Eccles has since backed BetDex, an online betting exchange, licensed and regulated here, that launched last month just in time for the Euro 2024 football championship in Germany.

Now I hear that Eccles has also set up a business called BetHog, which is preparing for the “next generation” of sports betting.

McKillen Sr at back of queue in shopping centre sale

The former Newcastle United owner Mike Ashley is looking at buying the Frenchgate shopping centre in the UK from a limited partnership controlled by Paddy McKillen Sr.

I’m told that Frasers, the department store business controlled by Ashley, is interested in the Frenchgate mall in the middle of hopping Doncaster in the north of England.

• The money fuelling Paddy McKillen Jr’s Press Up

The high street retail sector has been battered in recent years and I’m hearing that a price of €40 million-plus might be enough to get a deal done for the centre.

Amazingly it sold for more than €250 million back in 2008, when Anglo Irish Bank backed McKillen’s acquisition of the centre. Ten years ago the German bank Deutsche Pfandbriefbank refinanced the Anglo debt, which suffered a hefty writedown in its value post-banking crash.

Latest accounts for the shopping centre, up to the end of 2022, showed that the German bank was owed £91 million. A similar chunk was out to Hillhead Advisors, which acquired debt from Colony Capital in 2020. Hillhead’s sole director is Tony Campbell.

McKillen was owed £21 million and, sadly for him, is at the end of the queue. Gulp. Not one of McKillen’s better deals, by the looks of it.

Intercom founder seeks chief for secret tech venture

The Intercom founder Eoghan McCabe is working on a hush-hush new media technology start-up. I hear that he’s out shaking the trees looking for a “founding CEO” for the venture, which will be “a very different type of tech media company”.

McCabe will be personally funding and incubating the company, which will probably be based in San Francisco, where Intercom has its US offices. McCabe, who returned to his role as chief executive of the $1 billion-plus-valued consumer communication tool developer, “has his hands full” so won’t be running the new enterprise.

Intercom raised $125 million from investors including Silicon Valley royalty Kleiner Perkins in 2018, pushing the valuation of the technology group to more than $1 billion. The company reacted quickly to the downturn by slashing staff and reducing cash burn, giving it plenty of runway for growth.

McCabe doubled down on artificial intelligence last month by announcing that Intercom would plough more than $100 million into machine learning and hire some of the tippy-toppest minds in the space.

Growth List suggests that media start-ups raised more than $6 billion from investors in 2023 but have bagged only $356 million in the first half of this year.

I wonder what McCabe’s AI bots would say about his plans to invest money in a new media start-up. Does it compute?

Petrol station supremo left to ponder pub scheme setback

Bob Etchingham has had a little wobble in his plans to develop a housing scheme on the site of the Stillorgan boozer that the petrol station magnate bought after cashing in some shares in the Applegreen group.

Etchingham’s Belgrave Capital is looking to build two apartment blocks with 41 flats on the site of the Stillorgan Orchard pub — the one with the thatched roof. He bought the pub for about €3.5 million six years ago. Based on local prices for similar schemes in the area, I figure that it has to be worth at least €18 million today.

Bob Etchingham cashed in some shares in the Applegreen petrol station group

BRYAN MEADE FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES

It’s not without its complexities, as it would be hard for an approved housing body to pay €700,000 for a three-bed — even if it’s in Stillorgan. Similarly the private rented sector market is tumbleweed city as interest rates coupled with rent controls have made the sector unworkable unless policy changes.

Etchingham will have a bit more time to figure out his exit as the planning paperwork was rejected.

Space entrepreneur takes fast broadband to final frontier

Declan Ganley, Athenry’s answer to Elon Musk, is reeling them in. The cigar-smoking “space entrepreneur” has commitments of more than $10 million from potential customers of his proposed lower Earth orbit communications network, which is being developed by his Rivada Space Networks.

I remember Ganley telling me that bandwidth was like oil in that it’s a finite resource and we are running out of it. His Rivada Space Networks is planning to have 600 satellites ringing the Earth in low orbit to create a fast new broadband network, like Musk’s Starlink.

• Irish siblings vying with Musk to build the ‘internet in space’

The whole shebang is pencilled in to start in 2025 and be completed in 2028. While he’s dogged with a bit of litigation over his other Earth-bound network projects, Ganley made his initial fortune in eastern Europe as the Soviet Union collapsed and may have a better shot at success on wilder new frontiers.

Candy Crush gaming king to create more havoc

I’m told that Steve Collins has punched his last timesheet at the gaming powerhouse King.com. Collins is one of the country’s most interesting technology entrepreneurs, having set up the gaming software group Havok, which was sold to Intel for $110 million.

He was also a founder of the mobile marketing software firm Swrve, which raised close to $100 million from investors before fizzling out.

King.com’s Candy Crush Saga game has earned $20 billion in lifetime revenue

DIDEM MENTE/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES

Collins has been the chief technology officer of King.com — maker of the hit mobile phone game Candy Crush — for the past four years. He’s been replaced by Eric Bowman, the former Zalando and TomTom technology whizz.

King.com was bought by Activision Blizzard for $5.9 billion in 2016 and has struggled to replicate the same success as Candy Crush. I believe that Collins is heading off “to explore AI applications in software and game technologies”. Sounds like the making of Havok 2.0.

Curran sees clear potential in soft x-ray start-up

It’s ten years since Kieran Curran sold his DNA sequencing technology company, GenCell, to Becton Dickinson for about €150 million. Apart from Curran and the serial biotech investor Jim Walsh, some early-stage investors made a terrific turn on their seed money. These include Peter Gleeson and Richard Hubbard.

I believe that the two lads are now joining with Curran in backing Patrick McEnroe’s soft x-ray firm, SiriusXT, which recently replenished the funding tanks.

• SiriusXT’s germ of an idea under the microscope

SiriusXT has developed a supercharged desktop x-ray machine, the SXT-100, which can provide 3D imagery of cellular structures at a nanometre resolution. Most rival kits are the size of football fields, which means the SXT-100 device could be rolled out to zillions more locations.

UCD’s Conway Institute picked up one last year and I hear that more than 20 other institutions are considering splurging on one.