The latest from TechCrunch
- Users Will Download 44 Billion Mobile Apps By 2016
- Pixamid Is What Color Should Be – Agnostic About Photo Apps
- Cooliris Turns Liveshare Into An Insanely Fast Media Sharing Tool
- Tell Your Gullible Relatives Not To Click On Any Banned Lady Gaga Video Links
- Russian Search Giant Yandex Seeks To Raise Up To $1 Billion In IPO
- Kickstarter, Two Years And 20,000 Projects Later: $53 Million Pledged, $40 Million Collected
| Users Will Download 44 Billion Mobile Apps By 2016 | Top |
| There’s no doubt that there’s been both an explosion of growth in mobile app downloads and app stores. While Apple’s App Store has dominated in terms of number of apps and downloads, Distimo just released a study that projects the Android Market will become the largest store in terms of number of applications in about five months from now, passing the App Store. Today, ABI research is reporting that the app industry is on its way to achieving 44 billion cumulative downloads by 2016. Similar to Distimo’s findings, ABI reports that Android and Windows Phone 7 are steadily catching up with Apple in terms of downloads. So far, over 3 billion apps have been downloaded from the Android Market and Apple passed 10 billion app downloads in January. Last year alone, ABI estimated that total app downloads approached 8 billion. And we see more and more App Stores popping up (i.e. Appia and Amazon’s Android App Store ) and increased smartphone usage, downloads should increase significantly over the next few years. CrunchBase Information ABI Research Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Pixamid Is What Color Should Be – Agnostic About Photo Apps | Top |
| When Color came out with its $41m play, a rather lesser known startup had planned to launch around the same time – as these things go. How often does that happen? Pretty damn often no doubt. But while Color got all the press – not least for its funding – the lesser known Pixamid has had to wait for its time in the sun. But while I have struggled – really I have – to get into Color, Pixamid has given me pretty much exactly what I wanted out of this kind of app [ iTunes link ] from the word go. Today at the (sixth annual) Next Web conference in Amsterdam, I met CEO and founder Bart Denny who demo’d the app to me. | |
| Cooliris Turns Liveshare Into An Insanely Fast Media Sharing Tool | Top |
| Silicon Valley startup Cooliris demoed the next version of its social communication and media sharing app LiveShare to me earlier this week, and I was blown away by exactly how instant the sharing of photos, videos and whatnot has become. The tool, which isn’t available yet, is shown in a demo video (embedded below). Cooliris’ LiveShare lets you share photos, videos, maps, articles and more with others by the tap of a button or simply by dragging content to a stream or group of people. As you can tell from the video below, the sharing itself is as real-time as real-time can get. And I can assure you there’s no trickery involved – it was just as fast when they demoed it to me from their offices in Palo Alto, California. LiveShare to date has been described by the company as a group photo sharing service , but when this upgraded product gets polished up a little and hits the market, calling it that would almost be an insult. Expect it to become available in the next few weeks. Question remains if speed is enough a factor to differentiate LiveShare from the thousands of other media sharing tools out there (and there are increasingly more). Also read: Cooliris Gets $9.6 Million From Kleiner Perkins And Others (February 2011) CrunchBase Information Cooliris Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Tell Your Gullible Relatives Not To Click On Any Banned Lady Gaga Video Links | Top |
| There is a fairly egregious worm going around now that masquerades as a YouTube link for a “banned” Lady Gaga video. When you click on the bit.ly link it sends you to a fake YouTube page and then asks for permission to access your Twitter account. This results in another infected tweet being sent out on your Twoot stream, thereby continuing the long, sad cycle. Read more… | |
| Russian Search Giant Yandex Seeks To Raise Up To $1 Billion In IPO | Top |
| Yandex , one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, this morning announced that it has filed a registration statement with the SEC for a proposed initial public offering, as expected . The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the offering have not yet been determined, but the Wall Street Journal recently reported that the company had been given a preliminary valuation of between $6 billion and $9 billion ahead of the filing. According to the filing, the proposed maximum aggregate offering price amounts to $1 billion, which should give you an indication of how much Yandex seeks to raise. A portion of the shares will be issued by Yandex, and a portion will be sold by certain of its shareholders. Yandex will list its Class A ordinary shares on NASDAQ (symbol: “YNDX”). Yandex operates the most popular search engine and the most visited website in Russia (it is also the largest Russian Internet company by revenue). In 2010, the company generated 64% of all search traffic in Russian, trumping Google. In March 2011, Yandex.ru website attracted 38.3 million unique visitors. Aside from Russia, Yandex has operations in Belarus (yandex.by), Kazakhstan (yandex.kz) and Ukraine (yandex.ua). Total revenues for 2010 hovered around $440 million . Based on the filing, net income for 2010 was $134 million. Founded back in 1997, Yandex has been reported to be preparing an IPO before, with talks dating back all the way to 2006. In 2008, the company planned for an initial public offering but quickly moved to indefinitely delay those plans due to the global economic turmoil. Yandex is among the largest high-tech companies in Russia, with an estimated workforce of about 2,500 employees. Currently, Yandex has branches all over Russia (Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Ekaterinburg, Novosibirsk and Kazan), Ukraine (Kiev, Odessa, Simferopol) and in the United States (in Palo Alto, CA, to be exact). Morgan Stanley is acting as sole global coordinator for the proposed offering. Deutsche Bank Securities and Goldman Sachs are acting as joint bookrunners. The SEC filing follows in the footsteps of fellow Russian Internet giant Mail.ru’s successful listing – the company raised roughly $1 billion at the end of last year. Also read: Russian search giant Yandex partners with local Facebook-clone VKontakte Russian search engine Yandex gets a semantic injection Yandex acquires WebVisor's behavior analysis technology, team Yandex acquires Loginza, the single sign-in plugin maker Yandex IPO to Make Dozens of Yandex Employees Millionaires (Quintura blog) CrunchBase Information Yandex Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Kickstarter, Two Years And 20,000 Projects Later: $53 Million Pledged, $40 Million Collected | Top |
| Two years ago, crowd-funding phenom Kickstarter launched with a handful of projects. Anyone with an idea for a film, album, art project, or product could make their pitch, say how much they needed to get started, and ask for pledges. Once the minimum amount needed was pledged, the project would get started. Today is Kickstarter’s birthday, and it is releasing some stats. Over the past two years, $53 million has been pledged for 20,371 projects. Of that money, $40 million has been collected, going towards 7,496 successful projects (meaning they raised enough money to get off the ground). Over the same time period, 9,700 projects were unsuccessful and 3,175 are still live. That means Kickstarter projects overall have a 43 percent success rate, and 85 percent of money that is pledged ends up being collected. The money pledged on Kickstarter is growing steeply (see chart). In March, $7 million was pledged, up from about $5 million in February, and $4 million in January. April will be even bigger. The number of new projects also keeps on climbing. There are more than 2,000 projects added every month, double the rate a year ago. If 85 percent of pledged money is collected, why do only 43 percent of projects succeed? The answer is that more money goes towards successful projects. About a fifth of all posted projects, 21 percent, never receive any pledges at all. Simply finding one person who believes in your project enough to pledge some cash towards it is a good predictor of success. Projects with only one pledge have a 52 percent success rate. And projects which manage to reach 30 percent of the funding needed, have a 90 percent success rate. In the Founder Stories clip below from January, Kickstarter CEO Perry Chen talks about how projects like Diaspora (an open-sourced Facebook) or the TikTok iPod Nano watch take off on Kickstarter, and gives some advice for how to create a successful project. CrunchBase Information Kickstarter Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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