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.
Braintree’s $26.2 million deal to buy New York’s mobile payments startup Venmo seems to be paying off once more for the Accel-backed company. The company is launching an easier way for collaborative consumption startups — which could include Braintree’s best-known clients like Uber and Airbnb — to pay their contractors or users. Basically, the headache is this: these… → Read More
MessageMe, the multimedia messaging app that got smacked by Facebook last week, isn’t letting that hurdle set back their growth. The company said today that it has more than 1 million users, is sending 500 notifications now per second and recently picked up $1.9 million in funding from a large syndicate of some of the Valley’s best-known investors. They include True Ventures, First… → Read More
Nonstop Games, a Singaporean-Finnish gaming company (yes, really), just picked up $2.9 million from two Scandinavian venture firms, Creandum and Lifeline Ventures, to build out core games for iOS and Android. The company’s team has an interesting backstory. Henric Suuronen was a head of studio at one of Europe’s biggest social gaming companies Wooga, and a director at Digital Chocolate… → Read More
EA’s CEO John Riccitiello has just submitted his letter of resignation to the company’s board. He’s stepping down on March 30 and Larry Probst is stepping in as Executive Chairman. Probst will lead the hunt for a permanent CEO. The company announced the changes shortly after markets closed in New York and EA’s shares are up 2.1 percent in after-hours trading. He said in a… → Read More
Zynga’s biggest acquisition to date — the $180 million deal to buy Draw Something-maker OMGPOP last year — was the one it ended up being the most pilloried for. At its peak, Draw Something was beating Zynga’s longstanding Words With Friends franchise, a sore point for a company that positioned itself as the dominant social gaming company in the world. After it was acquired… → Read More
Emergence Capital Partners, an enterprise-focused venture firm that has backed Salesforce.com, Yammer and Box, just took on a new operating partner with the hiring of Alison Berkley Wagonfeld. She comes from Harvard Business School’s California Research Center down in Menlo Park. Before that, she co-created QuickenLoans at Intuit, which eventually became one of the biggest online home loan… → Read More
Although playing against someone else in real-time has a kick that nothing else can quite mimic, turn-based multiplayer games have thrived on iOS and Android. That’s partly because slower data connections prevented studios from having enough confidence that they could provide a fast, twitchy user experience. At the same time, it was questionable whether there would be enough of a critical… → Read More
MessageMe, an app that launched last week and raced up the charts to the #2 spot in social networking in the U.S., is confronting Facebook’s touchiness around access to its social graph.
The app’s integration with Facebook stopped functioning earlier today (see left), the result of the company’s decision to cut MessageMe off from its “Find Friends” functionality, according to sources familiar… → Read More
When Apple launched its app store about five years ago, the company had no idea it would become the success it is today. It disintermediated carriers from what would become a lucrative revenue stream, one that’s brought Apple more than $11 billion in gross revenue (based on the $8 billion figure that CEO Tim Cook said the company had paid out to developers by last month).- In the old feature… → Read More
If you build it, they will come, right? Not exactly. Growth is actually a lot more complicated than that. Getting users to discover your product, and then stick to it, is more of a rigorous science that uses lots of multivariate testing and traffic funnels. A pair of longtime investors and entrepreneurs, Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier, are getting together again to build tools that will help… → Read More
DeveloperAuction, a platform where engineers can put themselves out to dozens or hundreds of potential employers, raised $2.7 million from NEA, Sierra Ventures, Crosslink Capital, Google Ventures, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC, and John Suliman’s Step Partners. Part of the idea behind this round is to tap the portfolio companies of each of these venture firms. DeveloperAuction is trying… → Read More
Clash of Clans, the title that’s made Finland’s Supercell the new darling of the mobile gaming industry, has doubled its marketshare among U.S. iPhone users over the last six months, according to Onavo, an app tracking company that can actually see active usage. The data is part of a monthly report Onavo does on winners and losers in marketshare — which is defined as the… → Read More
Growing up, I pretty much had the standard dolls and toys everyone did — Trolls, Barbies and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles action figures. But with the advent of 3D printing, kids today have access to something truly special: their very own custom-made toys. A U.K.-based startup called MakieLab is making a bet that the rise of smartphones and tablets coupled with the decline of traditional… → Read More
Vostu, the onetime darling of the social gaming world in South America, appears to have just had a fresh round of layoffs over the last few weeks. Multiple sources who have worked with the company said that Vostu laid off about 100 people and is now down to somewhere between 50 and 70 employees. Vostu has not replied to multiple requests for comment. This is a huge decline for the company, which… → Read More
Bonobos. Dodocase. Warby Parker. A generation of e-commerce companies is growing up using a vertically integrated strategy where they take more ownership of the design, production, marketing and branding of their products. But how do you know very early on if you have a hit? With a purely web-based or mobile product, startups can watch how well they retain users after a week or a month. With… → Read More
OK, so maybe we said it would be hard for an app to break out at SXSW this year. But that isn’t stopping several startups from trying. One startup called Hangtime, from serial entrepreneur Karl Jacob, is looking to be the comprehensive Rolodex of events at SXSW and beyond. It pulls in events from Facebook that you have permission to see, ranks them by overall popularity, popularity among… → Read More
One of the sleeper hits on the charts over the last year has been a tiny game out of Denmark called Subway Surfers. It’s a runner game like Imangi’s Temple Run that has a character named Jake riding train tracks and dodging trains. That single title has helped Kiloo and Sybo, the studio it co-produced the game with, reach 26.5 million daily active users. For comparison, that’s… → Read More
After initially missing the boat on mobile-photo sharing and then having to turn around and plunk down nearly $1 billion for Instagram, Facebook wasn’t going to let a hot app (and potential existential threat) emerge too quickly again. Although Facebook is more than 1 billion users strong, the company still has a paranoia and mortal fear that the next social network could emerge out of a… → Read More
Yes, the messaging app space is super-hot and super-crowded. It’s probably the most competitive part of the consumer app space, with giants like China’s Tencent and Facebook in the ring along with established venture-backed companies like WhatsApp. Yet it’s still luring entrepreneurs and there are new breakout apps every year like NHN’s Line or Snapchat. Now a veteran team… → Read More
Jared Fliesler, who oversaw growth and user acquisition at Square, is crossing over to the venture side from the startup world and joining Matrix Partners as a general partner. A firm that has been around for more than 30 years, Matrix does Series A rounds in the enterprise and consumer space. It’s bi-coastal with offices in both Boston and Palo Alto. They are in companies like ZestFinance… → Read More
The TV news soundbite is about to get a lot shorter. NowThisNews, a New York-based startup that’s looking to reinvent video journalism for the Facebook and smartphone era, is hitting SXSW with an exclusive channel on its mobile app plus a six-second startup pitch competition using Twitter’s Vine. While we haven’t really covered the company before, NowThisNews is the brainchild of… → Read More
With DSLR sales up and Instagram setting a new bar for tastefully shot photos, there are countless hobbyist and amateur photographers out there. A new startup called Ourspot is tapping into that community by creating a marketplace where anybody can hire amateur photographers to shoot events for free to around a few hundred dollars or more. It’s out for San Francisco today, but Los Angeles… → Read More
Amazon is taking the first steps toward building a mobile ad network across its Kindle devices with a new advertising API in beta for developers. If you judge by the earnings of publicly traded mobile advertising companies like Millennial Media, which has had annual losses for the last five years, it’s a tough business with low margins. But Amazon has something that most other competing… → Read More
As Nokia tries to separate out its mapping business and make it a standalone entity earning more than 1 billion euros per year, it has stripped its name entirely out of the unit. This past week, the company said it would take its name out of all navigation products and instead brand them with the word “HERE” — as in HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit. Yes, it does sound a bit… → Read More
Back in late 2009, Zynga quietly acquired a startup called MyMiniLife, a maker of virtual worlds that allowed players to outfit their characters and homes with virtual lamps, furniture and so on. You couldn’t see it at the time, but the MyMiniLife acquisition was a company-making deal. It spawned FarmVille, the monster hit that put social gaming and Zynga on the map. At the same time… → Read More
SXSW is a week away and we were having an internal pow-wow about whether there would be any breakouts this year.
A collective “Meh” arose. No one could think of anything. HIGHLIGHT? GOOGLE GLASS?
Are we jaded? Is SXSW too crowded to anyone to stand out?
I don’t know. I think there are actually a lot of other factors at work. (But please prove me wrong and send us your pitch!) → Read More
Kristian Segerstrale, the EA executive who was in charge of leading the company into a games-as-a-service era, has just left the company. CEO John Riccitiello just announced it in an internal memo and said that EA COO Peter Moore is taking on his responsibilities. Segerstrale came into EA through its $400 million acquisition of Playfish, a social games developer that he co-founded with a high… → Read More
Zynga is cutting costs further by closing its Baltimore studio and consolidating its presence in New York City and Texas. The moves follow a series of cost-cutting efforts that saw the closure of the Boston and Tokyo offices along with layoffs for about 5 percent of the company’s workforce. Those moves allowed the company to save $25 million last quarter. In today’s changes, Zynga is… → Read More
Do you want to know whether cannibalism existed amongst Tyrannosaurus Rexes or whether specific viruses contribute to lung cancer risk? Better yet, do you want to be part of making this research happen faster? A Y Combinator-backed startup called Microryza is positioning itself as a “Kickstarter” for science research. The idea for Microryza sprouted when Cindy Wu, then an undergraduate… → Read More
Facebook is deepening its relationships with carriers in emerging markets today with a deal that would bring free or discounted data access for people who use Facebook Messages. The company has done these types of win-win deals in the past. Carriers get to give their customers access to what is probably the most widely-used app in the world, gaining an edge over competitors in the same market. → Read More
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