Category: Tech news

Heyzap continues to build out its social platform with the addition of player leaderboards that developers can add to their mobile games.

Other companies have released their own leaderboard options, most notably OpenFeint — except that the OpenFeint service is closing down on December 14, following its acquisition by GREE in April of last year. So there’s a bit of a vacuum. Plus, co-founder Jude Gomila said Heyzap’s version is more focused on friends’ scores and more engagement.

If you’ve signed up for Heyzap and are playing one of the leaderboard-enabled games, anytime you achieve a “personal best” score, the leaderboard will pop up showing how you compare with your friends. And you can act on the rankings by challenging others. The challenged user will get a notification, then you can each try to top each other as you play again and again. (Creating deeper engagement with friends seems to be a big focus in Heyzap’s recent additions; it also launched a Play With Friends feature last month.)

Leaderboards for both iOS and Android are now included in the Heyzap SDK, and Gomila said the integration only takes about an hour. It’s already live with 50 Android games, including GnarBike, Jewel Cut, and Trivia Burst. (It has also been integrated into some iOS games, but they’re still going through the Apple approval process.)

In case those Black Friday and Cyber Monday frenzies weren’t enough, here’s another big reminder of what a massive industry (and opportunity) retail technology is.

Global payment and retail technology giant NCR Corporation announced this afternoon that it will acquire Retalix, a provider of point-of-sale software and services, for $30 per share in cash, a total transaction value of approximately $650 million.

This announcement confirms rumors that had been flying around for several hours — although the actual purchase value was a bit below the rumored $800 million cash deal that was first reported this morning.

Retalix, which is based in Israel with a U.S. subsidiary in Plano, Texas, has been listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the ticker RTLX since 1998. The company’s software and services are deployed in more than 70,000 retail locations in more than 50 countries. Its stock price surged on the deal rumors today, from an opening price of $22.19 per share to a closing price of $29.11. NCR issued its confirmation of the deal just after market close.

NCR, meanwhile, is based in Duluth, Georgia, and has a market cap of $3.8 billion. In a statement, the company said that this will build upon the business NCR has built from its $1.2 billion mid-2011 acquisition of point-of-sale software provider Radiant Systems. Here’s a quote from NCR CEO Bill Nuti:

“Retalix is a strong, strategic fit for NCR and the combination of our two companies will drive significant value for both our shareholders and customers. Retalix’s market-leading software and services capabilities will enhance NCR’s retail solutions, creating a world-class portfolio of offerings. That innovation plus the addition of exceptional talent to our team positions NCR as the global leader in retail innovation.”

The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2013. J.P. Morgan acted as exclusive financial advisor to NCR on the transaction, while Jefferies & Co. acted as financial advisor to Retalix.

Microsoft started a rather controversial anti-Google campaign this morning that alleged Google is essentially misleading its users because all of the company’s shopping results are now paid. The “Don’t Get Scroogled” page is getting quite a bit of attention today, but at the same time, there is also some unease about how Bing organizes its own shopping results.

Bing, after all, recently partnered with eBay’s Shopping.com. While Bing previously allowed merchants to submit their own feeds for inclusion, the company now says that it is “not accepting new merchants for this program.” Instead, Bing says, merchants should work with Shopping.com. One of the reasons for this according to Bing is that “paid offers will be highlighted throughout Bing Shopping, including search result and product pages.”

It’s worth noting that Shopping.com describes itself as “an efficient advertising platform offering merchants direct response and targeted advertising solutions across a network of leading publishers.” Bing, in this context, is just another publisher in the Shopping.com network.

It’s worth putting this into some context, though: the fact that Bing is not taking new merchants into the program right now isn’t something unheard of, but a move the company has done before ahead of the holiday season to ensure the service runs smoothly. Overall, Bing works with both the Shopping.com feeds and the merchant feeds, and gets data from its web crawler.

There are legitimate reasons to worry about Google’s move towards a fully paid platform for its shopping results and what this means for the company in the long run.

Google, which wouldn’t go on the record with a statement about Bing and Shopping.com, would likely say, though, that while Bing accuses it of ranking by price, price is only a signal in its ranking mechanism. Also, because of the Shopping.com relationship with Bing, it’s not always clear which results were paid in some form or another and which weren’t. On Google, it’s clear that all of the results are paid for.

Both Google and Bing argue that they clearly mark any sponsored results. The two companies disagree that their competitor is actually doing so, though.

Of course, we asked both Google and Bing for reactions.

Here is what Stefan Weitz, the senior director of Bing had to say:

Bing includes millions of free listings from merchants and rankings are determined entirely by which products are most relevant to your query. While merchants can pay fees for inclusion on our 3^rd party shopping sites and subsequently may appear in Bing Shopping through partnerships we have, we do not rank merchants higher based on who pays us, nor do we let merchants pay to have their product offers placed higher in Bing Shopping’s search results.

Here is Google’s (rather bland) statement about this controversy:

Google Shopping makes it easier for shoppers to quickly find what they’re looking for, compare different products and connect with merchants to make a purchase. With new 360-degree, interactive product images, social shopping lists and a fast growing inventory of more than a billion products worldwide, Google is a great resource for shoppers to find what they need, at great prices for their loved ones this holiday season.

Windows Phone 8 has made its fair share of headlines lately but there hasn’t been has much official chatter about Windows Phone 7.8, the update intended to bridge the feature gap between older and newer Windows Phones. Well, consider that quiet streak broken — Microsoft confirmed today that the 7.8 update would begin rolling out in the first quarter of 2013, with devices running the revamped build poised to launch soon.

Sadly, the news flies in the face of several rumors that the update was to be launched this week. Now, pushing out new devices with Windows Phone 7.8 is a savvy move on Microsoft’s part as they continue to push for more global marketshare (7.8-laden devices are reportedly slated to hit China soon), but that’s probably not much consolation to early adopters.

Sure, it’s nice of them to put a finer point on the timeline, but that’s still a considerable wait for the Windows Phone faithful who took a chance on the platform in its early days. The wait will be even longer still for some users — software updates of this scale require testing and approval from device manufacturers and carriers too, so expect some devices to get the 7.8 nod well ahead of others. In case you haven’t been following the Windows Phone platform too closely (you really should, by the way), 7.8 isn’t going to add too much to the mix — think the Windows Phone 8 homescreen design, new accent colors, and some miscellaneous security fixes.

As much of a bummer as the prospect of a potentially lengthy wait could be, Microsoft’s own WP update track record highlights the need for taking the time to do things right. Case in point: a “pre-update” pushed to devices in preparation for the 7.5 Mango update in February 2011 wrought havoc with some users’ Windows phones, even forcing some of them to seek their wireless carrier’s assistance. Needless to say, Microsoft took things nice and slow when it came time for the big Mango push later that year.

Don’t be fooled by the iterative-sounding nature of this update: being able to edit spreadsheets on mobile devices – the functionality which Google has just now introduced in its mobile Google Drive applications – is actually a major upgrade in the eyes of many users.

The update brings the cloud-based alternative that is Google Drive (formerly Docs), more on par with native experiences, like Apple’s iWork suite, for example.

Google announced the Android version of the update on its official blog this afternoon, touting the newly added ability to create new spreadsheets or edit existing ones from the new release of the Google Drive application. (Side note: did we know that Google is calling Google Drive spreadsheets “Google Sheets” now? Did I miss the memo on that? That’s catchy.) In addition, users can switch fonts, resize columns and sort data, says Google, and other users’ edits will also be shown in real-time.

While the news was promoted primarily on the Android blog, an App Store update shows that similar functionality has come to the iOS version of the application as well. Both mobile apps also now support better text formatting when copying and pasting from one Google Doc to another (the apps support rich text copy-paste, that is), but Android users can edit the text within tables, too.

Google Drive isn’t the only Google app to get a boost on iOS today either – a new release of Google Chrome for iOS adds support for opening PDFs in other apps, Passbook support, and more.

You can grab the updated Google Drive for Android here on Google Play or the iOS version here in the App Store.

One of Steve Jobs’ biggest pet peeves was external LED lights on cellphones. Oh how he would storm through the Apple offices, harrumphing at the thought of a Motorola KRZR lighting up like a tiny Christmas tree. He’d probably be really angry at this new product, myLED, which is a tiny LED that’s designed to light up when you get an iOS notification.

The product will blink red when you receive calls, emails, Facebook notifications, Tweets, and Skype messages. It works by plugging directly into your headphone jack and they’ve included a little clamp to hold the LED when you’re not using it.

The little LED and the app needed to run it will cost $10 for early birds and they’re looking for $18,000 in funding.

Obviously this kind of takes up your headphone jack but it seems like a good idea if you’re not into having your camera flash twinkle when you get a call. Much like the Blink(1), this product reduces notifications to its barest element, which is useful and important, even if it might have pissed off Jobs.

Created by Federico Nitidi, Sean Lewin, and Ralph Wilson, the project came about when the team “became passionate about solving the lack of convenient notifications on iOS.” The project is currently in beta but they should ship in April.

Toronto-based cloud photo storage startup MyShoebox today announced a major milestone: the company has already stored and indexed 13.4 million photos from its users, in just its first month of availability, which represents more pictures than are stored in the entire Library of Congress. MyShoebox is also now storing an average of 3,275 photos per user on average, up significantly from the 2,600 it was managing for each user after its first week.

Founder and CEO Steve Cosman took the stage today at Extreme Startups Demo Day, where MyShoebox was among the accelerator’s current cohort. Cosman shared his startup’s impressive early traction, which represents strong performance for a company ostensibly entering a competitive space that includes Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox and other heavy hitters. In fact, it captures 27 times more pictures than Flickr.

MyShoebox offers a cloud photo storage service that goes beyond what most of those other companies provide, however, with a tool that can scan every photo on your computer (or in specific subfolders only), upload those to the cloud and make them available across devices for later viewing, complete with automatic organization options that group photos by location, the type of device they were taken with, dates and more. It also uses a clever implementation of natural language processing for easy search and filtering of your images.

For free, MyShoebox offers access to 1024 max pixel width versions of all your photos from its servers. For a $5 monthly subscription, you can upgrade to a premium plan that allows access to full resolution versions of all pics stored on the service. Users signed up for the service so far are all still on free trials, since the service launched less than 30 days ago, but the payment system for the product went live two days ago, and already the company is starting to see its first revenue roll in from users. While it’s too early yet to talk about conversion rates, Cosman explained why he has high hopes that free users will turn into paying customers.

“The more photos a user has in the system, the more likely they are to convert to our Pro plan,” he said. “MyShoebox was created to unify your photos across all your devices, so our product design aligns to our business. The more places you install MyShoebox, the more value you see and the more likely you are to pay for our Pro option.”

Sometimes, Cosman said, they’re getting 15 photos uploaded per second, and MyShoebox has also recently introduced a referral program similar to Dropbox’s early efforts to grow its user base, which allows users to gain additional one month trials for every user they bring on board that actually uploads photos.

For future plans, Cosman said that on the immediate horizon, the goal is to get an API out the door so that other developers can build on the service.

Our own apps use the same API we plan to expose to third parties,” We’re looking for partners and open source developers for a few key apps to participate in a private beta. The most critical things on our list are an uploader for Linux, an uploader for BlackBerry and plugins for Lightroom and Aperture.”

Early adopters seem to be liking what Cosman and his team are laying down already, and the company is still at a very early stage. Currently, they’re in the process of seeking funding and building backend improvements to help them keep pace with growth. Their success is likely due to the fact that MyShoebox takes a task which users have a growing need for and essentially makes it a background service. It’s sort of like where competitors like Picasa, Dropbox and others should be, but with innovative automatic categorization options that will likely only get better with time and volume.

I’m a big fan of Animoto and its automatic video-creation service. But even if you get a service to automatically create videos from photos that you’ve chosen and uploaded, there’s still, um, the process of choosing and uploading those photos. What if you didn’t even have to do that? That’s what Animoto is showing off today, with the launch of an ultra-easy site for creating Best of 2012 video montages from photos they’ve uploaded to Facebook.

Users who are interested in this sort of thing need only go to animoto.com/2012 and click “Watch your video.” A few minutes later, the site will have prepared a wonderful, pre-packaged video montage of your 2012 Facebook photos with little actual work on the user’s part.

Frankly, I made an Animoto “Best Of…” video like this a few years ago in 2010, but it was kind of a pain in the ass. The new workflow simplifies the process by stripping out all the unnecessary searching for just the right photo and putting it in order and all of that. It chooses photos for you — automatically! — and puts them in order — automatically! — leaving you to just, uh, share it out to all of your friends and worshippers.

That said, not all Animotos will come out perfect — my first run-through had some photos that I’d prefer to forget about, rather than share with friends — but there’s an easy enough fix. Just click “Tweak It” and you can edit and re-order the photos that Animoto has picked.

Or, if you’re satisfied, just click “Share it,” choose which friends to tag in the video, and post to Facebook. Each Animoto Best of 2012 video will also have a unique link that you can send to friends by email or on the Twitters or post to your Pinterest or whatever.

All in all, pretty fun, and better than that JibJab Gangnam Style bullshit.

You scrolled right past the old design for Facebook’s “Pages You Might Like” mobile ads. Too much gray, not enough description. But they just got updated to show colorful banners and explain what a business does. Their designer Jeff Kanter thinks you’ll stop to give them a look. Maybe even a tap. With style and targeting, Facebook is turning limited mobile ad space into its secret weapon.

As a product manager for the news feed ads team, Kanter’s job is to convey the messages of Facebook’s advertisers in a way that doesn’t interrupt the Facebook experience. To make sure he’s on the right track, Kanter tells me “we dogfood all these different ad experiences with employees first. We’ll give feedback, make tweaks, identify bugs, and then roll out a small external test.”

Next, Facebook watches to make sure they don’t anger the users. Kanter tells me “There are dedicated teams and people here who spend all day every day thinking about this, measuring sentiment and engagement carefully.”

Facebook only started showing ads on mobile in March, so it’s still figuring things out. “We’ve learned a lot this year and are continuing to learn. We’ve found that the news feed ads experience is pretty different from the right-column ads experience we’ve been working on for many years now, and we have already made a bunch of adjustments.”

Overall, the ads business is doing well, and Facebook is poised to rake in a ton of sales over the holidays. Facebook adtech developer Nanigans will be releasing data later today noting that the cost per click that advertisers paid Facebook over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping weekend was up 25 percent compared to earlier in November, and ad rates are now twice as high as in 2010.

But the future hinges on mobile. Since Facebook’s IPO, everyone has been terrified that the shift to mobile would kill its ads business. Critics seem to be ignoring an important fact about the intersection of advertising and mobile design: If you have less room to show ads, each of those ads must be more eye-catching and relevant to the viewer.

Every web advertising company has to weather this same storm. However, Facebook has extraordinarily powerful ways to address these two needs that could keep it afloat while everyone else sinks.
First, Facebook has your friends’ names and faces. They’re inherently eye-catching. Second, it knows more about more people than practically any website or even government: your age, gender, location, interests, the device you use, the apps you play with, and who your friends are. That means if it can only show you one ad, it’s more likely to be for something you actually want.

Kanter used both of these assets to make Facebook’s revamped “Pages You Might Like” ads better. Rather than suggesting three different businesses at a time, the new ad unit relies on Facebook’s targeting to show just one highly relevant Page. Beyond just showing the name of one friend who already Likes the Page, the ad shows the number of other people who Like it, providing a stronger peer recommendation. “If all these people Like it and so do my friends, maybe I will, too.”

Facebook has also improved the visual feel of the ads without burdening the advertiser by pulling in creative materials straight from the Page. Instead of just a tiny thumbnail of the Page’s profile picture, the ad takes its cover image and overlays a larger profile pic. Since covers are supposed to be big, beautiful images that generally represent a Page’s identity, they work well in the ads and can often give them a splash of color.

Finally, there’s a big “Like Page” button at the bottom to convert interest into a subscription. Kanter sums up how the new design makes much better use of a small space, saying “instead of showing three at a time, we show one with more context, and a more prominent call to action.”

Personally, I think these ads look great. Those succulent green apples in the Jasper’s Market ad up top are much more eye catching than the old gray box or Jasper’s profile pic alone. Facebook recently launched a similar redesign of its mobile app install ads, featuring big banners and descriptions of what an app or game does to replace the low-content “Try These Apps” design that showed just a profile pic and an often cut-off blurb. Both of these new ad units are certainly more noticeable than the old ones, which should get more clicks (taps). Facebook just has to make sure they’re not so overt as to distracting from organic content.

Beyond these designs, Kanter tells me “We’re also testing a bunch of different features for mobile ads, including Page and app categories and descriptions, social context, headers, and more. Friends’ faces are currently used more on desktop…and though we’re not currently testing these outside of sponsored stories for mobile, it might be something we could consider in the future.”

Facebook is slowly transitioning into a mobile ad company. Fourteen percent of its ad revenue last quarter came from the small screen, and adtech startups tell me brands are lining up to buy mobile inventory. That’s pretty impressive since I think the old mobile ad designs weren’t very compelling. Now Wall Street finally seems confident enough to start betting on the future of Facebook’s mobile ad business, and this is what it will look like.

I’m a big fan of conceptual designs. Basically, designers who love to look at things and want to make them prettier will mock up what they think a product should be. One of the hottest properties in the world is Instagram, and it’s a very visually appealing app. One designer decided that he’d like to see it take a giant leap forward, so he put together a concept treatment.

How much do outside concepts influence products? I’m not sure. Regardless, take a look, it’s really well done:

Stephen M. Levinson describes himself as a “UI designer, product guy and entrepreneur.” He sold an app company Scripts Pro, and is looking for work in NYC. All that aside, this guy could be on to something.

Without knowing what Instagram is working on, I can say that this is a version of the app that I would totally use. In fact, I hope Instagram gets to see this and gives Stephen a call.

What do I like about it specifically? It feels “airy,” and I like being able to simply jump back and forth between things in applications. Facebook’s own mobile app has some of these properties, as does Path. I love the suggested gestures – it really stretches the iOS experience and capabilities.

What say you? Would you use this Instagram?

UPDATE: Just chatted via email with Stephen, and here’s what he had to say:

I don’t use Instagram that much, but many people do, so when I was using it I thought it could be more elegant. I redesigned parts to be a bit more intuitive to gestures, removed the top menu bar that felt unnecessary, and I wanted to make the shots look like actual polaroids. Then to just test my abilities I animated the whole thing.

Genius. And he’s a free agent. Hire him quickly.

[Photo credit: Flickr from the past]

As affordable Android phones start reaching consumers on developing countries like Indonesia and Bangladesh, more will spring for data plans.

But the problem is that carriers see very low average revenue per user in these markets, perhaps around $2 to 3 per month per person.

Most won’t be able to afford standard plans, so how do carriers consumers a flexible range of options?

Maybe even a la carte access to specific apps?

That’s where Finland’s Blaast comes in. It’s a startup that’s been around for a couple years with a product that’s similar to what Facebook-acquired Snaptu used to do in bringing social networks and messaging to thousands of types of feature phones.

They’ve just launched a new app store that lets users in developing countries pick and choose which apps they want data access for. In a way, it’s similar to what Andreessen Horowitz-backed ItsOn is doing for developed countries. That company is partnering with one of the large U.S. carriers to give consumers an easy way to pick and choose how they want to access mobile broadband.

In contrast, Blaast is focused on developing countries. They’ve partnered with Sony and a carrier XL Axiata to pre-install it on certain Xperia phones in Indonesia. Just to note, Indonesia is a pretty unique market that’s extremely savvy about social networking products. It’s Facebook’s fourth largest market behind Brazil, India and the U.S.

The company already has partnerships with carriers in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia that put its product in 50 million active SIM cards.

Blaast’s app store compresses apps by up to 50 percent and runs them in the cloud. The store only has about 20 apps at the moment but they’re adding more. Their original product put more than 100 apps in a single one, and included Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, news apps and social games.

The 30-person company is not yet cash-flow positive and it’s raised 5 million euros from investors including Ambient Sound Investments, Veturi Venture Accelerator, Pekka Vartiainen and Steve Blank.

What seemed like a disaster turned out to be a blessing for 31-year-old entrepreneur Justin Miller, founder of Deja Mi and WedPics. After a feature story by NewsObserver left the company with an eviction notice for running the 13-employee business out of Miller’s home in Raleigh, NC, the community’s support led to a new working space at The Hub and a $250k investment from a local angel investors.

We first met Miller at the Raleigh-Durham meetup, where we learned about his second startup WedPics, an Instagram-style private photo-sharing app for weddings. The company’s first startup, another geo-based photo-sharing app called Deja Mi, and WedPics were both run out of Miller’s home, until very recently.

The city’s zoning department sent an inspector to give notice of eviction to the 13-employee company after the NewsObserver ran a feature story on Deja Mi, Miller, and the homegrown operation going down in Miller’s basement. The citation stated that if the business wasn’t removed from the house in 30 days, the city would fine Miller $500/day until the matter was resolved.

The city claims that a neighbor anonymously complained to the Mayor’s office about foot traffic in the neighborhood, yet this is the first Miller has heard of any complaints in the two years the business has operated out of his house.

This reaction surprised the community, coming from a region working to grow the startup scene in Raleigh and Durham. But Miller has told TechCrunch that he received over 100 different offers for a place to work (both permanently or temporarily) from local businesses and people from the area.

They ended up at the Hub, which is a brand new co-working space in downtown Raleigh. And perhaps even better than that, Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, caught wind of WedPics and decided invest in the company toward its second round of investment. With Copeland’s investment, Deja Mi has raised $250k towards a $1.5 million round. This follows a $750K seed round in June of this year.

WedPics has since moved from a paid model ($99 for the couple’s album) to freemium, instead generating revenue with account upgrades like custom printed invite cards, unlimited hosting, and true hi-res album downloads. The app has seen 5,000 couple sign ups, with an average of more than 300 sign-ups a day in over 40 countries.

With shiny new 4G smartphones clamouring for attention, it’s easy to forget about the humble talk-plus-text mobile phone. But the device continues to dominate in emerging markets, such as Africa, where access to third generation cellular — let alone 4G — is not even close to being widespread. ABI Research says GSM (2G) mobile subscriptions now account for 62.7 percent of mobile subscriptions in Africa, while 3G, in both CDMA2000 and WCDMA flavours, only represents 11 percent of the overall market. Just over a quarter (27 percent) of subscriptions rely on 2.5G access technologies for mobile data.

In its latest quarterly update for the region, the analyst says it expects mobile phone subscriber penetration levels to pass 80 percent in the first quarter of next year. In Q3 this year, Africa’s 54 countries and 1.08 billion people had accumulated 821 million mobile subscribers, according to ABI, up 16.9 percent year-on-year — to 76.4 percent. In Q1 2013 it predicts penetration levels will “eclipse” 80 percent — going on to note that, since many mobile users in the region maintain more than one active prepaid subscription “to minimize interconnection charges”, there is scope for (yet) more growth.

ABI adds that it expects the cellular market in Africa to grow to 1.12 billion subscribers by 2017 — contributing 13.9 percent to take the global cellular market to 8.11 billion.

The mobile subscription growth rate in Africa is easily outstripping mature mobile markets elsewhere in the world. ”While Western Europe languishes with barely positive overall growth quarter-on-quarter, Africa managed to generate 4.2 percent growth in the same period,” noted Marina Lu, research associate, ABI Research, in a statement.

A Deloitte report earlier this month — for global mobile carrier association, the GSMA — named sub-Saharan Africa as the fastest-growing mobile market in the world, with a “prodigious” average annual growth rate of 44 percent since the year 2000. The report noted that mobile connections in sub-Saharan Africa had grown to 475 million vs just 12.3 million fixed line connections.

According to ABI, the top seven Africa carriers by subscriber number are

Prepaid — as opposed to monthly carrier billing — accounts for the “vast majority” of Africa’s mobile subscriptions, owing to the relative lack of access to banking facilities and credit cards. In South Africa, ABI pegs carrier prepaid ratios at between 70 to 86 percent but in most other African countries it says prepaid ratios are more than 95 percent — “if not close to 99 percent”.

Mobiles have stepped in to help Africa’s unbanked in other ways too — via SMS-based mobile money services such as the Safaricom/Vodafone M-Pesa service. Earlier this week, a new mobile-based financial service launched for M-Pesa customers in Kenya — in partnership with the Commercial Bank of Africa. Called M-Shwari, this offers interest bearing savings accounts and small loans via the M-Pesa menu on mobile users’ (not so humble) mobile phones.

Collaborative consumption continues to be a hot trend in the eyes of investors as news comes today that Love Home Swap, the holiday home exchange marketplace, has raised a further £800k (approx. $1.28m) from MMC Ventures, along with a number of unnamed angels. The new capital will be used to scale the company, including through acquisition, and to continue to develop the service and launch a new bespoke insurance product, a much needed feature post-Airbnb woes.

MMC is a previous backer of the UK-based Love Home Swap, having previously invested £850k, bringing the total raised by Love Home Swap to £1.65m.

Founded by Debbie Wosskow, and launched in October 2011, Love Home Swap builds on the age old concept of home swapping as an alternative to renting expensive holiday accommodation. The holiday home exchange website provide members with the opportunity to connect with each other to swap their homes for “stylish and unique residences” across 70 countries — the premise being that not only can they reside for free via exchange, but they can also “holiday like a local”.

Membership of the site requires a paid-for subscription, which of course is how Love Home Swap makes money, and in addition, premium members get access to a dedicated travel team, personal concierge, travel guides and other benefits. The company is also talking up the social aspect of the site, as members share “insider tips” on the best things to see, eat, visit and do locally.

However, with today’s new investment, it’s all about scale. I’m told that the company is targeting 50,000 members by the middle of next year and that this will be partly achieved through “a number of competitor acquisitions” over the next few months, with the aim to achieve clear market leadership.

Meanwhile, Love Home Swap has sensibly been working on a bespoke home swapping insurance product in partnership with insurance company Hiscox, which will also provide a nice new revenue stream. It also plans to further develop its product to “build out social, mobile and local”, including further integration with Facebook’s social graph to let members find home swaps through their wider social circle. In addition, multi-language support is in the pipeline, with a French version launching at the beginning of January.

All in all, the collaborative consumption startup is pretty bullish about its growth prospects, citing research that shows that more than twice as many people are planning home swap holidays in 2012 vs 2011 – a rise from 1.6 million to over 3.2 million in the UK, apparently. Following today’s new funding round, it would appear that investors are bullish, too.

It seems like it’s been ages since SparkLabs revealed its intentions to nurture a handful of promising startups in South Korea (it was actually the end of July), but now the accelerator has officially pulled back the curtains on its inaugural class.

As you’d expect, most of these past months have been spent deliberating over the six companies that would participate in the three-month program, but that’s not all the trio of SparkLabs founders have been devoting their time to. The team has also been working to flesh out its honorary advisory board — the early roster included the likes of Mark Cuban and legendary computer scientist Vint Cerf, and SparkLabs has just recently added Arizona State University president Michael Crow and ex-Microsoft CTO/current Talko CEO Ray Ozzie into the mix.

Each of the class’s first six startups will get a place to work (if they don’t already have one), perks courtesy of the Global Accelerator Network, and $25,000 in seed funding — though some of them definitely need it more than others. SparkLabs co-founder Bernard Moon noted that the team was open to applications from startups that had already locked up considerable amounts of funding, so long as the teams behind them had their sights set on the international stage.

So, without any further ado, say hello to SparkLab’s first class (not in any particular order):

• ABLAR Company:

  ABLAR’s forte is mobile applications, and it has already launched a handful, including Craigslist-esque mobile classified ad service Bulletin, and Reservation King Poing, a Korea-only OpenTable analogue. ABLAR CEO Jungseok Roh previously founded Tatter And Company and helped to create its titular blogging platform (think of the company as Korea’s take on Automattic) before it was acquired by Google’s Korean arm back in 2008.

• Merrywind:

  There’s no question that South Korea is a major market for games, and a team of Nexon alums broke off to form Merrywind and focus on social gaming in mid-2011. The company has already pushed out its first work — a Facebook game called Hotel Casino — earlier this year, and has a few more titles already in the pipeline.

• KnowRe:

  The only edtech startup of the bunch, KnowRe is working on a personalized learning platform that adapts to its users’ particular strengths and weaknesses. For now KnowRe seems heavily geared toward bolstering users’ faculty with math, but it’ll be interesting to see how the product evolves as it expands across borders.

• Memebox:

  Tell me if this sounds familiar: you pay a set monthly fee in order to receive a handsome box full of beauty goodies on your doorstep on a regular basis. There are more than a few startups running with that particular model around these parts, but Memebox has taken off in South Korea (along with rival Glossybox) and now aims to branch out into a handful of new (and hopefully lucrative) Asian markets.

• WePlanet:

  One of the youngest startups in this batch, WePlanet makes “life-logging” mobile services meant to help users capture interesting moments in their lives as quickly and as simply as possible. The team’s first project is an iOS and Android app called PocketShare that automatically shares photos with a user’s friends, though they may end up having to change the name at some point.

• NFLabs:

  And last we have NFLabs, which is best known for its Peloton big data platform — it’s meant to help organizations and companies simplify the process of managing and analyzing all of their data. The startup counts SK Broadband and LG U+ (otherwise known as the third largest wireless carrier in South Korea) among its customers, and has inked partnership deals with Hyosung and U.S.-based Hortonworks.