New investment: Find and book special hotels through Escapio.com

As already announced this past week, Burda Digital Ventures and W Media Ventures have jointly invested in Escapio.com, a booking platform for selected hotels. Escapio is a sister company of Tripsbytips, the German travel community that Uwe Frers and myself started about 3 years ago. As Uwe is also the entrepreneur behind Escapio, it made […]

Amazon acquires AbeBooks

Today Amazon announced the acquisition of Victoria-based AbeBooks, the company I have been involved with for over 7 years (operationally as COO until October last year, since then as Director and consultant). As you can imagine, I am extremely excited about this deal which makes tremendous sense for everybody involved: Amazon (who has been heavily […]

Burda Digital Ventures turns into Acton Capital Partners

As the Internet evolves, the venture capital business starts evolving and we have been seeing more and more investors focusing on growth and late stages in the past few years. This is exactly the step that our partners over in Germany have taken in the past months: after having managed the corporate venture capital business […]

Building a great company culture – how hard can it be?

Last week we brought together over 20 founders, CEO’s and senior managers from 6 portfolio (AbeBooks, Suite101.com, Nexopia.com, TeamPages, Techvibes, Carrie & Danielle) and 2 associated companies (LiveCurrent, the company behind Perfume.com and Cricket.com, Strutta) for our first Burda Digital / W Media Ventures event in Vancouver. It was a day packed with best practices […]