Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch.
She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was the captain of the women’s varsity tennis team. She has also contributed technology content for Oprah.com.
It’s no secret that many deals have been struck and key relationships formed at TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s former house in Atherton. In case you aren’t familiar, Arrington threw epic parties at his home for the tech community in the early days of TechCrunch. Police were called, booze was flowing, people passed out. I don’t have enough fingers to count how many times I’ve spoken to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or VC who said he or she used to frequent Mike’s house parties back in the day. Clearly this was the place to be for anyone looking to meet their next investor, acquirer, co-founder etc.
And that’s exactly what Box co-founders Dylan Smith and Aaron Levie were thinking when they showed up to Mike’s house in early February 2006 for the Naked Conversations TechCrunch Party. It was in Mike’s backyard where they met then Draper Fisher Jurvetson partner Emily Melton. Beers in hand (actually only Levie was of age-barely, so Smith was drinking water), the pair pitched Melton on their idea. She was so impressed and their passion for what they were building cloud storage, that she immediately introduced them to the DFJ partner covering SaaS and enterprise investments, Josh Stein, who months later led Box’s first round of institutional investment. → Read More
Samsung Electronics has acquired mobile entertainment startup mSpot, according to a release issued today. Financial terms were not disclosed, but previous reports point to an acquisition price of $8.8 million.
mSpot let users stream and watch full-length movies on their mobile phones and on the web. The company had struck deals with Sony, Disney, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Lionsgate, Warner, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users’ PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie. → Read More
Chicago-based Base, a company that develops a cross-platform CRM product, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating. The startup previously raised $1.1 million in funding.
Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Base is a CRM product that is catered towards small businesses. Base wants to let businesses manage their customers and sales everywhere they are, and offers applications for the Android phone, the iPhone, Mac and Windows. The company also plans to release tablet and Windows Phone 7.5 apps soon. → Read More
Mobile payments processing platform Square has been used by a variety of individuals and businesses, from charities to taxis to food trucks to political campaigns. Next up—art fairs and farmers’ markets.
The company says that at Etsy’s New York’s Spring Handmade Cavalcade last weekend in Brooklyn, over 90% of the vendors used Square to accept payments. And this weekend, Square says that many vendors at Unique LA, the largest independent fashion market in the country, will use Square to process card payments. Unique LA expects over one and a half million dollars to be spent in its market over the weekend. → Read More
Chicago-based Belly, a startup that is a fast-growing contender in the local business customer loyalty and rewards space, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The company also announced that Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, former chairman and CEO of OpenTable and former president of PayPal, will join the Board. This latest round of funding adds to a seven-figure round raised by the startup from Lightbank, the venture firm founded by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.
Belly wants to reinvent customer loyalty rewards through gamification, digital check-ins and a iPad setup for businesses. But the startup has a slightly different take on how to achieve this. Belly offers a quick-setup, plug-and-play rewards platform to merchants. Part of this is an in-store iPad (which Belly supplies) that is used to validate paying customers right at the point of sale, and serves as a check-in point. Belly will also train employees to encourage them to participate in the program. → Read More
Exclusive: RichRelevance, a company that powers personalized shopping experience for online retailers, has raised $20 million in funding led by Crosslink Capital with Greylock Partners, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Tugboat Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to $50 million.
RichRelevance aims to take consumer shopping data and help retailers leverage this information into a more personalized experience. As e-commerce heats up, and big data strategies enter the market, more retailers want to provide customized online shopping for consumers to drive sales. → Read More
Design-friendly online invitations and stationery startup Paperless Post has raised $6 million in funding from RRE Ventures, SV Angel, Tim Draper and others. This brings the startup’s total funding to $12 million. Previous investors include Ram Shiram and Mousse Partners.
The startup is sort of like the anti-Evite, aiming to allow consumers to create sleek, design-focused, personalized invitations that deliver the same quality as paper stationery. Users can send out invitations for any occasion and monitor as guests receive and reply to their invitations. The New York company was launched in 2009 by brother and sister team James and Alexa Hirschfeld.
Startup Personal, which aims to give consumers control over their digital data, is debuting an iPhone app today, adding to the company’s existing web and Android apps.
Personal is a free web and mobile service that helps you take control of all the digital information about yourself and your life, decide who gets access to it, and use it for your benefit. This information ranges from your passwords, your kids allergies, emergency contacts, credit card info, and more. Basically, any information you may not want to store in email but want to be able to share with your loved ones or friends. → Read More
Credit card giant MasterCard is debuting a new study today, called the MasterCard Mobile Payments Readiness Index, which analyzed 34 countries and their readiness to use three types of mobile payments: person to person, mobile commerce and mobile payments at the point of sale. MasterCard actually developed a proprietary algorithm that takes publicly available data as well as MasterCard-owned data to rank countries on their potential to adopt mobile payments.
The study showed that while it is still early stages for mobile payments adoption, Singapore, Canada, the U.S., Kenya and South Korea are the most prepared markets to accept this technology. Additional findings include that young affluent consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 years old are the most willing to use mobile payments as they recognize the value of using mobile payments instead of cash or payment cards. While this demographic was predominantly male in most countries, women showed higher levels of interest in countries such as China, Egypt and the Philippines.
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TidePool, a startup that is trying to determine consumer personality from photos, has raised $1.5 million in a seed round led by Mike Hirshland of Resolute.VC and Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal Capital. Participating investors include Jarl Mohn, Tim Draper, Peggy and Jim Davis, and Jeff Lipp.
The startup’s central goal is simple—Tidepool uses a proprietary technology to uncover personality and other psychological characteristics from photos. To begin your assessment on Tidepool, you are presented a number of photos. You are asked to rank photos by which ones you like best. You are also asked to pick between two images that you like, choose different interests (based on pictures) and more. → Read More
Professional social network LinkedIn has just released Q1 earnings. Revenue for the first quarter was $188.5 million, an increase of 101% compared to $93.9 million in the first quarter of 2011. Net income for the first quarter was $5 million, compared to net income of $2.1 million for the first quarter 2011, in increase of 140%. Non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter was $0.15. Analysts expected earnings of $0.09 cents per share, with quarterly revenue in at $179 million. Clearly, the company blew past Wall Street expectations.
“LinkedIn’s solid performance in the first quarter built on the company’s momentum in 2011,” said Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn. “We saw strength across all key metrics from member signups and engagement to significant revenue growth across our three product lines.” → Read More
LinkedIn has just acquired professional content sharing platform SlideShare for $119 million in cash and stock. We’ve pasted the release below.
SlideShare is a sharing platform for business documents, videos and presentations. SlideShare lets anyone share presentations and video and also serves as a social discovery platform for users to find relevant content and connect with other members who share similar interests. The company also has a huge enterprise following, and companies like IBM and others use the platform to curate content from all of their employees and partners on a branded page.
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Klout, the startup that measures influence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Google+ and other social apps, has just released a new version of its API and released a number of new stats about its API usage.
Klout evaluates users’ behavior with complex ranking algorithms and semantic analysis of content to measure the influence of individuals on social networks. Klout says it now serves about one billion API calls per day, which is 80 times the amount of data we served this time last year. Klout says that in the last three months, API calls have risen from 10.5 billion to almost 30 billion per month. The company now has 6,000 API (up from 2,000 partners a year ago). → Read More
Fresh off a $35 million round of funding, mobile payments company Boku is announcing a direct carrier agreement with Sprint that will allow Sprint customers to charge online purchases to their Sprint wireless bill through a two-step authorization process. The agreement was made possible via a partnership with mobile payments operator BillToMobile.
As you may remember, Boku offers an online payments platform that allowed users to pay for online goods by charging the transaction to their mobile phone bill. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he can enter his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill.
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Fiverr, a global marketplace offering tasks and services for as little as $5, has raised $15 million in funding from Accel Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners. This brings the company’s total funding to $20 million.
Merchants, entrepreneurs, contractors and more workers in more than 200 countries use Fiverr to monetize their skills, talents and resources. They can offer “Gigs”, ranging from web design, logo creation and market research, to personal greetings and video animation, in Fiverr. Customers can then access these jobs for services they need rendered. Fiverr helps service-providers collect payments, promote their services, manage orders, exchange files and communicate with buyers.
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eBay was one of the first e-commerce giants to launch an iPad app following the device’s debut in 2010. As we’ve heard many times, mobile commerce is a huge growth area for eBay and the company is placing some pretty big bets on the mobile shopping experience. Today, the company, which says that its mobile apps have reached 80 million downloads, is debuting version 2.0 of its flagship iPad app, Buy and Sell with eBay, which has ramped up personalization, customization, image quality and more.
One of the major improvements in the app is a visual redesign of the home screen. Now you can completely customize your home screen with your most recent product searches or sales, which can be added, deleted or moved around based on user preferences. Additionally, first time users of the app will login and find their “My eBay Items” already populated to the home screen. → Read More
UK-based cloud accounting software company FreeAgent has acquired finance-tracking startup 60mo. The U.S. startup’s team will be incorporated into FreeAgent’s new American division. FreeAgent has also received an additional, undisclosed investment from Lightbank, which also was an investor in 60mo. This is Lightbank’s first international investment, says the firm’s partner Paul Lee.
60mo, which we’ve covered here, is an online service that helps businesses manage their finances by importing data from QuickBooks, FreshBooks, and a variety of financial institutions like Bank of America, Chase, and American Express. Once the data is in the system, you can use 60mo to create financial projections, manage your business’s budget and share the data with your accountant or investors — it’s sort of like a Mint for businesses.
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Visage Mobile, an enterprise mobility management company, has raised $8 million Series C funding led by Motorola Solutions with Worldview Technology Partners, Palisades Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures participating in the round. The startup has raised a total of $16.1 million to date.
Visage Mobile’s SaaS application, MobilityCentral, basically lets businesses have control and visibility over all of the wireless devices and spend within their companies. The service will organize how many wireless devices are being used in your company, which employee is using a device, your company’s monthly wireless spend and how your wireless spending breaks down. Additionally, Visage Mobile helps businesses set policies to govern employee usage of smartphone and mobile broadband. → Read More
Enterprise cloud storage provider Nirvanix has raised $25 million in Series C funding round led by Khosla Ventures with previous investors Valhalla Partners, Intel Capital, Mission Ventures and Windward Ventures participating in the round. The new investment brings Nirvanix’s total capital raised to $70M.
Nirvanix is a fully-managed, enterprise cloud storage service capable of storing, delivering and processing storage requests. It’s an alternative to Amazon Web Services, or Box.net. The company specializes in storing amounts of large unstructured content files, and offers usage-based pricing across public, hybrid and private cloud storage deployments.
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Real estate listings site Zillow just reported strong Q1 earnings. The company reported record revenue of $22.8 million, up 103% over first quarter 2011. Net Income came in at $1.7 million, resulting in EPS of $0.06. Analysts expected earnings of $0.03 per share on revenue of $21.5 million.
Zillow is also buying rental marketing software maker RentJuice, as we reported earlier this year. The transaction is all-cash, valued at $40 million. → Read More
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