire to build something. It will launch with €13 million in funding. It’s also taking more of a partnership rather than competitive approach, working with seven Technology Universities (via the European Institute of Innovation and Technology ICT Labs) and seven other international tech accelerators, listed here. The idea is to help unite the many fragmented European tech initiatives. And oh my are they are fragmented.

TechPeaks says it will have connections to the local tech university in Trento and its research centre, as well as up to €200,000 equity matching funds post-programme. We covered the region’s amazing initiatives here.

Individuals or teams with “deep technical or design” expertise can apply before April 5th and – if selected – get six months free housing, free food and a free office in the Italian Alps, plus support to get visas there if needed. Doesn’t sound bad, huh?

In terms of funding, it’s low, but comes in the form of a €25,000 grant, not equity, which might be attractive to some given that none of it needs to go for costs like office space. The €25,000 non-equity grant is made possible because Techpeaks is backed by the Trentino region of Northern Italy which wants to grow the technology ecosystem in the area.

The programme also boasts that it will have access to 40+ mentors from all over the world — the UK, US, and Russia, as well as companies like Jawbone, Eventbrite, UberVu, Zemanta, Barkbox in NYC.

Drew Nagda, Director of Corporate Partnerships for Lean Startup Machine – a partner – says the programme will use using lean methodologies.

The idea is reminiscent of the Startup Chile initiative, which offered various incentives to attract technology entrepreneurs and made a lot of noise while it did it.

Key organiser Evan Neilsson tells me: “We decided there was a void in the industry between universities and accelerators. We’ll accept Individuals and Teams. Hackers, designers and product people are applying from Russia, E. Europe, Balkans, Italy, and some from the United States. If you come with a business already, you focus on that business, but some people might love your product and would like to join you. Or you can come alone and after a month form a team with the others there and start building something new.”

Carlos Eduardo, partner of Seedcamp thinks TechPeaks is an “ambitious idea” and thinks the main challenge for it will be how to achieve the best results and convert “bright talented individuals into great founders of startups.” However he feels it has the “potential to really boost the European startup ecosystem and
motivate people, so we are very supportive.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch