Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator’s winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it was just a matter of “having a different vision in terms of how to move forward.” So what has Vaisman, along with co-founder Ankush Agarwal, now launched instead? Play Safe, an app for Android that lets kids safely play games on your own smartphone.
→ Read More
Roambi, one of the most popular names in an emerging set of business intelligence (BI) apps, has found an eager audience thanks to its enabling companies to transform their snooze-inducing Salesforce, Oracle, or SAP data (i.e. BI data) into interactive mobile dashboards, snappy charts and sexy graphs, and instantly deliver them to the iPad.
And today MeLLmo (the creator of Roambi) is taking its functionality one step further with the launch of a new platform that gives organizations the ability to deliver analytics and multimedia content to anyone with an iPad. The key value proposition of the new platform being that companies can now not only create interactive reports, but actually turn their sexy, magazine-style reports into apps that can be published on the App Store. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
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
smartDIGITAL, a startup that makes interactive ad displays, has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of funding.
smartDIGITAL displays are already available in Chicago and Miami, says co-founder and CEO George Burciaga, with plans to roll them out to 10 markets over the next 36 months. They’re essentially large kiosks with multi-touch screens that allow consumers to interact with an ad rather than simply staring at it as they walk or drive by. The goal, Burciaga says, is to “inspire them to do something” — whether it’s sharing a photo, purchasing a Groupon deal (yes, Groupon is a partner), or emailing something to their phone. That means the consumer is more engaged, and it also means the advertiser has a better idea about whether their ads are actually working. → Read More
Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless. With its “digital filing cabinet” software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to manage their bills, be they phone, cable, or credit card.
Of course, the world is quickly going mobile, and payment solutions are going right along with it. So, in an effort to close the loop between web and mobile services, Doxo is today launching a new mobile payment and management solution, along with a new Android app, to finally allow users to both receive and pay bills from their mobile devices. → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last May, the unanimous winner of the “Audience Choice” award was a young, Atlanta-based startup called CodeGuard. The startup caught the audience’s attention based on a simple value proposition: To become a “time machine for your website.” In other words, CodeGuard’s free service allows any site owner to back up their website and revert to earlier versions, while monitoring for infections.
After months of tweaking and beta testing, today CodeGuard is officially pulling back the curtain on a new-and-improved service, backed by a fresh $1.3 million in funding from Imlay Investments and a host of angel investors, including Palaniswamy Rajan, Bert Ellis, Tom Noonan, Matt Chanoff, and Merrick Furst. → Read More
Groupon just announced via its blog that it has acquired Breadcrumb, the creators of an affordable point of sale system and iPad app that targets local restaurants.
While the terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, Groupon has made a run of acquisitions over the last six months, and this move is likely one being made for talent. Not only that but the daily deals behemoth is looking to create more defined inroads with local mom and pop restaurants in its quest to become “the OS for local commerce,” and adding Breadcrumb and its technology to the team is a step in that direction. → Read More
You’re hitting deadline and you want to add that special something that will totally knock your web app out of the park. Do you add rounded corners? A Tweet This button? No, motherlover, you add Clippy JS.
Clippy JS, made by Smore, is a cute little bit of Javascript code that allows you to embed Clippy, Merlin, Rover, or Links (all of Microsoft Office fame) into any webpage. You can make these folks do all kinds of things including look around, jump up and down, and even converse with your users. Why? Because it’s funny, that’s why. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
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
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.
→ Read More
JackThreads, the members-only shopping club bought by men’s lifestyle brand Thrillist two years ago, just hit a major milestone this morning: 2 million members. At the time of the original acquisition, JackThreads was really small, says Thrillist co-founder and CEO Ben Lerer. It only had around 100,000-150,000 members in total. But it soon grew. JackThreads hit the 1 million member mark in July 2011, and since then, the average number of orders placed per month has more than doubled, average daily sales have more than doubled, unique site visitors per month grew 143%, and mobile visits grew 163%.
The company hosts flash sales with top apparel brands, but is now starting to try new things. It recently launched its own private label line collection called Goodale, which Lerer says led to the best-selling sale the site has ever hosted. It’s also planning to expand beyond flash sales, and will soon allow members to search the site’s inventory for specific items. → Read More
Listen up, ladies! (And upwardly fashionable gents!)
A new service has hit the web that you’ve likely been waiting for for a long time. Gone are the days of trotting over to a store sales associate and getting help with matching makeup or clothing colors. Now all it takes is a trip to Plum Perfect and a camera to get your style on.
Here’s how it works: → Read More
Last month, San Francisco unveiled a new cloud-based open data site as part of its move to adopt cloud services and, in turn, to encourage open government, transparency and accountability by improving access to data and information. San Francisco is hardly alone — both public and private sectors in the U.S. and around the world are pulling back the curtain on their data. Of course, opening the doors is one thing, but unlocking and making sense of that data? Not quite as easy.
That’s why Santiago and Palo Alto-based Junar has developed a platform that allows businesses, governments, and NGOs not only to unleash their data in order to drive collaboration and enhance transparency, but to remove the headache of having to develop their own proprietary software. And to fuel its initiative, the startup announced today that it has raised $1.2 million in seed funding from Aurus, Austral Capital, and a host of national and Latin American angel investors. → Read More
Australian travel search FlightFox has a new take on how to surface the best airline deals, and now it has a round of angel funding and entry into top startup incubator Y Combinator, to go along with it. The company has just closed an $800,000 round of funding from YC, 500 Startups, Kevin Laws (board member at AngelList), Matt Dickinson (early investor in Ark), Mick Liubinskas (from Pollenizer), and others.
As for what makes FlightFox unique? Instead of developing algorithms to return a list of flights to choose from, the company taps into the power of crowdsourcing instead. → Read More
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
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
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, Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; building-sector-focused Navitas Capital; as well as 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
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?
→ 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.
→ Read More
Did you miss some of our NY Disrupt conference this week? Or want to watch it again? TechCrunch Disrupt and our Hackathon provided more than 30 hours of demos, interviews, panel discussions, and Battlefield competition. Sure, you can spend the holiday weekend watching all of it. But, we’ve also put together daily video highlights that we will be publishing in a trio of posts today.
The player below shows some of the favorite moments from Monday, Day 1 of the conference, including some surprises from VC Fred Wilson, Fab.com and Tumblr. Monday’s Battlefield presentations included the first public preview from the Disrupt Cup winner and runner-up. → Read More
Sponsored Ads
San Francisco, CA
