July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

NEW YORK CITY — Thrillist CEO Ben Lerer said today at the F.ounders conference that 45 percent of the company’s revenue now comes from its JackThreads iPhone app, a stunning stat that shows a mobile-intensive strategy can sometimes pay off.

“The iPhone app will bring in an incredible amount of revenue this year … mobile will be the majority in Q2,” Lerer told VentureBeat after the panel. “It’s a beast. This is where our guys are.”

We recently put Thrillist on our list of 10 NYC startups we’re crazy about because the company started out as a small email newsletter tailored to urban males, but it now generates over $40 million in revenue a year. It offers a wide array of editorial content and the ability to purchase things through JackThreads and Thrillist Rewards. JackThreads’ iPhone app, however, has become an unexpected huge hit for the company.

Lerer said Thrillist has changed strategies to mobile-first in just the past few months, and the shift is occurring in “real time.”

“Our mobile-first strategy is a reaction to success we were seeing — we didn’t lean into a hot buzzword,” Lerer said. “We were web-first or email-first or not-mobile-first for a very long time, and over the past several months — and it has been this recent — we’ve seen such a shift in audience behaviors that instead of playing catchup, we decided we should be first movers in mobile.”

How to realize this sort of significant mobile monetization, and how other publishers and developers can tap into similar strategies, is one of the biggest challenges of today’s economy. (That’s why it is one of the key areas for discussion at our Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the top 180 executive in the industry. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of the community, from Google and Facebook, across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and emerging startups.)

Thrillist also offers an Android app for JackThreads, but it does not create customer action anywhere near the level of the iPhone app.

“The Android experience is not as robust as the iPhone experience, but we weren’t seeing the same sort of conversations,” Lerer said. “It wasn’t even comprable.”

The company does not offer an iPad app yet, but Lerer promises it will come down the pipeline “in the not so distant future.”

While the company is doing so much on mobile and heavily prioritizes it, he says its brands will continue to get some love on the web as well.

“It’s not a shift away from web, which is an important thing,” Lerer said. “Our web business is doing what we thought it would do. Our mobile business is just doing so much more. So we end up with a business that frankly doesn’t look like what had we expected it to look like a quarter into the year. And the trajectory we are on is different from what we forecasted eight to sixteen weeks ago.”

Ben Lerer photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Dev shop Zurb, which makes the Foundation web framework, has just released Foundation 4. The new version brings a host of new tricks and treats for developers and designers, all intended to bring mobile to the forefront.

The framework, said Zurb reps, has been rewritten to work with mobile-first approaches to product design and development — and the mobile-first trend is, indeed, shaping up to be a defining aspect of modern applications.

“Foundation 4 empowers a designer to reverse their thinking — design for the mobile experience before you design for the desktop,” read a Zurb statement on today’s news.

“One big hurdle for designers and developers is trying to figure out a solid starting place for their mobile designs — for them, Foundation is an excellent starting place and a great way to dive head-first into the world of designing for all types of mobile devices.”

Zurb reps said Foundation 4 brings “smarter, more semantic coding” to the table as well as placeholder classes and “mix-ins.”

“The more-streamlined code will allow designers to focus primarily on the HTML, which speeds up coding and time between iterations,” the statement said. “In addition, the JavaScript has been refined. We’ve opted to go with Zepto, a lighter and faster version of jQuery, to ensure that pages load quickly and efficiently given our mobile focus.”

Here’s a sneak peek:

Foundation 4 is available now to download. You can dive right in or browse around the documentation first.

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As the year draws to an end, Silicon Valley investors are looking for the next wave of technology after social networking.

VentureBeat spoke to a slew of the top players at well-known West Coast institutions — the founding team at Stanford University’s technology accelerator, StartX, partners at some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, and others — to help illuminate what the big trends will be in the coming year.

For VCs, it’s not enough to build an addictive mobile app or game: Investors expect to see more, something worth building a venture-funded company around. So in 2013, get ready for mind-blowing, nerdgasmic tech, whether it’s augmented reality, 3D printing, self-driving cars, or space travel.

For later-stage startups, 2013 will be the year all hell breaks loose. The IPO pipeline is already brimming with contenders: Venture-funded companies like Twitter, Box, and Square are ready for Wall Street. With heated competition for customers and users, there may also be some mammoth failures when some venture-backed companies that have received hundreds of millions of dollars simply buckle.

Most of the investors we spoke to agreed confidence in the tech industry is sky-high and 2013 is a year to take bigger risks. This time last year, we predicted entrepreneurship would be an engine to drive jobs creation and stimulate economic growth. With the global economy beginning to stabilize, we’re ready to take more risks and push technology into new verticals, like education, government, financial services, and health care.

Financial firms will finally embrace innovation

David Blumberg, managing partner, Blumberg Capital 

“The financial services sector should be highly attractive to IT entrepreneurs and investors for its size, growth, high margins, and dramatic need for greater innovation and efficiency. At more than 8.5 percent of the global GDP, the industry is measured in trillions of dollars.

“Despite rapid growth, the financial industry is burdened by outmoded IT systems and legacy software, extensive and increasingly punitive regulations, and taxes as well as a negative public image as being too expensive, inflexible, and inefficient. It is an industry consumers and politicians love to hate — hence it’s ripe for innovation to improve outcomes for all.

“And fortunately, startups are leading the way forward. Go for innovation in financial services, young entrepreneur — it’s where the money is!”

Ones to watch: Square, Credorax, Lenddo, LendUp, SoFi, Addepar, Zanbato

 Computers will get smarter and more autonomous

Mike Maples, founding partner, Floodgate Capital

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the next big tech cycle after social networking. One of the things we did right as a firm is to see that trend early [Editor's note: Maples is an early investor in Twitter and Reputation.com]. We use the term ‘hypernet’ to describe this notion that technology will no longer be characterized by one world wide web or one search engine.

“Computers will exist in billions of nodes and millions of clouds. In 2013, people will expect to be hyperconnected on the hyperweb: They will want to manage content on any device. We will see user experiences that are no longer assumed to be windows on a computer screen or a smart phone. Some of my favorite examples are Google’s self-driving car or Nest‘s thermostat, which learns the temperature you like and turns it down when you’re away.”

Ones to watch: Nest, Google’s self-driving car, IFFFT, Grok, Genwi

‘Big data’ won’t be a buzzword; it will be part of life

Ross Fubini, venture partner, Canaan Partners

“‘Big data’ is the buzzword of the year, but 2013 will be the year that big data will be a reality across many application areas.

“Big data allows the user to experience magic. Anyone can ask questions of the data, and soon we’ll be using these technologies for everyday decision-making, whether it’s pricing, hiring, or managing our finances. These new applications are going to require more than an open-source computing framework like Hadoop. The shift to ‘big data’ will herald an entirely new set of infrastructures to store and process all that data.

“Data has been a big deal and a big market for years — SQL, hello!. But ‘big data’ is a big deal because of the sheer volume of trackable data and because it’s cheaper than ever before to build an application to make that data valuable. By the end of the year, we will see some big winners emerge leading up to some splashy 2014 and 2015 IPOs.”

Ones to watch: Kaggle, Splunk, Platfora, Grok, Intuit, Quid, LendUp, GNS Healthcare

Storage will get even sexier

Bipul Sinha, investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners

“The enterprise storage market is experiencing a tectonic shift led primarily by virtualization and storage media disruptions. The incumbents are slow to respond, and the startup activity is at an all-time high. The new year will witness two significant trends: an acceleration of storage and compute hyper-convergence and a bifurcation of performance and capacity tiers for shared enterprise storage.

“These trends will eventually commoditize the storage layer of the enterprise information technology stack and essentially propel the emergence of software defined, agile enterprise datacenter.”

Ones to watch: SimpliVity, Nutanix, Zadara, Exablox, Bitcasa

The developer ecosystem will go mainstream

Peter Levine, partner, Andreessen Horowitz

“The shift from the web to an app-based computing architecture is reinventing the entire developer ecosystem. Until recently, Microsoft and Java controlled all software development and services because developers could only write for those APIs. With 2013 on the horizon, we believe those days will soon be over.

“The old way of computing has been eroded by and replaced with special-purpose, easy-to-integrate backend services. These best-of-breed services also innovate at a breakneck pace, which means applications can take advantage of many additional services, thus paving the way for a new developer ecosystem.”

Ones to watch: GitHub, Mixpanel, Pixelapse, Okta, Parse, Bizness Apps, Urban Airship

Hardware companies will raise larger rounds

Naval Ravikant, founder, AngelList

“The declining cost of building tech startups has finally reached hardware. We’re seeing accelerators like Lemnos Labs turning out very interesting seed-stage hardware companies.

“Some of the coolest I’ve seen this year include Momentum Machines, which builds burger-flipping robots; UnmannedInnovation, which builds an operating system for UAVs; NanoSatisfi, a Kickstarter-funded project to launch and rents CubeSats; and Nomiku, which makes sous vide [machines] affordable.

“It used to be that for a hardware company, you’d have to raise lots of money from the get-go. But now you can start small with a seed, as AngelList alum Leap Motion did, and then go on to raise significant rounds from large investors later.”

Ones to watch: Maykah, Goldiebox, OpenRov, Momentum Machines, Unmanned Innovation

Indoor location will be the next billion-dollar market

Don Dodge, developer advocate, Google; advisor, Google Ventures

“Indoor location will be bigger than GPS, which only works outdoors. We spend 90 percent of our time indoors, whether it’s in shopping malls, offices, schools, restaurants, and so on, where GPS doesn’t work or is inaccurate. In 2013, you’ll use your smartphone to find the exact store aisle location for every item on your shopping list.

“With indoor location, you can find people, products, or services plotted exactly on a floor plan with walking directions to get there. You could receive coupons, advertisements, or free offers for products based on where you are in a store. Imagine playing indoor location games like capture the flag, tower defense, or other games based on real-life indoor locations. There are thousands of applications in many different market segments that will be built using accurate indoor positioning technology.”

Related: Read VentureBeat’s roundup of indoor location technologies.

Ones to watch: WifiSLAM, ByteLight, Neuaer, IndoorAtlas

Health care will begin to feel personal

Cameron Teitelman, John Melas-Kyriazi, and Divya Nag (pictured, left), StartX leadership team

“In the medical space, advances in bioinformatics, genomics, regenerative medicine, and proteomics [the large-scale study of proteins] have propelled us into an era of truly personalized medicine. Many med-tech startups are harnessing innovation in these fields to prevent diseases, increase health outcomes, and tailor medical engagement on an individual level.

“With a rising number of med-tech companies launching personalized medicine platforms, we are going to see a greater demand for individual treatment options around the world as these options become increasingly accessible.”

Ones to watch:Morpheus Medical, Ubiome, Wellness FX, GenapSys, Numedii, The Chordoma Foundation

A.I. and human-computer interaction

Brian Singerman, partner, Founders Fund

“We are always highly suspicious of trends. The best investments are often in companies and industries that others do not consider hot or trendy. Therefore, a theme for 2013 will be to not invest in trends, but rather long-lasting value. Trends come and go, but the best companies will be the ones that buck the trends and don’t look like all the others, companies that don’t appear to have much competition.

“To that end, we think 2013 will see some major technological breakthroughs through new ways of interacting with machines. Interface breakthrough Leap Motion will change the way we think about and operate computers of all types. Google will make huge strides in self-driving cars. We will even see the beginnings of a sophisticated A.I. The new year will be a true revenge of the nerds year, with product giving ground to actual technological innovation.”

Ones to watch: Leap Motion, Metaio, Ouya, Deep Learning technologies, Google Glass, self-driving cars, anything involving space travel

Top image courtesy of Smileus, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Pocket Gems was one of the early “mobile first” game companies that did nothing but make games for mobile devices. The company was founded by Stanford University students in 2009 and it has never stopped running.

All 13 of the company’s games, from Tap Farm to Tap Pet Hotel, have been big hits on the Apple App Store. Three games are available on Android. Yet another game, the ambitious Paradise Cove title, is launching today.

A year ago, San Francisco-based Pocket Gems had around 10 people. Now it has more than 100. And the strategy of running fast, doing original games, and getting them out before rivals is paying off, said Ben Liu (pictured right) chief operating officer of Pocket Gems, in an interview with VentureBeat. The company’s games have been downloaded more than 60 million times.

“We had an amazing year in 2011,” Liu said. “We went through four different offices, and we’re still growing.”

Liu says that it’s a great time to be an app developer because the transition to mobile gaming is well under way, with engagement and monetization growing. Plenty of imitators have piled into the app stores. On Apple’s store, there are 100,779 active games. Copycat games are rampant. Tons of mobile game competitors are growing by the day. They include Gameloft, Electronic Arts, Zynga, TinyCo, DeNA-Ngmoco, Digital Chocolate, Glu Mobile, Backflip Studios and others.

But this is an environment where San Francisco-based Pocket Gems thrives.

“It does bother us that there are so many imitators, but that happens with success,” Liu said. “We focus less on what others are doing. We try to see what’s next in gaming. Our best defense is creativity and innovation. Those things are hard to copy. Any specific genre can be cloned. But the fundamental engine of innovation is hard to copy.”

Daniel Terry, chief executive, and Harlan Crystal, chief technology officer, founded Pocket Gems in 2009 while Terry was still an MBA student at Stanford University. Their first game was Tap Farm, an idea borrowed from Facebook farm games such as FarmVille, but executed in an original way for the iPhone’s touchscreen. The title was a big hit and it enabled Pocket Gems to get on the growth treadmill. In December 2010, the company raised $5 million from Sequoia Capital and others.

In a number of cases, Pocket Gems has created the first successful title in a genre, even if it doesn’t invent the genres.

“We follow the principle of ‘mobile first,’ creating things that make good use of the device,” Liu said. “We don’t worry about competition because the opportunity is huge. The shift from the PC to mobile computing is irreversible. The tide is with us.”

Other developers have been hurt by the rising cost of user acquisition. Ad costs are going up and it often costs more to get a new user than the amount of revenues that user generates. But Liu says the best solution for that is to have popular games. That way, each new game you launch can be cross-promoted inexpensively to existing users.

“Everything flows from having good games,” he said.

Pocket Gems still makes use of ad networks and promotional platforms such as Tapjoy. And Pocket Gems would like to take advantage of a mobile social network.

Discovery is still a large industry problem. Liu looks forward to seeing new social layers from companies such as Gree, Facebook, Apple, Google, Tencent and DeNA/Ngmoco. But he isn’t quite sure who will build the most successful social layer that makes it less expensive to promote games and get them noticed.

Over time, Liu expects the quality bar to rise for mobile games. That’s why the company spend considerable time creating its first exploration simulation game on mobile: Paradise Cove. The title has lots of moving objects on the screen and effects such as moving cloud that are semi-transparent.

In that game, two explorers are stranded on a desert island. They build a house to survive, find food, and then start exploring. They clear the jungle and build a fleet of ships. Then they uncover artifacts from a lost civilization and the game story proceeds from there, said Rich Cooluris, creative director, and Niels Hoven (both pictured), head of a new game studio and project lead for the title. The game map is large and the title has dozens of levels.

“This is the kind of game you have to do to stay competitive,” Liu said.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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