Category: Tech news

The app that allows you to create your own native apps, Propeller, has raised $1.25 million from Andreessen Horowitz, ffAngel, Menlo Ventures, Foundation Capital, Max Levchin, Ashton Kutcher, Keith Rabois, Scott Banister, Jason Portnoy, Lee Linden, Rothenberg Ventures and Alfred Mandel.

Like a less-complex Appsify.me or a Testflight for normal people, Propeller aims to democratize the app store. When launched, Propeller will eventually let people who don’t know how to code build their own native, not HTML5, mobile apps. Normals can design their own apps for their weddings, fraternities, businesses, whatever through Propeller’s drag-and-drop interface and templates. And then deploy those apps to others through the Propeller app on an iPhone or Android.

“Ever since smartphones came out, we’ve seen so many people looking for help creating apps,” founder Brian Rowen tells me. “From things like ‘I have a great idea for an app; how do I learn to code?’ to the ubiquitous search for a ‘technical co-founder.’ There are many people who want to make apps, but they just don’t know where to start, and if you’ve never built one before, the whole process can be pretty intimidating (and expensive).”

Rowen and his fellow co-founder Clay Allsopp met at Likealittle, a startup that became Circle after a pivot in the fall of 2011, and decided to do their own thing in September 2012 (fun fact: They met their first investor at Eric Eldon and I’s birthday party). “We’ve seen how tough it is for anyone to build a great app,” Rowen explained, “and we want to make that experience frictionless for everyone.”

Rowen tells me that the rest of Propeller’s competitive landscape has one or two or both problems. “Either the experience of making an app is complex and unintuitive, or the apps created by the product are low-quality because they use non-native technologies like HTML5 (or both). These apps don’t look and feel like the native apps we enjoy using every day.”

The company says that its attempts to build an accessible experience and solve the technical problem of dynamically building native apps has led to some “key innovations.” They plan to use the new coin, like every other seed-funded startup, to staff up and refine these innovations before launch.

When Vine started shipping for Android, there was one, big, near-universal complaint amongst its users: it didn’t support front-facing cameras. While the existing iOS port had been supporting front cameras for months, Android users looking to take Vine-selfies (Velfies?) were stuck contorting their wrists like some sort of chump. Users were hopeful it’d come baked into the update that shipped last weekend — no such luck.

In an update pushed to the Google Play store just a few minutes ago, Vine for Android finally learned how to play friendly with that front lens.

Meanwhile, this update also brings a few other new tricks: there’s a new upload manager for the Vine’s you’ve yet to finalize, a few tweaks to the settings screen, and an overall speed improvement — most importantly, the camera is said to load notably faster, now.

Here are the complete patch notes:

• Front-facing camera
• New upload manager for unsubmitted posts
• Improvements to settings
• Improvements to camera loading time and support for more devices
• Speed improvements overall
• Bug fixes and UI improvements

This update comes just 5 days after the last — a remarkably quick turnaround, from build-to-build. Say what you will about Instagram pickin’ up video support, but a little competition really does help kick things into gear.

You can find the latest version of Vine on the Google Play store here.

Unity, the cross-platform 3D engine and game development tool that’s been on something of a roll lately, has a few more bits of good news today. At Microsoft’s Build 2013 conference this morning, Unity announced two new tricks: Xbox One (and Kinect!) support, and completely free support for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 games.

It’s been a few good months for Unity. Back in March, they announced support for Sony’s Playstation 4. Then, after dropping support for the hot mess that is Flash, they announced that iOS and Android game developers could now build their wares on Unity free of charge — ditching their requirement that mobile developers pay a few hundred bucks for an add-on package for each platform. They’d continue to offer pro versions of both Unity ($1500 for the Pro build) and the iOS/Android add-ons (another $1500 per platform) for those who needed advanced functionality, but the free versions would cover the use cases for anyone just getting their feet wet.

With today’s news, Windows developers are getting a similar deal — in fact, the one they’re getting is a bit better. As with iOS and Android, developers using Unity’s basic/free product will be able to build their Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 games for free. But that Pro add-on? The one that iOS/Android developers need to plunk down an additional $1500 for? Unity and Microsoft have worked out a deal to eat the cost of that. If you buy (or already own) Unity Pro, the Windows Store Pro add-on and all the advanced functionality that comes with comes free.

For Windows gamers, that’s pretty good news. It means that pretty much any game built on-top of Unity can be ported to Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 with minimal effort, without that developer having to drop a dime on engine licensing to do it.

Meanwhile, the company also announced that Unity would be deeply supported by the Xbox One, including gesture/skeletal recognition through the Kinect. While tying into the 360′s Kinect from Unity has been possible for a while now, it’s always been a bit of a hack; once Xbox One support makes its way into Unity 4, it’ll be official. Alas, it’s not clear if the One-specific tools will be made available to everyone — while Unity says that they’ll be free to anyone published by Microsoft Studios, there’s no word on how much they’ll cost (or if they’ll even be available) to anyone just looking to tinker. We’ve sent an email to Unity asking for more details here.

[Update: A Unity rep tells us “Unity can still be used by [Xbox] developers being published by someone other than Microsoft Games Studios, they’ll just need to pay for it. We ask developers interested in using Unity to publish to consoles to contact us directly to discuss pricing.”]

With today’s news, Unity can now claim cross-platform support for every next-gen console, as well as every popular mobile operating system.

One developer feature Google is really stressing these days is Google+ Sign-in, the company’s recently launched authentication tool for third-party sites and mobile apps.

While the company will continue to support its standard Google Sign-in tool as well, it’s pushing hard to get users to switch to its new system. The Google+ version has the advantage (or not, depending on your perspective) of being linked directly to Google’s social network and profiles and can therefore provide sites with easier registration system and more information about their users.

A number of large companies have now integrated Google+ Sign-ins, and we are starting to get some data about how things are going. Mind you, these are somewhat self-selected Google partners, but the results are still pretty interesting. Most companies don’t want to go on the record with their numbers, but Google just published a case study with Snapette that’s pretty much in line what we’ve been hearing, too.

Snapette Case Study: 44.2% Use Google+ Sign-ins, Registrations Up 16%

The latest numbers come from mobile shopping app Snapette, which launched in 2011, and this marks the first time we’re seeing some of these stats for a service that uses Google+ Sign-in. Just over 44 percent of the service’s users now use Google+ to sign in to their accounts. That’s a bit higher than the 40 percent acceptance rate Google itself cited earlier this year.

Snapette also says it’s been seeing an uptick in user registrations since integrating this feature. The company says it saw “an increase in registered users of 16% above average growth” since it started using this tool.

Startup incubator AngelPad is looking beyond its current base in San Francisco — founder Thomas Korte just announced that he plans to hold one of his two annual sessions in New York City.

That doesn’t mean AngelPad is going to be working with more companies or hiring more staff. Instead, the New York class is taking the place of one of the two San Francisco sessions, and Korte said that he and partner Carine Magescas will be running both of them.

As for why he’s making the move, Korte noted the growth of NYC’s startup scene, and he said it has an advantage over the San Francisco Bay Area because there’s less competition for engineers. Plus, AngelPad has an extensive network in the city, with Korte estimating that 10 percent of the incubator’s companies are already in New York.

So despite the switch, Korte said he isn’t worried about missing out on great San Francisco companies — if founders want to participate in an incubator, they’re going to be ready to travel to make it happen.

“Between New York and San Francisco, the differences are really shrinking,” he said. “There’s going to be great companies built in the Valley there’s going to be great companies built in New York.”

The exact location of the AngelPad’s New York office hasn’t been determined yet, but Korte plans to start accepting applications in late August or early September.

He also said that he’s calculated all the money raised by startups after they left AngelPad, and the total is $100 million. The biggest rounds include a $12 million Series B for MoPub and a round of the same size for Crittercism. Korte noted that on its own, a lot of funding doesn’t make for a successful company, but he said it’s one of the two quantitative measures that AngelPad uses to track whether its companies are thriving (the other is number of engineers hired).

This seemed like a good time to ask Korte about whether he plans to raise a fund, but he was as coy about it today as he was last month.

“So far, AngelPad has been funded by the partners, and that may or may not change in the future,” he said.

Immigration reform is half-way to its goal: The Senate passed a comprehensive bill this afternoon 68 to 32. The bill is loaded with tech-industry goodies, including more foreign visas, a special visa for startup entrepreneurs, and unlimited space for brainiac inventors and scientists.

However, Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have unspecified issues with the bill and say the Senate version is a “pipe dream.”

“Apparently some haven’t gotten the message: The House is not going to take up and vote on whatever the Senate passes. We’re going to do our own bill — through regular order — and move the legislation that reflects the will of our majority and the will of the American people,” said speaker of the House, John Boehner at a press conference on Capitol Hill.

The House is intent on moving things through an orderly process of debate, revisions, and committee hearings. Currently, the House has broken up immigration reform into several bills, including a high-skill worker bill that CrunchGov is helping to crowdsource (contribute your ideas here).

So, it’s one big step, but not the goal line yet.

Adobe today announced that it has acquired Neolane, a conversational marketing company with an annual revenue of just under $60 million, in a transaction that’s worth $600 million in cash. Neolane was founded in 2001 and is currently headquartered in Paris, France, with offices around Europe, North America and Asia. The company’s customers include the likes of Accor Hotels, Alcatel-Lucent, IKEA, Samsung, Sony and Dior.

For Adobe, which is putting quite a few resources into its Marketing Cloud, this acquisition adds a new piece to its feature lineup. Adobe does offer Adobe Social, which provides a number of social media-tracking and analysis tools. Neolane’s feature lineup, however, is far larger and includes tools like handling leads, marketing resource management, high-volume email marketing campaigns and a real-time offer recommendation engine for personalized, one-to-one messages. Neolane, Adobe says, will become the sixth solution in the Marketing Cloud, joining its existing Analytics, Target, Social, Experience Manager and Media Optimizer offerings.

Last year, Neolane raised a $27 million funding round led by Battery Ventures with participation by Auriga Partners and XAnge Private Equity.

“The acquisition of Neolane brings critical cross-channel campaign managementcapabilities to the Adobe Marketing Cloud,” said Brad Rencher, senior vice presidentand general manager of Adobe’s Digital Marketing business in a canned statement today. “Adobe has long been the trusted partner to creative professionals and we are now extending our lead in the digital marketing space with the addition of Neolane. From campaign creation through planning, execution and optimization, Adobe technology is driving the entire marketing process.”

Google is trying hard to build out its Street View-style imagery of locales off the beaten path with its Trekker program. The Trekker, a roughly 40-pound backpack that has a camera-ridden sphere poking out over its wearer’s head, captures 360-degree fields of view which are then used to build interactive, first-person views of remote places like the Grand Canyon. Google is now looking for applicants to help it continue to expand its Trekker efforts.

The application is open to non-profits, tourism boards, government agencies, academic or research organizations or other groups interested in helping the search giant document the world. The applications will be reviewed over the next few months, and agencies selected will become part of Google’s pilot program, which is open to organizations around the world.

I got the chance to wear one of the Trekker packs at Google I/O this year, and to discuss the program with the tech’s co-creator, Steve Silverman. At the time, Silverman said that Google would be building out its Trekker program in the coming months, and it’s looking at outside partners to help with that, including the inaugural partner for this expansion, the Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau. It makes sense that Google would turn to the people who know the terrain best to help them chart and capture Trekker Street View scenery, rather than trying to do it all themselves.

If they’re looking for anyone to help negotiate the wilds of Toronto’s dense urban jungle, sign me up, but this is more likely a job for those occupying greener spaces.

New Relic and Microsoft will offer performance anaytics to gain insight into the performance of native apps and websites running on Windows Azure.

The new performance package allows New Relic customers to:

• Use a new optimized New Relic .NET agent designed for Windows Azure Web Site services.
• Analytics for the performance of applications deployed on the Windows Azure Web Sites.
• Support for iOS and Android mobile apps.
• End-to-end visibility, from the individual mobile device to Windows Azure Mobile Services backend services.
• Data from app users and sessions to see what users are experiencing.
• Monitoring of HTTP app errors and performance problems, which can be as bad or worse than crashes.
• Views of performance data by geography, carrier, device type and app versions to prioritize, isolate and solve problems with the app in question.
• Monitoring of external services.

New Relic already provides app performance for the Windows Azure services and solutions. These include Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Windows Azure Cloud Services, Web and Worker Role Instances. They also offer integration with Windows Azure SQL Database, which is available as a plugin to send data to the New Relic Platform.

The news follows New Relic’s announcement last week about opening its platform for developers to build their own performance services for apps they have deployed.

Just in time for Wimbledon, Rolocule Games is releasing a new tennis game today. It’s not Rolocule’s first foray into virtual racquet sports, but it is the first that turns your iPhone into the controller and Apple TV into a gaming console.

The Motion Tennis app, which costs $7.99, uses the iPhone’s gyroscope, magnetometer, and accelerometer to track the phone’s motion, so players can slice and slam shots across the court. All you need is an Apple TV and an iPhone: hook the two up, open the app, and you’re playing tennis.

Rolocule is selling rolomotion — its name for the technology that powers Motion Tennis — on a few points, one being that it eliminates the necessity for a console system and lets people play on any Apple TV, anywhere. Rolocule will eventually be releasing Motion Badminton and Squash as well, and they’re working on a shooting game unofficially called “Die Zombies Die!”

While Rolocule has only stepped into immediate competition with games like Wii Tennis today, it’s easy to see the implications of developing good console-free gaming. It’s a huge market to cut into, and rolomotion games are light, portable, and relatively cheap, excluding the $99 Apple TV.

Rolocule raised an angel round in India last year with Mumbai Angels and Blume Ventures, though Gupta would not disclose how much they raised. He said that they might be looking to raise again, especially if they want to become leaders in this technology. I wouldn’t put it past them.

It’s also a look into iPhone games that don’t involve tilting or swiping across the screen, which founder Rohit Gupta said has limited the creative breadth of games. That may be true, but it would seem that the first move for rolomotion would be to replicate every console game possible. Creativity can come after total game domination.

Oh, and you might want to invest in one of those iPhone cases with an elastic strap on the back. You know, so you don’t end up ruining your TV and your phone.

[Image from Rolocule]

Facebook’s just lost some critical business talent. Today, ads product director Gokul Rajaram was poached by Square, and now Facebook Exchange director Antonio Garcia-Martinez, who left in April, has signed on with one of Facebook’s top ad partners, Nanigans. Garcia-Martinez could help Nanigans keep adapting to Facebook’s ever-changing ad platform.

Founded in 2010, Nanigans has become a powerhouse in the social advertising world. It began with a focus on helping game developers determine the ROI of their marketing spend by showing how far users brought in through ads got into a game. With time it expanded into more traditional brand advertising on Facebook.

What’s really differentiated Nanigans, though, is its ability to keep up with the breakneck pace of the evolution of Facebook’s ads products. It quickly integrated Facebook’s Custom Audiences system, which lets advertisers reach a set of people they already have the email addresses or phone numbers for. It also built out real-time bidding demand side platform retargeting technology so it could serve Facebook Exchange (FBX) ads, which are targeted based on cookies showing where else someone has browsed on the web.

That’s how it ended up working with Antonio. Years ago he sold his Y Combinator adtech startup, AdGrok, to Twitter but jumped ship to join Facebook. There he built FBX and directed the product from its inception.

From his privileged vantage point, Garcia-Martinez could assess all of Facebook’s Preferred Marketing Developers, and when he left, he knew he had a hunch about who he wanted to work with. “Nanigans is the real deal. They were on top of all the innovative products Facebook was building. It’s the one company that does both sides well — traditional Facebook ads and retargeting. Basically, I thought they were the best PMD partner that Facebook has.”

Those two sides combine to give Nanigans some advantages, Antonio explains. “From a purely sales perspective, an advertiser like Fab.com has a pretty big social budget and they do FB ads, but want to do retargeting, as well. They can have their entire Facebook buy through one company.

“There’s also interesting things you could imagine in social and real-time bidding,” Antonio tells me, referring to the fact that right now Facebook advertisers can’t combine its traditional biographical targeting with cookie-based retargeting. I expect to make that combination available eventually if it can figure out the privacy implications. “If Facebook goes in that direction, straddling that divide could be interesting,” Antonio says with a hint that he hopes Facebook relaxes the restrictions on what advertisers can do.

Don’t expect him to give Nanigans any unfair help, though. “I’m still completely held to my confidentiality restrictions, of course. Frankly, Facebook’s product roadmap changes so quickly that anything I know would date so quickly I don’t think there are beans I could spill.”

DigitalOcean is quickly becoming a household name in the web-hosting world. For $5 a month, the company lets you rent a basic virtual private server (or “droplets,” as the company calls them) with 512MB of RAM and a 20GB of SSD-powered hard disk space in one of its three locations (two in the U.S. and one in Amsterdam). The company, as its co-founder and CEO Ben Uretsky told me, believes that its focus on simplicity, speed and keeping prices low will allow it to effectively challenge the incumbents in this space.

Things are clearly working out well so far. Over the last few months, DigitalOcean has become one of the fastest-growing cloud providers in the U.S. and has now launched mor than 225,000 servers for its customers (and because it uses KVM and SSDs, it typically launches these in under 55 seconds). According to Netcraft, DigitalOcean had grown from being home to just under 140 IP addresses in December 2012 to 7,134 this June.

TechStars

Uretsky told me that getting to this point was a bit of a struggle, though. The company eventually made it into the summer 2012 TechStars program in Denver, thanks to recommendations from Slicehost founder Jason Seats and other mentors. But at the beginning, there was “very little love” for a startup that wanted to disrupt the hosting space. Uretsky and his co-founders previously worked in the dedicated server space for 15 years and already had plenty of experience in managing servers and building hosting-related companies. Uretsky, however, says he still wanted to subject himself and the team to the pressure of joining an accelerator program and to build a large network of mentors — something he didn’t do with his first company.

The team was very strategic about jumping into this space and did lots of competitive analysis before it launched. Uretsky believes that every company, at heart, is a marketing company, so the team is clearly focused on honing its message. One thing DigitalOcean realized is that getting started with platforms like Amazon Web Services or Azure is very complicated, even for experienced developers.

Because of this, the team decided to focus strongly on keeping things simple, and a quick look at the DigitalOcean dashboard already tells you that they are taking this approach very seriously. Everything is laid out with lots of whitespace, and spinning up a new server — or taking is offline — is a matter of two clicks. The developers that DigitalOcean is targeting (right now that’s mostly individual developers’ startup teams) want flexibility and on-demand resources.

Today, DigitalOcean is already profitable, Uretsky says. Quite a few pundits have wondered whether the company’s low-cost model is sustainable, but Uretsky notes that its scale is now allowing the company to negotiate bulk deals on hardware and bandwidth that keeps its costs down. It’s also operating at a pretty healthy margin that scales across its pricing plans.

Coming Soon: More Data Centers, Focus On Features

Looking ahead, DigitalOcean is planning to launch a data center in Brazil, followed by a location in Asia (either Singapore or Hong Kong) and then India. The company also just hired 28 new employees to allow it to move from just sustaining its quick growth to launching new features. The first of these new features (which is already in beta), is support for quickly launching pre-configured servers with basic LAMP setups and similar use cases.

Sometimes I refer to Kickstarter as the “land of broken dreams,” especially when I’m looking through my backer history and noting how few projects actually delivered, and how disappointing were most of the ones that did. The Boombot Rex does not fall into either of those categories, thanks to an experienced team that sent me a review unit of the shipping product a couple of weeks ago.

• 6 hours battery, 1 hour charging time
• 85mm x 80mm x 54mm
• 3.5mm aux input
• Bluetooth
• MSRP: $119.99
• Product info page

The Boombot Rex has a design that isn’t quite like any other Bluetooth speaker out there, with a pretty much hexagonal shape that can be easily palmed, only a little bit larger than a hockey puck. It’s extremely portable, and that’s sort of the point: The Rex has a clip built into the back, and it’s meant to be the speaker you reach for when you set out on an adventure, thanks to weather resistance and a general hardiness that comes in handy while hiking, camping, biking, fighting pirates or whatever else.

The surface of the Rex is coated in a matte, rubberized ABS plastic housing, which is both durable and pleasant to touch, and there are a number of colorways to choose from. We got the “Savage Green” edition, given TC’s penchant for green things, and while the vibrant colors make it look a little like a child’s toy, the feel of the speaker suggests tremendous durability, as it’s completely solid and there’s no errant rattling or anything else going on. The clip is perfect for securing it to some board shorts, and there are flaps to keep mud, dirt and water out of the speaker’s three ports.

The Rex has a built-in speakerphone, and the noise cancelling tech used make it good for that purpose. It can also call up Siri with a long-press of the center button (between volume up and down) on the top of the speaker, and in my testing the iOS virtual assistant was as effective as when used from the phone itself. It’s perfect for a device meant to help you enjoy music and also stay connected while you’re doing activities where earbuds or headphones would hamper you.

It works really well. I can’t believe the sound that comes out of this diminutive speaker. It’s not on par with something like the Big Jambox, but it’s very capable with its dual drivers, especially considering its other advantages, even when biking through a forest on a fairly fast wooded path. And its durability works, too. I used it in light rain, and fell off my bike a few times with it on, and the Rex didn’t skip a beat, which is more than I can say for my shins.

Battery life is about what Boombot advertises for the Rex. It isn’t anywhere near the longest in the category, but it does the job, especially for active outings. As a set-and-forget option for camping trips, I’d have appreciated a lot more reach, maybe say double the time the Rex puts out.

Speakerphone functions work great on this unit as mentioned, though, and the Siri integration is actually really handy for quickly checking stuff like the weather forecast or for making calls without ever having to take your phone out of your pocket, which can really come in handy if you’re caught in the rain or, I dunno, sliding down the side of a mountain.

An active lifestyle is an oft-used marketing strategy, for electronics in particular. But the Rex actually is a good device for people who regularly expose themselves to the elements, it isn’t just posturing as one. And even if your desire to live a little more extreme is more aspirational than anything else, the Rex is a solid option in a portable Bluetooth speaker in any circumstances, that at least offers you the option of getting out of the office once in a while.

We already told you that Andrew Mason, the Groupon founder who was ousted from the CEO role there earlier this year, was dead serious when he said last month that he was planning to release a motivational album about career success called “Hardly Workin‘” (Mason is known pretty well for his sense of humor, so many people thought he had to be joking about his foray into music.)

Well, for those of us who have been very curious to hear Mason dropping workplace knowledge in musical format, the wait is almost over.

In a post on his personal blog today, Mason (who recently moved from Chicago to San Francisco) said that Hardly Workin‘ will be released next week through the usual channels (“iTunes, Spotify, etc.”) on Tuesday, July 2nd — “just in time for American audiences to incorporate into Fourth of July festivities.”

He also revealed the album’s cover art, which is embedded in this post, as well as the seven-song track listing:

1. Look No Further
2. The Way to Work
3. My Door is Always Open
4. Risin’ Above the Pack
5. K.I.S.S.
6. Stretch
7. It’s Up to Us

As a recap, Mason has characterized the idea behind Hardly Workin’ as follows:

“I managed over 12,000 people at Groupon, most under the age of 25. One thing that surprised me was that many would arrive at orientation with minimal understanding of basic business wisdom. …I came to realize that there was a real need to present business wisdom in a format that is more accessible to the younger generation.

It was with this in mind that I spent a week in LA earlier this month recording Hardly Workin’, a seven song album of motivational business music targeted at people newly entering the workforce. These songs will help young people understand some of the ideas that I’ve found to be a key part of becoming a productive and effective employee.”

The whole situation is so unique that a lot of people probably won’t quite believe it till they see (and hear) it. But I’ve heard on good authority that the album is indeed real, and the songs are pretty good — “really interesting” is one characterization I’ve heard. The rest of us will find out for ourselves in just a few days.

Applifier, which runs a mobile-social gaming network where players can share video playbacks of their virtual feats, is pulling FaceCam, a product using the front-facing camera, out of beta.

FaceCam records a person’s gameplay and their facial expressions while they’re playing from the front-facing camera. It sometimes can look a bit awkward (see here) or hilarious, but for some gamers, it’s the most vivid way to share how twitchy a game can be. The Helsinki and San Francisco-based startup incorporated FaceCam into games like NimbleBit’s Nimble Quest and Angry Birds-maker Rovio’s Bad Piggies in the beta.

The company says it’s seeing about two minutes of gameplay video shared every minute, with the volume of time growing 750 percent compared to the first quarter of this year. Month-over-month, the company says, the number of minutes shared has grown by more than 25 percent.

They didn’t disclose the raw number of videos shared, however. With improvement in data connections, we’re seeing mobile app makers — both in the general consumer space and in gaming — adopt more video features. On the general consumer side, Twitter’s Vine took off on the free charts and accumulated 13 million users as of a few weeks ago, while Instagram launched video last week.

In gaming, both the major consoles, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, announced built-in video sharing while Twitch, which stream live match-ups for video gamers, reports 35 million unique viewers a month who watch about 1.5 hours of video play each day on average.

Applifier, with its network Everyplay, is looking to replicate that video-sharing experience on mobile platforms. The company has a longstanding network for cross-promoting social games on Facebook, and pivoted (like much of the rest of the industry) to mobile platforms over the last year.

Last year, they launched a beta for sharing mobile gaming replays. Then they added front-facing camera options after closing a $4 million second venture round led by Finland’s Lifeline Ventures. They are also backed by MHS Capital, PROfounders Capital, Tekes and Webb Investment Network.