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.
Five years ago from their native city of Barcelona, Maria Alegre used to watch old Stanford Technology Ventures Program videos from entrepreneurs sharing their founding stories. Intrigued by what she heard, she picked up and moved to the Valley, where Alegre dug into mobile gaming at early developer Tapulous, which went on to be acquired by Disney. Fast forward to today, Alegre is running one of… → Read More
There are a plethora of options for mobile app crash testing, like Crashlytics, Crittercism and Bugsense. But what about before the day of the big launch? A startup out of India’s GSF Accelerator called Little Eye Labs is looking to handle crash testing before developers go into post-production. They just launched an app and crash testing service within the last few weeks. “We want to… → Read More
Love Home Swap, a U.K.-based startup that appeals to homeowners that want to trade their places, is getting into proper rentals. The company, which launched about a year and a half ago, was operating on a member subscription model. People would pay to get access to a network of homeowners that were open to swapping residences across 150 different countries, plus a travel team, personal concierge… → Read More
Yodo1, a Beijing-based company that works intensively with Western game developers to bring their titles to the Chinese market, raised $5 million from SingTel Innov8, the corporate venture arm of a mobile carrier. An earlier investor, Changyou Fund, also participated in the round. Yodo1 has a co-production model where they actually get access to the code base of a Western developers’ game. → Read More
Last month, we posted a bit of a rumor: that Finland’s Supercell — likely the most lucrative iOS gaming company in the world — had raised about $100 million in funding in a round led by Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners. Now we have confirmation today that the deal did happen, according to a flashy Forbes feature. The tiny Helsinki-based company… → Read More
Breakout Labs, a Peter Thiel-backed effort that supports startups doing cutting-edge research that might still be too risky to get traditional venture backing, just put capital into another two companies. They’re funding a Siri-like natural language processing startup called SkyPhrase and another biotech company called Stealth Biosciences, which is creating “nanostraws” that make… → Read More
The hunt for great engineering talent is global. It’s not just in Silicon Valley that the competition is so fierce that there are even agents or auctions for developers. It’s true in India too, where multi-nationals and emerging startups headhunt for the best engineers. HackerEarth, a startup out of the GSF India accelerator, is looking to make the process of assessing technical talent… → Read More
While Apple’s app store and Google Play have long had leaderboards for the most downloaded and lucrative apps, there hasn’t been that much transparency around engagement after the download. Heyzap, a Union Square Ventures-backed startup that runs a mobile gaming network, has stepped in and decided to build one. The startup, which was founded about four years ago and originally centered… → Read More
GSF India, a new accelerator with hubs across several cities in India, is adding another global partnership to its roster. The incubator, which has already done deals with the U.K.’s Seedcamp and the U.S.’s 500 Startups, is linking up with MIT to bring founders and mentors from Boston back to India and to send local entrepreneurs back on an exchange. India’s top technical… → Read More
Dropbox, which is courting developers to make it easier for consumers to add and use files wherever they want, just overhauled its “Chooser” feature. Introduced in November of last year, it was designed to make it easy for developers to build in an “attach from Dropbox feature” instead of having to create one from scratch. Adding Dropbox’s Chooser to an app involves a small… → Read More
Chile’s not the only South American country with a serious startup accelerator program anymore. Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation said today that it’s willing to invest up to $78 million in 100 local and foreign startups that apply for a new “Start-Up Brasil” program. The idea is to lure both domestic and foreign talent to build tech companies… → Read More
Nicholas Felton, who came to fame through many super-detailed infographics and reports about his life as quantified through data, is leaving Facebook almost two years after being acq-hired to work on projects like Timeline. His early work, which compiled data on things like all the songs he had listened to or everywhere he had been in a single year into a “Feltron Annual Report,”… → Read More
Bitcoin’s record highs and the ensuring surge in hacking attempts and thefts may be grabbing headlines. However, beneath the chaos, Silicon Valley’s best-known venture firms are finally starting to make real bets around the crypto-currency. → Read More
About a month ago, I wrote about a stealthy company called IronPearl, led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed. In fact, they don’t even really like the word “growth hacker.” For years, Chudnovsky had been advising companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how to… → Read More
Kippt, which lets you collect and share content from across the web, is looking to attract developers with a brand-new API and gallery of apps. The two-person startup has relied on outside developers to have a mobile presence on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. Kippt just returned to San Francisco from Helsinki, almost a year after graduating from Y Combinator’s summer batch. “An API is… → Read More
Bitcoin is undergoing a classic correction after quintupling in price over the past 30 days. The currency, which was trading as high as $265 earlier today on Mt. Gox, plummeted and is now trading at around $150. We’ve reached out to one of the biggest exchanges, Mt. Gox, to see what happened. But another San Francisco-based exchange called TradeHill is saying that the crypto-currency is… → Read More
With Japan’s Puzzle & Dragons pulling in an astonishing $62 to 86 million in just the Japanese market last month, it’s no surprise that Western game developers are looking to cherry pick more hits to bring back to West. Kabam, which is on track to pull in $200 million this year, is launching a $50 million fund to bring Japanese games into the West. Gaming giants like DeNA, GREE and… → Read More
Two years ago, while traveling in Beijing, the big surprise for me was how badly local mobile developers wanted to get U.S. customers. They wanted out, not in. Fraud, piracy, way too many Android stores and a still small installed base of iOS and Android devices made the local Chinese market financially nonviable for many developers. Today the picture is starting to look very different. Why? The… → Read More
Early-stage investor sentiment in India is mirroring the newfound caution we’re seeing on the West Coast this year, according to a survey from an Indian startup accelerator that runs a program in four different cities in the country. GSF, or Global Superangels Forum, runs a nine-week incubator program in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore with five startups in each city. They surveyed… → Read More
Braintree, a payments gateway that’s backed by Accel Partners and NEA, sounds like it has effectively doubled the volume of mobile transactions it sees per year to $2 billion. It now touts 40 million credit card accounts in its vault. How does that compare to competitors? eBay, which operates Paypal, said it had 123 million registered accounts in its last earnings filing and that it expects… → Read More
Brian Pokorny, who led photo-sharing service Daily Booth and Batch into a talent acquisition by Airbnb, is returning to SV Angel as a general partner. He has a long history with the firm. He’s been a strategic partner of SV Angel since 2009, before he left to be CEO of DailyBooth. He has also worked with Ron Conway on angel investing since 2006. Pokorny personally has stakes in companies… → Read More
Bitcoin’s wild surge in value has made it even more of an attractive target for hackers. Another wallet service called Instawallet said it is suspending itself indefinitely until it changes its security architecture. The crypto-currency, which currently trades at $129.90 to the dollar, has risen by almost fourfold in the last month, as new clarity in U.S. financial regulations and a banking… → Read More
Zynga’s shares are up by 5 percent in after-hours trading on news that the company is launching its first real-money games in the U.K. tomorrow. The company is bringing ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino to U.K. players tomorrow through a partnership with bwin.party, one of the world’s biggest real-money gaming operators. At first, the games will be downloadable or on the web, but… → Read More
Staying true to a health or fitness regimen can be tough, but San Francisco-based Mango Health is looking to see whether an app can help with that. The seven-person startup just did a full launch of their app following a 16-week trial where they tracked whether regular notifications helped prescription drug takers keep on top of taking their medications every day. CEO Jason Oberfest, who came from… → Read More
Dan Porter, who led Draw Something-maker OMGPOP into its $180 million acquisition by Zynga, is leaving the company just a year after the deal closed. His departure comes just on the eve of Draw Something 2′s launch, which is supposed to be the big follow-up to the original and is already live in Sweden. “Developing and launching games is a team effort, and we’re proud of the great work… → Read More
Even though the Nevada, Delaware and New Jersey state legislatures just passed laws that pave the way for online gambling in the U.S., Zynga is not going to be the first to get in on it. Given how terrible the economics of running a blog are, TechCrunch has been exploring new revenue streams. They may include, but are not limited to, premium Justin Timberlake-filters on blog posts, Path 3.0-like… → Read More
When you step off the elevator into Kixeye’s new downtown San Francisco office, a guy in military fatigues has you sign an NDA. After you do (I didn’t), a receptionist with a lot of piercings takes your name, while The White Panda’s “Foolish Monsters” blares in the background. Kixeye has whale harpoons stapled to its office walls, bad oil paintings (see left)… → Read More
Supercell is a very quiet, humble mobile gaming company out of the very quiet and humble city of Helsinki, Finland. Unlike their brasher, Angry Birds-making brethren a 15-minute drive away in Espoo, they don’t like to talk much about anything beyond making games and about the company culture they’re deliberately cultivating. All of this belies what has become a phenomenal business over… → Read More
Around four years ago, Riccardo Zacconi said he was close to selling King, the arcade gaming company that he had co-founded and bootstrapped six years earlier. The company, which has a destination site at King.com, had lost about 45 percent of its traffic as one of its biggest partners Yahoo! Games cut back. Facebook, the next big platform King was eyeing, had started to curb the cheap virality… → Read More
As a mechanism for payment, the credit card remains just as hardy as ever. It has so far defied the threat of mobile phones, and less plausibly, QR codes, among many other forms of payment. One YC-backed startup is betting that fingerprints and other forms of biometric identification may be the payment method of the future though. Called PayTango, they’re partnering with local universities… → Read More
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