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Monday, 15 July 2013
Red Hot Dating App Tinder Officially Arrives On Android, Begins Hooking Up With Big Media
The Digital Dating World has seen its fair share of companies come and go over the years, and few have been able to give the usual suspects, like eHarmony, Match.com and OkCupid, a run for their respective monies. However, since bursting onto the scene in October of last year, Tinder has been making a play at becoming the next digital dating giant by focusing on an area in which none of its predecessors have excelled: Mobile.
Drawing on the same addictive formula behind Hot or Not, Tinder allows those in search of a date (or a little casual flirting) to swipe through Facebook-powered profiles of prospective matches, accepting or rejecting based on visual appeal. Sure, it’s a bit superficial, but its game-ified approach to flirting is also more than a little addicting and has taken off among the SnapChat generation, beginning with college campuses.
In fact, since launching in October, Tinder has spread like wildfire — a fact that, as we reported in May, has had investors and potential acquirers drooling. Today, Tinder co-founder and CEO Sean Rad tells us, users have rated over seven billion profiles, and the app has served over 100 million matches in all (and is currently adding 1.5 million matches/day and growing, he says.)
Android
Yet, for a mobile-first startup, Tinder has been missing a huge piece of the smartphone puzzle: To date, the app has only been available on the iPhone. Beginning today, however, with the arrival of Tinder for Android, the popular mobile dating app is going multi-platform, opening its doors to users of the mobile operating system that now owns over 70 percent of smartphone marketshare.
In the lead-up to the app’s arrival on Google Play, the Tinder founders decided to take a somewhat unusual approach to drumming up attention for its new app — another testament to how popular the app has become.
Instead of simply launching the app on the app store as is normally the case, several weeks ago, the company created a landing page for the new app, saying that they would only make Tinder for Android available once they had received one million requests (via social media). They haven’t quite made it to one million requests, Rad says, but with over 800K already logged, the founders decided to pull the trigger anyway.
In its port from iOS to Android, fans of the mobile dating network will be pleased to learn that there haven’t been many changes to the overall user experience, other than some requisite optimizations for its new operating system. It’s still the same model: Once a user signs in, they’re shown snapshots of local singles based on location and mutual interests. They can “like” or pass each match as it appears and can decide to chat or meet up only when both users show interest (i.e. “like” each other).
It’s this simple model, which encourages people to make snap judgements of each other based on a few photos and some basic profile information on mutual preferences, interests and friends, that have led Tinder users to make over 7 billion profile ratings. For those looking for long-term, serious romance, the eHarmony and OKCupid approach is likely to have more appeal, but for younger users interested in a quick way to meet people and a casual way to flirt, Tinder has (thus far) been taking the cake.
As we wrote earlier this summer, based on its surging popularity among young people, rumors had been circulating for months that the company has been in the process of raising a huge round of outside financing or was busy looking for a big-figure exit. Today, both of these remain untrue and, while the startup is still not sharing how much capital it has in its coffers, IAC is (and remains) its primary investor and stakeholder.
For those unfamiliar, part of the reason Tinder has been able to do what it has over the last six months is that it’s been able to learn first-hand from the giants of Digital Dating. The startup was incubated at Hatch Labs, a new Los Angeles-based startup and accelerator backed by the aforementioned IAC — the same Barry Diller-led digital media giant that happens to own dating veterans Match.com and OKCupid. As a result, IAC maintains “first-dibs” rights to investing Tinder and has been the “sole investor in its seed and series A rounds,” which we’ve heard total in the millions (and likely more than a few “millions”), we wrote at the time.
Think Local, Flirt Global
With enough runway and plenty of interest, Tinder has also begun to focus on international markets, as the CEO told us at the time that over 15 percent of its users now hail from outside the U.S. Going forward, the startup has begun focusing its international efforts on the U.K., Australia, Latin America, Germany, France and China and is in the process of adding further language support, localization and is hiring local reps in each of these countries.
Rad also told us in May that Asia remains a potentially big opportunity for Tinder, thanks to “the explosion of mobile adoption.” To be sure, whether it’s Asia as or in other target global markets, the launch of Tinder for Android will be a key to unlocking continued growth in these regions. As Ingrid recently wrote, Google’s global share of smartphone sales was 64 percent in March and, with Android’s “share rising in every market over the last few months,” it will be approaching 70 percent soon.
Since the beginning, the Tinder founders have been hesitant to refer to their product as a “dating app,” as their long-term plans involve expanding the growing network beyond dating. With the stigmas that have traditionally come with “Internet dating,” this isn’t particularly surprising. No one is eager to be painted with the “superficial dating app” brush, even if in this case, the glove certainly fits.
Beyond Dating
However, the company has been making its first steps toward expanding the Tinder experience beyond dating, launching a new feature called “Matchmaker,” which enables users to create matches between any two Facebook friends for any purpose — flirting or otherwise. As we wrote in May, the idea behind the new networking tool is to create a “casual, simple way to make an introduction, whether you want to set two friends up on a date or make a professional introduction or connection,” while maintaining the anonymity of the typical Tinder experience.
But, as a decidedly free app, the Tinder team has been experimenting with ways to allow big brands to connect with its droves of young users — a coveted demographic for many advertisers — and with ways to monetize. While Rad tells us that its newest promotional deal does not in fact represent its current or future efforts to monetize, it does indicate potential roads the company could take to ramping up revenue generation.
Tinder And Big Media
As Variety and others have reported, the first brand (and TV network) to hook up with Tinder is USA, which launched a promo last night that’s targeted at younger generations ahead of the Season 3 premiere of its popular show, “Suits.” The Tinder CEO tells us that the company has had similar interest from a number of TV networks and brands, but they opted to go with USA and Suits because the network’s vision was the most closely aligned with their own — and because Rad himself is a fan of the show.
On the flip side, dudes under the age of 35 have traditionally been difficult to advertise to, and USA thinks that its promo with Tinder could help introduce its show to an audience it — and many other networks — are always trying to reach. As to the promo itself, beginning last night, when Tinder users sign in to the app, they may find that one of the matches waiting for them is actually a character from “Suits.”
When and if a user “likes” one of the characters, they’ll be given access to “exclusive content” from the show, which basically means sneak peeks, audio greetings and clips only available on the Tinder network. The characters from the show will also be choosing a few power users to “like” back to engage in a little live flirting over chat and, depending on how things go, maybe even live, in person. It remains to be seen whether or not this will appeal to Tinder users or just be a nuisance, but even though both parties were firm on the fact that no money exchanged hands as a result of the partnership, users can expect more of these types of promos within Tinder going forward.
Rad says that he and the team are focused intently on keeping Tinder ad-free, so, while its partnership with USA may not currently be resulting in any revenue for the startup, one can imagine Tinder pursuing similar strategies when it does decide to flip the “revenue switch.”
Sure, few Tinder users are probably champing at the bit to see their favorite mobile dating app begin to monetize, but, at at time when even the former “Miss America” is discovered to be using Tinder, the company would remiss not to take advantage of its 10 minutes. Especially before users discover that the hot date they’ve been falling in love with is actually just a spambot.
Tinder on Google Play here.
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Apple reportedly pitching ad skipping technology to cable companies
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IMDb updates Android and iOS apps, lets US users buy movie tickets directly
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Uber intros fare splitting for cost-conscious ridesharers
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El telescopio espacial Hubble descubre una nueva luna de Neptuno
La nueva luna de Neptuno
Descubierta por Mark Showalter del Instituto SETI el pasado 1 de julio en unas fotos de Neptuno tomadas por el telescopio espacial Hubble, y confirmada su presencia en otras imágenes tomadas entre 2004 y 2009, con S/2004 N 1 ya son 14 las lunas de Neptuno.
Es la más pequeña de las lunas de Neptuno, con unos 22 kilómetros de diámetro, y un albedo muy bajo, así que teniendo en cuenta que Neptuno está a una distancia media de la Tierra de unos 4.500 millones de kilómetros no deja de ser impresionante que el Hubble haya podido verla; da una vuelta alrededor del planeta cada 23 horas entre Larisa y Proteo.
Todos los detalles y e imágenes del descubrimiento están en Hubble Finds New Neptune Moon .
Ahora falta ponerle nombre.
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Create a Rhythmic LED Light Show Using a Guitar Pick
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All Good Things
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Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite Offers Polish on a Budget
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Kabam Eyes $300M In Revenue This Year As It Lets Employees Cash Out
With the IPO door seemingly shut to gaming companies, some of the biggest privately-held studios in the world have been looking for new ways to reward longstanding employees.
San Francisco’s Kabam becomes yet another one today in a deal that let employees sell $38.5 million of their shares at a $700 million valuation. Everyone in the company who had vested shares had the choice to sell, so it wasn’t limited to just the management. Kabam isn’t saying who is funding this offering, except to say that both current investors as well as a few new investors are participating.
Kabam’s most recently disclosed valuation before this offering was roughly $500 million in a May 2011 deal that involved Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures and Canaan Partners.
But since Kabam has successfully transitioned onto mobile platforms and away from Facebook with three of the top 25 grossing iPhone titles in the U.S., it’s been able to bump that valuation up a little bit. The company now says it may make about $300 million this year in revenues, up from $180 million last year.
While the company says it’s profitable, it’s still not clear how profitable it is. Kabam said it has more than $50 million in cash in the bank today. But the company also said it had $45 million in cash in the bank back in January, so a roughly $5 to 10 million increase in cash on the balance sheet over six months is not that much.
CEO Kevin Chou has publicly talked about the company’s IPO prospects in the past. But after Zynga’s disastrous debut with a 75 percent decline in its first year, very few gaming companies seem willing to test the IPO waters. Even though The Wall Street Journal reported last month that King, the maker of Candy Crush Saga, had hired bankers to explore an IPO, sources close to the company have told me King has backed off this prospect for the time being.
What that means is you have a host of companies that are throwing off cash that are tied in their ability to provide returns to early shareholders or reward employees. In this case, a secondary offering might make sense. Finland’s Supercell gave all of its employees the option to sell 16.7 percent of their stakes when they raised $130 million at a $770 million valuation earlier this year.
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Google and Microsoft agree to US guidelines for fighting ads on pirate sites
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Elon Musk: Hyperloop High-Speed Transport Design Coming Soon
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Geeksphone preps upgraded Peak+ Firefox OS phone, 25GB of cloud space for new users
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The Real Tech Behind the Mind-Controlled Robots of 'Pacific Rim'
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Nintendo's Famicom turns 30: a look back at the console that saved gaming
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India closes state-run telegram service after 163 years
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gdgt's best deals for July 15: Samsung 24-inch 1080p HDTV, ASUS Nexus 7
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IRL: UNDFIND's One camera bag and FIFA 13 for Xbox 360
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Amped Wireless' ACA1 802.11ac WiFi adapter launches July 22nd for $99.99 (video)
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Sprint's tri-band LTE modems go on sale this Friday
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Microsoft Cuts Surface RT Price to $349
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Opbeat Nets $2.7M From Facebook, Instagram Founders And More To Give Developers A Control Center For “Web Ops”
The role of a lead developer and engineer within a young tech company has become increasingly important over the last five years, with their job descriptions now including a diverse set of responsibilities. Opbeat, a stealth, Danish startup founded last year, wants to help over-worked engineers and developers by offering them a hosted Control Center for web operations that can be set up in a matter of minutes.
Today, the young startup is officially announcing that it has raised two rounds of outside financing from an impressive list of investors, beginning with — most recently — a $2.7 million series A round led by Balderton capital. Opbeat also raised a seed round earlier this year from a group of angel investors, which include Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, Facebook co-founder Andrew McCollum, former Spotify CTO Andreas Ehn, 23 co-founder Steffan Christensen and Thomas Madsen-Mygdal, an early investor in Podio, which was acquired by Citrix last year.
For Krieger, the contribution to Opbeat’s seed financing marks the first investment he’s made since Instagram was acquired by Facebook last year. “When I saw [Opbeat's] approach to taking on the challenges of life for developers, I immediately wanted to be involved,” Krieger says of the investment. Having been one of the leaders of a small team at Instagram that was tasked with scaling the app’s backend (and later managing that backend at scale) all while simultaneously working on building the product itself, the Instagram co-founder says that he “could relate to the serious pains Opbeat is trying to solve on the developer side.”
Opbeat co-founders and serial entrepreneurs Rasmus Makwarth and Ron Cohen say that the idea behind their new startup was born from the frustration of working at multiple tech companies (including several failed startups), where they repeatedly ran into the same problem. The small teams of developers and engineers at these businesses ended up wasting weeks and months cobbling together internal tools to manage the company’s web operations.
So, they decided to build a collaborative, hosted web operations platform for developers that can be set up in a matter of minutes, so that, instead of scrambling to apply duct-tape-style fixes and focusing on “maintaing,” they can get back to building the actual product. In a post that’s well-worth the read, 23 co-founder and Opbeat investor Steffen Christensen describes how the role of the developer and engineer has changed over the last five years, and why a service like Opbeat is a critical time-saver in light of those changes.
In the age of web tools and development, while the software stack has “become decidedly more varied,” the prevailing mindset is that operations and management should be easy, he says. Many assume that, because entrepreneurs and developers can turn to AWS, Rackspace or Azure — because hosting and dev tools have become cheaper and easier to procure — that anyone can manage web development. In fact, it results in developers “taking over a bigger and bigger piece of operations and, in many cases, all of it,” Christensen explains.
Today, developers find themselves having to deploy code “across several different services and servers, all integrating with each other and third-party services,” he writes, and “meanwhile, they’re responsible for uptime and stability.” In light of this — and their increasingly important role within companies — developers need a control center.
“We didn’t have the build-or-buy option, so we had to roll out our own fix,” the 23 co-founder continues, but, with Opbeat, lead developers and engineering teams now can farm some of that work out to a third-party.
Facebook co-founder and Opbeat investor Andrew McCollum echoes a similar sentiment in his own recent Opbeat blog post, saying that the up-side of the many new tools and cloud platforms available to developers is that it’s now easier “to deploy and scale web than ever before.” As a result, many startups and founders are electing to “forgo a dedicated Ops team for longer,” instead leaving deployment and server management responsibilities in the hands of developers.
McCollum says that he thinks Opbeat can be a “powerful new tool in this burgeoning DevOps movement,” because it enables engineers to “move faster and spend less time fixing things when they break.” In turn, for teams that may not have the same “resources of Facebook,” he concludes, Opbeat can help them “adopt some of the goals of rapid development and empowering engineers” that one usually only finds at larger, well-financed tech companies.
The Opbeat co-founders are convinced that the problem the company wants to solve is one that many startups across the map are currently wrestling with and, as a result, presents a significant market opportunity. For now, the co-founders say that their key focus is on developers in the U.S., where they see the largest need (and opportunity), and that their new capital will help be used to ramp up hiring and help Opbeat do some scaling of its own.
For more on Opbeat, and to sign up for Opbeat’s beta test, find the startup at home here.
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Canadian telecom Telus first to offer shortened two-year wireless contracts
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Angry Birds Star Wars 2 launching September 19th with Skylanders-esque toy tie-in
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Thom Yorke pulls recent tracks from Spotify in protest against low pay for new artists
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Microsoft drops Surface RT to $349 following global price cuts
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Rovio Confirms Angry Birds Star Wars II Launch For Sept. 19 With 30 Playable Characters And Hasbro Partnership
Rovio and Lucasfilm have just confirmed that it will indeed launch a sequel to the much-beloved Angry Birds Star Wars game on September 19 across the globe. This confirms our earlier report from last week.
Rovio’s Angry Birds Star Wars takes the same physics-based gameplay and puts it in a gravity-free environment, giving users new tricks and tools to destroy the piggies’ habitat and move on to other levels of destruction. With the sequel, Rovio will be launching brand new Angry Birds characters while slipping in a few new surprises.
The game, which follows the story of the three pre-quel Star Wars movies, will give users some new ways to interact with the game. To start, Rovio is combining its merchandise business with it’s mobile gaming business, with the help of Hasbro.
Hasbro will have 30 different “telepods,” which are simply physical fruitions of various characters, available at the time that Angry Birds Star Wars II launches. Users will then be able to scan those characters into the game using their phone or tablet’s camera. Telepods that “teleport.” Cute, right?
The second big change we’re seeing is that Angry Birds players will now have the option to taste Bad Piggies, as Rovio is letting users cross over “to the Pork side.” This essentially means that users can play as the pigs, which happen to be the bad guys, instead of as a bird.
This pulls from Rovio’s original game Bad Piggies, which reverses the roles of the villainous pigs and the heroic birds so that players are actually fighting on the piggies’ side.
As you’d expect, Rovio will also launch a new line of merchandise alongside the game, which will include toys, apparel, accessories, books and plush toys.
Rovio has confirmed that the original Angry Birds Star Wars has hit over 100 million downloads since first launching on the App Store, and there’s very little doubt that the sequel will perform any differently in the market.
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Head of Google China, Dr. John Liu, stepping down after six years
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Samsung ATIV Book 9 Lite launching on July 28th for $800
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Surface RT prices slashed in UK and Australia, 32GB model down to £279 or $389
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Meet Utilite, a $99 quad-core ARM-based PC running Ubuntu
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Judo Payments Secures $5M For Its Mobile-Focused Card Processing Platform
If there’s one thing we know, it’s that the mobile payment space is exploding. European players in this space include Monitise, Paddle, ValidSoft and left-of-field startups like Droplet. However despite operating in the UK since July last year it wasn’t known how one of the newer arrivals, Judo Payments, was backed. Founder/CEO Dennis Jones says that it launched with an initial US$5M seed round. Terms were undisclosed but it’s understood the round was led by a New York based private investor which previously backed Euroffice and PaymentSense, both UK startups. The startup has now come out of a year long beta with some 2,500 merchants on their platform who pay on a subscription basis.
The interesting thing about Judo however is its focus on mobile above all else. While Braintree and Stripe come close, both have been known more as heavy-lifters in desktop e-commerce. Judo has tools to help developers integrate mobile optimised card payments into native iOS and Android apps with a single line of code via a single server-call architecture and “in-app intelligence” to reduce card entry errors. In addition to RESTful APIs and SDKs for iOS and Android, developers can offer card processing to their users with instant Merchant Accounts and control over funds flow. Developers can sign up easily to accept card payments with a subscription model pricing starting at £19.99/month.
Dennis Jones, CEO of judo says getting people to pay via a smartphone app – say for a taxi ride – is fiendishly complicated compared to straight up commerce on the web. For starters there is the whole problem of dealing with a payment query routed over a mobile phone network than might keep cutting out. And most mobile payment attempts don’t lead to successful transactions because users find that it’s too difficult or time consuming to pay.
UK taxi app Hailo had to build their own payment system to tie together the disparate pieces of user interface, Merchant Accounts, and gateway services. They then had to manage payments to their end ‘businesses’ (e.g. taxi drivers for Hailo), reconcile accounts, take a share of transaction for themselves, and manage the risk associated with taking cards. But what if you don’t have the resources to build this from scratch?
To promote its service Judo is holding a competition for £1M in free card processing split between 10 mobile-first UK customers and has picked out the following apps to get £100,000 in free credit and debit card processing through judo.
· BarPass – an app enabling users to order drinks from their phone to their seats at bars, pubs and events
· Theatre Ninjas – an app offering free and discounted last minute tickets to theatre, comedy, and music events
· Metavurt – an app that enables retail businesses to engage with their customers both in-store and across social media
· Duchy Software –an app that helps entrepreneurs make money from their crafted hobbies and skills
· And a Stealth restaurant takeaway app that helps restaurants with customer retention, loyalty, marketing and order value
The second round of applications for judo’s £1 million competition is due on July 23rd with the selections announced on August 5th.
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Apple allegedly working with Samsung again on chips for 2015 devices
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Países como planetas
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