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Tuesday, 3 December 2013
Copenhagen Wheel turns any bike into an electric hybrid, ships early 2014 for $699 (video)
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Intel Makes Another Acquisition: Hacker League, A Platform For Hackathons, Is Now A Part Of Mashery
Intel's acquisition spree continues apace, with the latest being made to augment one of its other recent acquisitions. It is buying Hacker League, a popular platform for managing hackathons, which will be incorporated with the API management company Mashery (acquired April 2013). The terms of Hacker League deal are not being disclosed but we understand it is for a sum significantly smaller than the $180 million Intel reportedly paid for Mashery. Only the platform, IP and other assets are coming over to Intel; the three co-founders Mike Swift, Abe Stanway, and Ian Jennings, who are all in their early 20s, are not.
Oren Michels, Mashery's founder who still runs the business, tells me that the idea behind the acquisition is to augment the developer outreach work that it already does on a daily basis. “We acquired the assets of Hacker League to take a product that makes hackathons great so that we could do more things to support developers,” he said. “It adds something that we can support the developer community with and eventually build parts into our core product over time.”
Adding Hacker League will mean that Mashery (and Intel) will be significantly ramping up their events for developers. Mashery is involved in some 80 hackathons annually, while Hacker League has powered some 460 events worldwide since October 2011, with a database of some 6,000 hacks from those events. (The hackathons it has powered includes the one that kicks off TechCrunch Disrupt, our flagship conference.)
Mashery and Hacker League already had friendly relations before this, crossing paths in the hackathon circuit. “We have a lot of respect for Mashery,” Swift told me. “This is the best possible place for Hacker League to go. I got really excited by the idea of Mashery taking it to places where we couldn't.”
Swift - who created Hacker League with Stanway and Jennings while the three were still students at Rutgers University - says that it had from the start been a side project, created more out of what they themselves wanted out of hackathons than really a startup in its own right. It was always bootstrapped, and until this past summer (when they started to consider what would happen with Hacker League longer term) was run more or less as a side project, with the three co-founders holding down day jobs at places like SendGrid, Etsy and PubNub. They are continuing with other projects post-sale. All three had been a part of the HackNY program, which organises university student hackathons among other things, and this could be called HackNY's first exit. (Swift is continuing his interest in student hackathons; he's the “commisioner” of Major League Hacking, vying to be the official league for intercollegiate, competitive student hackathons.
While Mashery already has an existing business targeting developers - which is beneficial overall for Intel and its mindshare in that community - it will be interesting to see how and where Hacker League's platform gets used in the future. One area where Intel could use the platform would be in its own hardware-focused hackathons. And like other API-focused businesses like Appcelerator, Mashery itself is doing business with enterprises, helping them work on their own internal development, so potentially this could be used to help build out Mashery's outreach in that area as well.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/3V34T-FS6r8/
Rdio Names Former Amazon Exec Anthony Bay Its New CEO
After enduring a round of layoffs last month, Rdio, the streaming music startup from Skype co-founder Janus Friis, has found a new chief executive officer, Anthony Bay. Bay, whose experience includes executive positions at Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, inherits the challenge of making Rdio profitable as it competes against market leaders like Spotify.
Margins in the streaming music business are extremely tight and Rdio, which lacks the the music industry connections Spotify has formed, may be struggling to get enough paying subscribers to stay afloat (the company has not disclosed the size of its current user base). Rdio did not say how many employees were fired last month, but we were told by one person that the layoffs affected 35 people, while another tip said that the number amounted to about one-fifth to one-third of Rdio's workforce, with the biggest cuts in engineering.
A representative for the company told us that they layoffs were to “improve its cost structure and ensure a scalable business model for the long-term.” It's unclear how Vdio, the startup's video-streaming service, has been affected.
Another potentially worrying sign is that the startup has not released any user numbers in a while. In contrast, Deezer reported earlier in November that it had passed 5 million user mark, despite not entering the U.S. market. Spotify, which reported 6 million paying users in March 2013, announced today that it is opening up its analytics to musicians and managers. Rdio did tell TechCrunch, however, that its tripled the number of new users since the end of 2012, and 90% of those subscribers are now on the Rdio Unlimited tier, which costs $9.99 per month.
Bay was formerly head of Amazon's global video business, and also served as chairman at Loudeye, where he led its B2B digital media content division before it was sold to Nokia. At Microsoft, Bay was in charge of the company's e-commerce technology platform, as well as developing Windows Media Technologies, including Windows Media Player. He also worked eight years at Apple, where he led Apple's Online Services.
Bay follows Drew Lamer, who is now Rdio's vice chairman and strategic advisor to itsboard of directors. Lamer announced earlier this year he planned to vacate the CEO post.
Friis said in a statement that Rdio now plans to focus on growing its paying user base globally and added that Bay will “play a critical role in unlocking the value of our global terrestrial radio partnerships.” Rdio announced a strategic partnership with Cumulus Media, which operates 525 radio stations in the U.S., in September. The deal gives Rdio access to Cumulus' programming, as well as promotions on its stations. In return, Cumulus, which took an equity stake in Rdio's parent company Pulser Media, now has an online platform.
To date, Rdio has raised $17.5 million from Atomico, Mangrove, Janus Friis and Skype.
via TechCrunch » Startups http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/techcrunch/startups/~3/sUToVvLCUhY/
Motorola Apologizes for Cyber Monday Mess, Adds Two More Days of Deals
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Scientists create malware that communicates using sound, no network required
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