BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) this morning announced intentions to debut the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in an additional 16 markets over the next 30 days, including the UK, Hong Kong, France, India, Spain and Australia. So far, RIM's iPad competitor has only been available to customers in North America (since April 19, 2011), and has drawn mixed reviews.
Digital media company Evolve Media has acquired Crowd Ignite, a content exchange engine that contextually connects audiences of similar interests, the company announced this morning. The price it paid was not disclosed, with TechCrunch has learned that the deal value was low: $1 million in cash, equity and earn-out commitments, to be precise.
Crowd Ignite enables publishers within defined audience verticals to share their content within a closed network, thereby exposing their content to relevant users on other sites and allowing them to acquire new users and grow their audience.
Crowd Ignite’s proprietary technology is able to track which pieces of content within a site are the most popular, present it to users on sites within the network and then optimize the landing page in a way that presents the content they are most likely to want to consume.
Crowd Ignite has over 300 publishers participating across such verticals as women, fashion, parenting, movies, gaming, and male-lifestyle.
This is where the acquisition makes sense. Evolve Media combines an ad sales business (Gorilla Nation), a video solution (Springboard) and an interactive marketing business unit (Double Helix) with a publishing business (AtomicOnline), which includes such properties as SheKnows, CraveOnline, TheFashionSpot, GameRevolution and Momtastic in its portfolio.
The Crowd Ignite team will continue to run day-to-day operations post acquisition.
The company’s founder and creator, Jake Moilanen, will continue as MD.
The European Commission yesterday granted French entertainment and telecommunication services conglomerate Vivendi approval for its acquisition of Vodafone's 44% stake in SFR, the company announced this morning. The transaction, which is valued at 7.95 billion euros (roughly $11.5 billion), should be completed in the next few days. Vivendi henceforth owns 100 percent of SFR, a French mobile phone and Internet services company with over 20 million customers and more than 12,6 billion euros in revenue for 2010.
But at Founders Forum, the annual meeting of European startups CEOs who’ve (for want of a better phrase) “made it”, they like to go one better.
Last night attendees were treated to “On Her Founder’s Secret Service”, which features; Jason Gissing (co-founder of Ocado), Tessa Jowell (MP), Irra K (model & entrepreneur), Marc Worth (WGSN), Gerorge Milford Haven, Eliz Watson, Ola Ahlvarsson, Charlie Muirhead, Lisa Bilton, Jonnie Goodwin, Brent Hoberman, Jimmy Wales and the whole thing was cast by Poppy Gaye. It was produced by Magma Group.
Editor's note:This guest post was written by Rocky Agrawal, an entrepreneur who has worked on local products since 1995. He blogs at reDesign and Tweets @rakeshlobster.
“How much is your average sale here?”
“It’s about five dollars.”
That one question told me Jessie Burke had been sold an unsuitable product. Her average sale was $5 and her Groupon rep had convinced her to run a Groupon for $13.
I already knew how the story ended. Jessie had posted about her experience running a Groupon for Posies Cafe on her blog. She calls running a Groupon “the single worst decision I have ever made as a business owner thus far.” You can read the story in Jessie’s own words.
I wanted to drill deeper and get at the why. I sat with her for an extended conversation. This is only one business owner’s experience, but it is a story worth retellimg.
Jessie found about Groupon from a friend who saw that the pizza place across the street was full after running a Groupon. Seeing that “success”, she wanted to give it a try.
There is very little information on which merchants can make decisions. Merchants are primarily reliant on the information and recommendations of the sales reps, which can often conflict with the business’ best interest. In a conversation with Groupon CEO Andrew Mason after her blog post went viral, she said “This isn’t a newspaper ad where most people know how to do that. You’ve revolutionized marketing. So nobody knows the parameters unless you tell them. No one told me the parameters.”
The sales process seemed like buying a car. Initially, the rep asked for 100% of the revenue. He eventually “settled” for 50% “Understanding that your business is newer, I decided to split the revenue with you,” he wrote. At one point, Jessie was told that she could only ever run one Groupon over the life of the business.
Tracking and infrastructure was a really difficult problem. At the time, she didn’t have a computer, so she was reliant on a binder with 900 names in it. It was an inefficient way to track the deal. This also resulted in a lot of fraud as people redeemed coupons multiple times.
Groupon controls scheduling of deals, which in this case turned out to be bad for her. Deals are scheduled based on factors that optimize the deal for Groupon, not the merchant. Her deal launched the weekend that the neighborhood library opened. It was the opposite of yield management. She got more traffic when she least needed it. Between the two events, there was a line out the door the whole weekend.
The customers she attracted weren’t likely to be regulars. One customer tried to use three Groupons at once. “What are you going to get for $39? Do you want the whole shop? And they were really offended.” “Most people took a trek here. This is definitely a neighborhood shop. People don’t come here from other parts of town just to get coffee.” Some were abusive to staff and didn’t tip.
Most customers didn’t spend much more than the deal value. Groupon told her that something like 98% spent more than the value of the Groupon. “You think maybe like $5 above the value, not like 10 cents.” It’s in Groupon’s interests to make the deal value as high as possible because they get a cut of that. They don’t get a cut of anything extra that someone spends at the business.
There was minimal training on what to expect. Groupon sent her a link to a video. There was no explanation of how to handle things like expired coupons. “The onus of responsibility shouldn’t be entirely on this little business that doesn’t know the laws in the first place.”
Jessie didn’t do anything to convert Groupon customers into regulars, like asking them to follow her on Twitter or Facebook.
She would like to see more transparency. “I think it’s helpful for people to know that you’re not actually giving someone $6, you’re giving someone $3 in our case.”
Her Yelp ratings sank after the Groupon as Groupon customers complained about the business.
One of the things I’ve really struggled with in writing this is the potential for readers to view Jessie as ignorant or worse by the Silicon Valley elite. “She doesn’t know what an open rate is? Or what yield management is? Moron.”
That couldn’t be farther from the truth. From our conversation, I could tell that she’s clearly sharp. She shared an email she sent to Mason suggesting ways that he could improve Groupon and her suggestions were on the mark. Her online presence, including a blog, Facebook and Twitter is well above average for a local business. She’s even claimed her Facebook Places page and is running a Facebook Deal, which is relatively rare.
She tried reading through Groupon’s merchant agreement, but it had too much legalese for her to understand.
Jessie says she tried to do research on other people’s experiences, but there wasn’t much on the Web. (Which is why she wrote the blog post.)
Since she wrote the post, she’s heard from other businesses who have had similar experiences. “What was the saddest part of it for me was that this had had happened to a lot of businesses but because no one had ever said anything we all just assumed (and myself included) we just assumed we were bad business people. That we just didn’t know what we were doing. If everyone loves Groupon so much, we must be wrong.” She estimates that she lost $10,000 in hard costs. Other businesses she heard from claim far greater losses.
The Groupon experience has soured her on similar forms of marketing. “Our most successful advertising is through Facebook. And that’s free. Even offering deals through Facebook, which is also free.”
She gets calls regularly from companies trying to sell her on marketing, including LivingSocial and Google Offers.
A Groupon rep called last week. She suggested that he Google “Posies Cafe.” The rep responded a few hours later with, “A simple Google search showed that I’m an idiot. I’m really sorry.”
The pizza place across the street from Posies has now run a second Groupon. Something worked for them in a way that didn’t work for Posies. I left a message for the owner. If she calls me back, I’ll share her story. And if you’re a merchant who has run a deal and wants to share your story, email me at dailydeals@agrawals.org.
When we first broke the news that iOS 5 would come with Twitter integration, I wasn’t thinking big enough. Based on the fairly vague (but credible) information I had, I figured it was mainly based around the Twitter Photos product which Twitter was rushing to get out in time. Turns out it goes much, much deeper. Apple has essentially baked a “Twitter Connect” into iOS 5. It’s something that all iOS apps will be able to easily use.
And they should. And they likely will.
It’s a massive win for Twitter. And a smart move by Apple. Social is not at their core, and they know it (*cough* Ping *cough*). So they partnered with a company that gets it. But what does it mean for the Twitter ecosystem? After days of dodging my questions, I finally got a chance to talk with Twitter’s head of platform, Ryan Sarver, about it this afternoon.
Twitter gave a presentation at WWDC earlier today (which I wasn’t at — they don’t like my kind at such things) where they spelled out their vision for the integration with iOS. And this evening, Twitter is also holding an event at their headquarters in San Francisco to dive even deeper. Sarver expects it to be one of the largest events they’ve ever hosted.
“Overall the big thing for us is the combination of two big platforms,” Sarver told me. “And we’re complementary to each other. Twitter from day one has been a mobile-friendly company — that was a part of Jack’s [Dorsey] original vision. So to pair up with Apple on this is a great opportunity,” he continued, also pointing to the nice alignment of 200 million iOS devices with the 200 million Twitter accounts.
For developers, the value of this partnership breaks into two key things in Sarver’s mind. First, instant personalization. Any iOS app now has access to the Twitter connected identity and all its trappings and features. Second, there’s the distribution and user acquisition piece. Using the built-in Tweet Sheet feature in iOS 5 (essentially, a Tweet box that overlays on top of any app), any app can leverage Twitter’s network effects.
Sarver cited a recent stat the team behind Quora gave which said that every tweet going out from their service results in an average of 30 clicks back to Quora. Again, that’s on average for all links sent across the entire spectrum of Quora and Twitter users. “It’s an amazing amount of traffic,” Sarver noted, clearly suggesting that all iOS apps could potentially see the same type of thing.
But much of this was technically possible before. The difference now is that because it’s fully integrated into iOS 5, it will be more accessible to both developers and users. Sarver noted the simple hooks in place in the OS to add something like the Tweet Sheet. And for users, once they log in to the Twitter area in Settings in iOS, they’re basically all set for any app that uses the system.
Once you install an app with Twitter integration in iOS 5, you’ll see a single dialog box pop-up asking you if you’d like to connect the app to Twitter. This will look a lot like the pop-up that asks if you’d like an app to be able to use your location, Sarver said. Click, “OK” and you’re good to go. You’ll never be asked to enter a login/password or anything else. Nor will you see the pop-up box in that app ever again.
Imagine this in use for something like With, the latest app from Path. Because that app is built entirely around Twitter and iOS, this new integration is perfect for them. In the future, you’ll install the app, hit “OK” to enable Twitter integration, and you’re set.
If developers wish to go deeper, they can as well. iOS 5 has access to the entire Twitter API, Sarver noted. They essentially have a wrapper in place in the OS to allow developers to make calls to anything they want to use. And since it’s a wrapper (as opposed to iOS mirroring the API), whenever Twitter makes API additions or changes, iOS developers will be good to go as well.
So, now for the big question: where does this leave third-party client developers? After all, since the early days of the iPhone, they’ve been vital to the Twitter ecosystem.
There was a bit of a flare-up recently when Twitter revealed that they were moving developers from xAuth to OAuth usage in apps. The main driver behind this is that Twitter wants to have more control over the direct message feature of their service. This annoyed some developers because instead of a simple login/password sign-on, OAuth requires a user to go to Twitter’s site to authenticate an app.
But this is only for apps trying to access DMs. In other words, this mainly affects full clients. And the iOS/Twitter integration will be no different.
While Sarver declined to dive into xAuth/OAuth specifics in the iOS integration, he did say that there are multiple permission models. The one Apple is using for Twitter single sign-on in iOS 5 grants read/write access to Tweets and the ability to send DMs. But if an app wants to be able to read DMs, they will still need to authenticate on Twitter’s site with OAuth.
So yes, full Twitter clients made by third-parties are getting shafted a bit. Tweetbot, Seesmic, UberTwitter, Twitterrific, Echofon, etc.
But Sarver says this is not about screwing over those apps. “It honestly has nothing to do with making it harder for them,” he said. Instead, this authentication change is about protecting users. Sarver noted that very few apps should need access to DMs. And users probably don’t want apps like Angry Birds being able to read them when they don’t need to.
And of the 900,000 or so API tokens out there, and the 170,000 unique apps tweeting across the system, only hundreds of them are full clients that would want full DM support. “We want to work with them. But we need to think about protecting our users too,” Sarver said.
He did say that they’re thinking about a more elegant solution to the DM OAuth issue (which goes into effect at the end of this month). And if they can come up with something, they’d certainly be open to asking Apple to include it in a future version of iOS as well, Sarver said.
“We wanted to give guidance for the client-makers. We still allow them. They can still build clients. It’s not an area we’re turning off,” Sarver continued. At the same time, “if I were building a client, I would do it without DM access. But that’s just me,” he said.
At least that’s honest. And it reiterates his previous statements on Twitter’s increasingly complex (and conflicted) relationship with third-party client makers.
To lighten the mood, I asked about Twitter’s reliability. What if Twitter goes down, will iOS pop up a little Fail Whale notification, I wondered? Sarver laughed. “As always, developers need to code defensively,” he said. But he noted that a bigger problem may be the loss of cellular connectivity. And he said that Twitter’s reliability has been very stable lately, especially the API (which is true).
In terms of working more closely with other mobile players, Sarver said that Twitter brings a great and important social layer to mobile and they’d love to see it more places. But for now, this core iOS integration is going to be the huge emphasis for them.
And it goes both ways.
“I think this integration has the potential to be the second biggest referral for app growth behind the App Store,” Sarver said. ”I think the main point in my mind is that if you’re making an app for iOS and you’re not thinking about Twitter, you’re really missing an opportunity.”
There is no question in my mind that this integration is going to be huge for all parties involved. Well, except other iOS Twitter clients who, if not hurt by the DM issue, will be hurt by the fact that Twitter’s own app is promoted in the Twitter settings area of iOS.
More specifically, it seems impossible to overstate just how big of a win this is for Twitter. This is a deal that Facebook seemed destined for and would have further cemented their hold on social identity. Now their single sign-on solution looks very weak, by comparison. Twitter must be laughing at it, backed by 200 million devices, each with access to 400,000+ apps — many of which should soon feature Twitter fabric woven deep.
At E3, we had the opportunity to talk with Martin Rae, who is the President of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, an industry group akin to the more well-known Academy that puts on the Oscars. The idea is the same, but the industry is younger, and although their conventions and yearly awards are less well-known, they are gaining popularity and are part of the growing movement towards integrating games with more mainstream media.
I was curious to see how Rae and the Academy think the industry is changing, since we’ve gone from a time of far more straightforward gaming (i.e. the well-crafted ride of Half-Life) to things like Foursquare and Farmville, which blend with real life. I also wanted to hear what he thought of the success of indie hits like Minecraft and Limbo. When games with teams numbering in the single digits can outsell $40 million titles, what does that say?
Just in time for the impending Silicon Valley talent apocalypse, CodeEval, a platform that uses coding challenges to help recruiters find and filter the best programming candidates for the job, is launching today to the public.
CodeEval takes some of the guesswork that happens when a technical recruiter is not actually technical, pushing only candidates who get the challenges correct to its customers (and on to the next screening phase). “Think of it as a really efficient job board where all the candidates get prescreened,” says founder Jimmy John.
In the same space as CoderLoop, what CodeEval does differently than its competitors is that it allows employers to create their own programming challenges as well as providing extensive language support (10 different Open Source languages).
Right now companies and recruiters can use CodeEval with a the freemium model, with basic features being available for free and more extensive ones (like unlimited applications) now available to everyone in $199 a month and $399 a month packages.
CodeEval is San Francisco-based and part of the i/o Ventures incubator. John tells me that his future plans for the startup include further language and challenge automation support as well as one day expanding the platform to designer screening.
Google announced its new beta music service, “Google Music”, at I/O 2011 last month. The service, as it stands right now, is basically just cloud storage for all your music files that users can access through the web app. Users can stream their cloud-based music libraries to any device via a web browser. It even technically works on iOS, though the experience (especially on Safari) is pretty clunky. It’s also still missing discovery and purchasing power, though there’s no doubt that these features are on the way. After all, this is Google, and iTunes is heading to the iCloud.
In the meantime, Google is quietly unveiling the features to its music service, building a full-scale iTunes competitor piece-by-piece (or maybe hastily, it depends who you ask). And yesterday, Google Research officially congratulated itself for making some drastic improvements to “Instant Mix” — the playlist generator that is getting closer to being Google’s equivalent of iTunes Genius.
In essence, Instant Mix is a playlist generator that uses machine hearing to extract attributes from audio which can be used to answer pointed questions about songs, like, “Is this a song I can blog to?” or “Does it have blues guitar?” Not unlike Pandora’s Music Genome in intention, Instant Mix analyzes particular attributes of a song, using its algorithms to compare audio data to information pulled from the Web. Google has done some serious research in the emerging field of machine hearing, which endeavors to teach computers to better process information from audio sources, and it’s beginning to show.
With the combination of this audio analysis and web-crawled artist data, Instant Mix is able to compare songs that are similar in nature and work well together in a playlist. If you pick a quiet song while you’re working, the service will create a quiet playlist for you from your music library. For those not yet tapped into Music Beta, you can go to Google Research’s blog to check out a few sample playlists.
At I/O, Google’s Paul Joyce said that Instant Mix is meant to be one of the new music service’s “killer features”. But, is it? Erick Schonfeld and John Biggs demo-ed Google Music and Instant Mix a few weeks ago and found the service to be pretty hit-or-miss.
After Google Music’s launch, Echo Nest’s Paul Lamere did a deep dive into the comparisons between Instant Mix, iTunes Genius, and Echo Nest and found Instant Mix to be way behind the other two in terms of serving too many “WTFs” — songs that are glaringly dissimilar from the song you choose as the jumping off point for your playlist.
Google has since made several upgrades to the service, and it now works far better than it did at launch. It’s great to see how quickly Google was able to iron out the kinks. And, last I checked (iTunes disabled my account because someone hacked it), Genius takes awhile to incorporate newly downloaded songs into playlists, and whether or not Google Instant Mix intends to or not, it has been previously offering more of a “surprise” factor.
For some people, this will actually be a pleasure. If you have a large collection of music, it’s nice to be reminded of a song you may not have played in awhile. Of course, it would be nice for Google to be a little more open about whether this is something they intend, or whether it just shows that the feature has been relatively half-baked.
I’d like to see both iTunes and Google Music offering some user options in terms of how your playlist is created. One option could be more random, incorporating more surprise, while another might only create playlists of similar songs based on mood, and so on. What’s more, how about an evolving playlist mechanism that allows contextual updating, so that a playlist adjusts slightly to each new song, maybe pulling in different songs as it goes? Now that would be genius. Mensa level even.
It will be very interesting to see which combination of algorithms wins out. Does Google’s collaborative filtering mixed with acoustic similarity data offer a better alternative to iTunes’ collaborative filtering algorithm driven from purchase data acquired via the iTunes music store? Granted, these services are both essentially black box, so I’m glossing over a bit in terms of what I’m sure is more complicated, double secret mechanics on both ends, but it’s always interesting to see what combination of algorithms and data end up serving the best playlists — and recommendations, for that matter.
We can always use more transparency from algorithmic recommendation systems, so it’s good to see Google peeling back the curtain a bit on Instant Mix. Once discovery and purchasing hit Google Music, we may have one great service on our hands. Until then, I’d say Instant Mix is close, but not quite there.
The talent acquisitions continue for Facebook. The social network has just bought the software design company Sofa, we’ve learned.
The Amsterdam-based company was founded in 2006 and is known for its Mac applications and e-commerce products on the web. Notably they do all their own designs including art, icons, and interfaces for other “high-profile” clients. Not surprisingly, the team will be joining Facebook’s design team.
Big news today for Embedly, the service that makes it easy to embed content from nearly any site on the web. Today the company is announcing that it’s raised another $450,000 in a round that includes Howard Lindzon, Social Leverage, Venture 51, Adam Schwartz and follow-on investments from Betaworks and Chris Sacca, who participated in Embedly’s $250,000 round last August. Schwartz will be joining the company’s board.
But funding isn’t all Embedly has up its sleeves: it’s also announcing some changes to the way its APIs work. Namely, it’s combining its existing services into a single API to help reduce developer confusion.
Embedly has offered both a free standard API — which can be used to embed content from sites like YouTube, Rdio, and Twitter — and then a second, Pro API that can glean content from any site and generate nice-looking embeds (it’s like the story creator used by Facebook, but anyone can integrate it). Before now these have been two separate APIs, and now they’re be combined into one (you can sign up for the API here).
Finally, Embedly is sharing some new stats. The service is now used by 1,200 sites and services, including Hunch, Bit.ly, StockTwits, and Yammer (they note that Lindzon and Schwartz both actually use Embedly for their own apps). Across all of these sites, Embedly serves 2 billion impressions per month for its embeds. To put that in perspective, they were serving around 4 million URLs per month in July 2010.
Earlier today I was invited to do a quick guest spot on CNBC’s Power Lunch, where we discussed a question that’s fundamentally important to the future of Silicon Valley: Who is cooler, Google or Apple?
Okay, so the topic was a bit goofy. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it: after all, public perception can play a role in how quickly products from each company get picked up by new users, which in turn can impact their bottom lines.
Tune in to hear my thoughts. Because if there’s a guy who knows cool, it’s me. Oh, and there’s an interview with the folks who made the awesome Les Paul Google Doodle gracing the search engine’s home page today. You can watch that one here:
This is a sweet comeback for CEO Michael Barrett. As I noted in our first post about AdMeld in 2009, Barrett was fired from News Corp. in 2008 when the division that owned MySpace failed to meet a $1 billion revenue target. Most sources we spoke with at the time said he was the fall guy for an unrealistic revenue target to begin with, set by News Corp.’s Rupert Murdoch in a previous earnings call.
You know what they say about imitation being the most sincere form of flattery? Well sometimes, like in the case of Groupon and its many imitators competitors, the flattery is also huge business risk. The latest victim to get bombarded by an “attack of the clones”? Billion dollar darling Airbnb.
Obviously feeling threatened by its recent crop of competitors, the company sent out an email yesterday to its over 100K hosts, warning them about "impostor websites" like 9flats, Wimdu, Myfriendshotel and Airizu.
The email, titled “Airbnb Community News,” starts out with the usual PR milestones (in 181 countries and 13,000 cities!) and then it gets down to business:
You've Informed Us about Imposter Websites
A new type of scam has been brought to our attention: Airbnb clones posing as competition. We've discovered that these scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original.
After receiving emails from many of you who are upset with these tactics, it's time to address this issue as a community. Hosts are reporting these issues about the clone sites so far:
They falsely claim to be affiliated with Airbnb, or be the "international version" of Airbnb.
They claim that they are part of Ebay and/or Groupon. We've confirmed that this is not the case.
Their employees pretend to be Airbnb travelers in order to give you a sales pitch in your home.
They are duplicating personal profiles, descriptions, and photos of your Airbnb listing without your permission.
Help us protect our community by joining other hosts in alerting us whenever you see questionable activity from users.
Use the new flagging feature next to each message to report questionable behavior
While the fact that the co-founders point the hosts to a “detectives@airbnb.com” email address is cute, don't let that distract you from the grave point here. The biggest competitive threat to Airbnb currently is the Samwer-backed Wimdu, a clone that uses the classy ”Concept featured on CNN and the New York Times” on its splash page.
Why is Wimdu such a threat? Well Wimdu was created by the German Samwer brothers, prior Facebook investors whose modus operandi is creating European clones of popular American Internet services. The Samwers most profitably sold their eBay clone Alando.de to eBay in 1999 and their Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon itself for around €100 million in 2010.
The Airbnb email does everything but call out the Samwer brothers by name for their questionable cut and paste innovation tactics, “these scam artists have a history of copying a website, aggressively poaching from their community, then attempting to sell the company back to the original” and “they claim that they are part of Ebay and/or Groupon.” The site runner at the bottom of Wimdu brags, “Will be featured soon on Groupon.” Heh.
While I haven't heard anything about a Groupon/Wimdu partnership, the two services still have a connection post-CityDeal acquisition. Because they got in so early, the Samwers currently own around 10% of Groupon's voting shares and have a cushy International “consulting arrangement” with the daily deals site (and, we’re hearing, a mixed track record.)
Airbnb has even more reason to be threatened: It just acquired German clone Acceleo (with its recent $100 million windfall perhaps?) signaling its first serious move towards international expansion. It's no surprise that Airbnb acquired a clone, and then one week later sent out a mass email warning its community about other clones.
With its new funding and “now we have to take this seriously” valuation, Airbnb is following Groupon’s lead and investing for growth oversees. Hopefully it’ll have a better time of it than Groupon, who lost $170.6 million internationally last year (versus $10.4 million in the US) — Proving that the clone wars have more significant casualties then terrible blog headlines.
Movieclips.com, which launched in 2009, offers a clip engine with over 14,000 different clips from 1,400 titles from the libraries of 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal Pictures and Warner Bros. Pictures. Last year, the startup also launched a new product, called Movieclips Mashups, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, which allows anyone to make montages of two minutes clips.
Along with the studio partnerships (which is half the battle for licensing movie content), the company has also developed proprietary technology that assigns up to 1,000 points of data to every scene, making it super easy to find scenes by actor, film title, dialogue snippet, mood, director, genre, etc.
The site also launched a specialized video player and features an API developers can use to integrate Movieclips on other sites; AOL's Moviefone actually uses the technology on its platform.
Before Mike McCue discovered how to flip an iPad into a device that made reading digital magazines a cinch, he himself was discovered by some of the biggest names in the tech world while working away in Silicon Valley Woodstock, New York.
In this episode of Founder Stories with Chris Dixon, you’ll hear them geek out about programming video games for the TI99 in Extended Basic, how McCue went to IBM instead of college, discuss how he made ends meet when money was tight, how that situation changed a million times over, and the idea behind his first startup, Paper Software. “The idea was to create technology as simple and practical as a piece of paper,” he says. After a few twists and turns, it was acquired by Netscape, where he found himself when a little thing called JavaScript hit the programming world.
Then, after AOL bought Netscape, McCue tells Dixon he decided to re-scratch his entrepreneurial itch and describes jumping back into the founder game with his startup, TellMe. “We we wanted to build Dialtone 2.0,” he says.
Hear it all in his own words.
In the below interview, McCue picks up where he left off and discusses narrowly steering TellMe away from a dot.com crashing landing while overseeing a staff of 200 and spending “$45 million a year and little revenue” in the charred market of 2000. Fortunately, TellMe was able to raise a final $125 million round. “As the money was coming in from the banks,” recalls McCue, “the market was crashing." He had 200 employees at the time and was burning through $45 million a year with little revenues. He had some hard decisions to make as he prepared to “march through the desert.”
It all turned out okay. TellMe was eventually bought by Microsoft for $800 million. But getting there wasn’t easy.
Tomorrow, we’ll post more videos from this interview. Make sure to catch past episodes of Founder Stories with guests ranging Dennis Crowley and Mike Walwrath to David Karp and Lauren Leto here.
Back in February, every name in the book was thrown at Apple when the news hit that they were changing the App Store guidelines to make way for in-app subscriptions. Some of these new rules appeared onerous for a variety of different apps already in existence. Namely, everyone was concerned about Netflix, Kindle, SaaS apps, and music subscription apps. Given the terms, it appeared that none of them would be able to continue to operate on Apple’s platform the way they had been — and perhaps not at all.
Ahhhhhhhh. The death of iOS. The end of Apple, right? I must have read a hundred stories along those lines.
But those authors overlooked one very simple thing: Apple is not stupid.
That’s why the shock today is not that Apple is backtracking on the terms, but that people are shocked that they’re backtracking on the terms. I mean, people really seemed to think that Apple was going to shoot themselves in the foot — or worse, kill their ecosystem (and perhaps themselves) with these terms. No consideration was given to the fact that they might actually, you know, change them. Adapt. This is the most valuable tech company in the world we’re talking about here. Many truly believed they were on the verge of throwing that all away.
The reality is this: Apple had an idea, one that would potentially be hugely profitable for them, and they decided to test the waters on it. They put it out there to see if it would swim. It sank. So they reeled it back in and changed things. All of this happened, mind you, before anything was ever actually changed. I’m sure it’s a total coincidence that Apple just altered these guidelines right before the changes were due to take effect later this month.
Jason brought up many good points about abusing power and disturbing precedents. But he overlooked one vital thing: common sense. As I wrote in response at the time to Jason’s post:
It's time to take a deep breath and calm down and realize what is ultimately common sense: Apple is not going to destroy the empire they've built over a relatively small feature. If they have to change, they'll change. And the market will dictate that. It really is that simple.
Guess what happened? Apple looked over the market reaction and decided not to commit seppuku. Shocking.
At its worldwide headquarters in Mountain View, CA today Google installed at least 70 electric vehicle charging stations made by Coulomb Technologies. They will be used to power up employee-owned electric vehicles, as well as the company's GFleet EVs and electric hybrids.
GFleet is Google’s car sharing program for employes. The fleet so far includes Chevrolet Volts and Nissan LEAFs. Google plans for 250 more charging stations on its campus, according to a press statement from Coulomb today. Its goal is to make 5 percent of Google campus parking EV-ready. The project represents the largest workplace charging installation for electric vehicles in the country, Coulomb claims.
The chargers will also be managed by Coulomb via their ChargePoint Network.
This guest post is written by David Cowan, who joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 1992. He has since made 45 early-stage investments for Bessemer, including 19 that have gone public, and 18 that have been acquired by public companies.
Over the years I've heard many legitimate gripes from entrepreneurs about the way venture capital firms treat them while fundraising. I must confess an imperfect record of courtesy myself, though I do try to be respectful, and to incorporate feedback. For example, I once resolved never to keep entrepreneurs waiting long for me in our lobby, and I think I live up to that.
But I often hear one particular gripe from those who simply fail to think through the issue practically: For their first pitch to a large venture capital firm, entrepreneurs are often invited to speak or meet with someone other than a partner of the firm. Some interpret this as an insult, a waste of time, and a lack of substantive interest in their startups. And they are partially right.
They are right that in any first meeting or conversation, the VC is less interested than the entrepreneur. Not zero interest, but less. This is true for every pitch meeting that has ever taken place in history. In the second meeting there is more interest, and by the time a venture investor wires the money, the firm is just as excited as the founders.
They are wrong, though, about the insult. And the numbers prove incontrovertibly that it is not a waste of time.
The experienced partner you want as a lead investor probably has a lot of board seats. He or she spends most of the day at company meetings (board and otherwise), in interviews, and with the limited partners who actually provide the capital. I, for one, always try to reserve time in my week for hearing pitches, but it is scarce, and so if I took every first meeting myself, I'd be much less likely to actually meet the entrepreneur whose startup I wish to fund.
Also, as a seasoned VC I'm a lot dumber now about new markets than 15 years ago when I had fewer obligations. Researching all thewild tangents and nuances of cloud infrastructure, cyber security, social commerce, scalable data processing, etc., is a full time job. Who Has Time For This? Not I, but I can hire people smarter than me who do!
So if you're an entrepreneur interested in partnering with a smart, successful, well capitalized venture investor, you have many aspects of character, competency and chemistry to consider. Is the audience's seniority at your first pitch really the most important?
Think it through before you snub a meeting with that associate, analyst, principal or vice-president. That's who's most likely to get what you're doing, and to be your champion through the process. (Indeed, the last five investments I made arose from first meetings that the founders had with our VPs and principles James Cham, Trevor Oelschig or Ethan Kurzweil.) Consider it an opportunity to scope out the firm and to polish your pitch before you meet the partners.
And please understand that the intention is most definitely not an insult. Anyone in our orbit knows that many VCs fully appreciate the talent, courage, energy and genius of the entrepreneurs we meet. It is only because we wish to meet more of you that we have the process and organization that we do.
Now I've got to get going——the two engineers whom Sunil met on Thursday just showed up in my lobby.
Mubi has signed a signed a deal with Sony Bravia to be inside it’s connected TVs. The announcement wass made by Efe Cakarel, Founder & CEO, MUBI, at the annual European-focused Founders Forum near London. This is significant as Sony alone expects to sell 24m connected TVs this year and they are not even the market leader, Samsung is.
MUBI bills itself an “an online cinema, anytime, anywhere” and effectively socialises the experience so you can “find a girl in Tokyo who loves Kubrick” as they put it. Mubi has $3.15m in venture backing from the likes of Georges Harik, Aydin Senkut, Joel Peterson, Metin Anter and Eduardo Costantini.
In what seems to be panning out to be community service week for big-time tech CEOs, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg took the stage yesterday in order to inspire the graduating eighth graders at Belle Haven Community School in Menlo Park, CA.
Impetus behind the speech: Facebook is moving its headquarters to Menlo Park, so Zuck (Mr. Z or Mr. Mark Zuckerman according the Belle Haven principal) was just being neighborly.
“I don’t remember much about my middle school graduation,” Zuckerberg said, relating a story about a teacher he had that looked like a pirate “When you look back on your middle school graduation, you probably won’t remember that much either but I hope you have fun.”
Zuck continues, pontificating on the theme, “Illuminating the words ‘I can’t,” basically giving the eighth grade version of Steve Jobs’ Stanford “Do What You Love” speech.
“Everything that’s worth doing is actually pretty hard,” Zuck said. “It’s not about a single moment of inspiration or brilliance, it’s years and years of practice and hard work … Anything that’s really awesome takes a lot of work.”
Team Europe Ventures, the investment arm of German incubator Team Europe, is being rebranded as Point Nine Capital (PNC). Additionally, serial entrepreneur and angel investor Christoph Janz is joining its leadership team. To date, the fund, which focuses on early-stage companies in the Internet and mobile space, has invested in over 10 startups, including inFakt, Lieferheld, Madvertise, MisterSpex, myGengo and SponsorPay.
Russian geolocation service AlterGeo, has reportedly raised $10m from Intel Capital and Almaz Capital - a 25% share increase - and values the company at around $20-25m. Serial investor Esther Dyson, who has a track record in Russia, having previously invested in Russian search engine Yandex (a partner of AlterGeo's), is also said to have participated. The company plans to use the new financing to expand its user base and develop new services.
What happens when you mix local deals with reward points? You get OO.com. A couple months ago, Next Jump, which powers rewards programs for thousands of corporations and credit card companies, inked a deal with LivingSocial to get acces sto its inventory of daily deals. The first fruits of that deal are evident in OO.com, which is a retooling of Next Jump’s Overwhelming Offers (which now redirects to OO.com).
So what is OO.com? You enter your zipcode and are presented with a map filled with LivingSocial deals. But you also get rewarded with WOWpoints every time you buy something. WOWPoints can be redeemed for other deals or merchandise on OO.com, Target, Walmart, Amazon, Buy.com, and other partners. They add a gaming element to local deals by giving consumers an incentive to rack up points by buying more deals.
A typical deal might be $25 for $50 worth of food and drinks at a wine bar. That is no different than buying that same deal through LivingSocial. But if you buy it on OO.com, you also get 250 WOWpoints. (100 WOWpoints = $1).
In addition to the daily deals from LivingSocial, OO.com also has all the online deals that were previously on Overwhelming Offers. So it’s a mix of the two, but the daily deals are definitely highlighted more.
Is this an evolution of the daily deals model, or will OO.com be too confusing for consumers to grasp? Check it out and weigh in below in comments.
Google’s Vice President of Display Advertising Neal Mohan just published a blog post with a few interesting projections relating to display ads on the web. Google, of course, has a booming display ad business that brings in billions. Mohan gave a number of predictions for display advertising (in a keynote speech given at Internet Week this morning), explaining that the company is investing in improving display advertising for publishers, advertisers and consumers.
Mohan predicts that the number of display ad impressions will decrease by 25 percent per person because people aren’t connecting with these ad formats. But as ad formats become more relavent and attractive (i.e. playing games or watching videos), engagement rates across all display ads will increase by 50 percent.
Another predictive stat—people will have a direct say in 25 percent of the ads they see. Technologes, says Mohan, will give users more control over what types of ads they want to see online.
Advertisers will also look beyond CTRs and other measurements in the future for display ads, claims Mohan. He says 35 percent of campaigns will primarily use metrics beyond clicks and conversions. Other factors like emotional engagement and impact on offline behavior (like in-store shopping choices) will also be determining factors in how successful an ad campaign is.
Google is also betting on the fact that people want to know why they are seeing ads in the first place. Mohan explains that 25 billion ads per day will tell people why they are seeing them (i.e. giving users an "Ads by Google" notice). And over 40 percent of online Americans will name display ads as their favorite ad format, predicts Mohan.
In a survey with YouGov of more than 1,000 U.S. Internet users, Google asked them what ad formats they liked and the number of people who said they preferred display ads trailed slightly behind the number who liked glossy magazine ads, cinema ads and sky-writing—formats.
We just wrote about the recent eMarketer study that estimates online ad spending will come in at $31.3 billion this year thanks to an upswing in display ads. In fact, eMarketer predicts that display ad spending will surpass search by 2015. No wonder Google, which also dominates search advertising, is so optimistic.
When we first coveredPostagram in April, there was a lot of excitement about it. They take your Instagram photos and turn them into postcards that you can send right from your iPhone — who wouldn’t love that? Well, Android users, for one. With a new release today, Postagram has remedied that — with a twist.
Yes, Postagram for Android is now available for free in the Android Marketplace. But because Instagram itself still isn’t even available on Android, Sincerely (the team behind Postagram) decided to do things a bit differently with the Android version. With it, you can upload and create postcards from images found on your Android device or from your Facebook account. So yes, the “agram” aspect of the name doesn’t really apply here. At least not yet.
Still, as popular as Instagram has become, Facebook is much more popular. While Instagram is just about to hit 5 million users, Facebook is closing in on 700 million. And their photo service in particular is by far the most popular one on the web. In fact, it’s now larger than all the other ones combined. Content will not be a problem.
And alongside the Android release, Postagram is upgrading their iPhone app to version 2.0 as well to match the functionality. Now with the iPhone, you can upload a photo from your phone, or choose a Facebook photo, on top of the Instagram support.
Also new (and available on both the iPhone and Android versions) is the ability to send to multiple recipients. The design on the back of the actual Postagrams has also been altered to now include the (optional) message and a profile photo of the person who sent the Postagram.
While the price remains the same ($0.99), Postagram is also offering a 24 hour period in which new users can send one Postagram for free starting right now.
Well, this is interesting. Nuance, a company that develops imaging and voice recognition technologies, is once again suing competitor Vlingo, which also develops a voice search technology and is backed by Yahoo, AT&T and Charles River Ventures.
According to the suit, which we’ve embedded below, Nuance claims Vlingo is infringing on number of Nuance’s patents including U.S. patent no. 6,487,534 B1, which relates to a “Distributed Client-Server Speech Recognition System." By making, using, selling, offering to sell, and or importing its products and services related to speech recognition, Nuance says Vlingo is infringing on its patent.
Nuance is also claiming that Vlingo is infringing on that U.S. patent no. 6,785,653 B1, which is titled "Distributed Voice Web Architecture and Associated Components and Methods," U.S. patent no. 6,839,669 B1, titled "Performing Actions Identified in Recognized Speech;" U.S. patent number No. 7,058,573 B1, titled "Speech Recognition System to Selectively Utilize Different Speech Recognition Techniques Over Multiple Speech Recognition Passes;" and U.S. patent no. 7,127,393 B2, titled "Dynamic Semantic Control of a Speech Recognition System."
Nuance is requesting that Vlingo pay damages for infringing and profiting off the patents, but it’s unclear what the dollar amount of these damages are.
The two companies have a bit of a storied past. Nuance slapped Vlingo with a patent lawsuit back in 2008. Vlingo then bought a number of patents last year relating to voice and speech recognition, that aimed to force Nuance to drop its suit.
Dave Grannan, CEO of Vlingo, recently compared the act of competing with Nuance to “having a venereal disease that’s in remission.” He tells Bloomberg BusinessWeek, “We crush them whenever we go head-to-head with them. But just when you’re thinking life is great – boom, there’s a sore on your lip.” Gross.
Nuance is a massive company with a $6 billion market cap and is a formidable competitor. In fact, Apple appears to be licensing Nuance’s technology in OS X Lion. And we heard that Nuance was in negotiations with Apple for a partnership to license and use the company’s voice recognition technology, though Nuance was missing from the lineup of products revealed this week’s WWDC conference. And we’ve learned that Apple may already be using Nuance technology in their new massive data center in North Carolina.
Investor Dave McClure and his wily bunch of scrappy startups are at it again this time almost doubling up on startups, going from 12 in first cohort to 21 and bringing the accelerator’s total to 140. For those unaware, 500 Startups is the Palo Alto based incubator that was founded by angel investing firebrand McClure, investing between $25K to $250K in startups with a focus on the "Three Ds" design, data, and distribution.
The demographics breakdown of this new "Fast and the Furious" 500 Startups batch are as follows, 30% have international founders including Zerply (Sweden, Estonia), vvall (Hong Kong) and BugHeard (Australia). Many are from outside of the valley including LaunchRock (Philadelphia), Snapette (Boston) and HelloWorld (Austin).
McClure tells me that 500 Startups, which finds entrants to its accelerator program through word of mouth, is specifically looking for startups with a simple revenue model a.k.a things that can be easily understood and make money.
McClure and his former YouTuber partner Christine Tsai are also announcing their first d.fund and Twilio fund winners, the startups StoryTree and Culture Kitchen are the former and Volta has the honor of recieving the latter award. To help wrangle the startups presumably, Principal Christine Tsai has moved up in the 500 Startups world to Partner ("Chief Pug Herder") and Paul Singh has also joined on as Principal.
The 21 startups will more elaborately present their wares at the 500 Startups Demo Days in August, but in case you can't wait, here's a sneak preview below in alphabetical order.
AppGrooves The Palo Alto based AppGrooves is an app recommendation app for iOS.
BugHerd Bugheard aims to be the world's simplest website bug tracker.
CardinalBlue A realtime corporate collaboration tool that relies on photos and chat.
Culture Kitchen Culture Kitchen (“Iron Chef in your LivingRoom”) is a platform to connect foodies with lower income ethnic women skilled in cooking the traditional recipes they grew up with.
Daily Aisle Inexplicably founded by two unmarried guys, Daily Aisle is a wedding planning site.
HelloWorld.im HelloWorld wants to provide simple networking profiles to developers.
Kibin Get feed feedback on your writing, from essays, resumes to breakup notes.
Launchbit Female founded startup offering customer development software.
LaunchRock LaunchRock creates viral launching pages for startups, offering analytics as a premium.
Scoopola Yield management startup for live music, theater. Also: "We only eat meat from animals that we’ve killed."
Snapette A “Foodspotting for Fashion” Snapette lets you share photos of your latest Marc Jacobs bag, Louboutin heels or Prada skirt, you know, if you’re into that sort of thing.
StoryTree A platform that allows you to capture stories for your family.
Tout Email templates for people who send repetitive emails.
Vayable A marketplace for travel experiences experiences.
Vidcaster Allows you to turn any site into a video casting site.
Zerply A LinkedIn based on vocation, not corporation.
McClure tells me that there many advantages to hooking up with the 500 Startups brood, first and foremost its #500Strong network of advisors and founders. More than 50 percent of it previous class raised at least $250K, and 2 raised a million or more. Everybody raised something.
McClure said that the stunning Palo Alto-based office is also a factor, “We actually have physical space here. So they’re actually located with us. I think the female and international numbers are not a coincidence. We’re big on crazy.”
When asked why he chose “Fast and the Furious” as the theme for this batch, McClure said, “Because we’re fucking cool, and it was a close call between X Men, First Class and Fast and Furious. A distant third was Kung Fu Panda."
For more McCure watch the below video of him likeninghis incubator to the Oakland As to Sequoia’s The Yankees. You can also check out the seven best startups from the last batch here.
Location is the new black, but why do mobile apps need to have all the fun? Increasingly, location is getting baked into regular web pages as well. Today, Fwix is taking its hyperlocal places database and exposing it to web sites in a novel way. “Our goal is to index the Web by location,” says Fwix CEO Darian Shirazi.
With one line of Javascript through its new GeoTagger API, partner sites will be able to geotag their web pages. What that means is that Fwix will index the site and extract any places it finds. The first partner to roll this out will be NBC’s local sites such as NBC New York and NBC Bay Area. A Geotagger button on the page, which could be labeled “Places on this page,” will then create a places widget when someone clicks and hovers over it. It will show the names, addresses, and each place on a map.
GeoTagger shows all the places mentioned on the page without any tagging or other wok required by the publisher. It is all automatic. Fwix has expertise in this kind of geo-content analysis because it started out as a hyperlocal news aggregator before it switched gears. Now its ambition is much bigger: to geo-index the web and expose the location data buried in everyday web pages.
How useful will this be? It depends on the site. But as the web becomes more mobile, that kind of feature is something mobile users will definitely want to see.
Back in February, Apple unveiled its much-anticipated subscription feature, giving digital newspapers, magazines, and other apps a consistent and easy way to sign iOS users up for recurring billing. But it came with some major caveats: Apple’s rules, which were going to go into effect at the end of the month, gave these apps very little flexibility with their pricing and how they could actually distribute their content.
In particular, Apple was demanding that publishers like Time Inc and services like Netflix sell all content within the application at the same or lesser price as what it sold for outside of the application — and that they’d still have to hand over 30% of the take to Apple. The rules also seemed to affect Amazon’s Kindle platform, with Apple taking an untenable 30% on every book sold through the Kindle app.
There was a lot of controversy around the news — some said that it was a gamble that might make perfect sense for the company, others (including me), thought that Apple was being obscenely greedy. Now, nearly four months after Apple first unveiled the rules, it has quietly revised them. The changes were first noticed over at MacRumors, and they’re a big deal.
Here’s the old wording of the relevant section:
11.13 Apps can read or play approved content (magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, video) that is sold outside of the app, for which Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues, provided that the same content is also offered in the app using IAP at the same price or less than it is offered outside the app. This applies to both purchased content and subscriptions.
And here’s the new section, via the MacRumors report:
11.14 Apps can read or play approved content (specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video) that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app, as long as there is no button or external link in the app to purchase the approved content. Apple will not receive any portion of the revenues for approved content that is subscribed to or purchased outside of the app.
So what does this mean? Companies like Netflix and periodicals like Time can now encourage their users to sign up for subscriptions from their websites, and then direct users to download their iOS applications afterward, thereby bypassing the 30% fee.
Granted, Apple is explicitly forbidding applications from including a ‘buy’ button within the apps themselves that link to an external payment flow, but this is still a big improvement. And those applications that do want to take advantage of in-app purchases can now adjust their pricing to take Apple’s 30% fee into account.
The news comes after several publications like the Financial Times have opted to go web-only as a way to work around Apple’s subscription rules. And I’m sure plenty of apps and publishers have already been prompted to started developing for Google’s more open Android platform.
This isn’t the first time Apple has had to backtrack on highly controversial rules that it’s tried to impose on iOS developers. Last year, it heavily restricted the tools that developers were allowed to use to build iOS applications (including blocking apps that used of Adoble’s Flash->iOS app converter). Several months later, it reversed the policies. And who can forget the Google Voice fiasco, which banned Google’s app for “reproducing existing functionality” only to admit it into the App Store over a year later.
In addition, TechCrunch has learned, the company is currently in the process of finalizing a new financing round, and we’ve also learned that self-proclaimed design junkie and actor Ashton Kutcher has invested in the business and will be joining the startup’s advisory board.
Fab.com launches today with 200,000 pre-registered members and over 175 designers and manufacturers. Flash sales will launch daily at 11 AM Eastern time, 7 days per week and lasting for 72 hours. As is common with flash sales sites, upcoming deals are announced exclusively to members, through the Fab.com website as well as via a daily e-newsletter.
Fab.com membership is free but the startup says numbers are restricted in order to maintain “exceptional prices” for design products in a range of categories including furniture, home accessories, technology, lighting, art and toys.
Sales will be curated by design industry experts like Monica Khemsurov (founder of SightUnseen, editor at Details, former editor at ID), Fab.com Buying Director David Branham (former senior buyer for The Conran Shop) and well-known product designer Karim Rashid.
Based in New York, Fab.com was founded in 2010 by serial entrepreneur Jason Goldberg, formerly of XING, socialmedian, and Jobster, with design industry vet Bradford Shellhammer, contributor to Dwell and formerly of Blu Dot and Design Within Reach, along with Deepa and Nishith Shah in India and Veerle Pieters in Belgium.
As we heard yesterday, Fusion-io, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, upped the opening price of its IPO to $19 per share, valuing the company at $1.5 billion. Earlier in the week, the company upped the range f its offering to $16 to $18 per share from $13 to $15 per share. And this morning, company’s shares, which are trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FIO,” opening at $25 per share (up 32 percent), which gives Fusion-io a $1.9 billion valuation with 77,809,084 shares outstanding at the time of offering.
Fusion-io's enterprise flash-based drives help store data in smaller devices and is known for being an incredibly fast data storage solution. And Facebook is a big client of Fusion-io, which has raised $110 million in funding. Another fun fact—Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak is Fusion-io's chief scientist.
The company is offering a total of 10,755,607 shares in its IPO and aiming to raise as much as $254.6 million. Another 1,544,393 shares are being offered by selling stockholders. In addition, the underwriters have an option to purchase up to an additional 1,845,000 shares from Fusion-io on the same terms and conditions.
A 30 percent jump is significant but its still unclear if Fusion-io’s shares will be able to sustain the price increase. LinkedIn shares popped 84 percent on the first trade of its offering to $83 per share, but has dropped below this number of late (today’s LNKD shares opening at $76 per share). Yandex shares opened at $35 per share, but have dropped slightly (shares opened at $33.75 this morning).
The company’s revenue has been strong of late with revenue growing by four times to $125.5 million and gross profit up by four times to $65.7 million in the nine months that ended March 31. But the company’s revenue is based around a small number of clients. According to the Dow Jones, 10 clients account for 91% of the company’s revenue and Facebook alone generated 47% of Fusion-io’s revenue in the past nine months.
Here’s a tiny tidbit of news for all you Apple aficionados out there: the Cupertino company waited until the day its developer conference kicked off (June 6) to register a bunch of product-related domains.
I’m sure they cost Apple a heck of a lot less than the $4.5 million purchase of icloud.com.
The HP Touchpad, the great Palm hope of tablet lovers everywhere, will be officially available for $500 for 16GB and $600 for 32GB on July 1 in the United States. It will be available in the UK, France, and Germany “a few days later” and Canada in mid-July. The rest of the world will see it trickle out over the summer.
We’ve been waiting for the Touchpad since February and, in a few short months, it has appeared to be ready for launch a few times until June looked like the target date. Sadly, it was not to be and July is the final delivery date.
Check out our hands-on here and read the PR after the jump.
Short Version: After a few day with the new Nook I was hooked. It is a pure reading experience condensed into a device the size of a paperback and with a super-crisp e-ink touchscreen. The Nook is, in short, the best ereader from a major player I’ve used thus far and is well ahead of its competitors in terms of usability and form factor.
On today’s ever-evolving Web, it seems there’s a growing demand for web apps that incorporate realtime functionality. Of course, it’s by no means easy to build seamless realtime functionality, as it often requires site developers to learn a whole new framework, or worry over the configuration of existing infrastructure.
To address this problem, Pusher has built a hosted service that helps developers create web apps featuring real-time collaboration in a jiffy, all through a cloud-based API. From a free sandox account, Pusher allows developers to bring the added benefits of realtime technology to existing apps, across various languages and platforms, to small sites for free. And so far, so good. Pusher opened its beta in March 2010 and has delivered approximately 9 billion messages to date. Over 4K developers have signed up to the service, including those from Groupon, Slideshare, Togetherville, and more.
Above, you can see a screenshot of Word2, a massively multiplayer word game in which tiles placed by users are reflected in realtime for other players viewing that area of the board, thanks to Pusher’s realtime technology. To check out some awesome examples of how various developers and websites are incorporating Pusher’s realtime functionality, click here.
When WebSockets were announced as part of the HTML5 specification in 2009, Pusher believed the new technology would be an important part of the evolution of Web browsers and servers. Judging by investor interest from the likes of Orion Henry, James Lindenbaum, and Adam Wiggins (otherwise known as the founders of Heroku, the cloud app deployment and scaling platform that sold to Salesforce.com in 2010) as well as a full set of other VCs and angels, it seems that the Pusher team is not alone.
Led by co-founders Max Williams and Damien Tanner, Pusher announced today that it has raised $1 million in seed funding, led by London-based early stage venture firm, Passion Capital. Other investors include the Heroku founders, San Francisco-based angel Bill Lee (who has invested in Remarq, Tesla, and more), New York-based MI Ventures, and Greg Marsh (founder of One Fine Stay and formerly of Index Ventures).
Pusher will use its new capital to expand the features of its realtime platform and drive adoption of realtime features on the web. As to potential future internal revenue models? The startup plans to offer paid-plans beginning in mid-June.
“Pusher is built for a generation of developers who will spend their time making awesome apps rather than configuring infrastructure", said Adam Wiggins, Heroku co-founder and Pusher investor.
Back in May 2010, VideoGenielaunched at our Disrupt conference as a platform for consumers to connect with their favorite brands through user-generated testimonial videos. A couple of months later, VideoGenie reported back to us with an excellent progress status update.
Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised a $2 million Series A round of venture financing led by Blumberg Capital, with previous investors, including Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors, also participating in the fresh round.
The company informs us that they intend to use the proceeds of the financing round to expand the VideoGenie solution set, as well as grow the team.
VideoGenie basically enables brands and organizations to engage and capture the passions of their fans through customer-generated videos via a platform that requires no training or special experience to implement.
Brands can use the platform to gather, manage, publish and analyze videos recorded by their fans, incorporating the authentic video content they collect into a broad range of marketing and customer engagement initiatives.
Below, you can find a screenshot of an implementation by Shoedazzle.
VideoGenie has been selected by some of the world's biggest brands and organizations, including Levi's, Intuit, Sony Music and the U.S. Department of State, to power video-based testimonials, reviews and corporate communications.
The business broke even within 8 months after its launch at Disrupt, the company says, without spending a dime on marketing and without a dedicated sales team in place. The startup says it has since relied on operating income to fuel product development and new customer acquisition.
While Square is believed to be raising $50 million or more, say sources, at a valuation of $1 billion plus, and processing more than $3 million per day in mobile payments, others are noticing their traction. In China.
To that end iBOXpay is advertising its development of a “free mobile payment platform”, although it doesn’t appear to be on sale yet.
Shell spinoff Avantium raised another EUR 30 million, or about $43.9 million (USD) the company reported Thursday. Avantium produces “chemical building blocks” that industrial plastics, textile and fuel makers need to churn out green products that are as affordable and work as well as petroleum-based equivalents.
Avantium uses a catalytic process to convert carbohydrates into furanics, which are bio-materials that can be made from sugar or non-food sources.
The company plans to use its new funds, in part, to create a 100 percent plant-based, 100 percent recyclable polyester. It also aims to complete and begin operating a production plant in Geleen, the Netherlands. The plant was expected to be up and running already, according to earlier reports by Green Car Congress.
The EUR 30 million included EUR 25 million in financing from: Sofinnova Partners, Aster Capital and De Hoge Dennen as well as existing investors Aescap Venture, Capricorn Cleantech Fund, ING Corporate Investments and Navitas Capital. The company also obtained a subsidy and innovation credit of EUR 5 million from the Dutch Ministry of Economy, Agriculture and Innovation. Part of the overall round was used to buy out shares held by DFJ Esprit, AlpInvest, Eastman, EDBI and Pfizer.
Anil Hansjee, long time Head of Corporate Development at Google EMEA has left, effective today. This is quite a big change in the European startup eco-system, as Hansjee was effectively the guy who startups and VCs in Europe went to to sell their companies to Google. We’ve reached out to Google to check whether he will be replaced.
In an email to colleagues – which TechCrunch Europe has seen -Hansjee said:
“I most definitely won’t find anything like this job in any other corporate development role (and I mean ANY) so I’m not even going to try. Instead for now, I’m going to take some time and do some advisory work (and maybe raise a different kind of fund – but more on that later!)”
I rang him up to quiz him on this, and it turns out his plans to raise a fund to back early stage startups are more than a “maybe”.
Thursday marked World Oceans Day, a United Nations effort to “raise global awareness of the challenges faced by the international community in connection with the oceans.”
Getting in the spirit, Google Earth and about a dozen research labs paired their data, talents and technology to create high res maps of seafloor terrain. Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory led the charge contributing its Global Multi-Resolution Topography (GMRT) Synthesis and some 20 years worth of data from 500 ship cruises.
The interactive topo maps they created portray an underwater area bigger than North America. Such visualizations help scientists understand natural and man-made disasters including: tsunami events and runups, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, changes in coastal and deep-ocean sea levels, storm surges and contaminant dispersal, according to the website of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a research participant in this project.
A post on The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory website explained, from what’s already mapped:
“…Scientists have learned much. For instance, researchers can see details of earthquake faults and underwater landslides. Shifts in the seafloor can trigger tsunamis, as shown by this year's disaster in Japan, and the 2004 wave that swept Sumatra. The sharper imagery helps scientists assess the risk in various regions, including along the U.S.-Canada west coast. The maps also bring erupting mid-ocean ridges into sharper focus and help scientists understand volcanic eruptions on earth, the vast majority of which occur hidden far from view on the ocean floor.”
Other research entities that contributed to the World Oceans Day 2011 seafloor mapping effort with Google Earth include: the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of Hawaii, University of New Hampshire, University of Washington, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel and the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy.
Even though this group just collectively doubled what had been mapped before, Google estimates that only 5 percent of the world’s ocean floors have been mapped to date. So. There’s far more eye candy to be had! [hat tip: Julia Whitty at Motherjones].
Check out the Google Lat Long blog explaining the project further, or take a video tour of a few of the underwater volcanoes, ridges and mountain ranges as far as 26,000 feet below the surface of the sea.
Room 77, which officially launched in public beta in February, has collected and indexed data on more than 500,000 hotel rooms in 2,500 properties and also crowdsources reviews and ratings from travelers.
The site provides travelers with specific details about each hotel room at a property, including the room category, square footage, bed type, elevator proximity and if it is a connecting room. For each room, Room 77 also generates a virtual Room View, simulating the actual view from that room's window using Google Earth-enabled technology.
The best rooms for each traveler are automatically ranked using Room 77's proprietary Room Rank algorithm that adjusts to each individual's preferences for high or low floor, distance from elevator, view importance and need for connecting rooms. Each room is then scored with a color-coded match percentage indicating: "strong match" (green), "fair match" (yellow) and "weak match" (red). Room 77 also gives travelers insider tips on how to request desirable room(s) directly from the hotel and increase the probability of securing one.
For now the company is focusing on indexing every hotel room at every three- to five-star hotel and resort worldwide, which the company estimates to total approximately 25,000 properties. Currently, the startup has property and room data in 24 markets but hopes to use the funding for further international expansion. Room 77 will also use the investment to expand its core search platform to offer more ways to help travelers shop and book hotels online and via mobile devices.
Room 77 seems like it could provide a useful service as long as it collects the right intelligence on hotels. That’s why the startup has been partnering with hotel groups to provider accurate information. Obtaining this information may give it a leg up in terms of competition from user reviews giant TripAdvisor.
Social advertising is the next hot thing, and startups are starting to come out of the woodworks with different approaches. One to watch is Taykey, a startup we first wrote about a year ago, but which is which is launching today with a fresh $9 million B round from Crescent Point, Sequoia, and Softbank Capital. It previously raised $2 million in June, 2010 from Sequoia Israel.
Taykey tries to determine what topics are trending among different audience groups and then targets them with Facebook ads, promoted trends on Twitter, or search ads. "We think advertising is broken," says CEO Amit Avner, because it is "based on demographics."
The company tries to figure out what people are interested in based on signals from socialmedia and then respond with ads in realtime. Instead of targeting five million 18 year-olds, Taykey tries to reach people who are into hiphop. "Basically we are doing audience discovery based on trends," says Avner. "We figure out what is trending for who."
If you know what 18 year-olds who like hiphop are talking about, you can target ads around those topics and search terms. If Paula Abdul is trending on Twitter, Pepsi might want to buy Paula Abdul keywords on Google or Facebook ads targeted at a specific audience with related interests. As we enter summer, for instance, women are talking on social media channels about “friends,” “family,” “fun,” and “sleep.” Whereas men are talking about “twitter,” “beer,” “obama.”, and “itunes” (these are actual top trending topics discovered by Taykey).
Taykey tracks public data from 150 different social media services, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and Digg. The data is all anonymous and aggregated, and advertisers pay Tapkey on a cost per action basis. Depending on their goals, that could range from a cost per like to a redemption of an offer.
Visa this morning announced that it has agreed to acquire Fundamo, a specialist mobile financial services provider to network operators and financial institutions in developing economies, for $110 million in cash.
In a separate announced, the giant payments technology company said it has entered into a new, long-term commercial agreement with Monitise, a provider of mobile money solutions for financial institutions in more developed regions.
Here’s how the duo of agreements was pitched:
The combination of acquiring Fundamo and expanding the relationship with Monitise will enable Visa to deliver best-in-class mobile financial services and payments capabilities to consumers across the full spectrum of uses, geographies and mobile environments from basic services on simple handsets to more advanced services for smart phone owners.
Fundamo's platform enables the delivery of mobile financial services to unbanked and under-banked consumers around the world, including person-to-person payments, airtime top-up, bill payment and branchless banking services.
The combined Visa Fundamo platform will add enhanced functionality and new services to existing mobile financial services subscribers for globally accepted payments solutions. Privately held, Cape Town, South Africa-based Fundamo has more than 50 active mobile financial services deployments across more than 40 countries, including 27 countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.
Fundamo's deployments currently have a base of more than five million registered subscribers and the potential to reach more than 180 million consumers with mobile financial services.
Hannes van Rensburg and the Fundamo management team will continue to manage current and future Fundamo implementations as members of Visa's mobile product organization.
Monitise and Visa says they will launch a mobile banking solution in the U.S. for clients of Visa DPS, the company's debit and prepaid processing platform.
Former Time Warner CEO Jerry Levin is dipping his toes in the startup world. He thinks there should be more healthcare entrepreneurs, and so he is becoming the chairman of Startup Health, a project aimed at fostering a better community for health startups by helping them raise capital, offering longterm mentorship, and bringing other resources to bear. Startup Health is a partnership between OrganizedWisdom (a startup where Levin is also the chairman) and the U.S. Department of Health And Human Services, which is opening up government data to entrepreneurs and developers.
Startup Health is also partnering with Startup America, Steve Case’s new organization. It will be just like old times. Startup Health and Startup America will organize some roundtables together, but Startup Health is a private effort through and through. “When you look around,” Levin tells me, “all the entrepreneurial talent is going into certain sectors like the retail space. There is not a lot going towards health and wellness.”
The impetus behind the project is the lack of significant activity in the health and wellness sectors by startups. He wants to change that and “energize entrepreneurial talent” in the sector. “The disruptive locomotive of the net, which has disassembled every media business we know of, hasn't taken over health or wellness.” But now with open APIs to government data and the importance of mobile phones, all that is set to change. At least, that’s what Levin thinks. I hope he’s right this time. ,
Sapato.ru, a Russian online shoe retailer, this morning announced that it has secured $12 million in additional capital from Intel Capital, with existing investors Direct Group, eVenture Capital Partners and Kinnevik participating. The round brings Sapato.ru's total of funding to approximately $20 million. The investments will be used for expanding the assortment range, marketing and to improve customer service through enhancement of the startup's CRM platform.
In a message posted on its corporate blog earlier this morning, blogging software maker Six Apart essentially admitted that security holes in its Movable Type product(s) are to be blamed for the recent, prominent hacking and defacement of the PBS.org website, which occurred at the end of last month.
Hackers aligned with WikiLeaks at the end of May managed to break into and deface the US broadcaster’s website after it had aired a controversial documentary called WikiSecrets about the whistle-blowing site.
LulzSec, the hacker group that claimed responsibility for the action (and the same group that has been harassing Fox, Sony and Nintendo lately), in a recent interview with Forbes said that the attack was made possible thanks to PBS’s “outdated” content management system.
The hackers had managed to publish a fake report on the PBS website, claiming that legendary rapper Tupac was alive and well living in New Zealand (screenshot below).
The content management system used by PBS was, in fact, Six Apart’s Movable Type software, as had been pointed out by some over the past week.
Today, the company issued the first Movable Type update since the PBS hacking case. Mandatory security updates for Movable Type 4.3, 5.0, and 5.1 were released this morning.
The company says the impact of the vulnerabilities in its products did in fact allow hackers to “create, read or modify the contents in the system under certain circumstances”.
AMD sometimes makes strategic investments in companies that make use of its Fusion Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) products. ViVu is said to be working on a new generation of enterprise-class video conferencing applications that leverage AMD Fusion APUs.
Among other projects, AMD and ViVu are collaborating on the latter’s VuRoom videoconferencing solution and a prototype wireless display technology, which will enable real-time streaming of a 1080p HD video wirelessly from an AMD-powered notebook PC to one or more network-connected display devices, such as flat panel TVs, tablets or notebooks without requiring any additional hardware.
ViVu has previously raised funding; it completed a $3 million Series A round back in October 2009, from investors like Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Quest Venture Partners.
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Shell spinoff Avantium raised another EUR 30 million, or about $43.9 million (USD) the company reported Thursday. Avantium produces “chemical building blocks” that industrial plastics, textile and fuel makers need to churn out green products that are as affordable and work as well as petroleum-based equivalents. 
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