Tuesday, April 3, 2012

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Gamification Platform BigDoor Raises $5 Million From Foundry Group Top
screen-shot-2010-10-14-at-3-15-35-amWhite label gamification platform BigDoor has raised $5 million in new funding led by existing investor Foundry Group, bringing BigDoor's total funding to $13 million. BigDoor's gamification platform essentially allows online publishers to add game mechanics to web interactions and engagements. BigDoor helps companies build game-like mechanics and loyalty programs into their sites or apps by enabling points, badges, levels, leaderboards, virtual currency and virtual goods.
 
YouTube Marketing Gets Serious: Buddy Media Lets Brands Customize Channels With Apps Top
Buddy Media Customized YouTube Channel100 million views, 100 thousand subscribers, and brands still don't have special tools for still customizing their YouTube channels. That changes today as social marketing platform Buddy Media begins letting its big brand clients deck out their YouTube channels with stylized video players and interactive apps. Twitter feeds, ecommerce storefronts, quizzes, linked banners, photo galleries and more can all be hosted on a channel. The same way  brands doubled down on Facebook Page marketing once they could host apps, I think we're about to see a major uptick in the time and money they spend manicuring their YouTube channels. Too many captive eyeballs are going to waste.
 
Goodsie Lets Small Retailers Set Up Sleek E-Commerce Storefronts Top
goodsieGoodsie, a startup founded by the parent company of Flavors.me, wants to provide a simple, and relatively inexpensive way for any merchant to set up an e-commerce storefront. The platform, which launched last year, is getting an upgrade today with the release of a number of new tools that help retailers increase customer engagement and cross-platform engagement. A new email marketing system allows retailers to send targeted campaigns to customers based on order history, purchase amount and geography. The feature gives retailers the ability to add personalization to the mix, but without having to spend massive amounts of money on data analysis. Via a drag-and-drop interface, merchants can create these email campaigns that integrate with Goodsie's backend. Goodsie also provides a simple form for customers to sign-up for emails.
 
RR Donnelly Invests $2.5M In CoffeeTable To Bring Retail Catalogs Into The Tablet Age Top
Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 4.27.26 AMRR Donnelly isn't a name you see very often in TechCrunch, but companies don't survive for nearly 150 years without having one eye trained on the future. With 2011 revenues at an estimated $10.6 billion, the company is one of the world's largest commercial printers. The printing giant has been stepping up its digital investments of late, and today announced that it has invested $2.5 million in Real Value Corporation, the makers of iPad shopping app, CoffeeTable.
 
Join Wil Wheaton And Friends In A Rousing Tabletop Gaming Session Top
If you're a fan of Grant Imahara, Will Wheaton, Jenna Busch, or Sean Plott, this may be just the trick. Wheaton and Felicia Day have created a new series called Tabletop which consists of a series of gamers playing tabletop games. Is it boring, you ask? Absolutely not.
 
Phonedeck Lets You Control Your Cellphone Via The Cloud Top
phonedeck_insightsAn interesting new startup bubbling since it exhibited at TechCrunch 50 in the startup battlefield last year is Phonedeck. Effectively, it's created the cloud-based desktop for the mobile phone. That means it can track your outgoing SMS content, but also log calls (though not content). The result? A sudden realisation of you who call, how long for and a lot of other data that was previously invisible. I recall MG Seigler writing that the phone book remained the last mile into social networking. Well Phonedeck might be the bridge across that last mille and it launches into public beta today from Google Play for Android handsets.
 
Foxconn Recruiter: We're 'Hiring' For A June iPhone 5 Launch Top
originalCome one, come all! Come build the iPhone 5! In a conversation with TV Tokyo, a Foxconn recruiter mentions that the company is hiring more workers right now to prep for the iPhone 5 launch. "It seems like it will go on sale around June," he said. The manufacturing giant is apparently looking to add 18,000 souls to its assembly lines to build something.
 
Self-Hosted File Sync Solution ownCloud Goes Commercial Top
owncloud01People love Dropbox and similar services, but companies -- especially large enterprises in regulated industries -- have an understandable aversion to file sync services: they allow company data on servers "out there" in the cloud, no longer under company control. ownCloud, essentially an open source, self-hosted Dropbox, has a unique advantage here as it's strictly a software solution, not a storage provider. I mentioned ownCloud in passing when I wrote about OpenSUSE 12.1, but I've been keeping an eye on the project since. To make ownCloud even more attractive to businesses, a commercially supported version is being launched today at owncloud.com. The ownCloud server does a bit more than just file storage and synchronization. It offers CalDAV and CardDAV services to synchronize calendars and address books with your mobile device. Work is also underway to make it aware of the file types being stored within it, and to provide meaningful actions based on those types: photo galleries, music playlists, and more. There's a growing ownCloud app store to extend what the server can do. This is the power of open source: rather than relying on something like ifttt, you can have intelligent actions built right into the server you're running.
 
Berlin Is Still Sexy But No Longer Poor – Earlybird Raises $100M For A $200M Fund Top
berlinhotelsIt looks like Berlin, famously described by the city's mayor as "poor but sexy", is now quite a bit less poor in the realm of early stage tech startup financing. Earlybird Venture Capital has announced the $100m first close of its fourth venture fund. The target fund size is $200m. The new fund will be dedicated to early-stage investments in "disruptive global consumer and enterprise Internet and technology businesses originating from Europe, with an emphasis on German-speaking countries." Much of that innovation is coming out of Berlin right now, which has become a hotbed for startups and a talent pool for locals, internationals and the highly-prized engineering talent close by in Eastern and Central Europe.
 
Eventbrite: Facebook Drives More Ticket Sales Than Twitter And LinkedIn Across US And UK Top
ticketsSocial media sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly strong marketing platforms, and, eventually, we should start to see more metrics that show how effective all those likes, shares and RT's really are for businesses. (There are still precious few.) One company that's gotten an early start on that is Eventbrite, the online ticketing site, which today publishes some numbers that point to which social networks are giving it the best returns across its operations in the U.S. and UK.
 
Quepasa And MyYearbook Rebrand As MeetMe Top
LOGO.finalWhen social networking companies myYearbook and Quepasa merged last year, myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook told employees that his goal was to "build an enduring, global brand for meeting new people." That's still the plan, but the company is announcing that it will build that brand under a new name — MeetMe. Cook (who's now COO) says both the myYearbook and Quepasa names don't quite capture the current vision. myYearbook started out as a social working site for high schoolers, and even though it evolved into more of a social discovery service — one that's increasingly mobile — the name still reflected its early roots. Meanwhile, Quepasa, which tries to do something similar for a Latin American audience, has a name suggesting a regional social network.
 
YouDazzle Launches As A Simple File Sharing And Web Meeting Platform For SMBs Top
youA new startup, YouDazzle, is taking on the file sharing space today with the launch of its cloud-based collaboration, storage and online meeting platform. The company has also announced a round of seed funding from Chamath Palihapitiya's Social+Capital Partnership, and other undisclosed angels. The cloud based SaaS allows businesses to organize project or deal related files in a central online repository that customers or colleagues can access from anywhere and from any device; share large files that are too large to send via email; and conduct screen sharing and web meetings via YouDazzle.
 
The Story of Skout: From Deadpool's Door to $22M Led By Andreessen Horowitz Top
niklas-christianEighteen months ago, it looked like the location wars were over. Foursquare had just closed a $20 million Series B round and rivals like Gowalla, Loopt and Brightkite weren't having the same buzz or traction. Meanwhile, Christian Wiklund's company Skout was down to a skeleton crew of three people after burning much of the $4.6 million it had raised since being founded in 2007. "We were close to going under. We had no traction," Wiklund said. "But we were really stubborn and there was no way we were going to let that happen." A first-time entrepreneur, Wiklund and his co-founder Niklas Lindstrom put their heads down. In 2009, they changed the app to focus on a new demographic: young people who wanted to meet strangers and singles who wanted to flirt.
 
The Limits Of Social Influence? Big Ben Is Influential On… Drugs Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-03 at 11.36.46This is a guest post by Monty Munford. Last week I found myself in a sports bar in London's West End. I was standing next to a couple being interviewed by Middle Eastern TV news channel Al-Jazeera who were giving their (inane, alas) views on a football match between two teams from Liverpool. This experience was far removed from the one I'd had two hours previously when in the neighbouring cinema I had attended the UK première of "The Price of Kings: Yasser Arafat", a film about the life of the Palestinian leader. This juxtaposition is typical of a 'proper' night out in London, the new melting pot of Europe, but it had happened not because of any random connection or because I liked football. The invitation for the première was down to my alleged influence on social media and had come from PeerIndex and its new PeerPerks marketing service.
 
Dropcam Begins Shipping The $149 Dropcam HD WiFi Security Camera Top
dropcamDropcam is back with its second and most advanced security camera. Introduced back at CES 2012, the Dropcam HD is finally ready to ship and delivered within 5-7 business days. It's quite a good bargin, too. Not much has changed since we first looked at the unit in early January. This model does 30 fps, night vision, two-way audio and 16x the resolution as the original Dropcam Echo. The live video is accessible through a cloud service for $9.99 a month. Dropcam also offers a DVR functionality. At $149 it's priced very aggressively against other products with a smaller feature set.
 
More Developments For Amazon's In-App Payment System For Appstore, But More Work Needed Top
amazon-logoWhen we interviewed Ray Anderson, the CEO of mobile payments company Bango last month and asked him when we would see one of its key customers, Amazon, roll out its own mobile payment service, his cool answer was "in due course." A report out today from Bloomberg points to the company getting warmer on the idea. Bloomberg says that app publishers have been trialling Amazon's payment service for around the last month. The service would cover both one-off purchases as well as subscriptions through apps. And, like Google and Apple, Amazon plans to take a 30 percent commission on payments made using the platform.
 
Pinterest Co-Founder Paul Sciarra Is Now EIR At Andreessen Horowitz Top
Paul SciarraMore developments for Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra, who we reported yesterday was leaving Pinterest as Ben Silbermann officially took helm as CEO. Sciarra is going VC and joining Andreessen Horowitz as entrepreneur-in-residence. The move follows the bigger trend of startup execs/founders getting snapped up by the VC firms, to help them get a bit smarter in how they work with their portfolio companies. Just yesterday, First Round Capital hired Scribd's Jack Leidlein as head of talent.
 
Aframe Goes After Avid With A Fresh $7 Million And A Very Big Cloud Top
wpe7_concordPop quiz! How much is spent on making Television shows in the US annually? It's $300 billion or there-abouts. That's a lot of video. Petabytes of data and more. Next question! How are all those shows edited and produced? Well, it's almost all put though big-ass editing suites and in-office servers from the likes of Avid. Lastly, how many tech startups have gone after this TV market? No, I'm not taking about Brightcove and your little video podcast. I mean one that goes after Avid and that TV industry. Answer: None. Why? It's just very, very tough. But now one has. Aframe, the SaaS/cloud video production platform which has been bubbling under in Europe since 2010, has today raised a new $7 million Series A round of funding led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures. This is a large Series A in European terms, but one which also sees Aframe launching into North America with operations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Yes, folks, these guys are taking on the television production world with all guns blazing, already working with companies such as the BBC and MTV.
 
Can Two Young Entrepreneurs Solve The High Cost Of Hearing? Top
Screen shot 2012-04-02 at 6.12.01 AMIt's not an unfamiliar story: There's a niche market, which despite its relatively large size, goes unnoticed by most entrepreneurs and investors, because, simply put, it's not sexy. For this and countless other reasons, as time goes by, legacy models and hardware, fragmentation, and high prices prevail. In short, it begs for new blood, new ideas, and a fresh perspective. The same can be said for countless industries, but it's especially true for many of the markets within the bloated, backwards beast we know as the health industry. Case in point: Hearing aids. Of the 27 million Americans who qualify for a hearing device, 75 percent choose not to purchase one -- only one in seven Americans over 50 years old who need a hearing aid actually wear one. The problem is a sizable one, so former Stanford University classmates Sam Tanzer and Ross Porter decided to do something about it. In early 2011, they founded a startup called Embrace Hearing to apply some entrepreneurial pressure to the situation.
 
Mobile Social Gaming Company Dragonplay Raises $14M From Accel To Expand To iOS Top
DragonplayDragonplay, a free-to-play social games developer for Android and Facebook, has raised $14 million Series A funding from Accel Partners, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital. The Israeli company was founded in 2010 by Sharon Tal. Dragonplay specializes in multi-platform social game experiences in the cards, casino and board game category and is best known for its Android app Live Holdem Poker Pro. The studio's games are mainly free-to-play and use in-app purchases of virtual good for monetization. Live Holdem Poker Pro is frequently the top ranked application on Android's Google Play, and has over 12 million installs with more than 2 million monthly active players.
 

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