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Mobile gifting startup Giiv raised $3.35 million in a series A round announced today. Investors included Google CEO Eric Schmidt (through his personal seed fund TomorrowVentures), Saban Ventures, Founder Collective, and SK Telecom Ventures. Schmidt was already a seed investor.

If the investors could have texted the $3.35 million into Giiv’s bank account, they probably would have. Giiv is a mobile gifting service which works via text messages, an iPhone app, and a Facebook app. It’s tag line is “texting with benefits.”

Giiv makes sending gifts easy by letting people text a redemption code for a store credit to a friend. Instead of buying someone a gift card, you can simply send them an SMS code via Giiv which they can use in both physical and online stores, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Macy’s, and Fandango.

Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga’s managers are looking for the next best thing.

They’re not looking for the next Bieber or Gaga— well, they’re looking for that too, but that’s not what I’m referring to here— they’re aggressively searching for the next great web platform.

Troy Carter, CEO of Coalition Media and the manager of Lady Gaga, and Scooter Braun, Founder of SB Projects and the manager of Justin Bieber, oversee two very different performers but when it comes to the philosophy behind their online strategy, the managers speak the same language. After their Disrupt panel, “Success Strategies for Musicians in the Digital Era,” Braun and Carter elaborated on their vision during our backstage video interview (see above).

Both have used social media tools, namely Twitter and YouTube, to elevate their artists and both are actively looking for new tools to build and engage their audience. To give you a sample of their online success, Gaga has 4.3 million Twitter followers, Bieber has 2.8 million. On YouTube, Lady Gaga’s top three videos recently surpassed one billion views, the 16-year-old is not that far behind with more than 380 million views on his VEVO channel.

Now that their clients are major influencers online, Braun and Carter are ready to use that capital to strike lucrative partnerships with the next generation of startups. This is not idle chatter. “I don’t want to name these companies that I’ve been looking at,” Braun says. “But…I went out and flew out to San Francisco and spent two weeks just meeting with new, young entrepreneurs out there because I want to know who’s next and [I] realized that the power that our artists have created for themselves on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube are very, very valuable for launching these new platforms.” Braun sees it as a symbiotic relationship, the artist brings visibility to a company and gains a new way to engage fans.

With the record virtually dead, (Bieber managed to recently regain the top spot on the Billboard charts with a measly 60,000 albums sold for the week) the managers and the rest of the industry are still trying to redefine the business model. They haven’t figured it out quite yet, but Braun and Carter both believe that online partnerships with younger companies like Foursquare will be a major part of the formula, especially for artists that achieve a critical mass (like Gaga and Bieber).  Perhaps what’s most surprising, they say, is that they’re part of the minority in an industry that has the most to gain and lose by the rapid evolution of social media and technology:

Braun: The fact that Troy and I are the only people that I’ve seen at this conference from the music business is blowing my mind. I said this to L.A. Reid yesterday, the chairman of Island Def Jam, I said to him yesterday, the fact that you’re not down there and people from your company aren’t down there meeting everyone is just… it’s just not right.

Carter: The fact that it’s called Disrupt should have every record label here right now because no media business has been more disrupted like the record business…

Braun: If we don’t come to conferences like this and find that next young entrepreneur and find that next idea and become a part of it we’re going to die.

In a bizarre move, The Pirate Bay, the world’s largest BitTorrent tracker, is partnering with social dating site Meezoog to launch an online dating site PirateDate.com, to take on Match.com, Zoosk and others.

The Pirate Bay, which has had a tumultuous year, is launching a dating network around sharing. PirateDate will allow singles to share and assist their social connections in finding potential dates, while getting recommendations and referrals from their friends. Pirate Date is utilizing Meezoog’s technology to provide users with “social proximity” measurements, that allow people to efficiently filter their cyber connections.

According to the site, personal information added by members is immediately visible to their friends (through Facebook connect), encouraging users to be honest with their information. Pirate Date’s ‘Social Radius’ technology exposes members to singles who are socially connected to them, as well as displays how they are connected. The site will also share users’ ‘Trust Paths’ to every member, showing people’s social graph. And the site’s ‘Social Proximity Gauge’, calculates how close you are to people you find interesting on Pirate Date.

It’s unclear who would actually want to join this site considering the Pirate Bay’s brand. It seems more oriented towards men than women, considering the homepage of Pirate Date includes a picture of an attractive woman in a pirate’s costume. And why would you join this site over Match.com, E-Harmony or others that already have a considerable user base?

While a dating site seems like an odd departure for a file sharing site, it makes sense that the Pirate Bay would want to focus on other verticals considering the legal troubles the site has been involved in with sharing content. A few weeks ago the site was shut down thanks to an injunction obtained by the film studios which halted bandwith to the site due to pirated content. The Pirate Bay just announced a new bandwith host, the Swedish Pirate Party.

We’ve been wondering what direction Qype would take recently after rumours that it was in potential acquisition talks with various parties, one of which may have been Nokia, although nothing was ever confirmed. What we do know is that there has been an internal “debate” about whether to enter into a strategic partnership (usually code for acquisition) or whether to double down on becoming the go-to local reviews site in Europe. And so far it’s held it’s own against Yelp on this side of the pond.

But today it’s become clear that this “exit or grow” debate had reached an impasse. We knew from sources that CEO Stephen Taylor, a former Yahoo! Europe head, favoured a partnership/acquisition. But Founder and Chairman Stephan Uhrenbacher, who remains Qype’s largest private shareholder, favoured the go for growth / home-run approach. Whatever the case, last Friday Taylor departed.

In an interview with the Silicon Valley Mercury News, Google VP Andy Rubin — who founded and leads the Android platform — shared some information about the future of the mobile OS. One of the more interesting answers he had concerned Android’s rapid pace of innovation, and how things may slow down a bit in the future.

Since launching in fall 2008, Android has come an incredibly long way. In fact, in the interview Rubin acknowledges that the inital release felt more like a ‘.8′, rather than a full 1.0 release, but the platform has matured considerably with at least four major updates since then. However, many phones are still running versions of the OS that are months out of date, and developers have to worry about ensuring compatibility with each new upgrade. That’s going to change in the future: Rubin says that updates to Android are now coming around twice a year, and that once things settle down it will probably be more like once a year.

So we launched it, and from our internal 0.8, we got to 1.0 pretty quickly, and we went through this iteration cycle. You’ve noticed, probably, that that’s slowed down a little bit. Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down, because a platform that’s moving — it’s hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don’t want developers to have to predict the innovation.

In other words, Android will likely be adopting a more iPhone-like release schedule. While this isn’t fun to hear (I like getting my new features as soon as possible), it’s probably better for the health of the platform in the long run. Carriers/OEMs will be better able to keep up with rolling out upgrades, hopefully leading to less fragmentation, and developers won’t have to worry about optimizing for as many new releases.

In another question, Rubin also identified which products we’re most likely see to see Android on beyond phones, namely PCs, cars, and TVs. This isn’t really a surprise — we’ve already seen a few cars running Android, and  Google TV debuted last month —  but it sounds like these aren’t just going to be viewed as Android side projects: Rubin says that Google will be doing “everything [it] can to get the big ones”.

We’re at about 4 billion cell phones. About 1.4 billion Internet connected PCs — that includes desktop and laptops and everything else. Like 1.2 billion automobiles. Some 800 million TVs.
And it’s like, “OK, let’s target the top four.” Let’s do everything we can to get the big ones. Remember, our business is volume, because it’s an advertising business and we want to delight a lot of people. And how do you delight a lot of people? You get in the products that they use every day.

Enterprise threat management startup Awareness Technologies has raised $6.5 million from Brad Miller, the former CEO and Chairman of Perimeter eSecurity, and First New England Capital. Awareness develops InterGuard, a SaaS-based threat management platform that helps enterprises cover data loss prevention, web filtering, employee monitoring and laptop recovery.

InterGuard allows businesses to limit access to certain software applications, PSP, chat, social networking sites and even tracks employee work output and productivity. The software also monitors, records and controls employee computer activity and detects and averts activities and data-flows that could put a company in jeopardy.

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App store analytics startup Distimo just released its May report, and zoomed in on the average number of days applications across various categories maintain their top rankings in Apple’s App Store. Analyzing data collected from November 2009 to April 2010, the company found that paid applications in the Top Overall, Games, Business and Entertainment categories stay in these categories for 27, 39, 59 and 38 days on average, respectively.

Free applications stay in the Top 100 for a significantly shorter time in those categories, with 19, 21 and 39 days on average, respectively. The exception to the rule seems to be the Entertainment category, in which free apps stay in the Top 100 for a slightly longer period of time than paid applications; 43 days compared to 38 days.

The likely reason: there are approximately three times as many paid apps for the iPhone than there are free ones, so there’s less competition in the gratis segment.

In the App Store, the majority of paid applications that have been in the Top 100 Overall during the entire period of 6 months measured fall into the Games and Entertainment categories. The paid applications that have been in the Top 5 for the longest period of time are Doodle Jump (140 days), RedLaser (73 days) and Skee-Ball (68 days).

The paid application that has been number one for the longest period of time is Skee-Ball (24 days). The free applications that have been in the Top 5 for the longest period of time are Facebook (12 days) and Paper Toss (7 days).

Zooming in on the iPad, the highest ranked paid iPad application in the Apple App Store in April 2010 was Pages, followed by GoodReader for iPad and Pinball HD. The highest ranked free iPad application in the Apple App Store was iBooks, followed by The Solitaire and Break HD Free.

Let the ad retargeting acquisitions begin. This morning, GSI Commerce announced it purchased FetchBack, an advertising startup which specializes in retargeting. The size of the cash deal was not disclosed, but one source puts it in the $40 million range. FetchBack raised a single round of $1 million in January, 2008 led by Gersh Venture Partners, which is now Metamorphic Ventures (a New York City venture firm with strong ad-tech portfolio which likes to put in small amounts of capital in startups which become self-sufficient quickly). Angel investors Erik Matlick, 24/7 co-founder Geoff Judge, and Jeff Stewart also invested. The company quickly became profitable and never needed to raise another round. CEO Chad Little will continue to run the business within GSI Commerce.

The way it works is that if somebody visits an e-commerce site on the Web, FetchBack will show that same person related ads from that retailer or even the page they visited when they go elsewhere. The conversion rates are much higher than with standard display ads because they are being shown to people who have already shown an interest in the exact or similar products.

GSI Commerce powers many online retailers. Adding a retargeting capability to its marketing services is a no-brainer, since retargeting is basically a way to drive customers back to your shopping site after they’ve left. One of the biggest problems e-commerce sites have is shopping cart abandonment. Retargeting also allows retailers to present the items in an abandoned shopping cart in the form of a display ad. On average, less than one percent of visitors to e-commerce sites end up purchasing anything. With retargeting, Fetchback is able to get that number up to 8 to 10 percent. The trick is getting the analytics right and drilling down to what works and what doesn’t for each individual potential shopper.

Retargeting is a hot area right now in the ad world. French retargeter Criteo recently raised $7 million from Bessemer, and Google is getting into the game as well.

Realtime data startup Metamarkets has raised $2.5 million in seed funding. The round included an all star team of investors: IA Ventures (who led the round), Village Ventures, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Mike Maples, Stan Shuman (Managing Director at Allen & Company), AOL Ventures, Jim Pallotta, Josh Stylman, Peter Hershberg, and Dennis Crowley.

Metamarkets provides price data and predictive analytics to large-scale global media companies. Launched in late 2009, the company aims to solve the problem of ad price discovery on mobile and web platforms for media companies. Metamarkets aggregates billions of electronic media transactions to deliver dynamic price data, proprietary price and volume aggregations, and analytic media market views to sell-side media principals.

The startup serves ad server data, order insertion data, targeting data, audience data, conversion data, and more, enabling media companies and publishers to shift strategy in realtime based on how web and mobile formats are monetizing.

Founded by David Soloff, the former lead architect at ad startup Rapt (which was acquired by Microsoft in 2008), and Michael Driscoll, the founder of a data consultancy Dataspora, Metamarkets will use the new funding to build out the startup’s engineering team. While the company is currently serving its data to a number of media companies, Soloff declined to name which companies are using Metamarkets.

After geeking out in Shanghai and Beijing for a week, the GeeksOnAPlane (GOAP) caravan moved on to South Korea’s tech hot spot Seoul. The group spent the weekend in the city; an extremely short window of time, but enough to get at least a rough overview of what’s going in the country’s tech scene. And perhaps more importantly, we had the chance to interact and exchange ideas with a number of web and mobile entrepreneurs from Korea around the Startup Weekend Seoul event (the country’s first ever).

Overview of Korea’s tech scene

During the stay, our “host” in Korea, Chang Kim (one of the biggest star web entrepreneurs in the country), delivered a great primer on how the web industry evolved over the years.

There’s a number of interesting peculiarities in Korea, Asia’s fourth biggest online nation (37.5 million of the 48 million Koreans are online). For example, there’s the ubiquity of the Internet explorer (90%+ market share), the world’s highest broadband rate (which stands at a staggering 95%), or how certain social patterns in the real world are reflected on the web (distinct group behavior of Koreans in the real world facilitating viral marketing).

Here’s the presentation that Kim, now a product manager for Blogger.com at Google (the company that bought his startup two years ago), delivered:

The presentation follows up on Kim’s Tedx talk Kim gave last year and which I embedded below (it’s in English and contains a wealth of valuable information on Korea’s tech scene):

Demos from 12 Korean startups

Kim also organized a startup demo pad (separate from the Startup Weekend Seoul event, just like his primer), which was put together just for the GOAP group. Some of the Korean web entrepreneurs we met deplored the relatively small size of the industry, but the 12 local startups that showed their wares are building awesome stuff.

Here are thumbnail sketches on all of them. For more information, visit GOAP Seoul, the excellent mini blog Chang Kim thankfully put together just for the demo event (in English).

Startup 1: SundayToz
SundayToz is a four year old company that creates social games for Facebook, the iPhone, and NATE (the app platform of Cyworld, Korea’s leading social network that has 24 million users). The startup says it’s the country’s leading social game provider, currently seeing 500,000 daily visits daily. It now plans to expand to Asia, especially eying Mixi (Japan’s Facebook) as the first potential partner.

Startup 2: Flyfan (more info on the GOAP Seoul blog)
Korea’s e-commerce market is worth $17 billion, making it the world’s sixth largest. Founded in 2009, Flyfan launched Korea’s first “Etsy” (1forME) before officially launching their second product at the GOAP Seoul event. It combines a user-moderated group buying concept with heavy social elements. The idea is to let selected end users, for example “trusted” power mom bloggers, connect buyers (through giving product recommendations) with sellers (through finding customers for them) in a B2C2C model. Flyfan plans to launch the service in Korea this summer, with the US to follow later this year.

Here’s the complete presentation:

Startup 3: Fanatic.fm (more info here)
Fanatic.fm describes itself as a music branding platform, AdWords for music, and a “beyond-CD” music publishing tool for musicians. The service wants to answer the question how musicians get paid fairly online, especially when users listen to streaming music. Fanatic.fm enables fans and brands alike to financially support artists through ads that come “bundled” with the music whenever a song from those artists are being played. The startup is incorporated in California and has offices in Seoul.

Startup 4: Showstreet (more info here)
Provided by Seoul-based Rain.D, Showstreet combines self-developed, Google Street View-like technology with business databases and mapping information. The idea is to let users “pre-visit” destinations virtually before actually going there in the real world. House buyers, for example, can use Showstreet to “walk” along the street the house is located in and zoom in and “look” around inside the rooms. Through a joint venture with New Zealand-based WebConcept, Showstreet is mainly used by tourism agencies, real estate agents and small businesses in Australia and New Zealand.

Startup 5: TicketMonster
TicketMonster is a Korean Groupon clone that tries to capitalize on the country’s penchant for online shopping: whereas Koreans spend $24 billion to buy products on the web, real-world retailers see only $24 billion in sales per year. Another potential plus for TicketMonster is that because of the strong social element (group behavior) in Korea’s web, viral and word-of-mouth marketing works better than in other countries. As a result, TicketMonster says it spends just an average $0.47 to acquire a customer.

Startup 6: Kloseup (more info here)
Kloseup lets casual animators produce 3D animations, which can then be edited by other users from the community. Especially teenagers (the main customer base) are creating 3D movies centered around family and friends, parodies of popular TV programs, music videos, and even clips for school presentations. A mobile service called StoryMessage (built on top of Kloseup) makes it possible to send the movies to cell phones (as MMS) and customize the clips with text. Itonic, the startup behind the service, currently looks for new business partners in the US, Japan and other markets.

Startup 7: Twitcooler
Twitcooler is a Twitter-based social network for TV viewers. Users can tweet about a TV program while watching it on “three screens”, meaning on the cell phone (through a special iPhone app), on a PC site and their TVs (through an IPTV app). In the case of the IPTV app, relevant tweets will appear in a Twitter bar on the bottom of the screen. Twitcooler users can befriend each other and become fans of TV shows. The service is still in stealth mode.

Startup 8: Zimly (more info here)
Zimly is an Android app that was pitched as the “social media player” of the future. The app is already available (free download) and sees a pretty good number of downloads already. But the Zimly team is currently working on creating the “iTunes for Android”, just more open and with more social features. The idea is to make it easier to find new music by getting recommendations from people in your social graph.

Startup 9: Userstory Lab (more info here)
Userstory Lab is a quite international 10-man team based in Seoul whose mission is to “bring social search, recommendation engines and social layer to syndication channels in South Korea so it’s easier to discover, share, recommend web content, and purchase products and services online.” The company builds social services around “objects”, which at some point in the future will be merged into one big network that users can access via a single account. At the moment, Userstory Lab is focusing on two objects, books and links, with Userstory Book (a social network for book lovers) and tweetmix (a Twitter-based last.fm for links).

Startup 10: Paprika Lab
Paprika Lab is a social game provider that distributes titles on Facebook, iTunes and other platforms. At the demo event, the company pitched a social RPG with what appeared to be rather high production values and “Final Fantasy-like” game mechanics. Dubbed Pirate Legacy, the title wants to offer something the vast majority of the social games out there don’t: actual playability and deepness. Pirate Legacy is currently in beta and attracted 10,000 players so far.

Startup 11: Wetoku (more info here)
Wetoku is a completely browser-based service that lets users livestream video chats over the web. After the broadcast, recorded videos can be stored on the site or embedded in blogs and other places. The service is designed to be extra-easy to use, and it’s ideal for conducting video interviews, for example. Here‘s a recent one between Wetoku co-founder David Lee and Robert Scoble about Korea’s web scene.

Startup 12: Pixelberry
Pixelberry is an in-browser 3D game engine whose Chrome demo at the event looked amazing, with the sample 3D avatar shown almost reaching photo-realistic quality. (The presenter asked not to take pictures or provide deeper information as it’s still work in progress).

More pictures from the event can be found here.

Startup Weekend Seoul

The Startup Weekend Seoul, which was attended by a whopping 103 people, showed one clear trend in Korea: this country loves Apple. The majority of ideas the ten teams presented (thankfully mostly in English) at the final day (Sunday) centered on either the iPhone or the iPad – which currently isn’t even available in Korea.

In the end, three services won the top (cash) prizes of the event. Quicket, which is short for “Quick Market”, is a mobile app that will allow users to easily list up stuff for sale by just taking pictures of the items and pricing them. MiCasa is an LBS for the iPhone with which users will be able to customize maps to play games (i.e. scavenger hunt) in the real world, combined with an RPG-like ranking system. Troasis is another iPhone app that will help drivers in traffic jams to communicate in real-time with each other to share traffic information.

The GOAP group also had the pleasure of meeting Korean wunderkind Todd Oh at the event. Todd not only helped putting the Startup Weekend Seoul together, but he’s also fully bilingual, writes for The Next Web South Korea, and founded a US-Korean startup called spotengine – at age 16. Follow his English tweets here.

Plenty of video interviews from attendees can be found here, more photos are here.

Many thanks to Chang Kim – who covers Korea’s Internet landscape on his personal English-language blog Web 2.0 Asia – and the Startup Weekend Seoul organizers for hosting the GOAP in South Korea.

The group is currently in Singapore, attending the echelon 2010 tech conference (more on that in a future post). For information in real-time, follow the adventures of the GOAP via the #goap hash tag (the official Twitter account is here). GOAP pictures are being uploaded regularly over on Flickr.

Picture credit: Paul Papadimitriou