SOCIAL MEDIA

Happeo, a new social network backed by Irish investors and which is hoping to go head-to-head with Facebook, is due to launch within the next three months, The Sunday Times says.

The venture, with offices in Arizona and San Francisco, is the brainchild of Cork entrepreneur Greg Murphy, who last week staged a successful defence of a legal challenge taken by the Gap clothing chain. However, under the settlement, the company was forced to drop its original plans to call the website Gapnote, and to change it to Happeo instead.

Happeo plans to raise up to €3.6m in funding this year from venture capital funds in Silicon Valley. Its present investors include ‘a veteran investment banker with one of the largest US investment banks, and others from London, South Africa and an architect in Dublin,’ Murphy says.

Murphy claims Happeo will be ‘very disruptive’ to Facebook, the newspaper reports.