Market Analysis & Industry News
Major League Gaming recorded 500k concurrent viewers at its last “televised” event, as professional video gaming continues to rise in popularity. CBS signed an agreement last year to sell advertising for all leagues outside Korea. link
eBook revenues reached $282M in the first 5 months of 2012, exceeding hardcover sales at $230M, for the first time, according to the American Association of Publishers’ survey. link
25% of smart phone owners own a tablet, according to comScore, which implies 15% of the total US population, according to comScore. link
The Department of Justice has launched an antitrust investigation to ascertain whether cable companies are impeding web video innovation. link
Online video viewing is growing rapidly. Viewers increased their monthly consumption of online video to 21.7 (+47% y/y) and the total number of viewers grew 30% to 105M, according to comScore data. link
Wired phone lines in the US have fallen by 20% in the past two years according to the FCC. link
Product Releases
Apple held its developer conference last week and announced the following:
- Apple has 400M users’ credit card information, the largest collection in history
- 365M iOS devices have been sold to date, 80% of which run iOS5
- iMessage, the Apple mobile and PC messaging client, has 140M users who sent 1B messages daily
- iOS devices produce 47% of the photos on Twitter
- Retina MacBook Pros with high-resolution displays
- iOS6, the new version of the mobile operating system, including deep integration of Facebook into the operating system and core applications, a wallet application called Passbook, and a new Maps application powered by TomTom, not Google.
- Mountain Lion, the new MacOS, which has dictation, native sharing on Twitter and Facebook, Airplay screen sharing
- 125M iCloud users
Facebook is preparing its real-time bidding ad exchange. Facebook is second to display ad inventory only to Google. link Facebook is also testing an integration with Skype that permits video chatting. link
Gaming publishers PopCap and Wooga have pulled their games from Google+ citing lack of users. link
Dropbox is disabling public folder sharing, the company announced last week. link
Dwolla has launched FiSync, the company’s competitor to ACH. The main advantage of FiSync is real-time balance transfers. link
Qwiki signed a partnership to embed their interactive machine generated presentations into Bing search results. link
Company Announcements
Salesforce has signed a deal with Twitter allowing Radian6, a Salesforce company, access to the full Twitter firehose. link
Amazon taps MapR for high-powered Elastic MapReduce. link
Songza reaches 500,000 downloads just a week after launching their iPad application. Songza offers activity based music collections. link
Rage of Bahamut has become the top grossing game on iOS and Android and remarkably generates similar revenues from each platform, generating about $1 per day per DAU. link
Square is processing $6B in annual payment volume and has reached 2M businesses accepting credit cards. link
Skout, a mobile dating service, was plagued with 3 separate sexual assaults committed against minors using the service. The company has since prevented underage users from accessing the site.
Liquidity
Classmates.com has acquired social class mates search tool Schoolfeed. link
ConstantContact acquired SMB marketing platform SinglePlatform for $100M. link
Financings
| Company | Description | Investment | Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| CellScope, Inc. | CellScope, Inc. develops microscopic imaging devices for at-home disease diagnosis using smartphone cameras connected to a web platform. | 1.0 | Khosla Ventures |
| Roqbot, Inc. | Roqbot, Inc. provides a social music service for businesses. It offers Roqbot, a social jukebox service to engage with the music through phone. | 1.2 | Accelerator Ventures; T5 Equity Partners, LLC; Google Ventures; Penny Black Holdings LLC; Detroit Venture Partners, LLC |
| ThatGame | ThatGame develops PC based games and desktop companions. The company also develops viral interactive applications in the form of games, which are played via email. | 5.5 | Benchmark Capital |
| Lemon Inc. | Lemon Inc. provides online receipt organization and spending management tools. The company was founded in 2011 and is based in Palo Alto, California. | 8.0 | Draper Fisher Jurvetson; Maveron LLC; Lightspeed Venture Partners; CampVentures; The Social+Capital Partnership |
| Credit Sesame, Inc. | Credit Sesame, Inc. owns and operates an online analytics engine that manages credit and loans. | 12.0 | Globespan Capital Partners; Menlo Ventures; Inventus Capital Partners |
| Hipmunk, Inc. | Hipmunk, Inc. operates as a travel search site. Its interface enables users to search, browse, and filter flight search results. | 15.0 | Institutional Venture Partners; Ignition Partners |
| Gigya, Inc. | Gigya, Inc., a Software-as-a-Service company, provides a technology that builds Websites social and integrates online businesses with social networks and identity providers, including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. | 15.3 | Benchmark Capital; Mayfield Fund; Advance Publications, Inc.; Adobe Ventures; DAG Ventures, LLC |
| thisMoment, Inc. | thisMoment, Inc. provides online social content management solutions. | 22.0 | Fenway Partners LLC; Sierra Ventures; Trident Capital, Inc. |
| Yext, Inc. | Yext, Inc. operates as a local advertising technology company. | 27.0 | Institutional Venture Partners; Sutter Hill Ventures; WGI Group; CrunchFund; Marker LLC |
| LightSpeed Retail Inc. | LightSpeed Retail Inc. develops point of sale system solutions to retail and Web stores. | 30.0 | Accel Management Co, Inc. |
| iZettle AB | iZettle AB, a payment service provider, offers services for person-to-person and business-to-consumer commerce in Sweden. | 31.6 | Greylock Partners; Index Ventures; Northzone Ventures; SEB Venture Capital; Mastercard Incorporated (NYSE:MA); Creandum AB |
| The Climate Corporation | The Climate Corporation offers insurance programs on crop losses due to weather events for the global agriculture industry. | 50.0 | Glynn Capital Management; New Enterprise Associates; Western Technology Investment; Index Ventures; The Founders Fund; Khosla Ventures; Atomico Investment Holdings Limited; Google Ventures |
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