Wrike is hoping to expand its audience today with the launch of a free version of its project management tool.
Wrike says it already has 2,000 customers including Accenture, Stanford, and Ticketmaster, but until now, the cheapest pricing level was $49 per month. Even though releasing a free version is an obvious way to get more people to try the product, CEO Andrew Filev says he approached the “freemium” model cautiously, to ensure that Wrike didn’t end up “cannibalizing” any of its sales. → Read More
Mark Pincus took the stage today at D10, and of course because Facebook is all people can talk about after last week’s IPO, he got asked and asked and asked again about Zynga’s “attachment to Facebook.”
“Zynga is very tied to Facebook,” Kara Swisher brought up immediately, describing the two stocks as “tethered together.” Indeed, Zynga makes up 15% of Facebook’s revenue, and Facebook makes up most of Zynga’s. → Read More
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Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region.
The startup’s series A round follows the $1.6 million in seed funding it raised this time last year from a slew of prominent investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, NEA, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, Yuri Milner, Matt Cutts, Paul Buchheit, Alexis Ohanian, and Start Fund — to name a few. As a result of the new round, GRP Partner Mark Suster will be joining the startup’s board of directors.
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We’ve heard a lot about how monetizing mobile content is difficult in the context of Facebook’s IPO. A lot of the company’s growth is coming from mobile, after all, but it’s currently very hard to make money of this mobile traffic. At AllThingsD’s D10 conference today, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker released her annual overview of Internet trends and she, too, highlighted this mobile monetization problem. → Read More
Pinterest rival Fancy, which thinks it has figured out social commerce (or at least, before Pinterest did), is announcing today that it has reached 1 million users as well as an average of $50,000 worth of commerce through its service each week. To help further grow its shopping platform, which initially debuted in February of this year, the company has also updated its iOS application. The app doesn’t just support browsing and liking images (you “fancy” things, actually) as before, but adds the ability to purchase items directly from the app itself.
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The fallout from Facebook’s initial public offering earlier this month continues to play out in the media, but according to some of the most senior players in the financial space, any negative aspects of the social network’s stock market debut may not have really been the fault of the company or even the bankers who managed it.
The latest big name to offer this opinion is Mary Meeker. → Read More
Atlassian, the Australian company that makes popular software project management tools JIRA and Confluence, has opened a marketplace where customers can download and buy add-ons for the company’s apps.
Usually, the launch of a marketplace or app store signals a company’s broader platform ambitions, but Atlassian President Jay Simons says the platform approach has been “part of our DNA” for a long time. The company regards JIRA and Confluence, in particular, as its core products, so it has been building its own add-ons, and companies like Box and Zendesk have offered their own integrations. (Marketplace includes add-ons for a few other Atlassian products, too.)
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The whole area of making payments as a group of people, whether it be for joint gift purchases (weddings), or even simple things like housemates paying bills etc. has been an area several startups have tried to tackle.
ShareAGift in the UK focuses on joint gift purchases, but is more an affiliate gift sales model. In the US there is WePay and PayDivvy, both of which err on the side of being deposit account providers. WePay has moved to being a B2B play, trying to woo small merchants away from PayPal. In France there is Leetchi and FriendFund in Berlin. Many have substantial backing from VCs.
Now, Payumi in the UK is poised to come out of public beta and hopes to cover all the ‘group payment’ bases and has sealed a £150,000 ($186,000) round of seed funding taking its total seed funding to £250,000. → Read More
Parse, the Y Combinator-backed startup that powers the back-end for mobile apps like Band of the Day and Hipmunk, is rolling out support for mobile web apps too.
The San Francisco startup has a new SDK for JavaScript that makes it easier to build HTML5 apps. Parse has long billed itself as the “Heroku for Mobile,” a service that takes over the hassle of building a scalable back-end for applications.
The new Javascript SDK comes with security controls, flexible data storage, advanced data queries, user authentication and geolocation. It’s built on top of the Backbone.js JavaScript framework from DocumentCloud. Parse co-founder Tikhon Bernstam said about 38 percent of the company’s developers had requested HTML5 support. Their current split between iOS and Android is about 65-to-35, but many use both. → Read More
Media agencies want to ensure that their ads are only seen in the best light… But a lot of times, the networks they use to distribute those ads don’t do a good job of distinguishing between good content or bad content, or where an ad appears.
That’s why video ad startup TubeMogul has opened up a new page that will let anyone — whether it be a brand, an agency, a publisher, or merely a curious observer — scan a URL and see how it ranks in terms of brand safety. That page, based on TubeMogul’s PageSafe technology, is a powerful tool to show off what viewers really see and what brand associations they’re getting when ads run against certain content. → Read More
It’s been fascinating to watch the proliferation of photo apps before and since the rise of Instagram and its sale to Facebook. EyeEm has a beautiful app which makes tagging images to locations ridiculously simple (plus all that filter goodness). LoopCam makes hilarious photo loops you want to share with your friends. Now SlickFlick has appeared with an iOS app to help you create fun stories around your pictures. [download from iTunes here]
The boot-strapped startup was founded by Maria Constantinescu who has been relentless in pushing her vision for the last two years and today she lands a big-brother partner in the shape of the Getty image library. → Read More
PowerInbox, the email platform that’s been on a tear lately in terms of its releases, is rolling out yet another update today bringing a number of new features, including the addition of the most requested in-email app, LinkedIn. The platform already supports email “apps” like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Groupon, essentially making emails from those companies more interactive – you can like, reply, comment, tweet, circle and more directly from your email.
With the new LinkedIn app, you can now read more about the person requesting the invite, browse their network, and accept the invite right from your inbox. (Sorry LinkedIn inbox, but I won’t be visiting you as often.) → Read More
Everyone is focused on what hardware product Apple might launch next, but out of Italy comes news of a software development: the company has bought Redmatica, a small startup that specializes in digital music-editing apps.
The news was reported by the Italian blog Fanpage, which also did some sleuthing to dig up a document from the Italian communications regulator AGCOM that seems to prove it — although we have also reached out to Apple for direct confirmation.
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Mary Meeker, famed Internet analyst-turned-Kleiner Perkins partner, has released her latest data dump. Here you go: → Read More
The Evo 4G LTE is one of the best phones to land on Sprint shelves in a while, but that’s not to say it has no competition over at the Yellow carrier. The Galaxy Nexus has propped itself up as the Android phone to beat, while the iPhone 4S is available at the same price: $199.
So what will it take to pass up the iPhone and the GalNex for the latest iteration of the Evo line?
We’ve put together this head-to-head chart to answer just such a question. → Read More
Another big advance for mobile payments startup BOKU: it has inked a deal with T-Mobile USA to provide carrier billing for the T-Mobile Mall, the digital storefront operated by the carrier.
The deal is a signal of some momentum for the company: it comes less than a month after BOKU announced a similar deal with Sprint, and hot on the heels of a $35 million round of funding in March.
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Betting big on the future monetization opportunities to be found in the “smart TV” ecosystem is boxPAY, a company which is now bringing the carrier billing option to TV apps and services. With boxPAY, consumers can pay for Smart TV apps or make in-app purchases by charging those purchases to their mobile phone, no registration or credit card required. Instead, the purchase would show up on the customer’s next monthly bill from their mobile operator.
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I’m not a professional musician, but apparently it’s a headache for artists to publicize their tourdates on the myriad number of websites and apps that cater to music lovers. Not only is there Facebook and Twitter, but there’s YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud and Hype Machine.
Enter Songkick, a concert promotion startup that’s backed by Sequoia Capital and Index Ventures. They have tons of those little widgets across the web that show when your favorite band is in town. Now they’re trying to make it easier for musicians to manage promotions themselves.
They’ve built a product called Tourbox, which connects to a musician’s Facebook fan page and automates the publishing for concert dates across the web and in sites like YouTube, Tumblr, Vevo and Spotify. The company counts M83 and Of Montreal among Tourbox’s users so far. → Read More
Google+, with 100 million active users, still has a long way to go before being anywhere near social network rival Facebook’s nearly one-billion subscribers. But it has been working hard to leverage its substantial audiences in other areas to do just that. And today saw the latest advance in that area, with the double news that it is launching Google+ Local, and sunsetting Google Places, its older, less social version of local listings and local search.
Now, if you go to the web page for Google Places, you get two options: a link through to Google+ Local, or if you are a business, an option to claim your spot in Google’s directory — soon to be converted into its own Google + page, the company says. The change has been swift: Search Engine Land reports that as of this morning, some 80 million Google Places pages were converted to Google+ Local pages.
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Sometimes you just gotta do your own thing. Such was the case with Boris Vaisman, who dropped out of Y Combinator’s winter batch (where he was on kid-safe phone lockdown tool, Kyte). Says Vaisman, it was just a matter of “having a different vision in terms of how to move forward.” So what has Vaisman, along with co-founder Ankush Agarwal, now launched instead? Play Safe, an app for Android that lets kids safely play games on your own smartphone.
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