Skift, the travel industry-focused site that was launched in July 2012 by PaidContent founder Rafat Ali and Jason Clampet (who previously ran content and editorial partnerships at Frommers.com), is announcing today that it has raised $1.1 million in additional seed funding.

The new funding was led by Lerer Ventures, with participation from various funds and angel investors (skip to the end of this post for the full list). It brings the total amount that Skift has raised to $1.5 million.

Skift says that it will have more than half a million unique users this month, and that 25 percent of its traffic comes from mobile. It also says its readers are likely to be “executives and managers from leading brands” in travel and related industries, such as Expedia, Priceline, JetBlue, Starwood and others.

When I asked Ali how this growth compares to PaidContent, a news blog on the media industry that he launched in 2002 (it was acquired by Guardian Media in 2008 and is now owned by GigaOm), he said, “Just the velocity of how quickly you can make a mark, that’s changed a lot now.” Ali attributed much of the speed of Skift’s growth to social media — the company says 10 percent of its overall traffic now comes from Twitter.

Ali added that even though Skift’s topic is the travel industry, he thinks of it as a “business information” startup, rather than a travel startup. He said it’s a company where “media and data go hand-in-hand,” and where Skift’s news content can serve as a “funnel” to its other products.

That said, he acknowledged that the data side of Skift’s business is still early. In January, it released its first report, “13 Trends That Will Define Travel in 2013,” and in February it launched SkiftSocial, which offers social media data for travel brands. Ali said Skift will launch its first subscription data products next month.

“We have a big plan for the data part and we will launch these mini products along the way,” he said.

And like most online media companies (including TechCrunch), Ali plans to launch a Skift conference, though he said he wants to focus on “one flagship conference” that has multi-million dollar potential, rather than a bunch of smaller events.

Most of the Skift articles that I’ve read have been related to tech in some way, but Ali said the company’s coverage is broader than that, covering the full gamut of travel industry news, as well as other transportation trends like ridesharing.

“A lot of the traditional players in the travel industry are focused on specific verticals, while the silos are collapsing in travel, as they have in tech and finance and other industries,” he said. Ali also argued that a site covering business news (though to be clear, Skift wants to serve a consumer audience too) “doesn’t have to be boring”: “Travel is the most creative expression of human exploration. How can it be boring?”

Getting back to the funding, Ali said the company will use the money to double its staff from five to 10 and to move out of its current co-working space and into an office. The new funds in the round include Ironfire Angel, MESA+, Advancit Capital, and GrowLab/LX Ventures. The new angel investors include Jason Calacanis, Michael Cunniff, Duncan Jennings, Sean Keener, Shakil Khan, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Noglows, and Michael Yavonditte.

Skift declined to say whether any of the previous angel investors have increased their investment with this new funding, but those past backers include Chris Ahearn, Luke Beatty, Gordon Crovitz, Craig Forman, Jim Friedlich, Tom Glocer, Vishal Gondal, Jason Hirschhorn, Peter Horan, Alan Meckler,Mohamed Nanabhay, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Amol Sarva, and Chris Schroeder.

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New York City-based startup Cover wants to make paying for your meal at a restaurant ultra-easy — like so easy that you don’t even have to look at the check. So the company has raised $1.5 million from O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures to make that happen.

Here’s the idea: Ever been out to a restaurant with a large group of, say, 10 or so? You’ve just had a nice meal, great conversation, lots of wine and then the check comes and panic ensues. You could do that thing where 10 people all throw their credit cards in to split the check 10 ways. But then there’s always that one guy who has cash, or the person who just ordered an appetizer or doesn’t drink, and probably shouldn’t pay the same amount as everyone else.

Settling up is a pain in the ass, but it doesn’t have to be. That’s the premise behind Cover, which seeks to simplify the process through the magic of mobile payments.

Cover founders Mark Egerman and Andrew Cove decided that a solution was needed to make the experience of paying a check as seamless as paying for a ride on Uber. Egerman, who describes himself as a “recovering attorney” who had previously worked at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, told me that, despite the growing number of mobile wallet solutions out there, few consumers were taking advantage of them. Mostly, the two believe, that’s because the user experience just wasn’t that good.

“We wanted a service that lets you dine out and pay without waiting for the check,” Cove said. “Dining out should be about the people at the table around you. We wanted to make it about that experience.”

What they set out to build, then, was a payments platform and mobile application that would reduce all the fuss and calculations that happen when the check comes. It was important to them that the platform would be able to gracefully handle large groups, and also that it would work with restaurants’ existing point-of-sale systems so that they wouldn’t have to install a whole new order, ticket, or payments system.

For users, Cover is designed to allow one-click, instant payments without them even having to get the check. Users simply check in to a restaurant at the start of their meal, and when it’s time for them to pay the final bill, it’s immediately charged to their credit card. They modelled the experience on Uber, which Egerman called “one of the best payment methods” out there.

For groups, the app allows users to check in and choose which members of the party they’ll be paying for. If all diners have the Cover app, it’ll be taken care of with no fuss. For those who don’t have it, they’ll still be able to pay for their share with cash or credit card.

Cover isn’t the only startup trying to tackle mobile payments at restaurants — there’s also TabbedOut, and, of course, Square. But those have some limitations. For TabbedOut, the check-out flow isn’t as simplified as what Cover is aiming for. And Square requires businesses to use its own POS system.

The app is still in private beta, but the startup has raised $1.5 million in seed funding to get it off the ground. The round was led by OATV, with participation from Lerer Ventures and angels, such as Josh Spear, Dave Eisenberg, Ben Leventhal, Naval Ravikant, Andrew Kortina, James Altucher, Mike Greenfield, John McDonald, Chris Muscarella, Ed Zimmerman and Scott Belsky.

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For some of us, hanging out with our parents is something best relegated to off-work hours and holidays. But Kenneth Lerer and Ben Lerer have had some big successes working together at Lerer Ventures, the New York City venture capital firm whose portfolio includes BuzzFeed, Warby Parker, Everlane, FancyHands, and many others.

So when we had the chance to talk with Ken and Ben backstage at Disrupt NYC 2013 this morning, we asked how exactly they make the family dynamic work so well in a business setting. According to them, a big key has been that Lerer Ventures is not the only thing they’ve got going on — Ben is also very consumed with running Thrillist and e-commerce arm JackThreads, and Ken has had a number of other ventures throughout the years such as Huffington Post in addition to his investing work. Ben said:

“A big reason that it works so well is that a lot of the emotion and sort of the drama that comes with business that could maybe make it stressful and put strain on the relationship doesn’t necessarily exist because this isn’t the only thing that we’re working on. When we started the fund, dad still had HuffPo, and I’m obviously full-time running Thrillist and JackThreads. So I have other things in my life that I can stress out about and freak out about, and it allows me to really just take the good of the Lerer Ventures stuff and it’s not as emotionally charged as running my other business. So it takes some pressure off of the relationship.”

Another key, Ken added, was that it’s not just a family business.

“Don’t underestimate the value of having Eric Hippeau and Jordan Cooper as partners, because I think if it was just the two of us it might not be perfect, but with the four of us, it’s pretty perfect.”

We also talked to the Lerers about the importance of beautiful design when it comes to startup success, and how being vocal about politics — Kenneth is a prominent supporter of President Obama and a staunch anti-NRA advocate — affects their business deals. Check it all out in the video embedded above.

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Viddy co-founder Chris Ovitz has landed at another buzzed-about Los Angeles startup, the mobile gaming platform Scopely. He used to head up business development at the mobile video startup Viddy, which shot up like a star on the Facebook platform and iOS charts only to later to come back down just as dramatically.

At Scopely, he’ll be a vice president of business development, where he’ll work on external opportunities (presumably deals with third-party game makers) to grow the network and the business. Scopely is pursuing a playbook that many other mobile game developers are following. They’re trying to grow the biggest network of gamers possible using apps built both in-house and by outside studios.

With an eight-figure number of monthly actives, Scopely is still smaller than other larger competitors that have publishing programs like Zynga and Sequoia-backed Pocket Gems and the Japanese giants like DeNA and GREE. But they say they’ve been able to get all of their games into the top five free apps on the iOS charts.

After Ovitz left Viddy a few months ago, he and Driver started talking about what was next.

“I’ve had the privilege of watching his entrepreneurial career,” said Scopely CEO Walter Driver. “Honestly, I never thought we’d have a chance to join forces, but we recently started having casual conversations about his future and thought there might be a potential fit.”

Ovitz declined to go into a lot of detail about what happened at Viddy, except to say that the company has to be inward-focused right now.

“I obviously got to see the entire spectrum of a startup’s life. It was an incredible learning experience,” he said. “They really need to focus internally on product and technology, so there’s not a lot of business development for me to do there.”

Viddy skyrocketed up the charts as a short video-sharing app last year in the wake of Instagram’s massive $1 billion buy from Facebook. On that momentum and Instagram’s buzz, the startup raised $30 million at a $370 million valuation.

But it and its direct competitor Socialcam started hemorrhaging users after Facebook cut off the viral fuel that was helping both apps up the charts. Socialcam, in contrast to Viddy, took a more conservative route with venture capital, instead leaning on friends and family from Y Combinator for a giant party round. They parlayed that and their momentum into a $60 million sale to Autodesk.

Meanwhile, Viddy’s level of funding has complicated its options. The company recently had layoffs and saw another co-founder and CEO Brett O’Brien leave.

“I’ve been a gamer my whole life,” Ovitz said. “I grew up interning at Activision and tried to started my own gaming company in business school. I’ve always admired Walter as an entrepreneur and I wanted to hop on this rocket ship.”

Scopely has $8.5 million in seed funding from firms like NEA, Anthem Venture Partners, The Chernin Group, Greycroft Partners, Lerer Ventures, The Collaborative Fund, Yahoo’s former CEO Terry Semel, Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut, ShoeDazzle co-founder Brian Lee, Auren Hoffman, Buddy Media CEO Michael Lazerow, TechStars’ David Cohen and David Tisch.

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The makers of Just Sing It have announced that they raised $1 million in funding.

I wrote about the app when it launched earlier this month. At the time, CEO Alec Andronikov told me that his vision is to create a truly addictive social experience — users don’t just share karaoke performances, they actually play a game where they have to guess what the other person is singing, and they can win virtual coins that unlock additional content. Ultimately, he said he wants to use karaoke as the hook for a broader social platform.

In the first two weeks since launch, Andronikov said the app was installed 80,000 times. It reached No. 1 in the App Store’s music category, and its users are pretty active, having recorded a total of 500,000 performances during that period. Oh, and apparently Lindsay Lohan is a fan.

The funding came from Tribeca Venture Partners, Lerer Ventures, m8 Capital, Eniac Ventures, Dennis Phelps of Institutional Venture Partners, and Bob Geiman of Redwood Technology Ventures. Just Sing It says it will use the money for further development of the app.

The parent company behind the app is officially called AnyoneGame, but it sounds like the team will be de-emphasizing that name in favor of the Just Sing It brand.

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LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013.

Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now.

LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.”

“We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse’s considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device,” said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. “To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision.”

Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Standford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future.

The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S.

Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.”

Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, Greycroft Partners, and Lerer Ventures.

Updating…

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NewsCred, a company that licenses content from publications like The New York Times and The Economist for use in brand marketing campaigns, announced that it has raised $15 million in new funding.

The company was founded by Shafqat Islam, Iraj Islam, and Asif Rahman in 2008, and it has shifted focus a number of times, from a credibility rating score for publishers, to a “Ning for newspapers,” to a new kind of newswire and content licensing service. Licensing is actually still a big piece of the NewsCred business, but instead of selling that content to other publications, the company sells it to brands like Pepsi, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson to use for marketing.

NewsCred says that it works with more than 2,500 news sources, using technology and an editorial team to choose the right articles, images, and videos for each brand, then distributing them via the web, email, and social networks. For example, NewsCred helped power the Pepsi Now campaign, in which the Pepsi website was taken over by a pop culture-centric news board. NewsCred says that one month after the campaign launched, traffic to Pepsi.com increased 2.4x.

CEO Shafqat Islam told me that NewsCred’s content marketing business has exploded in the past year.

“At the beginning of 2012, there were zero brand customers who were buying content from us,” he said. “And if you fast forward to now, 60 percent of our customers are big Fortune 500 corporate or consumer brands.”

Revenue has gone up 11-fold in the past year, and there has been a 540 percent increase in customers, NewsCred says. (It also acquired a publishing startup called Daylife.) So from a business perspective, the strategy seems to be working.

As for the implications on the editorial side, there’s been plenty of discussion (sparked recently by a controversial piece of sponsored content in the Atlantic from the Church of Scientology) about how the lines between online advertising and content can start to blur. Islam acknowledged that this is a big concern for its publishing partners — for example, he said that signing The Times was “a feather in our cap”, but in order to make the deal work, there were a number of limitations on what content NewsCred could use and where it could use it.

Overall, Islam said that NewsCred operates in “less of a gray area” because it’s not pushing marketing campaigns or advertorials onto its publisher sites, nor is it paying those publishers to create specific content for advertisers. Instead, it’s taking content that was being created anyway and making it available to brands.

NewsCred had previously raised $5 million from investors including FirstMark Capital, IA Ventures, Floodgate Fund, Lerer Ventures, and AOL Ventures. (AOL owns TechCrunch.) The new round was led by Mayfield Fund, with participation from Greycroft Partners, FirstMark, and IA Ventures.

Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra is joining the NewsCred board of directors. Batra said that he looked at 25 or 30 companies in the content marketing business before deciding to invest in NewsCred, which he said he “almost” thinks of as “Google for high quality business content.”

“Content is the currency for establishing authentic relationships with … customers,” Batra said, adding that he was impressed by the NewsCred team because “they thought about content and the need for content and the role it plays in the market in a very, very comprehensive way.”

The next steps for the company include growing internationally and finding smaller publications to partner with. Islam said that today, the publications with the best reputation in NewsCred are big publishers like The Times And The Economist, “but tomorrow they might be the Andrew Sullivans of the world.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

New York-based eyewear startup Warby Parker is off to a good start in 2013, having recently been fingered as a possible partner for Google Glass. Now the company is reported to have gained an additional investment from American Express and J. Crew chief executive Millard S. Drexler. The new investors went in alongside General Catalyst, Spark Capital, Tiger Global Management, Thrive Capital, Lerer Ventures and Menlo Ventures, in a round totaling $41.5 million in financing, which officially closed in January.

The SEC filing was first spotted this past September, which at the time showed that Warby Parker had sold $36.8 million of a potential $40 million round. That round had closed, but left room for the company to bring on select investors, NYT reports today. Drexler, who really wanted in on this round from what we hear, also previously served as CEO of Gap, Inc. Having him on board will help the brand as it becomes more of a household name and scales its operations. However, the move does not yet indicate any sort of partnership between Warby Parker and J. Crew, the report adds. The brand will remain one that sells direct to consumers via the web for now.

Warby Parker’s other new investor American Express, meanwhile, has previously been a collaborator, as the startup works with the company on its Sync program, in order to give Twitter users discounts on the eyewear.

The company, which started at a time when less than 1 percent of eyewear was sold online, is betting big that the combination of technology and the flattening of the supply chain can help move this particular category of consumer products to the web, disrupting the traditional eyewear industry in the process. To make the transition easier on users, it introduced a way for consumers to virtually try on their frames online – something which solves the challenge of taking a thing consumers had typically needed to see in real life and making it possible to go the e-commerce route.

But the funding also highlights the discrepancies in the still-developing e-commerce space, where the differences between e-commerce “haves” and “have-nots” can be vast. For instance, subscription-based ShoeDazzle has been undergoing massive changes in an attempt to carve out its own niche in this market, while Vegas-based Ecomom is shutting down due to mismanagement of funds and a purchasing decision from which it couldn’t recover – news that follows the tragic loss of the startup’s founder.

In addition, although Warby Parker has created an entire market where each new idea can define itself as a Warby Parker for X, not all of these startups will succeed in the same way. In some cases, they may be too early, or they’re not bringing down prices far enough to generate consumer demand, but prices alone aren’t all one of these companies needs to be successful. They also have to figure out how to establish their brand – something Warby Parker is now getting into via TV ads – and they have to offer great customer service, just as many of their offline counterparts do today.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

4chan founder Christopher Poole (a.k.a. moot) launched Canvas in 2011 as a place to remix images and reduce friction in the image creation process. But he found that unless you were an active member of the remixing community, it wasn’t as natural to participate. So he decided to create an application that would serve the population that may not want to remix images, but instead would like to create their own art. DrawQuest, an iPad app and companion website, is launching today as a way for people to express themselves through drawing challenges.

The iPad app presents you with daily drawing challenges. DrawQuest will provide a template (i.e. a spaceship) and then you fill the drawing in using the touch interface and the app’s editors. You can fill in colors, add other images, and much more. Once you have finished your drawing, you publish it to the greater community. You drawing will become part of your profile, and you can also check out the other drawings made by the community in a gallery.

You can also follow others on the app, and can post drawings to Facebook, Twitter and other social sites. However, you cannot publish privately within the app; the drawing must be published to the entire community. One nifty feature is the ability to play back how drawing were made, which Poole says was one of the more challenging things to create. You can see a video of the evolution of a drawing from start to finish. While you can access drawings on the web, the iPad app has full functionality, and you cannot actually create a drawing on the web.

Poole tells us that while Canvas has its own editing tool, the company created the DrawQuest editing tool completely from scratch as this is a native app, and the Canvas editor is HTML5.

He explains that while Canvas still has its engaged community of remixers, there was a need for an application that appealed to the creative types who wanted a blank canvas. He also wanted to create an app that could be used by drawing enthusiasts of all ages, including children.

And DrawQuest isn’t a replacement for Canvas—it’s actually part of the Canvas family. Poole says Canvas is alive and well and seeing high engagement from the community.

While there may not be a monetization plan in place for DrawQuest, it could ride on the addictive nature of creativity that OMGPOP’s Draw Something saw. And the app’s interface and editing feature is easy to use, so it could be a fun way for children to use the iPad as a coloring book with the gaming twist.

Canvas’ backers incude Union Square Ventures (who led a $3 million round), SV Angel, Lerer Ventures (who led Canvas’ seed round), Andreessen Horowitz, Founder Collective, and Joshua Schachter.

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One of the great things about Twitter is that – unlike email – people are forced to get to the point by the limits on the medium. But unlike email, you can’t CC anyone on a private communication. However, on Moped, a startup based out of Berlin, you can. In fact, Moped’s iPhone and Android app is SO useful for sending private messages to individuals and groups, that I really do wonder why you people are still DM-ing on Twitter. You can also take photos and share them on Moped privately. Today they’ve released photos with filters. Photos are a big way of how we share our private experiences – look at the rise of apps like Path and Pair for that.

The Effects (filters) come in 12 formats. You can crop, add meme-like text to your filters, draw on them.

Moped is a private messaging platform that lets you send IM-like messages, but still with the useful hashtags (#s) and @s you find on Twitter. Users login via Twitter (or get a normal account) and message each other by @-ing recipient(s). It’s WAY simpler than using an app like GroupMe for privately sharing in groups. It’s also integrated with Dropbox, so unlike other messaging or private sharing apps, users can share big files within their messages. Indeed, a Chrome extension lets users to start conversations from a browser window.

Moped for messaging is just very useful. Contacts and conversations are synced across Moped apps, so if you have an iPhone at home, but use an Android when you travel, you don’t miss any conversations because conversations you have on one device, show up on the other. With Dropbox integration and a Google Chrome extension Moped is trying to cover all the bases from desktop to mobile.

The Berlin-based startup has $1 million from SV Angel (Ron Conway), Lerer Ventures, Betaworks and Earlybird Capital.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch