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

Readers, I think we need to talk. Communication is really important, and I’m just feeling like I need more ways to connect with you.

Good thing investors dumped millions into communications-based companies today. We saw $10 million go to a texting app that competes with companies such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Texting over anything but data is so passé anyway.

On the flip side of communication, Skyword got $6.7 million to communicate your brand through stories. PR through content is wildly popular now-a-days, but do people actually trust what they’re reading?

For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published.

Check out more about these companies below:

MessageMe nabs $10M from Greylock, Google, & others to take on WhatsApp

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today. MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it had one million users. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Skyword takes off with $6.7M for content marketing

Consumers these days expect their favorite brands to tell a story, and Skyword helps them tell it. Skyword has announced closing $6.7 million in growth financing for its content marketing solutions. This Boston-based startup provides agencies, brands, media, and retail customers with a platform to publish content and tools to distribute it effectively. It has a database of more than 20,000 professional writers that publishers can use to recruit and manage freelancers and keep track of workflow. Read the full story on VentureBeat.

Doc talking via Shutterstock

Better watch out, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hot messaging app MessageMe has just raised $10 million in its first round of funding, the company confirmed today.

MessageMe offers iOS and Android apps that send rich messages to friends, family, and groups. The app also lets you share YouTube videos, iTunes tracks, voice recordings, emoticons, and other things you might not share over traditional text messaging. MessageMe has risen quickly in status; it only just raised seed funding about a month ago. At that time, the service said it has 1 million users.

It will take more momentum on MessageMe’s part to displace WhatsApp’s traction. WhatsApp CEO Jan Koum recently told the world his app is “bigger than Twitter” and is now processing 8 billion inbound messages a day and over 12 billion outbound messages a day.

MessageMe’s new funding first leaked out through an SEC filing. The round was led by Greylock Partners’ John Lilly, with participation by Google Ventures, True Ventures, First Round Capital, SVAngel, Resolut.vc, and Social+Capital Partnership. Every firm that participated in MessageMe’s $1.9 million seed round participated in this round except for Andreessen Horowitz.

Top image via MessageMe

Hangouts, the free multiperson video chat and messaging service inside Google+, has been broken out into its own standalone applications for iOS, Android, and Chrome.

“Technology can just go away and people can focus on what makes them happiest, just hanging out.” Google SVP Vic Gundotra said today at Google I/O.

The new Hangouts service unifies all communication across Google’s platforms. It’s replacing all prior apps like Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and Hangout video chats with Hangouts. This new app handles texts, shares photos, video chats, and more.

No matter which app you use to access Hangouts, you’ll have access to a list of conversations that it backs up in the cloud. You’ll be able to message people even if they aren’t online.

Importantly, Hangouts will challenge WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and other popular messaging services that are supplanting traditional text messaging.

The Hangout apps for iOS, Android, and Chrome will be available today.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK CITY — Users of hot self-destructing messages startup Snapchat are now sending more than 150 million images every day, CEO Evan Spiegel said today at the Dive into Mobile conference.

After raising $13.5 million in early February, Snapchat launched the Android version of its messaging app, which has taken off crazily on iOS.

The 150-million-images number is huge, especially when you consider that mega-popular photo-sharing service Instagram is processing just 40 million images a day. But what sort of images are being shared?

Spiegel was questioned about the app’s reputation as a service for “sexting” and sending lurid images, but he insisted that this wasn’t the primary use case for his app.

“With 150 million images a day, it’s possible some of them are like that,” Spiegel said. “11 p.m. is when traffic starts slowing down. Some people are surprised and say ‘I thought that’s when things would just be getting started!’ … I don’t think it’s a great tool for sexting. We notify you about screenshots. It’s not a great way to send inappropriate content.”

Spiegel also revealed that he doesn’t regularly use social media outside of Snapchat. He had a Facebook account in college, but he doesn’t have one now. He said he sent his first tweet “a few days ago.”

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The popular mobile messaging company Kik isn’t sweating Facebook Home.

Kik announced today that it has reached a new milestone of 50 million registered users, up from 30 million in November, with more than 200,000 people joining every day.

The big draw? Simple HTML5 apps, called Cards, which Kik added to its iPhone and Android apps last November. Since you don’t have to leave Kik’s app to use the Cards, they’re a sly way for the company to keep its app in front of your face for extended periods.

“This is where you see why we went with Cards. It’s an integrated web app experience, rather than a native platform, because it gives us full control,” said Ted Livingston, Kik’s founder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat. “With Cards, the goal is to have more and more of your apps inside of Kik.”

The company can also update Cards without waiting for app store approval as well as easily deploy new Cards across its apps on multiple platforms, since they’re built in HTML5. Kik says that its users have installed more than 25 million Cards so far.

Kik initially launched with apps for viewing YouTube videos, searching for photos, and sketching together with your friends, but now it has a Card for viewing Reddit as well as a game called Squared that’s become surprisingly popular. Squared, which was written in a single weekend by a Kik employee for fun, saw over 1 million downloads in four weeks, and it has racked up the equivalent of more than 60 years of gameplay so far.

Kik’s approach with its in-app platform is sort of like an inverted version of what Facebook is trying to do with Home, an Android application that lets Facebook take over your phone’s interface.

Kik’s big advantage is that it can actually deploy its platform to the iPhone — while there’s pretty much no chance in hell Apple will allow something like Facebook Home on the iPhone. That cross-platform compatibility was far more important to the company than completely taking over someone’s phone, Livingston told me.

He found at least one thing to like about Facebook Home. “Chatheads is definitely interesting — awful name, but pretty compelling experience,” Livingston said.

With new versions of Kik’s apps launching today, the company has added its own HTML5-powered in-app push notifications, which lets you preview messages and updates to your Cards, without navigating away from your current screen. The company notes that it’s one of the first to pull off push notifications with HTML5 (one of the biggest problems with pure HTML5 development, which competitor Chorus.im is also dealing with).

Kik’s biggest cross-platform competitor is Whatsapp, which just recently squashed a rumor about a $1 billion Google acquisition. Livingston noted that “it would be fantastic for us” if Google bought Whatsapp, because there’s a good chance the search giant would just shut down the app and try to assimilate its users and technology.

He also doesn’t worry too much about Whatsapp as a competitor (which is said to have more than 100 million users):

They’re much bigger today, but they have much weaker network effects. They’re not a product company … half their users are on crappy feature phones. They’re waking up to this idea that it was all about the messenger, but now it’s about the platform around the messenger. … They’re in no position to compete at the platform level.

Based in Waterloo, Ontario, Kik raised $8 million last year from RRE Ventures, Spark Capital, and Union Square Ventures.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

You can write off the latest rumor about a potential suitor for the popular messaging app WhatsApp.

The company’s business development head, Neeraj Arora, confirmed to AllThingsD last night that WhatsApp isn’t in sales talks with Google. A report from Sunday claimed that Google was willing to pay $1 billion for WhatsApp, but that was based on statements from a single anonymous source.

Arora’s statements don’t rule out an eventual deal with Google — especially if Facebook starts negotiating an acquisition of WhatsApp, something that’s been rumored in the past. There’s no doubt that WhatsApp is one of the hottest apps right now, given that it’s the fifth highest revenue earner on the iTunes App Store and seventh on Google Play.

Facebook is still being threatened by messaging apps, so it makes sense for it to acquire WhatsApp or one of its competitors (like Kik or SnapChat). The social network already acquired messaging app Beluga a few years ago, but it looks like that deal was mostly for engineers to build out Facebook’s own messaging platform. I wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook is eyeing WhatsApp as well just to snap up its users (said to be over 100 million) and fast growth.

After all, Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram before it even had a revenue model. On paper, at least, WhatsApp seems far more valuable.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

WhatsApp is fifth in the app store for monthly revenue. Fifth on Google Play for downloads, and seventh on Google Play for revenue. And it’s the second-most-downloaded app on Google Play.

Impressive? Sure. But a billion dollars impressive? Hard to say.

That’s the question as rumors continue to swirl of a potential Google acquisition in the billion-dollar range. According to Digital Trends, the acquisition talk has been ongoing for a month, and WhatsApp execs want more. Perhaps, I’m thinking they should recall what happened last time Google offered a company billions of dollars.

Groupon, anyone?

WhatsApp is a cross-platform mobile messaging app: It sends messages to anyone on iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, or Windows Phone via an iMessage-like network. The messages use your data plan, not text, and require that both sender and receiver have WhatsApp, which, of course, makes the service inherently viral. Perhaps 300 million WhatsApp users send hundreds of billions of messages daily.

Industry insiders I’ve spoken to don’t put a ton of credence in the acquisition rumors. My question is: WhatsApp is hot — there’s no doubt about it — but is being one of the top revenue-producing apps on the app store or Google Play worth a billion dollars?

Google already has many messaging apps and services currently, such as Talk, Messenger, and Hangouts. Too many, in fact, which don’t integrate or connect. Based on some leaks and screenshots, Google appears to be working on a unification of its communications platforms, called Babel. Adding yet another SMS-style communications app to its stable wouldn’t appear to simplify the situation.

In addition, Google has shown an impressive capability to create great apps and distribute to enormous audiences.

In February, ComScore’s Digital Future report said that Google has five of the top six apps in America on any platform. Maps, Google Play, Google Search, Gmail, and YouTube took positions two through six on a combined Google Play/iOS app store downloads list. And Google’s YouTube and Google Maps have been swapping top spot on the iOS-only download charts for months.

Which means that when and if Google decides to create and release a unified messaging platform for both iOS, Android, web, and Windows Phone, it could very well do so on its own and become very successful.

The thing that WhatsApp does have going for it, of course, is those hundreds of millions of users. That’s what Arjun Sethi, the founder of WhatsApp competitor MessageMe told VentureBeat today:

“At the end of the day, they’re valuable because they have a massive userbase.”

Others, like Hille Fuld, the senior evangelist for app monetization platform InnerActive, agree that a high valuation is warranted:

@johnkoetsier I’d say so, yes. Technology: check. Users: check. Retention: check. It’s a great success story.

— Hillel Fuld (@HilzFuld) April 8, 2013

The massive userbase worked, famously, for Instagram, which didn’t even have a revenue model when it was acquired by Facebook for what turned out to be a little under a billion dollars in post-IPO money. Instagram had about 30 million members at the time, which has now grown to over 100 million.

I just wonder if it’s billion-dollars valuable, when Google has shown the capability to grow its only solutions in-house.

When asked, a Google representative said only that “we don’t comment on rumors and speculations.”

Image credit: ShutterStock/Billion dollars

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

Path announced this morning that Path 3 is now available, and the focus is the the type of intimate, free-form communication that happens in person. As the private social network says, “There is so much more than words that pass between us. A smile or nod or encouraging gesture – these allow for true connection and understanding.”

To enable that in a more organic — and non-Facebook way — Path has introduced private messaging. Despite the name, it can be used for both one-on-one and one-to-many communication, but the defining characteristic is that it is very free-form. Ye good olde fashioned text or photo-based status update looks almost a little limited in comparison.

A brand new language?

In the new Path, messages can be text or photos (of course) but also voice, location, a cartoon-style sticker or badge that communications your emotions of the moment, a song, a book, a video, your location, or even a movie clip you’ve found online.

In other words, just about anything but the pat on the back.

And a brand-new monetization

One of the new communication channels Path is adding is stickers, kind of a next-gen emoticon.

“These are pieces of art to be used in messaging. They are expressive and fun, and they communicate what words can’t,” Path says.

You get two free “packs” just for being a Path member, but other packs are available as well, at extra cost. Some of my favorites are designed by Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid fame, but stickers from other artists such as David Lanham and Richard Perez are also available. Path didn’t release any pricing information yet.

The new version of Path is available immediately for iPhone, and “coming soon” for Android.

Watch out, Skype. Tango’s video chat is gaining on you.

Tango announced today that it has surpassed 100 million registered users. To celebrate, the company is launching a revamped version of its mobile apps, which finally bring full iPad support for iOS and an updated design. The iPhone version has also added photo editing capabilities, powered by New York City’s Aviary.

“It’s a little bit like boiling water, you see it coming for a while,” said Tango chief technology officer Eric Setton in an interview with VentureBeat, referring to the company’s approach to 100 million users. “It’s also a great way to get more engineers into the company,” he added.

Tango isn’t discussing specifics about active users, but the company told me last July that around 40 percent of its users were active. Setton noted that figure has pretty much held steady.

The company started out with a cross-platform video chat app for iPhone and Android but it has since added more platforms, like Windows Phone and Windows PCs, as well as just about every messaging media you can imagine. Back in November Tango added Instagram-like photo filters and cute animal avatars.

The new app finally offers an iPad-optimized experience, which means Tango can finally take full advantage of the tablet’s bigger screen. Setton noted that iPad users with sufficient Internet speeds will have a higher level of video chat quality than other users. When it comes to Android apps, he said that Tango already scales well to most of them, though the company is considering a fully optimized Android slate version if there’s enough demand.

Setton has long dreamed of simply displaying the video during a call, without any other on-screen distractions, something that the new app finally makes possible. Tango has also added hundreds of new filters, animations, and avatars, as well as a complete version of Othello within the app. The iPhone photo editing suite offers just about every editing tool you’d need, and it’ll eventually make its way to Android.

The company isn’t slowing down with its crazy two-week development cycle, Setton said:

We’ve kind of managed to work this into the brain of every engineer working here; they’re used to the cycle, even at 120 people. The company keeps delivering on a number of things in a short time frame — it’s part of our culture, part of the DNA, and I don’t see that going away any time soon.

Tango now has almost 20 engineers working across two development teams in China, and around a dozen dev teams all over the world. The company just recently opened up a small office in Austin, Texas focusing on game-related content. Tango also recently moved to a larger main office in Mountain View, Calif.

“I can probably not count all the lessons,” Setton said, when I asked what the company had learned on its journey to 100 million users. “One of the things that echoes is it’s so much easier when you work on a service that you yourself are using every day…. It’s changed the way we interact with our close circle, that makes us even more proud.”

Tango was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $87 million from investors including Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Qualcomm Ventures, Access Venture Partners, Bill Tai, Len Blavatnik, and Alex Zubillaga.

These are just fictional amounts, but right now Facebook is testing various pay-for-message options at a variety of price points, including some fairly high amounts. You may have already seen our story on Facebook’s pay-for-messaging this morning in which Facebook is charging $100 for some test users to send a message to Mark Zuckerberg.

In response, a Facebook representative contacted me and released this brief update:

We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.

$100 to message Mark Zuckerberg?

The tests don’t have any deadlines — or at least any that Facebook is willing to share — and are not necessarily going to end up in any fully released product. In addition, Facebook had not made any decisions or necessarily even considered something that came up in the comments to that post: Would Facebook share any of the cash with the person who is getting the message?

That’s a very interesting idea, and on the face of it, one that makes perfect sense.

After all, if someone really wants to get in touch with you, and Facebook allows them, it’s your time that is being occupied and your attention that is being diverted from whatever you’re doing. As such, it would seem to make sense that Facebook might let you know that a message is waiting for you, and if you consent to read it, $5 will go into your Facebook Wallet.

Or, if you’re Richard Branson, $3,000.

I’d be up for that, and I’d also be totally OK with Facebook taking a cut — a middleman’s percentage.

photo credit: karen horton via photopin cc

The company sells private, managed clouds with voice and telephony, web conferencing, messaging, and video streaming capabilities to business customers.

“Our products are used by millions of people in the top Fortune 1000 and government agencies each year to collaborate and communicate virtually from around the globe,” said CEO Michael Fitzpatrick in an email interview. “These customer collaborate on new products launches, train their workforce and partners, leverage us for sales and marketing support, and even coordinate with first responders during national emergencies.”

Customers include financial organizations, large corporations, technology companies, and 12 government agencies. ConnectSolutions claims to have delivered more than 4 billion minutes of collaboration on its UC3 Managed Cloud product and has been profitable for several years. The executives decided to take this first round of funding to accelerate the company’s growth. The company will use the new funds for development and commercialization of its technology and possibly for some acquisitions.

Competitors include Cisco WebEx and IBM SameTime. Frontier Capital led this round. ConnectSolutions was founded in 2007 and currently has 50 employees, with headquarters in San Francisco. You can read the filing here.

That’s one of the reasons Facebook is reportedly working on a new app that will let users send photos — and maybe videos — to friends that will self-destruct. According to AllThingsD, Facebook is testing an app to compete with SnapChat, the social network that deletes photos and videos seconds after they’ve been viewed.

SnapChat’s app, which has been accused of being a sexting tool, allows users to take pictures or short videos, add short, superimposed text messages, and send them privately to a friend. The sender can also chose how long the message should be viewable. As soon as the receiver gets and views the message, the timer starts. Once the message is deleted, it disappears from the receiver’s phone, the sender’s phone, and Snapchat’s servers.

Too bad there’s such a thing as screen captures.

After perhaps a slow start in mobile that Mark Zuckerberg blames on an over-reliance on an HTML5-based strategy to build cross-platform apps, Facebook has moving into the app space aggressively with standalone apps. Of course, it bought photo-sharing service Instagram for $750 million. It also has Facebook Messenger, a sort of SMS-replacement app on which messages do not disappear, and the apparently Instagram-competing Camera.

In addition, as part of a strategy to improve quality and get better faster, Facebook is now pushing out refreshes to its core mobile Facebook mobile apps every one or two months. Just in the past week, Facebook updated its Android and iOS apps, which are both now native apps, with better performance than ever.

The new SnapChat competitor is rumored to be going live sometime in the next few weeks. Little hint to Facebook: before Christmas would be a nice gift to your users.

photo credit: Shandi-lee via photopin cc

The wheels on startup Message Bus keep on turning, as it drives into $11 million in growth funding.

This company is building the Message Bus Global Delivery Network, which delivers communications across multiple channels without having to deploy multiple servers. Its service powers email and mobile messaging through a cloud-native app, which allows for flexibility and scaleability as well as cost-reduction and a deeper connection with customers.

“Message Bus is replacing the old school approach, where senders simply hope a message was received, with a data driven approach where we actively manage the relationship between senders and recipients,” said founder and CEO Jeremy LaTrasse. “With email, your reputation is only as good as the last message you have sent, and in the highly competitive and often abusive/adversarial relationship between senders and recipients, it is very easy to make mistakes where you are suddenly viewed as a bad sender. And surprisingly, the data is there — if you as a sender choose to collect and act upon it.”

LaTrasse was part of the founding team of Twitter, serving as director of operations. He said his team is applying the lessons he learned scaling a cloud based platform to make delivering multi-channel communication more simple and effective for businesses.

“If you add up all the other message types such as SMS, APN, and social, the annual volume of those message types combined does not come close to the total volume of legitimate email sent today,” he wrote in a blog post. “Real business happens on email and it’s a multibillion dollar market. But it’s a market where there hasn’t been serious innovation for some time.”

There are a few competitors in the space, such as SendGrid and legacy vendors like MessageSystems, and Message Bus is still in beta. This round brings its total funding to $14 million, following a $3 million raise in March 2011 from True Ventures. North Bridge Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from True Ventures, Ignition Partners, and angel investors.

The company was founded in 2010 and is based in Marin. Read the press release.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Facebook yesterday updated its standalone Messenger app on iOS to fully support the iPhone 5 and iOS 6, while also adding some useful features for chat addicts.

In addition to general speed improvements, the Messenger app now lets you swipe left to instantly get access to your favorite Facebook chat buddies, as well as to see who’s online. The design of Messenger’s conversations has also been updated with chat bubbles — giving the app a look more reminiscent of IM applications and Apple’s iMessage.

The updates make it clearer who this app is for: hardcore Facebook messaging users. It’s now an even more useful way for Facebook users to chat with their friends without dealing with all of the features in the company’s bigger app.

Facebook last month completely revamped its iOS app with a slew of speed improvements. The social network also recently updated its Android app with an intriguing messaging feature: the ability to combine texts and Facebook messages in a single interface. Unfortunately, that feature will never be possible within iOS, given Apple’s strict restrictions with its software.

It feels damn good to have a manager recognize that you’ve been pulling long hours at the office, and even better when your colleagues notice it too.

Compliment Karma, a Chicago-based startup, builds on our generation’s need for positive reinforcement in our personal and professional lives.

Whenever you’re impressed by a colleague or friend, send them a personal message via Compliment Karma, and they’ll receive badges, trophies, and “kudos” in their email inbox.

Startups often talk about how to resolve a pain point, but maybe there’s another way to quickly grow a user base. We don’t need a compliment, but they do put a skip in our step. I received an Compliment Karma message from cofounder Aman Singh (pictured, above) for the skill of being approachable in responding to his pitch. I admit, it was a good feeling on a Wednesday afternoon!

Similarly to Tribe HR, a potential competitor as the startup scales (if it’s adopted by human resources teams), compliment-receivers can share positive feedback on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Later down the line, compliments will accumulate, and users will be able the earn tangible rewards, such as employee-sponsored gift cards or a cash bonus.

The vision for the company? “This has the potential to become the one-stop reputation management tool for anybody in any industry,” said Singh, who considers global gamification company, Badgeville, to be the primary competition at this stage.

The startup is already beginning to mine its user data, although it will have far more to work when it begins marketing the site. Set up a profile, and you’ll see a dashboard with a history of your compliments, and the skill sets you’ve accumulated.

Singh said he has spent years refining the technology that lets people reap rewards for going beyond the call of duty. “Although this fine gesture makes us feel appreciated, we still never realize the true potential of these compliments,” he told me.

Founders Singh and Michael Hoitomt, the technical lead, must have a healthier relationship than most! Singh tells me they compliment each other on a daily basis via the site. Their dashboards are filled with compliments like, “great job on building our brand,” and “thanks for developing the Jive app.” Founders, it’s free to register and use the site. You may want to get on board so you don’t kill each other in those stressful first months. It only takes a few seconds to send a compliment, and it’s a lot cheaper than therapy.

Compliment Karma is a bootstrapped effort, but the founders will be looking to raise a seed round as they gear up for a public launch next month.

Top image via Shutterstock

As I mentioned at the time, I was fairly excited about the app at first: totally secure, completely private, and users can erase their own emails on others’ devices. But when I realized that it only worked if the recipients of my emails were also on Wickr, I was a little less enthused.

In fact, I got downright snarky.

So I thought it would be only fair to let the makers of the app share their own perspectives on why Wickr actually does rock. Here’s my interview with Wickr co-founder Nico Sell:

VentureBeat: To be really up front, I still think your app is not mass market. But I want to let you prove me wrong.

Sell: Thanks for being a good sport, John. I’m sorry you have no Wickr friends to chat with. I don’t have any Facebook friends. Hopefully that makes you feel better.

Wickr being installed

Wickr is a social media app. Most of the top social media apps require friends … Kik, Google+, Path, SnapChat … Same concept for Twitter. Each person on Twitter has a different username that you have to find to follow and communicate with.

I don’t have any Facebook friends and I don’t use eVite, but I am proud to invite my family, friends, and colleagues to join Wickr. I consider it a community service message. At least Wickr doesn’t sell your friends’ info or leave it sitting on a server unprotected.

VentureBeat: I have a hard time seeing people use one email app for most of their email, and Wickr for very sensitive emails. Why will they? How will you change established user patterns?

Sell: If users care about their privacy, they will use Wickr when they need it. Privacy is the new black.

VentureBeat: You’re the 16th-ranked app right now, ahead of some tough, tough competition. Does that prove I’m an idiot? How have you risen so fast against such enormous competition?

Sell: There is a huge demand for apps that don’t make their money from ads or big data. People are not stupid. Wickr knows that.

VentureBeat: How often are your users using Wickr? Per day, and per week?

Sell: We can’t see that information, by design.

Wickr is the most used app on my phone. I use it instead of the Apple Text app. I use Wickr 100 times a day, every day, to communicate with the most important people in my life. My family also uses it instead of the Apple Text app, so everyday, numerous times a day.

If you set the session timeout to 4 hours, to a user, it will work almost no different than Apple Text.

VentureBeat: How many contacts does the average user have set up in Wickr?

Sell: We can’t see any of that information, by design.

VentureBeat: I do see opportunities for Wickr in companies as a dedicated email app. Agree?

Sell: Users should have two kinds of communications — traceable and untraceable.

Email is for traceable and Wickr is for untraceable. We have won the big fight once all online communications are untraceable by default.

VentureBeat: How about a military version?

Sell: We have been contacted by various groups about licensing our service.

VentureBeat: Any plans for a white-label edition for just those purposes?

Sell: Yes. We have had some initial discussions on this but have not finalized our strategy.

VentureBeat: Let’s talk about desktop. Can a mobile-only app really handle all your email needs?

Sell: Not yet. Our initial desktop strategy is to port the app over to Windows and Mac so it can be used much like the iPad and tablets are used today.

VentureBeat: What else should I ask?

Sell:  John, you wrote, “But how on earth as a journalist can I ask my sources to not email me, not phone me, not Skype me, but instead have an iPhone, find an app, download it, create an account, connect with me, and then (and only then) communicate with me.”

Maybe you need a more important beat? Cybersecurity is getting very serious, lives are at risk and Wickr will help. There is no better way to communicate anonymously and securely with sources.

Nicole Perlroth of the New York Times just tweeted today, “Dear sources, Let’s Wickr on sensitive intel going forward.”

VentureBeat: Now … where’s that hat?

Image credit: ShutterStock

MightyText is a very simple product with a killer value prop: text anyone, anywhere, from whatever device you happen to be using. And yes, that very specifically means both your computer and tablet.

To use it, Android users install one app onto their phone, and one extension into their browser. Once done, they’re able to SMS anyone in the world from their computer. And the text will come from their mobile number. Your messages are stored in the cloud for as long as you want, and all texts are synced up on all devices you use, enabling you to move seamlessly from your phone to your laptop to your tablet, without losing any data or context.

Mac OS X Lion will bring this capability to Mac users this summer, with one key flaw: It will only work with other Mac or iOS users. MightyText, though,will let you text with anyone on the planet, whether they’re using an Android, iOS, or feature phone.

“We built a very simple way to SMS from wherever you are,” says Maneesh Arora. He’s the co-founder of MightyText, and spoke with VentureBeat about the cloud-based service yesterday.

A former Googler, as is co-founder Amit Sangani, Arora was looking to build a truly useful consumer product around texting. But he didn’t think much of the SMS networks that were so hot in late 2011, like GroupMe and Kik.

“There are so many messaging apps … but each time there’s a new one, it makes all the rest less valuable,” Arora told VentureBeat. ”SMS is the largest social network ever.” Arora wanted to build a product for everyone to use that did not require getting your friends to all sign up for the same network.

80 million texts a month before official launch

After building a prototype last year in a Chrome extension, MightyText proved the concept. Then it raised a small amount of capital, $640,000, and starting building an actual product.

Today, after months of private beta, it has 250,000 users who are sending almost 80 million texts a month. And the beauty of it all is that it hardly costs MightyText a dime.

When users send a text from their computer, they’re essentially remote-controlling their phone. That has the huge benefit of ensuring that texts sent from any of your devices come from the one thing that all your friends will recognize: your phone number.

But it also has the huge benefit for MightyText that users bear the SMS costs, which keeps costs unusually low for an SMS startup.

And in fact, it’s a genius win, win, win, because the carriers, who are losing money when iMessage or BBM or other services send text messages via data channels or WIFI, still get their cut — and therefore have an incentive to work with MightyText at some point at an API level.

The benefit for users, though, is the key for Arora: effortless texting from large-screen devices with full keyboards.

He tells the story of the lawyer who saved a case by texting from her laptop — which she would not have been able to do with her phone, since phones were barred from the courtroom. Or the trucking fleet manager who runs his trucks via SMS and can do it so much more efficiently with his computer.

MightyText currently has no immediate plans for monetization. Appropriate for ex-Googlers, Arora and Sangani are content to create and deliver a very valuable product and worry about revenue later. Still, they get about 20-50 people a day inquiring where they should pay for the service.

Down the road, there may be a very targeted, selective advertising product, or a premium version for small and medium-sized businesses. Partnering with carriers is another option.

The company currently has three employees in its Mountain View, Calif. office, plus some outsourced resources in India. Investors include First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, 500 Startups, AngelList, and others.

Image credit: ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Amid RIM’s seemingly-unending struggles, the company has seen a light: BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM says that use of its proprietary instant message service has spiked from 5.3 to 55 millions users over the past three years, even as the Blackberry’s user base and market share have been eroded by the likes of the iPhone and Android, as The Wall Street Journal reports.

The continued success of BBM gave former RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie an idea: RIM could capitalize on its popularity by licensing the software to competitors.

But the problems with this plan were immediately clear. Letting third-party companies use the service would undoubtedly increase BBM usage numbers, but it would also remove one of the BlackBerry’s most key differentiators.

That argument is a large part of why RIM’s new CEO Thorsten Heins axed the plan. RIM won’t be doing any licensing deals under his watch.

But where does that leave BBM? Solely in the hands of BlackBerry 10, it’s next-generation OS set for  release later this year. But with competition from Apple’s iMessage and a bevy of other iOS and Android messaging apps at all-time high, RIM is going to have a hard time attracting users back to BBM no matter what operating system its running on.

The new feature is called Fan Mail and it enables Tumblr members to send stylish messages to the blog owners they follow.

“I’m very pleased to introduce Fan Mail, a beautiful new way to share those sweet, inspiring, or otherwise thoughtful notes with your favorite bloggers,” Tumblr founder and CEO David Karp jotted in his own Fan Mail-themed note.

Fan Mail will be rolled out to all users in the next few days, Karp added in an update on the release.

Members can send the cutesy messages via the Tumblr inbox, avatar drop-down menus and the top corner of the blogs they follow. Private messaging is a staple of most social media sites, and it should make for a natural addition to Tumblr’s blog platform and already thriving community.

Tumblr currently boasts more than 39 million blogs with a combined total of 15 billion posts. The New York-based startup closed an $85 million round of funding in September.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Plenty of apps let you share items with friends via Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail, but it’s still difficult to instantly share content within apps — for example, a cool new restaurant on Yelp’s app — across mobile devices.

Kik, maker of a popular mobile messaging app, aims to change that with its new API, which allows developers to quickly implement mobile content sharing within their apps to any of Kik’s 6 million registered users.

The API also lets you refer friends to a specific point in apps. For example, it could be used to point friends to a specific song you discovered on Shazam’s app. Even better, the API is platform agnostic, allowing you to share between iOS and Android devices seamlessly.

Kik’s app launched last year and saw explosive growth from users who were hungry for a fast messaging alternative to texting. The company now sees 500 million messages a month across its mobile apps, CEO Ted Livingston told VentureBeat in an interview yesterday. Kik’s chat volume has been doubling every quarter.

Kik is also launching a new “Apps that Kik” section of its app to promote apps using its API.

“Part of what has made Kik Messenger such a success has been connecting people anywhere while keeping the app experience very fast and easy to use,” Livingston said in a statement today. “The launch of the API and the addition of the Apps That Kik discovery service provide an insanely simple solution to drive app adoption for developers.”

As Livingston explained it, developers need to add only five lines of code to implement the Kik API. When a user chooses to share something via Kik, the third-party app opens the Kik app on their phone to complete the message.

Kik is launching the API today with several companies, including Smiler and FileKicker. To take advantage of the feature, you’ll need to download the latest Kik apps on iOS and Android, which also went live today.

That change was apparently always in the works because Huddle, a collaboration startup based in the United Kingdom, held global trademarks to the name “Huddle.” It’s one of the rare cases where a smaller company has been able to fend off a supergiant with billions in revenue using trademarks.

“When it launched we pointed out to Google that we held global trademarks for the term Huddle,” Huddle co-founder Andy McLoughlin (pictured right) told VentureBeat. “They very quickly came back to us with a message that they would be renaming the service, although this was ‘an internal business decision’ and nothing to do with our trademark ownership.”

Trademarks and patents have picked up a bad reputation in recent months thanks to patent trolls that actively sue larger companies as a way to make money. Google chairman and former chief executive officer Eric Schmidt slammed regulators and patent trolls at Salesforce.com’s annual Dreamforce conference in San Francisco earlier this month, saying the patent wars would slow down the mobile and device revolution started by Apple’s iPhone.

In addition to changing Huddle’s name to Messenger, Google’s group messaging app now supports photo sharing. That should serve to make Google’s Messenger more competitive against other group messaging apps from Facebook and Kik. Facebook’s messaging application, by the way, is also named Messenger. Google and Facebook frequently spar and also compete for advertising revenue.

Matrix Partners led Huddle’s most recent $10.2 million funding round, with previous backers Eden Ventures and Charles McGregor participating in that round. Huddle has raised $15 million altogether and is part of a rising enterprise 2.0 movement that includes the likes of enterprise social network Yammer and cloud storage provider Box.net. Those companies are taking features and lessons learned from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and applying them to the enterprise.

Huddle said it became cash flow positive around May last year. It reports having tens of thousands of customers, including Procter & Gamble, Disney and Taiwanese smartphone manufacturer HTC.

Developed by Bellevue, Washington-based Inscos, SmartDonuts will not only allow users to chat with groups of friends, it will also let them join groups fitting their interests, allowing for more secure communication than is possible from Twitter or Facebook. The company showed off the app on stage today at the Demo Fall 2011 conference in Silicon Valley.

“It’s a real-time media for real-life stories,” founder and CEO Kevin Kim told VentureBeat.

The group messaging field is a crowded one, with entrants like GroupMe and Kik already fighting for attention from users. Now Facebook and Google are getting in on the group messaging fun as well, with the recently released Facebook Messenger app and Google+ Huddles. It remains to be seen if a newcomer can compete with more entrenched opponents, but SmartDonuts certainly has a shot at finding fans, especially with its focus on larger groups.

Inscos currently has 10 employees and was founded in 2009. The company has raised $180K in funding so far, with some coming from the CEO, and the rest from a friend’s company.

Inscos is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

New startup Qwip, which launched today at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference in Silicon Valley, offers users a way to voice their short updates to Twitter and Facebook rather than be forced to type them up.

Qwip’s new iOS app is basically a voice-to-text messaging service. Users record short, 10-second audio messages (Qwips) or 25-second private messages. Those messages are then converted into text, which can be posted on the Qwip app or elsewhere.

“Voice is simply too rich and easy to remain limited to the province of phone calls. Our messaging needs are too diverse to be fulfilled by text alone,” said Qwip founder Taylor Bollman.

Unlike competitors, which are designed around existing texting and podcasting paradigms, Qwip focuses on being a rich communication, Bollman said. “Competitors support unlimited message length, so listening is a burden,” he added.

Bollman said the voice-messaging service will likely be popular among the rapidly expanding population of baby-boomers with smartphones.

Founded in 2011, the San Francisco-based company has under $100,000 in seed funding from a handful of individual investors. The three-person startup — which also includes co-founders Francis Li and Gabi Zuniga — faces competition from similar audio services like Audioboo, Cinch and HeyTell.

Qwip is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

[Screenshots of Qwip's iPhone app via Taylor Bollman.]

“[GroupMe] complements our existing leadership in voice and video communications by providing best in class mobile text-based communications and innovative features around group messaging that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties,” said Skype CEO Tony Bates in a blog post.

Both Facebook and Google recently released their own offerings targeted at group messaging with Facebook Messenger and Google+’s Huddle. Skype’s decision to buy GroupMe shows it wants to make sure it also has its group communication bases covered. It should pair well with the services it already offers, including video calling, global calling, instant messaging, and text messaging services.

Skype is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft. The big M said in May that it would buy Skype for $8.5 billion and as soon as the deal is completed, we will likely see Skype integrated into Xbox 360, Kinect, Windows Phone and Office 365. GroupMe’s application and technology would also help Microsoft flesh out its mobile offerings as it continues to expand Windows Phone 7′s presence and capabilities.

It’s a remarkable way for GroupMe’s startup story to close, as the company is barely more than a year old. The first version of GroupMe was built during a weekend in May 2010 during a hackathon programming contest hosted by TechCrunch. Investors quickly took notice and the company raised $850,000 in its first seed round of fundraising from places like Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Lerner Ventures. And back in January, GroupMe raised $10.6 million, with funding led by Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst Partners and First Round Capital.

GroupMe’s offices and its 20 employees will stay in New York. “As part of the deal, GroupMe will remain in New York, team intact, working on our standalone application,” GroupMe announced on its company blog. “The major difference will be that we will now have access to Skype’s 175 million monthly connected users.”

Are you a fan of GroupMe? What do you think of the acquisition?

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As if you need another reason to hate AT&T, the carrier is apparently planning to end its reasonable $10 texting plan for 1000 messages, forcing new customers to pay more for an unlimited plan or suffer through expensive per-message fees, Engadget reports.

AT&T has confirmed with Engadget that it will offer only a $20 unlimited texting plan, and a $30 unlimited plan for families with up to five lines, starting August 21. Existing subscribers of the $10 plan will be able to keep it for now, but just like AT&T’s defunct unlimited data plan, it will disappear if you ever leave AT&T and decide to come back.

“The vast majority of our messaging customers prefer unlimited plans, and with text messaging growth stronger than ever, that number continues to climb among new customers,” AT&T said in a statement this morning.

AT&T says that it’s “streamlining” its text messaging plans with the changes, but clearly it’s just looking for a new way to force customers to pay more for aging SMS technology. The change could be a response to the rise of messaging apps like Kik and Facebook’s recently released Messenger app, which allow for text and media messaging over cellular data instead of SMS.

AT&T customers who don’t want to pay for unlimited texting can still opt to pay per-message. Plain texts cost $.20 each, and picture and video messages cost $.30.

The real losers in the new deal are middle-range texting users like myself who text too often to pay per message, but not often enough to justify a $20 unlimited plan. It’s also yet another ploy by AT&T to keep existing users onboard — now many customers could face losing both their unlimited data plan and $10 texting if they jump to Verizon or T-Mobile.

If anything, AT&T’s behavior has finally convinced me that I need to move all of my friends over to a messaging app. At some point, I’d like to get rid of my texting plan entirely and not give AT&T another cent for SMS.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I have a bit of a crush on group-texting application GroupMe, which lets a bunch of phone owners jump into an ad-hoc chat room that’s powered by text messages. It’s simple, and best of all, it doesn’t use data.

The company unveiled a new version of its mobile app today, which sports some new messaging features that make it more lightweight. But while the app is powered by wireless data networks, you still get the option to stick with text messages. So when you’re stranded at a music festival with a dozen other people and no data network, you can still access its new features.

GroupMe is a group-texting service that creates a virtual chat room around text messages. You create a phone number that anyone who signs up to the group can text. That text is then delivered to everyone in the group. You can make as many groups as you want. It works for conference calls as well — anyone can dial in to the number and start a group chat.

The GroupMe app is a glossy BlackBerry Messenger-like app on top of the service’s typical texting service. Instead of going through text messages, the app creates a visual room where users can parse messages and photos and see the members of the GroupMe group. They can see on a map where previous messages were sent and also start a conference call with all GroupMe group members.

The app’s new direct messaging feature is equivalent to sending a direct text message to someone within the group, but it’s a little easier. Instead of hunting down an individual’s phone number, you can just send a message directly through the app. There is also a “questions” feature, which lets users quickly direct a message to specific GroupMe group or individual.

“We kept seeing people going to their old groups to ask a question,” GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci told VentureBeat. “We wanted a way for groups to become more lightweight, we’ve really driven our features from our own users.”

That doesn’t mean the SMS part of GroupMe is going away. When you install the app, it asks whether you want to receive SMS messages or push notifications. Any messages sent within the GroupMe app are also texted out to members in the GroupMe group. They show up in both text message and in the App’s chat interface. If a user has a weak data connection, the app also prompts them to drop down to SMS.

“The commitment to SMS has not gone down … you can invite anybody over SMS, they chat right over SMS, everything is backwards-compatible with SMS,” Martocci said. “SMS is something that we are still very heavily focused on, we think it’s a huge benefit of giving people able to use it.”

The app is now available in more than 90 countries for BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, iPhone and Android users. The new features in the app are cool, and they don’t get in the way of what made GroupMe great — its support of just about every phone out there by using SMS. The company is still working to roll out its SMS service in as many countries as possible, Martocci said.

Startups like GroupMe are constantly showing us that there are ways to make text messaging even more useful. All it takes is a little bit of thinking outside the box, and GroupMe’s $10.5 million in cash doesn’t hurt either.

GroupMe is built on top of a service provided by Twilio, a San Francisco-based startup that provides access to voice and text-messaging services that might otherwise be out of reach to small companies. The first version of GroupMe was built over a weekend in May 2010 during a hackathon, a type of programming contest that challenges developers to swiftly create a working Web service.

The news comes a week after Nokia finalized a deal to outsource its Symbian OS to Accenture (this deal has been in the works for years). Nokia, a Finnish company, is the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world but its market share is falling due to the growing smartphone market. The company abandoned Symbian as its primary mobile OS earlier this year and is now working on building flagship Windows Phone 7 devices.  Rumors continue that the troubled company’s phone business could be bought out by the likes of Microsoft or even of Samsung.

This is a giant acquisition for England-based Synchronica which has, until now, focused on messaging services in developing and emerging countries in Latin America, Africa, Russia, and Asia (it has more than 80 existing carrier contracts).

The technology acquired in today’s deal with Synchronica includes Nokia’s email, IM, and social networking gateway and client software, which Synchronica says it will continue the development and merge with its own Mobile Gateway infrastructure. Synchronica says its relationship with Nokia will be “long-term,” but doesn’t give any specific timeline.

Synchronica says it will provide the messaging software which Nokia will continue to pre-load on Nokia Series 40 phones. MocoNews.net reports Synchronica will be paid $18.2 million over in the next 18 months for Nokia to continue to preload the services into its own devices.

Synchronica isn’t just getting technology. Approximately 250 employees, externals, and contractors are planned to transfer from Nokia. Synchronica also gets 10 patents as part of the deal (eight remain with Nokia, but Synchronica will have a royalty free license to them).

The all-cash deal of $25 million also includes 18.3 million warrants to Nokia, to be exercised in three years to potentially buy shares in Synchronica.