P2P Currency Exchange TransferWise Raises $6M Led By Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, With Participation From SV Angel, Others
Here's some encouraging news for the European startup scene, and London in particular. TransferWise, the online currency exchange that uses the crowd to undercut traditional money transfer services, has announced that it's closed a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures -- the first investment in Europe by the PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor's international fund.
currency
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Facebook Appoints Ad Vet Nicola Mendelsohn As Its New VP For EMEA
Facebook has finally found a permanent person for one of its key leadership positions in its international operation: Nicola Mendelsohn, a longtime veteran of the ad industry, is joining the social network as its VP, EMEA. She replaces Joanna Shields, who left Facebook nearly seven months ago in October 2012 to run Tech City, the London tech cluster advocacy group. Carolyn Everson, VP of Global Marketing Solutions, was in the role on an interim basis.
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Facebook's Graph Search Supremo Lars Rasmussen On Relocating To London, Building A New Team, And The Challenges Of Natural Language
Lars Rasmussen, one of the two engineering directors who led in the creation of Facebook's new Graph Search and helps run its development, is leaving Menlo Park and setting up shop in Facebook's office in London. Graph Search, or at least the engineering part that he oversees, is coming with him. I took the opportunity of a quick reconnaissance mission he made to the city this week to ask Rasmussen about why he's coming to the UK, and what is on the road map for Graph Search, internationally and otherwise.
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WPP CEO Sorrell: Google Will Overtake News Corp As Our Largest Media Investment This Year Or Next
Martin Sorrell, the CEO of WPP, today laid out a stark picture of how significant a role digital is playing for the advertising giant. Speaking at the FT Digital Media Conference in London today, he said that digital now accounts for 34% of WPP’s media investment, amounting to some $72 billion, rising “from zero to over one-third in about ten years, the age of Google,” he said. Google, he said, is the second-largest recipient of that digital spend at the moment, at around $2 billion for the quarter, but that it will soon overtake the single biggest beneficiary at the moment, News Corp. Sorrell described Google as “a media owner masquerading as a tech company.” Sorrell referred to these numbers as a preview of WPP’s quarterly results, which are out tomorrow. He added that at the moment AOL and Yahoo are each getting around $400 million to $500 million in ad spend via WPP. Facebook, despite its size and current popularity, is only around $270 million. Twitter, he added, is “much ...
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Adobe Updates Its Social Marketing Tools To Predict The Popularity Of Your Facebook Post
Adobe is announcing new predictive capabilities for Adobe Social — capabilities that should be particularly helpful to marketers wondering why some social media posts take off while others fall flat. Bill Ingram, vice president for Adobe Analytics and Adobe Social, walked me through the new features earlier today in advance of the Adobe Summit in London. Adobe is using historical data — both in aggregate and at customer-specific level — to predict the likely engagement level and sentiment around a specific Facebook post, and it can recommend keywords, content types, and timing that might lead to a better response.
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