Multi-platform messaging service Imo.im has raised $13 million in second-round funding and updated its iOS and Android apps with a new feature called “Broadcasts.”

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Imo.im offers web, iPhone, iPad, and Android apps for communicating with friends and family. The new Broadcasts feature inside iOS and Android creates a channel where Imo.im users can meet new people who have similar interests and discuss those interests. Connections to new people are auto-generated based on your interests, location, and friends. Users can also share photos directly to the Broadcasts feed.

“Social discovery is an important feature,” Imo.im CEO Ralph Harik said in a statement. “We want users to find relevant and useful information, people, news, and other content that will make their lives better. imo broadcasts is a platform to achieve that.”

Imo.im claims that its apps have been downloaded more than 7 million times and that its 750,000 unique daily visitors send 50 million messages per day.

While those numbers might sound good, the messaging landscape is incredibly competitive now. Hot messaging service MessageMe just announced that it hit 5 million registered users just 75 days after launching. And then there’s WhatsApp, the hugely popular service that claims to be processing more than 20 billion messages per day.

The new funding was led by Imo.im co-founder Georges Harik, who is also known for being one of Google’s first 10 employees.

Photo via Imo.im

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

While messaging app MessageMe just raised $10 million in funding, that announcement was missing key info about the app’s growth. Now the company has come forth with some impressive stats, including that the service now has 5 million registered users just 75 days after launch.

Competing with popular apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, MessageMe offers iOS and Android applications that let you share rich messages and content with family and friends. On top of standard text, you can also send images, YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, and more. Ten days after launch, MessageMe users were uploading two images per second. Today, they are uploading eight images per second. More than 1,500 notifications are sent to MessageMe users each second.

“At MessageMe, our ambition lies in the goal to change the way people communicate around the world, and the mediums through which they connect,” the company said in a blog post today. “From a text message, to a song clip, to those personal moments with your best friends, we’ve built a product which is now used by more than five million people to communicate one day to the next.”

MessageMe only launched its apps in early March but already has attracted $11.9 million in funding. Investors include big names like Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, True Ventures, and SVAngel.

Next up, the company says it has “groundbreaking additions in the pipeline.” We’ll see if it can deliver on that promise.

Photo via MessageMe

BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM to Android and iOS was, in many senses, inevitable.

The world of mobile messaging apps has changed since BlackBerry introduced BBM in 2006. While the service still has a whole bunch of users (60 million of them, by BlackBerry’s latest count), those numbers are small compared to those of, say, WhatsApp, which claims it has 200 million active users, and China’s WeChat, which claims 190 million. There’s also Kik, which recently hit 50 million users.

Those numbers should speak for themselves: The smartphone world is moving away from BBM. But don’t tell that to BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins, who’s arguing that the opposite is true.

“Why are we doing this now? It’s a statement of confidence. The BlackBerry 10 platform is so strong and support has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become and independent messaging solution,” Heins said, possibly out of sorts with reality.

Source: giaomeng/Flickr

Services like WhatsApp are rapidly eroding BlackBerry’s command over the mobile messaging market.

BlackBerry’s strategy here is clear: Rather than cede the messaging app world to the likes of WhatsApp, the company is piggybacking off the marketshare success of iOS and Android, which have many more users than BlackBerry could ever hope to attract with BlackBerry 10 alone.

In fact, BlackBerry’s move isn’t very different from its decision to allow developers to port Android apps to its own smartphone platform. As an underdog, BlackBerry doesn’t have much to lose from taking these sorts of bold moves — even if they betray some of company’s current weaknesses.

Unlike the Android move, however, BlackBerry’s decision to bring BBM cross-platform comes with its own set of risks. Despite BlackBerry’s shrinking smartphone influence, BBM remains one of the central, most enticing things about owning a BlackBerry, and it’s possible that BlackBerry could cannibalize its BB10 ambitions while trying to increase its BBM user numbers.

Still, considering how successful BBM has been over the years, maybe we should give BlackBerry the benefit of the doubt. This, could after all, turn out to be one the savviest things the company ever done: While the initial set of Android and iOS BBM functionality will be limited to chat, BlackBerry also plans to adds features like screen sharing and video chat as time goes on.

Those are the sort of things that could give BlackBerry the edge over its newer competitors. While WhatsApp and company are attracting the users, it’s BlackBerry that has the experience. The question is whether experience alone will be enough.

Bringing BBM is both smart and inevitable – but it may also be happening a few years too late.

MessageMe has been busy since its launch a week and a half ago. The messaging application has been cut off from Facebook’s Open Graph, raised $1.9 million in seed funding, and attracted more than 1 million users.

MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages over Wi-Fi and mobile data to friends, family, or groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes songs, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging.

MessageMe had been tapping into Facebook’s Open Graph to help users find their friends on the service. But similar to what happened with Voxer, Facebook blocked MessageMe’s access to Open Graph data over concerns the app was too similar to the functions of the Facebook Messenger app.

Still, people are clearly digging MessageMe — the service said it is sending 500 notifications per second worldwide; and in the U.S. alone, more than 10 million doodles and more than 4 million iTunes songs have been shared.

“We launched MessageMe a little over a week ago on the App Store, and we’re excited about the feedback we’ve received so far — many people have made MessageMe their primary messaging platform, and that’s awesome,” the company said in a blog post today. “We spent the last year building MessageMe with the goal to deliver a fun, rich, and engaging experience by adding expression to messaging. We believe a core communication service like messaging can, and should, do more to keep up with the technological advances in the smartphone market.”

The new seed funding came from a collection of top-tier investors, including Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, True Ventures, First Round Capital, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, and Social+Capital Partnership.

Top photo via MessageMe

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Self-destructing messages app Snapchat has ditched its beta tag on Android and is now available in the Google Play store.

Snapchat has caused quite a stir in the past few months, coming seemingly out of nowhere to raising $13.5 million in funding earlier this month. Many folks have accused the app of being primarily used for “sexting,” but the app is also used for joking around or sending fun photos and videos to friends and family.

The app was only available for iOS to start, but now it has finally brought the app to Android. It works with phones running Android 2.2 and up. Front-facing camera support only works for Android 2.3 and above.

Like the iOS app, it allows you to send photos and videos that can only be viewed for a few seconds. You can take a screenshot of what was sent to you but Snapchat says it will let the other party know if a screenshot was taken.

Los Angeles-based Snapchat is now valued at $60 to $70 million. It reportedly sends more than 60 million messages a day and has millions of users.

Surprised man looking at phone via Shutterstock

Think of all the messages you text each day. Many of them have probably been forwarded to other people and archived in places you don’t even know. Well, self-destructing messaging app Wickr, has released new features today that it promises will protect you from that uncertainty.

Wickr is a messaging app that lets you send photos and texts that self destruct after a specified period of time. This week, the company announced it is also letting you send Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive files that will self-destruct at your command. It has also released new options that help you find contacts on the app and stay logged in for specified periods of time.

The difference between Wickr and other self-destructing apps such as SnapChat is that security, not content, is the main focus of the app. When the founders first started building Wickr, they were upset by the many liberties digital companies take with your data today. Specifically, Wickr calls out Google, Apple, and Facebook.

“I haven’t given my contact info to any app, but I bet there are hundreds of apps out there that have my contact information,” said Wickr cofounder Nico Sell in an interview with VentureBeat.

The founders hope that people will one day use Wickr in place of these companies’ messaging apps and text messaging.

When you send a message via Wickr, the company’s servers never actually see any of your information like your account details or your messages, but instead only see a series of numbers. And messages aren’t saved on the company’s servers. Once they have been delivered to your cell phone, they are immediately deleted from Wickr’s databases and are then further “destructed” from your phone.

But in order to make Wickr more appealing to a large number of users, the team has had to unlock the very restricted nature of Wickr. Originally, you were completely anonymous save for your username on the app. In order to message someone, you had to know their username.

“When we first built the product, we built it to be anonymous. … Then what we realized is that the majority of our customers don’t really care about being anonymous,” said Sell. “We didn’t want to do it in a way that we were collecting personal information.”

Sell called out WhatsApp for its privacy problems yesterday. The app is being accused by Dutch and Canadian privacy organizations of violating privacy laws when it comes to how the app saves contact lists.

You also had to log into the app every single time you wanted to send or read a message. In order to combat this, Wickr is opening up the app so you can decide if you want to be logged in for long periods of time. They caution, however, that this will lessen the security of your app.

I asked Sell whether she was concerned that opening the app in such a way would lead people to say Wickr is insecure. That is, someone could have a message leaked if they leave their Wickr app logged in and a friend reads the message. Then, because they took the risk, they might be angry with Wickr for ever opening the option for this kind of insecure behavior.

For Sell, the benefits of making a security app like Wickr accessible outweigh human error.

“I think we’ve been really careful about this and really tested and thought about using added usability features. We actually give you a pop up warning too and explain to you again that this is going to decrease your security,” said Sell. “There are so many other bars there of protection as well, this usability really allows people to use Wickr instead of text … and that’s going to increase security dramatically.”

Top secret document image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Updated 2pm Pacific: Whatsapp denied the rumors. We’ve updated this post to include its denial.

Whatsapp is refuting rumors that it’s in negotiations for a Facebook buyout. In a statement sent to VentureBeat, the company’s business head Neeraj Arora said, “The TechCrunch article is a rumor and not factually accurate. We have no further information to share at the moment.”

That’s in response to rumors earlier today that Facebook is in negotiations to acquire Whatsapp, a cross-platform messaging service that currently ranks as the No. 2 paid iOS app. The rumors first appeared on TechCrunch.

Multiple sources have told AllThingsD that an acquisition isn’t happening, even though both Google and Facebook have been interested in Whatsapp in the past.

Unlike most social apps, Whatsapp costs 99 cents on iOS — even though it’s free on other platforms like Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. The company announced a year ago that it’s serving 1 billion messages a day, a figure that’s likely significantly higher today.

It’s extremely popular in Europe and Asia as a free alternative to SMS messaging.

There’s no word on how much Facebook might have been willing to spend on Whatsapp, or how far along negotiations got between the two companies, if at all. When reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on rumors or speculation, naturally.

The rumors weren’t totally ludicrous. Facebook purchased the group messaging app Beluga last year, which it transformed into Facebook’s standalone Messenger app. But, just like with the $1 billion Instagram purchase, Facebook might have been eyeing Whatsapp more for its massive user base instead of its technology. TechCrunch notes that Whatsapp may have more than 100 million daily active users (probably because it supports feature-phone platforms like Symbian and Nokia S40).

Photo: Johan Larson/Flickr