Wednesday, May 2, 2012

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Vungle Hustles Its Way Into $2M Seed Round From All-Star Investors For Mobile App Video Trailers Top
vungle-hi-whiteVungle, a new company that wants to help mobile developers market their apps through video "trailers," has just raised an enormous $2 million seed round from the who's who of Silicon Valley. The round includes Google Ventures, AOL Ventures [Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL], Crosslink Capital, as well as several notable angels like SV Angel's Ron Conway, 500 Startups' Dave McClure, SoftTech VC's Charles Hudson, Maynard Webb, Scott McNealy and Tim Draper.
 
Next-Generation Publishing Platform Hyperink Wants To Transform Blogs Into Books Top
hyperYC company Hyperink, a next-generation digital book publishing platform, is debuting a new service which helps bloggers create short books from their existing content. As we've reported in the past, Hyperink wants to disrupt the book publishing world. The startup's digital book publishing platform and full-service agency will help any aspiring author write, design, publish, market, and sell a book without any up-front fees. Hyperink wants to represent the long-tail of book demand. Hyperink's books production costs are under $1,000 on average, and are published in under a month. And also offers higher royalty rates, and give authors up to 50 percent of their earnings (many publishers give authors around 25 percent).
 
Weebly Adds Slick iOS App To Its Quietly Huge Web Site Creation Business Top
postI keep hearing rumors about the ridiculous amounts of money that Weebly is making. But the San Francisco company, which provides a set of tools for small businesses and other organizations to easily create their own web sites, has only scoffed at the nine-figure amounts I've thrown at them. Instead, they've shared something else -- a new mobile app that lets new users quickly create their own sites, or existing folks manage what they have going. In a series of quick swipes, it lets you  get through naming a site, upload images, choosing a theme, and publishing your first post. If you want to get fancier, you can also take photos and alter them with a set of filters, or shoot videos to publish.
 
TalentSplash Is A Social Network For Finding Or Becoming The Next Lady Gaga Top
talentsplashI live in New York City, and feel lucky for it. Every day I meet a waitress, bartender, receptionist, or Occupy Wall Street protestor who dreams of greatness. They aren't really waitresses or receptionists; they're creatives just waiting to see their name in lights. But the ladder to the top is a creaky, weak old thing that few survive. And so was born TalentSplash. It's a social network for talent, at its core, with three main purposes.
 
New iPad Ship Time Improves To 3-5 Days At Apple.com Top
ipad-3The new iPad is nearly two months old and it's still not available for immediate shipping from Apple. However, the wait time just improved to less than a week. Apple.com now lists all the new iPad variations with just a 3-5 day wait time. Happy days. "[We're] selling as fast as we can make them," said Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer said on last week's earnings call. The iPad is clearly a hit and up until now, buyers had to wait one or two weeks when purchasing from Apple's online store. Unfortunately buyers in overseas markets will still have to wait more than a week.
 
Down, Not Out: Nokia Goes On The Offensive With 11 Lawsuits Against HTC, RIM And ViewSonic Covering 45 Patents Top
Nokia-Logo (1)As Nokia continues to try to turn itself around as a mobile phone business, it is also playing on the offense in the legal game: today it announced that it has filed fresh patent suits against HTC, RIM and Viewsonic in the a selection of courts in the U.S. and Germany. The suits go to show that a company like Nokia has a lot more arsenal in its stores to fight against competitors as it struggles win business with consumers. The fact that it has so many patents among its assets also means that there is significantly more value to this company than just its handset business.
 
Thanks To A 'Conflict Of Interest,' Target Said To Stop Selling Amazon's Kindle Top
targetthumbIf you were planning to swing by your local Target to buy a Kindle some time soon, you may want to add a little pep to your step. An inside source told The Verge that Amazon's line of Kindle e-readers and tablets would soon disappear from Target's store shelves, due to an unspecified "conflict of interest." Sales of Amazon's hardware hasn't dried up just yet though -- that same source sent along an internal memo that points to May 13 (i.e. Mothers Day) as the point after which store stock would no longer be replenished.
 
Twilio Rising: Microsoft Inks Deal To Offer Voice, Messaging APIs To 'Tens Of Thousands' Of Azure Developers Top
sunriseA potentially big move forward for cloud-based telephony API startup Twilio -- and an intriguing development for Microsoft, given its would-be ownership of Skype: Twilio and Microsoft have formed a strategic alliance to offer Twilio's APIs to developers on the Windows Azure platform. The offering will cover both Twilio's voice and messaging services, and Twilio is sweetening the deal by giving developers a credit of 1,000 free text messages or inbound voice minutes when they sign up.
 
Yahoo Launches Online Marketing Dashboard For Small Businesses Top
Yahoo! Small BusinesYou may not know this but Yahoo still operates a product called Yahoo Small Business, which provides SMBs and sites with web hosting, domain name registration, web site design templates, e-commerce solutions and more. In fact, Yahoo says that it has helped millions of businesses get online and grow their presence on the web. Today, the company is debuting a new marketing dashboard to give users additional insight into online reputation, web metrics and more. As the company explains, the new tool allows small businesses to analyze website metrics and maintain accurate and comprehensive business listings across the Web. For example, the dashboard enables social media monitoring and provides recommendations on new listing opportunities, including on Yelp, Yahoo and others.
 
Berlin-based Orderbird Gets $3.5M For Its iOS-Based Restaurant Ordering Solution Top
orderbird logoAs NFC continues to see growing adoption, we are still noticing more mobile payment solutions that don't use the technology picking up traction -- and funding: one of the latest comes from Germany, where a Berlin-based company called Orderbird has picked up a €2.7 million ($3.5 million) round for a service that lets restaurants use iOS devices to take customer food orders, send them to the kitchen and act as a "cash register" to process the payments at the end. The round was led by Alstin, a holding company headed by German financier Carsten Maschmeyer, who invested €2.4 million, with another €300,000 coming from angels and existing strategic investors backing Orderbird. (They include Lars Kamp, Carlo Kölzer and Tom Köhl.) The company has raised €3.2 million ($4.2 million) since opening for business in February 2011.
 
Jive Debuts New App Integrations, Universal Web Access For Social Network For Businesses Top
jive-1Social enterprise company Jive is debuting a number of new features for its social network for businesses today. The company is also announcing its Try Jive, a free 30-day trial for customers. Jive is one of the giants on the social enterprise space. Modeled to offer Facebook-like features to enterprises, Jive's software combines computing with social collaboration to offer fully-featured, internal social networks for businesses. Its suite of applications help businesses collaborate on a variety of tasks, including holding discussions, communication, sharing documents, blogging, running polls, social networking features and more.
 
The Weather Channel's Revamped Website Goes Social, Tells You When It Will Rain Top
Screen shot 2012-05-02 at 8.13.39 AMToday, The Weather Channel celebrates its 30th birthday. It will officially feel old at concerts and hot new night clubs. To mark the occasion, the company has revamped their website, weather.com, to keep up with the times. Weather is a very information-based vertical — there isn't a whole lot one can do to spruce it up. But TWC is looking to personalize the experience as much as possible. That said, you'll notice the redesign as soon as you visit the site.
 
Russian Classified Giant's $75M From Accel Shows It's 1999 In Emerging Economies Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-02 at 13.10.45Avito.ru, the biggest online classified ads site in Russia, has secured a fresh $75 million round of funding from Accel Partners' London office. Founded in 2008, Avito has so far landed $101 million from Accel, Baring Vostok Private Equity, Kinnevik, and Northzone. The capital will be used for expansion and hiring. Russia's classifieds ads business has plenty of room for growth because - guess what, kids - it's basically 1999 out there in Russia. And this large emerging market is playing through all those businesses models we know and love from back in the good 'ol days. Expect more of this.
 
DataSift Raises $7.2M For Powerful Social Data Analysis And Business Intelligence Platform Top
datasiftDataSift, a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources, has raised $7.2 million in a follow-on Series A round from existing investors GRP Partners and IA Ventures. This brings DataSift's total funding to $15 million. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook, YouTube, blogs, forums and online message boards. But what makes DataSift special is that it can sort through billions of social interactions then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative.
 
It's Finally Here: Spotify Launches Its Long-Awaited iPad App Top
Login screen with frame smallerToday, Spotify is releasing its long-awaited iPad app -- finally giving Apple tablet users, who also have a Spotify Premium (paid) subscription, a native route to accessing its 17-million song catalog. It will be worth seeing whether pent-up demand for the app will translate into a rush of downloads and usage, in the same way that Spotify saw around its (also long-awaited) U.S. launch last year. On the back of that, the U.S. has become Spotify's fastest-growing market, with the company projected to make $889 million in revenues this year on a global user base of 13 million people and counting.
 
Flattr Finally Lands Big Dailymotion Deal, But Its Business Model Still Sucks Top
Dailymotion video page with Flattr buttonFlattr, a social micro-payments platform which we've likened to a "Like button with cash" is to partner with the second biggest video site on the Web, Dailymotion. The distribution deal is targeted at Dailymotion's key content creators in its Motionmakers category. A cynic might call this a mere test of the platform to see if it can be rolled out across the site more widely. But both parties insist this is a card-carrying 'deal'. Suffice it to say Flattr has been crying out for a big distribution partner and yearned after one for the last two years. But TechCrunch remains skeptical that even this deal will lift the startup out of the early adopter crowd into the mainstream as there remain significant issues with its business model. Then again, at least they now get a real stress test.
 
Birst Lands $26M From Sequoia, Hummer Winblad To Bring Big Data Analytics To The Masses Top
Screen shot 2012-05-01 at 10.27.22 PMBirst, a San Francisco-based startup that offers on-demand business intelligence and analytics solutions for companies big and small, has raised $26 million in series D financing, led by Sequoia Capital. Existing investors, including Hummer Winblad and DAG Ventures, also participated in the round, bringing Birst's total funding to $46 million.
 
European VC Connect Ventures Launches With $22M Fund. Secret Sales Gets The First Helping: $487K Top
Connect Ventures logoMake way for another VC firm in Europe: Today sees the launch of Connect Ventures, a new London based fund that will focus on seed and Series A stages in European tech companies. It's kicking off with a €16 million ($22 million) fund, which will be dispersed in investments of between €250,000 and €1.25 million ($330k-$1.7m). Led by co-founders Pietro Bezza and Bill Earner, Connect Ventures will be focused on early stage companies in the consumer web, digital media, e-commerce, entertainment and gaming sectors. The first recipient of money from the fund is the London-based private sales site SecretSales, which is getting a £300,000 ($487,000) investment on top of the £6.3 million ($10.2 million) round that it got in February from a consortium of investors that included Doughty Hanson, Pantech Ventures and others.
 
Bing Strips Down Results Page To Make Google Look Like "Search Overload" Top
Mr. Clean Bing centeredWhile Google keeps cramming its search results pages full of tools and social content, today Bing confirmed with me the full roll out a redesigned search results page that completely clears the left sidebar, and replaces the tabbed header with a cleaner set of links. Bing's Facebook integration is also more subtle now, instead of plastering names and faces beneath Liked results. This more relaxing, dare I say zen, design gives Google a more claustrophobic and exhausting feel by comparison. Microsoft seems to have realized that if it can't match Google's algorithmic prowess, it could win with sleek design that doesn't bombard you with a thousand options. Here's how the designs of two search engines compare...
 
Yuri Milner, Dave Morin, SV Angel, CrunchFund And More Hook Up Pair With $4.2M Top
Screen Shot 2012-05-01 at 11.05.16 PMFor a social network that's, for lack of a better term, monogamous, social network for couples Pair has just raised funding from so many high-profile investors I'm having trouble picking who to include in this headline, and seriously running out of room. Investors in the company's recent $4.2 million seed round include Ashton Kutcher's A-Grade Ventures, Dave Morin, Paul Buchheit, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Lerer Ventures, Michael Birch, Sam Altman, CrunchFund, Tencent, Yuri Milner, Betaworks, Alexis Ohanian, Garry Tan, Harjeet Taggar, Gary Vaynerchuk, Brandee Barker, Brian Pokorny, Elad Gil, and Susan Wu. This sounds like it would be an amazing dinner party.
 

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