SeedAsia, an equity crowd-funding site based in China, has just launched. The company is offering stakes in selected early-stage startups to the public.

“It’s kind of a hybrid between Kickstarter and private investment,” said co-founder Tom Russell. The startups to be listed would have ideally gone through some some sort of incubation program and would have shown promise. They can apply offer between $50,000 and $1.5 million in equity through SeedAsia’s platform.

SeedAsia takes a 5 percent cash commission from the startup and another 5 percent of the investor’s equity. It is currently considering charging a management fee next year, said Russell.

Potential investors need to apply and be screened, and SeedAsia has set the minimum investment commitment at $2,000 per member. “It costs about $20,000 to $30,000 at minimum to be an angel investor, so this lowers the entry barrier for people,” he said.

SeedAsia is the first equity crowd-funding site to launch in the region, although the equity funding trend has been taking off in the US, where there are apparently over 200 such sites. One of them, FundersClub, recently cleared US regulators, paving the way for more such sites to flourish.

Hong Kong-headquartered Decision Fuel is the first fund to be listed on SeedAsia. The company offers a mobile platform to deliver short consumer surveys. It had $1.25 million in seed funding in 2011, according to AngelList, and counts clients such as P&G, Nike, Colgate. It has already gathered more than 14 million survey responses for its clients, it said.

Russell said the crowd-funding scene is a lot less developed in Asia than it is in the West. The culture is such that potential investors are still more keen on property than in an online startup, he said. Cultural differences also persist. “The local Chinese developers don’t like being transparent with their ideas and sharing, while Westerners don’t understand why the Chinese aren’t as transparent. The truth is, you have big players like Tencent that can copy you easily, which is why people aren’t as open with sharing here.”

SeedAsia has taken on some advisors to raise investor confidence in its portfolio clients. Inporia and Hive7 founder, Max Skibinsky, is one, and Oscar Ramos has been brought in too. Ramos founded Chinese seed fund, DaD Asia.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mowbly, which recently launched and is here at Disrupt NY, takes a counter approach to mobile development platform environments.

Instead of a steady stream of apps, Mowbly uses a single-app approach that it offers through its mobile platform as a service (PaaS), said Co-Founder Vignesh Swaminathan. Mowbly offers third-party app support. But it only processes the data by calling the third party app’s API. Mowbly delivers the data but not the user experience of the app.

At its core is an aggregator that filters data for the customer, employee or partner and presents it through the app. The service has a cross-platform capability, a mobile server for building, managing and deploying apps and a mobile user interface framework. It can be used across multiple mobile platforms and requires no special mobile development skills. It allows IT departments to deploy the apps using browser-based tools rather than hire developers.

The platform is designed to manage multiple identities. IT can use it to provide a finance person with data from the enterprise resource planning suite or a corporate partner with updated information about a channel program. Mowbly is offered as an on-premise software and as a SaaS.

Mowbly is one of a new generation of mobile platform providers that is offering a backend for quick app deployment. It is designed to reduce the costs and the time required to build out native apps. It also helps keep larger companies in compliance with IT policy.

Automating mobile app development is happening. Mowbly represents that. The question is whether the control is too much and if the service just adds more apps in addition to the ones people use every day.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Tealium has raised $15.6M in a series C financing round led by Tenaya Capital. Battery Ventures and Presidio Ventures also participated in the round for the for its tag management company that captures clean data streams for enterprise marketers doing analytics on web sites, mobile sites and mobile apps. Tealium has raised a total of $27.2 million.

Tealium’s single universal tag lets companies manage all their vendor tags, including analytics, advertising, affiliate, PPC search and other online marketing. The system lets marketers manages their vendor tag deployments using a drag-and-drop interface. Customers can add new tags, remove or modify existing tags without requiring additional IT resources.

The company will use the funds to accelerate sales, expand its mobile platform and extend its clean data cloud service.  In mobile, Tealium will provide support for different mobile architectures and operating systems. Tealium DataCloud will extend to capture more data from email marketers and other vendors. The cloud service collects the data, segments it and makes it available for export that marketers use to do analysis. Lunsford said Tealium has gone from 5 to 250 customers in the past two years, showing how the universal tag is becoming the most valuable piece of data on the web site.

Tealium’s team have a history in data tracking that dates back to the late 1990s when they worked with Webside Story, developing the first JavaScript tags to make it easier to look at web site data as opposed to the standard log files.

The practice became popular and soon companies had an assortment of tags that became a giant hairball to untangle. Tag management has emerged as a way to codify the JavaScript tags, making it easier for companies to manage the data.

Tealium CEO Jeff Lunsford said the whole industry has reached a pain point that tag management helps solve, providing a clean source of data from a company’s various vendors.

The tag management market is still relatively young. Lunsford compared it to the web analytics market in 2002 which now is a $1.3 billion market. The vendors in the tag management market have a combined revenue of $70 to $80 million and the market is growing faster than the analytics market did in its early days.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

You know a mobile app store is still young and needs more content when the company behind it still writes its own blog posts when interesting new apps appear in it. With 150,000 apps, the Windows Phone store isn’t actually quite as empty as the Windows 8 store, but Microsoft could sure use some marquee apps for its mobile platform, To get developers and consumers a bit more excited about it, the company is launching its “Windows Phone Next App Star” contest today.

Registered Windows Phone developers can opt in to participate in the competition by March 5th and the company will then announce the 64 finalists. Public voting will start in April and the top 64 will then slowly be whittled down to the grand prize winner. Microsoft says there “will be prizes along the way to encourage people to participate [...] and ways for you to promote your app and gain new fans.”

Overall, there will be “thousands of dollars in prizes for the developers of the 64 apps that get selected, including a Nokia Lumia 920 Windows Phone and a one-year free Dev Center subscription.” The grand prize winner will be featured prominently in Microsoft’s Windows Phone TV ads in the U.S., “bringing national exposure and a lot of buzz to one developer’s creation.” The contest is open for all developers, including students and hobbyists.

While it would be easy to make fun of Microsoft by saying that Apple never had to run a contest like this for its platform, it’s worth noting that Google regularly ran Android Developer Challenges in the early days of its mobile operating system and Intel and others continue to run similar Android-focused events.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Phunware, a company that specializes in enterprise branded mobile application infrastructure and experiences, just announced that it has acquired mobile ad company TapIt Media Group (not to be confused with the Australian NFC marketing company TapIt). The total purchase price was $23 million and the acquisition closed just before the end of the year on December 28.

All of TapIt’s employees, which work in the company’s offices in Irvine, California and Rockville, Maryland, will join Phunware and the company will continue to run TapIt’s ad products under the “TapIt by Phunware” label. When I talked to TapIt earlier this year, the company, which was bootstrapped with a $350,000 seed investment by its CEO Giancarlo Maniaci in 2010, had just launched a number of new mobile ad products and was already profitable and handling about 6 billion ad impressions per month.

TapIt specializes in offering self-service media buying, real-time bidding, cross-platform ad creation, publisher mediation and yield optimization to its network of about 30,000 active publishers.

“We are honored to become part of the Phunware family, as our combined mobile platform offerings will add operational value, insight and control to both advertisers and publishers alike,” said Giancarlo Maniaci, Co-Founder and CEO of TapIt Media Group. “With the velocity of adoption and maturation of mobile increasing daily, we strongly believe that fully integrated, easy to use, simple to deploy and all-inclusive mobile platforms like Phunware’s MaaS will soon define both ‘best of breed’ and the new global mobile standard.”

For Phunware, which already works with companies like the NFL, NASCAR, ESPN, Discovery and other major brands, this acquisition also gives it access to TapIt’s large customers like M&C Saatchi, Disney, Toyota, Amazon, EA Sports, MSNBC and Rovio. In addition, Phunware’s CEO and co-founder Alan S. Knitowski argues, the acquisition will allow his company to “add further breadth and depth to the existing global scale of our core MaaS [mobile-as-a-service] platform product offerings.”

For Phunware, this acquisition will allow it to combine its expertise in building apps on its mobile-as-a-service platform with TapIt’s monetization expertise. As Phunware also notes, this move also shows Phunware’s “aggressive push for ‘mobile cloud’ leadership globally” and the acquisition will help it solve “the underlying operational and monetization headaches of those required to reach, engage and delight them.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Airbnb is raising a whole lot of money at a big valuation, we reported yesterday, as the company continues to see hockey stick-like growth. But as quickly as its web usage is taking off, the company is seeing even faster growth among mobile users, specifically those using its mobile apps.

The company is announcing today* that the Airbnb iOS app has reached a big milestone, hitting more than 1 million times since first being launched in November 2010. In the hyper-growth mobile startup world, that might not seem like a lot of users over the span of nearly two years. But! Airbnb users aren’t just downloading that and later deleting it like oh so many others — in fact, more than half a million users updated to the latest version of the app when it was released. That means more than half of users have kept the app installed.

Airbnb is also seeing mobile drive an increasing amount of traffic from mobile users. Mobile now accounts for more than a quarter of all Airbnb traffic, which is up from about 12 percent a year ago, Airbnb mobile platform lead Andrew Vilcsak told me by phone yesterday. And more and more users are going to the native app experience, rather than using mobile web. As a result, Apple devices now account for more than half of all mobile traffic.

While the company wouldn’t break out specifics for bookings that happen on its mobile app versus its regular online channel, Vilcsak said that one of the main advantages to mobile is that it speeds up communications between hosts and guests. Rather than receiving an email notification of a new message and having to go to the Airbnb site to respond, mobile users can directly communicate with one another from inside the app, which results in messages being responded to three times faster on mobile than on the web. Airbnb says that more than half a million messages were sent via mobile apps last month.

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* It’s also released an infographic you can probably find on finer tech blogs that publish that sort of thing.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Local search app AroundMe recently surpassed the 6 million user mark, and is looking to expand its availability even more. The company has just announced a Windows Phone version of the app, which is available now in the Windows Phone Marketplace.

AroundMe’s iPhone app has been out since 2008, and just recently the company revamped the Android app with a new look and feel. As per usual with Microsoft’s mobile platform, AroundMe looks substantially different on a Windows Phone-powered device.

The company has also announced that the AroundMe app is available in over 200 countries and 19,000 cities across the globe, with 25 million monthly searches from its 6 million-strong user base.

CEO Marci Pifferi had this to say about the new launch:

Our vision is to provide our users with the most relevant and accurate information when and where they need it. The addition of a new Windows Phone version will make our service even more widely available around the world. We are confident our app will help Windows users get more out of their device.

AroundMe’s greatest competition is Yelp!, but the former has no outside funding, a founding CEO, and four employees. And to top it off, AroundMe has over 6 million users while Yelp! sees around 5.7 million monthly uniques on its mobile apps. However, Yelp has been on Windows Phone since late 2010.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Director of Platform Partnerships Ethan Beard announced today that he is leaving the company after more than four years.

Beard publicly announced his departure with a Facebook post seen below. He did not reveal his next plans. Beard joined the Facebook team as director of business development in April 2008. Since January 2009 he has led worldwide developer relations and marketing for the platform, which has expanded significantly with the rise of social marketing and advertising platforms, as well as web and mobile integrations with Open Graph. Beard previously worked at Google as director of social media and director of new business development.

This is yet another top employee leaving the company since it went public in May. Director of Product Management Carl Sjogreen announced the end of his time at Facebook last week. Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor announced his departure in June and Director of Corporate Communications Barry Schnitt recently left Facebook for Pinterest.

[Update 8/1/12 2:18 p.m. - Manager of Mobile Platform Product Marketing Jonathan Matus also announced today he's leaving Facebook "to explore new directions and entrepreneurial ideas." Matus joined the company in May 2011 after working for Google on Android product marketing.]

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has hired the three people behind Pieceable Viewer, which is software that allows developers to demo their iOS apps on the web.

According to Pieceable’s website, Facebook is not acquiring the company, technology or customer data. This is similar to another recent “acqui-hires” of mobile photo sharing app Lightbox and UX design firm Bolt Peters. In these cases, the team joins Facebook and their existing companies and projects are dissolved. Pieceable says its viewer will be available until Dec. 31, and an open source version will be offered to developers in the fall.

Pieceable did not indicate what area it would focus on at Facebook, except saying, “We can’t wait to begin working with the Facebook team to help our friends, family, and more than 900 million others connect and share in new ways.” The team could become involved somehow with Facebook’s mobile platform, however since Pieceable built desktop software, it might become part of another project.

Pieceable Viewer made it easier for developers to test and demo their iOS apps by creating web-based versions that used Flash to simulate app functionality. See a sample here. The team also developed a visual editor for people to create mobile apps without writing code.

The company began last year with seed funding from I/O Ventures. The team has only three employees: co-founders Bob Ippolito, Fred Potter and Jameson Hsu. Ippolito and Hsu had previously co-founded in-game advertising network and payments platform Mochi Media, which was acquired by Shanda Games in 2010. Potter had founded BerryStore, which let users browse, download, rate and review Blackberry apps. That company was acquired by Mogees in 2009.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook says it sent more than 160 million visitors to Facebook-integrated mobile apps last month, according to a post on the company’s developer blog.

Native mobile games like Zynga’s “With Friends” titles, popular apps from Spotify, Pinterest and now Viddy and Socialcam are among those that benefit from Facebook’s mobile discovery channels. The social network’s mobile platform also helps web apps like the Washington Post Social Reader, Flixter and BranchOut.

Visitors from Facebook accounted for 1.1 billion visits to iOS and HTML5 apps, meaning an average of more than 6 visits per user. These numbers are up from February when Facebook said it drove 60 million users to mobile apps an average of about five times per month. Next month is likely to be much higher since the social network began supporting mobile discovery for native Android apps last week.

Facebook says iOS video sharing app Viddy now has more than 16 million registered users, in part because of Open Graph integration that shares user activity between the mobile and desktop versions. Because of similar functionality, networking web app BranchOut has seen more than 18 million people come in from the social network in the past 28 days. Facebook also highlighted movie review and info mobile web app, Flixster, which has seen a tenfold increase in the number of visitors from Facebook in the past four weeks. These visitors generated a total of 15 million visits in the same period.

Facebook also made a point in its blog post that seven of the top 10 grossing iOS apps and six of the top 10 grossing Android apps integrate with Facebook through single sign-on or Open Graph.

Facebook’s mobile platform allows HTML5 and native iOS and Android apps to get distribution through News Feed, bookmarks and requests. When users navigate to mobile app links from Facebook, the appropriate native app will open on a user’s device or lead to a download page if the user doesn’t have it yet. Developers also have the option to integrate Facebook Open Graph, which lets games automatically publish stories about user activity, including reaching a new high score, leveling up, earning an achievement or surpassing another friend playing the game. These stories are distributed through mobile Timeline and News Feed and can drive traffic back to a mobile game.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook