Wednesday, December 29, 2010

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Actually, Groupon Already Closed Half Of That Billion Dollar Round Top
Yesterday we reported that fast growing ecommerce startup Groupon was in the process of raising nearly $1 billion in new venture capital at a $4.75 billion valuation . “The deal should be closed in a few weeks,” we heard from a source. And in fact the deal hasn’t closed yet – at least, not all of it. But the company has raised a healthy half billion dollars in new venture money at that valuation in the last couple of weeks. Documents signed, checks cashed, the whole nine yards. Now they’re talking to other investors about filling out the round. So who invested? Digital Sky Technologies , the lead in the last round , took a big chunk of the round, we’ve heard from multiple sources. And new investors Fidelity and Morgan Stanley have jumped in as well. As we suspected, the large majority of the money already raised is being used to cash out founders and execs, say new sources. More as this develops. We’ve reached out to DST and Groupon for comment. No response yet from DST. Groupon declined to comment. CrunchBase Information Groupon Information provided by CrunchBase
 
This Year, Apple Has Two Fangs To Suck The Blood Out Of CES: iPad 2 And Verizon iPhone Top
Every year, it seems the buzz starts building around now for CES, the giant consumer electronics expo in Las Vegas. And every year at CES, much of the buzz seems to be around the one company that isn’t there — perhaps the most important consumer electronics company these days: Apple. And this year will be no different. Except that this year, the CES buzz-kill may be more intensified as there are not one, but two key Apple products expected to be announced shortly after the expo: the iPad 2 and the Verizon iPhone. With just about a week to go until CES, the Apple rumor mill is beginning to ignite. Today alone, we have stories of Apple winding down iPad 1 production to get ready to ramp up for iPad 2. And then there’s this BusinessWeek article ( once again ) announcing the impending launch of an iPhone that will work on Verizon’s network for the first time. More specifically, here’s how AppleInsider phrases the iPad production story: According to a new report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of Concord Equity Research, Apple has shifted iPad production from an estimated 2.1 million units in November to just 1.6 million in December in order to prepare for the launch of revised new tablet, expected to be announced in January. And here’s what BusinessWeek has to say about the Verizon iPhone: Very soon, maybe by Valentine’s Day, Apple will likely host one of its splashy product introductions to announce a new version of the iPhone that works on Verizon’s network. In other words, if these reports are to be believed, Apple will likely be holding either one (massive) event in January to unveil both products. Or they’ll have two separate events in January for each different product. Neither event, obviously, would be CES. And so the buzz surrounding all the tablets and mobile devices that will be shown at CES will likely once again be overshadowed by the lingering promise of new products by Apple. It used to be that Apple screwed CES by announcing such products a few weeks later at Macworld. But now they go it alone, overshadowing the conference dedicated to them as well. The only real question is if Apple would actually unveil both the Verizon iPhone and the iPad 2 at the same event — or even in the same month? Both are tent pole-worthy announcements in their own right. The iPad 2 is bigger news than the Verizon iPhone, which is expected to simply be a current-generation iPhone 4 with CDMA-insides. But there are millions of people waiting for a Verizon iPhone, and Apple would undoubtedly want to use a stage to announce that the device is finally available on the biggest network in the United States. And most accounts have such an announcement taking place in January. The iPad 2 announcement would likely be a bigger one because it would also be a state of the union for Apple’s newest billion-dollar revenue stream, and supposed future of computing, and the future of iOS, etc. Apple announced the first iPad at an event last January, but didn’t actually release it until April. So while some, like AppleInsider, are betting on a January unveiling, Apple could conceivably wait until the Spring to show off iPad 2, closer to when it’s ready to ship. Of course, the talk of iPad 2 production already ramping up may suggest that they would release the device sooner. And spacing it 6 months apart from the traditional iPhone unveiling date does make some sense. And the other hot rumor is that the iPad 2 will come in three flavors : WiFi, GSM, and CDMA. That latter, obviously, would be an iPad that is Verizon-compatible. Apple could conceivably tie the two announcements together that way. I can see it now: “oh, and one more thing, the iPad isn’t the only device coming to Verizon…” But what about that other Apple event that was supposed to take place in early 2011? You know, the one to show off the new  News Corp.-created iPad newspaper ? Does that also fit into a iPad 2 unveiling? And what about rumored MacBook Pro and iMac upgrades? Oh, and what about the Mac App Store, which is set to  launch on January 6 ? Funny timing, that’s the first day of CES. [photo: flickr/ outcast104 ] CrunchBase Information iPad iPhone 4 Verizon Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Yext Organizes The Anti-Google Local Advertising Alliance (Screenshots) Top
Google, as you may have heard, is making a big push into local advertising. It is currently offering $100 million in AdWords credits to new small businesses that sign up and promotes Google Places results for all local searches. Quite frankly, this is scaring the shit out of competitors like Citysearch, Yellowbook, SuperPages, WhitePages, and Yelp. They all rely on Google search results for people to find a good portion of their listings, and if Google displaces them collectively for local business listings, their businesses will be destroyed. In local, Google is already a big snowball getting bigger and bigger. So how do they fight back? They enter into an anti-Google alliance, of course. The company organizing this alliance is Yext , a New York City startup which specializes in pay-per-call advertising for local businesses and dashboards to help them manage their reputations and listings online. On Monday, it will launch a new feature called “Tags” which will let small businesses highlight their names with a little tag and customizable message across about a dozen local listings sites. Launch partners for this “Tag Alliance” (I like my name better) will include MapQuest, Citysearch, Yellowbook, Local.com, SuperPages, White Pages, MerchantCircle, and Topix, with more to come. If these tags sound familiar, it is because Google also offers similar sponsored tags to small businesses for $25 a month. Whenever a local business advertising with tags comes up in an organic search result or on Google Maps, a yellow tag with a line of text appears beneath its listing to help it stand out. Now, Yext is offering basically the same product across all the other major local search and listings sites on the Web for $99 a month per business location. Yext will end up splitting that 50/50 with its partners where the tags will appear. But from one dashboard (see first screenshot below), small businesses will be able to create tags, activate them across all the partner sites, and change them or take them down at will. And this is just the first step. Since launching its reputation management system , Yext Rep, last May at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, the company has signed up 30,000 local businesses for the free product with no marketing. Tags will become a new tab/feature on Yext. Eventually, businesses should be able to update their tags not just on Yext but from any of the partner sites, and with one stroke update all of their tags universally across all the partner sites. And while it is starting with tags, Yext hopes to convince its partners to share more data and allow businesses to change their listing information or upload new photos in one place and see the changes replicated everywhere else. Below is the Yext Tags dashboard page and a couple examples of what the tags look like on SuperPages and MapQuest: CrunchBase Information Yext Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Thanks In Part To The Northeast Blizzard, Online Holiday Spending Surges To Record $30.8 Billion Top
Online holiday spending continues to set records. comScore is reporting that retail e-commerce spending in the U.S. for the first 56 days of the November to December 2010 holiday season has reached a record $30.81 billion, which is an 13 percent increase versus the same period last year. The past week before Christmas saw $2.45 billion in spending, an increase of 17 percent versus the corresponding week last year. As expected , comScore reports that the massive snow storm that hit the Northeast region of the U.S. over the weekend helped push post-Christmas spending to record levels. The company also reports that in terms of specific products, Computer Hardware ranked as the top growing category for the holiday season with a 23 percent increase versus last year. Interestingly, handheld devices (such as iPads and e-readers) and laptop computers have driven much of the growth in this sector. Other areas showed healthy growth as well. Books & Magazines ranked second with 22 percent growth, followed by Consumer Electronics (up 21 percent), Computer Software excluding PC Games (up 20 percent) and Toys (up 16 percent). Other categories in the top ten included Jewelry & Watches (up 11 percent) and Apparel & Accessories (up 8 percent). Record e-commerce spending this holiday season has been written in the cards for some time now. Over the past few weeks, online retailers have seen fairly strong results, with total sales up 12 percent to over $28 billion so far. And there’s still more spending to do, as many retailers are advertising New Years sales as well. Total sales for the full holiday season (through New Years) are expected to reach $32.4 billion this year, up 11 percent. I wouldn’t be surprised if consumers surpass this number. CrunchBase Information comScore Information provided by CrunchBase
 
TextualAds Raises $650K For Facebook-Fueled, Targeted SMS Campaigns Top
Facebook holds a trove of information about its hundreds of millions of users, and many of them are more than happy to hand over some of that data — like a list of their personal interests — so that they can connect with their favorite companies or play a new game.  Thing is, despite the targeting opportunities afforded by this data, many businesses have still failed to take advantage of it. TextualAds is a firm that’s changing that for text messaging campaigns, by allowing businesses and large brands to push highly targeted SMS messages to their customers. The service launched in September , and today it’s announcing that it’s closed a $650K seed round. The round’s investors include Dave McClure (500 Startups), Peter Boboff & Chris Redlitz (Transmedia Capital), Marcus Segal (Zynga), Shawn Simpson (former Googler), and Erik Moore. TextualAds currently offers a signup application that SMBs can install on their Facebook Pages, prompting users to enter their zip code, age, gender, and telephone number. Once businesses have collected this data, they can use the TextualAds platform to target text message campaigns at specific buckets of users (say, women over the age of 30). Text messages are obviously a very powerful channel for businesses and advertisers, and the ability to target them makes them even more appealing. So far TextualAds has 1,200 businesses using it, but there’s much more to come. In the next month, TextualAds will be launching the 2.0 release of its product, and it’s got several major household brands lined up as clients. The new version of the TextualAds application will feature a one-click signup — the service will better make use of Facebook’s platform and collect the user’s gender, age, and other content from their Facebook profile as opposed to making them enter it manually. In addition to the streamlined form, TextualAds will be giving clients access to a sophisticated analytics dashboard, which will include data on users’ Facebook Likes, wall posts, and other content that many companies haven’t taken advantage of yet. The service will charge based on the amount of customization companies need, and large clients are paying six figures a year for whitelabeled versions of the product. There are obviously other solutions for targeted text messages (we’ve covered Adenyo before) but TextualAds founder Craig Davis says that he hasn’t seen any other services tap into Facebook’s wealth of data. CrunchBase Information TextualAds Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Hitwise: Facebook Overtakes Google To Become Most Visited Website In 2010 Top
According to Hitwise data released today , Facebook.com was the top visited website in the US in 2010, taking up 8.93% of site visits between January and November 2010. Google.com came in second at 7.19%, Yahoo Mail is third with 3.52% and Yahoo.com is fourth at 3.30%. YouTube came in fifth at 2.65 %. While Hitwise came to the same conclusion back in March , this is the first time Facebook has been named most visited site of the year (crowding out last year’s winner Google). Comscore also shows Facebook.com passing Google.com in visits in November but all Google sites as still having more. According to Hitwise, visits to Google properties combined cover 9.85% of all site visits, making Google a formidable opponent. “Facebook” also ranked #1 for most searched term of the year directly in front of the hilarious “Facebook login” at #2. You can read the full results here. CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Targets Small Businesses With $100 Million Worth Of AdWords Credits Top
Google is going after local businesses in a big way. It is promoting Google Places any time someone does a local search, it tried to buy Groupon for $6 billion, and it put star exec Marissa Mayer in charge of local products . Since the middle of December, it’s been running a $100 million marketing promotion aimed at small and medium-sized businesses to try to get them to sign up for AdWords. Small businesses that sign up by December 31 have until mid-February to spend $100 on AdWords, after which they will be given another $100 credit. The promotion is good for “the first one million businesses only.” If one million businesses sign up and spend that $100 the total value of the campaign will be $100 million. Of course, the campaign won’t really cost Google anything. It is spending $100 to acquire these small local business as new customers. It has offered similar promotions in the past. But Google’s efforts go beyond offering these credits. In fact, Google wants to make it so easy for small businesses to get on board, that it even offers a phone number to call up and a representative will help them set up their first campaign. This is a very different approach than the automated self-serve model Google was built on, but that is because local businesses need more hand-holding when it comes to online marketing. As Greg Sterling pointed out when the campaign kicked off in mid-December: What we're seeing at Google is a significant commitment to the local market and a related internal cultural shift. Google needs to find its next leg of growth and local (which is intimately tied with mobile) is where it is putting a lot of its fire power. CrunchBase Information Google AdWords Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Lookout Identifies Advanced Android Trojan (But You're Probably Safe) Top
The future of computing is mobile, and, unfortunately, the future of malware will probably lie there too. Well-funded mobile security startup Lookout has just posted a blog entry detailing what it calls “the most sophisticated Android malware to date”: a Trojan that’s being “grafted” onto legitimate applications. Fortunately, the odds of you being affected are quite low. The Trojan in question has only been seen on third-party Android app marketplaces in China, which aren’t accessible without turning on “Unknown Sources” from Android’s settings menu (the vast majority of users only download applications via the official Android Market). And the infected applications request access to far more of the user’s data than they normally would (users have to approve these requests before installing an app), which can tip users off that something is amiss. But, if you’re unlucky enough to have cleared those hurdles, here are some of the details on what Lookout believes the Trojan is capable of: Though we have seen Geinimi communicate with a live server and transmit device data, we have yet to observe a fully operational control server sending commands back to the Trojan. Our analysis of Geinimi's code is ongoing but we have evidence of the following capabilities: Send location coordinates (fine location) Send device identifiers (IMEI and IMSI) Download and prompt the user to install an app Prompt the user to uninstall an app Enumerate and send a list of installed apps to the server Lookout writes that this is more sophisticated than previously discovered malware because it attempts to hide what it’s doing through encryption and bytecode obfuscation. It also says that this is the first Android malware that could potentially be used to create a botnet, though it hasn’t seen any instances of a server actually communicating with the Trojan yet: Geinimi is also the first Android malware in the wild that displays botnet-like capabilities. Once the malware is installed on a user's phone, it has the potential to receive commands from a remote server that allow the owner of that server to control the phone. One other thing to note: Lookout is in the business of mobile phone security — it offers applications for Android, BlackBerry, and Windows mobile — so it obviously stands to benefit from exposing these exploits. CrunchBase Information Android Lookout Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Next New Networks Raises $1 Million Amid YouTube Acquisition Rumors Top
While Google’s YouTube is reportedly in talks to buy Web content producer Next New Networks , the New York-based startup has just raised $1 million in debt financing. According to this SEC filing, the fledgling company is raising a round totaling $1.2 million. Listed as investors are Ross Levinsohn from Fuse Capital, Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, Goldman Sachs and Saban Capital Group. The potential acquisition of NNN, which also manages a network of independent filmmakers alongside producing its own channels, would give YouTube its first step into producing Web videos in-house. This would be not only a shot in the arm for the video sharing site proper – upping its ability to squeeze more advertising dollars out of the popular service – but also for Google TV. As for now, those are just rumors. The funding round, though, is fact. CrunchBase Information Next New Networks Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Back off SEC: Let's Put the "Risk" of Secondary Markets in Perspective Top
Back in early 2009, I was concerned about the development of private stock secondary market exchanges. I was concerned that it would affect retention of top executives if people were able to cash out before an IPO too easily. I worried companies wouldn’t be careful enough about who they would allow to own chunks of them. I thought it would be just a  band-aid for a larger industry problem of companies not wanting to go public early and often. And in the wake of the financial meltdown, I was concerned about people getting burned who were buying the shares on a loosely regulated market. We’ve seen shades of all of these, but mostly my fears were allayed once we saw these markets in practice. Why? Because it was clear these aren’t shadow public markets. They simply made secondary trading that already existed more efficient. Securities laws restrict the trading to wealthy individuals and accredited investors, and the companies have placed even more restrictions on trades, whether it’s not approving certain trades (they have the right of first refusal on transactions) or restricting the trading to very early employees or restricting trades to only former employees. It could have devolved into a late 1990s-like frenzy of buying and selling unregulated shares, as under-pressure VCs seek to lock in returns and employees strive to exit without the IPO wait. But, so far, it hasn’t. Listen up, because you don’t hear me say this a lot: I underestimated the Valley ecosystem and if the SEC’s inquiries are part of a larger push to regulate these markets, they are too. The companies tapping these secondary markets clearly had the same fears and rather than going for the short term dollars, they have been pretty judicious in how they are using this new tool. So what about those people with more than one million dollars in liquid assets who are allowed to buy shares? Don’t the rich people deserve disclosure too? At the cost of a company’s right to stay private, I don’t think so. If you want a piece of Facebook, but don’t have the connections to invest as an angel or VC, the skill to get hired there and get employee shares or the patience to wait until it goes public, well, there’s a catch as with anything else in life. You have to do it on the company’s terms. Those terms frequently require you get approved as a buyer first, and do not require the company to give you public-company-like details of its business. If you don’t like those terms, well then, wait for the company to go public. Let’s put what’s going on in secondary markets in perspective: The largest exchange, SecondMarket , is doing about $400 million in trades a year. That’s a lot. But not compared to how much venture capital is invested in private companies annually, between $15 billion and $20 billion. And it’s nothing compared to how many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of paper value is tied up in illiquid private company stocks. There’s a cap on how much these markets can grow because of all the restrictions on buying and selling. It could one day get out of control, but it’s nowhere close now. Secondary exchanges aren’t the same thing as the Pink Sheets . Put another way, these companies the SEC has been looking into aren’t trading on secondary exchanges because they can’t go public they are trading there because they don’t want to go public yet. There’s a big difference. We may not know much about their P&L sheets, but we know how popular their services are, we know quite a lot about their management teams, we have solid intelligence into their top line revenues and we know that they have professional boards of directors including venture capitalists who have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. They are covered by press and analysts more closely than many publicly traded companies. That’s because companies like Zynga, Facebook and LinkedIn are already larger than most the Internet and technology companies that have been filing to go public in the last year. Unless someone is engaging in total fraud– in which case, their VCs are in a lot more trouble than secondary buyers would be– it’s hard to imagine these companies are worthless as investments, and it’s hard to imagine the market values would plummet too far once broader markets were able to invest. At $40 billion to $50 billion range, Facebook is valued at about the same amount as Tencent, the largest Web company in China. Given the growth Facebook is seeing even after passing Yahoo as the largest Web site in the world, it’s priced for perfection and hardly a bargain, but the valuation isn’t outrageously out of line either. That means, the question over disclosure is really about how nosebleed the valuation can reasonably get as more people try to squeeze into these stocks and can’t know all the underlying information. But valuations of high-growth companies have never been based solely on facts. They are based on promise, growth projections and the demand to invest. That’s less exaggerated among public-traded companies, but still a big factor. For example, are Yahoo’s non-Asian assets actually  worthless right now? Of course not. It’s one of the largest properties on the Web and one of the largest sellers of online advertising in the world. But the market values them at practically nothing, because of a lack of faith in management and the company’s promise and growth going forward. On the flip side, the public had plenty of numbers for publicly-traded Internet companies in the late 1990s, and that didn’t keep valuations grounded. Anyone who thinks more numbers will make Facebook’s valuation fall is fooling themselves about how rational the American investor is. People keep saying companies like Facebook and Zynga are “essentially” public companies, but that “essentially” is a pretty big qualifier. They are like public companies in that they have methods for tapping investors for large amounts of cash to grow the business and some shareholders have the ability to sell some of their shares. But they are not like public companies in that the vast majority of the public can not buy their shares. That’s an important distinction where the Securities & Exchange Commission comes in . When the public can own something, the government’s duty is to protect that public citizen. If a company wants the full value of a liquid exchange where people can buy and sell stocks at will, and it can use a stock currency or public debt to fuel more growth? Yes, it has to play by all the rules that includes. But when it is just opening up trades to a slightly wider pool of rich industry insiders, any increased burden for disclosure and reporting should be similarly moderate. At the end of the day these are still private companies, and they deserve to have the benefits of being private. It’s a lot like the debate the industry had back in the early 2000s when the Mercury News led a Freedom of Information crusade that would require any venture firm that accepted public pension fund money to divulge underlying portfolio information. As a reporter, I’d love to see the venture world’s dirty laundry splayed in front of me, but I don’t believe that it is my right. It’s hard to argue it was really paramount to the public’s interest, when no bombshells resulted, these allocations were a tiny part of public endowments and, as it would turn out, the least of those endowments’ problems. Still, even if the intentions were good, guess what wound up happening? Every top venture firm just kicked out state pension funds as LPs, ultimately hurting the pension-holders. The same thing will happen here if the SEC starts getting too in-everyone’s-face about secondary markets. Companies that are driving the bulk of the deals on secondary markets will just wait to go public or do private deals with firms like Elevation, Andreessen Horowitz, DST and Naspers, leaving everyone else to wait for the IPO. I still think there are some cultural dangers to secondary exchanges that we haven’t seen the full ramifications of yet . But there is a clear downside for the companies and the Valley ecosystem if these secondary exchanges fall under too much government scrutiny, and I just don’t see that much upside. Consider why these companies take longer to go public in the first place– the very thing that created the market demand for secondary markets: It was well-meaning changes in regulations after the late 1990s that hurt smaller companies’ ability to go public, dampened entrepreneurs’ enthusiasm to do so and ushered in a raft of unintended consequences. The government has never understood how the Valley’s economic engine works. That’s OK. We like it that way. We don’t ask for bailouts, and there have been few cases of fraud among technology’s venture backed, pre-IPO elite. In fact, the ones that come to mind– like Enron and Mercury Interactive– were perpetrated by publicly-traded  companies. So much for transparency protecting everyone. As is, the SEC is understaffed and underfunded to adequately police Wall Street. My advice to the SEC: Just stay out of the system until companies start crossing clear lines like having an excess of 500 outside-the-company shareholders. My advice to companies: Keep using the secondary markets judiciously so you don’t become a pet Congressional cause. And my advice to people buying and selling on the secondary markets? Like anything else in this country, buyer beware.
 
More Lawsuits In The Land Of Electronics: Sony Sues LG Over Patent Spat Top
In the electronics industry, it often seems like everyone is pretty much suing everyone over something, somewhere. This morning, I caught that Sony Corporation has apparently filed suit against LG Electronics (right before CES , no less). LG Electronics is the division of the LG conglomerate that markets and distributes the group’s home entertainment devices (TVs, Blu-ray disc players, DVD recorders and whatnot) as well as its mobile phones and home appliances, among other products. For the record, LG is the world’s third largest handset maker after leader Nokia and Samsung, with an aspiration to become number two by 2012. I haven’t yet been able to pin down what the lawsuit is about, but from what I can gather, Sony is targeting two LG subsidiaries based in the United States, namely LG Electronics Mobilecomm U.S.A. Inc. and LG Electronics U.S.A. Inc. For your background: LG Electronics Mobilecomm USA does business as LG Mobile Phones and is the U.S. division that markets the company’s mobile phones, portable wireless-enabled PCs, and related accessories. The company also provides sales and marketing support in North America for parent organization LG Electronics. From what I can tell at the time of writing, it doesn’t concern a patent infringement suit ( see update below ), as is usually the case when electronics companies turn to the courts, but I haven’t been able to retrieve what it is about. The lawsuit was filed on December 28, 2010 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. We’ll update as soon as we get more information. Update: Benzinga and Bloomberg are reporting that Sony is attempting to block LG’s mobile phones from entering the United States, on the basis that phones such as LG’s the Lotus Elite, Neon, Remarq, Rumor 2 and Xenon use Sony technology. Sony is also seeking LG to stop selling its Blu-Ray DVD player for the same reason. CrunchBase Information LG Sony Information provided by CrunchBase
 
The Lumimask: A Mask That Wakes You As Gently As Mother Nature Top
There are plenty of clocks that “light” the room slowly, flooding your optic nerves with crisp morning luminosity in order to wake you the way Madre Natura wanted us to. But until now there’s never been a mask that will wake you with the same soothing change in luminosity. This device, called the Lumimask, is currently on Kickstarter and $50 gets you a pre-order unit while $100 gets you the device and a pair of pajamas (pre-washed). If it doesn’t get funded it doesn’t get made, so this guy is sending out his heartfelt entreaty to you, the Internet, in hopes that someone out there will help him.
 
Outsourcing Platform Freelancer.com Hits 2M Users – Guess Where Most Are Based? Top
Outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.com (formerly known as GetAFreelancer ) has hit a milestone: 2 million professionals have registered for its service to date. That’s up from 1 million in October 2009. The Sydney, Australia-based startup says the 2 million users (which I seriously doubt are all active) hail from 240 countries. The largest country represented is the United States, with over 21% of users. Second to the U.S. is India, with 19%. Following the top 3 countries, in order, is the UK, Pakistan, Canada, the Philippines, China, Bangladesh, Romania and Australia. Freelancer.com indicates that over 890,000 projects have been posted on the marketplace so far, from projects as simple as designing a website (~$200) or logo design (~$30) to stuff like “Design of a Fully Functional Dune Buggy” ($268) and “Composition of a Rap Song to help Chinese Students Learn English” ($102). The company says some of its most prolific users are making hundreds of thousands of dollars thanks to its platform. Earlier this year, Freelancer.com acquired virtual content marketplace Freemarket.com. And just last week, they purchased LimeExchange , adding another 80,000 freelancers from around the world to its userbase. CrunchBase Information Freelancer Information provided by CrunchBase
 
eBay's Gross Mobile Sales For The Holiday Season Up 166 Percent To $230 Million Top
eBay’s mobile sales continued to grow during the holiday shopping season, according to a release issued by the company today. eBay is reporting that gross merchandise value (also known as GMV, the total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through eBay) was up 166 percent to $230 million from Nov. 25 to Dec. 25 from the same period last year. In the U.S., sales from eBay’s mobile apps grew 134 percent over the same period last year, generating nearly $100 million in GMV. In terms of yearly stats, eBay says that designer handbags, diamond jewelry and Rolex watches topped this year's most expensive holiday purchases. In the U.S., the top five categories ranked by the number of items sold through eBay's mobile apps for the year were: clothing shoes & accessories; cell phones & PDAs; collectibles; jewelry & watches; and toys & hobbies. In terms of gadgets, the consumer electronics category saw its peak in mobile sales after the release of the iPad and iPhone 4. In the U.S., cars & trucks ranked in the top five categories in every state except Hawaii, and auto parts was a top five category in all 50 states. Other categories that were shopped through eBay mobile in nearly every state were clothing & accessories (49 states) and sporting goods (47 states). It’s no secret that eBay has been making a big push to launch and promote its new mobile offerings in time for the holiday season. And as more consumers look to their mobile phones as a way to search and shop for products, eBay is gaining more traffic to its apps. eBay's primary iPhone app has seen over 13 million downloads , and its suite of apps have been downloaded 30 million times. CrunchBase Information eBay Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Flight And Hotel Price Tracking Startup Yapta Is Raising A $6.4 Million Round Top
Yapta , which helps travelers book airline tickets ( and hotel rooms ) as cheaply as possible , has raised close to $3.5 million of a $6.4 million financing round, an SEC filing reveals. According to the information we’ve gathered through CrunchBase, the round will bring the company’s total amount of funding to $14.4 million . Yapta lets travelers track fares from most of the major domestic and international airlines, allowing users to select flights to follow, and then be alerted when the price fluctuates. If the price declines after you purchase your ticket, Yapta will help you get a refund or credit from airlines that have lowest guaranteed fare policies. The service was initially launched as a browser add-on in May 2007, morphed into a full-fledged website a year later and started tracking hotel prices in addition to flight fares in 2009. Yapta has previously raised funding from Bay Partners , First Round Capital , Swiftsure Capital , and Voyager Capital , among others. CrunchBase Information Yapta Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Skype Reveals A Bug In Its Windows Client Was What Crashed Its System Top
After suffering a massive outage last week, Skype CIO Lars Rabbe has now detailed what went wrong. One of the root causes? A bug in the Skype for Windows client (version 5.0.0152). Rabbe kicks off by explaining that a cluster of support servers responsible for offline instant messaging became overheated on Wednesday, December 22. A number of Skype clients subsequently started receiving delayed responses from said overloaded servers, which weren’t properly processed by the Windows client in question. This ultimately caused the affected version to malfunction. Initially, users of Skype’s newer and older Windows software, as well as those using the service on Mac, iPhone and their television sets, were unaffected. Nevertheless, the whole system collapsed as the faulty version of the Windows client, 5.0.0.152, is by far the most popular – Rabbe says 50% of all Skype users globally were running it, and the crashes caused approximately 40% of those clients to fail. The clients included roughly a third of all publicly available supernodes, which also failed as a result of this issue. From the blog post: A supernode is important to the P2P network because it takes on additional responsibilities compared to regular nodes, acting like a directory, supporting other Skype clients and establishing connections between them by creating local clusters of several hundred peer nodes per each supernode. Once a supernode has failed, even when restarted, it takes some time to become available as a resource to the P2P network again. As a result, the P2P network was left with 25–30% fewer supernodes than normal. This caused a disproportionate load on the remaining available supernodes. Rabbe goes on to explain a lot of people who experienced crashing Windows clients started rebooting the software, which caused a huge increase in the load on Skype’s P2P cloud network. He adds that traffic to the supernodes was about 100 times what would normally be expected at the time of day the failure occurred. A perfect storm in the P2P clouds, so to speak. To learn how Skype supported the recovery of its supernode network, and what they’ll be doing to prevent this from happening again, I suggest you go read the full blog post . And major kudos to the company for being so prolific in explaining what happened. CrunchBase Information Skype Information provided by CrunchBase
 
SCVNGR To Hover Over Times Square This New Year's Eve Top
In a few nights, an estimated 1 million people are going to pack into New York’s Times Square for New Year’s Eve (brrr). And amidst all of the confetti, snow, and alcohol, they’re going to see a whole lot of ads, which is what Times Square does best. One of them represents a win for location-based mobile game SCVNGR : the service will be prominently featured on American Eagle’s Times Square billboard starting today and running through the new year. To mark the occasion, American Eagle will be offering New Years-themed challenges on SCVNGR (for example, entering what your resolution is for 2011). For each challenge that’s completed, American Eagle will be donating $5 to Big Brothers Big Sisters of America — and SCVNGR will be matching that donation. As people stand outside in the frigid cold waiting for the ball to drop, you can bet a good number of them are going to check out the app. Getting a feeling of Déjà vu? That’s probably because Foursquare actually had a very prominent placement on the same Times Square billboard back in August , again as an American Eagle promotion. CrunchBase Information SCVNGR Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Stealthy Mobile Games Startup Wild Needle Is Raising $3 Million In Series A Funding Top
An interesting startup called Wild Needle that will be entering the social mobile gaming space soon, is raising $3 million in funding, $2.5 million of which it has already secured, according to this SEC filing . Self-proclaimed to be in “super sneaky stealth mode”, the company, which was founded earlier this year and is based in Mountain View, boasts that its mission is to “stretch the boundaries of the mobile game experience farther than it’s ever gone before”. From the Wild Needle website: We’re working on some great ideas for the next generation of social games for mobile devices. After all, a mobile device is so much more than a portable game player. What if mobile games were thoughtful, immersive, and filled with unexpected delight? What if they made you laugh out loud? Wild Needle reveals little about its plans on how to do that, let alone the team that’s putting things together over there. Its website only mention that the team consists of a small group of entrepreneurs with experience at companies like Playdom, Microsoft, PayPal, and Adify. The SEC filing turns up three names: Playdom co-founder and chairman Rick Thompson is listed as an executive, as is (former?) VP of Platform Solutions for Adify, Heidi Carson . Listed as a director is Robert T. Coneybeer , co-founder of VC firm Shasta Ventures , so we’re assuming they led the financing round, if they aren’t the sole investor to date. We’ll be watching Wild Needle, and possibly waste lots of time playing their games, in 2011. CrunchBase Information Wild Needle Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Energy Literacy Platform: Track And Turn Off Household Appliances With Your Phone Top
Using the web to track power consumption at home is something several companies are working on at the moment (including Google ). Tokyo-based startup Sassor is developing a solution that offers two big selling points: their so-called Energy Literacy Platform (ELP) [English link] lets you track each household appliance individually and makes it possible to turn these devices off remotely, for example by pushing a button on your smartphone. The Energy Literacy Platform is based on the idea that by empowering consumers with a tool that informs them how much energy their appliances really use, they will start saving energy. The platform consists of three parts: ELP modules you place between your various power outlets and home appliances. The ELP receiver that harvests power consumption data to the server. A website or smartphone app that lets you track how much energy each appliance uses and even allows you to turn devices off remotely if needed. The modules change their color over time, from green to yellow and finally to red, as you approach the energy limit you previously set on the ELP website or app (see below). On the web, your energy consumption is visualized in more detail, helping you to track the exact amount of energy (and money) consumed by each device in real-time. What’s cool is that you can turn off things while on-the-go through the ELP website or the smartphone app, for example if you forgot to turn off the lights in your house. The Energy Literacy Platform Project has come out of Japanese seed acceleration program Open Network Lab (which we covered extensively here ).  Maker Sassor, run by a group of students from Keio University’s Graduate School of Media Design in Tokyo, expects to launch the platform in summer next year. CrunchBase Information Sassor Information provided by CrunchBase CrunchBase Information Open Network Lab Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Seeing Interactive And Weebly Partner, Offer White-Label Websites To Bolster Small Biz SEO Top
YCombinator-backed Seeing Interactive , which helps newspapers build and sell space in online ad directories and YC-backed Weebly , the service that lets you create your own drag and drop websites, have partnered up to give local newspapers even more options when selling local advertising to small and medium sized businesses. Seeing Interactive, which raised $1 million in June , used to direct businesses to Weebly when they needed to build websites to supplement Seeing Interactive’s SEO-optimized Marketplace directory pages. Seeing Interactive has now integrated Weebly into its backend and as of January 1st will allow its newspaper clients to offer advertisers the ability to manage their website and directory listings from the same dashboard. Newspapers can now sell the two services as a package, or separately. “Many of our end users–newspaper’s clients–have never used the internet past e-mail and Weebly makes it easy for them to have a premium website. We’re thrilled to be able to integrate with Weebly,” says CEO Lloyd Armbrust. Seeing Interactive has already done a test launch with several newspapers including the Norfolk Daily News , The Daily American in Somerset, (the confusingly named)  York News Times and Belo Corp’s The Press-Enterprise . You can see an example of a Weebly/Seeing Interactive site here and the power of the SI  81-point SEO audit and social media integration here. According to Armbrust, the new Weebly white-label website integration has made The Press Enterprise an extra $60,000 in the first three weeks of trial and Armbrust projects revenue of over $500,000 for the entire year. Here’s to saving newspapers, one search ranking at a time. CrunchBase Information Seeing Interactive Weebly Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Over A Year After Its Acquisition, Is Mint Still Fresh? Top
Here at TechCrunch, we’ve long been fans of personal finance site Mint , which won our first TechCrunch40 conference in 2007 and was acquired two years later by Intuit for an impressive $170 million. But things may not be going gangbusters at the company these days. We’ve learned that in the next month, three key employees from the original, pre-acquisition team will be leaving, including Director of Marketing Stewart Langille, lead designer Justin Maxwell, and head software engineer Daryl Puryear. One Mint insider estimated that around 40% or more of the pre-acquisition team has left since Intuit bought the company in September 2009, some of whom have left substantial amounts of unvested stock on the table. Most of the executive team remains, but many employees have gone on to work at or launch their own startups. Granted, it isn’t unusual for personnel to leave after an acquisition. Startups thrive on being nimble, and the umbrella of a large company and a new corporate infrastructure can slow things down. We’ve heard from one insider that Intuit has handled the acquisition quite well in terms of giving the company resources. The issue, it seems, has been in the execution — Mint just hasn’t pushed out many projects in the last year. The big ones were an Android application , a launch in Canada , and a ‘Goals’ feature that helps you budget your income so that you can save up for that vacation or big-screen TV. Those aren’t bad features, mind you, but they don’t seem too groundbreaking. “Momentum has slowed down,” is how one insider put it. It seems that some Mint users aren’t pleased with the way things are going, either. As a litmus test Mint polled its Facebook audience in November to ask what they thought of the post-acquisition Mint. Most responses have been negative, with numerous comments complaining of bugs and slow sync times between a user’s financial institutions and their Mint accounts. Reached for comment, a company spokesperson said that there is “definetly no glut of departures”, explaining that the team has grown much more than it’s shrunk, and attributing any “key shifts” to long-time Mint employees taking advantage of the hot job market. The spokesperson added that Mint has been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to support international growth, and will be increasing its presence by adding two new countries next year. The company also plans to launch an iPad application and other mobile apps. CrunchBase Information Mint.com Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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