The sheer amount of media produced by film makers, advertisers and ad agencies is exploding. And of course, literally everything from a TV ad to an app like Angry Birds needs a soundtrack. That means money. So-called ‘synch deals’ with this soundtrack music grew in 2011 by 5.7 per cent to US$342 million according to one estimate. Music licensing is a market worth at least $6bn globally. But at the… → Read More
You’d think that social bookmarking as a startup opportunity has had its day. But in actual fact, linking to, and therefore sharing content, is built into the Web’s plumbing, while the success of Pinterest has no doubt inspired other startups to try their hand. One of those — at least on the surface — is Paris-based Minilogs. → Read More
A new convergence of startups and Internet companies has come together to provide other early-stage companies with the tools required to get up and running quickly, and most importantly, cheaply. It’s sort of like a Humble Indie Bundle, except instead of gaming, GetStartupTools.com offers software from Wave, Box, MailChimp, Zendesk, Uberflip and General Assembly that most brand new internet… → Read More
Desktop virtualisation startup WorldDesk has raised $1.25 million in new funding, in what is effectively a follow-on round from existing backers Lough Shore Investments, the Belfast-based angel investment firm, and a number of unnamed California and New York-based angels. Today’s funding news also coincides with what WordDesk is describing as a “significant overhaul” of its free ‘WorldDesk for… → Read More
The tech industry has seen its fair share of acquisition whoppers lately, with Salesforce acquiring ExactTarget for $2.5 billion this month, and Yahoo putting the icing on its acquisition spree by snatching up Tumblr for $1.1 billion. But the news today that Google is buying popular iOS map and navigation app, Waze, (reportedly for around $1.1 to $1.3 billion) is a little different. Here’s why. → Read More
It’s often said that if you’re not on Facebook you don’t exist, so dominant in our social lives has the uber-social network become. Therefore, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that businesses — big and small — may feel the same way. Hoping to cash in on the rise of Facebook advertising is Stockholm-based Qwaya, which offers a cloud-based tool for SMEs to create, publish and measure the… → Read More
Vine has already clarified just how quickly its userbase is growing, with the announcement that the app had hit 13 million downloads by the time Twitter launched it on Android. This was all just a week ago.
Today, however, we’ve learned that Vine has climbed to the top of the charts on Android as the top social app and the No. 4 free app on Google Play. Instagram is No. 5. → Read More
BrightEdge, a company that offers tools for search engine optimization and content marketing, is announcing that it has raised a big $42.8 million Series D.
The round was led by Insight Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Battery Ventures, Altos Ventures and Illuminate Ventures. The company has now raised more than $63 million total. → Read More
Gen Y is obsessed with content. Addicted even. This explains why Reddit and BuzzFeed are two of the most popular websites on the internet right now. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for disruption, right?
At least, that’s how David Arabov and Jonathan Francis, founders of Elite Daily, feel. Elite Daily is a blog, at its core, that was designed specifically for Generation Y, but with a… → Read More
Facebook and Twitter have become stellar venues for brands and small businesses alike to advertise their wares. However, while social-style gift-giving has seen some traction thanks to Facebook, social commerce has been slow to take flight. Chirpify launched in early 2012 to do something about this, offering an easy way for people to make purchases in-stream on Twitter. Late last year, the young… → Read More
InternMatch has raised a $4 million Series A funding round led by ARTIS Ventures and Subtraction Capital, as well as follow-on investors including Kapor Capital and 500 Startups. The company will use the money to expand its engineering and marketing teams and build data-based technology to help match companies with the right applicants. InternMatch, which launched in 2009, has now raised a total… → Read More
Just about eight weeks ago or so, I was on a call with Zynga’s COO David Ko following the company’s first quarter earnings report. Zynga was trying to manage expectations for the coming two quarters by saying it had paused its game slate to re-evaluate every upcoming title on the table. I can’t remember the exact question I asked, but it was something like, “Finland’s… → Read More
Retargeting, everyone’s favorite web advertising technology, is coming to smartphones thanks to a startup called TapCommerce. The company isn’t exactly launching today, but it has been relatively quiet, and now it’s announcing some initial advertisers, as well as disclosing a $1.2 million round that it raised last year.
Retargeting allows businesses to target their ads based on a user’s past… → Read More
BuzzTable seems to be progressing in its noble quest to make getting seated at a restaurant as quick and painless as possible. With its newly launched ControlCenter, BuzzTable’s guest communication platform now comprises three parts: WaitList+ for hosts, the BuzzTable app for guests, and ControlCenter, a web app that delivers to operators information gathered by the first two. That includes… → Read More
Apple usually shares the spotlight at its WWDC keynote with a few of its developers and partners. Today, the big winner was probably Andreessen Horowitz-backed AI startup Anki, but what also caught our attention was a brief demo of Famo.us, the startup that launched at our Disrupt conference last fall.
The demo itself was pretty short. It came during the announcement of OS X Mavericks… → Read More
If you know any serious musicians, you’ve probably heard them talk about the challenges of finding people to play with. You might also have seen those “drummer seeks band” ads in coffee shops or newspapers (or listened to that great segment about those ads on This American Life). Well, a startup called Giggem aims to make it easier for musicians to find bands, for bands to promote themselves to… → Read More
A new real-time web analytics platform Spinnakr is launching out of its closed beta today, accompanied by a seed round of just under a million from Andreessen Horowitz, 500 Startups, Point Nine Capital, Sand Hill Angels, and others. Though analytics is already a crowded space, Spinnakr’s product is offering something different – it’s bringing the intelligence of a data scientist to all web… → Read More
Fotopedia has made quite a name for itself as one of the leading media consumption apps for travel, but the company (led by former Apple Apps Division CTO Jean-Marie Hullot) is ready to zero in on media creation as well.
In April, the company soft-launched a new app called Reporter, in the hopes that the app’s user base would grow organically. And grow, it did! Fotopedia Reporter has already… → Read More
Rovio is continuing to cycle in new executive level management with Nokia veteran Teemu Suila taking over as chief operating officer after former COO Harri Koponen stepped down after about two years in the role. Koponen is moving on to do business development for the main investment company behind Rovio, presumably controlled by chairman Kaj Hed, who is the father of CEO Mikael Hed and owns about… → Read More
MyJobCompany is another take on the social recruitment idea. Its platform, which expanded beyond France and Latin America to the UK last week, enables anybody to become what it calls a “social headhunter” by recommending friends and acquaintances for a job. Or, put another way, by sending their social and professional networks job adverts, which if lead to a qualified application or actual… → Read More
A few weeks ago, we broke the news that InPowered would be selling its NetShelter display advertising business to publisher Ziff Davis. Now the company is ready to talk about what comes next.
Peyman and Pirouz Nilforoush, the brothers who co-founded InPowered and serve as CEO and president respectively, said they’re using the money from the deal (an undisclosed amount) to double down on… → Read More
Editing video is tedious enough on its own, but it becomes a whole new world of pain when producers, editors, audio guys, and others are trying to collaborate on a single project.
That’s where First Cut Pro (not to be confused with Final Cut Pro) comes in. The software comes out of Austin, where the company won our TC Meetup + Pitch-off Competition, meaning that the First Cut Pro guys will be… → Read More
According to the Globes, an Israel-based publication, Google is reportedly set to acquire the Israeli transit and navigation company Waze for $1.3 billion, making it one of the larger Google acquisitions in recent memory. This news comes amid swirling rumors that Waze would be bought up by one of the big guys, Facebook, Google, or Apple. → Read More
If you keep up with all the tech startup news, it’s easy to develop the impression that money is just sloshing around the Valley and even the worst products and ideas curry investors’ interests. Thankfully, this is far from the truth. As many of you know, raising institutional funding is quite hard and the process takes a long time, sometimes years. Years ago, Pandora suffered through brutal… → Read More
Dekko, a San Francisco-based startup that just closed extra funding to build a platform for augmented reality apps, just brought its first title to market with a racing game that has players drive virtual cars across tabletops. OK, so augmented reality, which overlays virtual items or information over the real world through a phone or tablet’s viewfinder, hasn’t really come into its… → Read More
Snapchat is aggressively recruiting sales people from Stanford as well as USC for its impending debut of a monetization scheme, we’ve discovered. Meanwhile it’s raising $100 million at a valuation as high as $1 billion to pay them, as well as buy more servers and hire other talent to power its rapidly growing self-destructing messaging app, sources say. → Read More
In Silicon Valley, it’s easy to find lots of advice on what I call the “external” how-tos of startups, including: structuring your company, building a minimum viable product, negotiating a term sheet with investors, selling your company, and on and on!
This post, on the other hand, is about the less publicized “inner side” of the entrepreneurial journey. → Read More
Solve Media, a startup that turns CAPTCHA verification systems into ads, says that it’s growing quickly.
There were more than 1 billion engagements with Solve’s Type-In ads last year, the company says. It will exceed that number in the second quarter of 2013 alone, and it should hit 4 billion for all of 2013. Solve also says that it’s on-track to bring in $13 million to $16 million in revenue… → Read More
Picture this: you’re traveling somewhere new and when it comes time to eat you want to get a feel for some local flavors. You’re not going to want to chow down at the nearby Applebee’s in that sort of situation, which is why South Carolina native Rich Winley and Philadelphian Dan Mall whipped up an iOS app called — creatively enough — NoChains.
NoChains has already soft launched in Austin, TX… → Read More
The growth of mobile devices, smartphones, and social networking services have forever changed the way we take photos. Today, we continuously snap pictures, pausing only to selectively share the best to our network of friends, family and followers on sites like Facebook and Instagram. Today, a new photo-sharing startup called Piccolo is launching into beta with a service that aims to make photo… → Read More
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