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
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
There goes another one — RIM announced today that Chief Legal Officer Karima Bawa will soon be leaving the company. This is RIM’s second major departure in as many weeks, with RIM sales head Patrick Spence leaving the ailing smartphone maker last Wednesday.
At the time, sources pointed to audio electronics company Sonos as his likely landing spot, though neither Spence nor Sonos have officially commented on the situation.
Unlike Spence, who reportedly jumped ship after being passed over for the company’s vacant COO spot (Sony Mobile EVP Kristian Tear eventually got the job), Bawa’s situation seems much less contentious. After spending nearly twelve years with the company (two of which were in her current spot), she’s finally looking to retire. → 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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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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As the heat around the “Facebook Phone” story gets higher, our thoughts turn to the days a couple of years ago when it emerged Facebook had been thinking about developing an actual phone. Back then, it transpired that Facebook was working with INQ Mobile on a smartphone. The phone duly emerged – the INQ1 – and did indeed have great Facebook integration. Even if it hasn’t exactly been a smash hit, it’s fared well enough.
Indeed, HTC has also released their own “Facebook” phone, such HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa respectively. INQ’s runs on Google’s Android operating system, but with deeper Facebook integration.
When asked about the INQ phone back in 2010, Zuckerberg said it wasn’t “some massive big thing”. But quite clearly, a phone is now firmly on the agenda. → Read More
In less than three decades, the mobile phone has gone from being a status symbol to being a ubiquitous technology that facilitates almost every interaction in our daily lives. One month after the world’s population topped 7 billion in October 2011, the GSM Association announced that mobile SIM cards had reached 6 billion. A 2009 study in India illustrated that every 10 percent increase in mobile penetration leads to a 1.2 percent increase in GDP.
Yet patterns of mobile phone use in developing countries are vastly different from what you see on the streets of New York, San Francisco, and Berlin. This is a market underserved by technologists and startups. This is where the majority of future growth lies, and Silicon Valley has yet to realize the huge economic opportunities for network operators, handset developers, and mobile startups. Where are these opportunities? → Read More
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TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.
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MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers — a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers.
Basically, the market creates a more direct relationship, where publishers get more control and predictable pricing, while advertisers get early access. Advertisers will get first look a publisher’s inventory — MoPub compares the marketplace to a eBay’s Buy It Now model, where buyers can skip the auction process and just purchase an item at a set price (in this case, an ad impression). They also get access to special data like demographics, geography, and in-app purchase history. → Read More
Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and SocialCam, says he’s not ready to disclose investors yet, except to say that there are around 25 different individuals in the round. The filing only shows Exec’s team on it, so it’s hard to tell who the firms or angels in the round are.
What’s Exec? It’s kind of comparable to TaskRabbit, because you can call on people to run your errands from an app. But Exec doesn’t require a bidding process and it calls up ‘Execs,’ or people to do your tasks, instantaneously. It also has a flat rate of $25 an hour. Exec covers all sorts of errands — deliveries, chores, cleaning, even art. One ‘Exec,’ who cleaned my house once, has also coached YC founders on their pitches for Demo Day. Seriously.
“This money is for building out the San Francisco Bay Area market,” Kan said. → Read More
It looks like the webOS contingent at HP isn’t done losing people. HP laid off 275 webOS employees back in February shortly after they announced their plans for the Open webOS project, and now their Enyo team is being picked apart.
The Verge reported late last night that key members of the Enyo team have left their posts at HP, and will migrate over to Google.
Enyo, in case you’re not steeped in webOS lore, is a JavaScript framework that allows devs to “build and maintain HTML5 applications of any size and complexity” that debuted alongside the ill-fated TouchPad. Considering that the platform is meant to help devs create platform-agnostic apps that can be tailored either for the web or for a mobile device, the team behind it apparently made for an enticing target for Google. → Read More
Ok, maybe not a bouncy ball, but pretty damn close.
M-Edge came out with a SuperShell for the iPad towards the end of last year, but the idea of a bouncing iPhone seems much more appealing. The case comes in four different colors — black, blue, purple, and pink — and has a finely dimpled finish to it to help with grip.
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Apple is continuing its “famous person uses Siri” commercials by bringing in famous person John Malkovich to add a soupçon of Old World weltschmerz and philosophizing to what is, in short, a way to schedule a wake-up call without unlocking your phone. The commercials feature Malkovich in what appears to be the house above the nasty places in Hostel where he muses on fine meats and the meaning of life.
I don’t quite get these celebrity appearances but, in the end, I suppose they’re good for brand awareness. Siri isn’t for the geeks – it’s for the folks who may have once been in love with BlackBerries. Siri suggests a certain ease, a certain subsumed technicality that would draw in the C-level exec and, in parallel, well-known superstars. It is, in short, a little assistant that will never talk back to you, never ask for a raise, and never request that you stop cursing. → Read More
In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store.
That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purchases of virtual currency, downloads of paid apps and advertising. It will probably most benefit mid and hardcore game developers, who are more likely to have rabid fans willing to pay for monthly access. It will also help magazine publishers, who are still figuring out how to sell content on tablets.
All of the subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set with monthly or annual fees. Developers set the price themselves. There’s also an HTTP-based publisher API that lets enterprise-scale backend servers validate or cancel subscriptions. It’s inter-operable with subscriptions on the web, so users can take their paid access with them across devices and web destinations. → Read More
Amazon’s Kindle Fire is one of the most popular Android-powered tablets, but it doesn’t feature a GPS chip. Given how important location-based services have become, that’s a bit of a drawback for many developers and quite a few apps that want to access location features on Amazon’s tablet actually crash. To avoid these issues, Kayak teamed up with Skyhook to provide location services for its updated Android app. Kayak, of course, relies heavily on location services to show its users information like nearby hotels and airport information. → Read More
Autodesk is expanding its growing portfolio of iPad apps today with SketchBook Ink. The pen-and-ink app is built on a new graphical engine that’s independent of resolution, allowing the created artwork to be exported in resolutions exceeding 100 megapixels.
This, Autodesk hopes, will reinvigorate graphic artists and even doodlers about iPad content creation since the vector-based artwork can scale to massive print sizes. → Read More
Mobile advertising company Millennial Media, one of the biggest in the U.S., has released its quarterly ad impression report, and the results show that Apple continues to remain the single-biggest brand, and most popular phone maker, on the Millennial ad network — with the rest of the list largely dominated by Android.
Apple has a clear lead in the field of device makers based on brand: the popularity of Apple’s iPhone handsets, iPad tablets and iPod music players gave the company a share of 28.32 percent of all devices on the network, with its closest competitor, Samsung, picking up a share of 18.25 percent of the overall market impressions. Millennial also notes that non-phone devices are continuing to see a growing impact on the overall mix.
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This time last year, Brett Martin took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York to launch Sonar, a mobile app that connects you to friends and other people nearby, based on your existing social networks. Fast forward to today and the Battlefield runner-up is rolling out a major update to its mobile app that will allow Sonar to finally become the “Here-Now” social network.
The app previously focused on providing relevant information to users about others around them based on connections via Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and Twitter. Extremely useful for conferences like Disrupt, when you’re at a party or maybe even starting a new job.
So what’s new? Aside from the usual under the hood tweaks, Sonar has crammed in Status, Sonar Presence, Notifications and Messaging. The status update serves as a hyperlocal broadcast tool for those within close proximity and even pushes out a notification to your friends when they’re close by. → Read More
Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.
The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.) → Read More
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