Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with a $10.7 million investment. The private equity arm of Debiopharm Group invested the remaining $2.7 million. As part of the investment, Balderton founding partner Barry Maloney will join the Urturn board.

The London-based startup, which also has an office in the Valley, is also launching an iOS app today, funded by its Series A, to extend its web-based platform to mobile. An Android app is also in the works, due later this year. Prior to the Series A, Urturn had raised around $500,000 in friends/family funding.

So what exactly is a social expression platform? Urturn — pronounced ‘your turn’ — is best described as a viral meme-generator. It offers both a social toolbox for creating and sharing ‘expressions’ with other users, with support for sharing these out to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and also a space to hang your creations and browse others (and/or follow celebrity users or your friends). It also has its own bookmarklet browser button to make grabbing source material for meme-making purposes even easier, as Pinterest does.

Expressions is Urturn’s term for the visual composites that are its social currency. These often start with a photo but can also include multimedia elements like video and audio, which are then augmented with text or doodles or other graphical elements, by a user selecting the relevant template. So, instead of having to go to Google to copy and paste the meme du jour to post to Facebook or Twitter, Urturn gives its users the tools to make their own version of that meme. Or something else entirely.

The image at the top of this post is a basic example of an expression created with Urturn — by first uploading a photo and then adding a series of pointers to the image. Other templates currently available on the site include doodles, collages, quotes, speech bubbles, hashtag tags, cartoon elements (such as the Bunnify expression, below right) and more. 

There are also templates that support interactions, such as love it/leave or this/that which ask other users to vote on whether they like whatever else they’re seeing in that template. And templates to incorporate multimedia elements, as noted above. In short, everything an angst-ridden teenager needs to express themselves online. Or a fashion blogger to ask their followers which slacks they dig.

Another core piece of site apparatus is Urturn’s ‘Your Turn’ button which encourages the viral component by letting users click a button to easily create their own version of a expression that someone else has made — leading to waves of similarly themed expressions to be generated by, for instance, fans of the musicians who have a presence on the site.

The main topics Urturn is focusing on for now are music, fashion, beauty and art & design. It notes that it has received “significant interest” from the music industry as a new way for artists to connect with their fans.  Artists already signed up to the platform include Alicia Keys, David Bowie, One Direction, Green Day, UNIONJ, Ellie Goulding, The Gossip, Carly Rae Jepsen and Kendrick Lamar. Urturn has also attracted interest as a blogging platform to engage with readers from fashion magazines such as Cosmo.

Urturn is not currently breaking out its total user numbers but says its biggest markets globally are the U.S., followed by the U.K. and then South America.

The original idea for Urturn stemmed from a sense of frustration with the limitions of existing social tools as a medium of expression explains Stelio Tzonis, CEO and also the co-founder pictured top, left, with Urturn’s fashion & lifestyle hire, Sophie O’Kelly.

“We were sharing some stuff on social media like Facebook, Twitter. And the frustration we got is most of the time we wanted just to play around with content, like taking an image and doodling on the top, or writing something. And you end up having to take the picture, go to Photoshop or whatever, so all the work flow were really complex,” he tells TechCrunch.

“We just want to be more expressive. Sometimes you just want to have a picture and ask something to your friends, or put a quote on it, or point to something. This is really what we mean by be more expressive.”

Urturn plans to open up its templates feature in future via an API, to further expand the scope of the expressions it offers.

“Social networks really enabled the way to connect people with friends and followers, and a way to share with like, reblog, repost, retweet. Other things like this. But when you come to express yourself it’s really limited,” Tzonis continues.

“What we saw was unlimited ways to express yourself. And what we were dreaming is to have a palette [of templates like Urturn's expressions] — if you want to record you just find something to record, if you want to create a quote, if you want to share some music, you want to point something you want to  doodle, and we believe that there is unlimited different numbers to express yourself. That was really the beginning where everything started with Urturn.”

Balderton’s Maloney says the fund saw a lot more in Urturn than just A N Other photo-sharing social network/comms network. “We see it as a medium for self-expression which we dont think has been done very well yet,” he tells TechCrunch. “Photos are an important part but it’s not just photos. What we liked about it was it brings together the idea of music, goes into segments like fashion so for us what grabbed our attention about it was the engagement that’s possible, when you can really use self-expression to engage with our audience.”

“The social networks that are out there do a great job at what they’re designed to do which is communicating. What this one really does is it gets to the heart of self-expression and we think that’s where the value is,” Maloney adds. “The way the audience has taken to the tools, the way they’ve made them pretty simple to use, they way they’ve presented them in a multi-fashion, multi-dimensional way where you can almost drop and drag any of the connotations that you want to get that engagement going, and then to watch the users that are on, how long they stay on, and what they’re doing are all really great early signs for us of something that’s got great potential.”

Urturn’s Tzonis says the startup is still exploring monetisation strategies, with possibilities under consideration being promoted posts, much like Twitter’s promoted tweets model. But the first order of business is to scale up the number of Urturn users and grow the community.

“There are a lot of different opportunities to monetise this because it’s so expressive, that we have a lot of brands asking us [about Urturn]. It’s a lot better than an ad because an ad it’s just broadcasting something. Here you have the audience that just take your message and do it their own way, so when you see your feed you don’t see again that ad — you see ‘hey, my friend has done that with that product’ or whatever,” he says. “If you have an audience you will get revenue from it… We have a lot of opportunity and people are coming to us with ideas directly.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Real-time parking startup ParkMe wants to help find you parking — in real-time. The company, which originally started out on the Web, has been making a big push behind mobile apps, which is really smart, because most times when you’re looking for parking, you’re not on a PC, but you have a smartphone nearby.

There was just one problem — this app to find parking spots in real-time was only available on iOS, so there were a whole bunch of people who couldn’t use it. And their real-time parking finding powers were thus severely impacted. ParkMe is trying to correct that, with the release of an Android app that provides parking help to even the most helpless among those seeking to find a place to put their cars.

Android users will not only be able to find the closest parking for where they are now or where they happen to be going, but they’ll also be able to find the cheapest parking. And somewhere in between, maybe even the best value — the mythical “cheapest parking which is not so far away from their destination.”

The app accomplishes that by showing relevant parking rates, hours of operation, payment types, and — for those of you who want to know exactly how many free spots are available in the potential parking garage of your choice — real-time occupancy information for garages and street parking.

Oh, and did I mention the Android app was designed with the new Google maps API? Yeah, that too.

ParkMe CEO and co-founder Sam Friedman told me that the company wanted to make sure the experience on iOS was finished before moving on to another platform. In part, that meant getting as much real-time parking data as possible. ParkMe is available in 28,000 locations, 1,800 cities, and 32 countries around the globe. That comes after it has struck partnerships with Amco and Amano McGann, which are two of the largest parking providers around.

ParkMe has raised funding from Los Angeles-based private equity firm Angeleno Group, as well as IDG Ventures and Fontinalis Partners, the investment firm co-founded by Ford Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

Apple has a good deal of cash. And, in the Valley, the startup ecosystem — for many reasons — wants to see Apple spend that cash. As their cash pile continued to grow as their stock price and market cap soared, Apple’s inability to provide robust software services combined with opportunities to expand their reach through acquisitions has become a fancy parlor game which includes every stripe of public and private investor imaginable. On top of this, pumping even a small percentage of cash pile into acquisitions could provide another pool of much-needed liquidity for founders and investors alike. While it all makes sense on paper, part of what makes Apple “Apple” is that they operate how they want to — not how the market wants them to. Recently, in response to a variety of pressures to do something, to do anything, Apple announced a two-part share buyback. There are many explanations for this financial strategy, and while the Valley may have their own armchair financial analysts with a Twitter account, I reached out to some friends who actually work in technology banking or at techonology-focused hedge funds and asked them to send me a paragraph on their perception of the move. Because of the world these folks work in, I’ve reproduced their answers below anonymously, as they are not permitted to publicly share their opinions on such matters:

Technology Investment Banker: With the amount of cash stock piled by Apple, and mainly overseas, it was only a matter of time until the water would break, especially with activist investor David Einhorn ruffling feathers. Apple did something very standard and not uncommon, but on a large scale the way Apple likes to do things. At the end of the day I feel Apple’s actions represent the following four points: (1) Increased Shareholder Value: There are many ways to value a profitable company but the most common measurement is Earnings Per Share (EPS). If earnings are flat but the number of outstanding shares decreases. . Voila! . . A magical increase in period-to-period EPS will result; (2) Higher Stock Prices: An increase in EPS will often alert investors that a stock is undervalued or has the potential for increasing in value. The most common result is an increase in demand and an upward movement in the price of a stock; (3) Increased Float – As the number of outstanding shares decreases, the shares remaining represent a larger percentage of the float. If demand increases and there is less supply, then fuel is added to a potential upward movement in the price of a stock; and (4) Excess Cash: Companies usually buy back their stock with excess cash. If a company has excess cash, then at a minimum you can bank that it doesn’t have a cash flow problem. More importantly, it signals that executives feel that cash re-invested in the corporation will get a better return than alternative investments. This is definitely a positive sign for the company going forward. Customers and investors should feel confident with these events transpiring that Apple will continue to deliver value to both parties respectively.

Technology Hedge Fund Principal: Since Apple has around $150B cash on the books (70% of which is foreign), it’s clear they need to do something with this cash because it’s just wasted sitting on the balance sheet earning low interest rates. People have assumed the market would respond well to Apple making acquisitions, especially in software and services, particularly in cloud and mobile software. While they have reaped the benefits of profits in mobile hardware, the value going forward is at the application and services layer. Other hardware manufacturers are catching up, if they haven’t caught up already. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t seem to have an appetite for these types of acquisitions. Another option is to buy back shares, a proven way to deploy cash, though doing so sends a signal that they are a mature (read: not growth) company. Tactically, buybacks can decouple EPS growth from new product lines, and Apple could see 2x its buyback investment in earnings growth as a result. Ultimately, Apple has withstood significant pressure from the investment community to do something with the cash, especially as growth has slowed. (Venture arms, since you asked, are not an effective use of capital for a corporate player; I see the share repurchase as a much more responsible use of proceeds.

Hedge Fund Partner #2: Apple had four basic choices of what to do with their cash, remembering that apple has a duty to its shareholders: (1)  Do nothing (status quo), which makes zero sense. given that they have ~$145Bn in cash and are adding ~ $40Bn in cash annually assuming zero growth earnings earning; (2) Strategic acquisition or expansion, though Apple will be hard pushed to effectively put either their cash hoard or future cash flows to use to do this; (3) a one-time special dividend and increased annual dividend; or (4) a share buyback (or various form of it). Only options #3 or #4 made any sense to me and I assumed it was only a matter of time before they did something. #1 is out as they are would not be meeting their shareholder responsibility and #2 is out simply because of scale.

I see the share buyback as positive for three key reasons: (1) Apple stock is currently very cheap. My back of the envelope calculations conservatively value them at $500-$550/share, so they are effectively leveraging and creating additional shareholder value here until the multiple recovers to fair value. What’s more is that management knows a lot more than what we all do, so they should be able to calculate their own value in two to three years fairly well, and I assume they saw this as a positive. (2) Because Apple issued bonds to finance the deal rather than using cash, this way they will not need to repatriate taxable offshore cash to perform the buyback and they will likely get a bond rate the crazy low prices. Bottom line, they are saving shareholders cash, although at some point they will need to find a way to address the offshore cash, so perhaps they are waiting for another tax holiday. And (3), assuming the market reacts rationally, a buy back signals that managements believes in stock and the story and believes that this will generate returns that will outperform for long-term investors, something that a cash hoard did not address at any level and effectively generate returns far in excess of what could be achieved in any other safe manner.

More often than not I do not like share buybacks. often management does this to boost their own salary bonuses (EPS biased etc) or simply follow bad advice and follow the investment banking herd, but this time I liked Apple’s share buyback at this share price and multiple and applaud the debt financing way of doing it, I would have applauded it more if they had also issued a $40 special dividend.

Hedge Fund Partner #3: The view is Apple has stopped being an innovator. While they were at the forefront of technology, people bugged them to use their cash for a dividend or buyback and they could say “no” because the stock price was going up on leading edge innovation. Once Jobs passed away, Tim Cook hasn’t been able to keep that going, and if anything they are now playing catch-up to Samsung or even Google. When you aren’t innovating and you have $150B in cash, a board has to find ways to keep investors happy and one tactic is to conduct a massive buyback. Showing they are returning money to shareholders, creating a new base if “capital return” investors rather than growth investors. It’s all a game to prop up the stock price, money is cheap because of Bernanke, so it’s an easy way for them to please shareholders without much cost to the business. In general, I think that Apple is falling behind and trying to figure out how to regain their lead, and I’m not sure if its possible any time soon.

Technology Stock Investor: They’re doing the buyback because: 1) they have an unprecedented amount of cash ($140+ billion) that’s earning nearly nothing; 2) the stock is down nearly 40% from its high and shareholders are angry; 3) the stock is cheap on every financial metric, signaling that buying shares is a good use of cash if you believe in the long-term growth of the company.  The company does not appear to want to do a large acquisition or massively increase its capital expenditures.  They don’t “need” to hold that much cash. So the company had a very inefficient capital structure ($140+ billion of cash and no debt). Equity investors (who, in the end, own the company) sooner or later demand to get returns on their companies’ cash. Capital markets are competitive, and if management doesn’t give investors great reasons to own their stock, investors will go somewhere else. AAPL is facing slowing revenue growth, margin pressure, and uncertainty about their next major product line. A management team that is perceived as unfriendly to shareholders is another reason for investors to sell the stock. The buyback is a big gesture by management that they understand their shareholders’ concerns, in addition to likely being a good investment.

Photo Credit: Eddi 07 / Flickr Creative Commons

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping ecommerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others, have been successfully selling to big companies who need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations.

RJMetrics has focused on what ecommerce companies need, Moore explains, although he notes that its clients range from online gaming companies to nonprofits. The secret isn’t some magical new type of BI software, but a better focus on lucrative online transactions businesses. If an online retailer wants to analyze how colors of different types of hats are selling against each other, for example, a non-technical sales analyst at the company could go into RJMetrics and quickly create a visual explaining what’s happening.

The company promises to replicate client data to hosted, secure servers and optimize it for analysis within seven days, versus the months required for more complex products, with a set of APIs developed around systems that ecommerce companies are already using. Then it makes a dashboard of data visuals available to the company, including key stats for transaction businesses, like customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability, and cohort analysis on database segments. This lets a company answer questions like which types of customers are likely to regularly buy red fedora hats. For clients with technical staffers, it provides access for them to run their own queries on more complex data sets hosted on its own servers. Prices for the basic version of the online service start at $500 per month.

Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg has written effusively about his experience with RJMetrics, and how its analysis helped him prove Fab’s worth to investors when it raised $40 million in 2011.

From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head. Since the RJ data updates several times per day directly from our database, it was many times more powerful than providing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets. This was the real stuff, auto-updating! And, since RJ enables all the data to be downloaded into excel, the analysts at the VC firms were able to do all of their own analysis on the front end of the investment process.

The core RJMetrics product grew out of Moore’s own data analysis work (which has separately resulted in some great guest posts for TechCrunch, like this formative 2009 analysis of Twitter user behavior). The new funding round, which includes participation from existing investor SoftTech VC, will go towards sales and marketing. With the overall growth in the Saas BI industry, Moore says it’s time to focus on the ecommerce part of it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Rightware, a Finnish startup that sells embedded user interface software and performance benchmarking tools to car makers and consumer electronics companies needing to build graphical user interfaces has announced it has closed a $5.2 million Series B round. Investors in the round include Inventure and Nexit Ventures, along with new investor Finnish Industry Investment.

The startup, which was founded in 2009 has offices in Finland, Germany, China, Taiwan and the U.S., and counts Audi AG among the customers for its Kanzi UI creation tool, has raised a total of  €7 million ($9 million) to date, according to CEO Jonas Geust.

He said the Kanzi tool is designed to “close the gap” between the UI designer and the UI engineer, with both being able to work together using the same tool. Kanzi also includes a WYSYWYG feature to help cut development times. “As the design work is proceeding you can see on your target hardware exactly how it’s going to look as the work goes ahead,” he added.

Geust said the new investment will be used to expand Rightware’s global sales, and also to continue developing the tool itself. Rightware is not currently breaking out customer numbers but says it’s seeing “big growth” in uptake of its Kanzi UI — with traction in the automotive sector and consumer electronics companies in Europe, US and Asia.

“We are seeing that we have an explosive growth in the Kanzi UI business unit. We saw already during first quarter of this year… 100% growth and that seems to be continuing month-over-month,” said Geust.

“We are using [the new funding] partly to further develop the Kanzi tool and technology — that’s more an R&D investment — and then the other side of that is to build an even stronger market presence — basically opening sales and technical support offices closer to the customers.”

Geust told TechCrunch that the company believes there will be increasing demand for its tools, thanks to the rise of higher resolution screens. “The underlying theme that we are seeing is first of all that the demand for more advanced graphical or we could call that photo-realistic user interfaces is increasing, as the high definition screens become more of a commodity in different industries. It becomes the default use case that you actually have a very good-looking screen,” he said.

“That also puts higher requirements on the user interface — that it is actually living up to the standard that the hardware can deliver, and that is where we are expecting to see explosive growth in demand for the tool that can actually deliver on that demand.”

Rightware said its Q1 2013 UI business revenues were more than double compared Q1 2012. It expects growth to further accelerate towards the end of the year.

Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Jussi Hattula, Director, Team leader of Growth Capital at Finnish Industry Investment Ltd said: “Rightware leads the embedded UI industry with its innovative technology and market penetration.  The company promotes next-generation applications where integrated 2D & 3D graphics deliver better and faster user experiences. We are excited to be part of this round and to work with the company to fulfill its vision.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Disqus is launching a new feature today that the company says will help publishers get more value from everyone commenting on their site.

The company already offers something called Disqus Single Sign-On, where users who are registered on a given site can sign into the Disqus commenting system automatically. A company blog post describes AudeinceSync as the “flip side” of that feature, where users can choose to share their Disqus information with a publisher.

If a site uses AudienceSync to request access to your information, you’ll be presented with an authorization request similar to the ones displayed when third-party applications want access to your Facebook account.

“It’s an extension of how already Disqus works,” said CEO and co-founder Daniel Ha (no relation to me).

He added that the shared information can include a user’s name, context, and basic biographical information. The company says users have created more than 100 million profiles.

Since publishers who use Disqus for their comments might still manage their own user registration systems, for example to send out email newsletters, AudienceSync should allow for a fairly seamless transition between the two systems.

“This is another way we’re helping publishers get more direct financial value of their investment in comments,” said Vice President of Marketing and Communications Steve Roy. He also said this removes “that false choice” that publishers face between trying to access a bigger audience through Disqus versus running their own registration, where they have direct access to user data: “This is essentially the best of both worlds.”

The company has been testing AudienceSync with a few of its publishers, and you can already see it live at The Daily Meal and Michelle Malkin. The feature is now generally available to Disqus publishers.

Disqus is also announcing that it has now been installed on 2.5 million sites and reaches more than 1 billion total monthly visitors. Ha acknowledged that this is really a measure of the reach of the company’s publisher network, rather than its engagement — those visitors may just load an article with Disqus comments without actually reading the comments or posting one of their own. But he also said that more than 55 percent of those visitors will actually view the comments.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This Sunday, there’s a lot you can do in honor of the woman who raised you. There’s TheMomtract, a project out of the ad agency Mother New York to give your mother authority back over some part of your life. There are flowers and promises to let fewer of her calls go to voicemail.

But the San Francisco-based startup Samahope hopes that funds usually reserved for cross-state chocolate delivery might be used to finance medical treatments for women in need around the world. Its #HonorYourMom project is soliciting donations for medical treatments for women along with tweet-length anecdotes about participants’ own parents’ uniqueness. And while funding fistula repair surgery may not have been part of some users’ plans this year, the non-profit organization’s founders hope that providing safe birth kits in a mom’s name won’t take much convincing.

Samahope CEO Leila Janah is the founder of Samsource, a company that offers work opportunities on enterprise data projects to poor individuals around the world. Janah said that while she was on a State Department trip to Sierra Leone for women tech leaders recently, she quickly realized that Samasource was unlikely to work in a country with a 60 percent illiteracy rate. But she was also disturbed upon realizing that a systematic failure to provide basic medical care to many Sierra Leonean women had resulted in people like Dr. Darius Maggi, a Texas-based doctor in his 60s, spending their retirements fundraising for and performing surgeries for women who had undergone traumatic childbirths.

“I thought doctors should focus on providing medical care,” Janah said,”and tech entrepreneurs could be focused on creating tools to raise money for them.”

Samahope’s day-to-day work to provide medical treatments for disenfranchised women is being led by co-founder Shivani Garg Patel, a McKinsey and Microsoft alum. It is particularly focused on “last mile” populations in rural areas where care can be difficult, if not impossible, to find. (Maggi’s organization, the West Africa Fistula Foundation, has become one of its first beneficiaries.) Users can help pay for medical treatments in Sierra Leone, Zambia, Nepal, and Mexico. Like microfinance organization Kiva.org, partner organizations that work in those countries help connect funds with individuals in need, and users can similarly connect their Facebook profiles and PayPal accounts. Samahope says it uses charity researcher GiveWell among others to assess prospective partners and researches their budgets and effectiveness.

The World Health Organization estimates that two billion people worldwide have no ability to access basic surgical care. Much of the focus of Samahope-funded operations is on fixable conditions that can be treated with surgeries. Users can help pay for cleft palate and burn surgeries resulting from close proximity to open flames used for cooking.

Angel investors including Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, founder of the Silicon Valley Social Venture Fund, and Scott Banister, founder of Cisco-acquired IronPort Systems, have helped the organization raise $100K to date. Patel says that 100 patients’ procedures have been funded by 250 users to date with monthly donations growing an average of 60 percent this year. Since #HonorYourMom launched last week, they say that donations on the site have more than doubled.

The team has an ambitious goal of making scary-sounding surgeries philanthropically funded, but they’re not alone. Watsi, the first non-profit that Y Combinator welcomed to one of its famed accelerator program classes, operates in a similar space of funding operations for people in need. The Red Cross continues to be a popular resource for giving in cases of massive disaster-related medical needs (and one many individuals think of first). And the explosive growth of crowdfunding and donation sites, while enabling more options, may have created a sense of donor fatigue amongst people who are asked to give to different contacts’ causes daily.

When asked about the competition for dollars, Janah said that it provides validation that what they’re doing is valuable and viable. “Given the number of people who don’t have access to acute care, there is definitely room for multiple players in this space,” she said. “We should be competing to provide the best service. If you can provide access to health care, you can solve a lot of other problems. Our challenge is to show how powerful this investment in someone is.”

There is an also an employment story underlying the cause: by helping women in need get well, they can get back to work. In the future, the site may try to provide opportunities to fund education on the path to jobs in medical fields. Training women and enabling increased career opportunities creates a “ripple effect of opportunity” amongst their families and communities, according to Half the Sky, a women’s rights organization inspired by the work of The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn.

Samahope says it will plan to expand geographically based on places where its medical partners can deliver low-cost medical treatments with the highest impact. It has its eye on South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, where more than two million women are thought to live with untreated obstetric fistula. Screenings for cancer and other detectable conditions are said to be fundable soon as well.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Yahoo has just acquired frequent flier search startup MileWise, whose team will move to New York to join the recently acquired Stamped team on Yahoo’s mobile squad. I hear MileWise’s investors made a small return, and MileWise’s entire five-person team is joining Yahoo. The startup has shut down its flight search.

MileWise specialized in helping serious travelers choose the cheapest flights, not just based on price, but also with frequent flyer mile discounts factored in. The Google ITA-data powered search engine could also let you see how many miles you could earn by buying certain flights. While it never reached the fame of sites like Kayak, it was a powerful resource for people who fly often.

Yahoo tells us, “Today Milewise and GoPollGo joined the Yahoo! mobile team. GoPollGo created a cool social polling app and the team has joined our mobile org in Sunnyvale. Milewise created a great app to make travel planning easier and personalized. They have joined our New York mobile team.” You’ll notice that Yahoo forgot the MileWise camel case in its own confirmation email.

For more info on the GoPollGo acquisition, read our story by Ingrid Lunden. We got tipped off that the MileWise acquisition was in the works last Monday, but heard it could still go either way so we didn’t publish. PandoDaily later reported the deal might go through.

The four-year-old MileWise had raised $1.5 million from Atlas Venture, Founder Collective, General Catalyst Partners, High Line Venture Partners, iNovia Capital, David Cohen, Geoff Judge, Mitch Kapor, Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, David Tisch, Kal Vepuri and several other angels. They all apparently made a modest return on their investment.

The startup could bring know-how for helping Yahoo differentiate its travel.yahoo.com site from competitors as it focuses on the small screen. While MileWise itself has shut down and its search engine can no longer be accessed, its functionality could certainly end up in a Yahoo travel app. In the meantime, MileWise users will receive an email with instructions for exporting their data.

MileWise co-founders Nicholas Meyer and Vinay Pulim previously founded Reble.fm and later sold it to Playlist.com. These flexible, seasoned entrepreneurs are just the kind of talent Marissa Mayer is looking for. She wants to focus on user experience, and these guys know how to deliver something simple and easy but that adds unique value.

Here’s the full note from the MileWise team:

We’re proud to announce we’ve been acquired by Yahoo!

MileWise began almost four years ago with the goal of creating a simple, powerful product to help people and providers get the most value out of their rewards.

Along the way, we’ve been lucky to connect with an incredible community of fellow travelers, without whom we wouldn’t have made it this far. To everyone who took MileWise for a spin: THANK YOU! You shared our vision of what MileWise could become, and generously donated your time and passion towards making it a reality.

As part of the transition, the MileWise service will be shutting down. It’s tough to say goodbye to something we’ve dedicated so much to. But, we’ve tried to make it easy to take your data with you. We’ll be sending everyone an email with instructions on exporting your data, and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to email us.

The MileWise team will be joining Yahoo! in NYC’s Bryant Park office. We’re thrilled to be joining such a talented group of inventors, and can’t wait to get working on the next big thing coming out of Yahoo.

Again, we’d like to thank everyone who supported us along the way: our investors, our employees, our partners, and most importantly, our fellow travelers.

The MileWise Team

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some research out today from Google indicates that among smartphone owners, some 79% can be classified as “mobile shoppers,” using their devices for some aspect of the shopping experience, from finding store locations through to finding goods. On top of that, among those who use smartphones for any kind of shopping or browsing, some 84% do so in physical stores. And when it comes to investing in experiences that consumers like, retailers should stick to mobile web sites: 65% of consumers prefer these to apps.

This means that while we are still slowly inching towards for one of the holy grails of mobile commerce — using devices for actual transactions at the point of sale — there are still plenty of retail opportunities to snag people along the way.

“Some stores promote their expanded inventory online or implement a price match guarantee to retain savings-hungry shoppers. Others are putting smartphones to use with QR codes that share more information about products, or apps with store maps and real-time inventory,” writes Adam Grunewald, Mobile Marketing Manager for Google, in a blog post. “Whatever tactics marketers choose, it’s clear that smartphones are changing the in-store experience, and that winning the key decision moments at the physical shelves mean owning the digital shelves too.”

And while Google didn’t spell this out, this research also speaks to how Google appears to be spending less time these days pushing its own mobile wallet solutions, and more time presenting itself as an enabler of more holistic mobile shopping experiences.

Working with retail research group M.A.R.C. Research, the Google Shopper Council surveyed some 1,500 consumers who indicated that they use their smartphones for some form of shopping activity. Apart from finding that the vast majority of them use the devices in stores, they found the average time spent on shopping-related activities devices was around 15 minutes. Within that, the most popular service was not so much shopping, as it was shopping around: some 53% of respondents said that they used their devices for price comparison searches. The second-most popular service was closely related: it was looking for offers and promotions (39%). After that it was store practicalities — finding store locations (36%) and opening hours (35%).

Google and M.A.R.C. also looked into how users were using handsets in the lead up to going to stores. As you would expect, some of those practicalities around store logistics are more popular at that time. (These results also closely mirror some of the predictions that Google made about how mobile shopping was likely to play out in the months ahead.)

In reality, retailers potentially are caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to mobile commerce. Short of them gaining the expertise and making the investment to capitalize on this themselves, there are a number of third parties tackling the opportunity of targeting shoppers who use mobile devices, and capitalizing on it. Startups like Shopkick, which in January of this year told me it was already profitable, has built a business partnering with major retailers like Best Buy and Target to offer users deals on goods while they are in store, with the offers pushed to them just as they are in the vicinity of the products. Shopkick says that usage of its app contributed to some $200 million in sales in 2012.

On the other hand, there are others that are actually seizing the opportunity afforded by smartphone usage to offer users cheaper alternatives that can be found via e-commerce channels. When Amazon launched its price check app in 2011 — a way for shoppers to quickly look up items just before buying them in store to see if they can find cheaper alternatives online (and on Amazon) — Forbes noted that it “may be evil, but it’s the future.”

The Google research seems to indicate that there is a clear opportunity to target avid smartphone users, as well as to encourage people to use their smartphones more: in general people using their mobile devices for shopping turn out to be bigger shoppers in general, with those buying health and beauty products increasing their median “basket size” the most, by some 50%. (Incidentally, Google doesn’t give any breakdowns between how males and females fare in these categories.)

In the wider world, apps have come to dominate how many interface with their mobile devices, but interestingly when it comes to retailers, mobile web experiences appear to be preferable to consumers. This may be because it is far more likely that a user will just want to look up information about something quickly rather than take the time to download an app in order to obtain information. Unlike Instagram, e-mail or your favorite game, it may be less likely that you will be returning to a retailer’s app on a regular basis enough to merit parking it on your handset.

Some of the research seems too directly self-serving to Google’s own interests — for example the stat that some 82% of mobile shoppers use mobile search to help make purchase decisions. But on the whole some interesting insights into the ever-growing connection between our smartphones and our wallets. The full research report can be found here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chinese Internet companies Baidu, Tencent and Qihoo 360 are reportedly competing to purchase Sogou, Sohu‘s search business. Sina Tech’s report cites unnamed sources in the investment industry (link via Google Translate) and Sogou CEO Wang Xiaoquan has already taken to his Sina Weibo account to brush off the report as “unreliable,” but it’s worth noting that rumors of two recent acquisitions–PPS by Baidu and Alibaba’s purchase of a stake in Sina Weibo–both turned out to be true.

According to Sina Tech’s sources, Sogou, the third largest search engine in China, is currently stymied by a development bottleneck and can’t grab any more market share away from Baidu and Qihoo 360. Baidu has 67.21 percent market share and Qihoo 360 holds 14.94 percent, compared to Sogou’s 9.15 percent slice, according to data from CNZZ. The company has been considering a sale for the past six months, with Qihoo offering $140 million including stock and cash options, while Baidu is offering an undisclosed but higher amount of cash. Meanwhile, Tencent has entered the fray mainly because it doesn’t want Qihoo 360 to get its hands on Sogou.

The sale has been held up in part because of dissension within Sogou’s top ranks. CEO Wang Xiaochuan is reportedly at the head of the faction that wants to sell to Qihoo 360, but Sohu chairman Charles Zhang prefers Baidu’s offer. Sina Tech sources say, however, that Qihoo 360′s offer looks poised to triumph. If Qihoo 360 does indeed buy Sogou, the deal will boost the combined company’s market share to about 25 percent. Qihoo 360 will also reap the benefits of Sogou’s unique “smart input” method, which currently has 195 million active users.

“If the two merge it will really subvert the current structure of the search market. It’ll become a power struggle between two competitors,” said Sina Tech’s source.

A Baidu spokesman declined comment. Qihoo 360 and Tencent have also been emailed for comment.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch