Category: Tech news

Kik has raised a $19.5M Series B funding round, the company revealed today, led by Foundation Capital and including RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The Waterloo-based messaging app company will be using the funding to help continue to support its growth, and the new injection of cash comes at a crucial point for the company as it sets its sights on broader platform ambitions with the recently introduced Cards feature.

I spoke with Kik CEO Ted Livingston about the funding, and asked him specifically about what he thought of WhatsApp’s announcement from last week that it was now larger than Twitter in terms of active monthly users. Kik, which recently crossed the 50 million user milestone and is adding on new ones at a rate of about 200,000 per day, is far behind WhatsApp in terms of its user base, but Livingston said Kik is much more focused on the long-term goal of what comes next for a messaging app than its most direct competitor.

“There are two sides to it. On one side, they’re massive, they’re killing it, no question they’re bigger than Twitter. There never was a question in my mind that they’re bigger than Twitter,” he said. “But when asked about being a platform, [CEO Jan Koum] just completely dismissed it. He said it wouldn’t be good for WhatsApp’s users, and that the company wants to focus, but also knowing that Kakao has had incredible success doing just that.”

The take on the messaging space that WhatsApp seems to be taking is a little reminiscent of when BlackBerry essentially ignored the iPhone and the launch of the App Store, Livingston says. Kik, by contrast, seems to be making a larger bet that a model based around turning a messaging app into something more, with the inclusion of its Cards (HTML5 apps within an app which will soon be opened to outside developers), will ultimately lead to a richer experience that results in more lasting long-term growth.

Kik’s choice of investment partners this time around also reflects its larger goals around building a platform and using that to explore monetization options. Foundation Partners, a new investor for Kik, was chosen precisely based on its strength in those areas, Livingston tells me.

“What’s great about Foundation is that obviously it’s a great firm, and a lot of those involved have been entrepreneurs, and they’ve done like Chegg, Netflix and Pocket,” he said. “But Anamitra [Banerji] who handled this investment and just became a partner, was employee number 30 at Twitter, first product manager and created and drove all their monetization. So he’s basically the perfect guy for what we want to do.”

Kik is a growing player in a rich and diverse field, but like WhatsApp and others, the time has come for these companies to emerge and prove they have monetization plans that work, if they aren’t looking for an easy exit. This funding will help as Kik begins to mature its own platform goals, which so far seem to be catching on with its existing users.

Event registration and ticketing service Eventbrite announced earlier today that it has raised $60 million in new funding.

The round was led by Tiger Global Management, which previously led Eventbrite’s $50 million Series E. New investor T. Rowe Price also participated. In the funding press release, CEO Kevin Hartz argues that “live experiences are the new luxury good” and describes the round is “the most efficient way” to scale Eventbrite globally “while remaining totally focused on our users.”

Last month, the company said that it had processed more than 100 million tickets since its founding in 2006, for $1.5 billion in cumulative sales. One-third of those sales occurred in the previous nine months.

“Kevin and his team have built a sustainable business that not only captures real value, but also uncovers new sources of revenue at very low cost,” said Tiger Global partner Lee Fixel in the release. “We are pleased to increase our investment in Eventbrite to help the company further expand its tools and platform.”

Eventbrite says it has now raised a total of $140 million.

WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties.

For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar pattern. Over the last few months, WordPress.com has been making a concerted effort to launch special verticals for businesses like restaurants and use cases like sites for schools and personal portfolios for photographers and designers. The emphasis here is clearly on showing how WordPress.com can be more than “just” a blogging tool and emphasizes the service’s overall content-management features.

The new responsive theme is fully customizable and specifically geared toward hotels. It uses WordPress’ page template feature to allow owners to add the details about their rooms and amenities and also features a reservations widget that allows users to easily contact the owners with their travel plans. This widget, it is worth noting, does not allow users to directly book a room, however, and isn’t currently integrated with any payments solution.

Typically, WordPress uses these announcements to highlight some of its paid upgrades like custom domains, extra storage and custom design features. Most hotel and B&B owners probably don’t need these, so the company doesn’t highlight them in today’s release, but chances are, WordPress.com’s overall strategy of launching these verticals is mostly geared toward adding more professional users to the platform, given that they will also be more likely to pay for these upgrades.

CA Technologies announced this morning that it has acquired API management company Layer 7. It is the second major acquisition of an API management company in the past week, signaling a consolidation of a market that larger companies see as vital for closing the gap between on-premise and online infrastructure and apps.

Last week, Intel acquired Mashery for $180 million. The acquisition price for Layer 7 was not disclosed but the Mashery price serves as  a good guide for what CA was ready to pay. CA also announced it is buying Nolio, a company that provides  continuous application delivery.

In a press release,  CA said its solution combined with Layer 7 will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and better deliver applications in the cloud across mobile and web environments.

CA said the acquisition will help:

• Securely enable strategic cloud, mobile and “Internet of Things” initiatives through API security and management
• Accelerate service delivery and increase profitability by externalizing and monetizing existing application assets that are securely offered via APIs
• Expand the network of API developers by offering a convenient API development platform that provides all the tools necessary to discover, publish and test APIs
• Govern API activity in order to enforce SLAs, improve operational performance and monetize big data transactions
• Secure the externalized API business through authentication, authorization, auditing and threat protection.

Layer 7 is considered one of the leaders in the API management space. It competes with Mashery and providers such as Apigee, which remains an independent company. The space also encompasses back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) providers such as Kinvey, Parse and Stackmob.

APIs have long been a staple for app developers. With the advent of REST-based APIs, the web and mobile app space boomed, providing the means to  integrate multiple services in one application. With today’s enterprise, the need is to integrate online and on-premise architectures. It becomes important to build a layer around applications that can be connected with APIs  to pull out relevant information that feeds into other systems.

That strategy seems to be a part of what makes Layer 7 appealing to CA.

The acquisition appears complenentary to the Nolio purchase, which “reinforces the enterprise evolution of DevOps – the confluence of application development and deployment via IT operations”, said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. He goes on to explain “how more enterprise and service-provider customers are implementing automation, continuous deployment and DevOps more broadly.”

That puts CA in a spot to provide a next generation of IT services for the emerging federated IT environment that bridges on-premise and the cloud.

The Archive Team, the same group who once saved around 900 GB of Geocities content before Yahoo shut it down, later releasing it in torrent format, is now focusing on archiving content from another Yahoo property preparing to hit the chopping block: Upcoming.org. The collective’s involvement in saving the index of the events database follows an impassioned plea from creator Andy Baio, who recently explained how Yahoo’s security made it difficult to back up the site’s content by simply scraping pages.

His post on Friday – well worth the read for the personal insight on what it was like to watch Yahoo slowly destroy his startup following the acquisition – has him calling the choice to sell to Yahoo “a horrible mistake,” and Yahoo “a particularly horrible steward for the community” Upcoming.org had built.

Baio doesn’t at all mince words in his post, saying that the team came into Yahoo hopeful, but soon discovered that the tech company wouldn’t live up to its promises. He wrote:

It wasn’t clear how dysfunctional the rest of Yahoo was until we’d settled in, and there was no indication how horrible they’d soon become in the years to follow. This was long before they gave up dissidents to the Chinese government, closed Geocities, weaponized their patents, “sunsetted” Delicious, and a number of other awful decisions.

The founder, also known for having built Playfic and Supercut, and helping to build Kickstarter, among other things, refers Yahoo’s decision to shutter Upcoming.org as “Yahoo’s typical f***-off-and-die style,” noting that the company offered only eleven days of notice and no way to back up past events.

He then detailed some of the technical challenges involved with attempting to archive from Upcoming, saying that even though its events and venues use auto-incremented IDs, Yahoo security measures only allow for scraping a few pages using curl or httrack before Yahoo starts serving up blank responses.

Baio then asks the community for help with getting a dump in any form.

As it turns out, the community had already stepped in. Baio tells us that he heard about the closure from friends, and then posted about it on the afternoon of the 19th. But he soon realized that the Archive Team had started rescue work of their own, after checking out this Github repository.

And now, the Archive Team needs your help, too, if you’re at all inclined.

The team, led by computer historian Jason Scott, has experience pulling down content from not only Geocities, but also other sites and services like Friendster, MobileMe, and Fortune City. It’s also currently working on Posterous, Formspring, plus Gamespy, 1up, UGO, and IGN, to name a few.

To help with Upcoming.org’s archival efforts, interested participants can download and install ArchiveTeam Warrior for Windows, Mac or Linux. The software is a virtual appliance that helps anyone to archive websites, then backup the saved content to Archive Team servers.

After you install the application, just choose the “Upcoming” project to begin the backup process, or choose “ArchiveTeam’s Choice,” which allows the team to adjust the software’s focus on demand. You can track progress of the Upcoming.org archival process here.

Here’s how the software works, an explanation courtesy of Baio himself:

Baio says that the Archive Team’s software also addresses the technical challenges he had previously encountered, noting that “they’re very thorough.”

And he adds that while he has no plans to ever relaunch Upcoming, he does want to put the saved content back online. “I’m hoping to set up a permanent archive for posterity and some visualizations of the site’s activity over the last decade,” Baio explains.

If you have spare cycles, it’s a lot more beneficial than bitcoin mining these days, that’s for sure.

Football is a sport that brings everyone together, even if you’re not a diehard fan or have never played the game yourself. The rush of energy that comes with rooting for your favorite team and arm-chair-quarterbacking an entire game is something people around the world do every Sunday.

For those who need to live, eat and breathe football throughout the week, fantasy football is an essential part of the pageantry leading up to every week’s packed NFL schedule. It’s a packed space, with Yahoo!, ESPN and the NFL itself having online leagues you can join with your friends and strangers. The model hasn’t changed though, with the premise being selecting the players that you think will perform the best throughout the season, collecting points as they play games week after week.

A familiar name and face, four-time Super Bowl champion quarterback, Joe Montana, has his own spin on fantasy football, and will be releasing an app called iMFL prior to the start of this year’s NFL season. The app is part fantasy football, part predictive social “game,” with the ability to place bets with friends as games play out in real-time. For example, you could guess that the next play will be an interception. If you’re right, the points are yours. The hope is that you’ll be playing around with iMFL on your iPhone or iPad while you watch the game with friends, no matter where they are.

Montana and his co-founder Damon Grow, CEO of Crowdmob, came into the office to give us an exclusive preview:

The app isn’t available yet, but it will be out on Apple’s App Store, so get ready. It’s a crowded space, but I think with the in-app purchases and constant real-time engagement, iMFL could do well. This isn’t a one-time thing for Montana, as he tells me that there are a few other projects that he’s working on which he’ll share with us soon.

Bonus: This isn’t Montana’s first “game,” as fans will remember Joe Montana’s Sports Talk Football for Sega Genesis. It was impressive back in 1991, but the Madden series won out and become a blockbuster success:

The latest electric motorcycle from Zero ditches the internal combustion engine, but keeps the speed and the euphoria.

Earlier this month, we wrote that High Fidelity, the virtual world startup led by Second Life founder Philip Rosedale, had raised $2.4 million of a $3.4 million round, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. However, we didn’t know who had actually made the investment — until today.

Tony Conrad of True Ventures just announced that his firm led High Fidelity’s Series A, and that Google Ventures and various angel investors also participated. The High Fidelity website now mentions Mitch Kapor and Linden Lab (the company behind Second Life) as investors too.

In his blog post, Conrad praises Rosedale’s achievement in building virtual world Second Life. Then he offers this description of what the new company does:

Philip is truly a Founder of a movement—his passion for authenticity in our virtual interactions is unparalleled. So it stands to reason that his most recent company, High Fidelity, is building a next-generation virtual world enabling even richer avatar interactions, driven by sensor-equipped hardware, simulated and served by devices (phones, tablets and laptops/desktops) contributed by end-users. Together with Co-Founders Fred Heiberger and Ryan Karpf, the High Fidelity team is creating a version of the SETI system, but with computers powering a tiny piece of the virtual world rather than folding proteins or looking for aliens.

If I understand Conrad’s description, as well as the details available on the High Fidelity homepage, the company wants to harness the collective computing power in user devices to build a new kind of virtual world. In case this clears things up: The site also emphasizes the importance of low latency in virtual world interactions, and it declares, “We work in labcoats. Starched and ironed.”

Conrad’s blog post does not mention the size of the round. I’ve emailed True Ventures for to ask and will update if I hear back.

Mobile advertising firm Velti has released its monthly report on advertising impressions across its network. The iPad is far and away the leader when it comes to the tablet market, and is gradually chipping away share from the iPhone in terms of overall dominance among mobile ads. The iPad mini remains a much smaller factor, but is growing steadily, and on the Android side it’s pretty much all about the Kindle Fire.

Velti’s data found that the iPad accounted for 91.6 percent of all tablet ad impression during the month of March, and only lost share to the iPad mini, which gained a full percentage point to come in at 6.2 percent during the month, firmly in second place. The Kindle Fire was the next strongest device, with a comparatively small piece of the pie at 1.6 percent. The Kindle Fire still dominates the Android tablet segment, however, with only the Galaxy Tab line of devices anywhere close. Amazon’s and Samsung’s tablets made up 73.4 percent and 26.2 percent of all Android tablet share, respectively.

Among phones, the iPhone still leads the pack, with the iPhone 4 still leading all handsets with 13.3 percent of the impression share. iPhones accounted for eight of the top 10 devices, with the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III coming in at 8th and 10th place, respectively. Samsung is running away with the Android market in terms of ads served according to Velti’s figures, with 68.2 percent of all Android impressions. That’s no surprise given the company’s clear continued dominance in terms of hardware sales.

In March, most mobile app usage took place during weekends, with a much greater deviation between Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the rest of the week than Velti had seen previously, which perhaps indicates that more people were settling down to do serious work during the month. Finally, Velti also saw click-through-rates continue to grow on Android and shrink on iOS. This means that despite having a much smaller share of overall ad impressions, the ones that are viewed on Android are more likely to convert into some kind of customers action.

That may be due to the more relaxed rules about what types of advertising and campaigns can appear within Android apps vs. those on iOS. Stil, iOS was better in terms of eCPM, but the gap narrowed between it and Android, meaning iOS users resulted in just a little less revenue on average than did Android users for advertisers.

The picture shows a fairly stable overall relationship between ads and the dominant mobile platforms, however; the needle hardly budged in terms of overall impressions. Will a flock of new devices coming to market affect this relationship in the coming months? Too soon to tell, though legacy handsets like the iPhone 4 and 4S, and the Galaxy S II still seem to be firmly entrenched.

Google Ventures’ general partner Karim Faris joined us in the studio this week for Ask A VC, where we put VCs in the hot seat.

Faris, who focuses on the enterprise and e-commerce investments for the firm, talked specifically about the opportunity in the enterprise security space and why we are seeing a growing number of startups succeed in the market. We’re looking at a year of a number of breakout security companies, explains Faris, and maybe even a few IPOs in enterprise security. We also tackled reader questions about where mobile is headed in the enterprise.

Check out the video above for more.

Startup Alley is the loud and boisterous marketplace of Disrupt. Young companies, huddled around cocktail tables demoing their wares, are vying for attention and a spot on the Disrupt stage. All of these startups are amazing and we invite you to visit with this amazing group at Disrupt NY later this month.

We have startups covering nearly every category, including separate pavilions for Brazilian, Israeli and Italian companies. The first two days will feature web startups covering media, mobile, lifestyle, enterprise, and many more. Then, on Wednesday May 1st, hardware companies will take over the Manhattan Center’s exhibit hall for Hardware Alley, our semi-annual celebration of gizmos and gadgets.

The full list of Startup Alley and Hardware Alley companies is here.

These companies are also fighting to demo in front of Disrupt judges on Monday and Tuesday. If selected as the Audience Choice, they’re fast tracked to the Startup Battlefield where they compete for the Disrupt Cup and $50,000 grand prize.

How can you attend?

You can find out more at the Disrupt event page but the gist is this: the event runs from April 29th – May 1st. We’re running a pre-event 24-hour hackathon for folks who want to get one free ticket but, as it stands, you still have the opportunity to pick up a ticket to the show. Or better yet, get a Startup Alley and Hardware Alley package and show off your startup. Packages are available here.

Accelerators, VCs and industry/government associations who would like to partner with us and bring a group of startups either to Disrupt SF or Disrupt Berlin, please email [email protected]

Sponsors: Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here [email protected]

If you’re a big fan of bikes and Airbnb-type sharing economy startups like me, you might have been disappointed to learn that Liquid (née Spinlister), the peer-to-peer bike rental startup, was shut down a few months ago. The service, which launched in New York City last spring, had just opened up to the general public a few months before being put on hiatus. Well, now it’s back, resurrected by one of its seed investors while the founding team moves on to pursue other interests.

After slowly making its peer-to-peer bike rental service available in a few various markets throughout the U.S., Spinlister made it into the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield in San Francisco last September, and soon after launched nationwide.

But then things got weird. A few months later, the tiny little startup rebranded as Liquid, suggesting that its marketplace for bike rentals might expand into a marketplace for other things. And then, both Spinlister and Liquid went dark, as the team shut down rental capabilities and contemplated what they were going to do next.

I met with Spinlister/Liquid co-founder Will Dennis a few weeks ago, as he talked about some ideas that the team had become more passionate about. They liked the idea of video discovery and video messaging, and he showed me some early prototypes of the things they were working on. But it was clear that they weren’t really that interested in continuing to focus on bike rentals.

The good news is that Marcelo Loureiro, Brazilian entrepreneur and seed investor in the startup, was interested in keeping the peer-to-peer marketplace alive. With that in mind, he took over the site and quietly brought the old Spinlister site — and the Spinlister brand — back to life earlier this month.

Loureiro is the quintessential image of the self-made serial entrepreneur, previously building companies in the apparel, restaurant, and beverage industry. He founded Brazilian clothing startup Mandi.net, and had been part of Sagatiba Brasil, a liquor company that sold to Campari a few years ago. Prior to that, he had sold an Internet portal company to Portugal Telecom, and had also run a chain of restaurants in Brazil.

When he invested in Spinlister, he liked the startup’s plans to make better use of underutilized assets, giving people access to things that they otherwise would have to own. And while the ‘Airbnb-for-x’ model still isn’t mainstream, Loureiro believes there’s still a huge opportunity for companies to take advantage of the peer-to-peer business model.

“The peer-to-peer business is going to take a while to take off,” Loureiro told me by phone. “But I still think the idea is really good.” With that in mind, he’s brought back the old Spinlister site, allowing users across the U.S. to once again list and rent bikes through the platform.

While not much has changed since the site went dark, Loureiro has big plans for Spinlister. More than 500 bikes were listed even while it wasn’t operational, but he’s hoping to update the site to make it more attractive and grow the community. That means more social features, as well as the launch of a mobile app to make renting more seamless.

Loureiro hopes to have some major updates ready to release by Memorial Day, when he plans a bigger marketing push around the service. That could also mean opening up the service for rentals outside the U.S., essentially making Spinlister available all over the world.

In a followup email to our original conversation, Loureiro showed some massive enthusiasm for Spinlister, especially after being in the liquor business for so long. It was, frankly, refreshing — especially for an entrepreneur who hadn’t originally founded the startup he’s now running.

“As I told you yesterday I wasn’t expecting to be running Spinlister now,” he wrote. “But I am certainly enjoying the ride and [am] confident on the potential of the business. If I am going to succeed, I don’t know. But I am not afraid to fail.”

This week on the TechCrunch Gadgets Podcast we talk about Google Glass, the Galaxy S4, and the magic of Ubuntu laptops. This time we’re joined by Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, Greg Kumparak, and a pair of underwear that vibrates in Australia. Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3pm Eastern and noon Pacific.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

If terrorism requires an audience, then the recent mainstream adoption of social media may be giving violent actors a bigger stage than ever before. There are many reasons people lash out at the world, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that becoming the center of the attention could be a factor pushing some to commit atrocities. Our retweets could be delivering their messages of fear.

This is not to say social media infamy is the cause of any of the recent tragedies in Boston, or Sandy Hook, or anywhere else. I have no knowledge of the motives of the suspects in those cases. But watching the world feverishly tweet and Facebook post about the manhunt unfolding in Watertown last night frightened me. I couldn’t help but wonder if other angry, disturbed, or mentally ill individuals might be watching, too, and craving that same notoriety. I shuddered to think of a future where a terrorist in hiding laughs as they see their actions trigger millions of mentions.

Some believe that social media’s role is no different than that of traditional media years ago — that terrorists and killers in the 1920s would have just been just as attracted to becoming a newspaper headline as the subject of a sea of tweets. I disagree. Those old outlets were broadcast mediums; they weren’t participatory. Listening to reports of catastrophe on the radio and discussing them with people nearby doesn’t internalize the fear the same way as personally re-sharing and reacting to them in a real-time global forum. Social media instills emotions deeper.

According to Max Abrahms, PhD, a counter-terrorism research fellow at Johns Hopkins and author of “What Terrorists Really Want” from the International Security journal, ”One thing counter-terrorism researchers want to know is what is the motive of the terrorist. They want to know that because they want to deprive terrorism of any utility. If we could remove the value of committing terrorism they wouldn’t do it.” He tells me, “One of the main goals of terrorists is to get attention. By it’s very definition, terrorism requires an audience, so it’s no surprise the advent of terrorism came alongside the growth of mass media in the 1880s. Social media today no doubt spreads the message of terrorists even quicker and to more people.”

We’ve already seen perpetrators make use of social media to promote their point of view, like Christopher Dorner who was caught in an extended manhunt after killing several police officers in February. He may have wanted the manifesto he posted to Facebook accusing police of corruption to be widely shared. And we shared it. His message hit closer to home because it was our friends distributing it, rather than a newspaper like the letters from the Zodiac Killer.

If killing sprees are a cry for attention or help or an attempt to show the world someone’s pain, then our fixation on tragedy, our willingness to pause our lives and spread the news bit by bit could be playing into their hands.

In fact, when video footage of Osama Bin Laden in his compound was recovered, Abrahms says one of the most striking things we found was that Osama was sitting on his sofa watching himself on television. It suggests terrorists do derive utility from knowing millions of people are paying attention to them.

Our real-time updates can even have real negative consequences for the safety of those involved in pursuits of criminals. In February during the Dorner manhunt, the San Bernardino District Attorney tweeted that “The sheriff has asked all members of the press to stop tweeting immediately. It is hindering officer safety. And last night, the Boston Police Department discouraged people from posting what they heard on police scanners:

#MediaAlert: WARNING: Do Not Compromise Officer Safety by Broadcasting Tactical Positions of Homes Being Searched.—
Boston Police Dept. (@Boston_Police) April 19, 2013

UPDATE: Boston Police are asking social media users not to post information they hear on police frequencies/scanner channels.—
CBS News (@CBSNews) April 19, 2013

But does this kind of attention inspire violence? When I asked Abrahms who studied at Oxford and has spoken on Al Jazeera, he explained “In a sense, yes. Ideally we would completely ignore terrorism.” That’s not to say discussion is bad, and Abrahms notes social media’s potential to surface evidence in investigations. Still, propagating the fear and grief caused by acts of violence has the potential to satisfy those who commit them.

This isn’t a call for guilt, or even abrupt change, but for mindfulness. When the Internet crowds around tragedy, do we think about the impact of feverishly sharing the latest gruesome details? There is a difference between distributing actionable news and trumpeting fear, and being aware of that difference is critical now that we each have our own audience.

Abrahms concludes, and I agree, “if people are sharing news stories they find intellectually interesting, there’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is if people internalize it and come to overestimate the chance of they themselves being victim of a terrorist attack. You don’t want society to overreact.”

Yahoo has just announced a change in strategy designed to prep it for the mobile age and let it concentrate on core products like the Mail and Weather apps it launched yesterday. Soon, it will shut down Upcoming, Deal, SMS Alerts, Yahoo Kids, Yahoo! Mail and Messenger feature phone (J2ME) apps, and some older versions of Yahoo! Mail. People simply don’t have the bandwidth for dozens of apps, so best to do a few well.

When I spoke to Yahoo earlier this year, representatives mentioned the company had over 80 mobile apps. Yet I know few people with any from Yahoo on their homescreen. That’s the real estate that truly matters, so cutting the fat and focusing on where it can really be best in class seems like a smart move.

On April 30th, many of this round will go dark. As for the details, Upcoming and its API will shut down and you can download your info here. Deals will close but you can save your coupons first. SMS Alerts will stop but you can follow Yahoo’s various news sites with its mobile apps, or set up email alerts through Yahoo Messenger. Kids, formerly Yahooligans, but kids under 13 can still get a  Yahoo ID through the Family Accounts program. Feature phone (J2ME) versions of Mail and Messenger will close, but you can still use the mobile web versions of Mail and Messenger, or download the native apps.

As for older versions of Yahoo Mail including Yahoo Mail Classic, they will close starting the week of June 3rd. Yahoo encourages people to switch to the new Mail product, and to use the HTML only / basic version if you’re on a slow connection, dial-up, or old browser. Yahoo also offers a Mail migration program.

The question now is what about Yahoo’s bigger products that don’t perform as well, such as Search and Maps. I heard rumors soon after Marissa Mayer took charge that she was not interested in competing with Google’s far superior maps product anymore. That means this could be just the first wave of shut downs.

[Image via]