Row Sham Bow, a new game development studio founded by gaming industry veterans and focused on creating games for social networks and direct-to-consumer platforms, has raised $3 million in funding from early-stage VC firm Intersouth Partners.
Founded earlier this year by president & CEO Philip Holt (former VP and GM of EA Tiburon) and CTO Nick Gonzalez (former Chief Software Architect at EA Tiburon and former CTO of video game technology company Massive), Row Sham Bow is based in Orlando, Florida. → Read More
Six years ago when Twitter was just a side project by a podcasting startup called Odeo, there was one member of the early team that wasn’t American. In fact, he wasn’t even based in the U.S., and for two years worked remotely and unknown to the world from an apartment block in Hamburg, Germany.
This is the story of the almost forgotten founding member of Twitter’s earliest crew, a typically modest European, Twitter user number 12, who helped build one of the world’s biggest platforms, today worth as much as $10 billion.
And today he is poised to emerge with a new startup, which, once again, hints at global domination. In fact he describes his excitement about the startup as feeling “exactly like Twitter.” → Read More
As we heard in the company’s most recent earnings call, e-commerce giant Amazon is planning to open at least nine fulfillment centers to meet growing demand in sales across the globe. Today, the company is announcing an expanded center in Phoenix, Arizona and brand new center in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Amazon’s fulfillment centers enables the company and third-party merchants to store inventory and fulfill orders. Amazon currently has over 50 fulfillment centers across the globe. → Read More
Luxury group buying service Gilt Groupe is joining the mega-round bandwagon today with a new $138 million funding, led by Softbank, which took nearly half the round. Goldman Sachs, New Enterprise Associates, Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth, Pinnacle Ventures, TriplePoint Capital and Eastward Capital also participated, as did existing investors General Atlantic and Matrix Partners.
Gilt Groupe operates a growing family of flash-sales sites, including the original Gilt, Gilt Home, Gilt City, Gilt Children, Gilt MAN, and Jetsetter. Members are offered discounted prices for a limited time, which drives demand. Gilt was one of the earliest flash sale sites, and now there are dozens of copycats. (HauteLook, a smaller flash sale site, was acquired by Nordstrom for $270 million last February). → Read More
AVOS, the new company formed by YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has acquired Tap11, a real-time business intelligence platform. The company’s platform integrates social publishing and analytics into a single dashboard to allow marketers to monitor, engage, and measure the impact of their campaigns. According to the press release, Tap11 works with over 500 major brands, media companies, and agencies. The company had raised funding from US Venture Partners, Alloy Ventures and Palomar Ventures. The acquisition closely follows AVOS’ recent acquisition of social bookmarking service Delicious. → Read More
European music startup musiXmatch will be announcing today at the MusicTech Summit in San Francisco that it has closed a $3.7 million series A funding round for its digital lyrics platform. The round was led by Italian investor Francesco Micheli Associates. musiXmatch adds to the prior $700K it has raised in seed funding from both Francesco Micheli and a former Dada executive.
Lyrics are one of the most searched for terms on Google, and I think many of us have found ourselves looking to Google and one of the many lyric sites to either help us win an argument, or clean up the lyrics of a favorite old song playing our heads. There are, of course, tons of song lyric sites floating around the Web, but the large majority of them are unofficial, or don’t have the rights to be broadcasting free song lyrics to the public. → Read More
eBay last month announced that it has agreed to buy GSI Commerce, a provider of ecommerce and interactive marketing services, for $29.25 a share, or total consideration of approximately $2.4 billion.
Under the terms of the merger agreement, GSI Commerce reserved the right to solicit acquisition proposals from alternative parties for a period of 40 calendar days.
That “go shop” period has now expired, and GSI Commerce and its financial advisor Morgan Stanley say they have not received any alternative purchase proposals in time, although they claim to have contacted “numerous potential acquirers”. → Read More
After disclosing its intention to list its IPO on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol LNKD, LinkedIn has released a new filing with the SEC that shows that it is pricing its IPO between $32.00 and $35.00 per share. LinkedIn filed its initial S-1 in January, with the total offering amount of $175 million.
LinkedIn is offering 7,840,000 shares in its IPO, offering 4,827,804 shares of its Class A common stock and the selling stockholders are offering 3,012,196 shares of Class A common stock. There are currently 94,498,627 shares outstanding. → Read More
Between PayPal, Square and NFC technologies, mobile payments are heating up. There’s no doubt that your mobile phone will soon serve as your wallet. Today, startup Tabbedout, a platform that allows you to pay your restaurant or bar tab with a smartphone, has raised $3.7 million in additional funding from New Enterprise Associates to complete the company’s Series A round of venture funding, totaling $5.75 million. This brings the company’s total funding to $6.5 million.
Tabbedout’s apps, which are available for the iPhone and Android platforms, partners with restaurants and other establishments to allow users to pay for their bills via the designated app. Unlike other mobile payment platforms, Tabbedout allows users to store credit card information directly on their phone, encrypted and under passphrase protection, instead of on Tabbedout’s host servers. That way, consumers are safe from the threat of lost or stolen credit cards. → Read More
Local deals juggernaut Groupon and Live Nation have a formed a joint venture to develop a new online ticketing deals channel dubbed GrouponLive. The site will serve as a local resource for Live Nation events, ranging from concerts, sports, theater, arts and other live events, as well as clients of its ticketing business Ticketmaster, the companies said in a joint statement.
Visitors of the new marketplace will have access to limited-time discounts on a variety of Live Nation events, albeit limited to North America. → Read More
Anybody who has had to sift through hundreds of resumes at a time or placed a job advert that’s gone unfilled for months will know that the recruitment process isn’t always as efficient as it could be. It’s not surprising then that many startups have tried to bring recruitment kicking and screaming into the Internet age – from various job sites to the professional social networking giant LinkedIn.
However, Labels.io, which launches out of Beta today, thinks that most of these efforts still place too much emphasis on the traditional resume, a format that is outdated with its tendency to list countless “key accomplishments” and one that encourages “dull corporate speak”, says founder Octavian Popescu. Instead, professionals are defined by three simple criteria: previous employers, skills and personality, he says, which is precisely the format that Labels.io standardises on. → Read More
Whoa, so Alven Capital has been a pretty busy bee this year – especially for a French fund. This is something like the 5th investment that the fund has announced since January, totalling over €8.5 million ($12.25 million) invested in companies like Entropysoft, HappyView, MobPartner and QuelleEnergie. Today’s investment of €1 million ($1.4 million) goes to custom travel site, Planetveo. → Read More
There’s no denying that startup accelerators are now officially in vogue. Whether that is a sign of a bubble (or even a Blubble) or not I will leave to you.
However, today the movement is joined by the Oxygen Accelerator a UK-based investment programme designed to intensively mentor super-early stage startups. The 13-week programme will take applications from around the world, so long as the startup sets up a UK limited company.
The programme is unusual in that it’s offering an “evergreen” loan of £20,000 to start with, in return for a 6% equity stake. In effect this covers the startup’s costs and ‘ramen noodle’ living expenses during the programme (they are working with local athorities to also provide subsidised or free accommodation for teams). → Read More
Finally there’s a reason for young people to use LinkedIn! If you’re having trouble keeping track of where your friends work in this current startupgasm, WhoWorks.At was made for you.
Just download the Chrome extension and it will let you know who in your LinkedIn network works at whatever site you’re currently browsing in Chrome, whether it be Facebook, Google, TechCrunch or some stealth startup.
It is amazing. → Read More
About a week and a half ago, I wrote a post defending Apple against the location FUD being spread. Due to some real, but minor issues (which have already been resolved) Apple was at the center of this. Then the focus immediately seemed to shift towards Google. If Apple is “watching you” with the iPhone, Google must be as well with Android devices, right? Sure — if you’re a paranoid looney who doesn’t really understand what the situation is.
Naturally, that group includes the United States government. In an effort for some lawmakers to attach their names to these highly publicized complaints and companies, they’ve called upon executives to testify before Congress. On Tuesday, those companies will head to a panel in Washington to answer questions. In other words, Congress will be getting a Location 101 briefing. → Read More
Back in August of last year, with a small amount of media fanfare, I quit Twitter and every other social network.
At the time, I was in the midst of making final edits to The Upgrade as well as writing three columns a week. For someone who makes a living writing about himself, I explained, Twitter is a huge distraction from paid work. It is also, as I discovered while researching the book, fatal to good record keeping: creating a string of disconnection, context-free updates, rather than the kind of consistent narrative you might find on a blog.
To those who suggested I simply cut back on my Twitter usage, rather than quitting cold turkey, I pointed to my struggles with drinking. The slightly-pathetic truth is, I’m cursed with an addictive personality; an all-or-nothing-mindset that has been, to paraphrase Homer Simpson, the cause of and solution to all of my problems. → Read More
Digging out from under a mountain of stuff this weekend, I’m hopelessly behind. Disclosure: I work at salesforce.com, doing amazing things I can’t say anything about.
Apparently, the tech press is abuzz with controversy about Mike Arrington’s continuing success at actually saying what he thinks. Disclosure: I am a big fan of everything Mike does, and particularly his skill at reinventing the media. I should be considered completely biased in that regard, and you should discount everything I say accordingly. → Read More
Earlier this week I issued a report about the positive changes that have recently taken place in the venture capital industry. These changes are profound and will have a lasting effect on both the venture capital asset class as well as today’s start-ups.
Much has been written about the so-called “golden age” of venture capital in the late 1990s dot-com era, when the likes of Netscape, Yahoo, Amazon and eBay were created.
Yes, those certainly were great times for founders and early stage investors, but I will let you in on a little secret: for all of the brilliance, ambition and hard work that went into building these iconic companies, the vast majority of the capital appreciation in these businesses took place only after they went public. → Read More
Last week I wrote a post about my current investment policy at TechCrunch, and pointing out already disclosed financial conflicts of interest. Our primary duty to readers, as I’ve said many times, is transparency. To that end we will (as we always have) be extremely careful in disclosing any investments I’ve made in startups or in venture funds. And these interests will be disclosed even when other TechCrunch writers are covering these companies.
In that post I said that there would be a lot of criticism headed our way from our competitors. And that’s exactly what happened. AllThingsD calls me “vaguely icky.” The Atlantic Wire says what I’m doing “lowers the bar for journalistic independence.” And Tom Foremski says “It’s best to have a blanket policy of no investments allowed. That way readers can read the news without having to do all the leg work to figure out if there is any bias.”
So, hold on a minute. → Read More
It’s just about that time again. Google I/O is happening next week and just as in year’s past, the company is expected to announce some big things on stage during their two keynotes on Tuesday and Wednesday morning. But what will those things be? Jason and I delve into some predictions for the event, which we’ll both be covering.
But first we take some time to look back at last year’s I/O which made a big splash at the time — and can now probably be best described as a big flop. Google TV, Google Music, Chrome OS. Etc, etc, etc… Will this year’s be more of the same, or will Google’s mouth actually be able to write checks that their body can cash this time around? Stay tuned… → Read More
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