The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Revel Touch Raises $10M To Help Retailers Create Sleek Mobile Commerce Apps
- Crisp Media Group Takes A Closer Look At The TC Atlanta Meetup [Video]
- Twice Raises $4M From IA, SV Angel And CrunchFund For Its Concierge-Style Secondhand Clothing Marketplace
- Facebook Ad Startup Nanigans Grabs Ex-Yahoo Exec Marc Grabowski As Its New COO
- Vicarious Raises $15M Led By Dustin Moskovitz’s Good Ventures To Build Software That ‘Learns Like A Human’
- Photo Sharing Comes To Skype’s iOS Apps Along With Performance Improvements
- GGV Capital Closes New $625M Fund To Focus On China, U.S. Expansion Stage Investments
- Urban Cargo Delivers ‘A Box Of Handsome’ To Your Doorstep Every Month
- Is This Apple’s Next iPhone? Yeah, Sure, Why Not
- Amazon Prime Instant Video Beefs Up Sports And Documentary Content, Adds ESPN’s 30 For 30 Film Series
- Content, Commerce, And Cars: High Gear Media Launches A Site To Buy New And Used Vehicles
- Personalize Your Jambox Starting August 28, Jawbone Insiders and Klout Users To Get One Week Head Start
- B&N Reports Nook Revenues Are Flat On The Year, Expects To Close $300M Partnership With Microsoft This Fall
- Best Buy Posts Fiscal Q2 2013 Results, Misses Expectations: $10.55B In Revenues, EPS Of $.20
- Kony Solutions Buys Aussie Sky Technologies As Mobile Enterprise Consolidates
- Discovery Bay Games Raises $15M Series B From Trilogy Equity, Logitech, Others For iOS “Appcessories”
- Fashion Orders Startup Miinto Secures $6M Series A Round From Dawn Capital
- With 54M Users, Video Chat Startup ooVoo Adds 4-Way Conferencing To Its iPad And Android Apps
- YouTube Branded Channels Get A Boost In Interactivity — wireWAX’s Taggable Videos Given Green Light
- Gourmet Ranch’s Playdemic Raises $4M Led By IBM’s Watson Family For Cross-Platform Social Gaming
| Revel Touch Raises $10M To Help Retailers Create Sleek Mobile Commerce Apps Posted: 21 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT  Revel Touch, a company that helps retailers, publishers, and brands create sleek shopping experiences on mobile platforms, has raised $10 million in funding led by Foundation Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Founded by Mar Hershenson, Revel Touch offers what they call a “merchandising cloud” platform to retailers and publishers. Basically, this software integrates with brands’ existing ecommerce systems to make the process of creating shopping experiences on mobile apps easy to deploy, update and customize. Revel uses a brand’s existing assets, photography and social content for app design, allows retailers to customize the app, and also offers data gathering and intelligence to add a personalized experience for consumers. And integration with existing ecommerce systems ensures that shoppers can always browse, search and purchase in-stock items. And Revel says that its app offer a touch-optimized shopping experience for the tablet, whether as Apps or HTML5 browser experiences, and for smartphones. Brands ranging from Anthropologie to Conde Nast's Lucky Magazine to Design Within Reach have used Revel to extend online shopping to mobile platforms.
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| Crisp Media Group Takes A Closer Look At The TC Atlanta Meetup [Video] Posted: 21 Aug 2012 08:45 AM PDT  Looking back on the Southeast Mini Meetup trip, I can’t help but remember Atlanta as the shining star of our week-long (five city) tour. We met southern belles, ate a lot of pork, and essentially experienced a hurricane-style lightning storm, but try as we might to recap the event for you, we simply can’t top this video created by Crisp. Crisp Media Group is an Atlanta-based video production company that specializes in promotional or testimonial videos for big brands like Coca-Cola and W Hotels. They were awesome enough to put together a little video for us (bonus points for using our water mark, you PR geniuses), and we couldn’t resist passing it along. The video is excellent, no doubt about that. But perhaps the more informative part of the story is garnering coverage using the company’s internal resources and strengths. It worked for Crisp, and it worked for ShoutOut Radio. They approached their marketing creatively — let’s face it, sometimes it’s not just about what you do, but about the attitude with which you do it. And that trickles all the way down to the user base, who get a taste of the company’s personality, not just the product.
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 08:27 AM PDT  The secondhand clothing space is heating up: Between Poshmark, 99Dresses and Threadflip, we’ve covered more than a handful of startups that want to hook users up with clothing that other people no longer want to keep. The “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” principle is currently being applied fervently in online women’s fashion. The latest contender in the space Twice has just raised $4 million from a formidable coterie of investors, including IA Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Lerer Ventures SV Angel, CrunchFund*, High Line Venture Partners, Buddy Media CEO Mike Lazerow, Trialpay CEO Alex Rampell, Former Twitter VP Elad Gil, Milo CEO Jack Abraham, Former Tumblr president John Maloney and Former Etsy CEO Maria Thomas. The company differentiates itself from closest competitor Threadflip by being 100% focused on its concierge-style market place. On Threadflip, concierge-style shopping is sort of an afterthought to its main peer to peer business, whereas it’s the whole deal with Twice. Twice sellers can send in their clothing to the startup (which pays for shipping) and get a check a week later. The items are evaluated by professional buyer, professionally photographed and then unleashed onto the Twice marketplace, which currently has an inventory of 8500 items versus Threadflip’s 200-300 “White Glove” itens Buyers can browse the marketplace by item category, and Twice lets them order with free same day shipping for anything over $49 (shipping is five dollars otherwise). Returns within 30 days are free, which is a pretty crucial feature for eCommerce companies wanting to compete with offline retail, and was pretty much the game changer as far as Zappos was concerned. Ex-Googlers Noah Ready-Campbell and Calvin Young decided to disrupt the secondhand clothing market after having childhood experiences where new clothes were too expensive for their families to buy. They hired a Director of Buying from brick and mortar secondhand clothing store Crossroads to round out their engineering backgrounds. “The average family throws away over 175 pounds of clothing every year — for many people, there's simply no convenient alternative,” Ready-Campbell tells me, “Some people turn to eBay, but it takes 20-30 minutes to list a single garment — in addition to the time spent fielding questions and shipping items out. Most people don't have the kind of time needed to sell efficiently on a peer-to-peer marketplace. Just like how Airbnb and Getaround have zeroed in on small pieces of Craigslist, our goal is to take a small piece of what eBay does, and do it much, much better.” The company monetizes by buying clothing at 1/3 of its anticipated selling price, and taking a cut of that margin after all ancillary costs like shipping are paid off. This model has resulted in a $1 million in revenue run-rate and much investor demand for this round, we’re hearing. The company plans on using the new financing to bulk up on hiring and to expand its product to handbags, shoes, children’s and men’s apparel eventually. “[But] we have our hands pretty full with women’s for now,” Ready-Campbell admits. *Disclosure: CrunchFund was started by TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, sometimes works out of the TC office in SF and is generally pretty chill.
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| Facebook Ad Startup Nanigans Grabs Ex-Yahoo Exec Marc Grabowski As Its New COO Posted: 21 Aug 2012 08:23 AM PDT  Yahoo has been losing a lot of steam to Facebook in the advertising game, and now it’s lost one of its execs to it, too. Nanigans, the Facebook advertising company, is today announcing the appointment of a new COO, Marc Grabowski, a nine-year veteran of Yahoo and one of the first to depart after Marissa Mayer took over the CEO job. The move is an interesting one, given that Yahoo has put a lot of emphasis on the display element of its advertising business, while Nanigans is more of an ad tech company, working in the still-emerging area of social media performance advertising, analysing and optimizing data about usage and viewers to drive installs, registrations, purchases and other engagement metrics. Nanigans says current traffic its ads are around 2 billion Facebook Ad impressions daily. This appointment could be a sign of Nanigans going for more traditional formats — or Grabowski finally getting to flex some more tech/product muscle. Nanigans would argue both, perhaps: “The depth of the company's technology and intellectual property coupled with social being at the crux of the next frontier of online advertising are just two of the reasons why I'm excited to join this team,” said Grabowski in a statement. “Marc understands all facets of online advertising, from sophisticated optimization techniques to the strategic opportunity that social advertising presents to businesses,” said Ric Calvillo, co-founder and CEO of Nanigans, in a statement. “We're excited to have an online media veteran like Marc join our team during this time of high growth.” The appointment, Nanigans says, comes as the company is in expansion mode, building up its sales, marketing, business development and operations teams. And just because Grabowski’s most recent position at Yahoo was VP of media sales, where he oversaw $1 billion of annualized revenue, that doesn’t mean that he was outside of looking at how to leverage technology to improve ad performance. In his time with the company, Grabowski had been one of the execs “driving the Interclick acquisition,” as well as leading on its recently-launched big-data platform called Genome. He also played a part in mid-market sales (a potentially big area for advertising on Facebook) and in Yahoo’s reseller relationships. Most recently at Yahoo! he was responsible for a team of over two-hundred online advertising sales and account management professionals.
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 07:59 AM PDT  Vicarious, a startup that says it’s “building software that thinks and learns like a human,” has just raised a $15 million Series A. The round was led by Good Ventures, the investment firm founded by Dustin Moskovitz, who also co-founded Facebook and Asana. (The firm’s profits will be donated to the Good Ventures Foundation.) Founders Fund, Open Field Capital, Steve Brown, and Zarco Investment Group participated too. Vicarious launched in February 2011 with funding from Founders Fund, Moskovitz, Adam D’Angelo (former Facebook CTO and co-founder of Quora), Felicis Ventures, and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale. Since then, co-founder D. Scott Phoenix tells me that the company has been in research mode. The research has resulted in a system that’s supposed to interpret the content of photos and videos in a way that’s similar to humans, and which is powered by the company’s “key innovation”, the Recursive Cortical Network. Ultimately, Phoenix says the technology could be used in “almost every industry,” including robotics, medical image analysis, and image and video search,. But that’s a ways off — Phoenix and his co-founder Dileep George say they’re still deep in research and development, and that the funding will be used to expand those R&D efforts. Developing products that commercialize the technology is still several years off, George says. “Based on our experiments in the last year, we are very optimistic about our rate of progress,” he says. “At the same time, this is a very challenging problem. We are not getting too excited about how productize things. We’re testing everything very carefully.” You don’t see too many venture-backed software companies spending years on research nowadays, and Phoenix says he was lucky to find investors who share his big vision — to use AI to “help humanity thrive.” The investors at Good Ventures and Founders Fund have a “natural affinity” for that kind of talk (Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel, for example, has been pretty vocal about what he sees as a lack of transformative innovation), but Phoenix says it’s “very different from the language that a lot of other investors speak.”
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| Photo Sharing Comes To Skype’s iOS Apps Along With Performance Improvements Posted: 21 Aug 2012 07:03 AM PDT  Amidst performance improvements to the latest update to Skype’s iOS apps, photo sharing – the most requested feature – has also been enabled. Images of any size taken with your iPad or iPhone (or any image from your photo library, I imagine) can be transferred via the Skype app. According to the company blog, further enhancements have been made to ensure the app’s stability for use in the background in regards to Skype calls and IMs. It’s also less battery hungry and will apparently fire up and load contact lists even quicker than before. The update is available now for the iPhone 3G/3GS/4/4S, all three iPad models, as well as 2nd generation and newer iPod touches.
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| GGV Capital Closes New $625M Fund To Focus On China, U.S. Expansion Stage Investments Posted: 21 Aug 2012 07:02 AM PDT  GGV — backers of tech giants like Alibaba, Buddy Media, Pandora, Square and Tudou — is gearing up for another big rush of investment activity: today the firm is announcing the closing of a significant new fund, its fourth, totaling $625 million, which it will use for expansion-stage investments in tech companies in both the U.S. and China. There were hints of this fund coming a few days ago, when GGV filed SEC Form D documents raising $508.9 million and $10.8 million. Those are the U.S dollar amounts; an additional sum of 650 million in Chinese yuan takes the total fund up to $625 million. As with previous funds, GGV plans to keep its investments in the expansion stage, with rounds in the rage of $5 million to $25 million, covering a range of tech companies. It plans to split investments equally between China and the U.S. The last fund raised by GGV was for $610 million in 2007. The firm's general partners that are part Fund IV are Jixun Foo, Jenny Lee, Hany Nada, Thomas Ng, Jeff Richards, Glenn Solomon and Fumin Zhuo. Additional partners in the Chinese yuan part of the fund include Jessie Jin and Bruce Yu. Recent investments the firm has made have been in the areas of consumer internet services like parent-focused home delivery startup Citrus Lane and cloud music service SoundCloud; but also a number of enterprise and B2B services that include cloud consultancy Appirio and Band Page, which helps musicians create and manage Facebook fan pages. Since 2010, 13 GGV portfolio companies have completed IPOs since 2010, the company says, with several others making exits as acquisitions by larger tech companies. These have included Buddy Media (Salesforce), Endeca (Oracle), hiSoft (VanceInfo), Qunar (Baidu), and SuccessFactors (SAP). More to come.
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| Urban Cargo Delivers ‘A Box Of Handsome’ To Your Doorstep Every Month Posted: 21 Aug 2012 06:58 AM PDT  Maintaining the delicate balance of your facial stubble, perfectly coiffed ‘do, and clear-as-day skin can be cumbersome. And that’s assuming that you’re already a relatively attractive dude. But there’s a new startup in town, backed by DreamIt Ventures, that wants to help you in your daily drive toward sexual relations. Urban Cargo, a subscription service that delivers “a box of handsome” to your door once every month, knows that personal grooming and maintenance is the first place to start. These boxes include three or four products each to help you with your various grooming activities, such as shaving, skin care, hair care, etc. The team was nice enough to send me a box, which was quickly thereafter raided by my male counterparts, filled with the following products:
As you can see from those prices, Urban Cargo certainly isn’t sending you crap. These are nice products, which my colleagues have confirmed, and they offer you a few different solutions to choose from in your morning routine. The idea is that each month covers a different part of your getting-ready process, so you may get hair products one month and shower scrubs the next. Urban Cargo also lets you take a little survey at the beginning telling them about your hair, facial hair, regular grooming habits, and preferences. They even ask you about your birthday — I can only assume this means you’ll get a little something special that month. What’s perhaps most amazing about the service is that your monthly costs are $14.95. That’s less than any one of the products in the box, so the value is certainly there. Check out the Urban Cargo website here. Click to view slideshow.
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| Is This Apple’s Next iPhone? Yeah, Sure, Why Not Posted: 21 Aug 2012 06:28 AM PDT  For the past few weeks Apple parts have been leaking left and right. Today, about three weeks before we expect the new iPhone to launch, iResq has rebuilt the new iPhone from spare parts, showing the new connector (a micro USB-sized port that I predicted a month ago) and a slightly longer screen. The glut of photos of this new model point to a few things, most importantly Apple’s new role in the supplier ecosystem. Remember two years ago when Apple security and local police literally busted down Jason Chen’s door and stole his computers at Apple’s behest? That was when Steve Jobs was still at the helm and security apparently mattered to the organization. Instead of protecting against leakers, Apple is now shrugging its shoulders at them. “Our weekly iPhone sales continue to be impacted by rumors and speculation regarding new products,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple CFO. Two years ago Apple had the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office as their private army. Now they’re all “Shit happens.” I’m far less interested in an iPhone rebuilt from scrap parts than asking how these scrap parts leaked in the first place. To be honest, I preferred an Apple that was trying to change the CE manufacturing industry by forcing accountability, control, and secrecy. Manufacturers love leaking information in an effort to pump and dump their stock. Earlier, a post in Digitimes simply hinting at an Apple partnership would usually do the trick. Now, with a new, kinder Tim Cook at the helm, it’s clear that manufacturers are far less afraid of Cupertino. I’m upset by this for one reason: a manufacturing environment without Apple will be far less regulated and far more damaging environmentally and in terms of human capital. Mike Daisey and his magical, iPad stroking crippled men aside, Apple has done more to change the face of Asian manufacturing than any hardware company. The constant refrain of “Cheaper, faster, less regulation” was completely upset by Apple’s power and the subsequent criticism that their role in the industry forced them to accept. Apple, by dint of being the largest and most lucrative customer for many of these factories, forced the factories to change. When Greenpeace and This American Life are against you (and I still think Apple knowingly ignored human rights issues until they didn’t), you try to change things as quickly as possible. These leaks show that this fear (and perhaps respect) has diminished considerably. Hardware suppliers don’t care, repair shops don’t care, and soon Foxconn won’t care. An Apple without teeth isn’t much better than an Apple that seizes journalists’ laptops on a whim. I do have a theory (and it’s far-fetched) as to why these leaks are happening: Apple needs to telegraph the changes they are planning to the dock and, as a result, are forced to release more test hardware than usual. This hardware is falling into the wrong hands. That we haven’t seen an actual working new iPhone in the wild is a testament to the respect Apple does have in the industry (as well as a testament to their tendency to literally chain iPhone prototypes to desks at partner design shops). If this is the case, it still doesn’t excuse Apple’s inability to keep a lid on things. Apple is strong and scary – or at least it used to be. These leaks are fun on one level but on another level they show a degree of carelessness that Jobs would never allow. Love them or hate them, Apple changed manufacturing for the better. If they lose that fear, the dark days may still return.
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 06:21 AM PDT  Amazon continues to ramp up the content in its Amazon Prime film catalog to draw users to the premium service, with the latest licensing acquisition expanding its back catalog of sports and documentary content. From today, users of Amazon Prime Instant Video, its on-demand streamed film service, can watch instalments of ESPN’s 30 for 30 popular series of sports documentaries including The U, Pony Excess and Winning Time, and Ice Cube’s Straight Outta L.A. The ESPN content brings the total number of movies and TV episodes up to 22,000, all of which can be watched on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, the Roku player, iPad tablets, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. It also brings Amazon Prime up to speed with arch competitor Netflix, which added a deal with ESPN to stream 30 for 30 films earlier this month. The move is a mark of the service maturing with more emphasis on the long tail of content on the service, away from blockbusters. ”We're continuing to grow our Prime Instant Video library to provide our Amazon Prime Members with all the content they want – from feature films, to hit TV episodes to documentaries, and everything in between,” Brad Beale, director of digital video content acquisition for Amazon, said in a statement. Other recent additions to Prime Instant Video have included TV shows from Warner Bros. and films and TV from MGM, and Paramount. In all there are some 120,000 films and TV episodes on Amazon’s Instant Video service, which includes new release movies and day after TV shows, for customers to rent or purchase, download or stream. Amazon Prime membership is Amazon’s upsell for loyal users, giving them users an unlimited amount of streaming for a flat fee — in the U.S. costing $79 per year, with free two day shipping on various items, as well as instant streaming of films and TV shows. H/T Brett Stubbs
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| Content, Commerce, And Cars: High Gear Media Launches A Site To Buy New And Used Vehicles Posted: 21 Aug 2012 06:21 AM PDT  Executives from automotive startup High Gear Media have talked to us before about turning the bleak economics of online media into a scalable business model. Later this week the company is unveiling a key part of its plans — a listings section on its flagship car review site TheCarConnection.com where you can now search for new and used vehicles for sale, and contact their sellers. Vice President of Product Management Jeff Birkeland describes this as part of the wave of companies trying to combine content and commerce (he points to other examples including Zillow and, on the startup side, Condiment). That combination should give High Gear an advantage over the many other car listing sites out there:
In addition, he says that the way High Gear is listing the cars is unique, making it easy to browse and compare a bunch of car listings at once. For example, if you’re looking at a listing for a Toyota Camry, the site will show you how the price and mileage compare to similar cars in your area. As for the listings themselves, they’re drawn from a variety of partner sites, for a supposed total of more than 3 million listings. The listings will also be available via on TheCarConnection’s mobile website, Birkeland says. That’s particularly important because the mobile web now accounts for 30 percent of the company’s traffic, up 500 percent from last year. (High Gear claims to have 5 million monthly readers total.) And unlike most ad-driven sites that are looking at the growth of mobile with concern, Birkeland says High Gear sees it as a big opportunity, because of integrations like this. “We have found users are VERY focused and interested in transaction related activities when they are integrated with our content on mobile devices,” he says.
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Everyone’s favorite portable speaker is getting a facelift later this month. Beginning August 28, Jawbone will let you customize the grill and caps to its popular JAMBOX on Jawbone.com. You can mix and match between 13 grill and 9 cap colors for over 100 color combinations. (Maybe I’ll order a white and orange one in honor of CrunchGear! Or whatever colors those are on CrunchBase.) Your designs can be previewed on the site or shared to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest for others to see. A week prior to launch, Jawbone insiders and Klout users will have an inside track from August 21 to the 27th to customize and order before the rest of the heathens. Pricing remains the same at $199.99. Jawbone says the Big Jambox will not be privy to new colorways like its little brother.
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:56 AM PDT  Barnes & Noble just released its 2013 first quarter financial results. The company’s Nook business continues to hold strong, accounting for 13% of its revenues last quarter. That’s at the same level from last year. Despite what the company’s CEO says below, the Nook business was essentially stagnant last quarter. B&N stated in the financial release that Nook device sales declined over the last quarter, noting lower average selling prices and production scaling issues for the Glowlight model as the chief causes. Nook revenues are flat on the year, with the company reporting $192M versus last year’s Q1 $191M. That said, digital content sales — digital books, digital newsstand and apps — increased 46% during the last quarter. “During the first quarter, we continued to see improvement in both our rapidly growing NOOK business, which saw digital content sales increase 46% during the quarter, and at our bookstores, which continue to benefit from market consolidation and strong sales of the Fifty Shades series,” said William Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of Barnes & Noble. B&N also notes that the company’s strategic partnership with Microsoft should be up and running this fall. The company expects to close the $300M transaction in the coming months, giving Microsoft a 17.6% stake in the NewCo. Under this new deal announced last April, B&N will combine its College and Nook segments with the two companies setting patent litigation in relation to the Android-powered Nook tablets. The B&N Nook digital bookstore will also be bundled with Windows 8.
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| Best Buy Posts Fiscal Q2 2013 Results, Misses Expectations: $10.55B In Revenues, EPS Of $.20 Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:45 AM PDT  Best Buy just released its fiscal Q2 2013 earnings a few moments ago (one day after announcing its new CEO no less), and it looks like the company’s financial woes aren’t over just yet. The beleaguered electronics retailer reported total revenues of $10.55 billion (down roughly 3% from the year-ago quarter) and adjusted operating income of $124 million, which breaks down to non-GAAP earnings of $0.20/share (down 49% year-over-year). That means Best Buy came up just a bit short of analysts’ expectations — they forecasted earnings of $.31/share, and revenues of $10.6 billion in the days leading up to the release. We’re also starting to see the effects of Best Buy’s retail streamlining process here, though it doesn’t yet seem as fruitful as shareholders would hope. The company’s retail footprint has shrunk to 41 million square feet (down 4% from 42.6 million square feet last year), which led to a slight bump in the average revenue per square foot — as the company continues to trim its physical presence and experiment with Apple-inspired layouts, plenty of eyeballs are watching to see if that number will jump in the coming months. The company announced a renewed focus on opening standalone Best Buy Mobile stores a few months back though, and the numbers make it seem like a smart move — same-store mobile phone sales were up 35 percent this quarter. Those looking for earnings guidance from the company will be awfully disappointed, as Best Buy has confirmed that it will no longer do so for the rest of the fiscal year. In its release, the company cited its transition period (Joly is waiting in the wings for his expected debut in September) as one of the reasons for discontinuing the practice, and also noted that the company has revamped its earnings expectations for the rest of the year: “Due to lowered expectations for industry wide sales and the uncertainty associated with several key product launches expected in the second half of fiscal 2013, the company has reduced its annual earnings expectations.” It looks like incoming CEO Hubert Joly has his work cut out for him. I noted the other day that stock prices took a dip after it was announced that he would join the company as chief executive, and that slide continues unabated now that Best Buy has another disappointing quarter on the books — Best Buy’s stock price has dipped over 10% in pre-market trading. This is a developing story, please refresh for updates.
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| Kony Solutions Buys Aussie Sky Technologies As Mobile Enterprise Consolidates Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:16 AM PDT  Some consolidation is afoot in the world of mobile enterprise services. Orlando, Fla.-based Kony Solutions has bought Sky Technologies, a mobility solutions provider specializing in SAP implementations based in Melbourne, Australia. Both companies are private and the financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. The deal is the first acquisition for Kony, which has to date raised $34.1 million, including $15 million this past May, from investors including Insight Venture Partners. The acquisition comes on the heels of increasing attention in the area of mobile enterprise solutions, with activity coming from different directions: just yesterday the device maker HTC invested $35.4 million in Magnet Systems, another provider of mobile enterprise services, as part of its refocus on that part of the market as its investments in consumer services have proven less successful. Sky Technologies has 35 employees and all will come on board as part of the deal. The company will operate as a subsidiary of Kony, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. The deal not only gives Kony more global reach and access to a new part of the software market with the SAP expertise, but it will also effectively double the size of its customer base. Prior to the acquisition, Sky Technologies had over 100 customers Global 2000 companies. While Kony has around 70, they are larger, falling into the Fortune 500 category. Kony has to date been focused on developing mobile enterprise solutions and app management that can work on any device and operating system, as well as HTML5. Its flagship product, KonyOne, is a development environment that allows businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps. Customers include Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial. The merger will also give existing Sky Technologies customers access to services that cover Siebel, Peoplesoft, Microsoft Sharepoint and other non-SAP environments, the company says. If the trend is for converged solutions covering both desktop and mobile, this is where Kony also wants to play: “This move makes Kony Solutions the undisputed mobile and multichannel application platform leader, with a strong roster of customers of all sizes, across multiple industries and regions,” Raj Koneru, CEO of Kony Solutions, said in a statement. “By combining forces with Sky, Kony enables our customers to partner with a single provider for all their mobility and multichannel needs.”
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| Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:11 AM PDT  iOS accessory maker Discovery Bay Games announced today that they’ve closed a $15 million Series B round with Logitech and Trilogy Equity Partners leading the charge. The Seattle-based company originally started as a board game company but transitioned to the iOS “appcessory” gaming market last year with the launch of the first “Duo” product for the iPad in conjunction with Atari. Other investors include Greg Maffei of Aspen Grove Capital, a number of Seattle investors and a “significant” amount of participation from existing investors. “The new funding is primarily for development and launch of a range of “digital + physical” gaming experiences for the iPad and iPhone, and the launch of those experiences under our Duo brand,” Mike Sievert, CEO of Discovery Bay Games, told me. “Moving forward, all iPad app-supported accessories will be branded under the Duo name. The funding is meant to ensure that Discovery Bay Games is positioned to be an early leader in a big new market.” You may recall seeing the Discovery Bay Atari Arcade for iPad the last holiday season but if you didn’t then you must not have read any holiday shopping guides. Point being, the app-enabled gaming accessory market is still relatively young and untapped. The more traditional game companies like Hasbro have also jumped on board with appcessories for popular titles like Monopoly. Other than DBG, the only other arcade-style accessory is one from ThinkGeek. I personally don’t game much on either my iPhone or iPad but many of you do as evidenced by the dominance of games in Apple’s App Store. Games are typically at the top of the charts for both the iPhone and iPad. With that in mind, DBG has struck several partnerships with household gaming companies like Atari and Gameloft to boost credibility and push the market in the direction of app-enabled accessories. According to Flurry, the games category dominates with a 49 percent share amongst the top 10 iOS categories. Just look at how much the market has shifted since 2009 from traditional portable machines like the PSP to smartphones. On top of that, users engage in about 25 minutes worth of gaming, says Flurry. So yeah, people like to game on their mobile devices. Earlier this year, the company released an Dora the Explorer peripheral and the plan is to release three more partner-themed accessories this fall. A new Atari Arcade will be in stores this year to help the iconic games company celebrate its 40th anniversary, Sievert told me. Gameloft plans to release its branded accessory this October but Michael Ehrenberg, senior key account manager at Gameloft, was coy about which titles would work with the system at launch. He says a variety of old and new games will work with DBG accessories. “Accessories made the right way in conjunction with high quality content has the potential to change the way mobile games are experienced by consumers,” Ehrenberg told me. “The Gameloft + DBG partnership enables us to be first to the iOS market with a true console-quality gaming experience on mobile. The partnership developed with DBG is currently focused fully on iOS.” With that being said, don’t expect to be playing all Gameloft games with an accessory. Ehrenberg says they’re mostly focused on delivering “core” games like FPS and sports titles that will only be enhanced with an accessory. Gaming accessories for iOS devices have come and gone but DBG seems to have struck a chord. Maybe it’s the partnerships or the games that work with its accessories. Whatever it is, the mobile accessory market is expected to generate $20 billion in revenue this year and hit $38 billion by 2017. So maybe they’re on to something. Sievert added: ”Our belief is that the consumer device market for games will unfold much the same way the accessories market for audio devices unfolded when the iPod was being popularized, but potentially on a much larger scale. Gaming is way bigger than music. There isn’t a bigger category than gaming in all of entertainment.”
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| Fashion Orders Startup Miinto Secures $6M Series A Round From Dawn Capital Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT  JustEat and businesses like it, such as Delivery Hero, have proved that you can accelerate the adoption of online amongst local restaurants by solving their ordering problems. But it appears the same can be done with other niches. Thus Miinto is doing for 'bricks and mortar' fashion boutiques what the likes of JustEat does for restaurants: it gets them online quickly, cheaply and efficiently. Indeed, there is more than a passing comparison since Miinto’s team and investors are heavily drawn from the Just Eat alumni. That combination has, claims Miinto, led to substantial growth, which has in turn led to the startup securing a $6M Series A investment from Dawn Capital out of London. The cash will be used to accelerate the company through launching in new markets and further investment in its platform. Norman Fiore, Managing Partner at Dawn Capital will join the board. Miinto currently operates in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, USA, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Ireland. It claims to be exceeding €50m in turnover. Morten Larsen CEO of Miinto says the company has over 1,600 fashion buyers with expertise from the boutiques in which they “always have the stock that people want." Miinto was developed by two Danish entrepreneurs, Mike Radoor and Konrad Kierklo. They got initial investment from Carsten Mikkelsen, an angel investor in London who also invested in JustEat, and Jesper Buch, who actually is a co-founder of JustEat. It launched first in spring 2009 in Denmark. Dawn Capital has invested in Wonga.com, Mimecast and previously Virgin Media, Advertising.com, Verisign and Self Trade.
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| With 54M Users, Video Chat Startup ooVoo Adds 4-Way Conferencing To Its iPad And Android Apps Posted: 21 Aug 2012 05:00 AM PDT  Thanks to fast-growing usage of its mobile apps, social video chat startup ooVoo has been growing fast, topping 54 million total users. That’s up pretty significantly from the 46 million users it had just a few months ago, when it rolled out its new iPad app. According to ooVoo President Jay Samit, it’s adding close to 100,000 new users a day. Well now it’s updated its iPad and Android apps to now include high-quality, four-way chat sessions between users. While ooVoo users can host chats with up to 12 total users, the new version of its apps will let viewers see up to four participants at once. In addition to high-quality, four-way video chat, the new apps also include group messaging and push notifications to enable users to keep connected at all times. Users have many ways to connect with each other — in addition to its mobile iOS applications, ooVoo allows users to log in and chat via Facebook and Mac and PC desktop apps. But mobile is clearly the future of the service: About 30 percent of all video traffic comes from mobile devices, and now 50 percent of all new users are mobile users. While four-way video chat, group messaging, and push notifications are available on both Android and iOS devices, the company is making a big bet on Google’s mobile operating system. It’s overcome intense Android fragmentation to enable four-way video chat on nearly 250 devices. The company has also deeply integrated with the native Android address book and created a widget to show online friends, missed calls, and chat sessions on the device’s home screen. It’s also optimized for LTE mobile networks, which are fast but also bursty, according to ooVoo CEO Yuval Baharav.
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| YouTube Branded Channels Get A Boost In Interactivity — wireWAX’s Taggable Videos Given Green Light Posted: 21 Aug 2012 04:53 AM PDT  In what looks like a pretty big win: wireWAX, the taggable video startup, has secured approval for its interactive videos to be placed directly on YouTube brand channels — meaning that its bigger known clients can now fully embrace the company’s technology. Prior to this, YouTube integration was limited to a ‘wrapper’, with the resulting video files only embeddable on third-party sites, thus somewhat limiting their exposure. In a blog post, wireWAX says the partnership came about in part due to pressure placed on the Google-owned video site by some of its own big brand users, including Nike and Neiman Marcus. It makes for a nice narrative, of course, but also underlines the way YouTube, through things like its YouTube Partner Program, has been embraced by brands as a destination site in its own right. Going beyond simple video ‘hotspots’ or annotations, wireWAX’s drag ‘n’ drop tool enables users to add full motion-trackable and clickable links around objects, such as faces, products or just about anything. The applications for such interactivity are almost infinite, but include monetizable uses such as ‘shoppable videos’, as created by the likes of fashion retailer Oki-ni. On that note, wireWAX operates a freemium model, charging for additional premium features, such as customisations, on a ‘pay for what you use’ basis. Despite the helpfulness of YouTube staff, getting fully baked into the platform was a “long and arduous process”, according wireWAX, involving technical compliance, massaging of code and changes to the user experience. I dare say it was worth it in the end, though. In July last year, we reported that wireWAX had secured funding from Passion Capital, the early-stage investment fund managed by leading European angel investors, Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero. No figure was released but our sources placed it in the $500,000 realm.
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| Gourmet Ranch’s Playdemic Raises $4M Led By IBM’s Watson Family For Cross-Platform Social Gaming Posted: 21 Aug 2012 04:49 AM PDT  Playdemic, a UK-based developer of social games, has announced a $4 million round of funding from a group of investors, with $3 million of that from the Watson family — the grandchildren of IBM founder Thomas Watson. The funding, it says, will be used to develop its idea of “second-generation social games” — that is, cross-platform games that will be interoperable between TVs, tablets, smartphones, the web and Facebook –with at least four new games coming this year. This can be taken as a sign that, although the world’s largest social gaming company may have had a knock in the markets after its last disappointing earnings, social gaming is still attracting investor attention, when the developers are bringing something new to the table. As part of the deal, David Watson becomes a non-executive director at Playdemic. As with other social games developers, Playdemic got its start on Facebook with titles like Gourmet Ranch, which currently has 700,000 monthly active users, and Crossword Buddies. However, now the company is pushing hard on the concept of cross-platform entertainment, with some 10 million regular players of its games across PC, web and mobile platforms, it says. This is a key area, because for the most part, games — even social games — are still siloed on different platforms. “Social games present an incredible opportunity for companies like Playdemic who understand that social is more than just one platform or destination,” Playdemic founder Paul Gouge said in a statement. “This funding not only validates where we believe we can take this business, but it gives us the vital resources to accelerate our roadmap and keep growing our community of Playdemic gamers. The future of social games has potential far beyond where we are today." And there is another reason for looking at platforms beyond Facebook: the social network has just become too damn crowded. “While the barriers to entry may have risen when it comes to gaining traction via Facebook, smart companies realise that the potential for social games is only at its very beginning,” noted Watson in a statement. “Paul and the Playdemic team are definitely a company that understands this, and that's why we are investing in them so they can hopefully realise their potential.” Part of the interest in Playdemic may be about it current user numbers and multi-platform social gaming vision, but it is also about backing a successful entrepreneur who already had experience working on different platforms. The company was founded in 2010 by Gouge, who had created the massively multiplayer online game Battlemail, as well as Rockpool, which developed games for mobile licensing titles that had been hits in other formats. Both of these companies were sold to Eidos, where Paul became head of the company’s casual games division until he left to found Playdemic.
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