Thursday, March 29, 2012

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FirstMark Capital Leads $7.5M Round In Social Shopping Startup Sneakpeeq Top
sneakpeeqSneakpeeq, a social shopping startup that debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt last year, has raised $7.5 Million in Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital with participation from existing investors Bain Capital Ventures and Metamorphic Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to over $10 million. The startup aims to replicate the experience of shopping for items in a retail store with a social twist. Similar to the way you flip over a price tag to look at the cost of at item at a store, Sneakpeeq doesn't tell you the price instantly when you visit a product's landing page. You click a "Peeq" button to find the price. The site features daily boutiques that offer discounts on clothes, shoes, home accessories and more from 1000-plus brands, from well-known names like Kate Spade and Puma to smaller designers and purveyors.
 
ShoeDazzle, Now 10M Members Strong, Expands To Offer Women's Clothing Top
sd_socialite2ShoeDazzle, the subscription service that sends out its own selection of women's shoe designs curated each month by celebrities and Hollywood stylists, has expanded its offerings to include women's clothing and lingerie. ShoeDazzle CEO Bill Strauss said in an interview (embedded above) that the expansion was inspired by the company's subscribers, who have been asking for clothing to match ShoeDazzle's shoes for months. ShoeDazzle, based in Santa Monica, Calif., was founded in 2009 and counts reality star Kim Kardashian as a co-founder and its "chief fashion stylist."
 
How Do You Go Global Against Clones And Competitors? Top
Picture_of_the_GlobeGoGlobal is Morten Lund's new venture. Earlier this month, Lund pitched GoGlobal live on stage at The London Web Summit. Despite a few people thinking it was a ruse, GoGlobal aims to be a platform to grow globally for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. Lund says wants to take three to four companies in to 40+ countries every quarter. Here is the problem I think he is looking to solve. As soon as an Internet startup shows signs of success, somewhere in the universe its business model is replicated with razor-sharp execution tactics. If the startup is under the radar, still, selling its products and services internationally is difficult without prior knowledge and business network.
 
Dell Gives Up On Selling Smartphones In The U.S. (For Now, Anyway) Top
dellgraveI'd wager that only a few of you will remember that Dell sold their own smartphones, and even fewer of you still have ever actually owned one. It should come as no surprise then that Dell, who entered the smartphone market less than two years ago, has announced that they have ceased sales of their last remaining smartphone lines: the Android-powered Venue and the Venue Pro Windows Phone. With those product lines getting the axe, Dell has (for now) put an end to their struggling smartphone business here in the States.
 
Nielsen: As U.S. Nears Smartphone Majority, It's A Two-Horse Race Between Android and Apple's iOS Top
horsesNew numbers out from Nielsen today point to just how close the U.S. is to having more smartphone than feature phone users: the proportion that currently owns a smartphone, as of February 2012, is 49.7 percent, say the analysts, a big leap on the 36 percent who owned smartphones a year ago. What's increasingly clear in that growth is that, at least in the U.S., no other platform is proving to be a contender against Apple and Google's Android. Currently, Android-based smartphones account for 48 percent of all smartphones owned in the U.S., while Apple's different versions of the iPhone account for 32 percent. Both of those shares have grown: in September 2011, Nielsen said that Android's share was 40 percent and Apple's 28 percent.
 
Millennial Media Shares Pop 100 Percent In Early Trading; Valued At Nearly $2 Billion Top
screen-shot-2012-01-05-at-5-41-34-pm-11-1Mobile ad network Millennial Media just debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MM," and saw shares pop 97 percent in the first trade of $25. The company initially priced its IPO at $13 per share last night, after increasing the range on Tuesday. At $25 per share, Millennial's valuation jumps to nearly $2 billion. Trading reached as high as $27.90 in early trading. Millennial which filed its original S-1 in early January, raised over $130 million in the offering, which is up from $75 million originally stated in earlier filings.
 
Bleacher Report Doubles Down On Personalized Content, Brings Team Stream To The Web Top
Screen shot 2012-03-29 at 6.11.04 AMIt's been fun to watch Bleacher Report grow from some random publishing site for amateur sports writers to a full-blown digital sports network backed by $40+ million in venture capital. Today, with 25 million unique visitors per month, Bleacher Report has become the fourth largest sports media property on the Web. Over the last year or so, the popular sports network has been doubling down on its team-specific coverage, convinced that this has become the preeminent way that fans follow sports. Since January, the startup's so-called Team Stream apps have lived on iPhone, Android, and the iPad, offering fans personalized dashboards with headlines, top stories, and tweets from their favorite teams. And today, Bleacher Report is bringing Team Stream to its home page.
 
Amazon And The NIH Team Up To Put Human Genome In The Cloud Top
1000GenomesAmazon and the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced today that the complete 1000 Genomes Project is being made available on Amazon Web Services as a public data set. The announcement, made at the White House Big Data Summit, will make the largest collection of human genetics available to anyone free of charge.
 
Wanna Access Your Windows Desktop Anywhere Before Windows 8? WorldDesk Says It Has The Answer Top
worlddeskWith Windows 8, Microsoft is introducing more portable, cloud compatibility in the form of Windows To Go, but what about those seeking a solution today that works on devices running Windows 7? WorldDesk claims to have an answer. The Northern Irish-founded, now Menlo Park-based company has launched a new virtualization platform that it says allows all Windows 7 users to carry their desktops around on any device, including some of the the smallest portable devices of all, like a USB drive, a smartphone and an iPod. Written as a 64-bit platform, WorldDesk can also work via the cloud through a Dropbox integration it first announced in February at the release of a 32-bit version of the platform.
 
TechCrunch Beirut Meetup This Friday #TCBeirut Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-29 at 16.14.58So ArabNet in Beirut is rocking, but we also wanted to make sure there was an opportunity for other startups in town to come say hi to TechCrunch while we're here, so we are throwing together a TechCrunch Beirut Meetup! The Meetup is organised in conjunction with entrepreneur platform Wamda, co-working space AltCity,and the Seeqnce tech incubator. Here are the details:
 
Former Zong CEO And Founder And Mobile VP David Marcus Named President Of eBay's PayPal Top
david-marcus-2After former president Scott Thompson departed for the CEO role at Yahoo, PayPal has named David Marcus, the former CEO and founder of mobile payments startup Zong and PayPal Mobile VP, as President (PayPal acquired Zong last year for $240 million). eBay CEO and acting PayPal president John Donahoe posted the news this morning in a blog post. From PayPal's blog post: [Marcus is] going to lead PayPal with that "founder's perspective," to bring start-up energy to PayPal's unmatched global reach and digital payment capabilities. With David at the helm, we will have an even deeper commitment at PayPal, and across eBay Inc., to be a leading technology-driven and customer-focused product innovation company. We'll continue to focus on accelerating product innovation, driving consumer engagement and creating a world where paying anytime, anywhere and any way is synonymous with PayPal.
 
Location-Based Shopping App Shopkick Adds Former Disney And Nike Exec To Board Top
Andy MooneyGeo-coupon system and shopping app Shopkick is adding a well-known retail and branding exec to its board today—Andy Mooney, the former Chairman of Disney Consumer Products and CMO of Nike. He joins Greylock's Reid Hoffman and Kleiner's Matt Murphy on the company's board of directors. For background, Shopkick provides an in-store, location-based mobile shopping platform, Instead of checking in, as you would with a geo app like Foursquare, Shopkick automatically recognizes when someone with the free Android or iPhone app on their phone walks into a store. Once a Shopkick Signal is detected, the app delivers reward points called "kicks" to the user for walking into a retail store, trying on clothes, scanning a barcode and other actions.
 
Snapguide Makes It Super Easy To Make And Share How-To Guides On iOS Top
Snapguide_logo_236Snapguide, which just launched on iOS, is rethinking the stodgy "How To" guide for a mobile generation. Thus far the consumption and creation of "How-To" guides on the web hasn't been particularly groundbreaking, with SEO-optimized, paid contributor-written fare like eHow.com dominating the market. In contrast Snapguide was built to be super simple, fast and take advantage of your phone: Think of services like WikiHow as Facebook and Snapguide as Path. "eHow was a pioneer in publishing content online," says co-founder Daniel Raffel, "but it is a lot of 'evergreen' [and impersonal] content. We want to be a place where people share what they're passionate about … " he explains, saying that he could even envision a partnership with eHow.
 
Google Ventures-Backed Kibits Lets You Share With Real-World Micro-Networks, Raises $1M Top
KibitsHomeDoes the world need another mobile social app? A new startup called Kibits thinks it does, and its investors (including Google Ventures and Charles River Ventures) seem to agree. The company's iPhone (and iPod Touch) app is launching today. At first glance, it may look like another variant on group chat, but co-founder and CEO Matt Cutler says that even though he's "an active user of multiple group messaging apps," Kibits is doing something different. For one thing, it's designed to "complement real-world interactions." That means you can form groups based on things like Facebook friendships, calendar appointments, and most interestingly, physical proximity.
 
Bump Pay Lets You PayPal Someone With A Tap, But Only In-Person Top
Bump Pay LogoNow it's as easy as a fist-pound to pay a friend back for dinner, drinks, or a cab. Bump, the popular contact sharing app developer, today releases a new standalone iOS app called Bump Pay that lets you transfer money via PayPal to anyone in arm's reach. But that's also Bump Pay's biggest limitation. Unlike Venmo where you send money to any phone number near or far, Bump Pay only works in-person. The standalone app comes from Bump Labs, Bump's experimental wing for trying out new features. Rather than risk complicating its 84 million-install flagship app right away, the developer will only bring money transfers to all its users if Bump Pay generates traction and delight.
 
Circl.es: Meet The Latest Dating Site That Uses Facebook To Help You Find Love Top
Screen shot 2012-03-28 at 11.52.23 PMOnline dating is a hard nut to crack. First of all, it's a very personal process ported to a largely impersonal medium -- and then there's the creep factor. Next, it's a big business, but a small set of names dominate mindshare. Sure, with size and scale comes revenue, but it also brings less appealing byproducts like noise, faked pictures, lazy filtering, inadequate profiles, and the difficulty of judging actual interest from spam or "virtual winking". People have become more comfortable with the idea of dating online, but they don't want an experience that explicitly (and constantly) reminds them of what they're doing. Instead, eDaters want to avoid overexposure, and experience "newness" by going beyond their immediate social graph. Although it may sound counterintuitive, a new site launching today called Circl.es wants to give date seekers that feeling of newness by tapping into one of the most familiar platforms ... Facebook.
 
Confirmed: Canadian VC Firm OMERS Ventures Takes $20M Stake In HootSuite At $200M Valuation Top
hootsuite logoAllThingsD has reported, and we have confirmed, that OMERS Ventures, a Canada-based VC, has taken a $20-million investment in HootSuite, the social media management platform, with the company now valued at $200 million. The investment is a secondary one, and will be coming in the form of purchases of equity from HootSuite's existing shareholders. These include employees as well as existing investors. That list includes Blumberg Capital, Hearst Ventures, Geoff Entress and Millennium Technology Value Partners, who collectively have invested $4.9 million into the company: $3 million in debt and a $1.9 million capital investment.
 
Barnes & Noble Incorporates In Germany, Closest Sign Yet Of European Nook Launch Top
barnes_and_noble_nook_tablet_1161200_g2Just as Amazon is launching a new versions of the Kindle in Europe (but not the Fire tablet, yet), one of its big competitors is taking one more step in its bid to enter the European market: Barnes & Noble has incorporated a new company, Barnes & Noble Digital Media GmbH, in Germany. B&N incorporated the German company on March 15, just around the time that the U.S. company came to London to promote the Nook to developers.
 
Developers Are Divided Over Adobe's Plan to Take Revenue Share For Higher-End Flash Games Top
Screen shot 2012-03-28 at 10.19.40 PMDevelopers are at odds over Adobe's plan to charge a 9 percent revenue share for higher-end Flash games that make more than $50,000 in revenues. So today, Adobe announced a new set of features for developers who create very graphics-heavy games with the launch of Flash Player 11.2. It also unveiled a partnership with Unity Technologies, the Sequoia-backed company with a popular gaming engine that powers titles like Mika Mobile's Battleheart. This could bump up the overall quality of browser-based games, considering that the new version of Flash has powers to tap into hardware for rendering 3-D graphics. But if you read the announcement closely, Adobe reveals its plan to start charging a revenue share for high-grossing games. It affects developers who call two APIs: one that provides access to domain memory, and one that's for hardware acceleration.
 
RentSocial, Launching Today, Adds A Social Layer To The Rental Process [TCTV] Top
Looking for an apartment is usually pretty simple: you go on Craigslist, find three apartments that look like they've been used to chop up beeves, and then move in with your buddy whose roommate made meth in the basement. At least that's how it worked for me a few years ago. Now, however, you have stuff like RentSocial. RentSocial is the front end for Yield Technologies property management systems. Yield, for example, makes a product called RentSentinel for property managers to handle renter rolls for large buildings. By plugging into this existing install base, Yield has been able to create a rental research site with real-time updates from each apartment complex, thereby allowing you to find other people who live in a complex you're looking at or, barring that, read reviews of places people have lived.
 

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