Because sometimes it’s the companies you don’t hear about constantly. FastSpring, founded in 2005 as an all-in-one e-commerce solution for companies selling desktop software and downloadable games before heading into the Software-as-a-Service space in 2011, has received a significant but undisclosed new equity investment from L.A.-based Pylon Capital. This is the first outside funding the previously bootstrapped company has taken in.

The funding comes with some shifting roles for one of FastSpring’s co-founders. While all four will remain with the company, CEO Dan Engel is now becoming Senior Vice President of Marketing and will serve on the company’s Board of Directors. Ken White, Ryan Dewell, and Jason Foodman will continue with their prior roles. Pylon Capital Managing Partners Chris Lueck and Tom Tzakis will now join FastSpring’s management team.

The company, which competes directly with DigitalRiver, offers more than payments, but instead is a way for businesses to outsource their e-commerce infrastructure, including product merchandising, digital fulfillment, global tax compliance, online payments that support multiple currencies, localized order pages, PCI compliance, refund management, reporting, and more.

Its newer service SaaSy (our coverage), also brings support for subscription-based payments, as are more common with online businesses. Since the launch of that option, FastSpring has grown its business from 1,000 clients worldwide to now 2,200, five hundred of which are using SaaSy. While the company can’t disclose the names of many of its customers, those it can mention are familiar: Smith Micro, Adobe, Flexibits (makers of Fantastical), Toshiba, Random House, and Intego (Anti-virus).

The company has been steadily growing its revenue over the years, climbing from less than a million in 2007, to $35 million in 2010, then $66 million in 2011, $95 million in 2012, and in the trailing twelve months, it’s over $100 million. It was also ranked #53 in Inc. Magazine’s Inc 500 list of fastest-growing companies in the U.S. in 2011. And Deloitte & Touche ranked it the #1 fastest-growing company in the Greater L.A. area and #13 in North America in its 2011 Technology Fast 500 awards.

Which perhaps begs the question: why the new investment?

Explains co-founder Dan Engel, “as a group of serial entrepreneurs, we have a lot of experience in getting from A to B — ‘B’ being getting to where we are as a company in terms of revenue, profit, headcount, and what we’ve scaled to, to date,” he says. “But we felt like we wanted some outside expertise from folks who had experience going from B to C, which is turning the business into something worth many hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Pylon’s L.P.’s have experience in all the areas where FastSpring now needs to grow, Engel says, which includes things like scaling sales and support both in the U.S. and internationally, for example. FastSpring has limited experience in Asia, which it sees as a big opportunity, and it also has a large percentage of its customer base in Europe (around 30% vs. the ~45% in the U.S.), but not much experience on the ground in that region – something which it plans to change, following the funding, in fact.

The company also wants to expand its e-commerce offerings outside of software, expand deeper into the gaming vertical, and break into micro-transactions (those under $10.00).

And FastSpring is working to develop its own private label app store solution for companies that want to have their own embedded store which works within their existing software. “There’s a lot of demand right now, and there really isn’t much in the way of solutions that we’re seeing,” Engel says of the app store offering. “And what’s neat about our app store is that it has all the capabilities of our web store – which is pretty vast,” he adds.

The Santa Barbara-based company, now a team of 24, will use the new funding to scale and hire, with plans to add around 10 more this year across all positions.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Penguin has offered, and has confirmed to us that the European Commission has accepted, a settlement with the EC over the agency pricing model for e-books — a case the stretched back to last year and involved Penguin, along with Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, as well as Apple. The other four publishers and Apple settled with the EC in September 2012. The deal will mean that Penguin can proceed with its merger with Bertlesmann’s Random House, first announced in October 2012, and approved by Brussels earlier this month, so that the two publishers can better battle Amazon.

But in making the settlement, Penguin maintained “it has done nothing wrong,” and that that its position “remains unchanged…the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors.”

The full statement from Penguin:

“Penguin confirms that, subject to the market test currently underway, it has reached an agreement with the European Commission to settle its investigation into the establishment of agency pricing agreements for eBooks. Penguin’s position that it has done nothing wrong remains unchanged and the company continues to believe that the agency pricing model operates in the best interests of consumers and authors. While we disagree with some elements of the Commission’s analysis, we are settling as a procedural matter to clear the decks in anticipation of our proposed merger with Random House.”

This also means that the EC’s investigation into agency model pricing will now also close. The full run-down of that case, as it has been played out with the commissioners, is here.

In essence, the publishers and Apple were being investigated over agency agreements signed between them that the EC believed prevented others (namely Amazon, but also Barnes & Noble and other online booksellers) from inking wholesale agreements with the publishers. The publishers would have looked for deals with Apple that it considered more favorable to the publishers, in light of the fact that Amazon regularly prices books at wafer-thin margins — and often at a loss — in order to drive more business overall.

The agency model lets the publishers set the price for books and offer resellers a fixed cut of that price (30% is a typical cut). The wholesale model sees publishers selling their books to distributors, who then sell them at whatever price they want. The latter is the route Amazon has used to great effect to grow its business, sacrificing margin on cheaper books for scale.

Penguin’s concessions in the settlement reached today are essentially the same as those reached by the other four publishers. According to the EC document outlining the case, they are as follows:

1. To the extent that they have not yet been terminated, Penguin will terminate the relevant agency agreements for the sale of e-books in the EEA concluded with Apple.
2. Penguin will offer each retailer other than Apple the opportunity to terminate any agency agreements concluded for the sale of e-books that: (i) restrict, limit or impede the retailer’s ability to set, alter or reduce the retail price or to offer price discounts or promotions; or (ii) contain a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments. In case a retailer decides not to make use of the oppor­tunity to terminate such an agreement, Penguin will terminate it in line with the conditions laid down therein.
3. For a period of two years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not restrict, limit or impede the ability of e-book retailers to set, alter or reduce retail prices for e-books and/or to offer price discounts or promotions. However, as regards agency agreements, the aggregate value of the price discounts or promotions offered by any retailer shall not exceed the aggregate amount equal to the total commissions Penguin pays to that retailer over a period of at least one year in connection with the sale of its e-books to consumers.
4. For a period of five years from notification of the decision to Penguin, Penguin will not enter into any agreement relating to the sale of e-books within the EEA that contains a price MFN clause as defined in Penguin’s commitments.

The newly formed Penguin Random House will be 53% owned by Bertlesmann and 47% owned by Pearson, Penguin’s parent.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator-backed Coderwall started out as a social site for developers to list their achievements and projects, but it has been moving into recruiting — first by allowing companies to build their own profiles and now with the launch of a new service called Pitchbox.

It’s a separate site from Coderwall, where developers describe the salary and work they’d want from their dream jobs. Then Pitchbox uses a combination of human curation and automation to recommend positions that they might be interested in, delivered as a personalized pitch. If the developer is interested, Pitchbox arranges for a 10-minute conversation with a developer at the recruiting company.

Founder Matt Deiters said this has a number of advantages over the normal recruiting process. For one thing, it avoids the random spam that developers often receive (and ignore) from recruiters. For another, it puts people who aren’t actively looking for new jobs in a position where they can still hear about opportunities that they’d be genuinely excited about.

“They are very complementary,” Deiters said when I asked why Pitchbox isn’t just a feature on Coderwall. “We had initially … thought about Pitchbox as being a product in Coderwall. As we evolved and added things around the community aspects of Coderwall, it kind of became its own network and its own community.”

Ultimately, Deiters said he decided that he didn’t want to have yet “another thing that we had to communicate” within Coderwall. At the same time, he said that the company has created “touch points” between the two services, for example by promoting Pitchbox to certain Coderwall members.

Deiters added that, thanks to the company profile feature (the profiles are free, but companies pay to promote them and add job listings), Coderwall’s revenue has been growing 40 percent “nearly every month” for the past six months, and in March, with the early tests of Pitchbox, it went up 10x. Coderwall is now profitable, he said. He also said that Pitchbox customers include YC startups, Dropbox and “a few Fortune 500 companies.”

As for how Pitchbox might expand, Deiters said there’s been interest from startups that want to recruit other types of positions. He wants to stay focused on developers for at least the next few months, but Pitchbox might expand after that.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Finally some good news about the future of publishing. Amidst all the doom and gloom about e-reading, one company – Byliner – is reinventing the business of selling online writing. As John Tayman, the company’s founder and CEO, told me, Byliner is monetizing the space between magazine articles and books by selling short-form pieces for around $2.99 or $3.99. With writers as illustrious as Margaret Atwood, Michael Lewis and Sebastian Junger, the 16 month old startup is already selling a million pieces a year, Tayman told me. What is particularly encouraging about Byliner is its uncompromising mix of the best written content with excellent technology. No wonder then that Tayman’s startup has attracted a stellar list of both old and new media investors – from Random House to CrunchFund – to finance this very encouraging experiment in monetizing short-form content.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Philips uWand is no stranger to CES. It’s been at the show in the past, and as a prototype it has been around for even longer, but this time around it got an updated look and feel, along with refined control that now puts it pretty much at one-to-one sensitivity, and makes for a satisfying experience when playing games on the motion-enabled set-top box it’s paired with.

Philips is now actually working with companies including Marvell, Intel and Broadcom to bring uWand motion controls to home entertainment set-top boxes, so the version you see in the video above likely will actually make it to store shelves. Based on the testing and opinion of the random CES-goer we spoke to about the experience, it sounds like this is a near-final version that delivers very accurate motion input detection. It definitely looked butter smooth playing Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja, which was itself a star of at least 500 CES demos this year.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With the closing of Spin Magazine’s print edition alongside the failure of the print edition of Newsweek (not to mention the shuttering of countless newspapers and magazines around the world) you’d be hard-pressed to say that publishing – particularly in the news space – is doing well.

Add in the merger of Penguin and Random House – a Napster-esque move designed to stave off the vagaries of a non-collusive market – and you’ve got an even bleaker picture.

In short, after centuries of progress, the old method of transmitting information via the printed page – not to mention the publisher’s tendency to control content with an iron fist – is crumbling. In its place we have an entirely new system and regime, one ruled less by a central authority – the editors, publishers, and printers of yore – and now ruled by the mob.

That’s not a bad thing. It lets people publish books that would have never seen a printing press and it gives an organization with seemingly bottomless resources – Amazon – the ability to define the rules to which all others must cleave. This new media has laid a book store chain low, bleeding publishers nearly dry in the process, and it has changed the way we consume media from a slow meal savored over time to an experience more akin to grazing or, more precisely, a bit of sushi on the go.

Here are my predictions for publishing this year. I love books and I hope not many come true, but we shall see.

You will stop buying paper books and magazines. If you’re here reading this, you’ve already stopped buying books. If you haven’t, you will. I got one book for Christmas this year, Building Stories by Chris Ware. We also bought some print editions for the kids. But a year from now? I doubt the Christmas list will even be on paper.

Digital comics will outsell print editions. In 2012 digital comic sales for DC rose 200 percent and, thanks to series resets and the like, the comics industry is selling more and more comics to a casual audience. Hardcore readers will prefer print for a while longer but folks who don’t want to trudge to the local Mutant Mania will probably be fine with a title subscription on the iPad.

Goodbye, magazines. Except for a few stalwarts, more print editions will disappear, leading to a chain reaction as others realize some of the same cash can be generated in selling digital copies. The New Yorker and Wired – most of Conde Nast’s catalog, in fact – is proof positive of this and the selection of ads in these magazines has gone from the same Rolex repeated twenty times in the title to cool, interactive advertisements that actually encourage further examination. This is a good thing.

Goodbye, Barnes & Noble stores. Barnes & Noble stores will see a massive contraction while smaller booksellers will thrive. B&N knows what’s up. They recently split their company into two and now one company sells paper books and the other one sells digital. In fact, Microsoft invested in the digital side, leaving the print side to fend for itself. And fend it must. Although this year saw brisk sales at small mom & pops, B&N saw a minor dip in retail sales due to store closings and slow sales in stores and on BN.com. Even the college business is slowing.

A major writer will go digital. I doubt Stephen King will make the jump, but one of the lesser mystery folks will probably go all digital. Why not? It gets them more cash for their efforts and places them at the helm of their business – and blockbuster writing is a business. Going indie no longer has a stigma attached.

Big names in journalism and publishing will go online… if online lets them. What do you do if you’re stuck in a mid-tier job at a newspaper or cable news channel or publishing house? Heck, what if you’re at the waning Associated Press? You look around. And what do you find? Us. Engadget. VentureBeat. TMZ. Everyone except the Scranton Times Journal And Ledger. But jobs will be hard to find. After all, we’re looking for people who aren’t entrenched already.

All is not lost. Publishing will regroup. The written word is still an amazing medium. Change is good. Gutenberg may not recognize the heights to which his invention has flown but he will recognize its constant sacred intent.

This is not to say that good content won’t come out of this new model. This site, for example, is a testament to the will of one man who dedicated himself to a purpose. That it sometimes makes mistakes, is tricked, or is sloppy is part of what you get when you burn down a medium. I fear I won’t be around to see the electronic press become as mature and moribund as the current “old media,” but here’s hoping it stays exciting for as long as we’re alive.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

I wouldn’t have an iPad if I didn’t have to do two things: Cook and do interviews. The first I have to do for work but the second I do for fun. Which is why I think that Snapguide’s bold and stylish move to the tablet is not only inevitable, but means that the service has finally landed in its true home.

For those of you who don’t know Snapguide, it is basically How-To guides for Generation Mobile, founded by former Yahoo Pipes PM Daniel Raffel and former Google Chrome engineer Steve Krulewitz. TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington called the duo “blank check guys” in his original post on their launch.

“Invest in them if you can no matter what crazy ideas they have, because they are so smart and so driven that they’ll likely figure out a way to win big eventually.”

In addition to Arrington (in case it wasn’t obvious), investors like SV Angel, Mike Volpi, Gary Clayton, Jeff Fagnan and Dave Morin have also put money into the eventual success of the product. We’ve also been tipped that the app, which is number two in Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 in the ”Discover with Friends” category, is in Apple’s acquisition crosshairs. We’ll see.

The Snapguide iPad app, like Pinterest or Flipboard for How-Tos, purposefully feels like a magazine — with big colorful photos of step by step guides like “How To Make A Girly Shirt From A Man’s Shirt” or “How To Make Your Eyes Look Bright And Awake.”

It’s easy to use and easy to see where a user could get lost for hours in both serendipitously discovering Snapguides though relevant topics like Style and Beauty (have you seen my Pinterest clothing page?) or on the Popular Guides page. Just like on any user generated content platform, many will also spend hours creating guides, if they happen to be a mom who painstakingly comes up with original recipes for her children with no appreciation, but manages to accumulate 1000+ appreciative followers on Snapguide or this random “Cook With Micho” guy who I’m pretty sure is Greek.

Basically the same people who like Pinterest like Snapguide, founder Daniel Raffel tells me, and it shows in the companies referral traffic. The service now has 1 million uniques a month, and boasts Pinterest as its top referrer. The service has all the sundry social features like following, liking and sharing of guides via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google Plus, all of which bolster its burgeoning community and App Store rating, which is currently at around 5 stars.

What the company does differently than older competitors Instructables or WikiHow is its fervent focus on simplicity and mobile design. “It became obvious that limiting the number of characters per step and only supporting short videos would become features and would allow us to design for predictable scenarios and keep the product easy to use,” Raffel explains. “Our focus on mobile challenged us a lot and frankly forced us to think about design approaches that tightened our product offering. We knew we could significantly lower the bar for publishing this type of content by offering drop dead simple mobile creation tools.”

The company plans on eventually monetizing by offering relevant ads against its How-To content and has already been approached for partnerships by some big brands who are looking to revamp their digital and particularly tablet strategies, we hear. “We decided to reimagine how Snapguide could work on this platform,” Raffel said “and it turns out that following along to guides while crafting or cooking is just a natural use for a tablet device.” Mhm.

The Snapguide iPad app is available in the App Store here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

New Zealand-based startup Booktrack launched last year to provide e-book readers with something that they’ve been missing: soundtracks to go along with what they’re reading. To push that idea forward, the startup has raised $2 million in Series B funding from Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures, Park Road Post Production, Weta Digital GM Tom Greally, Sparkbox Ventures, New Zealand Venture Investment Fund, EFU Investments Ltd., Stephen Tindall’s K One W One, and others.

The idea behind Booktrack is to make e-books more engaging by providing background music and sounds that go along with what you’re reading. According to founder Paul Cameron, it’s like providing the soundtrack to complement the text. Readers who try it out seem to like it — about 27 percent of customers who download a free sample purchase the book, and about 40 percent of those downloaded end up being read cover-to-cover.

Booktrack has been working with authors and publishers to create e-books that have soundtracks built in, creating a more immersive experience for readers (and listeners). Users can purchase and download these e-books through Booktrack’s web site and mobile applications today, but it’s looking to expand both the number of titles available and the distribution outlets that sell them.

So far, the startup has published soundtracks for books from the likes of James Frey and Salman Rushdie, and recently also released a soundtracked version of the Bible. But the key to its success will also depend on its ability to work with major publishing houses, which it’s already starting to do. It’s had books from Random House and HarperCollins, among others.

Distribution on other platforms and e-book stores will also be key to its growth. For that, it’ll need to work with distributors like Amazon to deliver to Kindles natively. Booktrack uses the ePub format for publishing, so Cameron believes that it shouldn’t be hard to get its files to convert and work on other platforms.

With the new funding, it’s also working to roll out a self-serve platform to enable more authors and publishers to build soundtracks for its books. Today, it relies on audio processing at Post Road Post Production in Wellington, New Zealand — the post-production house founded by Peter Jackson. But it wants to make it simple so that anyone can create their own e-book soundtrack using its tools to sell on its website and through its apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Many Facebook users are reporting that they’re seeing ads in different languages than the one they’ve set their accounts to.

This seems to be a bug that has been around for most of December, if not longer. New Zealand reader Sam Stone was first let us know about the problem, providing the screenshot to the right.

Occasionally users will see an ad in a different language if an advertiser has not selected proper targeting parameters, but this seems more widespread, with users are saying that the majority of their ads are in the wrong language, not just one out of many.

A question about the issue in Facebook’s community forum posted about a week ago has 20 followers and 34 comments. We’ve also seen dozens of public status updates and tweets from English-speaking users saying their ads are in Arabic, Russian, Swedish, Japanese, German and other foreign languages. It’s unclear whether advertisements in English are appearing to non-English speakers, but we’ve heard of a French user seeing ads in German.

Either way, it seems a number of advertisers could be wasting impressions on audiences who can’t understand their messages or might not even be in a relevant location for their product or services. We have not heard from any advertisers who have been able to tell whether their ads were affected.

We asked Facebook about the issue earlier this week, but the company has not provided any information or statement. We have not found any public acknowledgment of the bug anywhere on the site either.

last month my Facebook ads were in german. last week they were in arabic. today they’re japanese. #aroundtheworld twitter.com/eldon/status/2…

— Eric Rosser Eldon (@eldon) December 14, 2012

All the ads on the sidebar of my Facebook newsfeed are in German all of a sudden. Not sure why.

— Steve Oslica (@steveoslica) December 13, 2012

Why is #Facebook suggesting two ads in Swedish to me? Hint: I’m not Swedish. — Ed (@edlerner) December 12, 2012

And today, my Facebook ads are all in … German.Loving the random language selections and how it makes it so much easier to ignore the ads

— Jon Sparks (@jsparkphoto) December 14, 2012

WHY ARE ALL MY FACEBOOK ADS IN SWEDISH?!

— Erika Johnson (@PandaBearika) December 8, 2012

My facebook ads are all in Russian again.This is really weird.

— Kacie (@kacieflynn) December 8, 2012

I am not concerned about Facebook using my information for targeted advertising ’cause from the ads I am seeing they think I read German.

— Mike Fitzgerald (@MikeAFitzgerald) December 12, 2012

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Kngine (pronounced kin-gin, short for knowledge engine) is one of those startups with a goal that’s both straightforward and impressively ambitious — it wants to build an app that can answer any question. In fact, when you open the app, it prompts you to “ask me anything.”

When I watched the promotional video (embedded below), the first thing I thought of was Apple’s Siri. And while Kngine co-founder and CEO Haytham ElFadeel doesn’t shy away from the Siri comparison, he also said Kngine has a slightly different goal. One of Siri’s big selling points is allowing you to access a lot of the iPhone’s functions through voice, so when your questions are more fact-based rather than task-based (i.e. Kngine’s strong point) it relies on Wolfram Alpha.

I haven’t had a chance to give Kngine a thorough test, but when I tried the app out, it was able to answer all of my random questions accurately. (Naturally, I started with “What is TechCrunch?”) ElFadeel also said the company hired an independent consultant to compare Kngine to Siri and Evi in a test based on the NIST guidelines, basically by asking a bunch of different questions. The current version of Kngine answered 54 percent of the test questions (either by delivering the correct answer that showed an understanding of the question, delivering a partial answer, or delivering the correct answer despite misunderstanding the question), compared to 26 percent for Siri and 25 percent for Evi. Among the questions that Kngine could answer but its competitors couldn’t: What band is Fred Durst in? What is the periodicity of Halley’s comet? Who founded the AARP?

Version 2.0 of Kngine, which has yet to be released to the public, did even better, answering 71 percent of the questions.

Behind the scenes, Kngine is constantly crawling the web, not to index pages like Google, but rather to extract knowledge and meaning. ElFadeel compared the technology to Wolfram Alpha, but he said Kngine gathers its data in a much more automated way.

Kngine is based in Cairo, but ElFadeel has moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and is building out a business development team here. The company has raised $275,000 in funding from investors, including Sawari Ventures. The company first launched a prototype in 2010, but it didn’t release a real consumer app until this year.

For now, it’s more focused on acquiring users than making money, but ElFadeel said monetization possibilities include running advertising in the app and also licensing the technology to other companies, say enterprise search products that want a natural language interface.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch