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- Social Video Discovery Engine Shelby.tv Shuts Down, Promises New Version Is In The Works
- FuzeBox Raises $20M For Online Meetings And Collaboration, Round Led By Index Ventures
- Yahoo Confirms, Apologizes For The Email Hack, Says Still Fixing. Plus, Check If You Were Impacted (Non-Yahoo Accounts Apply)
- Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Reveals Revamped iOS And Android Apps
- How-To Publisher Open Air Raises $800K From SV Angel, Charles River, And Others
- Want To Know How Much More You Could Earn? Adzuna Launches Free ‘Market Insight’ Tool For Jobseekers
- Now Powering Music Intelligence For Spotify, VEVO & More, Echo Nest Nabs $17M To Go Big Abroad
- Jimmy Wales Will Give Menshn A Few Mentions With A Live Chat Next Week
- Amazon Ups Its Game, Again: Game Connect Ads Free And Massive Multiplayer Titles To Amazon’s Cloud Catalog
- With More Original Programming On The Way, Netflix TV Viewing Is On The Rise
- Reminder: TechCrunch Is Coming To Greenville, SC Tonight! (UPDATED LOCATION)
- Power To The Cloud: Twilio Takes Its SMS Messaging API Global, Adds Dozens Of New Languages, 150+ Countries
- The Currency Cloud Closes Another $3M To Attack Banks’ Cross-Border Payments Monopoly
- Greystripe Founders Michael Chang And Andy Choi Join Digitization Company YesVideo, Invest $5M
- Cloudability Raises $8.7 Million From Foundry Group For Service To Track Cloud Spending
- Square Issues Cease And Desist On Mobile Payment Competitor mPowa: Hands Off Our Hands Picture
- Copious Raises $5 Million Series A To Build Out The eBay With A Social Backbone
- TechCrunch Italy — An Event To Showcase Italian Startups Globally
- With 50,000 Videographers, PopTent Raises $5.5 Million From MK Capital To CrowdSource Ads
- Rovio Hopes Amazing Alex Will Catapult It Past Angry Birds Into Its $9bn IPO
| Social Video Discovery Engine Shelby.tv Shuts Down, Promises New Version Is In The Works Posted: 12 Jul 2012 09:03 AM PDT  New York City-based social discovery startup Shelby.tv will be going dark over the weekend, the CEO Reece Pacheco alerted users in a blog post today. But don’t write it off and add it to the deadpool just yet — management says that it’s working on a new and improved version that will be coming soon. Shelby.tv was founded to provide a platform for discovering and watching interesting videos shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter. The startup therefore launched a website and iOS app built to provide a continuous stream of videos, and let people in turn share them to their own networks of friends. The company, which was part of last year’s TechStars class, says that the shutdown is being done so that it can focus its full attention on the next version of Shelby.tv. Rather than continuing to support a product that it will soon replace, the Shelby team will be focused 110 percent instead on creating “an entirely new build” of its social discovery platform for watching online videos. According to CEO Reece Pacheco, the new version promises to be faster and have better processing power and more videos. The company will also be focused on improving community aspects of the platform, providing new ways for its users to share videos with friends. In the meantime, all the auxiliary tools that the team has built — its Chrome extension, iOS apps, bookmarklet, and weekly emails — will also be shut down. Shelby.tv has raised about $1.75 million since being founded in early 2011, including a $1.5 million seed round last July. Despite temporary shutdown, Pacheco says there will be no effect on headcount, which has tripled its team since last year, from four employees to 11 today. Users who wish to be alerted when the new version goes live can add their email address to gt.shelby.tv.
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| FuzeBox Raises $20M For Online Meetings And Collaboration, Round Led By Index Ventures Posted: 12 Jul 2012 09:01 AM PDT  Online collaboration company FuzeBox has raised a hefty $20 million in Series A funding. The company is probably best known for its Fuze Meeting products, allowing customers to run online meetings (complete with HD video) on their computers, tablets, and samrtphones. FuzeBox says its technology is now powering 78,000 meetings per day in 122 countries. Last month, it relaunched its iPhone app (under the name Fuze Join for iPhone), and when I got a demo, I was particularly impressed by the responsiveness and speed. The round was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Insight Venture Partners. Index partner Mike Volpi (who held a number of senior roles at Cisco) is joining the FuzeBox board. As with most venture rounds, FuzeBox plans to spend a lot of the money expanding its workforce — specifically the sales, marketing, and engineering teams. In discussing the funding, CEO Jeff Cavins places a particular emphasis on the marketing side. Thus far, he says FuzeBox has been largely “an unmarketed company,” but that’s about to change. FuzeBox has a complicated history. It was founded in 1998 as CallWave, and its initial focus was online products for fax and voicemail. The company was traded publicly on NASDAQ, but was it went private again in 2009 and renamed itself FuzeBox. Cavins says the CallWave name is actually coming back, but for a new company that FuzeBox is spinning out. FuzeBox is divesting itself of its patent portfolio (as Cavins puts it, “We don’t want ‘em”), and CallWave will focus on monetizing that portfolio.
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 08:52 AM PDT  There are still a lot of questions about this alleged Yahoo Voices data breach — including whether there was a reason behind the breach in the first place — but Yahoo has now officially confirmed that the data did in fact come from its servers, and that “approximately” 400,000 email addresses and passwords have been leaked in plain text online. Meanwhile, security specialists are now parsing the data and one, Sucuri, has come up with a script to check if your email address (which doesn’t have to be a @yahoo.com address) is among those exposed. In a statement in which it apologizes for the attack, Yahoo tells us that the data came from an older file from the Yahoo! Contributor Network (which it picked up via its Associated Content acquisition). But it also noted that less than five percent of the emails had valid passwords, and that it is now working to fix the vulnerability that led to the disclosure — note, it didn’t say it’s fixed yet. Here is the full statement:
Meanwhile, Sucuri company also has started to pull out some trends and make some analysis on some of the most common domains in the hacking list, including the most common passwords, and further analysis on password length. Looking at it once again is a reminder of how important it is to be a bit more cryptic in how you secure yourself online: According to Sucuri’s analysis, Yahoo is the most popular domain in the email list, but it’s by no means the only one. It notes that 135,599 emails came from yahoo.com; but that a further 106,185 came from gmail.com; 54,393 from hotmail.com; 24,677 from aol.com; 8,422 from comcast.net and 6,282 msn.com. Note that these numbers are not exactly the same as those being tallied by others, but they are close. Daniel Cid, the CTO, also noted that there were multiple passwords from government accounts. Other parts of the leaked data are true to form: “123456″ was used as the password for 1,666 of the accounts; “password” was used for 780 of them. Other frequent ones were common first names like Maggie and Michael, as well as other number variations (123123). Seven characters is the most common length of passwords. The fact that Yahoo says that it is still working on fixing the vulnerability should raise some alarm bells. Sony had a massive problem last year involving a data breach of user profiles on the PlayStation network, which took some time to finally patch up — but not before much embarrassment and more leaks for the company. So the reports that we may hear today, post Yahoo’s board meeting, interim CEO Ross Levinsohn confirmed as the permanent CEO, may indeed get put on the backburner for now. I don’t think this is the can of worms that Erick was referring to when Yahoo bought Associated Content in 2010.
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| Eric Schmidt-Backed Slice Reveals Revamped iOS And Android Apps Posted: 12 Jul 2012 08:16 AM PDT  Don't let their recent quiet streak fool you — the team at Eric Schmidt-backed receipt aggregator/tracking service Slice have spent the last few months slaving away on revamped versions of their iOS and Android apps, and now that major update is ready for the purchase tracking masses. With Slice 2.0, co-founder and CEO Scott Brady wanted to do more than just track packages and aggregate users' purchase histories. Perhaps the most notable addition to the updated Slice mobile apps is a new personal analytics option called Thingerprint that breaks down how much users have spent on what kinds of products, with options to drill into specific purchase categories, item types, and merchants. Naturally, most of my paycheck goes toward gadgets and other similarly shiny new things, so Slice's Thingerprint has branded me a "Gadget Geek." It may not be the most original addition to the mix — rivals Lemon and OneReceipt have taken a similar approach — but having a fairly comprehensive breakdown of your purchasing habits at your fingertips isn’t the sort of thing most users would turn their noses up at. While the addition of personal analytics adds another dimension to the service, some of the updated bits were just about making Slice more accessible to particular use cases. During Slice's early days for instance, the service could only connect to and scan Yahoo! And Gmail accounts for emailed receipts and tracking notifications. Not so any more — Brady and his teamed fleshed out Slice 2.0 with support for iCloud, Hotmail, and AOL email accounts. Also featured prominently is the ability to manually add a new purchase to your Slice account by scanning the barcode off of a packing slip, though it should be noted that the Android version requires users to download a separate scanner app for that feature to work properly. Some of the additions included in this most recent update may seem like no-brainers, but the process wasn't always that straightforward. Brady confirmed to me that there was plenty of thoughtful testing and retesting before he and team signed off on the final updates. "The focus groups give us ideas on where we like to take our capabilities," he said "We rely pretty heavily on them, and before we go too far on any product we do plenty of testing and tweaking." For what it’s worth, his approach seems to be working so far. Since Slice’s launch in May 2011, the service has processed and tracked over 25 million purchases, and that number is sure to grow even larger if the company eventually gives in to their users' demands. "Behind additional email support, global availability is the second most requested feature," Brady remarked. "Today we only support the U.S., but we've created a technology that can work throughout the rest of the world."
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| How-To Publisher Open Air Raises $800K From SV Angel, Charles River, And Others Posted: 12 Jul 2012 08:07 AM PDT  Open Air Publishing has just raised an $800,000 seed round to fuel its efforts to create a new kind of how-to book for tablet and mobile devices. Founder and CEO Jon Feldman compares the current state of tablet publishing to the early days of television, where most shows were just filmed radio plays — no one had figured out how to take advantage of the medium yet. In the same way, Feldman says there’s an opportunity to create books that are written and designed entirely for the iPad, the iPhone, and eventually other devices, rather than just slapping some digital extras onto a traditional book. Open Air was founded in 2011, and it has already published four titles, starting with Speakeasy Cocktails: Learn from the Modern Mixologists, and including Holiday Recipes & Party Planning Guide, a cookbook that we’ve written about on TechCrunch. Naturally, these titles include features like slideshows, video, and other kinds of “tappable” content. Feldman says this approach also means Open Air doesn’t have to worry about many of the issues in print publishing, such as making sure the books reach a certain length so that they take up enough space on the shelf. Feldman says that the company usually decides what the topic of its next book should be, then recruits a well-known expert in the field to write it — with the development itself being handled by the Open Air team and tech. (The company’s books are built on top of the Inkling Habitat platform.) This hybrid between a publisher and studio approach, combined with the fact that the titles are being built solely for digital, also means that books can be created at a fraction of the traditional time and cost, Feldman says. It sounds like the approach is working so far. Open Air says all of its books have reached number one or two in its category in the United States and elsewhere, and that they’ve all made it into the top 100 rankings in the US. The books are normally priced between $4.99 and $9.99. Until now, those titles have all been iPad-only, but now Open Air is releasing iPhone versions, and plans to publish future titles to be compatible with all iOS devices. Feldman also says that he plans to have nine books out by the end of the year. As for the funding, the investors include SV Angel, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, The Social+Capital Partnership, Richmond Park Partners, David Tisch (of TechStars NYC), Advancit Capital, DEV (Digital Entertainment Ventures), Graph Ventures, Red Swan, Lars Albright, Sam Stahl, and Josh Mohrer.
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| Want To Know How Much More You Could Earn? Adzuna Launches Free ‘Market Insight’ Tool For Jobseekers Posted: 12 Jul 2012 08:01 AM PDT  It’s always nice to see when a startup cracks open its data treasure trove — knowledge is power after all. And Adzuna, the ‘next generation’ classified search engine, has done just that in the form of its new ‘Market Insight’ tool that gives jobseekers in the UK free access to salary trends across many job sectors. Want to know what the average technology journalist earns per-year, for example? (OK, I looked) — Adzuna’s new offering has you covered. In addition, the startup, whose founders hail from Gumtree, Zoopla and Qype, is one year old this week (nicely timed PR!), and claims just over half a million monthly unique visitors in the UK, with 2 million ads indexed (giving it over 90% market coverage, apparently). It credits this growth to its social approach to classified search via its Adzuna Connect and Friend Map which lets users find a job, car or home with help from their social graph. The new and free ‘Market Insight’ tool is designed to help jobseekers make better career decisions by offering things like historical salary trends, pay comparisons, vacancy maps, and company hiring patterns. The available data compromises more than one million job title and location combinations — the kind of market data previously only available to large corporations due to its expense, says Adzuna. A few interesting stats pulled from the available UK data-set: technology journalists make on average £31,800 p.a., 9% less than fashion journos (luckily, our own Alexis Tsotsis has both covered); the average salary for Google employees is on average 5% more than Microsoft; 25% of startups currently hiring in London are offering stock to employees up front; and London Ruby developer wages have increased from £43k in January to £46k in June (ouch!). Moving forward, Adzuna says it has plans for international expansion in 2012 as it aims to become a global player. “We’re not afraid to enter the US with our product (in fact we’re excited about it!) and we’re doing all of this from sleepy Clapham and with a team of ten”, says co-founder Andrew Hunter.
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| Now Powering Music Intelligence For Spotify, VEVO & More, Echo Nest Nabs $17M To Go Big Abroad Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:34 AM PDT  There’s a good chance that you’ve never heard of The Echo Nest. As a self-professed music intelligence company, Echo Nest is at its best when running quietly behind the scenes, methodically mining, packaging, and classifying music data from across the Web to provide developers with insight into their listeners’ musical preferences and taste profiles. Instead, you might better know Echo Nest as the company that powers Spotify Radio or as the brainpower behind VEVO’s new personalized recommendation features. Thanks to its machine learning technology, Echo Nest has been laboriously building what is now one of the largest repositories of dynamic music data in the world, housing 5 billion data points from over 30 million songs. The Somerville-based company has come a long way from its beginnings at MIT Media Lab, where it grew out of its co-founders’ dissertation work in 2005. Today, the startup is helping over 340 developers better understand their music content (and their users), including prominent names like Clear Channel's iHeartRadio, eMusic, MOG, Spotify, Nokia, the BBC and VEVO. It hasn’t been an easy road for digital music startups over the last, oh, 10 years, and Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese is quick to admit it hasn’t been without its hiccups. Yet, because the company has focused so intently on data, building its model to cater to developers and startups themselves, it’s been able to avoid many of those Music Industry Blues in the post-Napster world. Plus, being a data-driven digital music business in the current landscape just doesn’t elicit the same puzzled expressions it once did, especially from investors, the CEO tells us. Case in point: Today, the startup has received a serious vote of confidence from the other side of the table — $17 million votes, in fact. This morning, Echo Nest officially announced that it has closed a $17 million round of venture funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners. The startup’s previous investors, including Matrix Partners, Commonwealth Capital Partners, Fringe Partners, Jim Palotta and board member Michael Brown, also contributed to the round. The investment brings Echo Nest’s total funding raised to just over $27 million, making it one of the most-funded music data startups out there. As the company now powers music applications from bigs like Spotify as well as thousands of independent developers, Echo Nest’s technology now reaches over 150 million end users each month. While the team is guarded when it comes to sharing insight into their financials, Echo Nest CEO Jim Lucchese tells us that sales have increased seven-fold over the last 18 months and that its overall query volume — the number of questions it sees about music every month — has grown 20-times-over in the last year to 250 million queries per month. On top of already working with European customers like the BBC, the CEO tells us that the company has seen a big spike in inbound interest from international developers and music companies, particularly in South America and Eastern Europe. That’s part of the reason that the startup was eager to take on its 17 million dollar bills — to begin really focusing on international sales, marketing, and business development. He expects its current team of 40 to grow significantly in the coming months. Updating
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| Jimmy Wales Will Give Menshn A Few Mentions With A Live Chat Next Week Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:29 AM PDT  In between weighing-in on Internet laws, as he is generally wont to do, Jimmy Wales has rather taken to London, his new adopted home. He’s been pretty active, petitioning to stop a tech student being extradited to the U.S., and generally appearing on the London tech scene quite regularly. He’s even due to host an event with the Mayor of London on technology soon. Indeed, Wales is fast becoming something of a London connoisseur. And his next phase seems to be championing startups from, and coming to, the city. Last year he backed a new startup conference in London which he’s poised to repeat this year. Now news reaches us that he is to bring his considerable publicity power to a UK startup, Menshn. Next week at 2pm on Monday, he’ll host a live chat on the new service, which launched recently and resembles the realtime live chat of Twitter but sectioned off into defined topics. Wales’s presence (he has 70,000 Twitter followers and is constantly covered by the media) is likely to boost interest in the startup created by Luke Bozier and MP Louise Mensch, although we’re assured that his involvement is just on the live chat session only so far, no Angel investment as yet. Menshn tells me the site has been tacking upwards of late since its launch in terms of users and engagement and a mobile friendly version is planned soon. Still, I wonder how long it will be before we see Mr. Wales turn Angel investor in the London startup scene. He’d be a welcome addition.
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:07 AM PDT  Another game day for Amazon. Today the company is launching Game Connect, a new platform for cloud gaming that will see the company add a new selection of massively multiplayer online and free games to its catalog. It is also opening the Game Connect platform to developers for them to integrate their games with Amazon’s existing game accounts. Launch titles include Battlestar Galactica, World of Tanks, Pandora Saga, Stronghold Kingdoms and Super Monday Night Combat. The news comes just one day after the company announced GameCircle APIs to enhance the gaming experience on its Kindle Fire tablets. The integration with developers will mean that the games can automatically link up with customers’ Amazon game accounts for the purchase of virtual goods and other in-game purchases, for example to reach new levels or playing subscriptions. Meanwhile, to incentivize consumers to get and use those Amazon games accounts, Amazon is also offering them exclusive content and other deals when they play these games using those accounts. The accounts, Amazon says, can be created right at the product page. As with the Kindle Fire GameCircle announcement yesterday, today’s news is about Amazon increasing its activities in digital content beyond films and books, and it looks like this may just be the tip of the iceberg for developments in Amazon’s Digital Games Store — which has been around since 2010 and now has 3,000 titles. “Game Connect helps game developers reach more customers, move more quickly and grow their business by simplifying the purchase process for customers,” said Mike Frazzini, director, Amazon Games, in a statment. "This is an exciting next step for the Digital Games Store and we have even more to come." The growth may be in part to capitalize on a wider trend around cloud-based, streamed media services. These have been spurred on in part by devices like the Kindle Fire as well as smartphones (and perhaps, even, an Amazon smartphone), which often lack the on-device storage needed to run these games. The move to cloud-based gaming is something that is happening everywhere at the moment: Sony’s purchase of Gaikai for $380 million is also part of that trend.
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| With More Original Programming On The Way, Netflix TV Viewing Is On The Rise Posted: 12 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT  Netflix has seen the amount of video its subscribers watch drastically increase over the past few months: In the fourth quarter, Netflix announced that it had topped 2 billion viewing hours during the three month period. Then, in June, it reached a billion viewing hours in that month alone. But what are viewers watching? According to research firm Nielsen, the growth in video viewing at the streaming provider coincides with an increase in the percentage of subscribers who are relying on Netflix to watch TV shows. Nielsen reports that, according to a recent survey, the number of subscribers who prefer to use the service primarily for TV viewing has increased from 11 percent in 2011 to 19 percent this year. That increase has come mainly at the expense of users who rely on Netflix for movie viewing, which fell from 53 percent in 2011 to 47 percent in 2012. Meanwhile, the number who watch TV and movies and TV has largely remained flat, at 35 percent in 2012 compared to 36 percent the year prior. That’s a pretty drastic shift in behavior, but it makes sense when you think about it:
Oh, and let’s not forget — with the price of cable continuing ever-increasing, and retransmission spats like those between Dish Network and AMC and DirecTV and Viacom driving more people to consume TV shows online, I expect the trend of TV viewing on Netflix streaming to keep on keeping on.
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| Reminder: TechCrunch Is Coming To Greenville, SC Tonight! (UPDATED LOCATION) Posted: 12 Jul 2012 06:03 AM PDT  For many a TechCruncher, the past week has been the same as most. Break some news, go to some events, turn the world on with your smile… you know the drill. But for John Biggs, Josh Zelman and I (and at times Matt Burns), this week has been a whirlwind of crazy awesome parties, Southeastern drawls, incredibly cool startup pitches, and an amazing amount of both pork and beer. It’s the Southeast Meetup tour ya’ll, and it’s coming to a close tonight. We’ve hit Atlanta, Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, and now we’re headed to Greenville, South Carolina. (As a side note, the location has changed. We’ll now be holding the event at The Overlook Grill – 601 South Main Street Greenville, SC 29601.) It’s been a long ride, but a great one. In fact, we’ve invited at least two dozen companies to apply for Disrupt — yep, that’s how cool these companies are. It’s amazing to look for startups outside of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley and find an abundance of exactly that. Hopefully, the last spot on this totally successful meetup tour will bring more of the same. Again, the location has changed, so if you’re coming tonight be sure to familiarize yourself with The Overlook Grill – 601 South Main Street Greenville, SC 29601. Here’s another look at our sponsors: Sponsors:
Savannah:
Atlanta:
Raleigh-Durham
CharlotteSpecial thanks to Packard Place for hosting the event.
Greenville:
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| Posted: 12 Jul 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Today comes another step in Twilio’s march to take over how web and mobile apps communicate to their users. The company is ramping up its SMS service, which now supports languages like Arabic, Chinese and Japanese; and interconnects with over 1,000 carriers in over 150 countries. These are both big expansions for Twilio, which previously had Latin-only support for just a few dozen carriers. The move puts Twilio into a stronger position in its strategy to focus on offering simple cloud-based voice and messaging APIs to developers, and for them in turn to incorporate them into their web, iOS and Android mobile apps as light, client-free features. Twilio says that global SMS had been one of the “all-time most-requested features” from its developers. Creating it also fits in squarely with Twilio’s larger business model, which hinges on scale: Twilio typically charges low prices for its cloud-based APIs and then makes its returns by pushing a lot of volume through them. Twilio says that the new SMS service will now be able to reach “billions” of people. The thinking behind Twilio’s SMS service — as it is with its voice service as well — is that it should be as easy to send text messages and make calls through apps as it is to send emails in email forms — that is, they should work like data services, and not require lots of individual carrier negotiations. “Simply because you are based in one country or another, you should still be able to easily contact your customers through your apps, no matter where they are,” says Patrick Malatack, product manager for Twilio. For online companies with global operations and global ambitions — Twilio’s customers include the likes of eBay, Airbnb and Salesforce.com — the multi-character language support can potentially mean significantly enhanced customer relationships as well. The languages now include Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Arabic, tapping into some of the largest and most connected markets in the world — which also opens Twilio up to being used by a wider geographic range of developers. When Twilio first launched its SMS services 2.5 years ago, Malatack says that the goal was always to send anywhere in the world, although it's taken up to now to finally arrive there. Along the way, he says, were a lot of carrier negotiations and conversations with dozens of providers that facilitate interconnect on these services. Before now, SMS messages could only be sent to the U.S., Canada and the UK. He says that while technically other services can also offer global messaging, "that is usually only a claim. In reality, it's not true — they only work on interconnects as and when you need them as a client." Twilio's role in the process, he says, is to approach SMS — a medium that sees billions of messages sent daily, and one where Twilio is already seeing tens of millions of messages sent — like a "big data problem." "We collect all the information that is possible around how traffic is run, and then we look at signals to make sure each route is working the right way." Pricing for the service, he says, is "volume based" and therefore competitive — the country list can be found here — and he describes what Twilio does as "not competing with carriers," but sending them traffic. They are doing this, of course, by taking a cut on the margin, but, again, the idea is that by enabling more SMS traffic through its APIs, Twilio will actually be helping grow overall SMS traffic. It’s important to note, though, that while Twilio is now able to send messages to any country in the world, its APIs still do not support people from anywhere in the world sending messages back. That is still only supported in the UK, U.S. and Canada, says Malatack. This is because it would require local numbers — which has also been the issue for why Twilio has yet to roll out its voice services to every market beyond the 12 countries it currently supports. “We’re actively working on tackling that in the course of this year,” he says. Further ahead, the company has other product plans to make use of the $33 million it’s received in funding so far: another much-requested feature, says Malatack, has been a developer dashboard to manage different Twilio-powered communications services from one screen. And there is also the question of SDKs for other platforms like Windows Phone. Twilio told us in May that it was “particularly interested” in Microsoft’s mobile platform — which makes sense, given that the two announced a strategic partnership on Azure earlier this year.
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| The Currency Cloud Closes Another $3M To Attack Banks’ Cross-Border Payments Monopoly Posted: 12 Jul 2012 05:29 AM PDT  By some estimations, the foreign exchange market processes a total of around $4 billion a day and within that the value of cross border payments made – that is, between countries – is worth about $200 billion a day, give or take a few dollars. As of today the vast majority of those cross-border payments are done through banks and it’s in their interests to keep the market favourable to themselves. Typically they charge a 4% fee whenever you make a cross-border payments. Plus, making and receiving international payments is still a very manual thing, with nearly 30% of transactions running into issues. That’s an extremely large, fat monopoly waiting to be disrupted, and today The Currency Cloud startup is raising yet another round of funding to attack it. It’s drawn in £2 million ($3 million) in investment from Notion Capital, the entrepreneur-backed venture capital firm with a focus on Cloud and SaaS which this year closed at $100m second fund. The investment comes on top of £2.5 million of previous funding from Atlas Venture and the Anthemis Group. Jos White, partner at Notion Capital, will join Sean Park from Anthemis and Fred Destin from Atlas, on The Currency Cloud's Board. The Currency Cloud, a B2B startup which provides a cloud-based currency conversion and international payments service, now aims to expand globally and build on its already strong demand. It’s very much leveraging the new wave of FinTech which has emerged amid banking scandals and exposés of the inefficiencies in the banking sector. This is Banking 2.0. Jos White of Notion told us “A new model for finance is required. I’ve never seen so much frustration and pain and general confusion and desire for a better solution in this market.” One of the big problems is that small firms pay a high price for cross border payments, and with about 20% of small firms now doing a great deal more global commerce, there is huge growth in the market. Mike Laven, CEO of The Currency Cloud told us: “We sit on top of traditional liquidity providers and then send payments on proprietary banking networks. But those are expensive to access. So for an SME to interface with a major global payment network is virtually impossible. We build a platform to provide access and simplicity.” One of their third party integrators is thus TransferWise, another London-based startup. They use Currency Cloud’s API platform and then market the service direct to consumers. Notion's previous investments in cloud-based services include Brightpearl, eSellerPro, NewVoiceMedia and Tradeshift. Jos White was co-founder of MessageLabs, one of the largest B2B successes to come out of Europe.
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| Greystripe Founders Michael Chang And Andy Choi Join Digitization Company YesVideo, Invest $5M Posted: 12 Jul 2012 04:30 AM PDT  Michael Chang and Andy Choi, the founders of mobile ad network Greystripe, are taking the reins at a new company. However, it’s not the hot new startup you might be expecting. Instead, they’re joining YesVideo, a company founded back in 1999. The pair has invested $5 million in the company. Chang is now YesVideo’s CEO and has joined the company’s board, while Choi is the new CTO. (The photo on the left shows Chang and Choi at YesVideo’s Santa Clara facility.) YesVideo takes personal videos in old formats like VHS and 8 millimeter film and digitizes them, so that they’re stored online and on DVD. The process takes less than three weeks, and customers get their originals back when it’s done. This sounds useful (the company says it has already served 7 million customers) — but not, perhaps, like a business with a big growth opportunity or real long-term prospects. Chang admits that one of the common questions he’s been getting is, “Isn’t that a dying business?” His answer? That there are an estimated 1 to 1.5 billion units of personal video still out there, and the need to convert them is becoming more urgent as the material degrades. YesVideo is also starting to move beyond digitization. As Chang puts it, “Once the content is in the cloud, now what can we do with it?” So YesVideo has started to build sharing products, so that customers can eventually take their converted videos and easily post them to Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Chang also says he could imagine an app in the future where users could watch YesVideo content. He argues that there’s currently a gap in online video — you can find longer, commercial content on sites like Netflix, and you can find shorter, personal videos on YouTube, but there’s no place for stuff that’s both longer and personal. (A skeptic might counter that personal videos are only bearable because they’re short, but we’ll see …) As for how this all came together, Chang notes that after ValueClick acquired Greystripe last year for $70 million, neither he nor Choi had to stick around to wait for an earnout. Still, they stayed at ValueClick for nine months, and Chang says he still feels good about how Greystripe is doing. But he also acknowledges that “things change” and says, “We just decided that it was time to move on.” Meanwhile, YesVideo’s founder and then-CEO Sai-Wai Fu was ready to move on, and Chang was already an angel investor in the company, so the two started talking and decided that this would be the right move.
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| Cloudability Raises $8.7 Million From Foundry Group For Service To Track Cloud Spending Posted: 12 Jul 2012 04:30 AM PDT  Portland-based Cloudability has raised $8.7 million from the Foundry Group in a Series A round for its service that tracks cloud costs and gives better visibility into spending for online services that often go unmonitored. Other participants in the round include 500 Startups, Trinity Ventures and Wieden + Kennedy, one of the world’s leading independent advertising agencies. Cloudability offers a free service, pro accounts and an enterprise level program for managing multiple cloud accounts. It’s the enterprise grade service that is growing fastest. Cloud spending has spread across the business landscape. As it has spread, so too has it left corporate finance with little ability to monitor spending of the services. The lack of visibility comes as lines of business use their own budgets to expense services. They don’t have to wait for IT to give them permission. They just open an account and start charging away. Cloudability provides an interface that lets the chief financial officer see all of the company’s cloud accounts (Iaas, Paas, SaaS) from the different parts of the organization. The accounts may be viewed individually or as a combined spend. Drill-down reports allow the CFO to analyze the costs by service, by account or by users. This gives a view into what's costing the most. Cloudability supports multiple cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), MailChimp and Salesforce.com. The company will use the investment for engineering talent, to expand to more cloud service providers and build in more features such as deeper analytics. There’s a fine line to play for the CFO when looking at how to monitor cloud spending. The business groups have grown attached to this new generation of services. They are easy to use, lightweight and often provide a better way to do business. But there are nightmare stories about costs over runs. Developers, for instance, who forget about the run they did on AWS and then get a huge bill. Cloudability notifies the customer about the status of its different accounts. It tells you if you are under budget, approaching spending limits or over spending on the account. It’s an opt-in service. With the enterprise offering, invoices for expenses do not get paid until the user signs up for the Cloudabilty account. This is yet another example of why IT needs to differentiate as service providers. In an interview, Cloudability Founder Mat Ellis said the days of command and control are fading for IT. We are at a point in time that compares to the early days of the industrial age. As companies grew at the turn of the 20th century, they needed their own power plants. Those corporate power plants were eventually outsourced to utility companies that specialized in providing different service packages. IT is going the same way. It is getting outsourced. IT needs to find their way to be leaders that provide services such as lists of preferred cloud service providers. They need to be the experts the business groups trust. On a final note, Cloudability is one of the first great success stories from the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE). It marks a new point, too, for Wieden + Kennedy, a first PIE supporter. Wieden + Kennedy has since attracted clients such as the Coca-Cola Company and Google as participants in the effort. PIE is located in the advertising agency’s headquarters in Portland’s Pearl District neighborhood. Why? Weiden & Kennedy is a forward-looking agency that sees how the world is becoming a more dynamic place. To adapt, it engages with people at the forefront of technology, arts and commerce. That’s where PIE comes in to play and subsequently Weiden & Kennedy’s investment in Cloudability.
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| Square Issues Cease And Desist On Mobile Payment Competitor mPowa: Hands Off Our Hands Picture Posted: 12 Jul 2012 04:09 AM PDT  They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Square is definitely feeling insulted right now. The well-funded and popular mobile-payments startup has issued a cease and desist letter to UK-based mPowa, a newer mobile payments company that offers a device very similar to Square’s — plugging into a handset or tablet to enable point-of-sale (POS) mobile payments. But the complaint doesn’t have to do with mPowa’s dongle, or the technology behind it: it focuses on a picture of how it’s used. Square alleges that mPowa has lifted a photograph from its site and is using it as its own. The C&D, while only related to a promotional photo that appears on mPowa’s home page, points to bigger issues about how competition is heating up amongst mobile payment companies — and specifically those that are looking to offer services that largely have a similar look and feel as far as customers go. In the letter that Square has issued to mPowa — we have embedded the full letter below — Square’s lawyers say as much, too: “The copying of Square’s image is clear and obvious,” they write. “Indeed, it appears that mPowa’s infringement is intentional and deliberate, and that mPowa’s attempt at imitation may extend to other key Square intellectual property, including the Square Website and Square’s trademarks and trade dress.” And, while mPowa launched in the U.S. the other week, the question of competition is not just in the U.S.: it comes one day after it was reported (yet again, one more time) that Square was planning to go international. To be clear, this is a letter accusing mPowa of lifting one of Square’s promotional pictures — not the device or technology themselves. However, it makes implications that there may be more at stake. Later in the letter, the lawyers ask for additional information, including how and why this came to be, who was responsible, and “whether and to what extent mPowa has investigated whether other proprietary efforts of Square have been duplicated.” Dan Wagner, the CEO of mPowa, has dismissed the letter: “We think this is a petty attempt to divert our focus from trying to capture a meaningful share of the mobile POS market,” he told TechCrunch. “It won’t deter us from our focus, and everything contained in the legal missive is completely unfounded.” He dismisses, too, any implications that mPowa is copying Square in other ways beyond photos. He notes that the company holds several patents on existing technology, specifically around the use of chip-and-pin and identifying users at the device and server end — and is also the holder of patents on technology that it will be introducing down the line, using retina and fingerprint identifications for mobile payments. Since mPowa launched in the U.S. the other week, Wagner says that the company has had a larger-than-expected response to the product. MPowa’s service is similar to Square’s (and others like iZettle, Payleven and more), in that it uses a dongle, but it is different in that it works with other platforms beyond iOS, and it accepts chip-and-pin as well as swipe strip cards. The focus of interest so far, Wagner says, has been from banks, telcos and larger merchants interested in white-labelling mPowa’s dongle. The other attraction for larger businesses, he says, is that “they already have banking partners, and they don’t want to have to arrange those deals again just to use Square’s service.” While Wagner would not comment on what mPowa’s legal response will be to Square’s letter, TechCrunch understands from another source that mPowa will “likely change the photo” to avoid further trouble like this. “The bloke in the picture will no longer have a denim shirt on.”
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| Copious Raises $5 Million Series A To Build Out The eBay With A Social Backbone Posted: 12 Jul 2012 04:00 AM PDT  Copious, a San Francisco startup that makes an online marketplace where people can buy and sell things, has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The new round was led by Foundation Capital, with Google Ventures and Relay Ventures participating — all three firms had invested previously in Copious’ $2 million seed funding round that closed in the spring of 2011. We were pleased to sit down with Rose here at TechCrunch headquarters for an interview all about the new funds and how Copious views the competitive landscape with large players such as eBay, Craigslist and Etsy, and new sites such as Threadflip in the mix. You can watch that in its entirety in the video embedded above. Copious, which launched in beta to the public in June 2011, essentially functions as an eBay-like marketplace for people to buy and sell new and used items. It is set apart by its socially-savvy backbone — you have to connect your Copious account to either Twitter or Facebook — which allows people to more easily vet the users with whom they’re doing business, and identify others with similar styles and tastes. According to Jim Rose, Copious’ co-founder and CEO, things have been going well. The site has hundreds of thousands of users, and its main demographic is women between 18-40, which is certainly a lucrative space when it comes to retail. The company plans to use the new funds to build out its team, which currently consists of 12 staffers, build out its feature set and demographic base, and work on eventually expanding its reach to international markets.
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| TechCrunch Italy — An Event To Showcase Italian Startups Globally Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:53 AM PDT  TechCrunch is landing in Italy. Save the date: Rome, 27th September. TechCrunch Italy will gather some of the most recognised leaders and innovators of the technology and media industries in Italy, Europe and the U.S. to give a unique insight into the big changes and trends happening in the world right now. We hope that this one day conference and startup showcase will propel Italy’s tech startups into the center of the debate about what’s changing in technology right now, what’s causing it and how we can harness the current economic climate to innovate and grow. We’ll be focusing on building global companies from Italy and how technology can re-engineer our economies for the better. Co-organized with Populis, one of Europe's leading digital media groups, we'll bring some of the best experts together to talk about what's next in the most spectacular venue imaginable: The Globe Theatre, Villa Borghese, Rome. A breathtaking replica of Shakespeare’s Globe in London, speaking or attending here is akin to appearing in one of the most recognized settings in theatrical history, so it's not to be missed. With support from Mind The Bridge Foundation, participants will meet the people behind the hottest new startups in Italy, see the new products and technologies driving the industry today, as well as hear from the influencers shaping the global trends in our sector across the world. We want participants to be part of a conversation that will stimulate and challenge. We hope it will spark change. Among others, we are delighted kick off our speaker list with: Riccardo Zacconi, Founder & CEO, King.com Others to be confirmed Spaces are limited so make sure you pre-register for a ticket now. Startup Theatre: We will be showcasing the best of the best Italian startups during the event in a totally new way. The top floor of the Globe Theatre will be transformed into a startup theatre, where each theatre box will be dedicated to one startup. To apply for a startup box please email lorenzani@populis.com IMPORTANT: Sponsors: There are a limited number of sponsor slots remaining: please contact lorenzani@populis.com for further details. Media Partners: If you wish to become a media partner of TechCrunch Italy please email adriana.rava@gmail.com Please keep watch throughout the summer for special announcements, the full agenda and ticket updates. Rome awaits you on the 27th of September: be part of our event to inspire change.
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| With 50,000 Videographers, PopTent Raises $5.5 Million From MK Capital To CrowdSource Ads Posted: 12 Jul 2012 03:00 AM PDT  High-quality video ads can be expensive to produce, running in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, depending on the ad format. But rather than hire a production agency to do their dirty work, Poptent proposes a better way for agencies and brands looking to produce video ads and other messaging: Crowdsource them. And it’s raised a $5.5 million round of funding led by MK Capital to get more advertisers and videographers on board. Poptent has built a platform for crowdsourcing videos from users around the world, which allows brands and agencies to submit various assignments and receive finished videos in return. It’s also got a pretty huge network of videographers from around the world — more than 50,000 from 140 different countries — who can respond to those assignments, giving advertisers plenty of content to choose from. Participating videographers get judged based upon the quality of their work, and build a portfolio by participating in various assignments, even if they’re not chosen. But the goal is to prove the quality of one’s work, which ultimately will lead to more jobs and more money over time. There are three different levels of assignments: There are open assignments, which anyone can submit a video for; there are invite assignments, through which a group of 25-50 videographers are chosen to compete; and production assignments, through which video jobs are basically *ahem* assigned. To date, Poptent says it has paid out more than $5 million to videographers since being founded in 2007. That might not sound like a lot, but the rate at which its assignments are coming in — and the paychecks are cut — continues to accelerate. It had only paid out about $2 million by late last year, so it’s more than doubled its revenues in less than 12 months. And it’s getting some big-name brands on board: Companies like Dell, Intel, Jaguar, and Walgreens have paid for video ads and messaging produced by Poptent’s network of videographers. Poptent’s latest funding comes after it raised $3 million in October 2010. The company has grown pretty aggressively already and plans to double headcount versus last year, to about 70 employees. Poptent CEO Andy Jedynak says it took on the new funding basically to invest further in its growth curve and accelerate the number of ads that are created by participating videographers. It will do that mostly through increased product development and expanding its sales and support staff. It’s also going for increased international expansion. Poptent has gotten a number of big wins in Brazil and the Philippines recently, and continues to see strong growth in Europe and North America. It’s also attracting interest from more remote locations, including recent submissions from Indonesia, Malaysia, and Romania.
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| Rovio Hopes Amazing Alex Will Catapult It Past Angry Birds Into Its $9bn IPO Posted: 12 Jul 2012 02:38 AM PDT  Angry-bird maker Rovio has shown that it’s more than a one-trick pony with the release today of Amazing Alex, a physics game that perhaps draws on the original trajectory physics of those annoyed Birds. This time, the game centers around whiz kid Alex and his creations, where players set up objects to bounce, pop, ricochet, bash, and crash into each other and thus create a device to move around 100 or so levels. The other thing Rovio hopes it will create is a new games franchise and an additional justification for its potential $9 billion IPO next year. Oh yes. Amazing Alex is available on iPhone, iPad and Android and will also come to PCs, Macs and Windows Phones. Fans will also be able to create and upload their own levels. The move confirms CEO Mikael’s statement earlier this year they they would start releasing non-Angry Birds titles. Angry Birds has been downloaded over a billion times, leading Rovio to expand into toys, board games, playground sets and various other products. An animated movie is also in the works. In 2011 Rovio reported profits of $48 million before tax, up from $10 million in 2010. There’s an irony in that if Rovio goes public for $9 billion it could end up being bigger than Nokia’s valuation, which is plummeting right now. Once again, as we’ve point out before, the apps and the games are now often outshining the devices they are played on.
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