I’ve attached an image file outlining my requests for this project. Essentially, I would like to copy the website design of fabulous.com’s homepage. I just want a simple cross browser compatible html file with images that will look the way I describe in the image file… (Budget: $30-250, Jobs: Dreamweaver, Format & Layout, Graphic Design, HTML, PSD to HTML)
Notion Ink: Adam Tablet “On Track,” Funding Settled
So the reports of the Adam being delayed until November were… partially mistaken. Notion Ink has updated their blog with more particular (and more optimistic) info, though they stop short of providing an actual launch date. “We are on track” is the extent of their hinting, and that’s good to hear (on track implies July or August availability), but there’s more to their post than that.
Source: Arrington To Buy iPhone 4
TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington has made it very clear that he’s an Android fanboy. Hell, he may have started the movement (which is now rivaling iPhone fanboydom). And yet, according to a source close to the situation, he plans to buy an iPhone 4 when it launches on June 25. How good is the source? Well, it’s Arrington himself.
As regular readers may know, Mike and I tend to fight in our internal Yammer room regarding iPhone versus Android. Mike posts those from time to time. So I figured it’s fine for me to divulge his startling (to everyone but me) admission. “Yeah ok I’m buying an iphone,” Arrington wrote in Yammer yesterday.
This is humorous for a couple of reasons. First, Mike has never actually seen the iPhone 4, nor has he used one. I have and Jason has, but Mike has not. Even some iPhone fanboys are waiting until they get their hands on one to decide if they should buy it. Not Mike.
Second, just this morning, Mike was ripping me for liking the iPhone. “MG Siegler irrationally loves the iPhone and it has become an important fashion accessory and self confidence crutch in his San Francisco hipster lifestyle.” Again, I do love this new iPhone, but it’s because I have actually used it.
My former colleague Eric Eldon left a good comment on Mike’s post: “I’ll start calling MG a ‘San Francisco hipster’ when he moves to the Mission, dyes his hair black, gets an armsleeve tattoo, starts listening to emo, drinks Pabst instead of better beers, rides a fixie — and switches to an Android device just to go against the mainstream of what’s considered cool (the iPhone).“
He’s dead-on. Hipsters don’t love the iPhone anymore. It’s way too popular. Hipsters want they device that spits in the face of the mainstream iPhone. They want an Android phone.
When I questioned why Mike would make the move back to iPhone land, he quipped, “why take a strong position on something unless you fully intend to reverse that decision dramatically at some point?” Fair point, though my strong position was that he was going to change his strong position. And I’m holding firm.
Likely knowing I was going to call him out, Mike went on to clarify, “just to be clear, it will still be my second phone. must have android/google voice for primary. But the EVO frankly sucks.” Second phone or not, that’s still him supporting the “Apple dictatorship.” Also, if you see him around, make note of which phone he’s actually using more.
Speaking of the EVO sucking, Mike does back up my stance that the device is no good. After a string of improving devices, Android took a step back with the EVO 4G. And Mike should know, he’s switched his phone like four times over the course of the past few months to be on the latest and greatest Android phone of the week. Me? I’ve had the iPhone the entire time.
KwiqApps Raises $500K For Mobile Learning Apps
Startup KwiqApps has raised $500,000 in angel funding for its eLearning application, “Word Search for iPad.”
KwiqApps’ iPad app is a hidden word game for children. The interactive app presents a 15×15 letter grid on the iPad with age-appropriate words hidden in the grid. It allows players to find words using touch gestures. The game also has kids-friendly themes to encourage player engagement and deepen reading skill development. The app, which costs $1.99, is one of the to-ranked apps in the Kids Paid iPad Apps category on the App Store.
KwiqApps, which was incubated at the Founder Institute, plans to use the new funding towards product development. The startup is currently developing additional apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android systems. KwiqApps’ founder Yadong Liu thought of the idea for Word Search when he noticed that his daughters often misplaced the paper-based word search sheets provided for them at school. And Liu found that the iPad was the perfect platform for interactive apps for children. FreshPlanet also creates interactive iPad apps for kids.
Information provided by CrunchBase
iOS Usage Around The World: US Has 3.45% IPhone/iPad/Touch Penetration
Our buddy Jack Deneut of Nelso looked at some of the AdMob mobile metrics reporting and came away with an interesting look at the penetration of iPhone/Touch/iPad (iOS) around the world. The biggest user of iPhones by population? You’ll never guess.
Jack looked at the total numbers and compared it to population. For example, China has .05% penetration with 922,138 iPhones and Touches in a population of 1,338,612,968 while the US has 18 million devices in a population of 309 million for 3.45% penetration.
Glam Swings For The Fences With Glam Adapt, An Ad-Serving Platform Built For Brands
As big brands move more of their ad budgets online, what they want most is not just to capture clicks, but to capture the attention and mindshare of consumers. The buzzword in the online advertising industry for this attention capturing quality is “engagement.” Every ad platform out there is promising to deliver more consumer engagement. Today, Glam Media, which itself is both a publisher of women’s sites and an ad network, announced an entirely new ad-serving technology platform called Glam Adapt it’s built over the past 18 months to help brands find and target the most engaged consumers.
GlamAdapt works with existing ad-serving technologies and networks such as DoubleClick, Atalas, and iBlaster, but Glam CEO Samir Arora has bigger ambitions for it. ”It also can be used as a complete replacement for Doubleclick,” he says. GlamAdapt came out of his own frustrations as a publisher and ad network. ”We were running into a wall in terms of having technology that do what the brands are asking,” says Arora: “targeted properly, engaging, detailed analytics and reporting, the aha of television. I decided to build a third generation ad-serving stack that can work with existing technologies.”
The current generation of ad-serving technologies, he points out, are built to “optimize clicks.” GlamAdapt is built around a broad set of engagement metrics, including audience targeting (demographics, location, income), contextual targeting (by topic, page placement, etc.), by device or ad type (display, video, iPhone, iPad, smartphone), brand metrics (such as sentiment), content metrics (by the authority of the source), and social metrics (such as buzz on Twitter, Facebook, etc). GlamAdapt includes a content rank, which aims to augment Pagerank as a way to determine which pages might be the best for a brand to place their ads on. Content rank will take into account the authority of a source down to the author level, social buzz, sentiment, as well as how much that article is being linked to.
GlamAdapt is built on open APIs which other partners can build on top of to create their own brand engagement targeting capabilities. Arora gives the example of a sun screen manufacturer who was testing the system in beta and wanted to target ads to people in cities with the highest levels of ultraviolet radiation. So it imported its own geo-data for UV levels across thecomScore, country and used that to target ads. Partners like Quantcast, and Pointroll can build in their own targeting capabilities tied to their existing data. For instance, a brand could target based on Quantcast or comScore demographic variables.
Information provided by CrunchBase
AdMob CEO: Apple’s New Mobile Advertising Rules Will Hurt Developers
Yesterday, All Things Digital’s Peter Kafka pointed out the possibility that Apple could be limiting Google-acquired mobile ad network AdMob from selling ads on the iPhone and iPad platform. The language was a little vague in Apple’s new developer licensing agreement, but indicates that only “independent” ad-serving companies will be able to serve ads. AdMob could be prevented from showing ads because it is not independent as a part of Google, which “develops and distributes mobile devices and operating systems.” AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui told us hours before Apple’s new terms of the agreement came out that nothing good would come of disallowing AdMob to serve ads. But today the company has officially responded to the potential issue.
Hamoui confirmed that the current Apple developer terms “would prohibit app developers from using AdMob and Google’s advertising solutions on the iPhone.” AdMob is wisely using the developer angle to help boost its case. The post states that the new terms would hurt both large and small developers in terms of revenue. Essentially, competition is good for developers because the more ways they have to make money, the better.
AdMob argues that less competition results in decreased innovation and lack of progress. Separately, there’s the question of what happens if an independent ad network, like Greystripe or Millennial, gets bought by Microsoft or another large tech giant. The rule seems arbitrary.
AdMob does have a point, but ultimately Apple can decide to let whoever they want serve ads on their devices. But this clearly comes across as anti-competitive, which is ironic considering that the Google-AdMob deal was nearly crushed by the FTC for anti-trust grounds.These types of moves could lead the FTC to get involved if Apple products continue to dominate the mobile advertising market.
Here’s the full text of the announcement:
Apple proposed new developer terms on Monday that, if enforced as written, would prohibit app developers from using AdMob and Google’s advertising solutions on the iPhone. These advertising related terms both target companies with competitive mobile technologies (such as Google), as well as any company whose primary business is not serving mobile ads. This change threatens to decrease – or even eliminate – revenue that helps to support tens of thousands of developers. The terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money. And because advertising funds a huge number of free and low cost apps, these terms are bad for consumers as well.
Let’s be clear. This change is not in the best interests of users or developers. In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.
Since I started AdMob in 2006, I have watched competition in mobile advertising help drive incredible growth and innovation in the overall ecosystem. We’ve worked to help developers make money, regardless of platform – iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Windows, and others. In the past four years, AdMob has helped tens of thousands of developers make money and build real businesses across multiple operating systems.
I’ve personally worked with many iPhone app developers around the world, including one who created a fun and simple game in the early days of the App Store. He built the app because he was interested in the challenge. He built this single app into a multi-million dollar advertising revenue stream with AdMob, hired a whole team, and turned a hobby into a real business.
We see these stories all the time. We want to help make more of them, so we’ll be speaking to Apple to express our concerns about the impact of these terms.
Topguest Rewards Travelers For Check-Ins At Hotels, Airports, And More
Location based services are moving towards establishing rewards program for check-ins; Foursquare just announced that it would be testing rewards offers to users this week. Topguest, which is backed by the Founders Fund, has an interesting take on the LBS arena; the platform gives travelers loyalty points and rewards for check-ins on Foursquare, Twitter, Gowalla, Yelp, Loopt and even Google Latitude.
So when you ‘check-in‘ at a hotel, frequent flyers’ lounge, board a plane, or rent a car you would would be able to collect a reward from a program you participate in. Topguest will give travelers loyalty points from established programs, such as Intercontinental, Starwood, or Delta’s programs.
You don’t actually have to download a separate application to take advantage of Topguest. You sign up for Topguest with your accounts on the various LBS services you use, and points are automatically credited from all of applications you used to check-in on Topguest.
The biggest challenge for Topguest (besides competing with the rewards programs of the location-based services themselves) will be striking meaningful partnerships with airlines, hotels, and rewards programs. But the startup has already signed on a premium partner-Andre Balazs’ Standard hotels. A Topguest users who checks in on any supported geolocation application and stays at all four Standard hotels in a week will receive a complimentary week stay at The Standard Hollywood, Downtown LA, Miami Beach or New York. Users are also eligible for 25% off their next reservation after 10 check-ins at any Standard hotel, bar or restaurant. Other location-varied rewards include spa treatments, Standard boutique discounts, and cocktails. And the startup has also signed up three other top loyalty programs as well that will be announced later this summer.
Of course, the number of people who will stay at all four Standard hotels in one week is extremely limited. But the rewards for check-ins at Standard bars and restaurants is actually compelling.
Information provided by CrunchBase
SponsorPay Raises Further $4.6m For Its Virtual Currency Ad Solution
SponsorPay, Europe’s leading provider of advertisement-based payment systems, has secured a further €3.8m (approx. $4.6m) of funding.
The new round comes from Hasso Plattner Ventures, Moscow’s Kite Ventures, and Team Europe Ventures who are the original backers of the Berlin-based startup.
The injection of capital solidifies SponsorPay’s dominant position in Eurpope, having recently acquired its equally young rival, Hamburg-based GratisPay, in early February. The combined properties’ customers cover the majority of the major online and social game publishers across Europe, including Gameforge, Bigpoint, InnoGames and Frogster. 
Zynga’s FrontierVille Looks To Recreate The Success Of FarmVille In The Wild West
It’s been almost exactly one year since social gaming powerhouse Zynga unleashed what was destined to become an online phenomenon: FarmVille. The game has 70 million monthly active users, many of whom are total addicts. But some gamers are doubtless ready for a new fix, and today, they’re getting just that — Zynga has launched FrontierVille, a Wild West themed game that shares many similarities with FarmVille, but with some new twists designed to instill a greater sense of adventure. We discovered the game back in April when it was still in early testing stages, but it hasn’t been available to the masses until now. To get a better understanding of what FrontierVille brings to the table, I stopped by Zynga headquarters yesterday for a full rundown of the new game, including a thorough demo.
If you’ve played FarmVille, you’ll be right at home in FrontierVille. Many of the same game mechanics are here: you can purchase and harvest crops, and in order to maximize your harvest and in-game bonuses you’ll have to check in at regular intervals throughout the day. But it also has some key differences. For one, the game obviously has a different theme (and it’s one that hasn’t already been pioneered by another popular game, which appears to be a first for Zynga). Perhaps more important, from a gameplay perspective FrontierVille has a number of new features designed to help add a feeling of spontaneity and a better social connection with your in-game friends. In order to better understand how this differs from FarmVille, I asked FrontierVille GM Brian Reynolds to run through the main differences:
- One of the biggest changes in FrontierVille involves your neighbors (basically, the friends you’ve connected with in the game, who are always shown in a panel at the bottom of your screen). In FarmVille when you visit a friend’s virtual farm, your potential actions are quite limited — you can’t do much to engage with your friend’s plot of land. In FrontierVille that dynamic has changed. You can now swing by a friend’s plot of land and tend to some of their chores, like harvesting their crops. Doing so gives you a reward, and also helps them save time. There’s one caveat to this though: your friend will have to approve your actions before they take effect (some players prefer to trudge through these tasks on their own).
- Another social gameplay element is the notion of “hiring” your friends, which entails paying some in-game money to have a buddy harvest your plants or do other tasks. In reality your friends aren’t actually sitting at their computers doing this “work” themselves (which would be pretty boring). Instead, you’re merely controlling their in-game avatar. The social element of this stems from the game’s stat system: over time you can accumulate multiple kinds of experience points, based on how much you’ve engaged with your friends and what you’ve accomplished in the game. The more points you have, the more ‘work’ you do for your friends when they hire you, which in turn makes it more likely that your friends will be looking to hire your avatar.
- FrontierVille is also putting a much bigger emphasis on its storyline. Soon after you start the game, you’ll encounter a letter from your betrothed who is stuck “out east” — it’s your job to build up your home and garden so that they can come out and join you. Once that happens you can start having children, who you design to look exactly as you want them to. Family members can be used to help decorate your land (which sounds a little weird, I know), and can also help speed up the rate at which you collect resources like wood. In addition to these story elements, there are also new missions that are designed to help mix up gameplay. For example, the game may instruct you to harvest flowers (something that you may not normally do) for the purpose of making a bouquet to woo your spouse.
- Finally, there’s a new set of features that Reynolds refers to as the “living world effect”. In short, these are events that are beyond your control, which help the virtual world feel more alive. Log off for a few days, and you’ll find that you may have some weeds growing in the yard. Trees will grow larger over time, and eventually they’ll start to drop seeds where seedlings will start growing. And an array of creatures like snakes and bears will sometimes encroach on your territory. They won’t ever actually harm your property, but they drain energy when you’re close to them.
One other addition is a robust item collection mechanic that’s borrowed from Mafia Wars. Gamers can collect a wide array of special items as they play; collecting a “set” of related items usually gives the gamer a stat boost. It’s also worth pointing out that the game will integrate Facebook Credits, obviously a result of the recent agreement that Facebook and Zynga reached after sparring over the payments system.
So will FrontierVille be a success? Probably — Zynga has these gameplay mechanics down to an art, and I don’t doubt that they’ll be able to attract plenty of FarmVille fans to this new game. What’s more, when you start playing FrontierVille you’ll notice that Zynga has integrated a special invite system that lets you immediately invite all of your FarmVille-playing friends to join you (the logic being that folks who like FarmVille will probably like FrontierVille).
That said, despite the new additions, in many senses this is more of the same. The game still relies heavily on repetitive tasks that are restricted by time, and your social interactions with friends are asynchronous (in other words, you aren’t going to be playing alongside your friends at the same time). There are obviously still a huge number of people that enjoy this kind of game. But these game mechanics are going to get old, and I’ll be surprised if Zynga sees another industry-shaking hit of the same magnitude as FarmVille until they start to mix things up more.
Information provided by CrunchBase
Group Buying Site Tippr Acquires White Label Deals Startup FanForce
Group buying site Tippr.com has acquired Austin-based deals site FanForce for an undisclosed sum. This follows the company’s acquisition of fellow deal of the day site ChicagoDeals last week.
FanForce offers a white-label Groupon of sorts, allowing small businesses to create their own deals. FanForce takes care of the promotion of deals and offers, sell the vouchers and collect payments. It’s similar in theory to TC Disrupt startup ChompOn, which launched a few weeks ago. The founders of FanForce will join the Tippr management team, including Samy Aboel-Nil who joins Tippr as President/COO, Dane Knecht who joins Tippr as VP of Product Management, and John Whitmarsh, who joins Tippr as CFO.
The collective buying space has seen considerable consolidation as of late. Tippr’s competitor Groupon just bought European deal site CityDeal. And with the growing number of similar sites joining the space, I’d expect the consolidation to continue.
Disclosure: My husband is an employee of Groupon.
Information provided by CrunchBase
California Primary Election Results: Fiorina And Whitman Prevail, Kelly Out
Former tech executives Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman prevailed last night in their respective races in the California primaries. Fiorina, former CEO of HP, won her campaign as the republican candidate for the U.S. Senate for the state of California, taking 54 percent of the vote. She will face incumbent Sen. Barbara Boxer come November. TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld interviewed Fiorina in January, where she spoke candidly of her views on government spending, Sarbanes-Oxley and more.
Former eBay exec Meg Whitman won her campaign as the Republican candidate for the California governor’s race, taking 64 percent of the vote. Whitman will face former governor and current State Attorney General Jerry Brown in November. Both Fiorina and Whitman dropped millions of their own money to fund their campaigns. The LA Times reports that Fiorina spent $5 million on her primary campaign and Whitman spent a whopping $71 million of her own money towards her race.
Another former tech exec, Chris Kelly, was not as successful in his bid to be the State Attorney General. Kelly, who was the former Chief Privacy Officer at Facebook, lost the primary election to San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris. Similar to Whitman and Fiorina, Kelly spent some of his own fortune on his race; $12 million to be exact.
Twitter Quietly Adds World Cup Theme
If Twitter is fast becoming the world’s watercooler as it is, watch what happens in the next few weeks as the World Cup takes over the planet. And as with any event of that size and – being a football fan at heart – importance, rest assured that hip Internet companies will be scrambling to lay some easter eggs.
Yesterday, we learned that Google has a special surprise in store for those who search for ‘world cup’ – scroll to the bottom if you’ve been living under a rock for the past 24 hours and you don’t know what we’re referring to.
An eagle-eyed reader just alerted us to the fact Twitter itself is also doing its part, by quietly adding a custom ‘South Africa 2010′ theme to its design gallery.
We don’t know how long it’s been there, but here’s how to get it: go to Twitter.com, log on, go to Settings and then click the Design tab. The theme can be found at the bottom.
Update: also, staff picks on the SUL for World Cup (thanks @Orli)
On a sidenote, the official Fifa World Cup 2010 Twitter account is @fifaworldcuptm, the most-used hashtags seem to be #WC2010 and, of course, #worldcup.
(Hat tip to Michel Wester)
Information provided by CrunchBase
Online Event Management Software Company Etouches Raises Funding
Etouches, a web?based SaaS provider that caters to event organizers, has raised an undisclosed amount of venture capital funding from a group of investors led by Greycroft Partners II (the firm started by iconic VC Alan Patricof).
Etouches started out 12 years ago as a self-funded, independent meeting planning company, but has since transitioned into a full-fledged software company offering a suite of integrated event management and marketing tools designed to implement and support every phase of the event lifecycle. The product is said to currently serve over 2,000 event programs all around the world annually, and is available in 27 languages.
In addition to Greycroft, the investment group that has now backed Etouches with this initial round of funding includes Connecticut Innovations, Rocky Hill and Cava Capital. The company plans to use the funds to increase and enhance product development as well as marketing and sales efforts.
Etouches was founded by CEO Leonora Valvo and counts two noteworthy independent board members: Leon Shapiro, Senior Vice President of Strategy and Operations at Warner Music Group and Christa Carone, Chief Marketing Officer of Xerox.
Information provided by CrunchBase
CustomMade Connects Custom Goods Buyers With Artisans, Raises $1.15M
CustomMade, which operates an online marketplace designed to connect buyers of custom made furniture, cabinetry, and other products with artisans, today announced it has secured an angel round of funding for $1.15 million.
The funding will be used to expand consumer-based marketing, branch out into other custom verticals and hire more staff for website development and sales.
CustomMade essentially provides custom goods makers such as woodworkers, metalworkers and glass makers with tools to find an audience for their services. For manual workers and other providers of custom services, CustomMade doubles as a local directory and an online window to their work and skills. For consumers, CustomMade can help in locating the right custom maker for the job.
CustomMade co-founder and CFO Seth Rosen says the company was initially looking for venture capital, but decided to hold off because of accelerating revenue growth, and took in convertible-debt bridge round instead. Rosen adds that the round was quickly oversubscribed.
The fresh capital comes from three unnamed Boston-based angel investors – one of the company’s seed round backers led the round with a $500,000 USD investment.
Rosen and the other co-founder, Mike Salguero, purchased CustomMade in 2009 and grew the community of 350 woodworkers to over 1,200 paying custom artisans today, we’re told.
Information provided by CrunchBase
