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- Hulu Announces Four More Original Series; Will Feature SNL Vets, Adrian Grenier Of HBO’s Entourage & Others
- YC-Backed Siasto Draws Nearer To The Holy Grail Of Project Management Software
- New York Hits Sprint With $300 Million Lawsuit Over 7 Years Of Tax Dodging
- Decide.com Launches Daily Deals; Offers Price Guarantees On Select CE, Home Appliance Purchases
- Le Web London Goes Faster Than Realtime – Grab Your TC Discount Here
- Fab.de Hits Half A Million Users, Revenue Reaches 1.5M Euro Per Month
- AT&T Opening Watson Speech Recognition To Developers With New APIs In June
- Struq Secures $8.5 million From Reed Elsevier, Pentech, Allen & Co
- Badoo Hires Google Exec Ben Ling As New COO To Push Its Platforms And US Growth
- Screenfeeder Is A Gorgeous Way To Display Social Feeds On Your iPhone, iPad Or TV
- Nokia May Be Down, But They’re Not Out
- Enterprise Data Software Company Splunk Prices IPO At $17 Per Share; Valued At $1.6B
- The TC NYC Mini-Meet Up Is Go! Here Are The Details
- TuneUp Takes On Shazam With Free (And Ad-Free) Mobile Music ID App
- BranchOut Hits 25 Million Users, Nabs $25M In Series C Funding
- Lots Of Pain, No Gain: Nokia Reports $4B Drop In Q1 Sales To $9.7B, Blames Restructuring, Competition
- WPP Makes Big Leap Into E-Commerce, Leads On $10 Million mySupermarket Investment
- Another Siri-Like App, Voice Answer, Hits The App Store For Those Of Us Without The iPhone 4S
- Kixeye Is The Lucrative Dark Horse of Facebook Gaming
- Dorsey Pitching Square At $4B Valuation To Legg Mason, Fidelity And Other Institutional Investors
| Posted: 19 Apr 2012 09:43 AM PDT  Hulu has been having a busy week. On Tuesday, the company announced a new deal for advertisers, which now charges them only for ad completions, and today at Hulu’s upfronts, the company announced the arrival of even more original shows. We already knew of several of the programs Hulu discussed this morning, including “Battleground,” “Up to Speed,” and “A Day in the Life,” for example. But this morning, the company revealed several more additions, including “We Got Next,” “The Awesomes,” “Don’t Quit Your Daydream,” and “Flow.” That Hulu is growing into original programming has been known for some time. Although a story in this week’s NYT brought new attention to the TV streaming service, Hulu had first announced “Battleground,” a scripted political comedy, back in January, as the first show to kick off its then growing lineup of original series. Today, Hulu revealed several more additions to that lineup. It’s notable that there are even some bigger name stars participating this time, including SNL’s Seth Meyers and Michael Shoemaker, for example, as well as HBO’s Entourage lead Adrian Grenier. Descriptions and details below:
Hulu also revealed many of its numbers to the advertisers in attendance, although much of this has already been reported. The company again noted that it has 2 million paying subscribers and saw $420 million in revenue last year. There are now over 360 content partners on Hulu and its premium offering, Hulu Plus, and the service now offers over 40,000 hours of content. This includes over 50,000 full TV episodes and nearly 1,900 TV series.
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| YC-Backed Siasto Draws Nearer To The Holy Grail Of Project Management Software Posted: 19 Apr 2012 09:41 AM PDT  In the quest for the Holy Grail of project management software — a product that just feels natural and easy to use — Siasto has made it further than most. If this were The Last Crusade, it’d be somewhere inside the temple, crossing the bridge of faith to reach the chalice. Siasto might seem a little too familiar at first, as it uses the same concepts as you’ve seen in competing products like Basecamp. You create projects, you add tasks to them, you upload documents, you invite other users, and so on. What’s special is the how the Y Combinator-backed company has organized the interface, and how it’s busy tying in with Google. Here’s a quick walk-through of what it’s doing. First, you sign in using your Google identity — the right third-party ID service such for work-related software, considering the popularity of Docs, spreadsheets, and Google Apps for Business. Second, Siasto manages to mostly get rid of navigation bars in favor of sticking the main information in tiles on the homepage. The result is fewer clicks. People in the system show up on the left-hand side, with pending user invites at the bottom. Projects, in tiled format, are to the right. If any team member makes updates inside of any project, you’ll see the number of new updates listed on the home page within the project’s tile. There are two other tabs on this page: tasks and the calendar. Click through the former and you’ll see a universal task list, sortable by active or completed, due for whom, and due date. The latter shows the traditional calendar format; beyond listing any upcoming tasks, it lets you click to create new events that you can categorize within projects. Third, a document section lets you upload files for any project. This part of Siasto’s product is especially well done. There are special interfaces for uploading files straight from Google Docs and Dropbox. You’ll be asked to provide permissions to either service, then you’ll see a file selector from your docs in either. Maybe it’s not new, but I haven’t seen anything quite like this interface before. The documents section also includes special interfaces for uploading from Google Docs and Dropbox or lets you create and edit your own, complete with a WYSIWYG editor (a nice addition you don’t see in a number of competing products). The company has already done some smart things to further tie in with Google, like adding a “Gmail contextual gadget” a few days ago. Install it, and you can turn an email into a task, event or document in Siasto with the click of a button. Expect it to go much further with Google integrations. You can import calendar events, for example, but there’s no way to export to iCal or other desktop calendars yet. You can also imagine ways of auto-creating groups by importing the users of a company’s Google Apps account. Stronger Google integrations would also aid with the biggest overriding problem for these types of companies, which is getting organizations to use them in the first place. That was my problem when I was trying to test it out over the past week while in the middle of a million other things. It simply requires extra up-front investment, even if it is way simpler than most others to use. All in all, Siasto’s streamlined interface is state of the art for this type of software, but the company will need to keep working on the onboarding and initial user experience to really pull in the types of overworked users that could get the most value out of it. Judging by how well the company has done so far, though, I expect them to cross that bridge.
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| New York Hits Sprint With $300 Million Lawsuit Over 7 Years Of Tax Dodging Posted: 19 Apr 2012 09:02 AM PDT  Sprint’s had its fair share of problems to deal with as of late, but who knew one of them would be taxes? According to a new flurry of new reports, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has filed a $300 million lawsuit against Sprint for (among other things) non-payment of taxes, and falsifying official tax documents. According to Reuters, Sprint failed to collect (and subsequently pass along) over $100 million of taxes from their customers over the past seven years. Schneiderman, who is picking up where a whistle-blower lawsuit filed against the carrier early last year, is seeking three times the amount of Sprint’s underpayment plus additional penalties for good measure. It’s quite a shift for Sprint, considering that they attempted to position themselves as the good guy looking out for consumer interests during the AT&T/T-Mobile merger proceedings. Sure, while Sprint customers may have unknowingly enjoyed an illicit price break on their phone bills, that’s certainly not going to keep up for much longer. Schneiderman alleges that Sprint’s non-payment of taxes was all part of a plan to lure customers away from larger wireless rivals like AT&T and Verizon. If true, it strikes me as a terribly misguided way to attract new subscribers — potential public relations nightmare aside, customers’ bills are only going to up now, which probably won’t garner much appreciation from the carrier’s existing users. I’ve reached out to Sprint representatives for comment, but have not received a response at time of writing. I imagine they’re working on a more thoughtful statement than “Whoops, we goofed,” so keep your eyes peeled — I’ll be updating the post as soon as I learn more.
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| Decide.com Launches Daily Deals; Offers Price Guarantees On Select CE, Home Appliance Purchases Posted: 19 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT  Decide.com, the shopping search site for consumer electronics and home appliances founded by former Farecast engineers, is now putting its money where its mouth is, so to speak. The service, which helps consumers know whether to “buy” or “wait” when researching items like laptops, phones, TVs, washers and dryers, wants to make it easier to trust its recommendations with the launch of a price guarantee. With Decide’s new “Got Your Back” program, if you click to buy an item the service recommends and the price drops within two weeks, the company will automatically send you a payment for the difference. To be clear, the guarantee doesn’t apply to everything across Decide.com’s website, only its hand-picked daily deals found at www.decide.com/deals. This section of the site will showcase ten backed deals every day, based on record-low pricing and the company’s confidence that nothing will change in the short-term. The deals will be online for up to 24 hours, or until a specified number of allocated “buys” for each guaranteed deal are reached. (It seems Decide is somewhat hedging its bets with that last one – just in case prices do drop, it’s limiting the number of payouts it would have to make). Consumers who buy one of these deals have to go through a couple of steps to ensure their deal is tracked for price changes. They must send in a copy of their receipt to Decide, and provide “proof of purchase” – that is, a photo of them holding the product in question. If the price drops – and not just on the original seller’s site, but at any participating retailer – Decide will then alert the buyer automatically and pay the amount of the price drop, up to $200. The payments are sent out either via PayPal or check. The program is sort of an odd one for Decide.com, as it isn’t a retailer itself, where such price guarantee programs are typically found. Decide is just a shopping resource which connects consumers to retailers through the use of algorithms that track pricing fluctuations, news and historical data to determine whether it’s a good time to buy an item. Decide is kicking off the launch today with ten deals, which include a laptop, camera, smart TV, printer, juicer, fridge and more.
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| Le Web London Goes Faster Than Realtime – Grab Your TC Discount Here Posted: 19 Apr 2012 08:16 AM PDT  ‘Allo my Breeteesh chums! If you have not been to Le Web before, zen zis is pour vous! Le Web is possibly Europe’s oldest, and certainly its biggest tech startup conference, running for many years in December in Paris. Because of organiser Loic Le Meur’s connections in Silicon Valley it regularly brings the creme de la creme of the Valley to Europe every year. It’s now adding a London conference (19-20 June) to its schedule and even attracting the likes of Michael Arrington, TechCrunch Founder and Crunchfund partner, to London. If I recall correctly, the last time he was here was 2006 – I know because I was there, in the same pub. So, now consider yourself educated about Le Web! Here’s how you can get a discount and enter the startup competition. The theme for LeWeb London will be "Faster than Realtime" and the startup competition is now open. You can register your startup for free. As Loic tells me “we like to do things well.” That means you can expect high production values, and an amazing live stream that is archived in HD, check out youtube.com/leweb. Hugh MacLeod of GapingVoid has produced a tailor-made sketch around the theme, check it out below. Readers of TechCrunch can claim £100 off the regular LeWeb London ticket price by applying the discount code TECHCRUNCH at check-out when purchasing. The startup ticket price is £750 on request on the site. Not bad for a two day conference, international speakers, food, top venue, drinks, wifi, live stream etc. Check out details of the LeWeb London start-up competition here and apply here. We’ll be there so see you then! Here’s Loic:
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| Fab.de Hits Half A Million Users, Revenue Reaches 1.5M Euro Per Month Posted: 19 Apr 2012 08:03 AM PDT  Fab has just released new figures on its growth in Germany and Austria, following February’s acquisition of Casacanda, a top flash sales site previously serving Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. And the news is good, it seems. As of today, the German vertical Fab.de has 500,000 users, having added 300,000 over the past month. And revenue per month is up by over half a million euro. The increase in user base, for obvious reasons, is also helping improve sales and revenue, the company is reporting. For the six months prior to the acquisition, Casacanda did less than 1 million euro in revenue total. Now under the new “Fab” brand, the service is doing 1.5 million euro per month. In terms of orders per day, you can see in the chart below how much Fab.de has grown following the acquisition. While Fab declined to provide exact figures, the number of orders per day for Fab.de are now approaching 900. Fab started working with Casacanda in January, then formerly acquired them in February for $11 million, making Germany the first major Fab center outside the U.S. The news hit three weeks after the launch of Samwer Fab clone Bamarang in Germany, the UK, France, Brazil and Australia. At the time, Casacanda grown to over 250,000 members since its September 2011 launch, and was delivering around 15,000 orders per month. CEO Jason Goldberg estimated then that the company would generate at least 10% to 20% of its overall revenue from international in 2012. The company says it’s now forecasting 20% of revenue from outside the U.S. this year. The U.S., however, continues to be well ahead with plans to hit $100 million in revenue in 2012.
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| AT&T Opening Watson Speech Recognition To Developers With New APIs In June Posted: 19 Apr 2012 07:59 AM PDT  Hot off of a AT&T Labs event held in New York City, AT&T has just announced they will be opening up their Watson speech recognition technology to developers this June. Though Watson has been open to licensing for years now (Vlingo inked their licensing deal with AT&T in 2009, for instance), the release of the APIs means that developers of every stripe will soon be able to access AT&T’s voice transcription engine. Tackling and interpreting voice input is no easy feat, and AT&T wants to help alleviate any potential headaches by tailoring multiple APIs for use in different specific contexts. Among the examples they list are APIs meant for interpreting web searches and questions respectively, as well as APIs for local business search, voicemail to text (a little Google Voice competition is nice to see), text messaging, and general dictation. AT&T’s John Donovan is quick to reassure us that there’s much more to come — APIs meant for use in gaming and social media are also reportedly in the works, though they’ll actually be made available is another story entirely. AT&T Labs has been working on Watson for over a decade now, and we’ve seen the service branch out into some familiar environments over the years. Perhaps as a shot across Ford and Nuance’s collective bow, AT&T (along with partners Panasonic and QNX) announced their plans to develop a car-centric voice command system at this year’s CES. Perhaps unsurprisingly, AT&T also made reference to an API geared toward their U-Verse television service that is specially tuned to handle voice inputs like movie title and actor names — not exactly the first time AT&T has made an overture for the living room. That AT&T would eventually bring Watson into the mobile space may have been a given, especially considering the technology is prominently featured in existing apps like the AT&T Translator. Still, with the APIs nearly in place — not to mention forthcoming Speech Kit SDK that sends snippets of voice input to Watson servers for transcription — we could be on the verge of seeing the next big voice-powered apps.
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| Struq Secures $8.5 million From Reed Elsevier, Pentech, Allen & Co Posted: 19 Apr 2012 07:46 AM PDT  The problem with internet advertising – and there are many – is that while there are plenty of users who interact with ads, the hard part is working out which users are actually the most valuable to advertisers. While the advertising industry normally sends one brand message and blasts it out across all channels, Struq, an advertising platform startup, works out which users show behavioral patterns that make them statistically more likely to purchase. But instead of showing them the one brand message it shows video or display ads most likely to chime with that user. To that end it’s attracted the attention of major backers today, with a significant $8.5 million funding round from Reed Elsevier Ventures, Pentech Ventures and Allen & Company LLC. The company has certainly garnered attention. It’s already working with 200 of the world's leading retailers across 19 markets (including Adidas, Hilton Hotels and Levis). Its Ad Personalization platform operates dynamically and in real time. As a result it claims to be able to deliver 12 times higher click through rates than standard retargeted ads and says its platform can generate up to $30 in revenues for every $1 spent in marketing spend. Sam Barnett, founder and CEO of Struq, says Reed Elsevier Ventures' experience in big data (an early investor in Palantir Technologies, now the 11th most valuable start up globally), combined with Pentech's experience in Personalization (an early investor in Maxymiser,), and Allen & Company's advisory history, will provide valuable experience in scaling the company up. Kevin Brown, General Partner at Reed Elsevier Ventures calls Barnett “one of the most talented young entrepreneurs in Europe,” which is high praise indeed given the current field of EU CEOs which is probably the best it’s ever been.
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| Badoo Hires Google Exec Ben Ling As New COO To Push Its Platforms And US Growth Posted: 19 Apr 2012 07:16 AM PDT  Dating/meeting-people site Badoo has been putting together a 147 million registered user base over the last six years, with a huge run on Facebook helping it to reach around the world last year. And today, it follows up on the momentum with a key hire. It has appointed long-time Google executive Benjamin Ling as chief operating office to help push it out across mobile and Web platforms. He’ll oversee product, engineering, business operations, partnerships and corporate development. Badoo has been best known for expanding into emerging markets like Russia and Brazil but it’s now growing in the US where it already has eight million users. Ling joins Badoo from Google, where he was product management director of Search Products and Local Business Products. His tenure at that company spanned roles including Google's search, commerce and Local Business products, to Google's Commerce products, to senior roles at YouTube. He also had a brief stint helping to lead Facebook’s developer platform in the early days. Ling will begin his new role at Badoo in May, based at its London headquarters.
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| Screenfeeder Is A Gorgeous Way To Display Social Feeds On Your iPhone, iPad Or TV Posted: 19 Apr 2012 07:07 AM PDT  Screenfeeder is a gorgeous new app for the iPhone, iPad or TV (via Apple TV’s AirPlay), which displays your social feeds on the screen from services like Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram and Dribble. But the interface doesn’t use columns like TweetDeck – it just flashes the updates as they arrive against an ever-changing background of images and colors. The idea may not be as practical for serious news watchers who follow thousands of accounts, sorted into multiple lists, but for the everyday user whose tweets flow a bit slower, Screenfeeder offers an attractive interface to view them in. The app uses the background images and color schemes from your Twitter friends’ own Twitter profile pages to help you associate the tweets with who they’re from, and it even lets you track or mute hashtags as they appear by tapping on the link in the tweet. This latter feature could make the app ideal for conferences, perhaps, but the other tweets continued to flow even when you begin tracking a tag. So for that to work, you would have to use Screenfeeder from a dedicated Twitter account that wasn’t following anyone else. However, one of the app’s creators, Gernot Poetsch, tells me that in a future update, you’ll be able to deactivate all your streams and only show the hashtag streams. For the Foursquare checkins, Screenfeeder displays a map in the background to show your friends’ vicinity, and its zoom level is dependent on how close you are to the checkin. Instagram and Dribble images are shown on top of a blurred backdrop copy of the same photo, which makes for a nice visual experience. My only complaints are that you can’t use the app for viewing Twitter lists, and the updates sometimes seem too fast. Poetsch says that the minimun display time is five seconds – which seems like long enough – but with the ever-changing background images, which requires your brain to adjust to the new content and layout, it would be nice to slow the pace a bit. We’re told they might add a mechanism for slowing the pace in a forthcoming version. The app was built by German design agency Edenspiekermann, and nxtbthng an app development shop in Berlin who makes the official Soundcloud iOS apps. You can grab Screenfeeder from here in iTunes.
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| Nokia May Be Down, But They’re Not Out Posted: 19 Apr 2012 06:50 AM PDT  As bad as Nokia’s financials look right now – a $4 billion drop in sales won’t make anyone’s day – don’t consider the Windows Phone move a failure just yet. They’ve done what many phone companies have thus far failed to do – namely change swiftly with the times – and, more important, they’ve done it quite admirably. If you’ll recall, the first real Android phone was HTC’s G1. Considered a clunker by all but the most die-hard of users, the device sold fairly well (1 million in 2008). But it did something more important than make T-Mobile the first Android carrier – it grabbed a certain contingent of user who understood Android, understood the framework, and would follow Android to the grave. The popularity of the G1 was a direct reaction to the burgeoning iOS platform. The same thing happened in the WebOS space, but WebOS was exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time and is a disaster distinct from the Android launch. Over time, the maker of the G1, HTC, got better and better at making Android phones. The experience gained from the G1 allowed manufacturers to rejigger their sales strategy, leading to the famous Droid marketing campaign and the hysteria for Google’s Nexus line. Nokia is in a similar space. An outside software product is trying to take market share and will probably flounder for the first few months. Nokia has pivoted completely. Their popular Symbian smartphones are essentially dead and their Windows Phone line is curtailed until popular adoption grows. Most important, they’re taking a bath on the Lumia line by pricing it at or below the comfort level of most casual smartphone buyers They’re essentially selling loss leaders in order to gain market share. Microsoft knows it and Nokia knows it and I assure you HTC, Samsung, and LG know it. They only folks who shouldn’t be worried – yet – are Apple yet I suspect Microsoft is definitely on their radar. I can say one thing without equivocation: Windows Phone is than Android. WinPho is monolithic, there are no issues of branching or hardware compatibility, and UI familiarity will soon be bolstered by millions of Windows 8 installs around the world. Android is great if you’re a small manufacturer and you just want to dump a stack onto what would have once been called a feature phone. Windows Phone is great if you want the largesse, the popularity, and the trustworthiness of Microsoft behind your product. So ignore Nokia at your peril. Their strategy is just right at just the right time. Remember: nobody ever got fired for installing Microsoft. Not even Stephen Elop.
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| Enterprise Data Software Company Splunk Prices IPO At $17 Per Share; Valued At $1.6B Posted: 19 Apr 2012 06:22 AM PDT  Splunk, an enterprise data company, will be making its debut on the public markets this morning after pricing its IPO at $17.00 per share (this is up from the range of $11 to $13 per share). At this price, Splunk is valued at a whopping $1.57 billion. Splunk, whose stock will begin trading on the Nasdaq today under the symbol "SPLK," raised $230 million in the offering. Splunk is a provider of intelligence software used to monitor, report and analyze real-time machine data as well as terabytes of historical data–located on-premise or in the cloud. For example, Splunk indexes and makes searchable data from any app, server or network device in real-time including logs, config files, messages, and alerts. Clients can also monitor distributed deployment across thousands of servers in multiple data centers; manage the infrastructure of a cloud platform-as-a-service (PaaS); monitor performance of cloud- delivered SaaS solutions and monitor hybrid SaaS/hosted models. Clients include Credit Suisse, Bank Of America, Comcast, Salesforce, Zynga, LinkedIn, T-Mobile, Swisscom, Shutterfly, Heroku and the US Departments of Labor and Energy. The company has over 3,700 customers, including a majority of the Fortune 100. For fiscal 2009, 2010 and 2011, Splunk’s revenues were $18.2 million, $35 million and $66.2 million, respectively, representing year-over-year growth of 93% for 2010 and 89% growth for 2011. For the fiscal 2012 year ended Jan. 31, Splunk pulled in $121 million in revenue, an 83 percent increase from the previous year. In 2009, 2010, and 2011, the company took a net loss of $14.8 million, $7.5 million and $3.8 million, respectively. In 2012, Splunk’s losses increased to $11 million Splunk has raised $40 million in funding from August Capital, JK&B Capital, Ignition Partners and Sevin Rosen Funds. For Splunk, this IPO has been in the works for some time now. In 2010, Splunk’s CEO Godfrey Sullivan told us that the company had plans for an offering in 2012. We’ll see what enterprise companies take Splunk’s lead in entering the public markets in 2012.
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| The TC NYC Mini-Meet Up Is Go! Here Are The Details Posted: 19 Apr 2012 05:50 AM PDT  As we mentioned before, we were floating the idea of a mini meet up in our own back yard and we definitely got quite a bit of interest. So here we go: Get ready for the TC NYC Mini-Meet Up on May 8 at Bar13. We’ll run from 6pm until about 10pm, with potential evening activities for those still in the mood. Note that the date and location have changed since our last post. We would have completely filled the AOL offices if we tried to do it there. This isn’t a seminar, panel, a conference, or really anything that requires people to sit down at a desk and look through a PowerPoint. Instead, we simply want to look upon your beautiful faces and hear about how you plan on disrupting the world through technology. Over beers. To recap: We’ll meet on May 8 (that’s a Tuesday) at Bar13, located at 35 East 13th St. and University Pl. The meet-up will begin promptly at 6pm and will end around 10pm, at which point we can all caravan to a bar for an after party. We’re also looking for sponsors. The more the merrier (since that means more beer). If you’re interested in a sponsorship, please send an email to john (at) techcrunch dot com with the subject: NY Meetup Sponsorship. To RSVP to the event, head over to our PlanCast page. Finally, if you’d like to connect with us pre-show time, you can follow me on Twitter at @jordanrcrook or John at @johnbiggs. Sponsors Yext helps provide amazing local search results with PowerListings, a local information hub that syncs listings across a network of premium sites and mobile apps. With Yext PowerListings, small and large businesses can quickly and easily update their business information, photos and specials from one central location. Today, Yext PowerListings syncs information for over 45,000 locations.
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| TuneUp Takes On Shazam With Free (And Ad-Free) Mobile Music ID App Posted: 19 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT  TuneUp, the service that cleans up your iTunes or Windows Media music collection, is moving into mobile from an unexpected angle. Unlike the TuneUp iTunes and Windows Media plugins, the main feature of the new iPhone app isn’t its ability to correct song titles and supply missing album artwork. Instead, you can activate the app when you’re listening to music that you don’t recognize, then it will identify the song based on the audio. (You can also look up the lyrics, and there’s a link to download the song from iTunes.) In other words, yes, the experience is pretty similar to Shazam and SoundHound. I tested TuneUp Mobile by playing some of the music on my laptop, and it identified the correct songs without fail. That’s not to say that TuneUp is better than the competition, but it holds its own. The real differentiator is monetization, specifically the lack thereof — the app offers unlimited song identifications for free, and there are no ads either. (Both SoundHound and Shazam offer free apps, but they’re ad-supported.) Founder and CEO Gabe Adiv says he’s “not concerned with monetization of the mobile app right now.” It’s much harder to convince consumers to pay for something on smartphones than it is on their desktops or laptops, so rather than trying to squeeze money from the app, TuneUp is treating it as a sales tool for its desktop product. In addition to the song identification, the app also provides a “free diagnostic” of the music on your phone, identifying ways that the TuneUp plugin could improve your collection. So in some ways, even though it’s ad-free, the app itself is functioning as an ad for the TuneUp plugin. In the future, Adiv says he wants to bring more of TuneUp’s features the phones — and perhaps his view on monetization will change then. You can download the app here. And speaking of the plugin, TuneUp also just announced that it has crossed 9 million registered users.
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| BranchOut Hits 25 Million Users, Nabs $25M In Series C Funding Posted: 19 Apr 2012 04:00 AM PDT 
This latest batch of money, which serves as BranchOut’s Series C round, was led by the Mayfield Fund with the participation of previous investors Accel Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures. Tim Chang of Mayfield will join BranchOut’s board of directors. The money will be used mainly for hiring more employees to add to BranchOut’s current full-time staff of 45, founder and CEO Rick Marini said in an interview, which you can watch in full in the video embedded above. Big Funding Following Big GrowthAt less than two years old, BranchOut certainly seems to be on a fast track when it comes to funding. But according to Marini, the money is only following the company's very real growth. BranchOut now has more than 25 million registered users, more than half of which — 13.5 million — are active on the app each month. To put those numbers into context, more than three new users are joining BranchOut every second. When BranchOut first debuted in July 2010, it was often characterized as a “LinkedIn for Facebook” — but it’s becoming apparent that BranchOut is carving out a very clear identity of its own. Marini explains its position like this:
The real key to BranchOut hitting the tipping point in terms of growth has been its mobile app, which launched in December and is now driving 40 percent of BranchOut’s total traffic. That has helped the company grow both in the United States and internationally, Marini said, noting that today about half of the new users joining BranchOut are coming from outside the US. Going Big, Exit Strategy-WiseRight now BranchOut makes money in two ways: Through job postings on Facebook and its Recruiter Connect product. Marini declined to provide any specific revenue numbers or detail how close BranchOut is to profitability, but he did say the company is generally more focused on growth than on monetization at the moment. “I would say right now we’re in investment mode,” Marini said. Large funding rounds like the one BranchOut just took on bring the topic of “exit strategies” a bit closer to the forefront. When asked if BranchOut could emerge as an attractive acquisition target for the likes of Facebook, Marini said that right now he’s all about staying independent — and alluded to being on the IPO track. “We are heads down growing a big company… We’re not even thinking about selling. We want to go big on this one.” Make sure to watch our full interview embedded above to get Marini’s thoughts on how Facebook’s IPO will impact BranchOut and the larger startup ecosystem, how today’s tech atmosphere compares to 1999, and more.
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| Posted: 19 Apr 2012 03:13 AM PDT  Nokia warned us last week that it would be reporting some worse-than-expected numbers, and here they are: sales for Q1 are down by $4 billion (€3.4 billion) to $9.7 billion (€7.4 billion), with a corresponding fall in earnings per share, down by a quarter of a euro and now at a loss per share of just over $0.10 (€0.08). Smartphones, the core of Nokia’s fightback strategy, declined by more than 50 percent both in revenues and unit sales. According to the results (pdf here) out just now, Nokia also swung to an operating loss of $1.7 billion, blaming the double-whammy of competition from Apple/Google as well as restructuring costs, as the company has pushed to put a stronger emphasis on its new line of smartphones in a race to gain back its rapidly disappearing market share in the higher-margin end of the smartphone market. Overall, the company saw an eye-watering 40 percent drop in revenues from devices, its biggest business. They are now at €4.2 billion. The biggest decline, perhaps most unfortunately, is that China sales have gone down by 70 percent over last year.This has been one of the big future hopes for the company in its recovery strategy, but that has been hit hard by competition from cheap Android device makers, and Apple, with consumers in the country increasingly turning to smartphones over lower-end devices. As a measure of what a decline this was: this time last year Greater China was Nokia’s second-biggest market; today it’s the third-smallest (after Latin America and North America, which had been in the bottom-two before as well). The company also appears to be trying out one more executive change to stem that sales tide: Colin Giles, EVP and member of the Nokia Leadership Team, is leaving at the end of June. The reason given by the company is to be closer to his family. Nokia is not replacing him, saying that it is taking the moment to “reduce a layer of sales management to ensure greater customer focus.” The regional sales heads will now report directly to Niklas Savander, EVP of markets. On a volumes level, Nokia’s mobile sales were down by 24 percent down to 82.7 million units. Smartphone volumes declined 51 percent, down to 11.9 million units. Sales of smartphones were down by 52 percent to €1.7 billion. And margins on devices nearly halved too: they are now at 15.6 percent compared to 28.9 percent. One bright spot: the average selling price declined by only two percent and is now at €143. Nokia blamed declines in Symbian primarily for the problem, rather than sales in Windows Phone devices, which are now at 2 million units sold. In the context of the declines in the smartphone segment, the declines in lower-end devices are relatively better. Down 32 percent to €2.3 billion and 16 percent in volumes to 70.8 million, with margins on the devices dropping by only about 2 percent.
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| WPP Makes Big Leap Into E-Commerce, Leads On $10 Million mySupermarket Investment Posted: 19 Apr 2012 02:52 AM PDT  The media and advertising giant WPP is taking a big step into e-commerce and how it can use it to leverage its other digital investments: today it has announced that it is investing $7 million into the grocery comparison shopping site mySupermarket, part of a $10 million round that also includes participation from existing investors Greylock and Pitango. WPP says that it plans to use the investment to help extend its digital portfolio, and specifically help in the marketing and other services that it offers to is customers in packaged goods — the FMCG segment is one of the most important in WPP’s client base. The deal will see WPP become a minority shareholder in Dolphin Software, the company that makes mySupermarket. The investment announced today takes the total amount invested in mySupermarket up to $23.4 million. mySupermarket, which has offices in London, New York, Tel Aviv and Tokyo, has been in business since 2006, with its service focusing on letting consumers compare a product, or a whole cart of groceries, across a range of retailers to see which offers the cheaper price, and it offers a compelling and disruptive service that falls squarely in favor of the consumer: In the UK, the range of stores covered by mySupermarket includes nine major retailers – Tesco, Asda, Waitrose, Ocado, Sainsburys, Boots, Superdrug, Majestic and Virgin Wines. It lets users not only check the prices for goods across these places, but then allows them to quickly swap their products over to the cheapest retailer to buy them. mySupermarket says that it trawls about 30,000 special offers every week and lets customers cut their bill by up to 20 percent. It says it has 2 million monthly unique users in the UK with sales growing 100 percent year-on-year. Allon Bloch, the CEO, tells me that it will be using the investment to go into the U.S. and other markets, and is looking to expand into further sectors — a most recent addition is health and beauty — as well as a “major push into mobile.” Bloch also notes that while the company “had term sheets from VCs” for this round, the company decided that WPP was a better strategic fit in terms of how the business wanted to develop. “WPP provides more domain expertise and their breadth of relationship is unparalleled in both the data and advertising worlds,” Bloch said. You can see how this will work with WPP: it currently makes just over a quarter of its revenues from digital — $4.8 billion out of a total of $16 billion in 2011 — but is always looking for ways to increase that share, as part of its strategy to be making 40 percent of revenues from digital in the next five years. Here they can help their clients develop offers for their products, as part of larger digital marketing campaigns, and then help connect those offers directly with consumers. It will also help the company pick up an enormous amount of consumer data, helpful for future campaigns. The two biggest digital divisions at the moment for WPP are Wunderman and OgilvyOne, with revenues of over $950 million and over $900 million respectively — these might be the agencies that we will see working most closely with mySupermarket in future.
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| Another Siri-Like App, Voice Answer, Hits The App Store For Those Of Us Without The iPhone 4S Posted: 18 Apr 2012 11:41 PM PDT  Looks like Apple might be loosening its grip even more on voice recognition apps? Or, it simply just feels that the competition is not as good as its own native Siri. We’ve just gotten word from Netherlands-based developer Sparkling Apps that its voice-response app, Voice Answer — rejected by Apple for nearly three months — has been approved by Apple and is now live in the App Store, and usable on any iPhone, iPod or iPad running iOS 4.2 or later. It took “almost three months of negotiating, tweaking and pushing,” developer Martijn van der Spek tells TechCrunch. Like Siri, the app is based on data from Wolfram Alpha, among other sources, and lets users ask questions by either speaking to the app or typing in a question. It’s priced at £2.49 ($3.99). He says the company is now going “full speed ahead” implementing more features into the app. These include location-based place finding and email/SMS and more voice function commands. Additionally it’s adding in a bit of sci-fi kitsch: it’s planning to create an animated robot for the interface. You can see the video of how that will look below. The news comes on the back of other voice recognition apps making a splash and then facing rejection issues with Apple, perhaps most notably Evi. Sparkling Apps in March had a free voice recognition app, Talk to Eve, also rejected for being “too similar to Siri” that was subsequently approved in March. With the voice-recognition space currently very active, the big question is whether any of these third-party developers will be able to gain traction against Apple, and what they will all do next to make themselves relevant and indispensable to users. Offering APIs to other app developers could be one lucrative route.
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| Kixeye Is The Lucrative Dark Horse of Facebook Gaming Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:57 PM PDT  While Zynga and other gaming companies seem to be doing everything possible to claw their way off the Facebook canvas, at least one San Francisco company is still in. Big time. With just shy of 5 million monthly active users on Facebook, Kixeye is ranked a dismal 72nd on the developer leaderboard behind Zynga, EA and Angry Birds-maker Rovio, according to tracking service AppData. But the astonishing revenue Kixeye makes per user has the company on track to gross more than $100 million in total revenue this year. That’s up from between $25 to $50 million last year, according to an independent source familiar with Kixeye’s financials. For comparison, Zynga earned $1.1 billion in 2011 on 240 million monthly active users according to its year-end financial report. Kixeye is part of a class of companies that is taking Facebook gaming far from its “Cow Clicker” past. The company doesn’t target the stereotypical 35-year-old female demographic that Zynga is well-known for, but rather a subset of hardcore gamers that are willing to pay up. Think fewer virtual potatoes and more epic sea battles with pirates. “We haven’t sold our souls,” said Kixeye’s chief executive Will Harbin, who plays the company’s games for a few hours every day. “We have found a formula where we can make games that we’re super proud of and that are efficient at contributing to our bottom line.” (That’s Harbin in the picture at the top. Yes, really.) The company only has a few games under its belt, but they have a longer life cycle than other Facebook games as players stick around for longer. Battle Pirates is set in a post-apocalyptic world where the entire Earth is submerged under water (kind of like Waterworld minus Kevin Costner). Players have to build and defend bases against the Draconian Empire. Then there’s Backyard Monsters, which has had a surprisingly long lifespan for a Facebook game after launching more than two years ago. The real-time strategy game has players building and raising a monster army. It’s gotten edgier over its life as Kixeye has gotten more comfortable with its demographic. That strategy of building very immersive games for a smaller, but more lucrative, segment of the market represents a shift that's happened on the Facebook platform over the past year. Games on the platform are becoming a lot more diverse than the casual, resource-management or simulation games that have dominated over the past two years. There are games with rich storylines, hidden object titles and bingo. The audience that Kixeye and other similar developers like Kabam and KlickNation, which EA acquired, is just one corner of this changing landscape. Facebook seems eager to embrace this change too. “It’s our job in the ecosystem to make sure that quality is highly-rewarded,” said Matt Wyndowe, a product manager for games at Facebook. “Developers are finding that there is enormous potential in higher-quality gaming brackets.” Meanwhile, casual mass-market developers are finding a tougher competitive landscape. You can see a visible slowdown in Zynga’s bookings growth over the past year as Facebook’s 30 percent revenue share ate into the company’s margins. Other social game developers like Kabam, Crowdstar, Funzio and perhaps most notably, OMGPOP, have diversified onto mobile platforms like iOS and Android in the face of thinning profit margins on Facebook. “Frankly, we don’t need the viral bullshit that other developers depend on,” Harbin said in his characteristically blunt way. “We have the luxury to make the games we want to make.” Just to give you a rundown of how sticky Kixeye’s games are, the company shared some stats on engagement. The average session length in a Kixeye title is more than 30 minutes and the company’s daily active users have been playing its titles for more than seven months on average. While the average social game might make 4 cents per day per user, Kixeye makes about 20 times that on a per-user basis. (Zynga’s was 6.1 cents per day in the fourth quarter of last year, according to its earnings report.) Surprisingly, Harbin says he’s not that interested in mobile for the time being. He’s laser-focused on browser-based games. Of course, the long-term question is about how large Kixeye’s market opportunity will ultimately be. Their approach is niche by definition, so how far can it scale? “Our market is maybe 8 percent saturated,” Harbin said. To grow its base, Kixeye is looking to launch a web destination off Facebook sometime in the summer. He says Facebook gaming still has a certain stigma attached to it and Kixeye’s hardcore players might feel more comfortable on a site that the company wholly owns. By next year, the company would like to have a 50-50 split in revenue from Facebook and from its own destination. Kixeye is also looking to staff up to about 300 people by year-end. To do so, they’ve stocked up on these ads with wolves (pictured below) that you might have seen while riding the BART trains around the San Francisco Bay Area. The company’s momentum has piqued the interest of both investors and prospective buyers. When Andrew Trader, who was part of Zynga’s founding team, came onto the company’s board of directors last fall, Kixeye’s $18 million funding round was so oversubscribed that he couldn’t get his venture firm Maveron into the deal. “Kixeye’s execution has been incredible,” Trader said. “They’re able to monetize revenge. When one of my friends comes to blow up my base in Battle Pirates, I can’t wait to repay the favor and I’ll pay for the privilege to speed that up.” Born under the name Casual Collective, Kixeye has raised $19 million to date from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Jafco Ventures and Trinity Ventures. This raises the long-term question of whether Kixeye wants to stay independent or join a larger entity. Another company focused on the same demographic, KlickNation, was acquired by EA last fall. Like many CEOs I talk to, Harbin deflects the question. “We’re financially independent. We don’t need funding. We don’t need to sell,” he said. “ But obviously, at some point we’ll have to provide liquidity for our shareholders.” There are interesting candidates out there. Nexon, the Asian freemium gaming company that went public just days before Zynga did, is focused on immersive games. And just because EA did KlickNation, that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t consider another gaming company like Kixeye. Although Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus has said he’s willing to put the company’s $1.8 billion in cash and short-term securities to work on acquisitions, a Kixeye deal would frankly be an odd fit. Zynga’s mission is to do mass-market, casual and social games. While Kixeye has social titles, they are neither casual nor mass-market. Plus, given how much Harbin harps on the strategy of other casual game-makers, it seems like he would rather be struck by a lightning bolt than be bought by Zynga. Never say never though.
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| Dorsey Pitching Square At $4B Valuation To Legg Mason, Fidelity And Other Institutional Investors Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:11 PM PDT  Payments company Square is raising another major round of funding, but is targeting institutional investors first because of the enormous size of the round, we hear from sources. Square’s CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois have met with both Fidelity and Legg Mason over the past week, and as AllThingsD reported earlier, Square is looking to raise at a $4 billion valuation, which we’ve confirmed as well. In addition, we are also hearing that the company is raising around $250 million, which was originally reported in the New York Times. We hear Dorsey wrapped up the 10-day trip to the East Coast to conduct the raise. Owen Thomas of the Daily Dot was the first to notice Dorsey’s and Rabois’ trips (broadcasted via Twitter) to Baltimore and Boston, where Legg Mason and Fidelity are based, respectively. Another potential institutional investor, T. Rowe Price, is also based in Baltimore as well. It’s notable that Rabois’ previous company, Slide, raised funding from Fidelity as well. Square just raised $100 million in funding last year at a $1 billion valuation, so a $4 billion pre-money valuation is a huge jump. You also have to wonder what Square is raising another big round for. International expansion is on the horizon for 2012, and we know that the company is ramping up on marketing spend with a new TV commercial. Perhaps Square could be looking to make strategic acquisitions as well in the near future? A spokesperson for Square says the company declined to comment on rumor or speculation. We’ll keep you updated as we hear more.
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