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Berne, 21 December 2006, 10:00
Investor acquires stake in Swisscom start-up company coComment
Japanese venture capital company Netage Capital Partners, Inc. is to invest in the new Web service start-up company coComment. This week Netage formally acquired a 40% share in the company at a cost of USD 1.5 million. coComment started out in February 2006 as a Web 2.0 service launched by Swisscom Innovations as part of a development project. The service enables comments posted on the Internet, for example in blogs, to be managed simply and transparently.
Anyone who places comments onto any of the numerous Internet blogs, photo websites or news sites quickly loses track of their postings. Thanks to coComment you can now manage your own comments simply and transparently. And if others join in the discussion, you are kept informed. If you place comments on other websites you can display them very easily in your own blog.
coComment started out in February 2006 as a Swisscom Innovations project and received glowing reports on the Internet scene. The number of comments being posted on the Internet - in blogs, for example - is growing enormously. coComment thus belongs to one of the new Web 2.0 applications. It soon became evident that coComment had great potential as an independent start-up company, prompting Swisscom to launch a search for likely partners to develop its activities further.
Despite keen interest from Europe and the US, in the end the offer by Japan's Netage was accepted. The venture capital company Netage Capital Partners, headquartered in Tokyo, has extensive Internet experience and is hugely successful in the Asian market. A Japanese version of coComment has already been launched by Netage and is well on the way to becoming an established Web 2.0 service in the Japanese market.
About Netage
As a holding company, Netage Group includes several enterprises: Netage, Inc. sets up its own new Web activities; Netage Capital Partners , Inc. specialises in venture capital investments. The Netage portfolio includes Mixi - the largest and most successful networking site in Japan. Mixi recently went public and achieved a market capitalisation of around USD 1.5 billion.
About Swisscom
The Swisscom Group, with revenues of CHF 7.2 billion in the first nine months of 2006 and a workforce of about 17,000, is the leading telecommunications company in Switzerland. Swisscom has a presence throughout the country, offering all services and products for mobile, fixed network and IP-based voice and data communication. Swisscom recently entered the television market with IPTV.