Category: Tech news

Social ad buying platform Adaptly has raised a total of $2.7 million in seed and Series A funding from First Round Capital, Charles River Ventures, Kirschenbaum Bond Senecal & Partners and Lerer Ventures. Angel investors also include Gary Vaynerchuk, Invite Media founder Nathaniel Turner and Interclick CEO Michael Katz .

Adaptly, which caters to clients like Pepsi’s Lipton/Brisk, makes it easier for brands to advertise across social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and Plentyoffish by thinking outside of the display ads box. “Social is NOT display,” co-founder Nikhil Sethi tells me. “What’s really important for us is to socialize the evolution of display ads. Those two dots don’t get connected and they need to be.”

Adaptly has two components: A white-label ad platform as well as a fully managed service where a team member helps brands through the process, “Imagine spending $5 million dollars on StumbleUpon ad. It’s not an easy thing to do, that scale is what we bring to the table,” says Sethi.

The ads space right now is dominated by Facebook specific-buying agencies like Blink, Ad Parlor and the companies that apply search metrics right next to social like Efficient Frontier.

What Adaptly does differently than the other players is that it understands that integrating ads into a site like Twitter or LinkedIn is an entirely different process and extends beyond Facebook, “Our bet is that social is not just Facebook, but that it will evolve into other sites like LinkedIn and Tumblr. Facebook is roughly 47% of the pie.” 

Adaptly recently moved its headquarters to NYC, and currently operates with a team of seven who mostly come from engineering backgrounds. Sethi tells me he will use the $2.7 million in recent funding to “build the most badass team” and has as an overall goal to put the “tech” in AdTech by building a really strong engineering-focused company.

Back in February, we heard that a private jet company had gotten FAA approval to use an iPad-based charting system instead of paper charts, which are the standard throughout the industry. They used an app called Mobile TC, but GlobalNavSource has come up with another app, EFB (“electronic flight bag”), and it’s being offered for free until they release it commercially on June first.

This isn’t Flight Control crossed with Google Maps: it’s an actual tool for pilots that could easily be used by commercial airlines in the next couple years.

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Google, Pixar, Twitter. All of them started as side projects or experiments which only later turned into big ideas. In a world of lean startups, the mantra is to get a product out there in the hands of consumers and keep making changes until something clicks. TechCrunch contributor Peter Sims (@petersims) has a new book out hat explains why little bets are more likely to lead to big ideas than big bets. It is called, appropriately enough, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries, and it is just hitting Amazon and the book stores this week.

Sims, who is a recovering venture capitalist, recently offered TechCrunch readers a preview of his thinking in a guest post which turned out to be very popular. He wrote:

The truth is, most entrepreneurs launch their companies without an brilliant idea and proceed to discover one, or if they do start with what they think is a superb idea, they quickly discover that it’s flawed and then rapidly adapt.

Of course, everyone wants to make big bets.  That’s a Silicon Valley maxim.  Go big.  Be bold.  But brilliant ideas are over-rated and people routinely bet big on ideas that aren’t solving the right problems, including Google Wave and WebVan.  Pixar storytellers must make thousands of little bets to develop a movie script, Hewlett Packard cofounder Bill Hewlett found that HP needed to make 100 small bets on products to identify six that could be breakthroughs.

Just as Twitter went from a small bet to a big one, small bets are affordable and achievable ways to learn about problems and opportunities, while big bets are for capitalizing upon them.

Put his book on your reading list.

MindJolt, the game distribution company that was acquired by MySpace founder and former CEO Chris DeWolfe last year, has made two significant acquisitions in the gaming space today— game developer Social Gaming Network (SGN) and game network Hallpass Media. The acquisitions were first reported by the New York Times. Financial terms of the acquisitions were not disclosed.

SGN creates a number of popular games for iPhone and Android devices and social platforms like Facebook. SGN’s hit online and mobile games (which have seen 30 million downloads to date), include Mini Tycoon Casino, F.A.S.T., and Skies of Glory. Founded by Shervin Pishevar, SGN has raised a total of $17 million in funding.

Hallpass Media, which has raised $2 million in funding, is a online gaming network consisting of vertically focused casual game destinations. The acquisition brings over four million gamers and nearly 1,500 new
games to the MindJolt platform.

So how does this fit into MindJolt’s strategy? DeWolfe said in a statement, The acquisition of SGN and Hallpass broadens our content offering and extends our reach. Mindjolt becomes a cross-platform ‘triple threat’ with great games across mobile, social, and web platforms…This three-pillar approach enables MindJolt to deliver our games wherever people choose to play, and differentiates our service from others in this space.

MindJolt has a catalog of over 1,300 casual games, which it distributes across partner sites as well as its own game portal MindJolt.com and a Facebook application that had over 10 million monthly active users, as of December. Currently, MindJolt has seen 30 million mobile downloads of its applications and is reaching over 25 million users across the web.

We had a chance to speak to DeWolfe about this strategic move. On the SGN side, DeWolfe tells us that the acquisition was partly a major talent grab and an IP acquisition. This expands our presence beyond just Facebook, says DeWolfe, and gives us a solid base in the mobile gaming arena.

One area where DeWolfe will be focusing his efforts is partnering with with movie studios and entertainment companies to create branded, game titles on mobile, social and casual platforms. He says that because MindJolt is based in LA, the company has ties with networks and production companies to partner with them to produce and distribute these games.

Whole he declined to give us financial specifics on the acquisitions, he did say that the deals were made from a combination of money raised from Austin Ventures last year, equity, and cash from the business. DeWolfe adds that the company will be making a number of smaller acquisitions in the near future and will be looking at larger acquisitions as well.

MindJolt also offers a monetization product called AdJolt, which includes ads and a virtual goods system. Currently, the company is seeing $20 million in revenue and is profitable, according to the New York Times report.

“We want to create hits on Facebook, mobile and the web,” DeWolfe explains. “That’s direction we’re going in.”

Last week, we invited big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly into the TechCrunch Studios to talk about Hoffman’s definition of “Web 3.0″– a torrent of innovation that’s going to be unleashed by all of this personal data being collected about us. In the first segment we talked about the scary implications of this wave of companies, and in the second segment we talked about the sometimes-futuristic, exciting ways data could make our lives better.

In this segment, I ask the two whether Web 3.0 is here now. The answer is yes and no. Like the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 the lines are blurred, with some companies– like Google back then and Groupon today– straddling two worlds. But the two are making investments in uber-data-centric companies now.

And just like you could see roots of Web 2.0 in early community-focused companies like eBay and Skype, many Web 2.0 companies are already embracing the cross-platform data revolution that Facebook first hinted at with its controversial Beacon launch years ago. Hoffman cites LinkedIn’s Skills product as an example.

One area where the two disagree is where the most innovation will occur: O’Reilly is expecting huge changes in the physical world, while Hoffman is betting more heavily on digital. Either way, if you’re in college now, do yourself a favor and specialize in data science. The job title that didn’t really exist a few years ago is becoming the must-have skill set for the next generation of companies, Hoffman says.

Earlier in February we had reported on UberMedia’s acquisition talks with TweetDeck, a land grab move that would have given Bill Gross’ UberMedia control of nearly 20% of all tweets served.

Shortly there-afterward Twitter shut down and then reinstated three UberMedia apps (Twidroyd, UberCurrent and UberSocial) for violating TOS policies. Hmm …

The WSJ is today reporting that Twitter and UberMedia have crossed paths once more, and that the status update giant is also in talks with TweetDeck, offering around $50 million for the Twitter client. We had reported that Ubermedia’s TweetDeck offer was between $25-$30 million.

This move (and overbid by about $20 million) if true, would seem to be a defensive one by Twitter, especially in light of a CNN report that Gross is “outlining plans” to build a Twitter competitor. UberMedia currently has $21 million in funding to Twitter’s $360 million.

I’ve contacted all parties involved including TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth for more information and will update this post if they respond with anything useful.

Launching today is Perth-based Cardnap, a site that lets you search for the best deals on gift cards. Cardnap wants to be what Hipmunk is for airline search, in that the startup is employing a user-friendly UI to make browsing and filtering your gift card results a non-teeth-grinding experience.

Cardnap not only lets you search for discounted gift cards, it allows you to resell your own, too. No doubt you have a few Pets.com gift cards lying around, and while Cardnap will probably turn you down on that one, you can resell your gift cards and get most of your money back. (The site offers returns as high as 92 percent.)

Cardnap Co-founder Lachy Groom tells me that the percentage of return on your gift card will vary, based on the demand for a particular brand and how many deals or promotions that company is already running for its gift cards. So, while you may only be able to get 70 percent value for an iTunes card (which is already heavily discounted at stores), for example, a WalMart gift card might yield a 90 percent return.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a rise in popularity of card-exchange marketplaces, like Cardpool, PlasticJungle, GiftCardBin, and ABCGiftCards, to name a few. Cardnap has forged partnerships with each of these sites to allow you to easily search their inventories to discover which site is currently offering the best rates on a particular gift card.

Groom, a 16-year-old entrepreneur who sold his first company at 15, tells me that Cardnap was originally intended to be an “Australian version of Cardpool”, but in the last year, he and co-founder Josh Davies decided to pivot.

The reason being, Lachy said, is that while eCommerce adoption is growing in Australia, that growth remains slow. At this point, the Aussie market is too small to create the mass demand that a secondhand gift card marketplace needs to get off the ground. Though sites like cardlimbo are giving it a shot, without a real equivalent to Amazon, the market will remain more fertile abroad.

As this is the case, Cardnap made the smart decision to identify the real pain point within existing gift card marketplaces, which have popped up in earnest across the U.S., and improve upon it, rather than launch a standalone card exchange. The search capabilities and UX for many of these sites, which are still largely in the early stages of growth, remain unpolished and clunky. So, Cardnap is aggregating the top card vendors in one location, and allowing users to search for the best cards and the best deals by nearly any parameter.

As of today, Cardnap is working on integrating its search with eBay and expanding to Canada, the UK, and Australia, and Lachy said that GiftCardRescue will be added to search results within the week.

Now, you may notice that one of the biggest card exchanges is not included in Cardnap’s search results. Lachy asked that the site’s name not be used, because the vendor has declined a partnership with Cardnap because “it was worried about the market share” the startup has already begun consuming, he said. This seems like an odd move, considering partnering with Cardnap is a win-win for gift card exchanges, as it will bring added traffic to the sites and likely higher profits.

Nonetheless, it seems that the startup has attracted the majority of the other noteworthy card sites, so the loss likely won’t affect their business. In fact, the founder tells me that the site has already become profitable. Considering it has only been a week since the startup’s soft launch, the future could very well be bright.

The co-founders are actively seeking seed funding, and have had some interest from Silicon Valley investors, though they’re not ready to reveal who quite yet.

So, if you’ve got some gift cards lying around you just can’t seem to re-gift them on unsuspecting family members, or you’d like to find a discounted 1-800-Flowers card in anticipation of Mother’s Day, check out Cardnap. You can find physical and electronic gift cards and sell your old cards for cash, Amazon exchange, or Facebook credits. Worth taking a look.

It’s not a good sign for a social network when game developers begin to shut down applications all together. And it appears that Zynga is shuttering its Mafia Wars game on beleaguered social network Myspace.

According to a notice on the Mafia Wars homepage within Myspace, Zynga is discontinuing Mafia Wars on Myspace beginning today but is encouraging users to continue playing Mafia Wars at MafiaWars.com. Interestingly, Zynga leads users to its own independent gaming portal as opposed to directing users to the Facebook version of the game.

We’ve reached out to Zynga for comment, but it’s likely that the social gaming giant shut the game down because there simply weren’t enough players to justify keeping the game alive. While the page for the game says it has 13 million active users, this is unlikely considering Mafia Wars on Facebook currently has 16.8 million monthly active users. It’s no secret that Myspace is hemorrhaging users and it really doesn’t make sense for Zynga to put resources into something that has an incredibly low user count.

For those of you who still play Zynga games on Myspace, it appears that Zynga hasn’t shut down all of its titles. Zynga Poker, YoVille, Vampire Wars, Fashion Wars, Special Forces and Pirates are still alive. For now.

I’ve been using the Blackberry Playbook since Friday and I find it to be a unique and very usable device. The obvious problems aside – no native email client, poor browsing, wonky Flash support – it’s clear that RIM took lots of care to produce a device that would appeal to their core audience of crackberriers. Even the ill-advised Blackberry Bridge makes a certain kind of sense. Why? Because the removal of all points of security failure from the tablet gives the folks in IT a reason to OK the device on their networks. The same can’t be said of any of the other tablets, iOS and Android devices included. In fact, without the Bridge the Playbook is a simple and compelling media consumption device.

But Blackberry is now trying to survive a period marked by a rapid and permanent change in smartphone usage. Back when Blackberries were pagers, the best a business user on the road could hope for was a fax sent to a hotel room. A few short years later and Blackberry ruled the mobile messaging space. Their email product and messenger allowed countless people to remain connected everywhere, at all times, an accomplishment that brought about a sea change in the way we interact online. The Blackberry is a unique artifact that defined how a generation lived and worked. Blackberries made it OK to be always on call, much to our own detriment.

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The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple has just filed another lawsuit in its legal crusade against Android: a ‘look and feel’ complaint against Samsung phones including the Galaxy S 4G, Epic 4G, Galaxy Tab, and Nexus S, that have allegedly copied “Apple’s technology, user interface and innovative style”. The suit was filed in the Northern District of California on April 15. The fact that the Nexus S is included is important, as this features Google’s stock build of Android 2.3.

And, as the report notes, Samsung is actually a chip supplier for Apple products.

This is only the latest attack in Apple’s war against phone manufacturers who have created popular Android devices.

In March 2010, Apple launched a patent infringement case against HTC that went for the jugular: it cited infringements on “20 Apple patents related to the iPhone’s user interface, underlying architecture and hardware”. The suit was a clear attack on Android (many of HTC’s most popular devices run Google’s mobile OS), and Google was quick to say that it had HTC’s back.

Because the suit was filed with the International Trade Commission, an Apple victory could mean that infringing HTC devices are banned from importation in the US. This morning, the staff of the ITC announced that it recommended against siding with Apple. This is pleasant news for HTC and Android fans, but it doesn’t actually have any consequence — this was just a staff recommendation, and it’s still up to the judge to decide whether or not to ban HTC devices.

And Apple isn’t the only one looking to fend off Android with lawsuits. Microsoft has filed suit against Motorola claiming nine cases of patent infringement (and got HTC to license its patents, likely to avoid a legal dispute).

Daily deals site Groupon has acquired Whrrl parent company Pelago this afternoon. The iFund-backed Pelago is most famous for its Whrrl product, which is a Foursquare-like LBS services app that allows people to check into places.

Pelago CEO and former Amazon executive Jeff Holden will be now be overseeing product development at Groupon and members of the Pelago team will be taking on roles in “Grouponnovations” after Whrrl shuts down on April 30th 2011 . No word yet on the price of the acquisition.

Groupon CEO Andrew Mason writes:

“Here’s a great way to start the week…  We’re excited to announce that the minds at Pelago, creators of Whrrl, have officially joined the Groupon family.

We’ve always liked CEO Jeff Holden, the Whrrl team and the technology they’ve developed.  Their obsession with real-world serendipitous discovery, or Anti-Search, is core to Groupon’s mission.  It’s about discovering what you didn’t know you didn’t know, right in your own backyard. Jeff intimately gets consumer buying behavior and the importance of a great user experience, and his team is this awesome combination of data-driven creatives…the people who create smart products that are really fun to use.

With Jeff overseeing Groupon product development and many Pelago people taking integral roles in future Grouponnovations, Whrrl will be retiring on April 30, 2011. You can read more about that on Pelago’s blog at http://www.pelago.com/blog/announcements/2011/04/big-day/.

So here’s a warm welcome to Jeff and the team!”

Pelago had $22.4 million in funding from T-Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Bezos Expeditions, DAG, Reliance and Trilogy Equity Partners. Groupon of course is funded to the gills (hence the shopping spree) with $1.14B from NEA, DST and others.

A stealth startup in New York City called Kohort has raised a pretty hefty “seed” round of $3 million from a large group of VCs and angels. IA Ventures led the round. But other investors getting in on the action include RRE Ventures, Countour, FF Venture Capital, and both David Cohen and David Tisch of TechStars (investing personally).

CEO Mark Davis is well-known in New York City venture circles. He is himself a former VC with DFJ Gotham. Davis is also the founder of both the Columbia Venture Community and the New York Venture Community. His co-founder and CTO is Steve Blood.

Davis won’t say what kind of product Kohort will be, other than it will be related to social media. The Kohort site is just a landing page which lets you reserve your Kohort name. You can also follow Kohort on Twitter.

It’s time for the much-awaited part two of our sit down with Internet big-thinkers Reid Hoffman and Tim O’Reilly. We invited the two in the studio last week to talk about what Hoffman has called “Web 3.0″– the use of an explosion of data being collected about our real lives online.

Last week, we talked about the undeniably scary aspects of Web 3.0– data and privacy and how we can trust companies or governments in a Web 3.0-era. This week, we talk about the good things: The realm of innovation that all this data opens up. From self-driving cars to sustainable mega-cities, in this segment Hoffman and O’Reilly give us their Web 3.0 wish list.

Enjoy!

Here comes the Veer! Is the world ready for a 2.6-inch touchscreen phone? Who knows! That’s the fun part. HP just sent out invites to a May 2nd “Launch Party” which, as the name suggests, is likely for the launch of the Veer. However, Monday May 2nd might not be the day the Veer hits the general retail market although the first week of May sounds about right. Now this doesn’t seem like a press event — at least we didn’t get an invite. Instead it seems that this is for retail associates of some level because after registering, a note pops up indicated that a Best Buy or AT&T ID or business card is required to attend. AT&T, eh? Yeah, the small phone hitting the ol’ telephone & telegraph company.

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As expected, real estate listings and search site Zillow has just filed its S-1, which indicates that the company will be pursuing a public offering. Zillow wants to raise $51.75 million in the offering, according to the SEC filing. It’s important to note that this is a placeholder amount that could change in the coming months. It appears that Citigroup is one of the underwriters of the IPO (others include Allen & Company, ThinkEquity, Needham & Company, and First Washington Corp.).

Zillow, which saw 19 million visitors in March, is now listing 100 million U.S. homes, including homes for sale, homes for rent and homes not currently on the market. For the years ended December 31, 2008, 2009 and 2010, the company generated revenues of $10.6 million, $17.5 million and $30.5 million, representing year-over-year growth of 49%, 65% and 74%, respectively. Unfortunately, in terms of income, Zillow has been taking a loss for the past three years, according to the filing.

Zillow, which launched a mortgage marketplace in 2008, expanded into rentals and mobile. The company’s traffic to its web and mobile sites is up 90 percent year-over-year and in March 2011, Zillow was used on a mobile device more than 8 million times, with more than 1.4 million homes viewed on mobile devices each day.

In terms of financial specifics, Zillow appears to be losing less money each year. The company lost $12.8 million in 2009, and lost roughly half of that ($6.7 million) in 2010. The company, which launched to the public in 2006, also revealed that as of December 31, 2010, it has an accumulated deficit of $78.7 million. Zillow forecasts that its revenue growth rate will decline in the future as a result of the “maturation” of its business.

Costs are also expected to rise for the company has it invests more money into product development; sales and marketing; technology infrastructure; strategic partnerships (Zillow powers Yahoo real estate listings) and acquisitions (Zillow just bought Postlets), and the general administration, including legal and accounting expenses related to being a public company.

From the filing, “If we fail to continue to grow our revenue and overall business and to manage our expenses, we may continue to incur significant losses in the future and not be able to achieve or maintain profitability.”

Marketplace revenues grew from $3.9 million in 2009 to $13.2 million (increase of 238 percent), and represented 43% of total revenues in 2010 compared to 22% of total revenues in 2009. Zillow says the increase in marketplace revenues was primarily due to the growth in the number of subscribers in its Premier Agent program from 2,764 as of December 31, 2009 to 8,102 as of December 31, 2010, which is an increase of 193%. Marketplace revenues also increased as Zillow began to charge mortgage lenders for participation in the mortgage Marketplace in January 2010.

Thanks to more traffic, display revenues increased from $13.6 million in 2009 to $17.2 million in 2010 and represented 57% of total revenues in 2010 compared to 78% of total revenues in 2009.

According to Experian Hitwise, Zillow.com isthe #3 most visited Real Estate site in the U.S and received 5.36% of Real Estate visits in March 2011, which is a 53% increase compared to March 2010.

Zollow’s IPO follows a number of technology companies that have filed S-1 filing to go public, including Pandora, LinkedIn, Boingo Wireless, and HomeAway.