Wednesday, April 4, 2012

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FanDuel Raises Another Round For Its Clever Side-Step Of Gaming Laws Top
top-10-fanduel-fantasy-opening-day-picks-1059175-flashDaily fantasy sports operator FanDuel gets around online betting laws in the US thanks to daily fantasy sports games being exempt under the carve out in the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. That means it's virtually a license to print money legally in the US. FanDuel says its revenues hit 4x in the past 6 months with the company giving out over $10m in fantasy payouts in 2011 and it plans to pay out up to $4m per month for the baseball season. Off the back of that success today the site has raised another $1.3m round of funding from existing investors, including Pentech and Piton Capital taking its total raised to date to $7m.
 
Acceleprise Wants To Be The 500 Startups For Enterprise Tech Top
BigAccelepriseLet the proliferation of vertically-themed startup accelerators continue! Today, a new accelerator focusing on the enterprise sector is launching in Washington D.C. Called "Acceleprise," the program's goal is to invest in 60 enterprise software companies over the next three years. Participating startups should be trying to solve problems facing large organizations, whether the Fortune 5000, large nonprofits, or government.
 
Fly Or Die: Nokia Lumia 900 Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 10.29.30 AMThe Nokia Lumia 900 is set to be the question mark of the week. The embargo lifted last night, so everyone and their brother is posting a review, proudly giving yeas and nays on the first hard-core Nokia/Microsoft mobile offering. But what do John and I think? Well, the answer is two-fold, but the big guy and I always find common ground somewhere. With the Lumia 900, it's Windows Phone itself.
 
PhoneDeck Is A Game Changer For Small Businesses, Divorce Attorneys Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 10.01.51 AMI sold mortgages over the phone in a previous life. That involved calling over 100 people a day using an archaic but functional web-based phone system. That system cost the company a fortune to implement and required a dedicated support staff. PhoneDeck does most of it for free. And it works directly with Android and S40 phones. This is disruption defined.
 
Strange Bedfellows: Google, Paramount Ink Deal For New Digital Movie Rentals Top
godfatherGood news, Godfather fans -- Google has just recently announced on their official YouTube blog that they've inked a licensing deal with Viacom-owned Paramount to bring some 500 new titles to YouTube and the Google Play store over the coming weeks. Google first started toying with the notion of movie rentals via YouTube in early 2010, and their rental catalog has since swelled to nearly 9,000 titles. Bringing movie rentals to the Android ecosystem took a little bit more time, with the feature launching in the Android Market in May 2011. With Paramount now in tow, Google has licensing agreements with five of the six major motion picture studios, with Fox being the only big player still sitting on the sidelines.
 
Windows Phone Marketplace Growth Keeps Up The Pace, Tops 80,000 Apps Top
windows-phone-7-marketplaceWindows Phone 7 is an excellent new mobile operating system — there's no doubt about that. But every rose has its thorn, and on Windows Phone it's a lack of apps. Luckily, the Marketplace seems to be growing at a rapid pace, today topping 80,000 apps. The platform has been slowly but steadily picking up steam, topping 50,000 apps in December, 60,000 in January, and 70,000 in March.
 
Yahoo Cuts 14 Percent Of Workforce; 2,000 Given Pink Slips; Will Save $375M Top
yahooYahoo has made its massive round of layoffs official. The company just released a statement saying that 2,000 jobs have been cut, or 14 percent of it total workforce (which was previously around 14,000). We've pasted the release below. "Today's actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal," said Yahoo's CEO Scott Thompson. "Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they've contributed to Yahoo!."
 
Eight Mobile Ad Companies Get Behind ODIN In A Quest To Replace The UDID Top
odin-logoMore than a half-dozen mobile ad companies are getting behind a working group called ODIN to find a new way of tracking and identifying iOS users that still respects their privacy. This is happening because Apple is pressuring developers to stop using an older method called UDIDs (or unique device ID numbers) faster than previously thought amid criticism that it compromises privacy. Velti, Jumptap, RadiumOne, Mdotm, StrikeAd, Smaato, Adfonic and SAY Media are hoping that by collaborating, they can influence the new standard that the rest of the mobile advertising industry will adopt. "We need to get everybody on the same page so that we have a uniform solution that ends up working for everyone," said Krishna Subramanian, who is Velti's chief marketing officer.
 
Show Us What You Got, NoVa: Let's Schedule A Quick Meeting Next Week Top
Old_GreggAs you may well know, we're having a series of three mini-meetups in DC, Norfolk, and Richmond next week. You've probably already RSVPed, but I'd like to spend Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings visiting some cool companies in the area. I think I'm already full in Norfolk - someone is dragging us around - but DC and Richmond are wide open. If you have a cool office, a cool product, or a hardware start-up, we want to hear from you. Are you building an iPhone app or a robot? Let's talk. Are you building a B2B marketing platform for the Albanian market? Maybe bring your pitch deck to the meet-up. Our time will be short in these cities and I'd like to shoot some cool video so ideally the more visual the better. We'll have plenty of time to talk at the event that night. So if you have something for us to see, email us at john@techcrunch.com with the subject "COOL STUFF [city of your choice]" and we'll try to schedule some meetings. Sound good? Good.
 
Mogreet Nabs $4.1M For An Easy Way To Share Rich Media To Any Mobile Device Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 5.16.04 AMMogreet, a Los Angeles-based mobile video marketing startup, is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in strategic capital. The round was led by Black Diamond Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including DFJ Frontier, Ascend Ventures, Bryant Park Ventures, and Draper Associates. The new infusion of capital brings the startup's total funding to $14.1 million.
 
Founder Of Dubai's First Startup Accelerator Looks To Educate, Inspire Global Entrepreneurs Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-13 at 6.18.52 PMWith how much TechCrunch and other tech publications cover incubators and accelerators in Silicon Valley and in the U.S., it's refreshing to occasionally get a glimpse of what's happening outside North America, especially those places where startup incubation and entrepreneurial activity is on the rise. One such example is a relatively new startup accelerator and seed fund called SeedStartup, which makes its home in Dubai, UAE. SeedStartup was founded by Rony El Nashar (who is also a managing partner), an entrepreneur an investor who is dedicated to finding and cultivating tech talent in the Middle East, which he says has seen an explosion of entrepreneurial enthusiasm over the last year. While SeedStartup was designed to begin to address the lack of funding and mentoring, the process starts with education. Especially education from the brightest minds and leaders in the tech sphere -- as they are the people that can help get would-be founders excited about taking the entrepreneurial leap of faith. To aid in that endeavor, Rony recently launched a side project called Cofounder TV, which is meant to be an educational resource for international entrepreneurs -- specifically in video form.
 
NEA Leads $33M Round In CRM Developer And Salesforce Competitor SugarCRM Top
sugarcrmSugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. We're told around $14 million of the round was equity financing. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital as well as the company's current investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. To date, SugarCRM has raised over $60 million in equity funding. While Salesforce tends to grab the most attention as the cloud-based CRM company, SugarCRM has quietly built a loyal, and growing userbase around its customer relationship management platform for sales teams. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 1 million users from over 6,000 companies in 192 countries.
 
Wikia Rolls Out Big Redesign To Bring Accessibility, Discovery To 20M Pages Of UGC Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 12.51.54 AMYou may not be familiar with Wikia, but the collaborative media company has been quietly growing into a giant, recently passing IGN, for example, as the largest network of gaming sites on the planet. Led by both its gaming and entertainment verticals, Wikia's content-driven social network is home to one of the largest and most active communities on the Web. For those unfamiliar, building on the popularity of its non-profit predecessor (Wikipedia), the site allows anyone (even you) to create new communities around any subject they're passionate about -- or participate in one of its 200,000 existing communities -- for free. However, as publishing models change, Wikia is looking to more strategically marry the world of professional content creation with the openness of UGC, without fundamentally changing or restricting the formula. As its communities have largely remained disaggregated and separate from one another, Wikia is today officially unveiling its biggest redesign in years, which aims to collect its communities under one, sleek-looking roof while improving both engagement and discovery for a more mainstream audience.
 
What Took So Long? Germany's Samwer Brothers Rumored to Launch a Square Clone Soon Top
square_rocket_logoSquare, the mobile payment startup founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies right now. It's no surprise then, that German clone factory Rocket Internet, which is run by brothers Mac, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, is now rumored to be developing its own blatant Square clone. According to German startup blog Deutsche Startups, the clone, which will supposedly be called Zenpay, is currently one of Rocket Internet's top priorities, though it is not clear when and where it will launch. The source that talked to Deutsche Startups, however, did indicate that Rocket Internet is planning to launch Zenpay "globally." Given the nature of these payment systems, however, this seems rather unlikely.
 
The Interesting Part About Amazon's In-App Payments Beta Is That Developers Have Pricing Control Top
images-screenshots-captures-amazon-appstore-logo-21032011_00B4000000001978The most interesting part of Amazon's move to provide an in-app payments flow is that they're ceding pricing control to mobile developers. Amazon has been testing a new in-app payments system with several top-tier mobile developers for several months. It's a big deal because there has been a huge shift over the last 18 months toward giving away apps for free instead of selling them for a dollar or more. This move would bring Amazon's Android appstore closer to parity with Google and Apple's stores for developers. But the part worth noting isn't that Amazon will offer an in-app purchases flow. It's obvious that they would do that, given their experience in online payments and commerce and need to compete with Google's app store. The part worth pointing out is that Amazon is letting developers set their own prices for virtual currency and digital content. That's a departure from the strategy the e-commerce giant tried to pursue last year with mobile developers.
 
Google Highlights Search Changes From March Top
IMPROVEMENTSGoogle has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment. We've highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn't much here that's life-changing. All the same, it's good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).
 
Nokia Lumia 900 Review: Initial Impressions (Video) Top
Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 1.15.53 PMNow that 9pm has rolled around and the awkwardly timed embargo has lifted, I can finally talk to you guys about the phone I've been playing with for the past week: the Nokia Lumia 900. I'm not going to get too detailed, as a full review and a head-to-head battle will go live in the coming days, but I wanted to hit you guys with initial impressions as early as possible. To put it plainly, I think this is a swell phone.
 
Tell The Truth But Tell It Slant: There Are Still Major Worker Issues In China, Just Not Where Daisey Looked Top
img_0066-620x465In the hullabaloo over Mike Daisey lying about meeting injured workers, the spotlight turned from actual employment problems in Asia onto the face of the orotund and penitent former colonialist. Now that the news cycle has passed, we're no longer interested in the topic of Chinese manufacturing and, judging by the positive response to my April Fools' post on Sunday, the world now understands assembly work to be a good if tedious form of employment. But the problems Daisey seemed to fabricate do exist. He just didn't do the legwork to see them. I've personally been to factories where OSHA is just a four-letter word and ISO standards are paid little more than lip service. And the factories I saw were relatively good and considered reputable suppliers by Westerners in town. After seeing these I wondered "If these are the good ones, what are the bad ones like?"
 
With $25M From Benchmark And Larry Summers Advising, Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy? Top
Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 4.57.07 PMWell, we've said it before: Technology is changing education. It's flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date -- $25 million -- in a startup/university called The Minerva Project. Sure, it's not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it's certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board.
 
Backed By Time, Next Issue Launches A Tablet Newsstand With Netflix-Style Pricing Top
next issueMany magazine publishers see the iPad as their salvation. Five of the big ones (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.) banded together to create a joint venture called Next Issue Media, and today the company is launching its Android app. CEO Morgan Guenther (formerly president of Tivo) says that despite all the excitement about bringing magazines to tablets, the current system is lacking — specifically, the need to download a new app for every magazine. Gone is the "newsstand" feeling of walking into a store and browsing a rack of titles. Instead, it's like you're ushered into a windowless room where you can read a copy of Wired. Want to read The New Yorker? You'll have to leave for another room.
 

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