Today, four-year-old Echo360 already has 1 million students using its blended learning solutions in over 6,000 classrooms and 500 institutions, owns 54 percent of its market, and is seeing annual revenue of $15 million. However, all told, Echo360 is only currently serving about 10 percent of the colleges and universities in the U.S., and, on top of that, its leadership sees big opportunities abroad.
Now, thanks to a big investment from some familiar names, Echo360 is looking to step on the accelerator. The investment comes from the $450 million Revolution Growth fund, founded by Steve Case, Ted Leonsis, and Donn Davis — all well-known entrepreneurs and executives in their own right and each a veteran of Aol leadership. (Case being a co-founder.) The fund, which typically makes $25 to $50 million investments in companies that it can help take “from niche to mass and scale to capitalize on huge market opportunities,” (i.e. disrupt big industries) sank $25 million into Vienna-based online auction company, FedBid, in January. → Read More
Nintendo unveiled the tablet-centric Wii U at last year’s E3. At the time the company was clear that it was a working name. A report earlier this year stated that Nintendo was exploring other options. E3 kicks off next week and it seems increasingly likely that Nintendo is sticking with the unusual moniker.
First off, Nintendo just launched a Wii U Facebook campaign complete with an intro video with Reggie Fils-Aime welcoming guests to the Wii U page. Second, and perhaps more importantly, the Wii U logo is now on Nintendo’s press site. → Read More
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Ace Metrix, a startup promising brands and agencies a smarter, faster approach to testing their TV ads, has raised $8 million in new funding.
CEO Peter Daboll, whose resume includes time as Chief of Insights at Yahoo and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, says the idea behind Ace Metrix is to “apply what we’ve learned in digital targeting and evaluation to television, which is the big kahuna in terms of spending.” → Read More
According to a very short, very rumor-filled VG24/7 piece, Sony is looking at adding cloud-enabled gaming to the PlayStation line, presumably in the form of an Onlive or Gaikai partnership.
Given that we won’t see much new this year at E3 – aside for official Wii U availability and perhaps (just perhaps) whispers of next gen Sony and Microsoft consoles, this bit of news could carry the show. The Vita is powerful, to be sure, but it’s hardly nailing it in terms of game availability and to be able to play a game on the handheld and then pop over to the console is pretty compelling. Presumably the console can also act as a conduit for a definitively more interesting gaming experience. → Read More
10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for MongoDB and the MongoDB Monitoring Service (MMS) and to better support its rapidly growing community and user base worldwide.”
Including this round, 10gen has now raised more than $73 million. → Read More
One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from a notable list of backers. They include Suleman Ali, founder and CEO of TinyCo; Sam Altman, founder of Loopt; Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail; Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, and Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; 500 Startups; and Y Combinator itself.
Plus, here’s a twist: the funding marks the first investment in a startup (outside of acquisitions) by the cloud-services company Box, as part of its /bin Box Innovation Network initiative. → Read More
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No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.
Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services.
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The Facebook IPO was supposed to be Silicon Valley’s shining moment. It’s the book-end for the decade of recovery that followed the first wave of consumer Internet companies. It was the debutante ball for the next great Silicon Valley company, the one with the most potential to last a generation or longer.
Instead, it’s turned into a public relations disaster. If we look a little more closely though, the Facebook IPO probably has more devastating consequences for the rest of the late-stage private market than it does for the company itself. → Read More
Faster than you can say “Can I borrow your copy of ‘How To Win Friends And Influence People,’” it’s tech conference season again. There hasn’t been a week during the month of May where I haven’t attended a tech conference or traveled to something tech conference-related. And judging by Techmeme’s events calendar the state of affairs only gets worse as we get deeper into summer.
Between Disrupt NYC last week, D10 tomorrow, NY Founders and Le Web London in June, Allen & Co, Sun Valley in July, the CrunchUp in August and TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, the tech community is pretty much spending the next couple of months checking in and out of airports on Foursquare, Path, Instagram or whatever their social/mobile/local drug of choice currently is. → Read More
Earlier this month, Y Combinator held its Work At A Startup Event, where many of its alumni took the stage — not to pitch investors (as is the case at the incubator’s enormous demo day), but instead engineers who might be lured to work at the startups in question. After the presentations, I grabbed some one-on-one time with a few of the presenters (Weebly‘s David Rusenko, Codecademy‘s Zach Sims, and Stripe‘s John Collison) to answer some basic questions: Why should someone work for your startup? And what’s it like to recruit right now?
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I’d started raising 3 rounds. One fell apart and the others raised $1M & $1.3M in a few weeks each. The startup game is a marathon and while I’m not yet qualified to give advice about crossing the finish line, I feel like I know a lot about the first 5 miles… It’s from that perspective I give the following advice to fellow founders who are looking to raise their seed rounds. → Read More
Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Although tech bloggers aren’t sent startup’s actual pitchdecks as often as investors are (thankfully), we’re still walked through them on dreadful, “let me read to you from my Powerpoint” phone calls more often than should be socially acceptable. That’s why when image aggregator Piccsy, which is simultaneously a competitor to Pinterest as well as a top 20 content source for the site, pinged us to take a look at its pitch deck, we were pleasantly surprised. A pitchdeck that’s actually fun to read? Can such a thing exist?
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We’re currently used to more drama-oriented stories coming out of Yahoo!, but that doesn’t mean business hasn’t entirely halted there. Yamli is a service which offers a smart Arabic keyboard that allows users who type in Latin characters to find -in real-time – the most accurate equivalent Arabic term. It debuted in 2007 but has become an important part of a market which serves hundreds of millions of users worldwide. The platform also offers services to help navigating the ‘Arabic web’.
Today Yahoo has acquired a license to use Yamli for its Arabic service, Yahoo! Maktoob, which will see it integrate Yamli’s existing technologies into a new product, “3arrebni,” or “Arabize me” in other words. → Read More
Face.com’s CEO has shrugged off rumors that it is being acquired by Facebook for up to $100 million when we asked. But the addition of its facial recognition tech to Facebook’s mobile apps could make sure friend tagging continues as the social network’s user base shifts away from desktops.
In fact, about 45% of users of Face.com’s app KLIK end up sharing their photos on Facebook, which shows how popular mobile facial recognition could be.
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Every gadget that graces our shelves goes through plenty of tweaks and changes during its design phase, but it isn’t too often that we get an actual glimpse of those scrapped iterations. It can be tremendously cool to see what our stuff could have looked like in some alternate timeline, and a new eBay listing reveals a peculiar iPad that may have been.
The listing is for an early first-generation iPad prototype, and unlike the final model it sports two dock connectors, allowing the iPad to be docked in either portrait or landscape mode. → Read More
It may not be the end, but the prognosis doesn’t look good. Social micro-payments platform Flattr is taking an unkind hit in terms of its future growth opportunities on mobile, the company details on its blog this morning. After being integrated into popular third-party podcast manager Instacast back in February, Apple decided at the beginning of May to reject the app from the iTunes App Store due to its Flattr integration. The result? The only way Instacast could get back into the app store was to change the user flow in the app to direct the actual “flattr” (as the micro-payment process is called) to take place in the Safari web browser instead. Not an ideal user experience, Apple admits, but it’s as required by the App Store Review Guidelines.
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Google just announced that its Google Apps for Business service has earned ISO 27001 certification. This certifies that Google is following the standard ISO information security management protocols and best practices “for the systems, technology, processes and data centers serving Google Apps for Business.” If you’re a startup or individual user, chances are you don’t care too much about whether a company you are working with is following any of the ISO’s over 19,000 standards. This certification, however, will likely give give larger and more highly regulated businesses (and the executives who sign off on these deals) the necessary reassurances that moving to Google’s cloud solutions is safe. → Read More
That’s the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue. → Read More
Cornell University made big news earlier in the year when it was announced the Ivy League school, located in upstate New York, would open a technology campus in New York City. Leading the charge for Big Red will be Dan Huttenlocher, dean of computing and information science — and a former Silicon Valley entrepreneur. Dean Huttenlocher was kind enough to come backstage after his session to discuss more details about the campus and program. Cornell will build a technology campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City, which will house a full master’s program that combines academic research in computer science and engineering along with a variety of practical training programs. While the curriculum will focus mostly on software, Huttenlocher did hint at the possibility of having programs focusing on smaller-scale hardware, as well. This video would be of interest to folks who are in the New York technology community, as well as those could have some type of relationship with the campus in the future. → Read More
If you’re in the City of Brotherly Love, you’re in a for a treat. Thanks to constant entreaties by one of your own, Anthony Coombs, we’re going to hold a mini-meet up in Philly on June 19 at the Field House, 1150 Filbert St.
Please RSVP here.
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