Squrl has released a new app that has optimized many of the features of its video discovery application for the iPad and made them available on the iPhone. It also hopes to increase engagement by allowing users to seamlessly share the videos they’re watching with friends on Facebook.
When Squrl released its first app about a year ago, most of its focus was on bookmarking videos and saving them for later. But since then, the company has moved more toward helping viewers find new videos that they might want to watch. → Read More
Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is gaining steam and has today announced a new addition to its mobile wallet: American Express. The Isis Mobile Wallet will now support American Express’ Consumer, Open Small Business and Serve cards, joining Chase, Capital One and Barclaycard, which have previously committed to the program.
A mobile wallet leader has not yet emerged – Square is growing, and Google Wallet has been floundering – but the space is still really new. Although half of the U.S.’s mobile population use smartphones, making transactions via the phone has yet to establish itself as a real, or more importantly, as a better alternative to the swipe. But if there’s a piece of the mobile payments pie to be had, you can be sure the carriers want in. Hence, Isis. → Read More
You’ve seen the ads. What once was Carly in a pink dress, talking about her myTouch 4G that let her Facebook her face off while making little “digs” at AT&T, has now become a biker chic badass whizzing by an iPhone biker with a wink and a hat tip. She’s now edgy, and has the leather to prove it.
But T-Mobile is getting punchier on its own. Even in its earnings call today, T-Mo’s CEO Phillip Hume said it himself, “the iPhone is slow, even on AT&T’s network.”
If you can’t join ‘em, might as well start punching, right? → Read More
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. *Deep breath* No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.No. No. No. No. No. No.
Update: They pulled the video, which is probably for the best for humanity and Nokia alike. → Read More
Y Combinator-backed analytics startup Mixpanel can now add Andreessen Horowitz to an already-impressive list of investors.
Mixpanel had already raised $1.75 million from Sequoia Capital, Square COO Keith Rabois, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch. Now Andreessen Horowitz has led a $10.25 million Series A, with participation from Levchin, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff, and Yammer CEO David Sacks. (It looks like Sequoia sat out the current round, though I’ve emailed Mixpanel to confirm.) Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine is joining the company’s board. → Read More
Mobile ad and monetization platform Tapjoy is announcing a new $5 million fund – the “Tapjoy Asia Fund” – which aims to support development and marketing of free-to-play mobile games on both iOS and Android. The new fund is an extension of the company’s earlier $5 million push from June of last year, which encouraged developers to port their iOS games to Android.
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When I think of product sampling, I remember the glorious days of wheeling around the grocery store with my mom and picking up every cheese and meat-laden toothpick in the building. My mom hated it. She was quite organized, and knew exactly what she wanted from the trip, while I was busy begging for the salami I just discovered or the special water crackers I sampled with a cube of Colby Jack.
She didn’t run off and buy the stuff I had sampled (probably because she never actually tried it), and I obviously wasn’t old enough to throw down cash for a box of crackers.
But clearly, product sampling can be big for a brand if it hits the right demographic in the right setting, which is exactly the business proposition of a new startup called LetsWombat. → Read More
When Google Drive launched at the end of April, a wave of partner apps launched too. Now Y Combinator-backed HelloFax, the startup behind one of those apps, says its Google Drive app has seen rapid uptake, with 51,000 installs in about two weeks.
In fact, the company says that number makes it the most-installed of the Google Drive apps. The claim seems a little odd at first, since there are other apps in the Google Drive section of the Chrome Web Store that show a much higher user count — LucidChart, for example, for example, has 332,930. However, HelloFax says those user counts don’t show an app’s strength on Google Drive specifically, because some were previously available as Chrome extensions. → Read More
It’s easy to miss the launch of the latest movies. You get a week of marketing and by the time you’ve figured out if you want to see it or not, it’s moved off the theatre and you’re waiting for the DVD release. Most movie marketing dollars are spent in these first few days. So MoviePilot, launched out of Berlin, brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste, turning the marketing model on its head and making better use of budgets. It focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows so that fans are less likely to miss new releases. This gives them a place to gather often long before official homepages are created, finding the right film for its natural audience and the right audience for a film.
Today it’s sealed a $7 million Series B financing, led by leading venture capital firm DFJ Esprit, and continued participation from existing VC funds T-Venture, Grazia Equity and VC Fund Creative Industries Berlin. This will be used to expand in the US and develop the platform.
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Mobile and online payments and ID verification startup Jumio has received an additional Series B investment led by Citi Ventures, a unit of global financial services company Citi. The funding follows Jumio’s $25.5 million Series B from March, led by Andreessen Horowitz. Although Citi’s investment amount is not being disclosed, to date, Jumio has raised $35.4 million in funding.
Other investors in the company include Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, Peng T. Ong, partner at GSR Ventures and founder of Match.com, and Vivek Ranadivé, founder of TIBCO.
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KLIK, the real-time, facial recognition iPhone camera app from Face.com, has released its official 1.0 version today. (The previous version, which debuted in January, was a beta). The production version of the app includes significantly enhanced recognition capabilities as well as – you guessed it! – photo filters. (Sigh, thanks Instagram.)
Despite hopping on the photo-filtering bandwagon, KLIK, if you haven’t yet tried it, is kind of cool. The app lets you take a picture of your friends, which it automatically recognizes, using Facebook as its photo-sourcing database. Of course, that means if your friends aren’t active Facebook users, it will have more trouble ID’ing them – but you’ve got to start somewhere. And Facebook’s 900+ million users is probably the best place (outside of Google images, perhaps) to train your face-detecting algorithms. → Read More
Let’s say you’re a video publisher who wants all the world to have access to your content… But translating videos into multiple languages is time-consuming and expensive — that is, unless you’ve got a team of volunteers to do it for you. One of the most efficient way to tackle the problem is by crowdsourcing subtitles, which is why translation startup Amara has raised $1 million from Mozilla and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Amara, previously known as Universal Subtitles, was created as an open-source platform to allow anyone to crowdsource transcriptions and translations of video content. Its technology has been used by volunteers to translate and create subtitles for more than 170,000 videos, including President Barack Obama’s message to Sudan and the KONY 2012 video, which was available in more than 35 languages in four days. → Read More
In the riveting story of consumer electronics, the lowly point-and-shoot camera is about to be cut. Its days are numbered and cheap cameras are becoming increasingly less relevant as smartphones steal the limelight. The point-and-shoot camera will soon be just a supporting character.
Samsung sees the writing on the wall, too. Speaking with the Wall Street Journal, Han Myoung-sup, head of the company’s digital imaging division, indicated that the massive Korean empire will shift away from “low-end compact cameras” in an effort to concentrate on mirrorless cameras. This bet, which is the correct move by the way, shows the company’s foresight as it’s very similar to the one Samsung made several years ago when it decided to shift away from its own smartphone platforms and instead concentrate on Android. This will pay off big for Sammy. → Read More
Yesterday Rovio announced that it had reached 1 billion downloads of games from its hugely popular Angry Birds franchise — and with it, a little teaser of what might come next from the Finnish developers.
Today the company has confirmed to us some more detail about that, and the clearest sign yet of what it plans for its big follow up. It says that it has bought the IP for the game Casey’s Contraptions — Casey is the guy in the little video clip yesterday, pictured here — from Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut.
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Potter fans will now be able to download all seven Harry Potter books from Amazon’s Kindle Lending Library, a service offered free for Amazon Prime users.
From the PR:
Yesterday, to much fanfare and resolute sentiment, HP announced a return to what made it a great company to begin with: poorly-named and generic computing devices tarted up to take on Dell. This year it’s the HP Envy SpectreXT, a thin and light that can’t officially be called an Ultrabook because that’s an Intel marketing term and these things sometimes run on AMD chips.
I think it’s important to point out the clear problems in the above statement: because Intel officially controls the “ultrabook” spec – including the pricing, screen size, speed, and physical size – manufacturers must toe the line when it comes to what can and cannot be sold under that rubric. In short, Intel’s own standards have so long stymied the OEM’s ability to innovate that, in the end, we’re all essentially buying Intel PCs no matter the brand or maker. → Read More
Newfangled social and gaming apps are popular and all, but it turns out that some content dating back thousands of years can still hold its own in today’s tech landscape. YouVersion, a Bible reading app made by nationwide Christian megachurch LifeChurch.tv, has crossed the 50 million download mark across the variety of mobile devices on which it’s available. → Read More
Samsung has been teasing Galaxy Note users with the promise of Ice Cream Sandwich for months, but now it seems like the consumer electronics giant has finally come through for their phablet fans.
Multiple reports from European Note owners confirm that the long-awaited software update is hitting devices, though how users actually install it seems to depend on their locale.
Dutch Galaxy Note owner Devin Balentina reported that his device received the update over-the-air for instance, while a report from SammyHub points out that German users can nab the update from Samsung’s Kies updater. → Read More
Coupa, the creator of spend optimization software for businesses, which brings something of a Mint.com-like view into where a company spends on operating resources, is today announcing the close of a $22 million Series E round of funding led by a new investor, Crosslink Capital. Previous investors Battery Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures also committed to the round.
Although CEO Rob Bernshteyn says that Coupa could be profitable in a month if it cut back on its investments, the company is raising the additional funding to help it expand its product as well as move into new markets. → Read More
About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella — as a service for businesses and the enterprise. Today, the service is better known as Google Apps and is, according to Google, being used by at least 4 million organizations, with some 40 million-plus end users.
Yet, as the Google Apps ecosystem has expanded, and its tools have become integral to the day-to-day operations of millions of businesses, many are looking for better ways to monitor, control and secure end-user access to apps like Google Docs, Sites, and Calendars. That’s why BetterCloud launched earlier this year — to provide a suite of complementary products that provide Google Apps with enhanced management and security tools for both IT admins and end users. To help it get off the ground, the New York City-based startup is today announcing that it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors. → Read More
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