The Dennis Publishing owner, in this video, settles in as though about to read us a horror story...

In fact, he’s introducing his new book, 88 The Narrow Road - A Brief Guide to the Getting of Money: “Those who tread the narrow road walk in single file, shadows plague each way we step, hazard haunts each mile.” Spooky...

Online media operators may have been scrambling to shore up their free, ad-supported services with premium options lately - but some are still intent on making advertising work.

Music service We7, which this month followed Spotify by launching paid-for options including a mobile app as economics and labels began to command more guaranteed returns, is outsourcing its display advertising sales to Yahoo.

The arrangement only covers visual ads and was to give the service more clout, CEO Steve Purdham tells me. “We’ve moved all of the main function to them. We’re hiring a new sales director to manage the relationship and media sales guys to sell the radio and audio ads mechanism; Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) won’t be doing that.” We7 had only three people on ad sales before the move and will remain on three after the rejig.

Though the focus seemed to have been moving toward premium, Purdham says: “There is a significant subscription opportunity that’s out there - but the new digital economy is about how the spectrum of models can work together, not in isolation.

“I don’t believe you can use ad-funded as a model to drive premium subscription. It needs to stand on its own right. The deal with yahoo is a big step toward that. We feel we can make the ad-funded economics work.”

Aside from banner ads, We7 was offering seven- and 10-second audio ads inside its streaming radio service.  It will soon also add “full, radio-format, 20- and 30-second ads”, Purdham says.

We7, originally funded by Peter Gabriel, initially launched with a model of embedding audio ads inside track downloads but has had to tinker with the model as the market has become clearer.

The Yahoo ad deal could be the start of something bigger for We7. “It’s primarily an ad sales deal, but we’d hope to deepen it over time,” Purdham says. “We’re hoping to provide elements of content in a deeper relationship as time moves on.”

That could be an interesting arrangement for We7, which is trailing in public perception to Spotify but has now built a decent web-based platform, and for Yahoo, which, on Yahoo Music, has outsourced its LAUNCHcast streaming offering to CBS Interactive (NYSE: CBS) in the U.S. and whose Rhapsody-powered track streams (at least at my end) just don’t work.

Now this is how you do a premium B2B web strategy. Lloyd’s List, the shipping news journal that’s been publishing for three centuries, is unveiling Lloyd’s List Intelligence, a high-end data service that offers info on 120,000 vessels, 163,000 shipping companies and 17,000 credit reports.

The Informa-owned List already operates a £1,400-a-year web subscription with daily news, but the new service will let readers move “from the top news stories of the day to the data sets that define underpin them”, according to the pitch. Unclear how much a subscription costs, but subs can be taken out only for individual channel areas of the new site.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence will make over two million amendments a year to the hefty database, CEO Fotini Liontou tells InPublishing - thanks to journalists, marine analysts and satellite intelligence, including from ORBCOMM.

The publisher already had much of the data at its Lloyds MIU site - the big change is linking it to the editorial content.

InPublishing: “Users are given the opportunity to ask Lloyd’s List Intelligence analysts to conduct investigations, analyse trends, evaluate demand, make forecasts, or simply get advice.”

Wikipedia: “(Lloyd’s List has) provided weekly shipping news in London as early as 1734. Known simply as ‘The List’, Lloyd’s List was begun by Edward Lloyd, the proprietor of Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London and founder of East India and Peninsular Navigation Company, today known as Unimarine Container Lines, as a reliable but terse source of information for the merchants’ agents and insurance underwriters who met regularly in his establishment in Lombard Street to negotiate insurance coverage for trading vessels.”

—AOL (NYSE: AOL) Advertising: New AOL Europe head Kate Burns is making two promotions to re-strengthen its advertising business - search manager Anthony Yazbeck (pictured) becomes search director and Brandon Keenen becomes head of publisher services. Yazbeck replaces Raj Mohan, who left last month. AOL’s UK search share has been falling.

—Adconion: The ad outfit is upping Matthew Hunt from its Aussie office to be its UK MD. Via MW.

—Ben Hammersley: After cutting his time at Wired UK to editor-at-large, Hammersley has become digital director at new design house Six Creative. He’s also launching a new publishing tool, Budding, under his own steam.

—Ilana Fox Having recently left as ASOS.com’s social media manager, the former Sun and Daily Mail (LSE: DMGT) community editor is launching her own social marketing training and consulting agency, Spoke Digital, says NMA.

Women’s lifestyle vertical publisher Glam Media has launched its site in France, following last week’s Paris Fashion Week - despite two warnings from a French company that it owns the “Glam” trademark in the country.

The French launch is the latest international expansion for Glam, which has launched in Japan, the UK and Germany, and counts MSN.fr founder Jean-Pierre Levieux as its general manager.

Amid the international expansion of Glam Media’s “vertical content network” last year, Glam One, a “vertically integrated social media platform” that owns glam.fr, began warning the U.S. company off, announcing it owns the “Glam” trademark and: “All unauthorised use of these brands could lead to counterfeiting penalties.”

Glam Media’s international head Bernard Desarnauts told us back in November the two companies operate in different spaces - Glam One has launched a social network and runs a series of portals based around the performing arts, but Glam Media is a content aggregator and ad network that brings together female-focused articles from some 1,800 sites in four continents.

So Glam Media has gone ahead with its launch anyway, at glammedia.fr. Arnaud Fischer, CEO of the French Glam One, is still today reminding Twitter followers that his company owns the “Glam” trademark. Asked today, Fischer told me: “we are not ok with anybody infringing on our trademark in France and will vigorously protect our rights…”

Unclear whether we’re about to see a genuine trademark cat fight, or just posturing from the French company. Queries are in with with U.S. firm.

Glam Media is making an immediate play for French advertisers in the fashion and beauty spaces. It’s attracted a favourable review in France’s Le Figaro paper.

But Glam goes up against Axel Springer-owned auFeminin, which has a foothold in the market.

Weedle, a site that lets users find people who have specific skills and also pitch their own, has raised $4 million in funding. On Weedle, users create short profiles for free complete with their background, as well as the service they’re providing. They can also “vouch” for other members.

Weedle has its share of competitors, from sites like Freelance.com and iFreelance, where freelancers can advertise their services, to SkillWho, which lets people with specific talents connect.

The company is based in Ireland and says it will use the cash to expand the platform to the United States and elsewhere. The money comes from several Irish “business entrepreneurs,” as well as Irish government agency Enterprise Ireland. More in the announcement.

What a mess. The government has rejected a controversial Digital Economy Bill clause that would force ISPs to block access to copyright-infringing websites - and will instead return to giving Peter Mandelson his own powers to enact similar measures.

Lib Dem lords last week won House Of Lords approval for a British Phonographic Industry-suggested measure (Clause 18) that would let rightsholders force blocking orders from ISPs via High Court injunction. After concern that this could mean irresponsible blocks on a range of websites, they proposed a further amendment that would allow blocked websites to take an overturn appeal back to court.

It didn’t matter. In the House Of Lords on Monday, the government’s Lord Young rejected the amendment, explaining: “We do not believe the clause as drafted could be legally enforceable.”

Instead, Young said, the government aims to “bring forward a clause that would seek to ultimately achieve the same effect” - but via different means. “We need to look for something that would work legally by giving the Secretary Of State the power to bring forward regulations to achieve the intended effect,” Young said.

This is troublesome for two reasons:-

1) The site-blocking idea was only introduced in the first place as a replacement for an earlier clause that, some Lords and others feared, would give Lord Mandelson wide-ranging autonomy to amend copyright law on an ongoing basis.

2) The government’s latest proposed replacement will be added to the bill in a kind of legislative dead zone, after the bill leaves the House Of Lords for the last time on Monday and before it goes to House Of Commons scrutiny.

The latter angers cross-bench peer the Earl Of Errol. He told the house: “It’s going to be inserted somehow between here and The Other Place. We’ve got no idea what it looks like ... it’s a complete and absolute abuse of parliamentary process - I’m not sure why we sit and debate at all.”

Monday’s third reading in the Lords was peers’ last opportunity to influence the bill. Lords expressed confusion on whether the as-yet-undefined new clause can be added to the bill before Westminster’s “wash-up” stage, requiring significant Conservative backing in the final days before parliament is dissolved.

Lord Clement-Jones, who had proposed the controversial site-blocking clause with fellow Lib Dem peer Lord Razzall, brushed aside criticisms after a leak last week showed their proposal had essentially been authored by the British Phonographic Industry: “I certainly don’t accept that all this is evidence we’re in the pockets of the music industry.” He added: “This is not the reintroduction of Clause 17” - referring to the original clause that would have given Mandelson the powers in the first place.

Regardless of with what the government chooses to replace the site-blocking clause, a couple of Lords, in final comments, suggested such a measure should extend to search engines like Google...

—Conservative Lord Lucas: “I think they will have to be asked to block material to some extent.” He relayed the example of him searching for a legal copy of an ebook narrated by Stephen Fry: “The first three pages were occupied by illegal material when I looked on Google (NSDQ: GOOG). It was easy enough to identify them because they all referred to Bit Torrent - it would have been easy enough to block them out of the index. It would be one of the most obvious ways of making life inconvenient (for pirates).”

—Labour Lord Triesman urged the government to “have a discussion with the search engine companies”: “There are variety of things things ... It’s not beyond them to deal with that - it’s not beyond them to cooperate because it’s socially right to cooperate, let alone legally right to cooperate. I urge that conversation goes ahead as soon as possible.”

—But, responding to the Earl Of Errol, who had spoken on behalf of search engines concerned at the prospect, the government’s Lord Young said it was not the intention to enact measures against search sites.

Latitude, Foursquare. There’s no shortage of mobile social location candidates stepping up. Now GeoSentric’s GyPSii of Holland has raised a further $11 million funding for its effort - bringing its total to $40 million.

The disclosure came in GyPSii’s announcement of a new Twitter app, Tweetsii, that puts tweets first, ahead of GypSii’s Foursquare-style place markers, which let users “check in” to a variety of locations. The funds come from Schroders.

GeoSentric previously got $13.1 from Horizon Group and Shcroders million in 2007 and is bundled on some Samsung, Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) handsets.

It’s hard to imagine a dedicated location-based social network becoming successful unless location is just a part of a social experience, rather than its raison d’etre. And, while Twitter and Facebook have gained mass social adoption and Foursquare rising fast on the location front, GyPSii’s window may be challenged (hence, Tweetsii’s entrance). But can one imagine another mobile social acquisition by a handset maker or carrier, a la Nokia’s Dopplr purchase? Yep.

This funding is “to support marketing and additional development of GyPSii applications”, the company says. GypSii says its OpenExperience API powers locastion-based service for outfits like China Mobile, China Unicom, Telefonica; it’s likely there it makes its money.

A year ago, the FT launched “a next generation search tool for business professionals”. Powered by Endeca, it was called Newssift and aimed to “enable users to string together a query that can provide insight into the relationship between people, organizations, geography, and business theme, which ultimately facilitates more informed business decisions”.

But Newssift is no more; the site has since gone offline.

Why? An FT Group spokesperson tells paidContent:UK: “It’s the nature of digital media start-ups that not all work out, but we still firmly believe in the need to experiment and innovate.

“Newssift was a good idea, but the timing was unfortunate in that its launch coincided with the advertising downturn.”

We never had any metrics on Newssift’s success, or lack of, but FT continues augmenting itself by acquiring subscription financial decision-making publishers.

The slow-burn consolidation and shakeout of the online video services space continues. KIT Digital, the online video tools player now based in Prague, Czech Republic (it jumped from NYC to Dubai to now Prague in last 2-3 years), has done another acquisition, its sixth in recent years: it has bought rival video player Multicast, for about $18 million, a week after it announced closing a $15 million equity offering. It will use this $15 million to buy back 4 million outstanding warrants.

Of the $18 million KIT-Multicast deal, $4.9 million is in cash and the rest is in 1.3 million shares of KIT digital common stock, plus the assumption of approximately $4.6 million in long-term liabilities.

Multicast, based in Atlanta, hosts live as well as on-demand video events and focuses primarily on corporate audiences. It says it has about $12 million in annualized recurring licensing fees for its IP video management software, with other additional revenues related to professional services. Its 90+ employees will continue to be based out of Atlanta for now. Details in release.

Update: The debate took place later on Monday. Read our full story...

Original: Peers last week drew fire for adding Digital Economy Bill provisions, requested by the British Phonographic Industry, that would compel ISPs, by High Court injunction, to block access to websites that illegally host copyrighted material.

This provision is retained in amendments due for debate Monday evening - but the two Liberal Democrats who last week proposed the idea have now tabled new clauses that would let anyone peeved by such a block apply again to the High Court for an overturn injunction.

Amendment #22 from Lib Dem Lords Clement-Jones and Razzall, if adopted, would add to the bill…

“any person aggrieved may apply to the court on notice to the copyright owner and service provider to require the service provider to remove or vary the nature of the block; and

... the court must order that the block be removed if it considers that it would not have made such an order”

These and other amendments are due for Lords debate after 2.30pm on Monday. But they would seem to allow for a kind of injunction ping-pong, as copyright holders and then blocked sites (or fans of blocked sites) lodge their respective wishes with the High Court.

More amendments proposed to the controversial new clause…

—#14: Copyright holders who would seek a High Court injunction compelling ISPs to block infringing websites must first inform the ISP and website (ie. ISPs would then have the opportunity to voluntarily block the site before going to court).

—#16, #19: Before granting such an injunction, the High Court must consider “the extent to which granting the injunction would disproportionately not consider “any issues of national security raised by the Secretary of State”

—#21: A U-turn on costs - whereas the blocked website would have had to pay the court costs of the copyright holder which sought the blocking injunction, now this would be up to the court to decide.

European VC firm DFJ Esprit, which set up a €150 million fund in September, is hiring a trio of new hires to manage its tech investments…

Veteran investor Mikko Suonenlahti is joining as senior adviser, to focus on investments in B2B, consumer software, medical technology, bio-IT and energy efficiency.

Meanwhile, Encore Ventures, the wing created by VC house DFJ Esprit last year to buy some of 3i’s tech investment portfolio, is also adding new staff to manage the companies…

Oxford Capital Partners’ investment manager Richard Marsh is joining as partner. Jefferies International technology associate Jonathan Freuchet-Sibilia is joining as investment manager. Marsh will manage “certain assets” amongst those inherited from 3I, though which ones are not named.

In September, DFJ raised £170 million from Coller Capital and Harbourvest, creating Encore through which to buy 29 3i portfolio companies. It only named six - Icera Semiconductors, Light Blue Optics, ApaTech, The Cloud, CamSemi and FastBooking. Encore remains headed by Charles Cameron.

The media sector is now out of the crunch, as far as private equity investments in to the sector go, according to financial advisory BDO.

Its poll of 50 UK private equity funds and 100 P.E.-backed businesses says 2010 will see a “resurgence”...

—24 percent of private equity houses say media and telecom is amongst their top three targeted investment sectors this year.

—Only eight percent say hi-tech companies are in their top three.

—Nine out of 10 P.E. firms say they will make more investment this year - and 40 percent of them plan “significant” increase.

—The investment firms are reckoning on a big upturn in exits in 2011 and 2012 - “the next 18 months heralds a flurry of exit activity”.

From the survey: “Underlying this appetite is a broad consensus that 2010 will be a good time to invest and to deploy the extensively uninvested funds that were raised prior to the downturn.”

BSO’s technology, media and telecom head Julian Frost: “The outlook for TMT investment is improving rapidly and there are plenty of enthusiastic private equity investors out there who need to increase their rate of investment.”

By Richard Wray: Google’s attempt to break into the mobile phone market has hit serious problems in Britain with the launch of its flagship Nexus One device understood to have been delayed until the middle of next month.

The setback means that by the time Google’s first own-branded foray into the market this side of the Atlantic is available to consumers, its local network partner Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) will have launched a competing product, which analysts say is better, called the HTC Legend.

While Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has been working with the industry on the Android mobile phone software for several years, the Nexus One, made by Taiwan’s HTC, is the first handset over which the search engine group has had complete control. But launching a new phone has proved more difficult than Google expected.

It was released in the US in January, but Google’s decision to sell it solely through its website immediately came in for criticism as buyers struggled to get help with technical problems, and Google, which has traditionally relied on email for consumer contact, was forced to introduce telephone helplinessupport and the problems it has experienced in the US has given it reason to pause over the phone’s launch outside the US, to make sure it has its customer service operations in place. Last week Goldman Sachs slashed its estimate for Nexus One sales this year from 3.5m units to 1m worldwide.

In the UK, Google will not only sell the phone at full price to any customer who wants to put their existing sim card into it, but it has also teamed up with Vodafone, which will offer the device free to anyone willing to sign a £35 monthly contract.

But the delay in the launch of the Nexus One, which under Google’s original plan would have been available earlier this month, means that it will come after the launch of rival Android devices that analysts reckon are at least as good, if not better. Vodafone, for instance, will be offering the HTC Legend in April which has the same operating system as the Nexus One but is more stylish: being built from a single piece of milled aluminium. Orange and T-Mobile, meanwhile, will both be stocking the HTC Desire – which is exactly the same as the Nexus One, but has an optical trackpad instead of a trackball – from next month.

The delay also means the Google device will be available in the UK only weeks before another hotly anticipated gadget, Apple’s iPad. Several of the UK’s mobile phone companies are finalising deals with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) to sell the tablet computer to British consumers. Unlike its last mobile device, the iPhone, which was offered through just one exclusive partner for the first two years, the iPad is expected to be available through multiple network operators from the start.

Apple will ship two versions of the iPad in the UK, one that can access the internet using short-range wi-fi networks and one that can also access 3G mobile phone networks. But Apple needs to sign deals with at least one UK mobile network, because the iPad makes use of micro-sims, meaning that buyers cannot just put the sim card from their existing handsets into it. In fact, it will be the first device launched in the UK that uses micro-sims.

Apple said earlier this month that the device will go on sale in the UK towards the end of April but the mobile phone companies believe that the 3G version of the iPad will not be available until May. Orange, T-Mobile, O2 and Vodafone all expect to be selling the iPad to customers and they are all locked in talks with the Californian company. Apple, however, has made it plain that it does not want iPad users to be tied to long-term contracts with any mobile phone operator. Instead it wants users to be able to pay for mobile network access on a pay-as-you-go basis.

One part of the music business has finally reached the fabled tipping point at which digital income offsets declining physical sales.

UK royalty collector PRS For Music, announcing 2009 income, says: “(Digital) growth (£12.8 million) outperformed the decline in traditional CD and DVD formats (down £8.7 million) for the first time, though the legal online music market is still comparatively small.”

Royalty income from online grew a big 72.7 percent (to £30.4 million), “reflecting the increased number of legal licensed digital music services available in the UK and across Europe”.

And this helped push total PRS income up 2.6 percent to £623 million, though most of that effect was contributed from more overseas income, now that PRS is collecting European royalties for some artists and publishers.

The digital tipping point could be a watershed for the industry, which has so far been unable to substitute its shrinking CD sales with rising digital sales…

But these figures refer only to royalty income to songwriters, composers and music publishers - not to the income that labels themselves are experiencing. On that basis, annual digital growth matched the rate of physical-format decline last year - 12 percent - IFPI recently said (though of course the declining segment is larger than the growing one).

Unclear - the extent to which these rises are thanks to Spotify. The popular service, as well as new anti-piracy laws, helped turn income decline in to growth in Sweden last year, and PRS collects royalties from Spotify in the UK and other countries, though neither side will detail terms.

The last couple of years has seen several unlimited-access music services launch, and a few more are due to arrive this year.

By Randeep Ramesh: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and other websites that carry news they do not produce should be taxed and the money generated used to prop up local newspapers, says a report which warns control of the media is concentrated in too few hands.

The Commission of Inquiry into the Future of Civil Society, headed by Tony Blair’s former head of policy, Geoff Mulgan, will warn next week that news is becoming “recycled ‘churnalism’ and aggregated content”. In a report, Making Good Society, the commission says a future government must preserve freedom on the internet, ensure the media is not controlled by powerful interests, and promote accuracy.

It says four publishers control 70 percent of the local and regional press, three companies – BBC, ITN and BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) – produce national television news and just four companies have nearly 80 percent of the commercial radio market.

In a rapidly changing market, more than 100 local and regional newspaper titles vanished last year – a trend amplified, says the commission, by advertising revenues and audiences shifting to online platforms. “The advent of free newspapers, the emergence of 24-hour television news and the popularisation of online and mobile platforms have all contributed to a far more volatile and unstable environment for news organisations.”

The report argues for levies to promote new media and encourage a diversity of news sources. Recycling money in this way, say the authors, is not new for Britain. Google could generate £100 million a year for cash-starved media if it was taxed for the content it distributes.

The commission also says the law should be changed to allow charities to fund news gathering. In the US there is a model of “philanthropy journalism” which has seen the Huffington Post website secure cash from charitable foundations to fund its investigative reporting.

British charity law “adopts a stringent interpretation of public benefit that excludes any reference to news gathering” – and the commission argues this needs to change so that civil society can be involved in media ownership.

The report points out that civil society already produces its own media. Ofcom, the industry regulator, found the third sector spent an estimated £80m on public service content online in 2006-7.

To promote truthfulness, the report backs the idea of a “kitemark system” that would provide “transparent information on how content is produced”.

The report also backs the BBC, saying that a recession makes it all the more pressing to “protect the respected, world-class, independent and original journalism produced”. It says resources should be found through new industry levies rather than “top-slicing” the licence fee.

The first victim of the free navigation wars: Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) is shutting down Wayfinder, the Swedish mapmaker it purchased for $30 million in late 2008.

It was the carrier’s goal to use Wayfinder to provide directions to both drivers and pedestrians, while overlaying location-based advertising to alert users to nearby restaurants or shops. The carrier planned to start embedding mapping applications on devices this summer with a location-based advertising trial coming soon after. But according to a report in a Swedish publication, Vodafone has decided to close down the whole operation, Engadget reports.

Clearly, the market has gotten a lot more complicated since Vodafone’s acquisition. Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) both started offering free maps with turn-by-turn navigtation services on phones, and much more entrenched competitors, like TomTom and Garmin, are struggling because of it. Vodafone’s Anna Cloke tells Engadget: “We could not charge for something that others gave away for free.”

Related

• Google Rolls Out Navigation To More Android Devices; Will Other Smartphones Follow?
• Vodafone To Use Wayfinder For Location Based Advertising
• Vodafone's Wayfinder Purchase Maps Out a Future For Mobile Applications
• Vodafone To Buy Swedish Navigational Software Firm Wayfinder For $30 Million
• Nokia Says Free Ovi Navigation Driving A Download Every Second
• Nokia Follows Google Down Free-GPS Route In Drive Against TomTom

Print publishers can’t wait for iPad to hit the streets next month, perhaps so they can once again start producing info in a similar-looking format to their core products of yesteryear.

NYT’s flagship app lit the blue touch paper for iPad, Wired also got in on the act early, both Denmark’s Information paper and Penguin Books have imagined themselves on the tablet, even The Economist is getting excited.

Now Holland’s De Telegraaf newspaper has published a concept video, showing how it’s thinking of approaching the gadget…

Another Dutch publisher, Sanoma Magazines, says publishers have been having “secretive” talks with Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) about supporting iPad’s roll-out.

But, for all the iPad concepts we’ve seen lately, many are still only that. De Telegraaf’s video is a corporate montage designed to depict a forward-thinking multi-platform publisher, but it doesn’t exist.

In fact, it only renders Telegraaf.nl’s existing website on the gadget - and, as Apple watchers will know, Telegraaf’s Flash news videos seen in the clip won’t even work on the iPad.

Via Emerce.nl.

We’ve seen a spate of investments in online shopping clubs over the last year. But most of the sites are geared to selling goods - as the market becomes crowded, can they branch out in to other verticals, like experiences?

That’s what Germany’s Brands4Friends, one of the leading buying clubs, is doing by acquiring two-year-old TripHunter (no, no that Trip Hunter), an online club that was already operating in the deluxe holiday space.

Berlin-based Brands4Friends says travel and its existing lifestyle categories are a perfect fit; it will hire about 100 positions in travel in the coming months.

Shopping clubs generally work by offering quick-fire discounts only to registered members, or offering discounts only when a threshold number of buyers is triggered. The space is hotting up and should prove attractive to established online retailers like eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN). Over the last year…

—Mycitydeal picked up €4 million from eVenture Capital Parnters, Rocket Internet and Holtzbrinck Ventures (which also coincidentally backs brands4friends)

—Russia’s KupiVIP.ru raised $20 million.

—Spain’s Privalia got €8 million.

—Brands4Friends received €10 million.

—BuyVIP raised €14.9 million.

—News International has invested in BrandAlley.

—France’s Vente Privee is by far the biggest of these all with revenues of around €650 million annually.

Brands4Friends is growing fast. Having got in to the shopping club game relatively early, it’s already on its own acquisition spree - it bought in to the UK last month by investing in SecretSales.