Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture financing. She attended UC Berkeley and was editor of the student paper The Daily Californian. She has lived in London, New York, Buenos Aires and Hanoi and speaks Spanish and some conversational Vietnamese.
Jawfish Games, a Seattle-based startup run by a former professional poker player and the engineering team that built the Fult Tilt Poker site, launched a gaming platform that can host more than 100,000 simultaneous players in real-time tournaments across iOS, Android and the web. While asynchronous, turn-based games have done well on mobile platforms and Facebook over the last five years, pure… → Read More
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. → Read More
For years, the iPhone has carried a small etching on the back that says ‘Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China.’ It’s fueled the stereotype that China is the world’s factory, but hasn’t had a flexible enough education system to produce R&D talent that can also design world-class products for a global audience. But that’s a stereotype that… → Read More
With India’s annual GDP growth of about 5 to 6 percent per year, a new wave of affluent consumers is coming. While there have been e-commerce successes like Flipkart, a handful of local startups are targeting the upper-end of the market. Squarekey is a startup that brings high-end fashion brands to India for the same prices as ones that a consumer would pay in the West. “Retail is… → Read More
China now has more active iOS and Android devices than the U.S., up from about 40-50 million in circulation the last time I visited in late 2011. What that means is local entrepreneurs can finally build scalable mobile software businesses. iDreamSky is one of the companies riding this wave. → Read More
While there’s a perennial debate on the West Coast about whether and when business cards might become irrelevant, they continue to be at the center of business customs in China and Japan. That’s why it’s natural that a Chinese company — not an American one — might be able to dominate this market and behavior globally. → Read More
QFPay‘s card reader admittedly looks a bit clunkier than its U.S. or European equivalents Square or iZettle.
It looks like a wonky, old calculator. But that’s because Chinese consumers don’t trust merchants easily and a basic phonejack reader without a keypad makes them nervous, says COO Tim Lee. He says consumers are worried that their PINs will get stolen by unscrupulous merchants. → Read More
One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.
Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social… → Read More
Whom do the idols idolize?
Lei Jun, the CEO of Android handset and OS maker Xiaomi, is arguably the face of tech entrepreneurship in China as a long-time angel investor and serial entrepreneur behind companies like Amazon-acquired Joyo.cn and the recently IPO’d YY.
He’s been called the “Steve Jobs of China” in the sense that Xiaomi is an integrated hardware and software maker that has… → Read More
Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% since the deal was announced. → Read More
A year ago, Evernote kicked off its strategy to bring its personal organization app to China, with the launch of Yinxiang Biji on its own dedicated platform. Now, with 4 million users of the Chinese version, Evernote is taking the next step in monetizing that with the introduction of Yinxiang Biji Business. Phil Libin, CEO and founder of Evernote, announced the news today at the GMIC conference in… → Read More
It wasn’t until widely respected economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff shared the Excel files behind their influential paper on the relationship between government debt and economic growth, that a very basic and consequential spreadsheet error was discovered.
Suddenly, a conclusion that policy makers around the world had seized on for years to justify steep spending cuts was thrown in… → Read More
While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally. Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and… → Read More
Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk, a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency. Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks… → Read More
Almost one-third of Facebook’s advertising revenue is now coming from mobile platforms, according to the company’s latest earnings release. About $375 million of Facebook’s $1.25 billion in advertising revenue came from products like the company’s new mobile app install ads. That’s up from last quarter, when Facebook said it made 23 percent, or $305.9 million, from… → Read More
Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz has landed at another buzzed-about Los Angeles startup, the mobile gaming platform Scopely. He used to head up business development at the mobile video startup Viddy, which shot up like a star on the Facebook platform and iOS charts only to later come back down just as dramatically. At Scopely, he’ll be a vice president of business development, where he’ll… → Read More
Mobile enterprise startups are like unicorns. Nearly every VC I talk to wants to have a bet in this space, yet there really aren’t that many new candidates each year. Everyone knows that workers are bringing their own devices to work and want to use their personal tablets or phones instead of clunky, employer-mandated devices. Yet employers want to make sure that corporate data remains… → Read More
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick said that he hasn’t spoken to investors in a year and half about raising capital, denying reports that the company is raising funding at a $1 billion valuation. Reuters reported that story earlier today, citing one source. We had heard similar rumors over the past few weeks but they weren’t substantiated enough to report. That said, just because Kalanick… → Read More
Braintree, the Chicago-based payments gateway that’s processing about $2 billion in mobile transactions per year, just poached one of Google Wallet’s creators Rob von Behren from Square. Von Behren was one of the co-founders of Google Wallet, the NFC-centric mobile payment system that was designed to let consumers pay directly for goods and services with their smartphones. Wallet… → Read More
Sina Weibo, the micro-blogging platform that took root among China’s white-collar class, may be worth more than $3 billion today after Alibaba agreed to pay $586 million to buy preferred and ordinary shares in the company. The deal creates a strategic alliance between Alibaba, which runs the eBay of China, and Sina Weibo, which is kind of like a Facebook-Twitter hybrid. Weibo grew to 46… → Read More
Bill Gurley, a general partner at one of Silicon Valley’s top tier venture firms Benchmark Capital, said that the late-stage market is the “most frothy” he’s ever seen since the late 1990s. Even though Facebook, Groupon and Zynga shares are still all underperforming relative to where they debuted at in their IPOs, growth-stage investors are still pouring capital into… → Read More
Two years ago, I had a terrible experience at the Great Wall when I visited its most popular corridor in Badaling. Trapped between tens of thousands of local tourists for miles upon miles one scorchingly humid August day, I eventually managed to get off by riding a roller coaster down the Great Wall that ended up in a bear park. Really! I’m not alone. AnyRoad co-founders Daniel and Jonathan… → Read More
EA, the game maker in the midst of a big transition from the console era of gaming to the free-to-play world, confirmed widespread reports of layoffs today. The company did not disclose the size of the layoffs, but several other outlets are reporting either hundreds of layoffs or figures that are as high as 10 percent. The downsizing, which comes on the heels of other layoffs in Montreal and Los… → Read More
Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.
The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.” → Read More
SecondMarket’s CEO Barry Silbert just confirmed that the company had layoffs this morning. From a tipster, we had heard it was as much as one-third of the company’s headcount but SecondMarket says it was less than that. The rationale? Basically, Silbert said that the company had grown a “bloated cost structure,” from when it had a model that was based on transaction fees. → Read More
As more developers are receiving their pair of Google Glass, the tinkering with the device is heating up. One developer found a very interesting easter egg within Glass itself, which introduces you to the entire Glass team. The steps to reproduce it are fairly simple: Settings -> Device info -> View licenses -> Tap the touchpad 9 times -> Tap Meet Team Here’s a video demo… → Read More
SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care. The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce… → Read More
Zynga’s revenues for the first quarter of 2013 declined 18% year-over-year to $264 million as the company is in the midst of doing a big pivot onto mobile platforms. Last year, during the same quarter, Zynga earned $321 million in revenue.
Analysts had estimated on average that the company would pull in $209.8 million in revenue and lose 4 cents a share. The quarter had net income of $4… → Read More
Assured Labor, a New York, Mexico City and São Paulo-based startup that helps low- and middle-income workers across Latin America find jobs through their mobile phones, just closed $5.5 million in funding led by Mexican private equity firm Capital Indigo. Other existing investors include Great Oaks Venture Capital, Nexus Venture Partners, Kima Ventures, Enzyme Venture Capital, Fabrice Grinda and… → Read More
For cynics who say that Silicon Valley has become too mired in photo-sharing apps and addictive games, take a 15-minute drive to South San Francisco. In a non-descript lab is a company that may be paving the way for the Valley’s next wave of disruptive startups, which marry software with data from the human genome. Counsyl is doing genetic tests that look for more than 400 mutations and at… → Read More
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