• April 4th, 2012

    FanDuel Raises Another Round For Its Clever Take On Fantasy Sports

    top-10-fanduel-fantasy-opening-day-picks-1059175-flash

    Daily fantasy sports operator FanDuel isn’t subject to online betting laws in the US thanks to daily fantasy sports games being exempt under the carve out in the 2006 Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act. That means it’s virtually a license to print money in the US. However, FanDuel is 100% legal as it is classified as a game of skill not of chance.

    FanDuel says its revenues hit 4x in the past 6 months with the company giving out over $10m in fantasy payouts in 2011 and it plans to pay out up to $4m per month for the baseball season.

    Off the back of that success today the site has raised another $1.3m round of funding from existing investors, including Pentech and Piton Capital taking its total raised to date to $7m. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Acceleprise Wants To Be The 500 Startups For Enterprise Tech

    BigAcceleprise

    Let the proliferation of vertically-themed startup accelerators continue! Today, a new accelerator focusing on the enterprise sector is launching in Washington D.C. Called “Acceleprise,” the program’s goal is to invest in 60 enterprise software companies over the next three years. Participating startups should be trying to solve problems facing large organizations, whether the Fortune 5000, large nonprofits, or government.
    → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Fly Or Die: Nokia Lumia 900

    The Nokia Lumia 900 is set to be the question mark of the week. The embargo lifted last night, so everyone and their brother is posting a review, proudly giving yeas and nays on the first hard-core Nokia/Microsoft mobile offering.

    But what do John and I think?

    Well, the answer is two-fold, but the big guy and I always find common ground somewhere. With the Lumia 900, it’s Windows Phone itself. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    PhoneDeck Is A Game Changer For Small Businesses, Divorce Attorneys

    Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 10.01.51 AM

    I sold mortgages over the phone in a previous life. That involved calling over 100 people a day using an archaic but functional web-based phone system. That system cost the company a fortune to implement and required a dedicated support staff. PhoneDeck does most of it for free. And it works directly with Android and S40 phones. This is disruption defined. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Strange Bedfellows: Google, Paramount Ink Deal For New Digital Movie Rentals

    godfather

    Good news, Godfather fans — Google has just recently announced on their official YouTube blog that they’ve inked a licensing deal with Viacom-owned Paramount to bring some 500 new titles to YouTube and the Google Play store over the coming weeks.

    Google first started toying with the notion of movie rentals via YouTube in early 2010, and their rental catalog has since swelled to nearly 9,000 titles. Bringing movie rentals to the Android ecosystem took a little bit more time, with the feature launching in the Android Market in May 2011. With Paramount now in tow, Google has licensing agreements with five of the six major motion picture studios, with Fox being the only big player still sitting on the sidelines. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Windows Phone Marketplace Growth Keeps Up The Pace, Tops 80,000 Apps

    windows-phone-7-marketplace

    Windows Phone 7 is an excellent new mobile operating system — there’s no doubt about that. But every rose has its thorn, and on Windows Phone it’s a lack of apps. Luckily, the Marketplace seems to be growing at a rapid pace, today topping 80,000 apps.

    The platform has been slowly but steadily picking up steam, topping 50,000 apps in December, 60,000 in January, and 70,000 in March. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Yahoo Cuts 14 Percent Of Workforce; 2,000 Given Pink Slips; Will Save $375M

    yahoo

    Yahoo has made its massive round of layoffs official. The company just released a statement saying that 2,000 jobs have been cut, or 14 percent of it total workforce (which was previously around 14,000). We’ve pasted the release below.

    “Today’s actions are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo! – smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require. We are intensifying our efforts on our core businesses and redeploying resources to our most urgent priorities. Our goal is to get back to our core purpose – putting our users and advertisers first – and we are moving aggressively to achieve that goal,” said Yahoo’s CEO Scott Thompson. “Unfortunately, reaching that goal requires the tough decision to eliminate positions. We deeply value our people and all they’ve contributed to Yahoo!.” → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Eight Mobile Ad Companies Get Behind ODIN In A Quest To Replace The UDID

    odin

    More than a half-dozen mobile ad companies are getting behind a working group called ODIN to find a new way of tracking and identifying iOS users that still respects their privacy. This is happening because Apple is pressuring developers to stop using an older method called UDIDs (or unique device ID numbers) faster than previously thought amid criticism that it compromises privacy.

    Velti, Jumptap, RadiumOne, Mdotm, StrikeAd, Smaato, Adfonic and SAY Media are hoping that by collaborating, they can influence the new standard that the rest of the mobile advertising industry will adopt.

    “We need to get everybody on the same page so that we have a uniform solution that ends up working for everyone,” said Krishna Subramanian, who is Velti’s chief marketing officer. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Show Us What You Got, Virginia: Let’s Schedule A Quick Meeting Next Week

    Old_Gregg

    As you may well know, we’re having a series of three mini-meetups in DC, Norfolk, and Richmond next week. You’ve probably already RSVPed, but I’d like to spend Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday mornings visiting some cool companies in the area. I think I’m already full in Norfolk – someone is dragging us around – but DC and Richmond are wide open.

    If you have a cool office, a cool product, or a hardware start-up, we want to hear from you. Are you building an iPhone app or a robot? Let’s talk. Are you building a B2B marketing platform for the Albanian market? Maybe bring your pitch deck to the meet-up. Our time will be short in these cities and I’d like to shoot some cool video so ideally the more visual the better. We’ll have plenty of time to talk at the event that night.

    So if you have something for us to see, email us at john@techcrunch.com with the subject “COOL STUFF [city of your choice]” and we’ll try to schedule some meetings. Sound good? Good. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Mogreet Nabs $4.1M For An Easy Way To Share Rich Media To Any Mobile Device

    Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 5.16.04 AM

    Mogreet, a Los Angeles-based mobile video marketing startup, is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in strategic capital. The round was led by Black Diamond Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including DFJ Frontier, Ascend Ventures, Bryant Park Ventures, and Draper Associates. The new infusion of capital brings the startup’s total funding to $14.1 million. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    NEA Leads $33M Round In CRM Developer And Salesforce Competitor SugarCRM

    sugarcrm

    SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. We’re told around $14 million of the round was equity financing. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital as well as the company’s current investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. To date, SugarCRM has raised over $60 million in equity funding.

    While Salesforce tends to grab the most attention as the cloud-based CRM company, SugarCRM has quietly built a loyal, and growing userbase around its customer relationship management platform for sales teams. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 1 million users from over 6,000 companies in 192 countries. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    Wikia Rolls Out Big Redesign To Bring Accessibility, Discovery To 20M Pages Of UGC

    Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 12.51.54 AM

    You may not be familiar with Wikia, but the collaborative media company has been quietly growing into a giant, recently passing IGN, for example, as the largest network of gaming sites on the planet. Led by both its gaming and entertainment verticals, Wikia’s content-driven social network is home to one of the largest and most active communities on the Web. For those unfamiliar, building on the popularity of its non-profit predecessor (Wikipedia), the site allows anyone (even you) to create new communities around any subject they’re passionate about — or participate in one of its 200,000 existing communities — for free.

    However, as publishing models change, Wikia is looking to more strategically marry the world of professional content creation with the openness of UGC, without fundamentally changing or restricting the formula. As its communities have largely remained disaggregated and separate from one another, Wikia is today officially unveiling its biggest redesign in years, which aims to collect its communities under one, sleek-looking roof while improving both engagement and discovery for a more mainstream audience. → Read More

    April 4th, 2012

    What Took So Long? Germany’s Samwer Brothers Rumored to Launch a Square Clone Soon

    square_rocket_logo

    Square, the mobile payment startup founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is one of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies right now. It’s no surprise then, that German clone factory Rocket Internet, which is run by brothers Mac, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, is now rumored to be developing its own blatant Square clone. According to German startup blog Deutsche Startups, the clone, which will supposedly be called Zenpay, is currently one of Rocket Internet’s top priorities, though it is not clear when and where it will launch. The source that talked to Deutsche Startups, however, did indicate that Rocket Internet is planning to launch Zenpay “globally.” Given the nature of these payment systems, however, this seems rather unlikely. → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    The Interesting Part About Amazon’s In-App Payments Beta Is That Developers Have Pricing Control

    images-screenshots-captures-amazon-appstore-logo-21032011_00B4000000001978

    The most interesting part of Amazon’s move to provide an in-app payments flow is that they’re ceding pricing control to mobile developers.

    Amazon has been testing a new in-app payments system with several top-tier mobile developers for several months. It’s a big deal because there has been a huge shift over the last 18 months toward giving away apps for free instead of selling them for a dollar or more. This move would bring Amazon’s Android appstore closer to parity with Google and Apple’s stores for developers.

    But the part worth noting isn’t that Amazon will offer an in-app purchases flow. It’s obvious that they would do that, given their experience in online payments and commerce and need to compete with Google’s app store. The part worth pointing out is that Amazon is letting developers set their own prices for virtual currency and digital content. That’s a departure from the strategy the e-commerce giant tried to pursue last year with mobile developers. → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    Google Highlights Search Changes From March

    IMPROVEMENTS

    Google has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment.

    We’ve highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn’t much here that’s life-changing. All the same, it’s good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel). → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    Nokia Lumia 900 Review: Initial Impressions (Video)

    Now that 9pm has rolled around and the awkwardly timed embargo has lifted, I can finally talk to you guys about the phone I’ve been playing with for the past week: the Nokia Lumia 900.

    I’m not going to get too detailed, as a full review and a head-to-head battle will go live in the coming days, but I wanted to hit you guys with initial impressions as early as possible. To put it plainly, I think this is a swell phone. → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    Tell The Truth But Tell It Slant: There Are Still Major Worker Issues In China, Just Not Where Daisey Looked

    img_0066-620x465

    In the hullabaloo over Mike Daisey lying about meeting injured workers, the spotlight turned from actual employment problems in Asia onto the face of the orotund and penitent former colonialist. Now that the news cycle has passed, we’re no longer interested in the topic of Chinese manufacturing and, judging by the positive response to my April Fools’ post on Sunday, the world now understands assembly work to be a good if tedious form of employment.

    But the problems Daisey seemed to fabricate do exist. He just didn’t do the legwork to see them. I’ve personally been to factories where OSHA is just a four-letter word and ISO standards are paid little more than lip service. And the factories I saw were relatively good and considered reputable suppliers by Westerners in town. After seeing these I wondered “If these are the good ones, what are the bad ones like?”
    → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    With $25M From Benchmark And Larry Summers Advising, Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy?

    Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 4.57.07 PM

    Well, we’ve said it before: Technology is changing education. It’s flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date — $25 million — in a startup/university called The Minerva Project.

    Sure, it’s not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it’s certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board. → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    Backed By Time, Next Issue Launches A Tablet Newsstand With Netflix-Style Pricing

    next issue

    Many magazine publishers see the iPad as their salvation. Five of the big ones (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.) banded together to create a joint venture called Next Issue Media, and today the company is launching its Android app.

    CEO Morgan Guenther (formerly president of Tivo) says that despite all the excitement about bringing magazines to tablets, the current system is lacking — specifically, the need to download a new app for every magazine. Gone is the “newsstand” feeling of walking into a store and browsing a rack of titles. Instead, it’s like you’re ushered into a windowless room where you can read a copy of Wired. Want to read The New Yorker? You’ll have to leave for another room. → Read More

    April 3rd, 2012

    Facebook Sues Yahoo With Patent By A Former Yahoo Employee

    Revenge Of The Facebook Patents

    In 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo. Facebook claims that Yahoo’s Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on “Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network”.

    This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for “generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity” and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo’s filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn’t always pay. → Read More

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    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    Compliance11 — Acquired by Compliance11, Inc..
    11.15.2012
    Bolt | Peters — Acquired by Facebook for $50M.
    6.21.2012
    Actual Systems — Acquired by Solera Holdings.
    5.29.2012
    5.29.2012
    ServerOrigin — Acquired by Black Lotus.
    5.29.2012
    Optimizely — Received Series A funding from Battery Ventures, Google Ventures, and InterWest Partners
    5.30.2012
    Draker — Received $475k in Debt funding
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Received $2.7M in Series A funding from Advantage Capital Partners
    5.30.2012
    AudioCure Pharma — Received Seed funding from High-Tech Gruenderfonds and Dr. Schumacher
    5.29.2012
    InterWest Partners — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Google Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    Battery Ventures — Invested in Optimizely.
    5.30.2012
    5.30.2012
    Trinity Ventures — Invested in Badgeville.
    5.30.2012
    Facebook — Went public with stock symbol NASDAQ:FB.
    5.18.2012
    smartDIGITAL — Company added to CrunchBase
    5.30.2012
    Actual Systems — Company added to CrunchBase
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    AudioCure Pharma — Company added to CrunchBase
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    Kurion — Company added to CrunchBase
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    PayPal Media Network — Product added to CrunchBase
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    ACT for Lotus Notes CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
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    VMobile - Mobile CRM — Product added to CrunchBase
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