JustFab, the subscription-based fashion commerce site, is putting the $109 million that it has raised so far to use: today it is announcing the acquisition of The Fab Shoes, a European e-commerce shoe club in France and Spain, to build out its global operations. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal will give JustFab a stronger foothold in the European market: it already has operations in Germany, where it has a European HQ in Berlin, as well as in the UK; now it will be adding France and Spain, with the integrated site coming in July 2013. Growth in Europe has been coming at a fast pace for the company so far. In 2012, JustFab did $2 million in sales, CEO Adam Goldenberg tells TechCrunch. “This year we are on track to exceed $30 million.” The Fab Shoes has slightly more than 500,000 users; combining that with the 1.5 million across Germany and the UK, JustFab will now have over 2 million members, with 15 million worldwide.

Call it a funny coincidence, but this isn’t the first acquisition JustFab has made of a would-be competitor with the word “Fab” in its name. Earlier this year, the company acquired FabKids to spearhead a move into children’s fashion. “We have a running joke that whoever is called ‘Fab’, we’ll buy them,” says CEO Adam Goldenberg. (And indeed that may not extend to the biggest Fab of all, Fab.com, which apparently is now raising a $250 million round at a $1 billion valuation.)

More seriously, Goldenberg says that his company is not singularly focused on buying up so-called “clones” of its own service. Taking a lesson from some of the challenges companies like Groupon have had digesting large, inorganic acquisitions to scale up their services — from what we understand Groupon has yet to migrate many of its extensive global assets on to a single common platform with the U.S. operation — JustFab has a different approach.

As Goldenberg describes it, the company’s M&A policy is based on acquiring smaller businesses that complement JustFab’s and are also built on the same subscription model. This means that they can be easily integrated into the bigger company’s infrastructure.

There is another reason for this: it’s increasingly a challenge for e-commerce fashion companies these days to raise money, with much of it going instead to those that have proven to have the most scale. “This is part of the reason why we raised such a big round last year,” Goldenberg noted. The Fab Shoes, founded in early 2012, was raising financing — or trying to — when JustFab came knocking.

“Scale and infrastructure are key if you want to grow quickly in the fashion business,” said Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes, in a statement. “While The Fab Shoes has had a lot of early success, we are thrilled to take our core business to the next level. With JustFab, we can provide our existing members and potential new customers with excellent styles, quality and service for an outstanding shopping experience.”

“We met Pablo and Xisco” — Pablo Szefner, CEO of The Fab Shoes and Xisco de la Calle, its COO — “and we decided this would be a great talent acquisition as well.” De la Calle will become the VP of operations for JustFab Europe, while Pablo becomes General Manager for France and Spain, overseeing 12 employees in Barcelona and Paris.

While some have waved a red flag over subscription-commerce sites — the implication being that they are not transparent enough about how they charge users on a regular basis — Goldenberg is insistent that this is a model that works well and is a hit with its customers, and investors. “There is a subscription commerce funding craze right now,” he says. “But because it is so low-cost you have to have the scale to make the economics of it work. We have millions of satisfied customers.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Amazon today took one more step in its strategy scale up its Kindle Fire tablet business. The company announced that it will now sell the two higher-end versions of the device, the Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9″, globally: pre-orders in 170 countries begins today with the first models shipping out June 13.

Although the HD is available with an optional LTE component in the U.S. it looks like this rollout is WiFi-only: to improve range and service, it comes with dual-band Wi-Fi capability for both 2.4 GHz network and 5 GHz network services. As with other Kindle Fire products, the two models going on sale today will work with Amazon’s existing and wide range of content, including apps, films, TV, games and 300+ books “exclusive to the Kindle Store.”

The move comes two months after Amazon dropped the price on the bigger two tablets, with an 8.9″ screen, to $269. At that time, it started selling it in Europe and Japan. To date, Amazon has been selling the two HD tablets in the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan. For a company like Amazon, which operates on a basis of competition-beating prices and low margins, it’s important for it to add as much scale as it can to its operation, so expanding Fire HD sales globally is an essential part of that strategy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an eleventh European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and now Russia, giving it a larger international geographical footprint than other European mobile point-of-sales rivals including iZettle and Rocket Internet-backed Payleven.

To support its Russia launch SumUp has opened a local office in Moscow, and partnered with Svyaznoy Group, a Russian retail and financial conglomerate, which will distribute SumUp’s card readers through its nationwide consumer electronics retail network of close to 3,000 stores.

Svyaznoy stores will also be using SumUp’s solution to accept card payments from its customers — giving SumUp another leg up in the market. The retailer, which specialises in the sale of phones, digital equipment and portable electronics, sells close to a third (30%) of all the smartphones in Russia, according to SumUp.

SumUp said Russian businesses can now sign up to its service in Svyaznoy stores as well as on its own website, and are able to receive native language assistance from its Moscow-based support team. Daniel Klein, SumUp CEO, said it’s targeting the more than 6 million small businesses in Russia, and also aiming to grow off rising smartphone usage.

“We see a real need for an easy and secure solution for card payment acceptance in the Russian market. We are excited to work with the strongest possible partner in Russia right from the start,” he said in a statement.

SumUp has been using a partnering strategy to build out its European payments business, including partnering with a women’s plumbers organisation, Stopcocks Women Plumbers, in the U.K.; a maker of iPad POS software in Europe; and with a taxi hailing app and an odd job software platform provider in Germany.

As with the myriad mobile payments players targeting small businesses, SumUp does not charge a monthly fee to businesses using its system but rather takes a 2.75% per card reader transaction charge. It accepts Visa, Mastercard and recently added support for Amex in the majority of its markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

There’s plenty of buzz about the concept of making our cities “smarter” — that is, loading them up with sensors and data-driven services to improve efficiency and quality of life. Hell, even Google has taken to loading up its event venues with scores of sensors.

Most of the discussion out there deals with how local governments are working toward this lofty, nebulous goal, but a team called Acrobotics Industries is trying to put the onus on the citizens. To that end the team has kicked off a $50,000 Kickstarter campaign for a small sensor array called the Smart Citizen kit in hopes that people will start collecting and sharing their environmental data with the world.

“There’s a problem with the way current cities were built,” Acrobotic’s COO Francisco Zabala told me. “Beijing’s air quality is insanely bad — we think we have it bad in L.A. — and it’s not getting any better.

The heart (or brain, I guess) of the Smart Citizen project is an Arduino-powered kit that gets tucked away inside (or outside, if you’ve got the right kind of enclosure) of a user’s home to track local environmental variables — think temperature, humidity, air composition, ambient brightness, and sound levels. It’s arguably neat enough to keep tabs on the environmental conditions at your home while you’re not there, but the real value here is when a host of users set up their Smart Citizen sensors and fire up them up en masse.

It’s the team’s hope that Smart Citizen kits will sell widely enough that regular people will be able to get an accurate glance at environmental conditions with a finer sort of granularity than you’d get by firing up, say, the Weather Channel app. For what it’s worth, Zabala concedes that the Smart Citizen project is largely geared toward making people aware of climate change and global warming without getting too political or divisive about it.

“I believe that climate is changing for the worse, but our approach is more personal,” Zabala said. “By raising awareness we’re working toward a solution without banging on people’s heads.”

As it happens, a few of those Smart Citizen kits have already been fired up. A quick look at a demo version of the sensor-tracking website reveals that a handful of the little things are live in Zabala’s native Barcelona — the Smart Citizen team ran an earlier, more local crowdfunding campaign (Zabala called it a “proof of concept run”) that saw a number of users in Spain install and fire up their sensor arrays all around the city. Hovering over a bright blue spot displays the latest environmental data (users can define how often they want those updates to occur), while greyed out units haven’t been fired up lately.

Thanks to how the Smart Citizen kit is constructed, users will eventually be able to monitor more than just the environmental criteria this early kit supports. Zabala said that the Acrobotics team is currently working on swappable daughterboards that will allow the Smart Citizen kit to be used for soil and water testing, too — perfect for you city-dwelling gardeners. If you’re suddenly itching to monitor your surroundings more acutely, you’ll be able to lay claim to a fully constructed Smart Citizen for $155 — the more handy among you can save a little money by springing for the $105 unassembled kit instead.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another funding raise for a collaborative consumption startup: Spain-based private sales club Privalia, which sells branded clothes and accessories at discounted prices to members in the five markets it currently plays in, has closed a new €25 million round ($32.3 million). The company did not specify which round this latest raise falls under but has previously raised a total of $218 million in two rounds, taking place in 2010 and 2011, according to Crunchbase.

The new financing brings Privalia’s total funding to date to $251 million. It also adds a new investor, with Belgian-based fund Sofina – also an investor in European online shoe retailer Spartoo – becoming a shareholder. Other prior investors include La Caixa Capital Risc, Nauta Capital, Highland Capital Partners, General Atlantic, Insight Venture Partners, Index Ventures, the founders of dress-for-less Mirco Schultis and Holger Hengstler, and José Manuel Villanueva and Lucas Carné, the two co-founders of Privalia.

Privalia currently operates in Spain, Italy, Germany, Mexico and Brazil. It said it plans to use the new funding to expand its growth in the Latam region, as well as to strengthen its financial structure and extend its leadership, noting in a press release that sales in Mexico grew by more than three digits in 2012, and that Brazil is its main operating company by sales volume.

Overall, Privalia said its business grew 32% in 2012, with total revenues of €422 million ($543.5 million), adding that it ended the first quarter of this year with positive EBITDA on a consolidated basis. It points to early investment in mobile as a key engine for growth, with €1 in every €3 spent via its mobile apps in Spain, while in Mexico the figure rises to more than 40% of sales — and up to 60% during holiday dates.

Commenting on the raise in a statement, co-founder Lucas Carné, said: “In the last three years we have invested heavily to consolidate as one of the first groups of e-commerce in Europe and Latin America. The current size of operations this year allows us to focus on operational efficiency and profitability growth. Only those electronic stores that are profitable or have strong support from investors, will able to survive in the next three years.We are fortunate to meet both conditions.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fresh from last week’s Verizon Lumia device launch, Nokia has taken the wraps off a new smartphone in its Windows Phone-based Lumia range at an event in London today. The Lumia 925 is its first flagship for T-Mobile in the U.S. This means that following the Lumia 928 launch on Verizon, and factoring in Nokia’s initial launch of the Lumia 920 on AT&T last year, Nokia now has a flagship Windows Phone ranged on all three major U.S. carriers. Globally the Lumia 925 will be ranged with Vodafone in Europe, coming to markets including Germany, Italy, Spain and the U.K. (priced at €469), and in China with China Mobile and China Unicom. The device will ship in June in Europe, with a U.S. launch slated for soon after.

The Windows Phone 8-based 4G Lumia 925 continues Nokia’s strategy of emphasising the camera smarts of its flagships Windows Phones, including PureView branding, Carl Zeiss optics and an 8.7MP lens with image stabilisation tech inside. But the camera hardware in the 925 is a little different to the 928 and 920, with one extra lens. This sixth lens improves photo performance in bright sunlight, according to Nokia, as well as sharing the low light performance abilities of its fellow flagships. In addition to that new camera hardware, the phone includes new software, called Smart Camera, that’s aimed at extending the photography experience by giving users new ways to capture and share photographs.

The camera software on the device includes a burst mode which allows up to 10 shots to be captured at a time. The software also has three new capture modes that take advantage of this burst feature, namely: Best Shot, for composing a composite shot from the best elements of several images; Action Shot for snapping a series of stills of action shots, such as sports, that can then be edited and shared as a sequence; and Motion Focus, a Lytro-style mode that allows the snapper to pick different elements to be in or out of focus after the shot has been taken. Nokia confirmed to TechCrunch that the latter featured is the first bit of software to make use of technology Nokia acquired when it bought imaging company Scalado last July.

“Whatever you do you can go back and edit again and again,” said Jo Harlow, head of Nokia’s smart devices unit — pictured above left, with SVP of product design chief Stefan Pannenbecker at the London launch. “The Nokia smart camera is our latest uniqie experience for our Nokia Lumia portfolio.”

The Smart Camera software is exclusive to the Lumia 925 initially but will be pushed out as an over-the-air update called Amber to Windows Phone 8-based Lumias in Q3, the company said. Nokia looks to be trying to bolster its efforts against Samsung here, which included a raft of new camera features on its flagship Galaxy S4 device, such as Dual-Shot and Drama Shot. The lack of Instagram for Windows Phone continues to hamper Nokia’s photo-focused efforts however, but also today it announced a partnership with Oggl, Hipstamatic’s new photo community app — noting that since Oggl has a relationship with Instagram, users will be able to access the latter service via that app.

Design wise, the Lumia 925 is the first Lumia device to include metallic trim. A silver aluminium band runs around its four edges, and doubles as the phone’s antenna — taking its cues from the iPhone’s design (but with “rigorous testing” to ensure no repeat of antennagate, according to Nokia). The mobile maker’s trademark polycarbonate clads the back of the device, so there’s a two-tone look and feel.

Nokia says the plastic back is designed to make it feel nicer and grippier in the hand. It may also be about keeping the weight down (to 139g), since heavy handsets is something Nokia has been criticised for. It certainly felt lightweight and slender during a brief hands on. Handset colour options are muted rather than the usual bold Lumia offerings, with black, white and grey options for the plastic back. Wireless charging shells, sold separately, can reintroduce the usual Lumia splashes of yellow, cyan and red.

Under the hood there’s a 1.5GHz Dual-Core Snapdragon chip, and 1GB of RAM. On board memory is 16Gb plus 7MB free cloud storage on Microsoft’s SkyDrive. The 4.5 inch AMOLED display has a resolution of 1280 x 768. Dimensions are 129 x 70.6 x 8.5mm. The 2000mAh battery is good for up to 12.8 hours of talk time on 3G, or up to 6.6 hours video playback, according to Nokia.

A ‘true PureView’ Windows Phone device — codenamed EOS — has been rumoured for several months, and the Lumia 925 looks to be that device. However it certainly does not include the 41MP sensor and pixel oversampling techniques featured in the Symbian-based 808 PureView. It seems unlikely that bona fide PureView technology will ever make it to Windows Phone, not least because it’s something of a camera pro curiosity, rather than a consumer-friendly mainstream feature. Rather Nokia is extending the PureView branding — to associate it with a range of camera-centric features, not just that original huge sensor.

Harlow closed the presentation by hinting at further new device launches from Nokia “later this summer”. “I can’t wait to see you later this summer when we will continue to bring new innovation and new experiences to our Lumia portfolio,” she said.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Learning a language is never easy. One thing that’s usually missing in the way students learn a new language is the ability to use their new skills while talking to a native speaker. LanguageTwin, a startup I met at the Willamette Angel Conference in Corvallis, Ore., last week, aims to do just that. The service brings together language learners for peer-to-peer interactions to give students the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in the classroom while having a conversation or acting out real-life scenarios.

It’s worth noting that this is not a freemium service. LanguageTwin only plans to work with colleges and K-12 schools right now and will charge these schools a $10-$25 fee per term (or a slightly discounted price per year). The idea here is that the service will pair students from two different countries and then allow them to talk to each other over video chat. Right now, the team is focusing on students who want to learn Spanish (with French, German, Mandarin and other languages on the roadmap) and has run a number of tests with 5,000 students from over 100 universities in the U.S., Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Chile, Costa Rica and a number of other countries.

As the name implies, the original idea behind LanguageTwin was to assign a “twin” to every student in the system. Say you are learning Spanish. LanguageTwin would set you up with a student in a Spanish-speaking country who is trying to learn English. The problem with this, as the founders told me, is that it’s not easy to coordinate the schedules of two students living in different parts of the world, and students shouldn’t be penalized if their twin decides to forget about a meeting or turns out to be flaky. The system the team now uses is more flexible than the original scheme and allows users to find new ‘twins’ every time they use the system.

The twist here is that teachers can use the system to assign students to use LanguageTwin for a set number of minutes every day or week. All of the chats are recorded and teachers can play them back at their leisure. Some teachers who have used the system, the company’s co-founder Michael Lucia told me, also pick one random LanguageTwin session from their students in place of an oral exam.

The video chat, which is at the core of the service’s platform, also features text chat capabilities, a translation tool and, most importantly, a folder with assignments and a few ice-breaker questions to get less-structured conversations going. Professors can, of course, upload their own content to the service.

As Lucia told me, it’s this framework around the chats (plus the ability to record them) that makes LanguageTwin very different from just using Skype to start a conversation.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The global mobile messaging app space is the new social battleground. Startups that would have had little chance of unseating Facebook’s dominance on the web are attacking Zuckerberg’s empire by refocusing social networking around the mobile phone contacts book. Enter your phone number, and these apps already know who all your friends are. No need to go laboriously recreating your social graph. Your network is already sitting on your phone, just waiting to be switched on.

Smartphone growth is clearly fuelling the trend. More and more cross-platform messaging apps are exploding onto the scene to take advantage of the powerful feature-set of a comms device that’s never far from its owner – racing to leverage the opportunity to disenfranchise Facebook and build comms and content empires of their own, adding more and more social features to keep users engaged and socialising within that app, not elsewhere — from photo-sharing with built in Instagram-style filters, to HD video calling, to meme-creation tools, to cutesy cartoon characters. The phone is the tool being used to drive a wedge between Facebook and its users.

Little by little, these mobile messaging apps are eating away at the mindshare of grand web-based social networks, even as they recreate their own social content platforms online to extend and bolster their mobile offerings. Facebook was slow to recognise the threat but has since countered with its own Messenger app, and additional offerings like SnatChat-rival Poke. How seriously Facebook is taking the mobile messaging app threat now is evident in its most recent mobile effort:  Facebook Home – an Android launcher that seeks to elbow its way past rival apps by foregrounding Facebook’s own chat channel atop other apps.

But Home may already be too little, too late. With limited availability, the launcher can’t yet reach very far – it’s had only around one million downloads to-date — and will likely never make it onto iOS. There’s no word on active users of Home but the launcher has failed to impress those who are downloading it, with only a two-star rating on Google Play so far. Facebook’s strategy of trying to stop the runaway mobile messaging train by standing on the train tracks looks like a pretty forlorn hope. A better bet is for it to drive usage of its own mobile messaging apps – but that’s where the geographical variation of messaging platforms poses a huge challenge.

Different messaging apps are doing well in different geographies. There’s huge and growing mobile messaging variation, as more and more companies wise up to the opportunity and launch their own messaging attacks. A recent example is the Bharti/Softbank telco joint venure messaging app, Hike, that has grabbed more than five million users since launching in December. Another contender is U.S. startup just.me, which launched its messaging play last month in 155 countries and 32 languages. Add to that Google looks to be readying a new unified messaging play of its own, codenamed Babel.

Below is a primer on some of the biggest mobile messaging players in the space at present – it’s by no means a comprehensive list, but even looking at this handful of larger players gives a sense of how diverse the space is, and how many serious assailants are scaling the walls of Facebook’s grand social citadel. Zuckerberg and co are now fighting a war on scores and scores of fronts. The big question for Facebook is whether there can be just one social messaging winner, and if not how can it stay relevant when there’s so much chatter taking place elsewhere?

As Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans notes in his latest newsletter: “There are so many mobile comms apps with over 1m downloads on Google Play that I’ve given up counting. Not clear to me that there’ll be a consolidation, either.”

[Top image by stevedotcarter via Flickr]

Mobile’s Biggest Messaging Apps

Skype

Birthday: April 2009 (mobile app)

Age: 49 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP, group chats, send videos/photos

Special powers: emoji, desktop client

User-base: 280 million+

Geographical reach: Global

Stronghold: Unknown

Languages supported: 16

Latest reported revenues: $800 million when Microsoft acquired the company in 2011

*

WhatsApp

Birthday: July 2009

Age: 46 months

Basic service cost: Free for a year then $0.99 yearly subscription; or one-off cost of $0.99

Comms abilities: text, group chat, share location/photos/audio/video

Special powers: preloaded on a dedicated hard key on Nokia Asha 210, anti-adverts

User-base: 200 million+

Geographical reach: 100+ countries

Stronghold: Spain

Languages supported: 23

Latest reported revenues: Rumoured to be $100 million annually

*

KakaoTalk

Birthday:  March 2010

Age: 38 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP, group chats/calls, send photos/audio/video, photo wall

Special powers: games, stickers/emoji, celebrity accounts, Android launcher in the pipeline

User-base: 90 million

Geographical reach: Global

Stronghold:  South Korea

Languages supported: 13

Latest reported revenues: $45 million in 2012

*

Kik Messenger

Birthday: October 2010

Age: 30 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, share photos/images/videos

Special powers:  emoji, cards: aka HTML5 apps inside the platform including games, meme-generator, sketches, YouTube videos etc; open API

User-base: 50 million+

Geographical reach: Global

Stronghold: Canada/Australia

Supported languages: 13

Latest reported revenues: None yet

*

Viber

Birthday: December 2010

Age: 29 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP, group chat, desktop-to-desktop video calling, share photos/location

Special powers: stickers/emoji, desktop client

User-base: 200 million

Geographical reach:  193 countries/global

Stronghold: Monaco

Languages supported: 27

Latest reported revenues: None yet

*

WeChat/Weixin

Birthday: January 2011

Age: 28 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP, HD video chatting, group chats, send audio/photos/location, walkie-talkie mode, live group chat

Special powers: emoji/stickers, photo wall, locate nearby/other WeChat users who are also looking to connect, leave audio messages for strangers to pick up, official accounts, desktop client, open API, gaming platform in the works

User-base: 300 million

Geographical reach: 30+ countries

Stronghold: China

Languages supported: 15

Latest reported revenues: None yet

*

Line

Birthday: June 2011

Age: 23 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP, group chat, social timeline, share photos/location/audio/video

Special powers: Kawaii characters with own cartoon show & merchandising, stickers, games, celebrity accounts, desktop client

User-base: 150 million registered users

Geographical reach: Global

Stronghold: Japan

Languages supported: 12

Latest reported revenues: $59m in Q1 2013

*

Facebook Messenger

Birthday:  August 2011

Age: 21 months

Basic service cost: Free

Comms abilities: text, VoIP in select markets, send photos/audio

Special powers: stickers/emoji, Chat Heads (on Android), integration with desktop Facebook

User-base: Facebook does not break this out but estimated 60 million in November 2012

Geographical reach: Global

Languages supported: 22+

Stronghold: Unknown

Latest reported revenues: Not disclosed

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, gaming console and software company OUYA announced that they have closed a $15 million round led by Kleiner Perkins, and with participation from the Mayfield Fund, NVIDIA, Shasta Ventures and Ocean Partners. This marks one of the largest institutional investments to go to a project that had its humble beginnings on Kickstarter.

OUYA is a company that launched back in 2012 on Kickstarter under the guiding hands of Julie Uhrman, a video game industry veteran who believes that gaming should be affordable and enjoyable for everyone. She and the team developed a $99 Android gaming console, which hooks into the TV and comes with automatic access to free-to-try games. It launched on the crowdfunding site to much fanfare, scoring $8.6 million in funding, which ends up being around 9x more than OUYA asked.

Along with the $15 million round, which brings OUYA’s total amount of funding to $23.5 million, the company will also be bringing KPCB General Partner Bing Gordon on to the board of directors. Gordon brings with him years of experience from Electronic Arts.

Here’s what he had to say about the funding:

OUYA’s open source platform creates a new world of opportunity for established and emerging independent game creators and gamers alike. There are some types of games that can only be experienced on a TV, and OUYA is squarely focused on bringing back the living room gaming experience. OUYA will allow game developers to unleash their most creative ideas and satisfy gamers craving a new kind of experience.

The OUYA hardware has proven its spot in the market with the successful Kickstarter project, followed by an institutional investment led by a firm such as KPCB. “The message is clear: people want OUYA,” said Uhrman.

But the same story rings true for software, as the company has seen over 12,000 developers sign up for the platform to build games and monetize them in any way they’d like. This is up from 8,000 developer signups in March.

And if that weren’t enough, OUYA has been picked up by major retailers like GameStop, Best Buy and Amazon, with availability originally intended to begin June 4. OUYA is pushing that back to June 25, however, announcing the delay today as a result of a desire to be able to meet initial demand.

Clearly, the affordable gaming console speaks to people. But is it enough to make OUYA profitable? In an interview with TechCrunch, Uhrman explained that OUYA essentially breaks even on the hardware from the $99 gaming console, and that all games will be free-to-try. Curious if that was sustainable, we asked Uhrman if free-to-try would always be the case with OUYA games.

“Free to try is a core tenet of OUYA,” said Uhrman. “We wanted a gaming experience for the television that’s inexpensive to get into. Developers monetize however they’d like to, which is why we have games with unlockable demos inside a fully paid version, or micro-transactions, and even a donation based game. I’m looking forward to the first episodic, subscription-based game,” she said.

According to Uhrman, the latest round from KPCB and friends will go toward further supporting game developers and development, bringing in exclusive and unique OUYA content, and meeting the demand seen from all parts of the world, including Japan, Brazil, Germany, Spain, and Italy.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

A startup called Webflakes aims to bring some of the best international content on fashion, food, travel, and more to English-speaking readers with the help of volunteer translators. The site is officially launching today, and the company is also announcing that it has raised $3 million in Series A funding.

CEO Nathan Shuchami told me that people searching the web can sometimes struggle to find “genuine, authentic content” on a given topic due to language issues. For example, for wine connoisseurs, there are certainly plenty of sites about wine, but the commentary of many French experts is inaccessible unless you speak French.

To address that issue, Webflakes has selected 60 established bloggers in Japan, France, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Switzerland and Peru and has licensed the rights to their content in every language except the original. Then a team of volunteers translates their work into English and posts it on the Webflakes site.

For now, neither the blogger nor the translator is paid. Shuchami said the blogger gets exposure to a new audience. Meanwhile, many of the translators also do professional translation work, so this is an opportunity to do something more fun and build their portfolio. Plus, Webflakes will donate $1 for every 500 words translated to the charity of the translator’s choice. And in the future, Shuchami suggested that Webflakes might be able to offer revenue-sharing deals to both groups.

But is the global nature of the content enough to attract readers? One advantage, Shuchami said, is that Webflakes is currently focusing on lifestyle topics where the blogger’s nationality should be a particular draw — not just French writing about wine, but also Italian writing about Italian food, Japanese writing about Japanese architecture, and so on.

I poked around the site this morning — I don’t read a lot of lifestyle content, but I thought the range of topics was pretty interesting. The top trending article right now is a French writer on “How To Wear A Bow Tie.” Also on the front page is a Peruvian writer telling readers to “Invite Your Mother To Peru For Mothers Day!” And the translations are usually quite readable, if not always graceful. (To be fair, that may have as much to do with the original post as the translation. And yes, the writing on English-language blogs can be pretty rough, too.)

Eventually, Shuchami said he hopes to add more writers and translators and to expand to other kinds of content.

As for the funding, it was led by Oren Zeev’s Orens Capital, with participation from Genesis Capital, Audible CEO Donald R. Katz, eBay CTO Mark Carges, Chegg co-founder Aayush Phumbhra, former GoDaddy CEO Warren Adelman, former Apax partner Stephen Grabiner, and others.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch