Posts Tagged ‘Deals & More’
ISBX raises $750K to give cross-platform mobile apps a fighting chance
Smartphones and their add-on apps are increasingly catching the eyes of angels and other venture-capital investors as the war between product offerings heats up, Arthur Iinuma, COO at cross-platform mobile developer , told VentureBeat Monday.
Iinuma said the nine-month-old Los Angeles-based smartphone-focused development shop has seen revenues grow an average of 25 percent every month since its founding. On the strength of those numbers, ISBX announced Monday that it had raised $750,000 in funding from , Taiwan-based angel investors.
At a time when many app developers focus first on the iPhone, then Google’s Android operating system, and leave other mobile platforms as an afterthought, ISBX builds mobile apps for brands and businesses across all mobile platforms including iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone 7, and Symbian. Customers include Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Glam Media, and the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
This sort of seed money sown in smartphone-related startups is only the beginning of a rush of venture capital into the sector, predicted Iinuma (pictured here).
“This is most certainly the tip of the iceberg, since the mobile universe is one of potentially significant scalability, but is still in the early stages of innovation,” said Iinuma. “Growth in VC activity in this sector will, no doubt, spur a wave of innovation, but more importantly, signal the VCs’ acknowledgement that mobile application technology needs to be given serious consideration in today’s fast-paced world of mobile phones. Our market research consistently informs us of the potential for significant expansion of the mobile app universe, with enterprise poised as the next growth segment.”
Iinuma added that institutional interest in mobile application technology is something that is not unique to the States, with some of the largest user bases coming from a diverse group of smartphone platforms in Asia and Europe.
“There there are savvy investment groups based in those regions that are not going to let Sand Hill take all the winnings for themselves,” said Iinuma, referring to northern California’s cluster of venture-capital firms near Stanford University.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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ClairMail raises $13.8M for more mobile banking options
, which sells mobile tools for banking alerts and transactions, announced today that it has .
ClairMail offers a suite of mobile applications to help consumers stay aware of their account status with each bank. The platform provides a mobile application, text messaging alerts, and the like to update users on new activity regarding their bank accounts. ClairMail also offers mobile payment options and ways for credit card companies to deliver alerts to their customers.
The most recent fundraising round was led by Investor Growth Capital. Existing investors JAFCO Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Outlook Ventures also participated in the round. The funding is pegged to help improve its mobile infrastructure and for research and development.
Interest in mobile banking has grown lately with each major bank providing its own mobile banking applications. Some financial institutions, like USAA, also offer ways for banking customers to deposit checks simply by taking a picture of the check with an iPhone. Data from comScore indicates that in April, which is a 70 percent increase from a year ago. About 41 percent of smartphone users , according to data from comScore.
So far, eight of the top 12 financial institutions in the United States have jumped on board with the mobile banking platform, the company said in a press release. ClairMail has some high-profile banking names like BB&T and Bank of the West as top-tier customers, as well as more than 45 other financial institutions with a reach of 161 million users. ClairMail saw 300 percent growth in its revenue year-over-year in its second quarter of 2010, the company said in a press release.
The San Rafael, Calif.-based company was founded in 2004 and currently has 125 employees. ClairMail declined to disclose its total funding to date.
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Week in review: Digg founder admits mistakes
Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:
— Digg, the pioneering social-news site that lets users vote on top headlines, began to lose momentum during the recession because it pulled engineers from designing new features to improving revenue, founder Kevin Rose said Wednesday.
— Apple tipped its hand on future iPad designs by filing for patents in China.
— Digg is trying to work its way out of the traffic hole it created with its botched redesign attempt. This week it announced the return of several popular features from its previous version.
— Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, talked about how she sees Facebook and about whether or not it’s a competitor.
— Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hit the stage at RIM’s BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, where he unveiled the company’s long-awaited tablet — the BlackBerry Playbook.
And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:
— Jajah, the internet phone company that was snapped up by Spanish telecom giant Telefonica for $207 million, is declaring war on calling cards.
— Vinod Khosla, dynamic founder of Khosla Ventures, said, “You can reduce more carbon by painting your roof white than you can by buying a Prius.”
— How can you tell when a CEO is lying? It turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than monitoring the movement of their lips.
— AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong announced that he has acquired popular tech blog TechCrunch.
— For Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the next step in technology is the same that it has always been — augmenting humanity to handle information that a human brain couldn’t otherwise keep up with, and just make things work.
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Four reasons why Facebook should acquire Skype
Andreas Bernström is chief executive of , a VOIP calling service.
Voice is the new black. Seems like after all the hype of apps, the world still wants to connect in real-time and in many cases is willing to pay for such value. In the battle of voice, Skype, Google, Apple, telecom operators and independent outfits are gearing up for battle. The trillion-dollar land grab is officially on.
Apple launched FaceTime video chat. Google Talk is turning into the new pay phone. Oh, and Skype has filed for an IPO as well as announcing plans to enter the enterprise space.
But besides the indie stalwarts, who’s the dark horse in the room?
Facebook.
What should it do? How should it enter the space? The answer is clear. Buy Skype.
Yes, despite the rumors you may have heard that , or working on the software that a third party hardware device would support, the company has clear ambitions to leverage their massive contact lists and the opportunities to do that go well beyond a simple Facebook phone.
I’m not the only person to think of this. Following , GigaOm wondered, “” Here are four reasons why a Skype purchase makes sense:
1. Facebook’s social graph is the best phonebook in the world built from their mission statement up.
Facebook’s mission statement reads:
Facebook is a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers. The company develops technologies that facilitate the sharing of information through the social graph, the digital mapping of people’s real-world social connections.
Sounds like a calling option fits right in. What could be more real-time?
The list of companies that have had a similar mission statement is long. However, what sets Facebook apart from its predecessors is the unique critical mass of users. Let’s be honest here. Do you know anyone who matters to you (other than possibly your grandparents) who you cannot get a hold of through Facebook?
From a network perspective, Facebook epitomizes . What that means for people is that the value of joining Facebook is simply too great to ignore just because it is so ubiquitous. Facebook is the sole social network to ever exist that plays host to a social graph made up of our real-world social connections. I am not talking about the same people we follow on Twitter and enjoy the occasional update from. I am talking about people we actually know.
Sure Facebook could try to build this themselves but Skype has a lot of things that Facebook doesn’t including excellence in calling service, routing, origination and termination. Skype owns relationships with carriers, operators and suppliers worldwide. They have built out online fraud and payment expertise. This isn’t rocket science for Facebook to build, but takes a lot of time and talent.
2. Facebook and Skype have a common lineage.
These social behemoths intersect at Marc Andreessen, whom VentureBeat has called . Andreessen’s venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz, which he cofounded with longtime business partner Ben Horowitz, was a lead firm in the buyout of Skype from eBay only a few months ago. In addition, he also holds a position on the Facebook board of directors and is widely known as a close advisor to Mark Zuckerberg himself.
If there is anyone who could build a bridge between Skype and Facebook and turn them into one symbiotic entity, it is Andreessen. With regards to the rumored (and probably imminent) social networking war between Facebook and Google, it is rather unlikely Andreessen hasn’t noticed the synergies and end user value a marriage between Skype and Facebook would entail.
If are true, Facebook is bound to create a more holistic and compelling ecosystem, similar to Google’s. A lot of us are already heavily invested in Google and it is absolutely vital for Facebook to include voice as a cornerstone in the project of building a social eco-system appealing and competitive enough to go against Google.
3. Facebook is already the most popular mobile app of all time, ready for a turn-key global calling play.
The most recent numbers speak for themselves. Out of more than 500 million people using Facebook, 30 percent, or approximately 150 million, interact with the service on a regular basis using a mobile device. They access the service either through the Facebook mobile website or by way of any of the mobile apps Facebook has made available for the Android, Blackberry and iPhone platforms. With the continuous proliferation in the use of third-party apps on mobile devices, this figure is bound to keep soaring.
Other than the obvious value of being able to connect with friends while on the go (for free), users also have access to the most comprehensive, cloud-based contact list out there. The tedious process of constantly making sure all contacts details to your friends are current is no longer a concern either, as a Facebook Phone Book manages itself by having all the personal details in it tied to Facebook profiles.
Facebook becoming our de facto address book is a vision bound to become reality in a not too distant future. It is a highly utilitarian aspect of the service that hasn’t been properly exploited. By deeply integrating Skype, the most recognized consumer calling service with the greatest mind share, Facebook would not only boost its revenue to greater heights but also position the company very favorably in the war against Google.
4. Skype wants a big exit but also a better fit than last time.
Let’s face it. eBay didn’t know how to properly leverage Skype. It was a
failed premise from the start that sellers would want to talk to their buyers on eBay. This time around Skype certainly wants the best financial exit. Besides pure cash
liquidity, who has the fastest rising private stock? It’s got to be Facebook
in the last 6 months, with analysts valuation having been raised from $10 billion to
$33 billion.
Who can scale Skype to the biggest user base? It has to be
Facebook again. Skype may want $5 billion but would it settle for $4 billion and the
promise of a fast rising stock like Facebook. Skype founders would
ideally like to stay involved if such an acquisition happened, but that seems doubtful with Zennstrom and Friis being notoriously difficult and probably not compatible with Facebook’s intent on running a tight ship.
Why does a combined SkypeBook beat Google? The graph is greater.
By building the social graph for all Google services of any remote social nature based on the people we send emails to, Google committed a cardinal sin that might prove detrimental. The connections tied to your Gmail account that now also double as your Google Chat contacts (yes, the same ones Google wants you to call), are predominantly formal contacts. Your co-workers, your real estate agent and so on. The people that we send emails to are not the same people that we want to have a voice, let alone a video conversation with.
Email was, is, and will be the main standard for formal communication for a foreseeable future. We use it to communicate with our co-workers, to send customer support requests and to contact our real estate agent when we want to sell our house.
Dan Tapscott (celebrated author of Wikinomics and Grown Up Digital), frequently touches on this in the context of media habits for the generation of Digital Natives:
Young people don’t use email anymore. They see it as a traditional form of communication. They use it to thank their grandparents for a Birthday gift (or other times when they have to speak with old people).
So, where are all these friends that we want call? Chances are you’ll find them on Facebook.
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Eniac Ventures raises $1.6M fund for mobile startups
A team of four mobile entrepreneurs and investors just announced that they’ve formed , a seed investment firm aiming to back in mobile startups.
The firm says it has raised $1.6 million in its first fund, which it will invest in $25,000 to $100,000 chunks over the next four years or so.
Eniac is the supposedly the first seed fund with an exclusive focus on the mobile industry. And its partners Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh, and Tim Young aren’t just investors — they all have high-level positions at mobile startups right now. Mehta, for example, was an angel investor in AdMob (which was ), but he’s also the chief executive of mobile startup .
The firm is named after . The idea is that the mobile phones are the next big computing platform and will, in Mehta’s words, become “bigger than the Web giants that emerged a decade ago.” (Plus, Eniac was built at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where the four partners met as well.)
Eniac says it has already invested in six startups, including , , , and .
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Japanese augmented reality gaming company Tonchidot lands $12M
, a mobile augmented reality (AR) platform provider, just landed $12 million in second round funding. Several Japanese companies and venture capitalists participated in the round, including mobile operator KDDI Corporation, media conglomerate Recruit Co. Ltd., and mobile advertising company SPiRE.
Augmented reality refers to the use of computer-generated imagery over a live feed of a real-world environment — something usually achieved with a cellphone camera.
According to Osuke Honda from VC fund DCM, a previous investor, the investment will be used to build a larger, more diverse team and reach out to an international audience — as well as extending the company’s SoLAR gaming platform.
Social gaming is already a multi-billion dollar market in Japan. Leading mobile games portal DeNA, for example,$576 million in revenue in the six month period from April through September of this year and is on track to generate over a billion dollars this year. Japan’s other social gaming giant Gree already has 20 million users and an extremely high ARPU. Zynga recently in Japan with SoftBank.
In July this year Tonchidot launched a social, AR gaming platform for developers called SoLAR which combines location, augmented reality and social play features. Tools to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and payment features for iPhone and Android will be provided in the upcoming October product release.
Tonchidot’s flagship product, an AR app called Sekai Camera, has been downloaded 1 million times and is installed on an estimated 30 percent of all iPhones in Japan. Sekai Camera is available for iPhone in 90 countries and for Android in more than 20 countries. A lightweight version for feature phones just launched.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To purchase tickets, .
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Verve Wireless lands $7M for mobile publishing and local ads
, a startup that offers mobile publishing and advertising platforms for local media companies, announced today that is has snagged $7 million in a funding round led by BlueRun Ventures.
The Verve Publishing Platform allows publishers to easily bring their content and advertisers to mobile devices. Verve Wireless is also notable for local mobile advertising — Verve Connect is the largest premium local ad network around, the company says. It serves 750 customers with Verve Connect, including notable publishers like the Associated Press and Belo Interactive.
When , the company was still coming to grips with the idea of location-based advertising. At the time it managed to land deals with media partners including The New York Times Company, Freedom Communications and Media General — and the company also formed agreements with all four major mobile carriers in the US.
Now the company reports that in July more than 14 million users have accessed mobile content via its publishing platform (a 151 percent increase over a year ago) and that it served 150 million mobile web pages (a 105 percent per-year increase). Thus far it has served over a billion mobile ad impressions.
Verve plans to use the funding to expand its publishing and advertising services, as well to hire more staff in advertising and operations.
With this funding, the San Diego, Calif.-based company has raised a total of $9.5 million to date. This latest round also saw participation from previous investors, including The AP.
Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at . Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our . Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, .
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