The latest from TechCrunch
- Zynga Settles Mob Wars Litigation As It Settles In To Playdom Fight
- Social Media Guide to #TC50
- Five Startups Present At Capital Factory's Demo Day In Austin
- SimulScribe Signs Exclusive $17 Million Partnership Agreement With Ditech Networks
| Zynga Settles Mob Wars Litigation As It Settles In To Playdom Fight | Top |
| Social game startup Zynga sure does get into a lot of legal fights. Just as they settle down to business with the Playdom you-stole-our-playbook fight , we’ve confirmed that they settled a different lawsuit – one where they were playing defense. In February 2009 Mob Wars creator David Maestri sued Zynga for copyright infringement. Zynga's game Mafia Wars – a text-based game very similar to Mob Wars – was just too much of a copy of Mob Wars, said Maestri. Maestri himself had only recently cleared up his own rights to the game after a scuffle with his former employer, SGN . The Maestri-Zynga lawsuit has now been settled as well. The rumor was that Maestri was demanding $10 million from Zynga to settle the litigation. Ultimately, says one source, he got a payment in the “high seven figures.” So that implies something like $7 – $9 million. Wonder why the settlement was so high? It’s hard to believe, but Mob Wars was pulling in an estimated $1 million/month at one point from users eager to upgrade their weapons and other stuff. These games seem silly, but real money flows through them from virtual goods. Not a bad payday for Maestri. And it also highlights the fact that none of these companies have a completely clean record when it comes to respecting the intellectual property of competitors. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Social Media Guide to #TC50 | Top |
| With TechCrunch50 less than 24 hours away, and already the reviews and advice to startups are coming hot and heavy . For all of you who want to know how to keep on top of the latest Tweets, posts photos, and news from the conference, just remember one thing: #tc50. That is the hashtag we are encouraging people to use for all TC50-related posts, photos, videos, etc. The more people who use that, the easier it will be for others to find Techcrunch50 related content. You can also use the hashtag #techcrunch50, but that’s a whole eight characters longer. Here are some examples of how you can use these hashtags to connect with fellow attendees and folks on the web. Twitter: #techcrunch50 or #tc50 FriendFeed: #techcrunch50 or #tc50 Flickr: techcrunch50 or tc50 And for those social location fans, we’ve even made a venue for TechCrunch50 on Foursquare. Who will be the mayor? Hope to see you all on Monday morning! Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Five Startups Present At Capital Factory's Demo Day In Austin | Top |
| The startup incubator model pioneered by Y Combinator is quickly spreading across the country, with programs popping up in places well outside the Silicon Valley bubble, including Colorado and South Carolina . Earlier this week Capital Factory , an incubator based out of Austin, held its first demo day where the program’s five startups presented themselves to a number of potential investors and press. The demo day also included a discussion panel with six venture capitalists, who discussed some of the things involves in building a strong startup. We’ve embedded a video of the event below, along with a description of each startup. Cubit Planning — Cubit Planning is a service that allows agencies to automate some of the more tedious and time consuming parts of writing NEPA documents — the documents that summarize how a project will impact the environment as part of the National Environmental Policy Act. The startup says that you can get “cut and paste ready” data for these reports in as little as five minutes. Famigo is a gaming company that focuses on helping bring parents and their kids together. The company will soon be releasing an iPhone version of the game ‘hot potato’, which it plans to launch in the next few weeks. In the long run, the company plans to be a platform that other developers can leverage to help make family-oriented games. For more, you can see a video interview with the company here . Hourville is a marketplace for local service providers, who can offer anything from private tutoring to haircuts and more. The site lets these service professionals create a sharable calendar so potential customers can see when they’re available, and allows customers to book online (service professionals will get Email alerts and phone calls when someone books a timeslot). PetsMD is a new resource for pet-related health information. There are plenty of sites on the web that offer guidance for taking care of your dogs and cats, but these can be inconsistent and poorly organized. PetsMD looks to offer a comprehensive and accurate database of this data, and includes reports that have been approved by the site’s “Veterinary Review Board”. There’s also a Symptom Checker where you enter in the behavior your pet is displaying to see what the problem might be (the site recommends that you still visit a vet if there appears to be something wrong). Sparefoot is a site that lets you rent out any extra storage you might have around your house — be it a shed in the backyard or a room in your house — and also gives more traditional storage facilities another marketplace to present their available space on. The site also features a site that lets users who are looking for storage to browser through the available offerings. Over the course of the last ten weeks, each startup was given “up to $20,000″, along with mentorship, PR support, server usage, and legal help, while the incubator took a 5% stake in each company. Other incubators we’ve seen recently include Y Combinator (demo day coverage here ) , fbFund (coverage here ), and DreamIT Ventures (coverage here ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| SimulScribe Signs Exclusive $17 Million Partnership Agreement With Ditech Networks | Top |
| SimulScribe , the scrappy voicemail transcription company, didn’t get acquired exactly, but it just signed an exclusive partnership agreement with Ditech Networks that could be worth as much as $17 million. The deal is $7 million in cash up front with a $10 million earnout, and gives Ditech the exclusive rights to resell SimulScribe’s speech-to-text transcription services on a wholesale basis to telephone companies and developers. SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff will become the chief strategy officer of Ditech, and his co-founder Mark Dillon will also work there. It is a decent outcome for a startup that raised only $5.7 million and is already profitable on sales of about $4 million, according to SimulScribe CEO James Siminoff. But competition is intense, with Spinvox on the one hand, which has raised an insane $200 million, and Nuance on the other, the speech-recognition behemoth which is nearing $1 billion in sales. SimulScribe offers its own voicemail-to-text service called PhoneTag , which has about 20,000 paying subscribers, and reaches about 80,000 more subscribers through wholesale partnershps with Vonage and British Telecom. The big play is getting those deals with carriers, but with only 7 employees, SimulScribe didn’t have the resources or manpower to go after those deals. Ditech already has equipment sitting in nearly every major carrier’s network. It sells voice processing software that minimizes background noise on calls to the telephone companies. Adding a new service is a software upgrade. Ditech will resell SimulScribe’s service to its existing telephone carrier customers. The companies will also combine their two technologies for more accurate transcriptions. Background noise is one of the biggest contributors to auto-transcription mistakes Simulscribe still supplements its transcriptions with humans, but the more accurate the auto-generated text is, the easier it is to fix. If major telephone companies start adopting voicemail transcription services, it could quickly grow from what looks like it might be a $100 million market this year to a $1 billion million market. A lot of this adoption is being driven by a fear of Google, or more specifically Google Voice. Converting voicemails to emails is one of the great features of Google Voice, but its auto-transcription still needs a lot of work . Google Voice is using a homegrown speech recognition system developed for the GOOG-411 free directory information service (which is why it is not so great for conversational speech). But at least Google Voice is waking up carriers to the fact that the only thing voicemail is good for these days is converting it into emails so you don’t have to listen to them. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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