Thursday, April 28, 2011

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Spotify Lands Major Studio Deals, Prepares To Launch Movie Service Top
Spotify continues to negotiate with Facebook over its long promised U.S. launch . But that isn’t the only thing the music streaming service has been up to. They’ve negotiated a number of deals with major movie studios to offer users streaming movies as well as music, a source in the industry tells us. Earlier this week we reported that YouTube plans a similar service (something we first wrote about last year ). As with Google/YouTube, we’re not sure when Spotify will launch the new service. But our best information suggests this Fall. And these aren’t your standard Netflix/Amazon/iTunes type movie deals, either, we’ve heard. Spotify is aiming to offer users much earlier access to movies. Similar to the release dates that hotel’s get for premium in-room movies. They’re expensive, but users can often see them just a couple of weeks after they’ve been in theaters. We believe the studio deals being negotiated are for worldwide rights, so Spotify users anywhere would have access. CrunchBase Information Spotify Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Techmeme Becomes Jobmeme Too Top
How do you know times are booming in the tech sector? Techmeme  just became a job board. To be clear, it will continue to be the go-to source for technology news as it has been for the past several years — but there’s now a new area in the right-hand column devoted to “Who’s hiring in tech”. Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera writes about the new addition here , noting that “billboards suck” and taking a shot at our parent company, AOL, which has become addicted to putting up billboard touting jobs all over the Bay Area. Obviously, Rivera hopes this will become a new chunk of revenue for his site. “I think ‘we’re hiring’ is one of the key messages companies want to get out to the industry,” Rivera tells us. “You see it in the publicity stunts. In all the weird sponsorships at SXSW. And of course, the billboards,” he continues. So does this mean Techmeme will now be more conflicted — certainly a hot topic these days — and put up more news stories about the companies that buy these job spots? “Not more than any other news site that accepts advertising from an array of companies. The only time I mentioned consideration of sponsors to my editorial staff was when I asked them specifically not to give sponsors extra consideration,” Rivera says. Besides, Techmeme already accepted more straight-up advertising anyway. The companies up there right now did each write their own taglines too! So far, the best: Twitter: Less characters; more fulfilling. (Cute.) Microsoft: Come as you are. Do what you love. (Is that a Nirvana reference?) Square: Come simplify the complex. (True and much needed.) StumbleUpon: Invent the future of web discovery. (Bold.) Twilio: Come run wild in our geek pasture! (Tempting.) Airbnb: Build a galactic marketplace. (Insane?) CrunchBase Information Techmeme Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Visible Measures Raises $7.7 Million For Online Video Engagement Solution Top
Visible Measures , a third-party online media measurement solution for advertisers and publishers, announced today that it has secured $7.7 million in an open-ended financing round led by DAG Ventures , with participation from Northgate Capital and General Catalyst Partners . The newest round brings the company’s total funding to $37 million. Visible Measures offers a platform through which advertisers can measure the effectiveness of a digital ad campaign, and provides an in-depth look into how how online viewers interact with video content and how that content spreads across the Web. In April, the company launched Viewable Media , a video ad network that allows advertisers to buy user-initiated views in social video, allowing it to both drive and measure user-initiated views as well as the impact of the publicity it receives through promotional efforts. Viewable Media is powered by its Viral Reach Database and Video Metrics Engine, which fuel the Ad Age Viral Video Chart and the Variety Top 10 Online Film Trailers Chart , among others. Customers of Visible Measures include MTV, AOL Video and YouTube, among others. CrunchBase Information Visible Measures Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Hulu Plus Hits XBox Live Tomorrow And The First Week Is Free Top
You’ve waited for it. You’ve prayed for it. You’ve spilled the blood of countless sacrificial chickens for it. And now it’s here: Hulu Plus for XBox 360. The service is launching tomorrow and you’re basically getting the Hulu interface with which you’re familiar plus a few Kinect add-ons including voice control and gestures. With sufficient bandwidth you also get high-quality streaming on what Microsoft is calling the “biggest screen in your house.” The service will be available for free from April 29 – May 6 and will thereafter cost $7.99 a month. Click through for more info on the service, including some words about Kintect interaction. Read more…
 
CrowdStar Nabs Seasoned Mobile Exec Alex Galvagni As New Studio Head Top
Social gaming company CrowdStar has hired former Glu and Transpera executive, Alex Galvagni , as the Head of Studios. In his role, Galvagni will be taking on a COO-like position, heading up scaling the company in operations, games, and hiring. Prior to working at CrowdStar, Galvagni was the President and COO of mobile video advertising company Transpera, which was acquired by Tremor Media in February. Previously, Galvagni was the Senior Vice President of Global product development for Glu Mobile, where he worked for eight years. During his time with Glu, he built, scaled and led the technology and product development of the company. Galvagni also served as an Architect at BEA Systems where he planned the extension of the WebLogic platform to mobile computing. It’s not surprising that CrowdStar brought on a seasoned mobile exec as the company is hoping to expand to additional markets is through mobile initiatives. Crowdstar has a number of hit games on Facebook including Happy Aquarium and It Girl. And in terms of monthly active users, the gaming company is fourth in line (it was at the second spot in February) behind Zynga and EA. But recently CrowdStar went through a bit of a shakeup, with a number of recently hired executives leaving the company. Executive Chairman Peter Relan stepped in the CEO spot in January, and is looking to help the company grow in terms of users and games. And CrowdStar has been actively hiring. The company began the year out with 75 employees and now has 100 staffers. CrunchBase Information CrowdStar Information provided by CrunchBase
 
AppShowcase Lets Companies Like SimpleGeo Spotlight Apps Built With Their API Top
Appstores.com , formerly Appbistro, is finally live today with the release of its AppShowcase product. AppShowcase lets platforms like Eventbrite and SimpleGeo automate the process of showcasing (I know right!) apps that are built with their APIs. “AppStores.com is the most exciting new service for platform companies because it delivers an effective solution that we don’t have to design or develop — allowing us to focus on our platform and core product,”  explained Eventbrite’s Mitch Colleran on why Eventbrite decided to use the AppStores platform to spotlight its developer ecosystem. You can find the Eventbrite AppStore here. AppStores’ AppShowcase is especially useful because it brings visibility to third party applications, giving developers a good look at what the possibilities are for a given API by highlighting who else is building on the platform. It’s also great for app discovery: Now the platform can help market the app! The potential of this is really exemplified by the SimpleGeo AppShowcase , which highlights popular apps like Hipmunk, Path and Posterous, but also introduces you to lesser knowns like Votizen, which connects voters to politicians, and Project Noah, a wilderness discovery app. AppShowcase is platform agnostic, accepting apps from Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and PalmOS. The product is launching today with three partners and over 1000 apps and will bring on 15 more in May. Co-founder Nalin Mittal says that they are currently monetizing AppShowcase with a tiered pricing plan for partners who want increased features. Appstores.com’s second product for publishers will be out in late May. CrunchBase Information Appstores.com Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Investors Don't Just Like LikeALittle A Little, They Like It A Lot Top
Anytime there’s a startup that has been quietly catching fire, you can always find a trail of investors warming themselves by the flames. Take LikeALittle , for example. Though they’ve kept it quiet, we’ve now confirmed with multiple sources that they raised $1 million from Andreessen Horowitz and others at some point earlier this year. And it makes sense. LikeALittle first popped on our radar back in December of last year while we were looking into a Hacker News thread claiming that one of the Y Combinator Winter ’11 startups had done 20 million pageviews in six weeks — and was growing by over 1 million pageviews a day. That startup, of course, was LikeALittle, a social network for flirting started by former Googlers and Microsofties, Evan Reas ,  Prasanna Sankaranarayanan  and  Shubham Mittal . If you haven’t heard of LikeALittle before it’s probably because you’re over the age of 22. Like Facebook in the early days, LikeALittle aims its anonymous flirting network at college campuses. In fact, the college atmosphere mixed with the short messages users send mixed with the anonymous layer makes it seem a bit like Twitter meets Facebook meet Chatroulette — with the sexual undertones of flirting mixed in. No wonder investors are hot on this thing. Rules of the LikeALittle game include: When you make a comment, you are given a random fruit-name, for a given thread. This helps you maintain a conversation, while being anonymous. For a new thread, you get a new random fruit-name. Fun. And they have tools to remove sexually explicit and offensive posts. They like to think of themselves as a “flirting-facilitator platform”. The $1 million round was raised at a $10 million valuation, we hear. And they’re apparently already putting the money to good use: they now own lal.com . This is obviously one to watch. CrunchBase Information Likealittle Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Hitpost 2.0 Looks To Score With Player Tweets And News Alongside The Pictures Top
When we first looked at Hitpost back in January, it was still just a concept — people taking pictures of sporting events and talking about them as they watch them on TV. Shortly thereafter, the iPhone and Android apps hit and it was off to the races. Today it’s time for the 2.0 launch which brings a couple new big features: tweets and news. The “meat and potatoes” as Hitpost founder Aaron Krane puts it. When you load up Hitpost 2.0, you’ll now see scores, news, and athlete tweets to go along with the main event: photos. The UI of the app has also been completely reworked. Notably, there is now a “My Teams” view to get an overview of all the aforementioned information about the teams you follow. And full Facebook sharing integration has been added. “In the short time since launch we’ve already had thousands of photos, and more importantly, some distinctly amazing photos that were captured/captioned by users,” Krane notes. But he did recognize the users want more information to consume while using the app. As such, we now get tweets and news. The tweets come from pro athletes who are active on Twitter, and Krane notes that they have at least one account for every team you can follow. “They are generally quite amusing,” he says. The news comes from all kinds of sources. This means big (ESPN, Yahoo), medium (SB Nation, Bleacher Report), and small (local team blogs). “We analyze each post by topic, so when you load the Giants feed you get a feed of the most current/complete news from all sources,” Krane says. But while these new additions are the “meat and potatoes”, photos remain the “bread and butter”. “ In sports, as in life, photo sharing is the highest common denominator for moment sharing,” Krane says. With the NBA playoffs about the head into round 2 and Major League Baseball now well underway, it will be a good time to try these new features out. Find Hitpost in the App Store here . And in the Android Market here . Version 2.0 should be in both stores shortly if it’s not already.   CrunchBase Information Hitpost 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 darn 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.
 
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. Update : More stats and pretty graphs on the Kickstarter blog. CrunchBase Information Kickstarter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Crisp Media Raises $6 Million From Intel And Others To Take Its Rich Media Platform Global Top
Crisp Media , a cross-platform rich media advertising company, today announced that it has raised a $6 million round of growth capital from Meritage Funds , Intel Capital , and EDBI . The round brings Crisp’s total investment to $17 million. VP of Marketing Tom Limongello says that Crisp will use its new funding to expand into international markets, specifically Asia, and will be establishing a second headquarters in Singapore. The use of cell phones and tablets in Asia is exploding, Limongello said, so building a second home in Singapore, along with partnering with EDBI, one of Singapore’s leading investment firms, will assist the company in its plans to roll out its advertising solutions across Asia. Crisp will also be using its funds to scale its recently launched rich media ad management platform, Crisp Engage . Engage is a self-service ad management platform that allows companies to build cross-platform rich media campaigns. Engage makes use of HTML5-based ad solutions to enable businesses to run campaigns through the browser, across desktops and mobile, that are relatively SDK-agnostic. Crisp is currently runing its campaigns across the websites of top publishers like CBS, CNN, ESPN and Yahoo!, and has seen brands including GM, Ford, Toyota, VW, IBM, and Intel use the platform to create rich campaigns. Crisp also recently teamed with several other publishers to form a consortium called ORMMA Initiative (or the Open Rich Media Mobile Advertising Initiative), which aims to simplify the serving of rich media ads into mobile apps by creating an open standard and API intended to be adopted by leading publishers, developers and vendors. Founding members include The Weather Channel, TringApps, PointRoll, and Jumptap. Why is this important for ad providers? Well, if an operating system launches a new version of a mobile app, mobile ad providers don’t want to sit around twiddling their thumbs as rich media vendors or analytics providers slowly conform to the new version. As colleague Sarah Lacy pointed out recently , providers want to roll out the best solution as soon as the update takes place, which ORMMA takes steps toward facilitating. A vendor-agnostic HTLM5 standard that can work on any platform, on any handset, without a dozen or so SDKs and constant updates and tweaks, well that’s music to the ears of both publishers and advertisers. What’s more, if advertisers can scale easily and quickly across various platforms and devices, there will be a lot more money and stake, making the existence of standards (and fair use) not only important — but necessary. If ORMMA can continue to attract big players into its consortium, the more likely it is to become the standard, and an important functionary in the growth and scale of rich mobile advertising. And $6 million in funding is just more fuel for the fire. CrunchBase Information Crisp Media Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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