FUNKY GREEN: 12/11/13

Wednesday, 11 December 2013

Chrome Apps get Mac compatibility

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Valve's SteamOS will be available for individuals and OEMs on December 13th

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Gmail for Android gets a vacation responder, printing and universal attachment support

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Whoa, Watch This Hotel in Munich Get Transformed in 88 Different Ways

Android Device Manager, Google's desktop tool for finding a misplaced phone, finally has an Android

Snapchat Raises $50 Million In Series C From A Single, Undisclosed Investor

Amid rumors of a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook and a potential $200 million funding round, turns out that ephemeral messaging sensation Snapchat has actually raised $50 million in Series C funding.

Co-founder Evan Spiegel has exclusively confirmed with TechCrunch that the $50 million was from a single investor, with no secondary offering. However, there is no word on who that investor might be, or whether or not it was a previous investor.

Spiegel did say that the money will go toward growing the business.

The SEC filing reveals nothing.

Rumors have been swirling recently that Snapchat was looking to raise $200 million, potentially from Tencent, at a valuation north of $3 or $4 billion. Spiegel has mentioned Tencent, and it’s chat subsidiary WeChat in particular, as an interesting company to learn from.

However, it’s now confirmed through court documents and TechCrunch’s inside sources that Tencent has already invested in Snapchat, likely during the Series B round. But that doesn’t mean that Tencent isn’t solely responsible for this latest round, either.

According to Crunchbase, this $50 million puts Snapchat’s total investment at no less than $123 million, and without a revenue stream in sight. And honestly, it doesn’t seem to matter right now.

Snapchat announced recently that it sees over 400 million snaps sent per day, which is more than Facebook’s daily photo uploads.

Though the company doesn’t publicly disclose numbers, it is rumored to have around 30 million monthly active users. However, TechCrunch has confirmed that Snapchat actually has more than that.

Previous investors include Light Speed Ventures, who led a small seed round, Benchmark and SV Angel, who joined Lightspeed and invested $12.5 million in Series A, as well as IVP and General Catalyst, who contributed to a massive $60 million Series B round in June. Word on the street is that the last round was actually closer to $80 million, with $20 million going toward founder liquidity.

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Pinterest outfits iPad app with retooled navigation for iOS 7

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Petsy.mx Raises $1M To Bring U.S.-Style E-Commerce To Mexico’s Pet Lovers

If, like me, you’re old enough to remember the original Pets.com, then this funding story will make you smile. The iconic pet supplies online retailer, not to be confused with new owner PetSmart, sits alongside Boo.com and Webvan in Dot Com history. Folklore has it that Pets.com, which went from IPO to liquidation in 268 days, was selling its wares for one-third the price it paid for them, and that’s before taking into account the huge advertising spend. Oh, how things have changed…

Enter Petsy.mx, Mexico’s “premier petcare e-commerce retailer”. Hoping to make a land grab in the burgeoning Mexican e-commerce market, the young startup has announced a modest seed round. It’s raised $1 million, led by Venture Partners, with participation from Capital Invest, and Dila Capital, as well as unnamed angel investors. Money, Petsy says, will be used to fund its growth and product development.

Launched in June 2013 with the aim of bringing “US-style” customer service to the Mexican e-commerce market, Petsy.mx sells a wide variety of pet care products, including premium dog and cat food brands such as Royal Canin, and Eukanuba. Like a lot of e-commerce activity in Mexico and the wider LatAm region, it looks to be gunning for something close to first-mover advantage.

“Mexican pet owners suffer from a lack of retail options, both brick and mortar and online, when seeking the best products for their pets,” says Toby Clarence-Smith, Petsy.mx’s co-founder, in a statement. “We want to solve this problem while offering fantastic customer service at all times. Our goal for Petsy.mx is to play a central role in the Mexican pet community, as both a partner and an advocate.”

E-commerce in Mexico seems to be quite a hot space right now, probably because its burgeoning nature means that, for the time being, competition is limited compared to maturer markets. In traditional e-commerce, timing is everything. Move too early, and the market is too small. Move too late, and incumbents make the barriers to entry that bit higher. To that end, Petsy is talking up an increase in the number of debit and credit cards in Mexico, and the government’s active role in supporting the Internet sector.

Of course, in emerging markets like Mexico, Rocket Internet, the hugely well-funded German e-commerce incubator, is the elephant in the room. As an example, Rocket’s ‘Amazon of Latin America’, Linio, picked up $50 million in funding last month from the likes of JP Morgan Asset Management, Investment AB Kinnevik, the Tengelmann Group, Summit Partners, and Rocket Internet itself.

Perhaps counteracting (or complementing) the Rocket effect, however, local startup activity more broadly is also on the increase. Initiatives like 500startups’ presence in the region, with its 500 Mexico City accelerator, are proof that the local startup scene is maturing. Meanwhile, VCs, such as Spain’s Seaya Ventures, are becoming a lot more bullish about the LatAm market, not least Mexico.

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Pinterest Rolls Out New iPad App for iOS 7

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13 Tech Companies That Set Up Shop in Latin America

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Skip The Kerosene With These Smartphone Controlled LED Lanterns

PSA: Android Device Manager now available for your downloading pleasure on Google Play

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JetBlue fills a plane with reporters for the ultimate Fly-Fi satellite internet test

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A Closer Shave, A Better AirPlay Speaker, Game Of Thrones [Deals]

#FiveWordTechHorrors: Your Worst Digital Nightmares

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Watch a Huge, Newly Discovered Asteroid Almost Graze Earth

Southwest Airlines Will Let You Use iMessage Onboard For $2

Engadget's Holiday Gift Guide 2013: For the Geek who has everything

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Digital Storm teases hybrid Steam Machine, reveals $1,469 starting price and not much else

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LG G Pad 8.3 Is First Google Play Tablet Not From Google

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Outlook.com's latest move to win over Gmail users is an easy, one-step importer that copies over you

Nexus 5 Camera With Android 4.4.1 Test Shots: A Speed Focus Machine

Google Drive Sheets gets offline document creation and editing, speedier calculations, smoother scrolling

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Microsoft rolls out tool that makes it easier to switch to Outlook from Gmail

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KeepTruckin Makes Trucking Fleet Management Easy And Compliant

No, this might not be the sexy new disappearing messages app. However, it’s a startup that takes software and applies it to an unsexy but potentially lucrative market.

KeepTruckin is an eight-person San Francisco-based startup that’s trying to make it easier for trucking companies to manage their fleets and have their drivers legally log their hours.

Long-haul trucking is a half-trillion dollar business in the U.S. employing 3 million drivers nationwide. Currently, drivers record their hours in paper books that they have to have them at all times for potential inspections. Not only that, dispatchers who organize trucking fleets still use whiteboards and spreadsheets to manage their drivers. Then brokers have to make phone calls to look for truckers to move their loads.

It’s cumbersome and clearly in need of an overhaul, argues Shoaib Makani, who started the company after leaving Khosla Ventures.

Now that smartphone penetration is high enough in the U.S., Makani believes its time for an easier solution.

So he teamed up with Ryan Johns, who was previously a vice president of technology at TapJoy, to start KeepTruckin. It’s a combination web- and mobile-service that helps drivers keep track of their hours on their phones. While developing the product, they interviewed hundreds of truckers, brokers, shippers and carriers while hanging out at truck stops in California.

“It’s market area that has been really underserved,” he said.

They created a skeuomorphic user interface on their mobile app that almost looks like the paper logbooks so that truckers would feel comfortable using an app that felt familiar. It works with the current legal regulations and recognizes if a trucker might be running into a violation like driving for longer than eight hours. This is key because errors can cost drivers thousands of dollars in fines.

Screen Shot 2013-12-10 at 8.28.01 PM

“The trucker wants to be in control,” Makani said, explaining why the app doesn’t auto-populate or passively detect when the driver is on the road or not. They’ve deployed the app to about 200 drivers so far in the field.

On the dispatcher side, trucking companies can direct message their drivers, audit their log books and track their location if the driver consents to it.

The plan is to let the app grow organically as truckers pick it up. Because all fleets are registered in a public database, KeepTruckin can use that to reach out to the employers of their users and market the fleet management software. The software is free for now, although they will charge a nominal amount per month per driver later on.

KeepTruckin has raised $2.3 million from investors including Google Ventures and angels like Karma and Tapjoy co-founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, Playhaven COO Charles Yim, Greenoaks Capital and Zubair Jandali, who heads Google’s mobile app developer ad sales.

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Apple TV adds Watch ABC, Crackle and Bloomberg apps

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Appidemia Shutting Down After Changes In Apple’s Policy

Ever since it launched five months ago, Appidemia has been on a rough ride thanks to Apple’s app policy. After weeks of exchanging emails with the review committee, the team decided to pull a plug on their most successful app because it cannot meet iOS 7 policy changes.

Appricot’s founder and CEO, Igor Salindrija said for TechCrunch that in order for the app to work, it has to be updated but the last version just couldn’t meet Apple’s rigid set of rules. Cupertino-based tech giant has turned down the app because it mimics certain aspects of the App Store. Applications that include filtering, bookmarking, searching or sharing recommendations are not considered significantly different from the App Store, therefore they cannot be approved by Apple. This forced Apppricot, the company behind the app, to make a final decision considering the future of Appidemia.

“Appidemia is a social discovery app and as such was getting a significant traction as well as positive feedback from users who preferred our solution for discovering new and useful apps. This latest and absolutely necessary update was, once again, kept on hold and then rejected which frustrated the team”, said Salindrija.

Before the final decision to shut down the app, Appidemia has managed to acquire more than 200,000 users with an almost perfect rating in the App Store. However, none of this mattered to Apple as none of the versions were approved by their app review service. Clearly disappointed, Sallindrija told TechCrunch that his team kept changing the app so much that they ended up with something completely different from their original idea.

This was never an option for Appidemia. Since shutting down, the team has shifted focus to a different project aiming to disrupt cross-platform collaboration.

“This was the only option and we hope our users can understand this”, said Salindrija.

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What the World Would Look Like If You Could See Cell Phone Signals

Why the UK's Department of Health is spending millions of pounds on mobile gaming

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50 juguetes míticos desde 1963 en un gráfico

50 Years 50 Toys de Abby Ryan Bennett , vía Laughing Squid

# Enlace Permanente

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Spotify adds 20 new markets

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Led Zeppelin comes to Spotify

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Spotify Goes Freemium On Tablets, Launches Free Shuffle Product On Smartphones

For the first time since launching, Spotify now offers free access to the its streaming music catalog on iOS and Android smartphones and tablets.

The service will be different for the two: tablets will have access to the same freemium experience users are used to on the desktop. Meanwhile, Spotify will offer a Shuffle service for Android and iOS smartphones.

Spotify Shuffle, which is a lot like Pandora, iTunes Radio, or other station-based streaming services, but Spotify’s Shuffle product gives you more control over the playlist.

In other words, if you choose to play Lady Gaga, you’ll get only Lady Gaga music instead of 20 percent Gaga and 80 percent Gaga-like music. There are also Songza-style playlists that are delivered up based on the time of the year and other circumstantial factors.

For smartphones, you can access all of your precompiled playlists, as well as use the Shuffle product. However, you can not perform unlimited search and listen queries.

We predicted this last week.

Originally, Spotify asked users to pay $4.99 for an ad-free web experience, and $9.99 to listen across multiple devices beyond the desk top. The top tier also came with offline access.

In the new model, Spotify will allow freemium access on tablets, but shockingly not on mobile. This likely has to do with the artists and record labels who are tough to negotiate with when it comes to free access to full tracks. This was a struggle for Spotify in the beginning when the company first introduced freemium on desktop.

Out of 20 million total users, only six million of them are paying customers. But times have changed from when Spotify’s desktop-first business model was introduced.

No longer do people discover web products that translate to mobile, but rather they explore new content and services on their mobile devices and hope for an accompanying web app. Especially where music is concerned, the ability to try out Spotify on your phone when you’re already out in the world discovering new music is just the ticket to inspire folks to upgrade. Launching on tablets is the first step toward that.

Plus, free access on tablets widens the net for new, unpaid users in a world growing more and more competitive. Apple and Google have both entered the streaming music space, alongside existing competitors like Pandora, Deezer, Rdio and more are sure to follow.

Spotify also announced 20 new markets, growing the app from 35 markets to 55 markets. All of the new markets, mostly in South America, will have access to the newly announced mobile products.

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Wednesday, 11 December 2013

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