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Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Slickdeals' best in tech for April 17th: 55-inch Samsung HDTV with $400 Dell gift card in tow
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Samsung Galaxy S 4 up for pre-order at US Cellular for $200, ships late April
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Doodle3D aims to make 3D printing easy enough for anyone, is totally rad
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Google Glass Records Google Glass 'Unboxing'
via Tech http://feeds.mashable.com/~r/mashable/tech/~3/WI0sWAH754o/
Microsoft Adds Two-Step Verification for Microsoft Accounts
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Two-step verification starts rolling out for Microsoft accounts
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Evernote looking to create its own hardware, first with partners then internally
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Sky Movies lands deal with Entertainment Film Distributors to stream top movies
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Deezer launches on Windows 8, streams music with Charms and Snaps (video)
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Watch 10,000 iPhones Fall Like Dominoes
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Confirmed: Red-Hot Gaming Startup Supercell Raised $130M, Made $179M Last Quarter
Last month, we posted a bit of a rumor: that Finland’s Supercell — likely the most lucrative iOS gaming company in the world — had raised about $100 million in funding in a round led by Index Ventures, Atomico Partners and Institutional Venture Partners.
Now we have confirmation today that the deal did happen, according to a flashy Forbes feature.
The tiny Helsinki-based company, which is about 100-people strong, did in fact raise $130 million on a $770 million valuation from Index, Atomico and IVP. Like we said, the round was secondary: all shareholders, including early investor Accel Partners, sold 16.7 percent of their holdings in the company to the newer investors. Index took $52.5 million of the round.
Not only that, Supercell shared some revenue figures, (and holy crap, are they bigger than I thought they would be). Last quarter, Supercell made $179 million and netted $104 million of that after expenses and Apple’s 30 percent cut. Last year, they grossed $100 million.
Today, they’re making $2.4 million a day — which is about double the rumor figures I had heard from numerous sources in the industry. They also have about 8.5 million daily active users, which is actually lower than comparable companies like King or Zynga.
So they monetize their existing players well.
Why share these numbers now? It’s likely because Finland has some unusual rules around financial disclosures for privately held companies. Even privately-backed companies have to share the the split of their equity holdings. Angry Birds-maker Rovio reported earnings a few weeks ago, saying they doubled revenue and made about $195 million last year.
Supercell’s CEO Ilkka Paananen said in the Forbes story that they took the funding to give early shareholders a payout, give a “thank you” to employees and avoid pressure to go public. Clearly, they didn’t need the capital. But $770 million is a steep bar to clear and they’ll now have pressure to prove that they’re worth several times that.
As for Index, which is effectively betting that Supercell will become a multi-billion dollar gaming company, one of their partners, Neil Rimer, posted an explanation of the deal earlier today. They were enamored of Supercell’s culture:
The founders had witnessed the downfall of too many companies that had turned into bloated, bureaucratic behemoths with many design studios in multiple time zones requiring massive management overhead and crushing hierarchies and to coordinate.
As its name implies, Supercell is organized as a collection of small, independent teams called cells tasked with developing new games or building new deep features for existing games. Cells are given complete autonomy in terms of how they organize themselves, prioritize ideas, distribute work and determine what they ultimately produce. Describing himself as the “world’s least powerful CEO”, Ilkka encourages cells to exercise extreme independence and prides himself on having no creative control over them once they are constituted. The company as a whole is merely an aggregation of these cells; a Supercell.
With only 100 employees compared to 3000 at Zynga and almost 10,000 at EA, Supercell offers a radically new model for agile content development that has made it the highest grossing iOS game developer with only 2 game titles (versus EA’s 970).
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/o03oNtu1ZWw/
Animal Crossing-flavored Nintendo 3DS XL bundle costs $220, arrives this June
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HAPILABS launches HAPIfork Kickstarter campaign, we go hands-on and in-mouth
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Osom mashes up Craigslist and Instagram, lets you sell your beautiful things
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Nintendo Wii U's spring update, Panorama View arrive next week
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Google Glass appears on eBay, you can't afford it
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El estado de las redes sociales y su relación con las marcas en España en abril de 2013
Zenith y The Cocktail Analysis acaban de publicar la quinta oleada de su observatorio de redes sociales, con especial énfasis este año en cómo estamos reaccionando los usuarios a la presencia de las marcas en estas.
Facebook, Twitter y los móviles son los grandes destacados, mientras que la presencia de marcas en as redes sociales y la forma en la que se relacionan los usuarios con ellas muestra diferencias considerables de una a otra.
Los detalles en El 70% de los usuarios de redes sociales se muestran receptivos a la presencia de marcas en este entorno .
Los resultados se basan «en más de 1.500 entrevistas a internautas, 4 Focus Group a usuarios activos de al menos una red social y 8 entrevistas adicionales en profundidad a los usuarios más activos».
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/internet/estado-redes-sociales-su-relacion-con-las-marcas-en-espana-abril-2013.html
Here Are the U.S. Prices and Dates for the Samsung Galaxy S 4
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Poncho, For Those Who Can't Be Bothered To Open A Weather App
Long before the era of iPads and Snapchats and holographic Tupacs, some of the greatest minds in tech and science spent their life trying to understand weather patterns. Since, we’ve evolved to have an almost overwhelming amount of data on what today’s weather will be like, and it’s entirely possible that we’ve gone overboard with the notion of being ready for a little rain.
That’s exactly the premise that Poncho, a new startup launching out of BetaWorks, operates under.
Sure, you could download apps or log in to weather sites and get all kinds of hourly forecasts for the whole country, Doppler radar readouts, weather news (which is usually the most boring type of news), and a host of other types of information. Or you could see a daily breakdown of the weather in a way that’s meaningful to you, and only to you.
Poncho works by first learning about your daily routine. When you sign up to the service, you’re asked a series of easy questions about the flow of your day: when do you wake up? Do you have any pets you need to walk? When do you head into work? What time do you take lunch? When do you leave work? How do you commute?
After you’ve answered, you can choose to receive your daily weather updates by SMS or email.
“The core objective is to have Poncho become a default part of your routine,” said co-founder Kuan Huang. “We want to take you away from the noise of other apps and clients and give you the weather in a simple way.”
Updates from Poncho are clean and easy to understand. You get a general outline of the day, along with specific temperatures for the times Poncho knows you’ll be out and about in the world.
Huang led the team that developed Poncho out of BetaWorks, which is a program that aims to pull talented engineers into the BetaWorks family in order to co-found and develop great ideas into full-fledged service. Unlike most accelerators, there is no application process and there really aren’t any strict curricula either.
Rather, BetaWorks gives entrepreneurs everything they need to turn an idea into a business, at no up-front cost to the engineer (or Hacker in residence, as BetaWorks calls it). BetaWorks does provide a team, co-working space, and mentorship like a traditional accelerator, and they also take an unspecified slice of equity in the business, but generally the program operates very differently from traditional accelerators and incubators.
Poncho is just the first in a string of forthcoming product launches for BetaWorks, so stay tuned.
To sign up for Poncho, head over here.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/wZMuZVSsSQk/
Si lloras en el espacio, ¿caen las lágrimas?
Y en este vídeo la demostración—vía Explorer,
Así que en el espacio nadie puede oir tus gritos y encima al parecer puedes morir ahogado con tus propias lágrimas.
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/humor/si-lloras-en-espacio-no-caen-las-lagrimas.html
Gmail, Drive, other Google apps down for some
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Samsung Officially Announces Galaxy S 4 in the U.S.
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Zopo C2 embraces Aliyun OS, boasts 5-inch 1080p display, 5MP front camera and a low price
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Samsung Galaxy S 4 priced at $150 on Sprint and T-Mobile, hits both carriers in late April
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¿Quién necesita a Superman cuando tiene a…? ¡Social Media Man!
Para labores ciudadanas ya tenemos al poderoso Peatónico, pero… ¿Están nuestras personalidades digitales seguras en esta jungla en que se ha convertido la superautopista de la información?
Para salvarnos a todos llega Social Media Man™, un superhéroe surgido de Internet para realizar el trabajo sucio que alguien tiene que hacer. Entre sus poderes: Recibir notificaciones, maximizar su presencia online, mejorar su marca personal, penetrar en la blogosfera, gestionar una estrategia de contenidos, lanzar tuits (y taguearlos mucho), geolocalizar, un sentido arácnido de realidad aumentada, rebloguear, favoritear y crear campañas virales.
Las emocionantes aventuras de Social Media Man es una historieta creada por Pandy (al que llegué vía Neatorama).
via Microsiervos http://www.microsiervos.com/archivo/humor/social-media-man.html
The Hobbit will be first movie to support UltraViolet in New Zealand and Australia
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TomTom refreshes GO sat nav, offers 3D maps and lifetime traffic information
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Toshiba's Kirabook rocks a 2560 x 1440 display, arrives May 12th starting at $1,600
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TomTom makes own-brand GPS sports watches, no Nike swoosh in sight (updated)
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Tiny lithium-ion battery recharges 1000x faster than rival tech, could shrink mobile devices
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Peter Thiel's Breakout Labs Funds “Nanostraws” And A Siri-Like Natural Language Processing Startup
Breakout Labs, a Peter Thiel-backed effort that supports startups doing cutting-edge research that might be still too risky to get traditional venture backing, just put capital into another two companies.
They’re funding a Siri-like natural language processing startup called SkyPhrase and another biotech company called Stealth Biosciences, which is creating “nanostraws” that make it easy to insert material into single cells without destroying them.
Breakout Labs, which launched last year, gives up to $350,000 to early-stage companies. The motivation behind Breakout is to bridge that gap between the point when a startup is engaging in risky, more capital intensive research and when they’ve found something that is commercially viable or that can be made into a product. Breakout is meant to be the first external investor before a startup goes on to find more traditional venture backing.
Lindy Fishburne, who is the senior vice president for investments of the Thiel Foundation, said that several of last year’s companies have gone on to raise angel financing in the $1 to $1.5 million range and two have received additional grants from prestigious institutions like the National Institutes of Health.
She said that Breakout funded Stealth Biosciences because its technology could help researchers and doctors avoid using viruses or viral vectors to insert material into cells and treat patients.
“This is actually a scalable way to insert material directly inside of cells using nanotechnology,” Fishburne said. “They’ve developed nano-material that allows them to pierce and get what they need into cells, avoiding the use of viruses or viral vectors, a technique which has other issues.”
Stealth developed nanoscale devices called “Nanostraws” or “Stealth Probes” that can measure and control biological processes at the level of single cells. The two Stanford University professors behind Stealth, Nick Melosh and Craig Garner, say this could be used in personalized medicine, oncology and neuroscience.
The second company Breakout is backing is called Skyphrase. There are two schools toward approaching natural language processing; one relies on a brute force statistical approach and the other relies on logical reasoning and language rules. SkyPhrase says it has a technology that marries the strengths of these two techniques.
They briefly had a Gmail search app for the iPhone last year that could look for content with rich phrases like “emails that Jane sent me during the holidays containing pictures.” But it’s no longer available in the store.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/YzGZE5xs_LQ/
HP's Slate 7 set to hit UK on May 1st for £129
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