Category: Tech news

Here’s yet another sad turn in the story of one of social networking’s also-rans.

Bebo, the early U.K.-based social network that AOL bought for $850 million only to turn around and sell for less than $10 million later, may see its current CEO Adam Levin go.

The company’s shareholders, who include the original co-founder Michael Birch, filed a motion today in California superior court to have a receiver appointed for the company. That court-appointed receiver would take over the company’s assets and day-to-day operations. It may take at least another two weeks for the court to come to a decision as it extended the hearing today, said Eric Benisek, the attorney representing the plaintiffs.

He said that Levin and Criterion hadn’t opposed the appointment of a receiver.

“Unless we did something funny with the papers, the expectation is that the court will grant the motion,” Benisek said.

Levin did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

This is the latest development in a nearly year-old lawsuit that pit minority shareholders like Birch, Richie Hecker, SV Angel against Criterion Capital Partners, the Los Angeles-based private equity firm that bought the site from AOL in 2010.

In a suit they filed early last year asking for $5 million in damages, they claimed that as CEO, Levin let Bebo default on its lease, resulting in an eviction from its San Francisco offices.

Levin then allegedly moved the company down to Los Angeles, without consulting the board. The suit also claimed that Levin paid himself $14,000 a month (or about $168,000 a year) as CEO even though he wasn’t working full-time at the company and was focused on other work for Criterion.

It also said that the company didn’t hold any board meetings for at least 20 months and didn’t turn over financial information about the performance of the company over to the board.

Since that suit was filed, the company also allegedly didn’t pay its review fees to operate as a registered company in Australia.

The new motion and its letters of support from other plaintiffs also say that Levin let leads for the sale of the company to potential buyers like Tagged and AdKnowledge die. Hecker, who owns less than 10 percent of the company, said in a letter of support for today’s filing that Adknowledge had talked about a potential sale for $15 million plus a $15 million earnout, but Levin never provided financials to AdKnowledge, letting the talks die.

The plaintiffs say that if a receiver isn’t put in charge of the company, it is in “severe danger of destruction.”

It would be a sad end to one of social networking’s early forerunners. At the time of its sale to AOL back in 2008, Bebo was the second largest social network in the U.K. after Facebook. It claimed that it had 40 million users who spent an average of 40 minutes a day on the site at that time.

Motion to appoint a receiver for Bebo by Kim-Mai Cutler

Request for Judicial Notice in Bebo shareholder lawsuit by Kim-Mai Cutler

Plaintiffs Memorandum in support of motion for receivership by Kim-Mai Cutler

Declaration of support for motion from Richie Hecker by Kim-Mai Cutler

<a style="text-decoration:underline;" title="View Original Bebo shareholder suit<br /><br />
on Scribd” href=”http://www.scribd.com/doc/124167200/Original-Bebo-shareholder-suit”>Original Bebo shareholder suit by Kim-Mai Cutler

You may not be familiar with her name, but Judy Estrin has quietly become one of Silicon Valley’s most successful serial entrepreneurs and executives. She began her career working with Vint Cerf’s research group at Stanford University — the same one that played a central role in the development of the Internet. Since the early ’80s, she has founded seven technology companies, has served as the CTO of Cisco Systems and held board positions at FedEx for 20 years, Sun Microsystems for eight years, and currently sits on the board of The Walt Disney Company (a position she’s held since 1998). Oh, and she’s also the author of “Closing the Innovation Gap” and led the team that developed one of the first commercial local area networks (LAN).

While it’s been years since Estrin last paid a visit to Startup World, this past year she stepped out of retirement with the help of her son, David Carrico. In late 2011, Carrico teamed up with designers Alex and Jonathan Beckman to found a startup called EvntLive, a digital music venue for live and on-demand concerts that is set to launch later this quarter. Estrin tells us that, initially, she had only planned to act as an advisor, but as the business evolved over the last year, she decided to take on.

While the family connection undoubtedly provides an extra incentive, the veteran Silicon Valley exec now finds herself as the Executive Chair of EnvtLive (and one of its early investors) — roles that she wouldn’t have assumed if she didn’t believe in the mission, she says, or its potential to become a sustainable business.

That mission, by the way, is an ambitious one: To create a scalable platform to stream live concerts ranging from sold-out arenas to intimate clubs, backed by a curated library of shows fans may have missed, integrated with social media, behind-the-scenes video and e-commerce.

Based on this mission (and with help from Estrin), the startup has recruited music industry talent like Troy Carter, who has joined the team as an advisor and early investor. Carter is a well-known music manager as well as the founder and CEO of Atom Factory (a music management company), which represents Lady Gaga and John Legend, among others. He’s also an active angel investor, having invested in companies like PopChips, Uber and Backplane, to name a few.

To fuel its early development, EvntLive raised $2.3 million in seed funding, as Estrin and Carter have been joined by an impressive roster of investors, including “Father of the Internet” and Google exec, Vint Cerf, Mayfield Fund partner and Glooko Chairman, Yogen Dalal, former Intel exec Dave House, Silicon Valley Connect Managing Director Ellen Levy, Tapjoy President and CEO Steve Wadsworth, Former Summit Partners director Walter Kortschak, Judy O’Brien, Jack Lasersohm, Roberta Katz and Amal Johnson, among others.

Of course, while the startup’s leadership and its investor roster may be impressive, that talent means nothing if the business itself is a dud. Plus, it’s not as if the backdrop doesn’t have its own set of challenges. The music industry has changed dramatically in the last five years, fundamentally destroyed (or saved, depending on how you look at it) by digital technologies. The industry, and the record labels that once defined it, have a long road ahead as they attempt to adapt to new distribution, marketing, recording and manufacturing models — and rebuild.

While the industry is still shaky, Estrin believes that the emergence of this new music industry and the changing nature of music consumption is finally creating the right conditions under which a dedicated, destination platform for live music and concerts can be successful. Of course, EvntLive is hardly alone in eying the potential of the live, online events space — or the first to dive in.

YouTube, Livestream and Ustream, for example, each offer streaming concerts to some degree and are clearly interested in expanding their presence in the market; however, at this point, concerts are just one piece of their broad, streaming video services and far from being their only focus. Meanwhile, smaller companies like Concert Window, StageIt and Qello have also been finding traction in the space (particularly the latter).

Qello, for example, offers access to a growing catalog of high-definition (mostly rock) concerts across platforms, but most notably through awesome iOS, AppleTV and Android apps. That said, Qello has focused more on building a platform around archival concerts, not so much on the live side of the business. The EvntLive executive director sees these startup platforms as being more “niche focused” and that by offering bigger artists, bigger venues and by combining social, interactivity and telling the story behind the show, the startup has the opportunity to build a more appealing experience for fans and artists.

She also believes that EvntLive can also benefit from those macro changes taking hold of the music industry, particularly around distribution. With the scale of digital distribution channels, it’s easier than ever before for artists to get their music into the ears of listeners and tap into new (and potentially much larger) audiences. With music moving towards free, revenue growth (and profits) for both artists and businesses are increasingly coming from live performances and touring. Of course, there are limitations to this growth, as artists can only play so many venues and, in turn, venues only have so many seats.

Expanding touring online can remove some of those limitations and allow the industry and its artists to add another revenue stream. In the big picture, Estrin says, the music industry has finally realized that it has to embrace digital models instead of fighting them tooth and nail, which is slowly beginning to work in startups’ favor. Of course, the evolution of the online live performance space is really just beginning, and it remains to be seen whether or not the timing is right for a platform like EvntLive.

To help tilt things in its favor, the team made a conscious decision to resist rushing to market. Rather than launch early, pushing an MVP into customer’s hands right away and scramble to iterate, the team has been developing and testing the platform for over a year now. The company’s web services technology, in particular, is the product of its acquisition of Nubo9 — a software company founded by Bharat Welingkar and Matt Gloier, who previously helped lead cloud services engineering at Barnes & Noble (specifically at Nook). Nubo9 built a software platform to help develop and operate mobile APIs at scale, which EvntLive acquired last year and has since made the core of its backend technology.

While Estrin and company aren’t ready to divulge all the details of what a fully launched EvntLive product will look like, the team was willing to give us an early sneak peek. Of course, Estrin herself happens to be particularly proud of the technologies working behind the scenes. At launch, for example, the platform will be a “true web-based service,” she says, using HTML5 and a “100 percent de-coupled front and back end.”

The platform will distribute processing to maximize performance, she added, which means that it will be able to more easily run complex algorithms in the cloud — processes that traditionally consume precious resources on the client. On top of that, EvntLive has built a cell-driven cloud architecture that aims to optimize reliability and enable efficient scaling up or down based on demand, along with cost-effective implementation that leverages both open source and pay-per-use utility computing.

For the non-technical, this means that EvntLive will be able to stream hours of live music content from dozens of artists — or at least that’s the idea — in turn allowing artists to add as much or as little content (and complementary services around that content) as they need. With EvntLive’s goal of allowing users to watch concerts anytime, anywhere, the platform will launch with support for tablets and smartphones through HTML5 on mobile browsers and will add native apps down the road.

The platform will offer live and on-demand concerts, some of which will be free and some of which will come with typical pay-per-view prices, Estrin says. Really, the goal is to not only give the user a platform-agnostic music channel, but a customizable music experience in which they can tailor their own viewing experience with different camera angles and feeds, for example.

Each artist will have their own profile page, which fans can follow to find more information on their albums, their upcoming tour dates, and eventually the startup wants to allow users to buy tickets directly from their pages. Each concert will have its own event page as well, which will include streaming video, different angles and views, while allowing fans to engage in conversation during the feed, to drill down into more information on the band and plan meetups for after the show, for example.

To complement its streaming options and provide more value, EvntLive also wants to become an archive for concert footage. So, while you’ll be able to go watch The Rolling Stones live from MSG, you’ll also be able to check out footage from past tours.

Naturally, one is only willing to invest so much in the live streaming concert experience — both in terms of cash, money, flow and attention. I’m not going to sit in front of my laptop to watch a two-hour concert — at least not with any regularity — no matter how good the quality of the stream is. Instead, the more it’s able to build out a library of high-quality, on-demand concerts from top artists (and not just the last two shows), combine that with live top artists, exclusive content, and so on, the more stickiness the platform will have.

Plus, the more it can provide the synchronous, social experience of addictive music apps like Turntable.fm, allowing users to tweet, like and chat with their friends and others watching live shows or recorded footage, dig into artist data in an AllMusic-like data resource, follow and get updates and alerts on your favorite artists (when they’re coming to town for example), purchase tickets (for an actual live concert), the higher the value for the consumer.

And, on the band side, artists are hungry for supplemental revenue channels and, with busy (or empty schedules) want better, easier ways to increase engagement and interest without having to manage this themselves. Not exactly their area of expertise — why they’re called “artists,” right? Partnering with third-party services that have already nailed the mechanics of marketing, etc., will be critical for EvntLive over the long-term.

At the outset, the startup will be going after the big ticket names in music to help it build awareness and brand recognition, but over time, Estrin sees it expanding to include the long-tail, the indie artists, the mid-sized bands that can’t fill out big venues but have engaged, core fan bases already engaged.

The platform is currently in private beta, with a full-scale launch to come in the next few months. So stay tuned for more. Find EvntLive at home here.

TuneIn is a massively popular online radio service with more than 40 million monthly active listeners, according to its own data. The reason for its success is mostly due to its popular mobile apps and not necessarily because of its cool website. Until today, TuneIn’s web presence was functional but looked somewhat outdated. Now, however, the service has given itself a complete web makeover. The old, text-heavy design that emphasized station names has been replaced with large album cover-like images that indicate what’s currently playing on a given station. The experience, TuneIn tells us, is meant to “replicate the experience people used to have in a record store.”

This new “content-first display,” as TuneIn calls it, marks the most significant update of the service’s homepage and station pages in a very long time. Last July, TuneIn told us that its mobile listener base had grown 267 percent year-over-year and that total listening hours had increased 348 percent. All the while, the service’s web presence didn’t quite keep pace with the development of its mobile apps and its expansion into connected cars.

“Not everybody knows what they want to listen to when they come to TuneIn,” said Kristin George, TuneIn’s director of product in a statement earlier today. “When you visit the new site today, you get a better idea of our depth of content. This is a big step away from the older web experience, which presented the TuneIn content offering as more of a directory of stations. We’re hoping this new layout does a better job of showing people just how exciting it is to have the world’s audio at their fingertips.”

With today’s update, TuneIn is also bringing its list of trending stations, which was previously only available through its mobile app, to the web.

TuneIn currently offers its users free access to over 70,000 stations from around the globe and over 2 million on-demand programs. The service raised a $16 million funding round from heavyweights like General Catalyst Partners, Jafco Ventures, Google Ventures and Sequoia Capital last August. At the time, the company said it planned to use this money to increase its headcount and grow its product development initiatives. Chances are, today’s improved web presence is a direct result of this.

Now this is a watershed moment — Microsoft is looking at offering a Linux version of Office in 2014.

According to ExtremeTech, Microsoft is taking a “meaningful look” at releasing a full Linux port of Office in 2014. That would be quite something and it makes perfect sense. It’s apparent that Office, as proprietary software, will not regain the luster of its enterprise glory years. Open sourcing Office gives the company a window, no pun intended, into collaborating with a developer community outside the .NET universe.

Extreme Tech reports that rumors of the Linux version of Office surfaced last weekend at FOSDEM, the open source conference held annually in Brussels. Sources there told ExtremeTech that the meaningful consideration is prompted by Microsoft’s realization that Linux may be a viable commercial opportunity after all.

It also stems from Microsoft’s plans to develop a version of Office for Android to work on mobile devices. According to ExtremeTech:

Android, as you may already know, is a Linux-based operating system, meaning a lot of the porting work will have already been done — it shouldn’t take too much effort to take the next step and bring Office to Ubuntu, or whichever distro Microsoft favors.

Microsoft has never offered a Linux version of its software.

Here’s what I think about this development: Stuff it all you bastards who say Linux does not have commercial viability. Microsoft is looking at open sourcing its crown jewel.

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s leading mobile operator, has announced that it will invest in 500 Startups as it prepares to launch a 10 billion JPY ($109 million USD) venture fund in late February. The accelerator program will focus on the development of new businesses for smartphones and tablets.

DoCoMo’s investment in 500 Startups is part of the Tokyo-based company’s plan for its new incubation program and will be carried out by DoCoMo Capital, its international VC arm which was stakes in startups including Evernote, Fab and Cooliris.

NTT DoCoMo said back in October that it planned to create a fund to support early-stage tech and mobile startups by March of this year. This should be welcome news to entrepreneurs in Japan, where the startup industry is relatively low profile and early-stage funding is difficult to secure. The Next Web notes, however, that there have been some high-profile exits in the country, including Yahoo Japan’s October acquisition of app-maker Community Factor for $12.8 million.

In a statement, DoCoMo said it “aims to strengthen cooperation with venture companies through initiatives such as investments, primarily in Japan, to help upgrade services and technologies for smart devices in existing fields of business” on behalf of its parent company NTT Group.

The new venture fund also seeks to:

 ”accelerate development of business models, services and technologies in eight new strategic fields: media/content, finance/payments, commerce, medical/healthcare, machine-to-machine (M2M), aggregation/platforms, environment/ecology and security/safety. Such efforts are expected to rapidly expand DoCoMo’s involvement with integrated services centered on mobility.”

DoCoMo is looking for companies “developing mobile-related services that have the potential to become global standards.” The application period for the incubation program is until March 11. Startups and venture companies selected for the program will receive mentoring, get the use of office space, and up to 2 million JPY ($23,000 USD) seed funding in convertible notes. DoCoMo and 500 Startups will also help participants learn how to enter markets in North America and other regions.

Over the last several years, Netflix has put a lot of work into building a cloud-based architecture off of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to run its video streaming and DVD rental services. Then the company announced that it was going to open source those same tools and make them available to other developers. Ever since, Netflix has been slowly making other cloud-management tools available for others to build off of. Now it’s hoping to make it easier for others to implement not just one or two of those tools, but all of them.

At a meetup for developers who use — or might be interested in using — the open source cloud management tools that Netflix has already released, the company showed off some new technology that it’s working on, and provided a roadmap for future open source releases. The big message for them is that Netflix is looking to make its open source cloud architecture more portable for those who wish to adopt it, and to make it easier to apply its tools to more use cases.

“Many of you who are using [our open source tools] are probably just using one or two,” Netflix Director Cloud Platform Engineering Ruslan Meshenberg said to an audience of developers. “But these are more powerful when you use them together… If there is one takeaway, it’s that the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.”

Several years ago, Netflix standardized its cloud architecture on AWS, which Cloud Architect Adrian Cockcroft says the company sees as providing “undifferentiated heavy lifting” for the services that it wishes to run on top of the cloud. In addition, Netflix has built a series of tools to do smart light lifting, and has over the years been adding new tools as new AWS features appear.

But what works for Netflix doesn’t always work perfectly for other companies. The company is trying to change that, as it attempts to make its open source tools easier to use and more applicable to other services that might not be built around the personalized recommendations or the distribution of media online.

How will it do that? For one thing, the company is introducing a series of “recipes” that will help others launch multiple versions of its open source applications seamlessly together. It’s also hoping to roll out a simplified launcher that will make deploying those tools a piece of cake. One specific tool that the company is looking to release soon to make its architecture more portable is called “Denominator,” and it is being built by Adrian Cole, the jClouds guy.

For Netflix, making these tools open source is one way to ensure that its own development won’t eventually go to waste in the future if some other tools are standardized. Cockcroft compared its cloud philosophy to those caravans traveling west during the 19th century. Netflix may have blazed the Oregon Trail for cloud services, but now it’s looking to lay down railroad tracks to make it easier for others to standardize on the cloud.

“We started off a few years ahead of the industry,” Cockcroft said. But he believes it’s better to leverage that architecture as a shared pattern. The thinking goes that if Netflix makes it easier for others to adopt, those tools will become standards for the way cloud services are built. “We want to establish our solutions as best practices or standards,” he said.

For the industry, that’s probably a good thing. Offering reliable, scalable code that can be reused among multiple companies can make adoption of cloud services a lot more efficient over the coming years.

At the beginning of this year, social GPS app Waze was the rumored target of an Apple acquisition. Had the linkup happened, it would have been a rare case of the Cupertino company acquiring a startup. But, as it turns out, there wasn’t a deal, even though Waze is a data partner for Apple’s mapping software. January might not have started out with as huge a bang for Waze as some people had hoped, but the company’s 2012 roundup shows it still had a pretty good year.

Waze grew rapidly in 2012, hitting a milestone of 200 million users in July after doubling that number in six months. In total, 36 million drivers in 110 countries shared 90 million user reports (including traffic and road condition alerts) last year. Users are an active bunch: a total of 65,000 Waze users made 500 million edits, updating Waze’s 1.7 million changes on the ground. Furthermore, about 70% of system-detected map problems were solved by Waze’s users over a 30-day period and almost all user-reported map problems were taken care of within a week.

The company attributed the growth of its user base to its improved map editor, as well as new features like its gas station editor, which was made available to international users in July after first launching in the U.S. Users added more than 50,000 gas stations on the map in the first month and real-time gas prices are now active in 20 countries.

It remains to be seen whether these number will help Waze land an M&A deal, if not with Apple, then maybe with a location-discovery service like Foursquare.

Earlier today, CNNMoney broke the news that well-known Googler/YouTuber Hunter Walk and former Googler Satya Patel would be starting a new VC firm called Homebrew. What wasn’t known was whether Walk would be leaving Google to pursue Homebrew full time, but he has confirmed that to be the case.

The last time we spoke with Walk, he was passionately explaining all of the things he gets to work on with the YouTube For Good team. It consisted of people with all types of skill-sets, including forward-thinkers and leaders like Walk, who would help non-profits and organizations spread their messages and raise awareness for their programs using YouTube.

In a blog post, which is the email that Walk sent to his colleagues at Google, he thanked those who brought him into the company and gave a glimpse into the Google culture that you hear from those who have “re-entered the mainstream” after leaving the Mountain View company:

After nine years, two months it’s time for me to figure out how to make lunch for myself. Yup, I’m leaving Google and it’s my year-old daughter’s fault. You see, when I look at her I think about the values my wife and I want to instill. Among the most important is the belief that you should pursue all your dreams, think big, lean into your fears and keep building. The best way for me to teach this is by example, so I need to step away from Google’s comfort. No next adventure to announce yet – this is about feeling there’s more for me to do, but also knowing I need some space to figure it out.

Google has changed my life. The chance to work with so many smart and creative people – thank you for letting me learn from you. There’s no university in the world which could have supplied equal education. Because of my time at Google I truly look at the world in a different way, one of problems waiting to be solved rather than insurmountable obstacles or indelible truths. I’m especially appreciative of Joan Braddi, Susan Wojcicki, Chad Hurley and Salar Kamangar – leaders who took me into their teams and, when it was time, encouraged me to find new challenges. Selfless, intelligent and loyal to Google.

While being inside of Google is special, passing through the membrane back into the outside world is also a unique time, one which affords me a few perspectives on being a Googler. Our best efforts come from desire to thrill our users, not from fear of competitors. Work hard and be uncompromising but treat one another with kindness. So many of our products have continued growth ahead and I’m especially excited to watch YouTube’s accelerating evolution towards the first global livingroom.

Here’s to truly hoping I have the chance to work again with all of you. If I can ever be of help, don’t hesitate to reach out via [email protected] or mobile.

It’s probably only fitting that I leave you with a favorite video: http://youtu.be/DxwdskaRxcU

Warmly,
Hunter

The video in his email is a lip-sync that was six years in the making, which is kind of a metaphor for the preparation that Walk has been through for his new venture:

Patel has spent time at Twitter in addition to being senior product manager for AdSense, and he invested in companies for Battery Ventures as a VC.

Walk joined us on TCTV to discuss a cookbook for Geeks, which benefits charity. It will be interesting to see what types of companies the two decide to invest in, and I imagine that the fabric those startups will be made of will be very unique. There’s something special in the DNA of some of the folks who work at Google, and seeing them break out onto their own is exciting.

All that we know now is that the two will be focused on enabling “the people-based economy.”

Sounds fitting.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

A software company’s conference in Las Vegas for executives of hosting companies is not exactly where I’d expect to see a bunch of startups showing off what they do. But when the software company’s executive chairman of the board is also an investor in the startups, then the reason for their attendance becomes pretty clear.

Five startups, all funded by Runa Capital, attended the Parallels Summit this week in Las Vegas. Parallels develops software to manage infrastructure for hosting companies and service providers. Parallels Founder Serguei Beloussov is a senior partner in Runa Capital and also an investor in Anturis, which launched at the conference this week. These companies also integrate with Parallels software. Put those factors together and it makes perfect sense why these companies came to Las Vegas this week.

Nevertheless, they are still startups so let’s take a quick look at who showed up:

• Jelastic offers hosting and scaling of Java and PHP apps with no code changes required. Parallels is a primary technology partner. 
• ECWID is a SaaS solution for e-commerce that allows developers to create a web store by using a set of AJAX e-commerce widgets that can be integrated with existing sites managed by content management systems and social media sites. ECWID is the number one widget for eCommerce on Facebook. It has more than 220,000 storefronts in 175 countries.
• StopTheHacker is a SaaS provider that protects websites from interruptions or harm to their online reputation. It includes anti-malware technology and can scan a website to detect security holes that hackers may exploit. It also offers uptime and reputation monitoring to detect if a site is blacklisted by any search engines.
• Infratel sells a platform that allows small, web-based businesses of fewer than 10 employees to offer a voice-based customer service offering delivered over a company’s website.
• Cellrox provides solutions for the adoption of smart mobile devices- phones and tablets – by corporate IT departments. The company’s ThinVisor technology enables co-hosting of two or more individual, independent and secure virtual environments on a single mobile device.

All these companies could fit in a hosting environment and integrate with the Parallels platform.

Early-stage VC fund 500 Startups today held the first of several demo day events for the fifth batch of startups graduating from its accelerator program. It was a fun event, with 32 high-energy founders pitching their companies to a room full of investors and tech press.

All of the companies were compelling in their own ways, covering a wide range of technologies, geographies, and sectors — you can check out the full list right here. It was tough, but we narrowed down a list of some of our favorites.

In alphabetical order, here are the standouts we saw:

CompStak: Founded by former NYC real estate broker Michael Mandel, CompStak has built a platform that compiles crowdsourced information about all things commercial real estate. In particular, the site tracks what’s known as “comps,” which is industry-speak for comparable price rates on real estate leases for similarly sized and featured spaces. This information is valuable, but it’s also historically been nearly impossible to find — people who have this kind of data tend to keep it close to the chest, even while seeking it out from others. CompStak has created a platform where people can trade info they have with info they need, giving incentives to all sides. We’ve written about CompStak before, which you can check out here.

Cubie: Like a super lightweight and more fully featured Draw Something, Cubie is a mobile messaging app for both Android and iOS that lets people create and share drawings, photos, video, and voice messages inside a social chat client. It has become hugely popular, according to the founders, rising to the #1 social app spot in 16 countries, and amassing 5 million total downloads. The company has already attracted some hefty investor attention, with $1.1 million raised from a group of international investors.

Dealflicks: This company has a simple mission: To get more butts into movie seats. Up to 88 percent of movie theater seats end up empty, Dealflicks says, so it sells movie tickets and concessions for up to 60 percent off to make sure spots that would otherwise be vacant are filled with moviegoers. The company says it is now on track to have $5 million dollars in annual bookings flowing through its platform, and its app boosts online and mobile movie ticket sales by 40 percent. Filling last-minute vacancies by offering discounts is a strategy that has worked well for other apps such as Priceline and Hotel Tonight, so this could really be one to watch.

GazeMetrix – What if you were a brand marketer and you could take all user-generated photos and recognize when your logo or product showed up on Facebook, Intstagram or Twitter? That’s the kind of tool that Gaze Metrics provides, scanning photos posted to social networks and alerting brands when those photos start to go viral. The company is already working with more than 30 brands, and is sure to sign up plenty more as they learn about the technology.

iDreamBooks – When you want to find out what movie to watch, there’s Rotten Tomatoes to give you an idea of how good they are. For video games, there’s MetaCritic. But there’s no good universal guide for book ratings. Even Amazon’s ratings system is starting to lose its lustre, as they’re easily gamed by fake posts. Enter iDreamBooks, which seeks to be the Rotten Tomatoes of books. The startup was already chosen by the New York and San Francisco Public Library systems to provide aggregated professional ratings of books on their websites and is looking for more distribution.

Kickfolio: Typically, an app that’s in the pre-launch stage must be uploaded directly to a mobile device for trial purposes — this makes the process of testing a mobile app cumbersome, time-consuming, and often expensive for the app developer. Kickfolio has built a platform for developers to upload builds of their iOS mobile apps straight to the web where they can be more easily accessed for testing. Kickfolio’s platform uses HTML5, so it makes apps accessible to anyone with a web browser. Kickfolio echoes in some ways Pieceable, the startup recently acquired by Facebook — just one sign that it’s in a very exciting space. TechCrunch covered Kickfolio’s launch back in December, and you can read that right here.

Privy: This startup aims to “take the mystery out of local marketing” by making local advertising more efficient for small and medium sized businesses. Local merchants simply tell it how much they’re willing to spend and what their specials are, and Privy seamlessly does social and search advertising for the businesses. Customers bring in coupons on their phones to complete the loop, and the system tracks conversion rate and efficiency of the campaign, providing detailed analytics to the business. The company makes $3,000 per year on average per business, but typically helps them recoup those costs within three months.

SupplyHog: SupplyHog aims to reduce the amount of time that local contractors spend running around trying to source supplies for projects that they’re working on. Not only does the startup ensure that it can provide the supplies that are needed, without having to run around to various different home-improvement stores, but it can guarantee lower prices than those outlets. It does that by working with thousands of different local manufacturers and distributors around the country to find the lowest price while also ensuring that the materials needed are in stock. With a limited beta trial, the company has also had $130,000 in revenues, but more importantly — 100 percent of all the contractors who have used the site have come back to use it again so far.

WalletKit: With the rise of mobile payment systems like Apple’s Passbook, there’s a growing need to help businesses take advantage of these platforms. The problem is that it takes a team of designers and engineers to implement Passbook and other mobile wallet technologies. WalletKit takes the pain out of this process with a platform for quickly integrating with Passbook and other mobile wallet systems. We’ve written about WalletKit before, and you can check that out right here.

WayGo: We’ve written about WayGo before — it provides instant translations for Asian-language text into English on mobile phones. How cool is that? So cool, it makes our top 10 list. That’s how cool. It makes money by charging just $14.99 for unlimited usage. Which, frankly, is a steal for overseas travelers.

Our own Romain Dillet noted the regrettable lack of confirmed games for the upcoming OUYA Android-based home gaming console just yesterday. Today, as if in answer, OUYA founder and CEO Julie Uhrman spoke at DICE to announce some new launch partners for the Kickstarter-funded project. The newly announced titles include Double Fine Adventure (another Kickstarter success from gaming legend Tim Schafer’s studio) and Rob Gilbert’s The Cave, also from Double Fine studios.

In addition to the Double Fine titles, Uhrman said onstage that Paul Bettner, best known for creating Words With Friends, would also be developing titles for OUYA. No word on the specifics, but it is a vote of confidence from a game creator who has had enormous success on mobile platforms.

When Romain complained about a lack of substantial games for the OUYA, he was mainly talking about marquee titles that would attract core gamers to a standalone console. The argument he made is essentially that users won’t flock to dedicated hardware that they can essentially already play on their Android or iOS devices. Without noteworthy launch games to give it juice, he believes OUYA’s will become yet another device gathering dust on peoples’ shelves.

What OUYA announced today isn’t its own Sonic or Mario — something to propel the console to something unique with an experience you can’t replicate elsewhere — but it is a pledge from a studio (Double Fine) that produce consistently interesting, engaging games that attract the attention, love and respect of gamers.

Double Fine Adventure won’t arrive until Q2 2013 and therefore likely won’t make OUYA’s launch. The Cave hasn’t yet begun OUYA-specific development, so this doesn’t answer launch lineup concerns, but it does indicate there’s a pipeline for more quality titles to come.

Google is rolling out a new AdWords system over the next few weeks called Enhanced Campaigns, which it’s pitching as a better way to advertise across multiple devices.

As described in the announcement blog post and a conversation that I had with a Google spokesperson, the goal here is both to simplify the campaign process and make campaigns more about reaching the desired users with the optimal ad, regardless of what device they’re using. In the post, Senior Vice President of Engineering Sridhar Ramaswamy writes, “Enhanced campaigns help you reach people with the right ads, based on their context like location, time of day and device type, across all devices without having to set up and manage several separate campaigns.”

The Google spokesperson told me that previously, if a business wanted to advertise on both desktop and mobile, they’d have to create separate campaigns. With Enhanced Campaigns, they create a single campaign that runs across devices, which can then be modified to accommodate different contexts — for example, an advertiser could bid less money to run their ads on mobile, or they could bid more to run their ads in a certain geography. Here’s an example from the blog post:

A breakfast cafe wants to reach people nearby searching for “coffee” or “breakfast” on a smartphone. Using bid adjustments, with three simple entries, they can bid 25% higher for people searching a half-mile away, 20% lower for searches after 11am, and 50% higher for searches on smartphones. These bid adjustments can apply to all ads and all keywords in one single campaign.

Other features highlighted by Google include the ability to customize the ad unit based on the context (so that a mobile ad, for example, could include a click-to-call button) and new reports that incorporate metrics like calls and downloads.

Starcom MediaVest says it has already been testing out the system, and Paul DeJarnatt, vice president and group director at Starcom USA, told me via email that there are “some positives and some limitations.” He said he’s excited about the advanced reporting and the “promise of things to come.” However, he suggested that Google also “went too far” in its attempt to simplify the process, and is now offering too few options for mobile and tablet targeting.

“Many of our clients have done extensive research and testing to uncover what is important to someone on a tablet versus a true mobile searcher, which may be altogether different from a desktop searcher,” DeJarnatt said. “While we may still have those insights, we now have no way to target our campaigns accordingly to serve the most relevant ad to the most interested audience. That seems to move away from Google’s mandate of delivering relevancy with every interaction with the search engine.”

Similarly, Adobe’s Bill Mungoven published a blog post pointing out that advertisers can no longer target their campaigns at tablets specifically. To a certain extent, that makes sense, he said, because “tablets really are used more like lap­tops or desk­tops than smart­phones.” But he argued that it also benefits Google because Google makes more money when tablet ads are lumped in with desktops.

DeJarnatt made a similar point, saying, “The largest beneficiary, at least at this stage, appears to be Google itself.” He suggested that Enhanced Campaigns could help small businesses, but added, “For sophisticated marketers and agencies, however, Enhanced Campaigns feels like a step back.”

Ubuntu’s recently announced mobile operating system certainly has some panache, which has prompted more than a few nerds (myself included) to become enamored with it. Thankfully, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has just recently given us a clearer idea of when to expect it — he told the Wall Street Journal that the first Ubuntu-powered smartphone would see the light of day this October.

That is, of course, if everything pans out the way that the Ubuntu team hopes. It’s not unheard of for mobile platform launches to miss their intended launch windows after all — BlackBerry 10 was famously slated for a 2012 launch before being delayed until last week.

Sad to say, the rest of Shuttleworth’s chat with the Journal wasn’t nearly as revealing. Though we’ve seen the nascent mobile OS running on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus both in the initial announcement video as well as at CES, Shuttleworth declined to offer names of any confirmed or potential hardware manufacturers Canonical may be working with. Even so, Canonical’s fondness of the one-time flagship device doesn’t end there. Developers will be able to tinker with Ubuntu on the Galaxy Nexus starting sometime this month (though the fact that it was originally supposed to be released last month may not bode well for Canonical’s launch window).

Shuttleworth also mentioned that the mobile OS would make its official debut in two major markets this fall, but you guessed it — there’s no hard word on which markets he’s actually talking about. But he did concede that North America is a “key market” for Ubuntu. That said, Canonical may do well by tackling some less-developed markets right out of the gate.

Canonical’s Jane Silber noted that when Ubuntu for phones was first revealed that the appeal of Ubuntu phones extends far beyond the enterprise, adding that Ubuntu’s native apps and stylish UI could make it a popular choice for more basic smartphones. Some of the other upstart players are looking to expand the reach of their mobile operating systems by taking a similar tack. Carriers like Telefonica are planning to use Mozilla’s Firefox OS as a means of getting more low-cost, feature-rich devices into the hands of consumers in markets like Brazil. Attempting to make a splash where mobile OS allegiances have not quite had a chance to settle yet could give Canonical an edge, as those regions become more digitally developed.

Wanted: An entrepreneur or team of rivals who want to stand on stage to present their project to thousands of investors and members of the media. Sounds like you? You’re in luck.

TechCrunch is holding Office Hours this week to scope out some potential Disrupt Battlefield and Startup Alley participants. These things usually sell out wicked fast so read on to figure out what to do.

Office Hours is one of the best opportunities we can offer to a startup to get featured in our massive Disrupt NYC conference. More than a few of our past Disrupt alumni were discovered during Office Hours.

It’s pretty straightforward: you come, we meet for 10 minutes, learn about your product, and give any feedback we may have. Do you have to be at office hours to grab a spot at Disrupt? Absolutely not, but putting a face to the name definitely helps.

We’ll hold the meetings in our Aol Ventures office at 670 Broadway on Thursday, February 7, at 1pm. But before you rush over and sign up, there are a few requirements:

• Since we’re looking for potential Disrupt companies, we ask that you have an unreleased product. That means you’re in stealth mode, or in a private beta.
• You must be ready to launch in late April/early May.
• No PR people allowed at Office Hours.

You can sign up for a session with John, Chris, or myself right here.

Competition and activity continues to heat up in the mobile payments market. UK-based mPowa — a mobile payments provider that, like Square and others, provides a dongle that merchants can attach to a mobile device to process card payments — has signed a white-label deal with Portugal Telecom for the carrier to resell mPowa’s services as the centerpiece of its own mobile payments solution. The exact financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but mPowa’s CEO Dan Wagner tells TechCrunch that the deal is for seven years, worth multiple millions of dollars as a minimum commitment, and potentially covers some 100 million people — the size of Portugal Telecom’s footprint across Europe, Latin America and Africa.

Wagner says that mPowa is preparing to announce additional customers later this year. He says that discussions with more carriers, as well as with banks, are in “late stages” after the company has been “inundated” with requests for partnerships.

Carrier partnerships is a natural and increasingly used channel for mobile payments companies to scale up their businesses. Square works with AT&T to resell its dongles, and in the UK iZettle works with EE.

mPowa had a slightly odd legal wrangle with Square last year when it was accused of lifting photographs from Square’s marketing materials. But in reality there are some fairly large differences between them.

Unlike Square, which has some 2.5 million customers and is mainly active in the U.S., mPowa has been setting its sights on trying to build up an international presence. The next deals to come from mPowa will be in Africa, Asia, South America and Europe. North American partnerships, he says, are likely to come after that. “I don’t know who will drop next but we’re talking to people in South America, Asia, Europe, and Africa. North America will be later this year, while others are in late-stage discussions.”

Like other mobile payment providers such as iZettle and Payleven that are targeting users outside the U.S., mPowa is working on the premise of chip-and-PIN solutions that do not use the magnetic stripe on the back of payment cards. This is required in many markets like Europe and is likely to be the worldwide standard, including the U.S., by 2015.

Wagner also adds that the PT deal is likely also to involve using mPowa’s e-commerce back-end services to integrate with the mobile point-of-sale solution.

Small businesses that do not have card-acceptance facilities have traditionally been a first target for dongle-based solutions — and they are in this PT deal as well — but mPowa is also aiming for its services to be used by any retailer or businesses that depends on point-of-sale transactions, regardless of size or existing infrastructure. The idea is to take any of those transactions away from cash registers.

“It will either be a case of customers browsing and scanning and then picking up goods at a collection point, or of sales assistants going around to where you are to complete transactions,” Wagner said.

The PT deal was a relatively quick turnaround, he said. “They came to us only in November,” he said. “I haven’t even been to Portugal.”

In its home market of Portugal, PT is already offering fiber-to-the-home solutions to some 1.6 million customers and was one of the early movers in LTE, which now covers 90% of the Portuguese population. Its plan is to extend those and other services across the whole of its footprint.

“mPowa will be integrated in Portugal Telecom Group’s innovative solutions and services with a ready to deploy, robust, resilient and secure infrastructure to allow us to roll out mobile point of sale solutions to our customers,” said Celso Martinho, CTO of the Sapo Portal, owned by Portugal Telecom, in a statement.