This sponsored post is produced by MicroVentures.

VentureBeat recently reported that funding marketplace MicroVentures raised over $16 million for tech startups. Over the past 2 years, MicroVentures has reviewed over 2,000 companies and through its rigorous review process, filtered the prospective list to less than 40, which met the criteria to raise on the platform. This represents approximately 2 percent of the companies that initiated the process. Once the SEC issues the final rules around the JOBS Act, it will pave the way for funding portals to start equity-based crowdfunding, giving more startups an opportunity to find a place to raise capital. Many of those 2,000 companies will now have another resource available to raise capital online.

What does this mean for investors?

It means that investors will likely spend more of their time searching multiple “Equity Crowdfunding” sites attempting to understand the risks associated with deals on any given platform. Early stage investing is inherently high risk/reward. However, risk correlates closely to transparency, which can only be achieved through professional due diligence performed by experienced individuals. Over the last year we have seen an uptick in the number of companies requesting funding as a result of the JOBS Act. Because of this, it is critical that investors are only offered opportunities that have been properly vetted and reviewed prior to listing on a given site, in order for the investor to make an intelligent and informed investment decision. This review coincidentally also adds value to the company looking for capital, as it helps them understand what information is important to investors from Day One, helping them start with shareholder value in mind.

What do online investors look for in a deal?

Here are a few of the many factors investors look for when reviewing a startup:

1)     Experienced Team – Investors look for a team that has experienced both success and failure. They look for teams that have met challenges and figured out how to get over, under, around, or through.

2)     Traction – For early stage companies traction doesn’t necessarily have to be revenue. It could mean a successful beta with active users and a healthy growth rate. However, proof of execution is key.

3)     Angel Money – Investors would like to see investments from angels or VCs, who can add value beyond simply capital.

Receiving positive feedback in the three areas above may create initial interest from investors reviewing an opportunity on an online platform. However, in order to create a win-win for both investors and the company raising capital, investors must have access to fundamental information about the company and be able to determine whether any growth inhibiting liabilities exist. Without rigorous due diligence, this is impossible. For example, it is great to see high profile angel investors participate in a round with a company you might have interest investing in, but that information alone provides you with no detail regarding that investor’s agenda, reason for investing in the given company, personal relationship with the company, etc. It is paramount as an investor that you understand how each startup featured is being vetted and that the due diligence criteria matches aligns with your methodologies for making risk-based decisions.

At MicroVentures, we proactively perform two levels of due diligence before our investors review an opportunity to ensure that we are offering what we believe are high quality, curated opportunities. Further, MicroVentures provides the necessary transparency and tools to investors so they can perform their own due diligence before investing. If you would like to be a part of the investor community at MicroVentures, please sign up today. It is free to join.

Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com.

Peter Thiel’s late-stage venture firm Mithril Capital Management is planning to invest in space exploration and transportation.

Mithril partner Jim O’Neill denied in an email that he is raising a dedicated fund, but confirmed that the firm just hired several space industry experts to join the investment team.

“We are delighted to have hired two space industry veterans on our investment team to help us examine hard technology companies, including transportation and space,” he said.

Sources also said that several million dollars has already been poured into the fund to build vehicles for space exploration. Mithril denied this, and said they will not be raising additional money beyond the existing $402 million fund.

Likewise, the extent to which Thiel will be personally involved with exploring space-related opportunities remains unclear.

San Francisco-based Mithril is a growth fund that fits between Thiel’s other investment firms, Founders Fund, which typically focuses on earlier stage investments, and Clarium Capital, a global hedge fund.

Founders Fund has invested in SpaceX, a private space transport company. And in a 2011 interview with the New York Times, Thiel said that not enough energy is spent tackling big challenging problems, “like space exploration.” Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that Thiel is a science fiction junkie obsessed with putting his money behind ideas that would expand human possibility.

Thiel is known for making risky investments that most venture capitalists wouldn’t touch — the billionaire has backed a nonprofit, Breakout Labs, in a bid to kickstart scientific innovation.

Mithril would be among the first private funds to venture into space exploration — Kentucky Space LLC announced last month the formation of SpaceTango, the first business accelerator for entrepreneurial space ventures.

Peter Thiel image via Ken Yeung 

Rumors came out earlier this month that Yahoo was interested in Hulu after Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer met with members of Hulu’s executive team. Hulu’s current owners — News Corps, Disney, and Comcast — tried to sell the company for around $2 billion in June 2011 after irreconcilable differences over business strategy. No one came close to the asking price and the sale was officially terminated. Instead, the owners decided to focus on growth.

A report in AllThingsD today said “a person familiar with the process” revealed that Yahoo submitted an offer this morning.

Hulu offers high-quality videos of popular TV and movies. Its revenue increased by more than 65 percent last year to $695 million. It has more than 4 million paying subscribers and had commercials from more than 1,000 advertisers in 2012, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier. The content is free or costs $8 a month for newer programming, and advertisers are willing to pay high prices to run their ads alongside the videos. A report in Bloomberg said that Disney prefers the advertising-focused business model, while News Corp. wants to rely on subscriptions. Now a number of other companies are entering the bidding fray to join the discussion (and rewards).

Other bidders include cable TV provider Time Warner Cable, Amazon, Guggenheim Digital Media, and former News Corp. President Peter Chernin, who made a $500 million offer.

With this renewed interest from buyers, the real question is how much are they willing to pay?

Yahoo recently placed and lost a bid to acquire a $300 million, 75 percent majority stake in Dailymotion, a French video service. This deal fell through after the French Industry Minister Arnaud Montebourg decided he didn’t want to see a successful French business sold to an American company. Hulu could be an alternative option for Yahoo, which recently signed an exclusive deal for all Saturday Night Live clips and acquired popular social media site Tumblr for $1.1 billion. Yahoo is clearly eager to scoop up popular content that it can monetize through advertising.

With that huge cash deal fresh on the books, does Yahoo have the resources to throw down for Hulu as well? And if so, how much is it willing to spend? Until this all gets settled, I’ll be watching the latest episodes of Modern Family for “research.”

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s all sunshine and lollipops over in Windows Phone land today.

Google announced that it’s ending its fight over Microsoft’s YouTube Windows Phone app and that the two companies will be working together on a revamped version.

In a statement, Google says it will be “working together to update the new YouTube for Windows Phone app to enable compliance with YouTube’s API terms of service, including enabling ads, in the coming weeks.” Additionally, Google says Microsoft will replace the existing YouTube app with an earlier version for now.

Microsoft caught fire for its unauthorized YouTube app last week, which notably blocked YouTube’s ads, let users download videos, and didn’t respect platform requirements set by video authors. For its part, Microsoft said that the app was in response to Google blocking access to YouTube’s APIs, which prevented it from offering a fully featured app on Windows Phone. Google simply called Microsoft’s app a violation of YouTube’s terms of service.

Microsoft likely knew what it was getting into when it released its rogue YouTube app. During Google’s I/O keynote last week, Google chief executive Larry Page bemoaned the negativity in the technology world as well as the lack of decent interoperability between services. While it made for a great speech, Page’s comments were somewhat hypocritical given Google’s refusal to let Microsoft properly access YouTube’s APIs.

Now, at least, Microsoft has Google’s attention.

This week I did something that I hadn’t done for five months and 12 days: I went to Flickr on my laptop, accessed some photos on my hard drive, uploaded them, named them, tagged them, and organized them in a set.

The magic of the Internet happened before my eyes, and they joined the other rectangular images on the venerable photo-sharing site. And finally, for the first time in almost half a year, I had something beside square pics on my Flickr photostream.

Yahoo announced its massive revamp of the Flickr service with three missing Es, calling the updated site Biggr, Spectaculr, and Wherevr. But really, the update boils down to two massive changes: Dropping freemium and making an old and tired user interface awesome.

Since I was just wondering about reupping my Pro account, the first is really significant.

Yahoo’s giving each Flickr user a full terabyte of space for images for free, which essentially means you don’t need to be a Pro user anymore. You still can, for an ad-free account, or to add even more space … but I don’t mind a few ads, and I’m only using 0.8 percent of my freely available terabyte anyways.

But the best and most important is the incredible new look.

There’s varied response to the new look, to say the least, and the official forum thread on the new layout has a staggering 241 pages of user comments: 24,102 in total so far. The vast majority of them are negative, and most of those appear to be from long-time users who liked the site the way it was and are asking Flickr to change it back.

Good luck.

Flickr as it was was turning into a byway, a leftover, and an also-ran. Which is why most of the pics on my photostream and home page were square: They were exports, shares from Instagram photos. In other words, Flickr was changing from the place where you went to share photos from, to the place where you shared photos to. That may be a small change in the English language, but it’s a massive change in user engagement.

And it had huge effects on Flickr’s traffic, which dropped about 40 percent in the last year alone:

The new look is gorgeous and photo-centric, giving photos — the raison d’etre of Flickr — center stage.

Sure, it’s Pinterest-ic and Tumblr-y. But if you love images and imagery, the new Flickr displays photos immeasurably better that the previous iteration. In a funny modern way, your digital photostream now resembles an old-fashioned photography album, without any cheesy in-your-face design elements attempting to highlight the fact.

In addition, the new layout options gave Yahoo the option of displaying images with much more creativity while honoring the photographer’s shot selection — such as Flickr displaying panorama shots across the entire page:

I’m sold. Flickr, I’m back.

“I think Flickr is awesome again with these new announcements,” Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said. “Photos make the world go around. Flickr was awesome once. It languished. But now it’s awesome again.”

I agree. And so does one of the more famous photographers on Flickr, Thomas Hawk:

despite all of the naysayers about the new @flickr, my page has never had more engagement than it has there in the last 3 days.

— Thomas Hawk (@thomashawk) May 23, 2013

Image credits: John Koetsier

Erply provides POS system and inventory management software for commercial retail and e-commerce businesses. Today the company announced raising $2.15 million in its second round of funding, according to a report in TechCrunch.

The iPad app and cloud-based platform provide a centralized place to manage multiple areas of a retail business, including POS, inventory, payroll, accounting, and multi channel e-commerce in an integrated system. Businesses can easily add new locations into the system and the retail CRM feature tracks customers and captures their data. There are also sales and marketing campaign tools.

Erply can handle data across physical shops, online stores and warehouses, and provides real-time dashboards of activity. The software is integrated with other platforms including accounting programs like QuickBooks and web-shops like Magento, Amazon, eBay, and Google.

Old school POS systems are difficult to manage, not connected to the Internet and expensive, not to mention cumbersome. Retailers used to deal with printers, cash registers, barcode, scanners, physical receipts, inventory software etc… and none of these systems were connected.

Over the past few years, a crop of startups has given the POS industry a mobile, cloud-based overhaul. The most well-known of these startups is Square which pioneered a small piece of hardware known as a dongle that is accompanied by a suite of software called Square Register. However retailers that have existing POS systems may not want to throw them out the window, and Erply’s technology helps them bring together the convenience and connectedness of cloud-based systems, with all the features and support they need.

The company has 100,000 small to medium business (SMB) customers and 120,000 users, and its client base is growing by around 20 percent each month. Customers include Elizabeth Arden, BMW and The Athlete’s Foot and the company is making a push to support Fortune 500 companies and gain traction in the enterprise space.

Erply has offices in New York, London, Australia, Denmark, and Tallinn, Estonia. Previous investor Redpoint Ventures led this round of financing to fuel growth and international expansion, and take on bigger players like Square and PayPal, other startups like GoPago and Vend. Index Ventures and Dave McClure also participated in this round.

It has raised $2 million in 2010 and this brings its total capital raises to $4.2 million.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Editor’s note: Keynote Systems’ Startup Shootout Index provides some insight into the three-screen challenge — desktop, smartphone, and tablet — now facing anyone with a web presence. We’ll be bringing you a fresh set of data from Keynote every month. Check out previous Startup Shootout results.

New technology allows us to take an even closer look at the impact of Web performance on the desktop user experience. Rather than simply measuring the time it takes for the entire page to load, new standards allow us to capture details about how long it takes for the visitor to see something change in the browser and how long before a visitor can begin to interact with a page. These are important points in the user experience, which mean that not all load times are equal. Let us explain.

For years, Web sites have used monitoring services that provide an external perspective of performance by measuring complete page load times. However, this doesn’t represent how well a user’s Web browser is actually assembling that content or how soon the user can begin to interact with the page. We also know there are many ways to assemble and display content on a site – some methods are better than others.

New industry standards supported by modern browsers like IE9, Chrome, and Firefox can reveal performance more holistically—based on users’ true experience during the page load. The browser itself now saves timestamps from various events in the process of loading a new page, including timestamps for the starting and ending of phases to help measure:

• The first point at which the user sees something other than a blank screen or the previous screen (“Time to First Paint”)

• When a page can be clicked, swiped and scrolled (“Time to Interactive Page”)

• The total time a page takes to load all assets on the page (“Total User Experience Time”)

As an example, imagine you visit two sites, each with a page load time of five seconds. If site A starts delivering content in half a second and site B doesn’t start giving you any content at all until four seconds, your perception of site A will be much more positive even though both sites have the same overall five second user experience time.

Rovio, where art thou?

On the Keynote Startup Shootout Index, digital entertainment media company Rovio has a woefully slow desktop response time of 7.75 seconds. Given its stature amongst the mobile device user community, it comes in with an also unimpressive 5.71 seconds on the iPhone and 6.59 seconds on the iPad.  Users have high expectations today; sites like Rovio should be aiming for two seconds end-to-end page load times for the desktop and no slower than six seconds end-to-end page load times on 3G mobile networks. Rovio’s desktop site could definitely be faster than it is. We were surprised at some missed opportunities and failures to follow best practices.

Time to Paint

In addition to slow end-to-end page load times, Rovio is also showing a very slow time to first paint. We are seeing over 63 elements loading before the browser is able to render any content on screen. This includes 15 JavaScript files, five CSS files plus four custom font files (few websites use custom fonts, in part because of the effect they have on performance, as the site might need to load fonts before its initial render).

Compression

Interestingly, Rovio is also not using gzip compression on all the elements that are compressible. All modern browsers support gzip compression, which shrinks file sizes for transfer over the network before decompressing them to use in the browser. If the Rovio site were to use gzip on all page assets, many files could be 60-70% smaller, again helping to speed performance. There really is no reason not to do this.

Image Bloat 

We see a number of images loading, such as YouTube video thumbnails that the Rovio site is displaying at a lower resolution in the browser.  The images are being downloaded at 480×360 pixels, but then displayed at 160×120 pixels. This means that the Rovio site is downloading images 9X larger than it needs, an inefficient use of network bandwidth and client-side processing time.

HTTP Persistent Connection

And lastly, Rovio is failing to take advantage of HTTP persistent connections (also known as HTTP keep-alive or HTTP connection reuse).  Without HTTP Keep Alive turned on at the web server, browsers are making and then tearing down dozens of unnecessary network connections to the server.  HTTP Keep Alive allows the same network connection to be re-used for multiple requests, and is much faster.

Conclusion

The three additional metrics for measuring web performance add a very useful nuance to being able to truthfully gauge how a user will perceive a page loading in the web browser.  It gives developers and site owners an additional dimension to improve and refine. Let’s hope Rovio takes some time to step up performance across these best practice areas.

To view the full range of Keynote Indices, please visit here.

Keynote tests the sites in the index hourly and around the clock from four locations over the three largest U.S. wireless networks, simulating visitors using three different devices. Data is collected from multiple locations and then aggregated to provide an overall monthly average in terms of both performance and availability.

Muhammed Yunus is a 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the founder of Grameen Bank, and he sparked a movement with the simple question: “If you are a socially conscious person, why don’t you run your business in a way that will help achieve social objectives?”

Today, entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley — and increasingly in tech hubs around the world — have taken this mission to heart. The trend is often referred to as “social entrepreneurship” or “impact investing,” and the goal is to use business process to drive positive change.

But social entrepreneurship has its critics. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank quipped in a recent interview that it’s a “a bit of a fad” and startups that “confuse social good with being in business usually end up as 501(c)(3)s.” Likewise, Clay Johnson, author of the Information Diet, accused Change.org (the poster child for social entrepreneurship that just pulled in $15 million) in a story for the Wall Street Journal for being a “lead-generation business disguised as a social-change organization for whoever is willing to pay them for the email addresses.”

Related: Read more about the young entrepreneurs who are changing the way we do business.

Pierre and Pam Omidyar with Virgin’s Richard Branson.

To take a closer look at social entrepreneurship, I headed to Omidyar‘s annual conference in San Jose, Calif. Omidyar is not your average venture firm — it refers to itself as a “philanthropic investment” practice. Its founders are eBay’s Pierre Omidyar [pictured above and left] and his wife, Pam. Its private event ONEF has grown each year with more interest from entrepreneurs and mainstream venture firms.

I caught up with Omidyar’s Todor Tashev and Paula Goldman, Lenddo cofounder Richard Eldridge, and d.light president Ned Tozun to speak to the trend for our “idiot’s guide” series.

VentureBeat: Let’s dive in with a basic question. What is social entrepreneurship? 

Todor Tashev: Right now, it’s a huge tent, meaning there is a very loose definition. Lots of people are pursuing it, and interpreting it in different ways. Generally speaking, social entrepreneurs are delivering a product or service, but it’s intended to address a fundamental social issue.

Social entrepreneurs don’t just make widgets. They make widgets to advance a real benefit for the world.

VentureBeat: Can it be tricky to align the social mission and the profit motive?

Tashev: We look for companies where there is no conflict between the two. We call it a “single engine.” Some people would put companies like Facebook or Google in this category, but they view social good as a side benefit.

Paula Goldman: There is some question of intentionality. Are you doing this with the explicit goal of making a difference?

Omidyar investment partner Todor Tashev.

VentureBeat: Can these social enterprises be for-profits? Or are they typically nonprofits? 

Tashev: More recently, the trend was associated with companies that are for-profit — or have a blended model. Benefit corporations are a popular option [As of January, 13 states -- including California, Maryland and Hawaii -- have passed legislation allowing for the creation of B corps. --Ed.]

B corp’s like Couchsurfing and Change.org are not just driven by maximizing shareholder value. 

It’s important for companies who need a better way to explicitly convey to their users, backers, and to the general public that they have a broader mission. Couchsurfing may well be the first in history to have attracted mainstream venture capitalists – General Catalyst led a series B round.

Goldman: We are not trying to replace traditional philanthropy. But we believe we can use the market; we will have impact more quickly with these for-profit models.

Remnants of a brainstorm on a dusty window at Change.org’s San Francisco office.

VentureBeat: Is this a trend that is primarily supported by Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires?

Tashev: The trend is much broader than the Valley; it’s gone global. But to sustain itself, we need a strong supply of entrepreneurs.

VentureBeat: Is that the biggest challenge? A lack of talented entrepreneurs?

Tashev: I would say there is more of a supply of capital than a supply of entrepreneurs right now. We held a forum recently on “impact investing.” It was amazing to see the interest. I haven’t done the math but there must have been $20 billion or $30 billion dollars represented around the table.

VentureBeat: Do B corps typically grow as quickly as Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter? 

Tashev: Some people think that social entrepreneurs aren’t as driven. We just invested in Change.org — Ben is passionate about scaling the company and growing users just like any CEO or founder.

Richard Eldridge: I agree. I set out with a vision to economically empower the middle class. We thought we could make the most impact using my best skillset: tech. I thought it could scale fast and impact lots of people. We built a platform “Lenddo” for people to engage their social network to gain access to life improving loans. We’re optimized to serve emerging markets.

Ned Tozun and team started d.light because it’s “unjust that billions of people still use Kerosene lamps for light.”

Ned Tozun: We build solar powered lights and energy products. We started the company because we wanted to get two billion people access to electricity. The market is a really effective means to address that solution. But at our core we have a strong social mission.

VentureBeat: Is “collaborative consumption” or “sharing economy” services like Zipcar and Airbnb social entrepreneurship? 

Tashev: Collaborative consumption is a similar category. But if you’re part of this economy, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a social entrepreneur. Brian [Chesky] from Airbnb would identify himself this way — they have a broader societal impact. It’s good for the environment and resource optimization.

VentureBeat: Will the majority of businesses have a social mission or function like B corps in the next 20 years or so?

Goldman: It’s hard to say, but we do know that millennials really care about purpose and their work. You will see a new class of entrepreneurs who aren’t subject to this false dichotomy: for-profit or nonprofit. Entrepreneurs will hold the keys as capital is increasingly a commodity.

Tashev: Listen — it’s going to take some time. But in the business schools, the social entrepreneurship classes are oversubscribed. The interest will percolate throughout the system.

VentureBeat: Is it more difficult for social entrepreneurs to hire and retain talent? Especially if they can’t compete on salary?

Eldridge: When we recruit people, one of the first questions we ask is “Do we you want to change the world?” A lot of our data science team in New York is ex-Wall Street. They wanted to do something where they could make a difference.

Tozun: It’s similar for us. Most of our engineers are passionate about building a product that millions of people will use. There are motivators besides money. You will make a real impact; not just put stuff in landfills.

Top image via Omidyar Network // Change.org photo credit: Christina Farr // Todor Tashev headshot photo credit: Joi via photopin cc // d.light photo credit: Global X via photopin cc // Omidyars with Richard Branson photo credit: pmo via photopin cc

Best Buy is putting the iPhone 5 on sale starting Sunday. Two plus two equals?

According to a report by AllThingsD, Best Buy is planning to offer $50 off the iPhone 5, 4S, and 4 models starting Sunday and lasting for four weeks. The electronics retailer is also planning to offer discounts on older Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC … but not the just-released and hot-selling Samsung Galaxy S4.

Source: http://sjbbs.zol.com.cn/2/30_11361.html

The iPhone 5S in limited production, supposedly.

Rules aside, it’s not completely unheard of for iPhone to go on sale. And Apple has been experimenting lately with discounts (excuse me, incentives) in price-constrained markets such as India. But if it’s not the sign of the iPhone 5S showing up next month, it’s certainly the footsteps we’re hearing from the not-too-distant future.

Apple is certainly getting ready to release the 5S, with screens reportedly entering mass production in June, and one report saying actual phones hitting the market in August.

Which, if correct, means we still have three months to wait.

However, analyst Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets has predicted a June announcement and a July ship date for iPhone 5S as well as a new, cheaper iPhone Mini, which he says will be available in multiple colors.

photo credit: Incase. via photopin cc

Apple’s been through some tough spots historically. And while anyone who remembers the “beleaguered” days of the late 90s and early 2000s can’t think that the company is in too much trouble right now, with the stock losing hundreds of billions of dollars and Google’s Android taking massive mobile market share, there’s definitely a sense that Apple’s best days might be in the rear-view mirror.

But Cook has maintained 90-plus-percent approval ratings internally, according to Glassdoor:

That’s just a shade below Steve Jobs’ lifetime rating of 97 percent.

In addition, Apple employees are still pretty happy to be working at the iconic Cupertino company. Employee satisfaction, which reached a peak 80 percent in the middle of 2012 when Apple’s stock soared to over $700, has only dropped slightly to 78 percent.

Which doesn’t mean that working at Apple is easy. Or that working for Tim Cook is easy.

Cook looks for early hours, according to one Apple manager in Cupertino, who said he was “a CEO who demands work before 6 AM every day, and ‘accountability without control.’” And another Apple employee, an engineer, complained about work/life balance at Apple … or rather, the lack thereof.

“No work life balance is to be expected while working at Apple. Weekly management reviews and expectations from management is that you are reachable after work hours.”

The upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference will be an interesting test for Cook, and Apple. After basically telling the world not to expect any new products before fall, an iOS7 reveal will likely be the big news at the developer-focused show — and well as, possibly, announcements about developments in Apple core services like music and media.

Those announcements have to be good enough to reassure the Apple faithful within and without the company that Apple is still the leader in mobile operating systems and ecosystems and can still amaze and delight its customers.

And its team members.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

Blogging service WordPress’s parent company Automattic is getting a $50 million investment from Tiger Global, according to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

The announcement comes from a blog post on Mullenweg’s personal site today, and this comes just days after rival blogging platform/community Tumblr sold to iconic tech giant Yahoo for a whopping $1.2 billion.

Mullenweg notes that the investment comes from a secondary sale led by Tiger Global’s Lee Fixel, meaning Tiger Global purchased shares from early Automattic employees and investors. He also notes that Fixel was one of the “quiet geniuses” that previously invested in successful tech companies such as SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, and Square.

Here’s what Mullenweg had to say on his blog about the investment:

“Anyway, wanted to get in front of the news that will inevitably come out in the next week or two: there has been a large secondary transaction in Automattic stock, about $50M worth. “Secondary” means that it’s existing stockholders, like the earliest investors or employees, selling stock to another investor versus money going into the company (“primary”). It was led by Lee Fixel at Tiger Global, one of the behind-the-scenes quiet geniuses that has previously invested in SurveyMonkey, Facebook, LinkedIn, Palantir, Square, Warby Parker… Automattic is healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly — we’re not capital constrained. The minority of stockholders that elected to participate are holding on to the vast majority of their shares. We’re building an independent company that’s going to be a growing part of the fabric of the web for many years to come, so allowing early investors to lock in some returns releases any short-term pressure there might be on the company for a liquidity event and allows us to focus fully on the long road ahead.”

h/t to AllThingsD

Photo credit amperegrino/Flickr

Not so much at U.S. District Court in New York, however.

“I believe that the government will be able to show at trial direct evidence that Apple knowingly participated in and facilitated a conspiracy to raise prices of e-books, and that the circumstantial evidence in this case, including the terms of the agreements, will confirm that,” U.S. District Judge Denise Cote said on Thursday.

The trial features the U.S. v. Apple on a Department of Justice charge that Apple conspired to price-fix ebooks, limited ebook competition, and break Amazon’s hold on the market. And it’s an interesting example of a monopoly-style case being brought against a company with a tiny fraction of the ebook market (Apple), mostly to the benefit of a company with a massive wedge of the ebook market (Amazon).

Apple comprehensively denies the charges.

“Apple has not ‘conspired’ with anyone, was not aware of any alleged ‘conspiracy’ by others, and never fixed prices,” the company stated in a reply to the suit last year.

Tell it to the judge, I guess.

That’s precisely what Apple is attempting to do, but statements like the above must be more than a little worrisome for Apple legal representatives. Perhaps just as worrisome is that Judge Cote has already begun writing a draft of her decision — before the trial has begun.

Evidence has already been submitted to the court, however, and that — apparently — is enough for Cote to form an opinion on the case.

One of those pieces of evidence was a line in an email from then Apple CEO Steve Jobs to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company owns the publisher HarperCollins. The line that the DOJ released was fairly damning, on the face of it:

Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.

That certainly looks like it could be price-fixing, right?

But here’s the line in the full context of Steve Jobs’ email:

Our proposal does set the upper limit for ebook retail pricing based on the hardcover price of each book. The reason we are doing this is that, with our experience selling a lot of content online, we simply don’t think the ebook market can be successful with pricing higher than $12.99 or $14.99. Heck, Amazon is selling these books at $9.99, and who knows, maybe they are right and we will fail even at $12.99. But we’re willing to try at the prices we’ve proposed. We are not willing to try at higher prices because we are pretty sure we’ll all fail.

As I see it, HC has the following choices:

1. Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.

2. Keep going with Amazon at $9.99. You will make a bit more money in the short term, but in the medium term Amazon will tell you they will be paying you 70% of $9.99. They have shareholders too.

3. Hold back your books from Amazon. Without a way for customers to buy your ebooks, they will steal them. This will be the start of piracy and once started there will be no stopping it. Trust me, I’ve seen this happen with my own eyes.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see any other alternatives. Do you?

In that context, Job’s sentence appears to be simply an option that HarperCollins has. And it looks a lot less damning.

It’s not clear what other evidence Judge Cote has seen. And it’s not clear if she’s trying to urge the parties involved to come to a pre-trial settlement by pressuring Apple to make nice and roll over for the DOJ.

But let’s hope she maintains some level of objectivity in the case she’s judging — and that she at least waits until the case is heard in a court of law before making public statements about whether she believe the defendant is guilty or not.

photo credit: kalavinka via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Intel’s long years investing in mobile processors are about to pay off with its biggest win to date. We’ve confirmed that the next Samsung Galaxy tablet, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, will have an Intel Atom chip based on the Clover Trail code name.

A source familiar with the matter confirmed to us that Samsung has chosen the Intel chip over other competing ARM-based solutions, including Samsung’s own Exynos mobile processors. If it’s true, that could mean that Intel’s mobile processor business is finally getting some traction.

Benchmark testing sits leaked that news this week. The GFXBench site and the SamMobile site noted the Intel chip appeared to be inside a device dubbed the Samsung Santos 103 tablet with the product name GT-P5200 running Android on an Intel Clover Trail chip. Various sites concluded that was Samsung’s third-generation Galaxy Tab slate, which has a 10.1-inch touchscreen.

Test results say the device has a 1,280-by-800 display and is running Android 4.2.2 operating system. The processor can run between from 800MHz to 1.6GHz in terms of clock speed. That’s within the stated capabilities of the dual-core Atom Z2520 processor. The Intel chip is made in a 32-nanometer high-k metal gate manufacturing process.

Other sources have noted that the Samsung tablet will come in multiple versions and will have an Exynos processor. That may mean that Intel has just one of the versions. Other rivals competing for the business include Nvidia’s Tegra chip.

Intel expects to make more progress in mobile over time. It is releasing chips now with the code-named Haswell microarchitecture that will improve power efficiency and graphics performance dramatically. The graphics will be twice as good as previous Atom chips, and active power will be 50 percent better.

Intel will release new information in a talk at the upcoming Computex trade show in Taiwan. That will include new designs and upcoming low-power chip microarchitectures including Silvermont (used in Bay Trail tablets for this holiday), Avoton (for micro servers) and Merrifield for smartphones.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Searching for a job is a stressful process that involves web searches, exhaustive emailing, networking, and ends with anxiously awaiting a phone call. However a study issued today found that job seekers are increasingly turning to mobile devices for every part of the quest for employment, starting with search.

The study was conducted by Glassdoor, a career and jobs community site. It has information on more than 250,000 companies, 20 million registered users, and 13 million monthly unique visitors. Glassdoor launched an iPad app last week and led an accompanying effort to explore mobile job seeker behavior.

Glassdoor found that 68 percent of job seekers are using their mobile device to search for jobs once a week or more. 3 in 5 job seekers has searched for jobs on their mobile device in the past year, and 30 percent search for jobs more than once a day from their phones. As anyone who has been unemployed (or in transition) knows, the state of uncertainty lends itself to compulsive searching, hoping that your dream job has popped up in the last hour.

60 percent of people are likely to search for jobs on their mobile device, while 54 percent are likely to read company reviews, 52 percent will research salary information when they are on-the-go, and 46 percent want job alerts pushed to them. One in four job seekers are deterred from applying to a job if the company’s career site is not mobile optimized, and 30 percent think applying for jobs on mobile devices is difficult. Phones are good for some tasks, but answering questions about why you are the best suited for a position is best done at an actual keyboard.

As we continue to rely on a smartphones for everything from social media contact to managing health care, job searching is likely to head in this direction as well. 84 percent of respondents said they believe mobile devices will be the most common way people search for jobs within the next five years. Mobile technology lends itself to situations where you want immediate, context-driven results. Part of looking for a job is typing in search parameters and receiving results, but word-of-mouth, referrals, and networking drive recruiting and hiring, at least in the tech world. If you hear about an opportunity while out-and-about, your phone is the clearest method to learn more.

Mobile devices are also useful for staying on top of a company’s news and being prepared for an interview. 64 percent of candidates said they check a company’s social media channels in the hours before an interview. 43 percent of candidates use their smartphones before an interview to read the job description and 34 percent said they visit the company’s website. Once the interview starts however, 78 percent avoid using their phones.

Glassdoor surveyed 1,100 employees and job seekers online. The company has raised $42.2 million to date and is based in Sausalito, California.

Photo Credit:antrophe/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple is widely expected to reveal a new iOS7 on June 10 at its Worldwide Developer Conference. And there are some big changes in store.

Scott Forstall and his love of user interface elements that mimic the “real world” is long gone. Jony Ive, the design genius behind the iMac, iPhone, iPad, and pretty much everything Apple in the last decade, was appointed to overhaul and comprehensively redo Apple’s most important crown jewel in October of last year.

Now, it appears, he’s close to complete.

Ive has been leading a thorough revamp of the iPhone UI in preparation for the upcoming iOS 7 release, and according to 9to5 Mac, he’s also most done. The changes are significant, described as “black, white, and flat all over.”

That’s a massive change from the original colorful, shiny, semi-transparent iOS development language, which tries hard to make virtual controls and objects look and feel and act like real controls and objects. You see that today in the drop shadows behind icons, the compass interface of Find My iPhone, and the physical button-like Apple toggle controls:

Source: John Koetsier

iPhone UI design

Forstall, the former iPhone chief who was cut from the Apple team after refusing to apologize for the Apple Maps disaster, was a big fan of skeuomorphic design: design that connects the new to the old with decorative but — some might say — unnecessary elements.

Those “some” would include Ive.

Apple’s Notes app is an example of skeuomorphic design, with faux leather at the top and the virtual remnants of virtual torn-off pages at the top. On iPhone, iBooks, Find My Friends, and Newstand are examples, with with fake bookshelves, fake stitching, fake leather, and fake shadows.

For a designer like Jony Ive, who has spent his life stripping away excess, simplifying relentlessly, there is something inherently dishonest about skeuomorphic design. It’s something of a lie … because there is no wood in your iPhone, no dead animal skin on the screen, and no paper to be torn off. And, he’s been quoted as saying that software designs built with physical metaphors do not stand the test of time.

There are design elements in the iPhone’s user interface language that are already trending away from the original color and connection to material controls.

Safari and Mail, for instance, have no parchment, no leather, no torn-off page remnants:

There are no images yet of iOS7, which will be one of Apple’s most closely-guarded secrets up to WWDC. Changes reportedly include dropping the textured, cloth-like background of Notifications Center in favor of a flat grey, and the shiny, transparent lock screen will lose its luster for a flatter, less evocative interface. You would have to think that a detail-oriented design-obsessed Ive will have comprehensively altered the appearance of almost everything in the iOS design language, but we’ll know more on June 10 when Apple reveals it.

In all this rush to get rid of skeuomorphic design, there’s one thing to remember.

Perhaps the iPhone was so transformative, so new, and so different, that skeuomorphism was a necessary first step in the evolution of its design language. And perhaps the virtual has now become so real … that now we don’t need it anymore.

photo credit: marcopako  via photopin cc

The bigger Google gets, the more often regulators are getting on its case.

The next probe into the company could from the Federal Trade Commission which is trying to figure out whether Google is leveraging its ad market dominance to push customers to its other services, as Bloomberg reports.

The criticism is a common one lobbed at Google by its critics, the most vocal of which is search engine rival Microsoft. Like much of the European Union, Microsoft isn’t crazy about Google’s ability to own, from top to bottom, peoples’ interactions with the web. While the FTC recently cleared Google of  similar charges, its counterparts in Europe are still on Google’s case.

Unlike Google’s search dominance, however, Google’s ad market share is far from locked down. The company controls roughly 18 percent of  digital display ad revenue — a slight bump over Facebook’s 15 percent, according to the latest numbers from eMarketer. That’s a far cry from a monopoly.

Still, at issue here isn’t Google’s dominance but rather the top-down integration of its many services. It’s one thing to control a market, but its something else to pursue anti-competitive tactics mean to make it impossible for any other company to challenge that control.  The FTC is trying to figure out whether that’s what Google is doing.

One thing to keep in mind is that the probe is still in its preliminary stages and might not officially happen. But don’t expect Google’s competitors to stop lobbying for regulator intervention anytime soon.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Social driving app Waze is attracting its fair share of suitors. Google is reportedly in talks to acquire the company for more than $1 billion, Bloomberg reports, following a report from a few weeks ago that Facebook was eyeing Waze.

It sounds like Waze could be setting itself up for a bidding war between the two companies, and it likely sees itself as more valuable than the $1 billion Facebook paid for photo-sharing app Instagram last year. Other suitors may also join in — Microsoft has reportedly invested in Waze, and the driving app would be a good addition to its Bing Maps.

Waze lets drivers crowdsource driving conditions and other data with its mobile apps, which often give drivers better insight into traffic conditions than other systems. The company may also choose to stay independent and raise another round of funding, Bloomberg notes. Palo Alto, Calif.-based Waze has raised $67 million so far from Kleiner Perkins, BluerRun Ventures, Magma Venture Partners, and others.

If it does come down to a Facebook vs. Google buyout, I’m rooting for Google.

Facebook has no experience with mapping yet, which means it could be some time before it fully taps into Waze’s potential. While snapping up the driving app would be a good way for Facebook to kick-start its mapping ambitions (and it would also work well to support Facebook’s recent local search focus), for Waze it could actually be a step back.

Google, on the other hand, has years of mapping experience — expertise that became clear when Apple tried its hand at maps in iOS 6 with disastrous results. Waze would fit nicely into Google Maps’ mobile turn-by-turn directions, but there’s also a huge amount of potential for the company in Google’s moonshot projects. Imagine Google’s self-driving cars autonomously reporting driving conditions, or Waze integration with Google Glass to give pedestrians the ability to contribute to Waze’s data as well.

Waze’s social elements may seem better suited to Facebook right now, but that’s an area Google is getting better in too. If Waze wants to continue down the road of becoming an essential mapping solution, Google seems like the ideal mate.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Pandora took some heat after placing a 40-hour listening cap on its power users back in February, but the move apparently helped the company. Instead of fleeing the service for competitors, users decided to subscribe in order to keep listening to more music.

The company has added over 700,000 new subscribers to its paid Pandora One service, it revealed in its fiscal year 2014 Q1 earnings report yesterday. The company now has 2.5 million paid subscribers, and the increase for the quarter is more than it added during the entire previous year. Pandora attributes the subscriber growth largely to both the listening hour cap and Android enabling in-app purchasing of Pandora One on mobile devices.

The subscription growth is interesting because it seemed like the listening cap, which was put in place to help Pandora control its content licensing costs, would send some of its users into the arms of competitors. Slacker Radio told us it saw a huge boost in new user registrations after Pandora rolled out its cap policy. But having heard outgoing CEO Joe Kennedy’s explanation on the earnings call, I can understand Pandora’s logic for the cap: The average Pandora user listens to about 20 hours of music per week and is far more valuable from an advertising revenue standpoint than the user who consumes twice that amount of music.

Regardless of the paid subscriber boost, the company said it’s still firmly committed to focusing on its free, ad-supported service.

“We don’t look at [Pandora One] purely as a subscription service but rather as a paid option for our users that’s almost like a feature addition instead of a business line,” Kennedy said during the earnings call. “We will be thinking a lot about in-app purchasing behavior, especially on Android. It’s changed the dynamic of how people look at paid listening as a preferred option.”

Pandora also reported a record number of listener hours, which hit 4.2 billion for the quarter (a 35 percent increase over the same period last year), a 55 percent year-over-year increase in revenue to $125.5 million, and a larger share of all U.S. radio listening to 7.83 percent (compared to 5.86 percent last year). Investors responded positively to the earnings, too –  pushing the stock price up nearly 9 percent to $18.68 a share in after hours trading.

Photo by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The update, according to a press release from the Redwood City, Calif.-based company, combines its three most requested features: in-app and email alarms, quick note-based to-do lists, and pinning notes to the top of your note list.

The new features are currently available for the Mac, iOS, and Evernote Web platforms. The company says that the features will be available for more platforms in the near future.

Below is a video explaining the update. Evernote faithful with qualifying platforms can also find out more information on the Evernote Blog.

Evernote’s web service launched in 2008, and since that time it has grown rapidly. It is currently ranked 723rd globally in Alexa traffic rankings.

As this publication has reported in recent months, services such as Google’s Keep and Mammoth have risen up to challenge the company’s place in the note-keeping sector. Small updates such as as this one will go far to keep existing customers happy and attract new users.

Photo credit: Evernote

LoyalBlocks

The company was founded in 2011 by Ido Gaver and Eran Kirshenboim and is headquartered in both New York City and Tel Aviv.

LoyalBlocks has two main products that complement one another. The first is their merchant-focused loyalty marketing solution, which enables brick-and-mortar businesses to build an app, set up a base station in their store, and select rewards programs to offer customers. The second product is an app targeted at mobile phone wielding consumers. The base station set up in the business automatically sends rewards to the customer as soon as they walk in the door.

The platform also provides for Facebook integration and smart punch cards that clients can access on customers’ mobile phones. As with other services, the smart punch cards are automatically “stamped” as the customer with the LoyalBlocks app installed on their phone walks into the store.

“We have taken mobile loyalty to the next level by making it easy for merchants to give their clients more, automatically. From a business perspective, it is an incremental layer of marketing that leverages their day-to-day activities. It is a simple, innovative and effortless way of generating more business and establishing long term customer loyalty,” said Ido Gaver, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, in a press release.

General Catalyst Partners led the series A investment round, with participation from Founder Collective and previous investor Gemini Israel Ventures.

The company also announced three additions to its board of directors: General Catalyst Partners managing director Adam Valkin, Gemini Israel Ventures managing partner Yossi Sela, and mySupermarket chief executive Allon Bloch.

Photo credit: LoyalBlocks

Compared to sizable companies, small to medium sized businesses (SMB) seem to be less concerned with mobile security because they feel too “unimportant” to be attacked. This, of course, is not true.

In the first half of 2012, small businesses accounted for 36 percent of all targeted cyber attacks, up from 18 percent at the end of 2011, according to Symantec data. These SMBs are becoming more frequent victims of mobile cyber attacks due to their lack of device defenses and their position as “gateways” to larger firms’ or consumer data.

And while many SMBs deem security a major priority, most aren’t taking the proper precautions. Fifty-five percent of small businesses classify security as a major mobile risk, but only 16 percent have a mobility policy in place, according to CompTIA’s Second Annual Trends in Enterprise Mobility report published in April.

Many have mobility policies that don’t cover critical security areas like personal device use, transmission and storage of data, and public Wi-Fi accessibility. Even more disconcerting: 37 percent of policies don’t include a protocol for lost devices, even though almost half of businesses identified device loss as their most common mobile security incident.

Security breaches can cost thousands or millions of dollars in damage and put a business down for months at a time, but many SMB cyber-crimes are preventable. The IT channel is full of firms that offer ways to create or strengthen preventative and disaster recovery plans for businesses of all sizes.

Whether your enterprise mobility policy and solutions are outsourced or managed internally, there are passcode and encryption strategies, software, and monitoring tools that can help prevent damaging data breaches from happening, or lessen the blow of those that do.

Here are a few tips for developing a more effective SMB mobility policy:

• Leave room to grow: For organizations writing their inaugural mobility policy, it’s OK to start small. Include even the most basic protocol for setting device passcodes and downloading third-party apps, but understand that these areas are subject to change and will evolve over time. At first, your policy might mandate all app downloads be approved by an IT manager, but if you build an internal app store in a year or two, that process will need modification.
• Security and data deserve their own treatment: When writing a mobility policy, it’s easy to use “security” as an umbrella term to include both physical device threats like jailbreaking and data vulnerabilities. Data, however, can be a beast of its own and should be treated as such in a company policy. Data spans across mobile devices, desktops, office networks, and personal networks. To keep information safe outside of a business’s walls, it demands constant monitoring (either internal or outsourced), a Data Loss Prevention platform, and end-user awareness of data safety best practices.
• Engage your business leaders (not just IT): At smaller firms especially, where IT staff may be limited, it is important to get mobility policy buy-in and guidance from the management team. Understanding that mobile security is a strategic business issue, not just a technology problem, builds the right foundation for a more sound, comprehensive policy.
• Designate control: One of the biggest decisions for SMBs is whether or not to outsource the mobile management process. Regardless of who holds the keys to device and data maintenance, make sure that they have access to all necessary information and the ability to make updates or quick fixes without disturbing staff productivity. If the proposed security measures can’t coexist seamlessly with your day-to-day operations, then your strategy may need tweaking.

As mobile technology continues to evolve, SMBs must be proactive in implementing cohesive processes to combat imminent threats. Prioritizing security and letting go of the misconception that SMBs are immune takes time and effort, but it can help keep an organization from a world of unwelcome chaos.

Todd Thibodeaux is the president and chief executive officer of CompTIA, the leading trade association representing the business interests of the global information technology (IT) industry. He is responsible for leading strategy, development and growth efforts for the association.

Mobile security image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

App recommendation engines are getting booted from Apple’s app store because they suck, according to a new player in the app-finding business. But Hooked Media has come up with an entirely new take on app recommendation that has two unique qualities.

One, it doesn’t suck. And two, it can’t be rejected by Apple.

“Obviously, app discovery is a problem on iOS and Android,” Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal told me, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of apps on both platforms. “The key problem from Apple’s perspective was that no one was solving the problem … they were just looking at opportunities to make money.”

That’s why Hooked Media chose to avoid simply relying on manual curation or social discovery, which is what most app recommendation engines use. Instead, Uppal says, Hooked Media generates app recommendations for its users based on 46 independent factors, including time of day, day of the week, what apps you’ve installed, which you’re deleting, the sequence in which you use them, your demographic factors, and yes, some social factors as well.

The result?

A 30 percent uptick in installs based on Hooked Media recommendations — and 33 percent more play time on games downloaded in response to a recommendation.

And most of that is without the typical app-recommendation app that shows you the free games, highlighted apps, and deals of the day. Because instead of just being an app, Hooked Media provides an in-app app recommendation service that helps mobile developers monetize and get distribution.

In other words, a large part of Hooked Media’s app recommendations happen in other apps: In that moment when you’ve just finished a level or played a game, the app flashes up suggestions of other apps to download. These aren’t just paid ads, they’re personalized recommendations.

“We’ve built a partnership on both platforms,” Uppal says. “We’re helping companies that are already doing this do it better, smarter, and more personal … and increasing conversion rates over 20 percent.”

In other words, because the app suggestions are more targeted, users who see them are more likely to download and use them — and app developers are more likely to be able to monetize their app via other developers’ marketing incentives.

“The minute you add that predictive rating for users, it totally transforms it from being an ad unit to something that’s personal to me, which totally changes that experience,” said Uppal.

It also changes the definition of an app recommendation engine from an app to a cross-platform service that developers can embed in their own apps via an API. That makes it virtually impossible for Apple to take action against Hooked Media, because it’s in thousands of apps — not just an easily isolated one.

Hooked Media, which has been making online game recommendation engines for years, spent a dedicated two and a half years building the technology behind the recommendations for mobile apps. That’s partly due to the many, many factors in Hooked’s complex algorithm, and partly due to the need to provide customized recommendations based on huge numbers of criteria in literally milliseconds.

The service won 25 million users in beta on Android, and an app recommendation app that it built — partially as a proof of concept — was promoted by Google twice. That’s a far cry from Apple, which has been busy kicking app suggestion apps out of the store.

Source: Hooked Media

Personalized app recommendations

And while there’s good opportunity on iOS, which Hooked Media is happy to serve via its API, Android is where there’s a “bigger opportunity,” according to Uppal.

That’s not really due to the fact that Android has more users and now has or shortly will have more apps. Rather, it’s due to the fact that the “app store” functionality is fractured on Android, with more than 200 Android app stores in existence, according to Hooked Media.

“The app discovery problem becomes even more challenging on Android — users don’t even know where to go,” Uppal said. “In the U.S., Google Play is definitely dominant, but outside the U.S., Google Play is very small.”

In Korea, Uppal told me, Google Play is only used by a fraction of Android smartphone owners. (That seems a little extreme, given the fact that Korea ranks number two in the country list for downloads on Google Play.) And, she pointed out, Verizon is soon coming out with its own store. Hooked Media, however, will seamlessly find the right app store to download the right app, dynamically.

The core point?

Hooked Media has built a platform, app store, and app agnostic app recommendation engine. It’s one that can’t be banned by Apple. And it’s one that benefits developers who are seeking monetization as well as those who are seeking distribution.

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

Loyal3 makes buying stock more social and accessible for people who don’t have much experience with the stock market. In three steps, you can invest as little as $10 in well-known companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, Disney, Google, Coca Cola, Walmart etc…

Loyal3′s core philosophy is “own what you love.” Buying stocks can seem daunting for people without financial expertise. Loyal3 wants to make this process more user-friendly by providing fee-free investing and enabling the purchase of stock through a brands’ Facebook page. Loyal3 is a registered broker-dealer and offers stock in publicly traded companies, stock in Initial public Offerings (IPOs) and stock in follow-on offerings.

Consumer engagement is a major buzz word in the brand world right now as companies try to deepen their bonds with consumers and build loyalty. Loyal3 serves companies that want excited shareholders, as well as consumers who want to feel a strong connection to the brands they use everyday.

DNS-L3, LLC, an entity owned by Michael and Gigi Pritzker Pucker, led this round, along with existing investors Cris Kelly (former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook) and Barry Schneider, Loyal3′s CEO. This is the company’s third round of financing. Loyal3 is based in San Francisco.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

VentureBeat excited to announce the opening of applications for the MobileBeat 2013 Innovation Showdown, one of the highlights of our 6th annual event on the the future of mobile.

Mobile startups: This is your chance to showcase your company, product, or solution to 700 mobile executives, leaders, IT decision makers, venture capitalists, and press.

We’re inviting 10 finalists to present their innovative mobile app or product live at the event. Our expert team of judges will provide feedback, recap the highlights, and determine the winners.

This year’s focus is on how your company embodies, enables, or amplifies a killer “Mobile Experience.” We’re selecting the 10 finalists based on these criteria:

1) Early stage companies (late seed stage to Series A):
We’ll select five companies that have received a range of $500,000 to $3 million in seed or early Series A funding. If you are a startup or a company that has received less than $3 million in funding, you may apply. We will provide you with a mandatory “bootcamp” pitch mentoring process where experts will help you to hone your pitch. We will also accept applications where companies have minimally viable product that is in a pilot or a beta but have not launched on a large scale yet.

2) Midstage Companies (Series A to Series B funding):
The other five companies must have at least Series A or B funding (have received more than $3 million in funding, including your first or second venture round). You have a product on the market with a defined customer base and paying customers or pilots. You have a defined sales cycle and pipeline. You are looking to expand your executive, tech, or sales team and need to do another raise for expansion.

We’ll be announcing prizes in the coming weeks. Click here for full application guidelines and form.

Make sure to register for MobileBeat 2013 soon. Early-bird pricing ends Tuesday, June 28 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.

Thanks the following industry leaders for supporting MobileBeat 2013: CloudOn as Platinum Sponsor; New Relic & Tapjoy as Gold Sponsors, Fjord, Flurry, Kontagent, LifeStreet Media, & MoPub as Silver Sponsors; and Helpshift, IDrive, & Urban Airship as Event Sponsors.

SimpleRelevance’s platform gathers customer data and then personalized emails to specifically target individuals. The technology looks at information like past purchase behavior and combines it with geographic, social, and demographic’ data to send highly targeted emails. The goal is to make emails ‘smarter’ so the right message is automatically delivered at the right time, with custom subject line, content, and delivery times.

The company claims that this degree of customization can increase conversion rates by 51 percent, increase open rates by 21 percent, and increase click rates by 29 percent. It also said that companies integrating the technology into their marketing have seen revenue increases ranging from 40 to 400 percent, as well as better customer engagement.

“The “big data” revolution has exploded over the past decade,” said founder Erik Severinghaus in an email. “Companies now have access to massive amounts of data from multiple, disconnected platforms such as social media, web traffic, and internal sales systems. However, few companies know how to combine this data and make it actionable, especially from an email marketing perspective. Email marketing is one of the easiest and  cost effective forms of marketing, however it is still significantly behind from a technology perspective.”

The technology uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to get evaluate users and make predictions. It gets smarter over time and can be tuned for different types of interactions and objects. The solutions are comparable to those provided by Sailthru, another digital marketing company that raised $19 million in February for its Smart Data platform that personalizes communications through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

SimpleRelevance is a newer, smaller company that will participate in TechStar’s Chicago’s inaugural 2013 class. Hydpe Park Angels and Hyde Park Venture Partners led this round with participation from i2A Fund and additional angels. The funding will be used for recruiting and hiring, and to expand its enterprise-level solutions.

Apple is officially holding its developer conference keynote on June 10 this year. The event, otherwise called WWDC, is one of Apple’s biggest where it traditionally announced a number of new products and software updates.

VentureBeat received its invitation today for WWDC, which will run from June 10 through June 14.

In late April, tickets for WWDC sold out within two minutes of going on sale. The tickets cost $1,600, but with iOS and Mac operating system updates on the horizon, developers are rightfully scrambling for the access. Apple revealed earlier on that it would be talking about both iOS and OS X at WWDC, but other announcements are unknown. However, during Apple’s latest earnings report, Tim Cook hinted that we likely won’t see any new hardware announcements until after the summer.

“We’ve accomplished a tremendous amount,” he said during the call. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services we can’t wait to introduce this fall and throughout 2014.”

Last year Apple announced iOS 6, the latest version of its mobile operating system, as well as details for its Mountain Lion Mac operating system. Apple also updated its Game Center, introduced its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, and added more guts to its MacBook Air line.

WWDC photo via Apple; hat tip All Things D

Folders is an application developed in France by Martin Destagnol. It provides (in true French form) “the most elegant client for your cloud storage.” Using its “amazingly polished user interface,” people can manage multiple accounts like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive; copy, move, delete, or transfer files; sort, search, and share files; and view them clearly on your smartphone.

In a blog post about the news, Box’s VP of Engineering Sam Schillace said the acquisition is all part of Box’s mission to make enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” and make Box’s applications as user-friendly as possible.

“I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design,” he said. “They have to be “consumer-grade” in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users.”

Earlier this month Box announced the acquisition of Crocdoc, a YC alum that turns documents into interactive, entertaining experiences. Both Folders and Crocdoc are part of Box’s effort to make enterprise products more engaging, well-designed, and fun to use. Folders will be integrated into the next version of Box’s iOS application.

Photo Credit: Flickr user/benoit_D

In other words, the giant that sold almost 400 million phones last year is getting bigger. And faster.

There’s a reason Samsung gobbles up 95 percent of the profits in the Android device market. It knows how to produce, market, distribute, and sell phones and tablets in massive numbers.

And, it doesn’t rest on its laurels.

The company also announced today that it would soon be introducing more color variations. The S4 is currently only available in black or white, or, as Samsung likes to say, Black Forest and White Mist. New color options coming this summer include Blue Arctic, Red Aurora, Purple Mirage, and Brown Autumn.

Meanwhile, five and a half months after the introduction of the iPhone 5, Apple is still not offering varying color options, although this are rumored to be in the product pipeline, probably for a fall release.

One caveat on the numbers: Samsung typically counts shipped units as sold units. And the company very carefully worded its announcement as “global channel sales,” which should likely be construed as units that are sold and delivered to its channel sales partners. So it’s possible that in terms of actual units in the hands of customers, Samsung has not yet hit the 10 million mark.

But there’s no doubt that the device is successful and will sell a boatload of units.

I still maintain, however, that the extra software, add-ons, and flashy-but-buggy gewgaws Samsung has added to the device will spell the beginning of the end of Samsung’s smartphone dominance. And would suggest people interesting in buying one wait for the Nexus version, which is basically an Galaxy S4 stripped of all Samsung’s software, and featuring a pure Google Android experience.

Image credit: Samsung

Eric Hirshberg, the head of Activision Publishing, is sitting pretty with a Call of Duty franchise that generates $1 billion every year and has a loyal audience of 40 million. Yet he plans to take a big risk with a big bet. The company skipped the expected plan of making Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 and decided to create a brand new version of the game dubbed Call of Duty: Ghosts. That game will debut on a number of platforms, including Microsoft’s just-announced Xbox One. The title, which will be out on Nov. 5, will feature exclusive downloadable content from Microsoft.

That’s a big commitment by Activision, and that’s why Hirshberg took the stage in the final minutes of Microsoft’s announcement of the Xbox One on Tuesday. He showed off a new game that will push graphics to the limit and feature other innovations, such as voice commands.

We caught up with him after the announcement. Here’s an edited transcript of our interview with Hirshberg.

GamesBeat: How are you taking advantage of these things in the Xbox One with Call of Duty: Ghosts?

Eric Hirshberg: We showed a lot of things I think are differentiating and exciting to us about what both our new engine and the next-generation hardware enable us to do. I hope you agree that the visuals are a step change in terms of realism and immersion and subtlety. It’s important for a game like ours, where every pixel matters and we’ve always run at 60 frames per second. Making that environment as immersive and detailed as possible will make the game better.

Also, one of the biggest things is the ability to connect emotionally with the characters. The more human and natural they feel, the more we can build real connections with the characters through the narrative. That’s why we’re focusing so much on story. That’s why we’re working with someone like Steven Gaghan. That’s why we’re focusing on a single squad for the entire campaign. Traditionally, Call of Duty has jumped around, and your identity changes from level to level. Sometimes that even happens multiple times per level. This commitment to going through the adventure and the journey with one band of brothers is going to be a nice shift for the franchise.

GamesBeat: That does look like an interesting convergence, where you need to hire the best writers to match up with what you can do visually.

Hirshberg: Exactly. They’re very related. And that’s not new. We worked with David Goyer on Black Ops. Having top talent involved with the story is not new. I will say, though, that we’ve gotten even more integrated between the creation of the story and characters and the creation of the game events than ever before.

GamesBeat: I came from the panel where they did the Kinect demo. They can apparently measure your heartbeat now by watching your face move. The controller gives you this heartbeat-like feedback as well. You can imagine that in a Call of Duty game, where that feedback makes the game more intense. Everything that you talked about on stage was on the visual side, but are you also excited about those features as well, like what a better Kinect can deliver?

Hirshberg: I made a passing comment that you’re going to see voice integration, voice commands via Kinect, which is something that we haven’t done in the past with Call of Duty. We think the improvements to Kinect really excite us because of the level of responsiveness and detail. I thought that the demo they did with the voice commands on television, the instant changing between games and music, was really compelling. You’ll see more of this coming from us as we get closer to the launch.

Obviously, we didn’t reveal that element today. We just mentioned it. But we’ve always made sure that we don’t just use new technology for novelty’s sake. We always make sure that it makes the gameplay better. In this case, we think it will.

GamesBeat: When you buy into some of these things, what do you think about, given that you have choices? You have Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft here. If you’re buying into Microsoft’s platform, why do you choose that?

Hirshberg: I think that’s probably a better question for Microsoft. Obviously, we want all these platforms to be successful. We’re proud to be here to help reveal the new Xbox, and we want to provide some great content for the players.

They all have to be great game machines first. I think that’s the tip of the sword. Everyone’s trying to own the living room and own the entire entertainment experience, but it’s a game machine first and foremost. We’ve been pleased with Xbox’s approach.

GamesBeat: There is more entertainment stuff that’s going to happen, though, on this box in the future. Is that a good thing for everybody?

Hirshberg: I think it is. The only way it isn’t is if somehow that makes it a less potent gaming machine, but in this case, what we’re seeing in the next generation of hardware is giving us tremendous new tools to play with.

That said, I don’t think competition for different forms of entertainment in the living room is anything new. People can watch TV in their living rooms now. People can listen to music in their living rooms now. There’s a false divide that gets created in people’s minds sometimes, as though hardcore gamers don’t also consume other forms of entertainment and wouldn’t appreciate those things being made more seamless and more integrated into a more elegant experience. I think that’s all that you’re seeing here. To me, as a gamer, I’m excited by it.

GamesBeat: One thing that seems difficult for these guys to walk the line on is these consumer-rights issues that are popping up, about [digital rights management] and the constant connection and used games and so on. It seems like a sharper conversation to me than it’s been in the past.

Hirshberg: There’s certainly a lot of passions around it all. I think that it’s on the first parties to make sure that the benefits are compelling enough to attract people to that feature. But again, this is probably a better question to ask Microsoft. I know they’re considering that element carefully. I don’t want to just weigh in with my opinions. This is one of the things they’ve got to get just right with their launch. I think that a great experience is the way to the promised land.

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Following the lead of other recent tech-focused IPOs, e-commerce software business ChannelAdvisor‘s shares popped almost 40 percent in its first day of trading as a public company.

ChannelAdvisor, based in Morrisville, N.C., was founded in 2001 and offers a cloud-based e-commerce platform that helps retailers easily list items on Amazon, Google, eBay, Bing, Groupon, and more and keep their data unified and up to date. The company had more than 1,900 customers worldwide at the end of 2012. And in 2012 alone its customers processed more than $3.5 billion in gross merchandise value through the platform.

The company filed for its IPO back in April. Its initial public offering of 5.8 million shares was priced last night at $14 a share, the high end of its pricing range. As of this writing, shares are hovering at about $19.50, a 39 percent bump over the IPO price.

“Twelve years ago, my co-founder Aris [Buinevicius] and I started ChannelAdvisor with the mission to help retailers grow and optimize their e-commerce channels,” CEO Scot Wingo said in a statement. “And while we knew e-commerce had potential way back in 2001, we had no idea how big e-commerce — and our mission — would become.”

ChannelAdvisor is now listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “ECOM.” Prior to today, ChannelAdvisor raised $75 million in venture capital funding from investors including New Enterprise Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures, Kodiak Venture Partners, and eBay.

Check out the video below for more on the company.