Category: Tech news

Among the many announcements made today at Apple’s WWDC was further information on Apple’s iAd platform. At the conference and in a release issued today, Steve Jobs revealed that Apple currently has mobile ad campaigns for AT&T, Best Buy, Chanel, Citi Target, The Walt Disney Studios and a number of other high-profile brands. Another interesting stat: Apple has iAd commitments for 2010 totaling over $60 million, which the company says represents almost 50 percent of the total forecasted US mobile ad spending for the second half of 2010. Jobs said in his keynote that Apple has only been selling iAds for 8 weeks.

iAd, which is built into iOS 4, will allow users to engage with in ad within an app, even while watching a video, playing a game or using in-ad purchase to download an app or buy iTunes content. Apple will give developers 60 percent of iAd Network revenue paid via iTunes Connect. The platform will debut on July 1.

Apple originally announced the iAd platform in April after the company acquired mobile ad platform Quattro Wireless in January. And the iAd network will go head to head with Google’s ad network AdMob. The mobile advertising market represents a massive revenue stream, and the $60 million stat only reinforces the potential takeway that both Apple and Google could pocket from their moves into the arena.

As expected, the iPhone 4 was announced today during Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC. Its flagship features are, of course, the extremely high resolution screen, video chat capability with FaceTime, and the sexy new form factor. But there’s more to the 4 than that, and even those seemingly self-explanatory new features deserve a closer look. Let’s see just what Apple’s done here with its biggest update to the iPhone since the original.

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Seattle based RevenueLoan, a new startup founded by Founder’s Co-op, is open for business. Think of them as a friendly loan shark who won’t come to break your legs if you don’t pay up (I don’t think they will, anyway).

A lot of startups that have revenue don’t want to raise venture capital because of the onerous terms – lots of equity, board seats and maybe even overall control of the company. Bank debt is an option but it’s hard to get, usually requires personal guarantees and the repayment schedules can be difficult or impossible to meet. This is RevenueLoan’s sweet spot.

If you have revenue of at least $1 million a year you can qualify to get a loan from them of $100,000 – $500,000 or more. There’s no set repayment schedule. Instead you give them a percentage of your revenue over time until you’ve paid them back 3x – 5x the amount borrowed. That may take 2 years or it may take six years, says chairman Andy Sack, and they’re ok with that.

More importantly, RevenueLoan doesn’t want control of your company, or any board seats. They don’t ask for personal guarantees. There’s no equity component (although in some instances they may ask for warrants), so there is no dilution to shareholders.

And RevenueLoan has money to spend. They’ve just raised $6 million from Voyager Capital, Summit Capital, and Founder’s Co-op, and they’ve earmarked $4.5 million of that for loans.

Press release is below:

RevenueLoan Secures $6MM First Round of Institutional Financing,
The company offers innovative new financing option for small business
Seattle, WA June 4, 2010

For small businesses, raising capital has never been easy, and the recent financial crisis has effectively closed the capital markets to all but the biggest and most high-flying small companies. The gross majority of growing businesses in the northwest have no access to growth capital. These are the businesses that have the greatest potential to create jobs, turn around the economy, and otherwise transform our lives. But help is on the way for business owners in the Pacific Northwest: a new company called RevenueLoan has just opened its doors, backed by $6MM in fresh capital from Voyager Capital, Summit Capital, and Founder’s Co-op.

RevenueLoan was created to address the needs of business owners with an innovative new form of financing growth. Instead of lending money at fixed rates – which can burden young companies with unrealistic monthly payments – RevenueLoan offers loans in exchange for a percentage of future revenues, so payments start small, and only increase as the company is able to grow revenues. This approach, called revenue based finance, is common in the mining and entertainment industries, but has not been applied to the needs of small business.

The company was founded and is being managed by Andy Sack, managing partner at Founder’s Co-op. According to Sack, his experience running venture capital backed companies helped him see the benefits of revenue based finance and prompted him to create RevenueLoan. Sack says, “Revenue loans have a huge number of benefits that I know from first hand experience as an entrepreneur matter a LOT. The benefits of no personal guarantee, no dilution, no valuation negotiation, no active control provisions, and no need for a clear exit strategy make this money very appealing to entrepreneurs trying to grow their businesses. A less obvious benefit, but an important structural benefit is that revenue loans align incentives of entrepreneur and investor. “

RevenueLoan focuses on funding early stage technology companies in the Pacific Northwest with trailing revenues of $1MM up to 5MM. In most instances, revenue loan amounts will range from $100K to $500K and beyond depending upon the company.

Erik Benson, of Voyager Capital, says that “Revenue Loan unique approach to use technology and finance to provide growth capital to a large number of businesses attracted his attention. I know first hand that companies off the beaten path geographically and thematically have a really hard time raising equity capital. I think there’s a real opportunity in finding and servicing these companies.”

According to Thomas Thurston, “Revenue Loan is on the forefront of a movement that is quietly beginning to transform the startup landscape as we know it – in an extremely positive way. We’ve seen a more than a 22X jump in the dollars invested through this type of funding over the past decade or so, and it has only begun to scratch the surface.”

“RevenueLoan focuses on a large underserved market of companies. These companies are growing but not fast enough to provide venture capital returns and don’t yet have enough assets to create meaningful availability under a working capital line. I’m excited to see RevenueLoan stepping in to support these businesses.” says Bruce Helberg, Northwest Market Manager of Silicon Valley Bank.

About Voyager Capital

Voyager Capital is a leading Pacific Northwest information technology venture capital firm, providing entrepreneurs with the resources, experience, and connections to build successful companies. Voyager invests in early and growth stage software, wireless and digital media companies, where the firm’s domain expertise and go-to-market resources help build market leaders. Voyager Capital has offices in Seattle, WA; Portland, OR; and Menlo Park, CA. Additional information found at www.voyagercapital.com.

About Summit Capital

Summit Capital is a multi-strategy, globally-oriented asset management firm, deploying capital in asset classes, investment vehicles and underlying securities deemed most attractive from a fundamental value perspective at various points throughout a full market cycle. Our style is most synonymous with endowments and foundations targeting total return allocated across a
full spectrum of asset classes through both direct and indirect active investment management. Summit Capital is based in Seattle, WA with additional information found at www.summitcapital.com.

About Founder’s Co-op

Founder’s Co-op is a seed- and early-stage investment partnership based in Seattle. The firm is led by experienced entrepreneurs Andy Sack and Chris DeVore, and invests on behalf of a hands-on limited partnership including more than 20 successful startup veterans. Founder’s Co-op helps web and mobile software entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest from the earliest stages of venture formation, with a hands-on approach that emphasizes agility, capital efficiency, creativity and active support from our extended community of investors and portfolio company founders. To learn more, visit us at http://www.founderscoop.com

The second biggest news out of San Fran today? The announcement of iPhone OS 4.0, Apple’s biggest improvement to the iPhone OS since, well, 3.0. This new version includes multi-tasking (although backgrounding would be the proper term), app folders, a new version of Mail, and a carrier unlock (Not officially sanctioned by Apple, but available nonetheless).

The weirdest thing? It’s now called iOS.

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Today at the WWDC keynote Steve Jobs unveiled the iMovie app for the iPhone. You would be amazed to know that this time around the video on the iPhone will be wickedly useful.

Today at the WWDC keynote address, Apple CEO Steve Jobs did a bit of tidying up. When talking about the new iPhone OS 4, Jobs noted that they were renaming the OS to be simply “iOS.” This is obviously because the iPhone OS has extended beyond the iPhone and onto new devices such as the iPad. Jobs also had a bit stat to throw out there: later this month, Apple will surpass 100 million iOS devices sold.

Jobs joked that developers have plenty of reach across their iOS platform. And it’s more than just reach. There are now some 150 million accounts across iTunes, iBookstore, and the App Store. These account all are attached to “credit cadrs ready to buy your apps,” Jobs noted.

That’s the most of any store across the web, Jobs said noting that across the stores there have been 16 billion downloads combined.

Today at Apple’s developer conference (read our livenotes), Steve Jobs announced that the iPhone will new getting a new search engine option: Bing. We heard rumblings of a deal in late May. Currently, Google is the default search engine on the iPhone, which can be changed to Yahoo in the settings. “”We’re adding a third option which is Bing,” says Jobs. “Google will stay the default.”

As competition between Google and Apple increases on the mobile front, their once-cozy relationship is now a thing of the past. “Microsoft has don’t a really nice job on this,” praises Jobs. Not a nice enough job to replace Google as the default apparently. But the new option will put Google on notice that the default spot won’t necessarily be theirs forever.

Apple doesn’t want to get into Web search directly, but its $200 million acquisition of Siri points to a new direction in mobile search it will move towards in the future: voice-controlled virtual assistance. That technology is just in its infancy. While Apple works on perfecting it, traditional search will continue to grow on mobile phones, and playing off Google against Bing is certainly in Apple’s best interest.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings got up on stage right after Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the WWDC 2010 conference, which we’re liveblogging here. Guess why he was there: there’s a free Netflix app for iPhone on the way, and it’s coming this Summer.

It isn’t much of a surprise. I mean, Netflix already has an (amazing) iPad app, and it started surveying interest for an iPhone app early March 2010, while rumors of its impending launch have been swirling for much longer.

Judging from MobileCrunch writer Greg Kumparak’s comments on the liveblog, the features Hastings mentioned on stage mirror that of the iPad app: full catalog, Instant Queue access, and movies will start playing where you stopped watching even if it was on any other platform than the iPhone OS.

Update: Engadget has a screenshot:

Today at the WWDC event in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs took the stage for his keynote address. During it, he gave some key stats about three key pillars of Apple’s recent strategy: the iPad, the App Store, and the new iBooks store.

First, the key iPad stats:

• There have been 2 million iPads sold in 59 days.
• That’s 1 iPad sold every 3 seconds
• It’s in 10 countries now (9 new ones) — and 19 by the end of July
• There are over 8,500 native iPad apps
• These apps have been downloaded over 35 million times
• That’s about 17 apps per iPad

Next some iBooks stats:

• There are over 5 million book downloads in the first 65 days of the iBooks store
• That means each iPad has about 2.5 iBooks on them
• Apple has 5 of the top 6 book U.S. publishers and they say that Apple has taken about 22% of the U.S. eBooks market

App Store:

• There are over 225,000 apps in the App Store now.
• 15,000 apps submitted every week (both new and updates) across 30 languages
• 95% of all apps are approved in 7 days

Jobs also used the stage early on at WWDC to take his first shot at Google. He notes that the developer of Elements for the iPad recently emailed him to let him know that he earned more money in the first day of sales for the iPad than he did in 5 years from Google ads on his periodictable.com site.

Jobs also highlighted something that Apple has begun pushing recently thanks largely to its war with Adobe: HTML5. “We support two platforms at Apple,” Jobs said — HTML5 and the App Store. “Apple’s browsers are in the lead in supporting the HTML5 standard,” Jobs noted.

The two biggest stats Jobs said for last. There have been over 5 billion app downloads so far. And Apple has paid out over $1 billion to app developers (their 70% cut fo all sales).

Zynga’s hit game Farmville is coming to the iPhone, says the gaming giant’s CEO Mark Pincus at this morning’s WWDC keynote. This should make the 35 million daily players of Farmville players overjoyed, as now they can create their virtual farms on the go. Oddly, Steve Jobs pronounced Zynga, “Zenya” in the keynote. Twice.

The app looks like Farmville on Facebook, but formatted for the iPhone. The app will feature in app purchase support, along with push notifications for harvesting and other activities in the game. You’ll have access to your same farm, and your same friends as on Facebook as well. FarmVille will have exclusive market place items for iPhone users including a Snow Leopard in honor of Apple’s OS. The app will launch at the end of June.

The app should be immensely popular, considering the immense amount of users on Facebook and the game’s own site. And it’s only a matter of time before the gaming company launches native apps for the iPad and Android.

Steve Jobs finally made the iPhone 4 official. He’s probably more glad to see this happen than us with more than a couple iPhone 4s prematurely making their way into journalist’s hands over the last few weeks. But none of that really matters anymore. The iPhone 4 is here.

Developing…

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Today at the WWDC keynote in San Francisco, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the newest iPhone — the iPhone 4. Jobs didn’t dance around the fact that the device has been seen before. While he didn’t mention Gizmodo specifically, he did note that, “now, some of you have already seen this.” But he quipped, “believe me, you ain’t seen it.“

Jobs unveiled the new device called the iPhone 4. The first feature he highlighted is that the new device is 24% thinner than the iPhone 3GS. It’s all glass and stainless steel, Jobs noted comparing it to a “beautiful old Leica camera.” It’s the thinnest smartphone on the planet, Jobs said.

The second feature he noted was what Apple is calling the “Retina Display.” This is a new IPS technology-based screen Apple is using in the new device. Why are they calling it that? Because at 326 pixels per inch, it’s more pixels than the human retina can see (when the device is held 10 to 12 inches from your face).

“Once you see a retina display, you can’t go back,” Jobs said.

The iPhone 4 screen is 960×640, giving it four times as many pixel as the iPhone 3GS. The 800:1 contrast ratio is also four times better than the iPhone 3GS. In fact, the iPhone 4 gives you 78% of the pixels on the iPad, right in the palm of your hand, according to Jobs.

The third feature Jobs showed off is the inside of the hardware. As expected, the iPhone 4 will use Apple’s A4 chip. The device also has a bigger battery than ever before. The combination of these two things allows for 40% better battery life in some situations (like talk time), Jobs said.

Jobs also pointed out that the new steel rim around the iPhone 4 doubles as an antenna. (That’s why there are the seems you may have seen in the leaked iPhone photos.)

The fourth feature Jobs highlighted was a gyroscope. In addition to the compass, this will allow for new kinds of apps (and especially games). Jobs showed off a Jenga-style game that uses this.

The fifth feature highlighted was the new camera. The back camera on the iPhone (there is also a front-facing one) is now 5 megapixels (up from 3 in the iPhone 3GS). Jobs notes that megapixels aren’t everything (a subtle nod to some other devices which have higher megapixel cameras), and says that instead, Apple focused on the quality of the pictures the iPhone 4 can take.

Notably, the iPhone 4 can also take 720p HD video at a full 30 frames per second. To edit these new videos, Apple has made a new app: iMovie (yes, just like the software bundled with iLife). This will be available in the App Store for $4.99.

The sixth feature Jobs highlighted is the new iPhone OS 4 — which they’re renaming the iOS 4. This makes sense given that the OS is moving beyond just the iPhone now. Jobs showed off a few of the new features of the OS and confirmed that Apple is adding Bing as a new search option (but Google will remain the default).

The gold master build of iOS 4 will be available to developers today.

The seventh feature Jobs highlighted is iBooks for the iPhone, to go along with the version for the iPad. And just like the new iPad version this will feature PDF-reading.

The eighth feature Jobs talked about were iAds. He rattled off some of the big brands that have already signed up: Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Channel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbell’s, Sears, JCPenny, Target, Best Buy, TBS, and Disney were some of the ones he named.

These brands have signed up for the second half of the year, and they’ll start being turned on starting July 1.

But that’s not all.

Jobs had “one more thing…” up his sleeve. The ninth feature of iPhone 4 is FaceTime, a new video chat feature that will work on the iPhone 4. Jobs demoed it on stage making a call to Apple SVP Jonny Ive.

In 2010, this feature will only work over WiFi, Jobs noted saying that they’re working with the cellular providers to bring it to those networks eventually.

The iPhone 4 will go on sale June 24 — preorders start a week from tomorrow. On June 24 it will launch in 5 counties – in July they’ll add 18 more countries. By the end of September they will be shipping in 88 countries, Jobs noted.

iOS 4 will launch three days earlier on June 21. It will work completely (aside from FaceTime) on the iPhone 3GS, and will mostly work on the iPhone 3G and new iPod touch. For the first time, the upgrade will be available for free across the board.

The iPhone 4 will be available in black and white. The 16GB version will be $199, the 32GB version will be $299.

It’s time. After months of whispers, leaks, lost prototypes, and police raids, it all leads up to this: Steve Jobs’ keynote at WWDC 2010.

Will the prototype fourth-generation iPhone we’ve seen so much of be the real deal? Do Steve and co. have any tricks up their sleeves to satisfy their ever more rabid fan base? Follow along as we liveblog every minute of the action from the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

The keynote begins at 10 A.M Pacific (thats 12 P.M Central/1 P.M Eastern). Bookmark this page, and set your alarms — and be sure to tune in early! We’ll have some pre-show coverage, video footage, and pictures beginning at around 9 A.M.

Dmitry Shapiro, the founder and CEO of shuttered video site Veoh, is joining MySpace Music today as Chief Technology Officer. Shapiro will report directly to Courtney Holt, President of MySpace Music.

In his new role, Shapiro will be “responsible for all aspects of technical developments for the MySpace Music platform”, including new versions of artist profiles and tools as well as the overall music experience on MySpace. Shapiro is known for founding Veoh, whose assets were recently sold to Israeli startup Qlipso. Veoh has had a troubled history, facing copyright litigation with Universal Music Group. While the startup Veoh won a summary judgement in its favor last year, the lawsuit proved to be too costly and distracting. Veoh was forced to file for filing for bankruptcy in February.

Prior to founding Veoh, Shapiro was the Founder and CEO of P2P network security company Akonix Systems. Interestingly, Shapiro is an angel investor and Chairman of Irata Labs, the company that built the Twitter game Spymaster. MySpace’s parent News Corp just bought Irata Labs in April.

MySpace has seen an exodus of talent over the past few months, so it’s nice to see a key hire at the social network for change.

The iPad just sold 2 million units in two months, a pretty huge number for a device with no track record and it does, in fact, get girls interested in you. The device is in 10 countries today and will be in 19 in July. There are also 8,500 native iPad apps available now. There have been 35 million apps download, 17 per iPad.

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