Big Money For Little Sites: Mobile Website Maker DudaMobile Raises Another Round, Extends Series B By $10.3 Million

Mobile website maker DudaMobile has just raised another round, following a busy 2012 which saw the service grow to 4 million mobile sites, the introduction of new partnerships, and a major overhaul of its site builder product. The funding, an extension to its $6 million Series B from last spring, brings in $10.3 million in new funding, led by previous investors Israeli-based Pitango Venture Capital and Oren’s Capital.

The company got its start as a white label platform which allowed businesses to build mobile-optimized websites. Then, around a year and a half ago, it launched a self-serve platform open to anyone. Unlike some DIY website building tools out there, what makes DudaMobile interesting is that it takes an existing desktop website and turns that into a mobile site that automatically stays in sync with its desktop counterpart as new changes are applied.

In addition to pulling in the content from the desktop site, DudaMobile’s product also looks elsewhere across the web, where the business might have other data worth adding to its mobile presence. For example, the site builder can pull in content from places like Facebook, Yelp, or Google Places – even if the website owner didn’t provide their usernames or URLs for those services.

Last month, DudaMobile relaunched its website builder after five months of development efforts, updating its legacy interface to uncover some of the buried features, while also making it more intuitive and user-friendly.

The company has also formed several high-profile partnerships, with resellers and other partners like GoDaddy, Yahoo, Google, Homestead, OpenTable, AT&T and Webs.com. It closed several deals in Japan, as well, two being Yahoo Japan and GMO Nikko, and three more which it’s not yet permitted to disclose for a month or so. It has also localized its platform in three other languages besides English, including Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese.

The Google GoMo partnership, which offered small businesses free mobile sites, officially wrapped last month, but the impact to DudaMobile was huge. Over the last year and a quarter, the company grew its team from 5 in the U.S. and 15 in Israel to now 30 in the U.S. and 30 in Israel. Last summer, the Palo Alto-based company opened up an office in Atlanta, Georgia, too, focused on mobile advertising.

This new division launched in response to customer feedback, explains DudaMobile’s Communications head, Dennis Mink. Once they had their mobile website running, he says, customers then wanted to know how to get traffic, leads and sales. The ads team now helps customers run mobile search and ad campaigns, especially those that get customers to call the business directly. “That’s so much of what it comes down to these days on mobile websites these days – it’s that little ‘click-to-call’ button…it’s unbelievable how successful that little button is,” Mink says.

The GoMo deal also helped DudaMobile grow its brand-name recognition, and build out its reseller program. While the company declined to provide revenue information, Mink says growth on that front has been “significant” and the company is hoping to hit profitability by year-end.

Going forward, the new funding will be used mainly for product development. The company already integrates with services like OpenTable, Locu, SinglePlatform, Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, Google Places, and soon, Constant Contact. Now it’s looking to expand integrations with a focus on email and CRM systems, plus couponing, deals and offers platforms.

Mink also teased news of a “game-changing” new product release expected to launch into beta later this year, but wouldn’t go into details. “It will leverage all the experience we have in converting sites and identifying content and being able to reorient it in different ways for different screens,” he hints.

Also in the works, and expected to release at the end of April, is a new “build from scratch” mobile site builder which instead of syncing with an established desktop site, simply lets businesses start a new site on mobile, whether that’s because they’re bypassing the desktop altogether or they need a site to function as a mobile-friendly landing page for a campaign.

With the additional funding, DudaMobile has raised around $18+ million in total.

DudaMobile makes websites mobile. The platform makes it easy to convert existing websites into mobile friendly sites with just a few clicks. First launched as a white label platform in early 2010 and later as a self-service mobile website builder at http://www.dudamobile.com/, DudaMobile now hosts over 1.4 million mobile websites, with users creating over 100,00 new mobile sites per month. Duda offers mobile features geared toward small businesses including one-click site conversion, auto sync between the regular site and mobile...

? Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });

View the original article here

After Rebooting, Lulu Sees Its Database Of Guys App Hit 200K Users In 8 Weeks Across U.S. Campuses

Lulu (formerly Luluvise), the controversial mobile app that lets girls anonymously review and recommend guys, is seeing some pretty decent traction since it rebooted in February to focus on launching across U.S. college campuses, early Facebook-style. The London/U.S. company, backed by Passion Capital, PROfounders and a host of prominent angels including Yuri Milner and Dave Morin, has garnered 200,000 users in 8 weeks across the five U.S. universities where it’s actively been marketed.

That’s out of a possible market of 6 million female U.S. undergraduates, while at the current trajectory Lulu reckons it could be on track to reach 1 in 4 female undergraduates in the U.S. by the end of the year, something which it then plans to use as a springboard to target the U.S. female market as a whole.

Pitched as a “girls-only app for dating intelligence” or an anonymous database of guys, created by girls — men are strictly prohibited from joining via Facebook login and other checks — Lulu has, perhaps understandably, received its fair amount of criticism, even though it initially stalled before take off. The main charge being that the same concept if applied to guys rating girls would be frowned upon, not least by investors, though in actual fact there are a number of similar startups targeting males.

The other, more legitimate, charge levied at Lulu is that the men reviewed have little right to reply due to being locked out of the app, even if there is a limited accompanying app that lets them edit their basic profile. A lawsuit waiting to happen, maybe, though the app’s ToS clearly puts the onus on the women asked to upload reviews, suggesting slightly disingenuously that they must seek the permission of the guy they are reviewing first if they choose to post information about them that may contravene any data-protection laws.

All of which hasn’t put off the startup’s backers. In February, Lulu announced it had added another $2.5 million to its coffers, bringing the total raised to $3.5m.

Of course, controversy has also undoubtedly brought lots of PR, including a fair amount of mainstream media coverage in the UK and U.S., such as on Ryan Seacrest’s Virgin Radio show, so it’s not so surprising to see some traction happening stateside.

Interestingly, I’m told that overall Lulu’s U.S. college campus traction is coming at an acquisition cost of $0.07 per user, while in the first 5 universities where the app launched, it achieved 35-40% penetration within 2-3 weeks. It’s now scaling this approach nationwide.

Other interesting stats that have been shared with TechCrunch: 50% of new users come back weekly, visiting 8 times per week on average, spending 45 mins in the app per week. In addition, 52% of users create content. Overall, Lulu has seen 57 million profile views, 4 million user sessions, 5.2 million reviews read, and 10 million searches.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, for every three women that join, one guy tries to — unsuccessfully — sign up.

Well, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

Lulu is the smart girl’s app for private reviews and recommendations of guys.

? Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });

View the original article here

Facebook Phone Review: “HTC First” Decorates Home With Extra Alerts But A Shabby Camera

After years of rumors, the Facebook Phone aka the HTC First finally launches April 12th for $99 on AT&T. It’s light and supple, plus comes with a suped-up version of Facebook Home pre-installed that pipes in non-Facebook notifications, but the 5MP Camera is a let down. If you’re highly social, want a mid-range handset, crave email alerts, and aren’t a photo buff, the First could be a great fit.

Considering this is Facebook’s first time really getting its hands dirty with a handset, I was very impressed with the First. Its comfy feel and soft edges make it a joy to hold. The 720p, 341 PPI screen is sharp, though not blazingly bright.

Facebook’s launcher replacement runs great on the First’s modified version of Android Jelly Bean 4.1, which is responsive and fun to play with. Home’s Facebook Chat/SMS multi-tasking is a game-changing efficiency booster, and the detailed screen makes laying back and watching Cover Feed photos stream by very relaxing. Unlike the downloadable version of Home that becomes available for five other handsets on Friday, the optimizations made to Android let the First display notifications from any app on your Home/lock screen, rather than just those from Facebook.

But in getting the price down to $99 on contract, Facebook and HTC sacrificed camera quality. Its 5MP can’t compete with the 8MP of the cameras on the iPhone 4S and Samsung Galaxy S III which crowd its price range. Home also buries access to camera beneath an extra tap, which might make you miss some spontaneous candids. You can disable Home completely, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

That’s my short take. Now let’s look a bit closer.

When I first got my hands on the HTC First during the demo session blitz after the launch event last week, I was so fixated on the Home software that the handset’s hardware kind of faded into the background. It wasn’t until I got my review unit that I realized that was the point. The First is designed to get out the way so you can focus on the people instead. It accomplishes that by feeling downright friendly in your palm.

The glass screen seems to curve down at the thin bezeled edges into the surrounding plastic case and its matte finish. There’s not a sharp edge to be found, nor any cold glass or aluminum. Rather than a triumph of industrial chic, the First feels cozy — dare I say sensual. It’s thin, and the plastic helps keeps the weight down despite the 4.3 inch screen. Between the rounded edges and sleek figure, it’s a breeze to slide into your pocket.

The First’s specs place it firmly in the mid-range handset market. That’s why HTC didn’t trumpet them too loudly at the launch event. But other than its camera, it holds its own in its class alongside the 4S and S III.

The LTE connection is very speedy, the screen is colorful and clear, and NFC is a nice bonus. The battery life is decent, but goes quick if you’ve got the brightness turned up to take advantage of Cover Feed. The last 15% of the battery seemed to drain infuriatingly quickly, which can be rough when you’ve been rationing and expect that much juice to get you to the end of the day. Thankfully the micro USB charger fills up relatively fast, though the phone won’t automatically turn back on once it’s banked sufficient electrons.

Here’s the First stacked up against the 4S and S III:

Facebook went out of its way to declare that Home doesn’t require a forked version of Android, and that it didn’t build some “Facebook OS” — except it did. Mark Zuckerberg noted that the First’s operating system was optimized for Home. Later, HTC confirmed to me it worked with Facebook to alter some of the Jelly Bean frameworks. This gives the HTC First’s version of Home a big improvement over the standard downloadable homescreen replacement app that also launches April 12th.

The First’s homescreen and lock screen can display big notification tiles for anything that appears in the Android notifications tray. This includes Facebook alerts about tags and likes, but also incoming emails, calendar appointments, Twitter replies, and more. The downloadable version of Home only shows Facebook notifications. Surfacing a wider set of alerts could attract more business-minded consumers, in contrast to the general opinion that the HTC First and Home are for teenagers.

As for the standard Home features, they work great, but are merely a reason to own some phone that can download it, which doesn’t have to be the First. Cover Feed fills your home and lock screens with a full-screen, one-story-at-a-time stream of the best updates from your news feed. It only works in portrait mode, which is a bit odd considering so many photos these days are shot in landscape. A Ken Burns-style slow pan effect makes sure you see most of an image in the 5 seconds before a new one slides in. If a friend shares a pure text update or link, you’ll see their cover photo behind words. The big images and large fonts on the sharp screen make Cover Feed a great laid-back experience, perfect for laying in bed. It makes the standard Facebook app’s news feed look sterile and stagnant by comparison.

My favorite feature of Home on the First was Chat Heads, the chat multi-tasking system. Incoming Facebook Messages and SMS appear as little bubbles of friends’ faces that persistently float over the top of whatever app you’re using as you navigate around the phone. Tap one and your message thread drops down in an overlay on top of your current screen, allowing you to look at something like a Map or Yelp, and then quickly open a conversation and relay information you just learned, bouncing back and forth without having to open and close the apps like with standard “multi-tasking” on iOS and Android.

To leave Home, you tap and hold your profile picture at the bottom of cover feed and drag it in one of three directions. Left for Facebook Messenger, right for the last app you used, and up to open your app favorites screen. You can customize this with whatever apps you want quicker access to, or swipe right to reveal your full list of apps.

You can turn off Home with a few taps of of the Home settings menu to get a more standard Android experience. If you don’t though, there are a few things you give up. Rather than being able to access Google Now and search from the home or lock screen, you have to open the app drawer and slide right to get access to the search box. You can luckily hold down the Home button on the First to instantly conjure these though.

What’s more problematic is that the standard Camera app is totally buried in the app drawer so you can’t access it for spontaneous candid shots. When you do get it open, the 5MP camera takes soft, almost blurry images, and is even worse in low light. This is the worst part of the HTC First.

Facebook’s goal is to wrestle more control of the mobile ecosystem away from Apple and Google, and the HTC First could be a smart initial move. The device isn’t perfect, and considering Facebook’s recent focus on photos, the lackluster camera seems incongruent. But Facebook’s probably wasn’t expecting to hit a home run on its first swing. It has a lot to learn, and by working closely with HTC it likely gained a ton of insight on what to do next.

It could be a long time, if ever, before Facebook has the skills to make a premier smartphone to challenge the latest Apple and Samsung models. But the mid-tier market is large and that’s Facebook’s game — scale. It wants to connect everyone, not just those with hundreds and hundreds of dollars to throw down on a handset.

The HTC First is aptly named. It’s just the first “Facebook Phone”. Facebook has devised the Home Program where it will offer other handset manufacturers guidance on how to fiddle with the versions of Android they run to optimize Home. It might take six months, but I expect some OEMs will bite. If you’re deadset on getting a Facebook Phone, this probably won’t be your only option.

In the end, if you want the latest mobile technology, the First lags behind. Still, it’s a great device beyond the camera. So if the HTC First’s strengths align with your priorities, go ahead and pre-order.

View the original article here

Viki, The Hulu For Foreign Language Content, Revamps Site, Upgrades Subtitling Tech To Scale Up Users

Viki, the video streaming site that has carved out a niche for itself as a destination for premium, subtitled, foreign language streamed video content — some 1.5 billion streams today, all translated by crowdsourcing — has renovated itself in a bid to scale up to improve its advertising-led business model. Today, it is unveiling a new site, including an improved video player and easier subtitling technology to “improve engagement and overall consumption,” in the words of its VP of engineering, Rohit Dewan, who notes that while the site is aiming for 100 million users, actual monthly uniques are closer to 22 million, with over 7 million on mobile.

It’s an interesting time to take a look at the company — backed by $24.3 million from the likes of Andreessen Horwitz, Greylock and Charles River Ventures — given the focus that over-the-top video streaming has at the moment. Yahoo is reportedly very close to announcing a deal to buy a majority stake in Dailymotion for a price of $200 million or more; Spotify might just be eyeing up a move into streaming video, and meanwhile competitor Rdio has launched Vdio. And that’s before looking at the growth of Amazon and Netflix in this area.

One of the big focuses for a site like Viki, created around long-tail content in partnership with premium content publishers worldwide, is to make it as easy as possible for users to move from one video to another. To that end, included in the update will be a better focus on recommendations. That includes a YouTube-style river of related content down the right side of the screen once you enter a video — frankly, surprising that Viki lacked that before — plus more sophisticated recommendations based on what you are actually viewing on the site. A “Netflix-style” engine, is how Dewan describes it.

But perhaps subtitling is where a site like Viki perhaps comes into its own to stand out from the likes of YouTube, DailyMotion and the others. It runs a patented platform that lets users collaborate on subtitles for the millions of pieces of content on the site. The focus of those translations tends to be the web’s lingua franca, English, but as you can see in the shots below Viki makes great use of the power of the web to provide a number of other languages — the Korean show below has translations in 27 languages, “all created for free by our users,” notes Dewan. “It’s astounding.”

The update, Dewan says, will improve the speed and accuracy of those crowdsourced translations, with the ability to do more segmented viewing and translating. But where Viki has yet to go — although we may see more of this on the horizon — are ways of testing the boundaries of how to subtitle and how to consume those other languages. For example, if the site has so many mobile users, you could see a time where it might look for a partnership with the likes of Nuance to power voice-to-speech translation. And since dubbing has such a strong following in some countries, some of those voice translations could even potentially be used in raw formats, without translation to text.

Dewan would not comment on whether Viki might explore these sorts of innovations down the line, but he did note that it is exploring a way of using Google Translate, or a variation thereof, to create instant translations, which could then be tailored and improved by users.

In a bid to spread its content elsewhere, Viki is also now on version four of its API. It’s already available as apps on iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, Samsung TV, BlackBerry and Nokia and around 10 other platforms.

Old and new comparisons below.

Viki is a global TV site that streams TV shows, movies and other premium content, translated into more than 150 languages by a community of avid fans. With over 1 billion videos viewed and nearly 300 million words translated, Viki uniquely brings global prime-time entertainment to new audiences and unlocks new markets and revenue opportunities for content owners. Viki is the first and fastest platform for real-time subtitling of video – from Hollywood Hits to Japanese Anime to Korean...

? Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });

View the original article here

Google Gives $3M Global Impact Award Grant To Three Organizations To Support “Global Human Trafficking Hotline”

Google’s non-profit arm announced its Global Impact Awards program last December and has announced three organizations that would be receiving $3 million in grants. All of these organizations are focused on setting up human trafficking helplines to help identify potential victims and provide them with support, no matter where they are in the world.

The three organizations — Polaris Project, Liberty Asia and La Strada International — are working together to form a “Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network.”

In Google’s announcement today, the company says that 21 million people are enslaved in one way or another globally and generating $32 billion in profit for those who are managing the illegal activity. The hope for these organizations is that they can collect data from all local helpline services to be able to view patterns and triangulate the hotspots in the world that are most egregious. Dating back to 2011, Google has invested $14.5 million into anti-trafficking efforts.

Two outside companies, Palantir Technologies and Salesforce.com, are providing analytics and data-integration tools, as well as a hotline center to help scale the anti-trafficking network.

Here’s what Jared Cohen, Director of Google Ideas and Jacquelline Fuller, Director of Google Giving, had to say about the announcement:

In the U.S., Polaris Project has collected data from over 72,000 hotline calls, helping local and national anti-trafficking communities better understand the dynamics of the crime. No such actionable hotline database has existed globally — but it doesn’t need to be that way. Clear international strategies, increased cooperation, and appropriate data sharing amongst anti-trafficking organizations will help victims, prevention efforts, and sound policymaking. Slavery can be stopped. Let’s get to it.

Here is the announcement of the awards:

You can read more about Google’s non-profit efforts in an interview that I conducted with Jacquelline Fuller for The Weekly Good.

View the original article here

Adknowledge Acquires SocialWeekend Labs To Add App Promotion Tools

Online ad company Adknowledge just announced that it has acquired SocialWeekend Labs, a startup that built tools for developers to promote their apps, and also built its own Facebook and mobile apps (such as Birthdays+ and Photos+).

It sounds like Adknowledge is most interested in the startup’s developer tools, as well as its team — the company says it plans to integrate those tools into its own offerings, while continuing to serve existing SocialWeekend customers.

“SocialWeekend has a first-class team of engineers with proven user acquisition expertise,” said Ryan Stephens, general manager of Adknowledge’s Apps business, in the acquisition press release. “They can help us take our already-robust marketing suite for app developers to an entirely new level.”

The SocialWeekend website doesn’t go into too much detail about the startup’s technology, but it says that more than 150 million users have “installed a SocialWeekend product.” It also emphasizes the startup’s strength in analytics, social, scaling and mobile.

SocialWeekend was founded by Shane Walker, Andrew Tso, and Fariz Chowdhury, and it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Brad Harrison Ventures, and various angels. The financial terms of the acquisition aren’t being disclosed, either.

The entire SocialWeekend team will supposedly join Adknowledge’s San Francisco office.

Adknowledge is an online advertising company that seeks customers who are looking for ad solutions beyond Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Adknowledge operates an online marketplace that allows advertisers to bid for traffic in websites, email and smaller search engines. Publishers can show Adknowledge ads by utilizing AdStation on their website, email list, or search engine.

? Learn more

Great Oaks Venture Capital LLC (GOVC) is an early and seed-stage investment firm funded and launched by Andrew Boszhardt, Jr. Based in New York City, they invest in start-ups in technology sectors such as e-Commerce, SaaS, Cloud, Mobile, Gaming, Social, Ad Tech and Content/Distribution.

? Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });

View the original article here

Badgeville Names Former Cast Iron Exec Ken Comée As Its New CEO

Gamification startup Badgeville just announced that it has appointed Ken Comée as its new CEO. Co-founder and outgoing CEO Kris Duggan will become the company’s chief strategy officer, and he will also remain on the Badgeville board.

Comée was formerly the CEO of Cast Iron Systems, a cloud company that was acquired by IBM, and of PowerReviews, which was acquired by Bazaarvoice. He might not seem like the obvious choice to run a gamification company, but Badgeville says it’s actually selling its tools (which allow companies to add social features and game mechanics to their products) to some big enterprise customers, like Deloitte, EMC, and Oracle.

“Gamification is not a fad,” Comée told me via email. He later added, “I see user engagement as the vital factor in the success of all cloud and web-based technologies. While we’ve … had tremendous success in driving user engagement across key consumer environments, we’ve also tapped into a great market opportunity to extend more into employee engagement.”

As a startup grows, it’s not unusual to see a more seasoned executive replace the founder as CEO. However, I asked why the move made sense now, and Duggan pointed to two things. First, he said the company needs “a proven leader to scale to the demand of our enterprise customer and partner base.” Second, this will give Duggan time to become “a full-time visionary and evangelist” who can “cement the market.”

I also asked how they’d avoid some of the conflicts that can arise when someone steps down from the CEO role but doesn’t leave the company. Both of them said they’ve already been working together, because Comée has been serving as an advisor to the company for the past four months.

“We make a great team,” he said.

Badgeville launched in September 2010 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, where it won the audience choice award. (Duggan is the one on the left accepting the award in the photo above.) It says that it now has hundreds of customers, and that its revenue doubled in 2011, doubled again in 2012, and will, yes, double this year.

Launch Date: September 27, 2010

Badgeville, The Behavior Platform, is the global gamification leader. World-class companies including Deloitte, EMC, CA Technologies, Dell, Appirio, Samsung, NBC, Universal Music, Bell Media, The Active Network, Recyclebank, and hundreds more rely on our SaaS solution to measure and influence user behavior. With the industry’s largest network of partners and integrations, Badgeville provides Game Mechanics, Reputation Mechanics, and Social Mechanics that track, surface, and reward behavior across all of a company’s web properties and enterprise applications. The Badgeville Platform leverages...

? Learn more jQuery(function() { jQuery("#tabs-crunchbase").tabs(); });

View the original article here