While some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals like media and fitness and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s headed to enterprise next.
Badgeville’s vision of a web and business experience being re-shaped by game dynamics is not only being validated by the media, but by investors, too. Earlier this month, mobile gamification startup SessionM raised $20 million from Charles River Ventures, Highland Capital Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, among others. And today, Badgeville is leap-frogging SessionM, announcing that it has closed a badge-worthy $25 million round of series C financing. → Read More
Salesforce.com may be close to acquiring Buddy Media in the largest social media marketing acquisition to date, according to sources close to the company. AllThingsD reported earlier today that Salesforce is getting close to a deal for more than $800 million, and we’d heard acquisition rumors earlier this week too, though Buddy Media declined to comment. Now our sources say the price may be considerably higher depending on the equity component of the deal. That may put it more in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
If the acquisition happens in that price range, the deal would would be an impressive multiple given Buddy’s current revenue run rate. As of last year, Buddy was projecting a run rate of $100 million for 2012 and $180 million for 2013, we hear. That’s a much more generous multiple than the 3x one that Vitrue got in its $300 million acquisition by Oracle. → Read More
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Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out today from the boutique French consulting firm faberNovel, which encourages us to look at the bigger picture, and why, in its words, Facebook is “the perfect startup.”
The mammoth slideshow is an annual thing for faberNovel, which picks one company to tackle each year — others have included how Amazon controls e-commerce, how Apple dominates, and what could go wrong with Google. Like those before, the one out today on Facebook is a deep-dive into the company, and it looks not just at the origins of the social network, but what sets it apart from other attempts at global social networks — and other startups. (And by the way, faberNovel sees all this drama and attention on the IPO as just “one point on a startup trajectory.” Some investors may not feel quite the same.)
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Pain, pain, and more pain for Facebook’s stock. Facebook sunk into the $20s for the first time today, declining about 9 percent as options trading started. The decline also came a day after a third wave of reports came out about a Facebook phone, which would push the company into the risky and expensive world of building hardware.
Shares hit a new low of $28.65 and have closed nearly 10 percent lower at $28.84. After-hours trading has the company down another 0.5 percent to $28.69. That gives the company a market capitalization of $79.02 billion, down from $115 billion market cap Facebook opened at on the day of its IPO when it started trading at $42.05 a share.** (That said, if you’re a glass-is-half-full kind of person, Facebook is now cheap, cheap, cheap!) → Read More
Last we heard from Game Closure, the young startup had just turned down offers from Zynga and Facebook on its way to a $12 million raise from Highland Capital, Greylock, Benchmark, General Catalyst, and more. Even in spite of $100 million-plus offers, Game Closure CEO Michael Carter tells us that the startup is not eager to sell — not now, and not in the future. Yet, stealing high-placed executives at the big gaming companies? Not a problem.
Today, Game Closure, which is building a game development environment and SDK that makes it easy for developers to create, host, and deploy HTML5, cross-platform, multiplayer games, is announcing that it has poached Laurent Desegur away from Zynga, making the engineer and executive VP of Mobile Engineering. Until recently, Desegur had been CTO of Zynga Mobile, on top of being a veteran of Netflix, Big Fish Games, Amazon, Apple, and EA — to name a few. → Read More
An Irish women’s charity, Women’s Aid, linked to some articles on the Irish Examiner (like this, this, and this) and thought that all was right with the world. Heck, that’s how the Internet works, right?
It turns out that according to the Irish Newspaper Licensing organization, you need to pay to link to the newspapers. And there the troubles begin.
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In the aftermath-analysis about what exactly happened in the Facebook IPO, and what it might mean for the future, here’s one side-effect to the east of Nasdaq: Vkontake, the top social network in Russia, which shares a shareholder with Facebook, Mail.ru, has decided to delay its own IPO.
The news was confirmed by the company’s CEO Pavel Durov on Twitter. In Russian, he tweeted, in answer to a Russian journalist’s question about the planned IPO date, “It’s not planned. The IPO of Facebook has destroyed the faith of a lot of private investors in social networks and the IPO of VK has now been postponed indefinitely.”
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Link shortener Bitly today launched a major redesign and number of new features that all add up to what the company itself calls “a new bitly.” Among these new features are ‘bitmarks,’ bitly’s name for its new bookmarking features, the ability to search and find these bookmarks, a fast search functionality, as well as enhanced public profiles that give users more privacy control. Bitly is also rolling out new bookmarklets, a Chrome extension and its first iPhone app. → Read More
Social commerce startup Lockerz just announced that it has acquired online fashion community Chick Approved.
Lockerz allows its members to earn “PTZ” by sharing content and other activity on the site, which are then redeemed for discounts in the Lockerz store. Fashion, style, and beauty are the company’s fastest growing categories, says founder and CEO Kathy Savitt, and she describes this acquisition as a way to “really double down” in that area.
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We first met the folks from Lamp Lighter at an NYC office hours session, and just as we expected, their iPad app Trivia Party is doing swimmingly in the App Store.
After a week of availability, the app has already made its way into the Top 100 zone within the trivia category, and tallied more than 10,000 questions answered. → Read More
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
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’s not clear if this is a one-off glitch, a signal of a bigger issue — or a way of pumping up/sabotaging Klout scores for those who care. But it’s not great news any way you spin it, if it’s true: a Klout user has gotten in touch to say that when he accesses the social influence ratings service, he is getting signed in to Klout not as himself but as someone else.
Using an HTC Sensation device running the Ice Cream Sandwich version of Android, IT consultant Halil Kabaca,of Istanbul, Turkey-based Novarum Consulting, tells us that when he goes on to Klout via the phone’s mobile browser, he is being signed in automatically as someone completely different — someone he doesn’t know at all who happens to work for Adobe in business development (see screenshots of Kabaca’s and the other guy’s profiles after the break).
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It’s not a given that a leader in search can successfully pivot into other areas like social media — just ask Google — but a new service launching in Russia today, from that country’s search leader Yandex, shows one route a company with a lot of smarts can take to make sure they remain a central player in the social game. Today sees the launch of SocialMart, a social shopping startup financed by Yandex (through its seed-funding program Yandex.Factory), and powered by Yandex (via Yandex.Market), but is not Yandex itself.
Both Yandex and SocialMart are banking on the fact that the rising popularity of ecommerce in Russia is inevitably going to cross over with the equally popular trend of social networking: up to now, those twains have not met, unlike in other markets, where services like Mertado (now part of Groupon), Sneakpeeq, and Fab have been running away with the “social shopping” banner, picking up users and funding in the process.
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Facebook games just got a lot more viral. People don’t want to install and give data permissions to games, they want to play them, so now Facebook is allowing games to be played directly from within news feed or Timeline stories. These previews give gamers a taste and could get them over the install hurdle once they’re already addicted.
Facebook has to keep delivering growth for apps to get developers to stick around, or better yet, build for it first. Feed gaming could be a big selling point that could get devs to prioritize Facebook’s canvas over iOS, Android, Chrome web store, and other platforms that force people to download and install before the fun starts.
Some of Facebook’s most popular games are already using this tactic. Read more to try out playing Angry Birds, Bubble Witch Saga, and Idle Worship from the feed… → Read More
Not everyone loves Facebook enough to give it three, four, or five spots on their homescreen. So yesterday’s launch of Facebook’s third consumer iOS app, Facebook Camera, could actually end up reducing usage of Facebook’s main app, Messenger, and others by compelling people to consolidate them into a folder.
This issue isn’t one just for Facebook but for any developer looking to break out specific features of a cluttered omni-app into streamlined standalone apps. Is a lightweight feel worth the risk of app overload? → Read More
It has been a week since the Facebook IPO, with a whole lot of drama in the aftermath about the glitch with Nasdaq (and the legal implications), and questions about how much traders have lost as a result, while the share price has fallen: from a start of $38 it is now $32.79 in pre-market trading. But in a speech earlier this week to the 2012 graduating class of Harvard Business School, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg steered very clear of these topics.
Instead, as you can see in the video we have embedded below, we got a pretty good (and in my opinion pretty inspiring) speech: quite a few Facebook references but not directly about the business itself, and a lot of talk about remaining honest, and the role of women at the highest level of business.
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Two big customer review platforms are teaming up: Bazaarvoice just announced that it has agreed to acquire PowerReviews.
The agreement is for up to $31 million in cash, plus stock, bringing the total estimated value to be $151 million. Bazaarvoice says the acquisition should close before the end of July. → Read More
Thanks to health-focused startup accelerators like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a disqualifier for entrepreneurs looking to enter the health space. There are plenty of problems to tackle, and there’s growth capital to be found.
To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to combine the Web’s medical data with advice from regular people (and experts) to create a smart repository for health information. To give it the fuel it needs as it gears up for launch later this summer, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angel and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia. → Read More
Insta-who? Today Facebook begins rolling out Facebook Camera for iOS to English-speaking countries, a standalone photos app where you can shoot, filter, and share single or sets of photos and scroll through a feed of photos uploaded to Facebook by your friends. Developed by Facebook’s photos team without the help of Instagram because the acquisition deal hasn’t closed yet, Facebook Camera looks a lot like the app TechCrunch leaked images of a year ago, and is designed for quicker publishing than Facebook’s multi-featured primary mobile app.
Facebook Camera lets you rapidly pick one or more photos, apply filters, tag friends and locations, add a description, and post. While its 14 filters, batch uploads, and streamlined interface are a big step up from Facebook for iOS, the design isn’t as beautiful as Instagram and neither are the photos you’ll see in it. When asked if Facebook Camera would become a direct competitor to the photosharing network it bought last month, a spokesman told me “As Mark asserted, we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently, so I anticipate some healthy competition.” → Read More
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