SV Angel, one of the Valley’s best-known early-stage firms, says it’s starting to look heavily at health startups that take a “software-first approach” towards human biology, medical research and patient care.

The firm has always had a list of six to eight “megatrends” that it invests prolifically in. Right now, those are big data, social commerce, online-to-offline commerce, education tech, the sharing economy and the “Internet of things.” Now they’re adding “health informatics” to that list.

By that, SV Angel is looking for startups that “use software, IT and data science to help diagnose, treat, reduce and cure disease – at the physical, mental and emotional levels.” It’s a broader definition than just bioinformatics, because it encompasses medical records and other types of patient data.

Managing director David Lee, who is a cancer survivor, said that the firm finally feels comfortable with the idea that software is about to eat healthcare.

“I’m not a biologist. I don’t invest in biotech companies. We’re software investors first and foremost,” he said. “But the more I learned about bioinformatics and health records, the more I felt that the timing was ripe.”

A couple things are feeding into this. For one, the costs of genome sequencing are falling dramatically. The cost of sequencing a full human genome has gone from $100 million in 2001 to $8,000 today — even faster than Moore’s Law. Secondly, there are meaningful governmental and financial incentives to move toward electronic medical records. (It’s also just common sense to move away from paper records.)

He pointed to investments in companies like Counsyl (which I profiled earlier this week), Benchling and medical records startups like Elation EMR and Practice Fusion. There are also younger startups like Medisas, which is building software to help with patient hand-offs and transfers.

A few other firms like Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and Felicis Ventures have carved out reputations over the past few years for aggressively investing in health tech. Note that no one here is backing companies that require an expensive, 10-year drug testing cycle overseen by the FDA. All of these firms tend to look for companies that have less regulatory risk, like in the medical devices space or with diagnostics and bioinformatics.

SV Angel has been one of the most prolific backers of social networking, real-time, mobile (and yes, even SoLoMo) startups over the past few years. So are they eating their words?

“People might say that consumer’s not hot again, but we’re still going to invest in consumer startups,” Lee said. “We don’t try to time the market.”

Lee explained the firm’s thinking behind its new focus in a blog post today: 

We at SV Angel invest in “megatrends.” We pick 4-6 investment themes and invest heavily in each one. Some of these trends include: real-time data, online-to-offline consumption, social commerce, collaborative consumption, education and the internet of things.

We believe that there is a massive opportunity in the intersection of software and biology, which we broadly define as “Health Informatics.” This term has a formal definition but we tweaked it to make our own. It is a software-first approach to solving problems in human biology, medical research and ultimately, patient care. We think the timing is right for software developers to make an impact in these areas. The ultimate goal is to use software, IT and data science to help diagnose, treat, reduce and cure disease – at the physical, mental and emotional levels. If we see a bright founder working in this area, the opportunity will move to the “top of the pile” as if it’s in one of our other preferred trends.

The catalyst of this trend is the cheap, abundant data of two types – medical and molecular data. Cheap, abundant data combined with new ways of measurement and analysis leads to technological breakthroughs. There will be a flood of medical data driven by electronic medical records and the like. For example, the recentAffordable Care Act (i.e., “Obamacare”) basically pays doctors for complying with a federal mandate to move from paper to software-based solutions. By 2024 or so, every hospital will move to electronic records. Right now, it’s estimated that only 2% of hospitals comply with this law. Thus in ten years, the amount of data will increase 50X.

On the molecular front, the costs of sequencing technology is falling almost 5x faster than Moore’s Law. (The interpretation and analysis of the data lags this trend but is improving as well.) President Obama also recently announced a major national initiative to map the human brain in the same way that human genome was mapped back in the early 1990′s. This is just another example of “offline” or analog data being digitized and accessible to coders.

Google motivated a generation of bright computer scientists to learn the ins-and-outs of the advertising industry and turn it into a software problem. The original PayPal founding team went through the schlep work of learning the norms, regulations and other vagaries of the payment industry in the early 2000′s. And they used software to help re-invent it. And most recently, Palantir went through the hard, unsexy work of understanding the intelligence and defense industries and used software to attack hard, important problems. We want to back founders who want to do the same when it comes to health informatics.

We are already working with and investors in founders and companies in this area. Those include Counsyl, Benchling, Practice Fusion, ElationEMR, DNA Nexus, Medisas and Flatiron. Counsyl in particular is a flagship company. They were featured yesterday inTechCrunch. The founding team has a traditional computer science background. In fact, they even started the company thinking they were going to be a pure software shop. Ultimately, they built a lab using cheap, commodotized hardware – a trend that wasn’t in vogue then but is now. Ramji Srinivasan, the CEO of Counsyl, is the archetype of what we will look for. He will be an advisor to us on this effort.

Another advisor is Professor Atul Butte, a Stanford University School of Medicine professor, researcher and entrepreneur in medical bionformatics. He has been a thought leader and pioneer in the area of applying computer and data science to biomedical research. He is a sounding board and inspiration for us to pursue this trend and we’re thrilled to have him with us as we learn more about this fascinating area.

But perhaps the most critical advisors to us will be Jeremy Richman and Jennifer Hensel. They are scientists and lost their only child, Avielle, in the Newtown shooting. They courageously set up the [Avielle Foundation}(http://aviellefoundation.org/) to use science and technology to help understand why these tragedies happen. They encouraged us to think more holistically about how to reduce gun violence and how to use technology to identify and treat the root causes of these tragedies. Biomedical research, bioinformatics and brain health are all areas that need further investigation to understand the “why” as well as the “how.” Great software companies and entrepreneurs can play a fundamental role here.

On a personal front, I am a cancer survivor so I have a selfish reason to accelerate this vision. Scientists are more confident than ever that genetic mutations play a huge role in why cancer happens. I believe that great software companies in the mold of Google, PayPal and Palantir will help make cancer a chronic condition and quite possibly, cured.

To be clear, while this megatrend has philanthropic and personal benefits, this is not a philanthropic or personal venture. We believe this is a massive market opportunity for young hackers and founders. And we want to be crystal clear that this effort is consistent with our historical focus – great founders using software to address new and large markets.

Kudos to Gautam Sivakumar (Medisas), Ramji Srinivasan (Counsyl), Sajith Wickramasekara (Benchling), Jeremy Richman and Jennifer Hensel for helping me with this.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Toronto-based startup TrendSpottr, which provides tools to help businesses identify trends before they get huge so they can better capitalize on those opportunities for advertising, editorial or other purposes, today announced the launch of TrendSpottr Alerts. This new offering, which has been in beta testing for a few months now, is aimed at giving high-level stakeholders who don’t have time to manage a dashboard real-time notifications via email when something important to their company or field is on the verge of blowing up.

The frequency of the alerts and in what areas they’re triggered can be customized by a user, on a freemium basis where a number of broad areas are available for free, but users can pay a subscription to access a broader range of alerts for any term or subject they choose. The alerts are grouped into three urgency categories, and thanks to a brand new partnership with Lybmix also announced today, they are also analyzed for sentiment, so you can tell if they’re positive, negative or neutral. That’s especially important if you’re a brand manager and want to see PR disasters in the making and potentially cut them off before they go extremely viral.

Users receiving the email alerts can also click through for a more detailed look at the trending item identified, complete with a single page analytics summary that details the timeline for how frequently the trend is being mentioned on social media, the dispersion of sentiment across mentions and a more granular pie-chart sentiment breakdown that shows how people are feeling about a topic across essentially various emotional criteria, rather than just the cut-and-dry “Good/Bad/Neutral” you’ll see from other similar platforms.

“What Alerts does is it sends you that information, that is based on trending information, that is exceptional, so that you can get it pushed to you, and with Lymbix what we wanted to do was add a level of sentiment to it,” TrendSpottr CEO Mark Zohar told me in an interview. “So you can quickly see it in your email inbox where you live, you can see what it is and see its sentiment very quickly and act on it, either by delegating, sharing or so on.”

The whole point is to essentially create an early response system that doesn’t require mobilizing an entire chain of command. Emails provide all the information you need at a glance to get started on a disaster response plan (as in the case of something like the totally crazy Manti Te’o story Notre Dame is dealing with right now) or to instantly capitalize on an opportunity. Zohar notes that a lot of these trend opportunities are short-lived, so having all the info you need to formulate an instant response is much more important than it has been in the past.

Adding sentiment analysis to the TrendSpottr platform should be a huge benefit for its users, even though it seems like a small thing. The difference between having to figure out what kind of tone people are using in discussing a topic and having it explained instantly could mean the difference between committing a major gaffe and pulling off a major coup in a social media campaign designed around trending content.

Alerts will be available direct from TrendSpottr, but the company is also going to offer a white-label solution that allows its clients to offer relevant alerts under their own masthead to their customers and users via email subscriptions. So if you’re a brand consultancy, and you want to keep your clients apprised of trends in their industry but do so under your own flag, that’s something TrendSpottr can set up.

There’s a new timeline for managing and monitoring trends thanks to Twitter, and it’s about anticipation, not reaction and response. That’s what TrendSpottr and Zohar have concerned themselves with, and Alerts is another way to try to help companies anticipate the curve. It could end up being just another email digest cluttering up your inbox, but for the right manager and in the right use case, it could also be a great new way for high-level staff to get a ground level view of their business.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Today, Facebook introduced its third quarter earnings for 2012 and shared some updated stats on how the social network is performing. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg shared that Facebook had crossed the billion user mark, and the trend continues upward, as our own Josh Constine predicted.

The interesting statistics are going to come on the mobile front, a place that Facebook is paying extra special attention these days.

This is developing, more stats to come.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Toronto-based startup TrendSpottr today announced a new partnership with Salesforce that will see its product made available to the larger company’s customers directly through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. TrendSpottr will now deliver real-time, predictive analytics to Salesforce’s massive customer base, providing them with the tools it has developed to spot emerging trends before they go mainstream and spot potentially viral content early on in its popularity cycle.

“We’ve been talking for some time, and it was late in August when we talked some more with their product team and they saw what we were doing, and they said ‘Listen, we’re expanding our partner ecosystem and we’d love to have you guys part of that,’” TrendSpottr CEO and co-founder Mark Zohar said in an interview, describing the origin and nature of the partnership. “We’re actually deeply integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform. For the first time, they’ll be able to make much more sense of the data that they already have through Radian6 and Salesforce.”

TrendSpottr’s main product can identify trending content on social networks like Twitter before it hits its viral peak, in an attempt to help its users get in on the ground floor with themes, memes and topics that could help them gain exposure, or help them put out fires before they start to blaze out of control in the case of spotting potential social network gaffes. Now, with its Salesforce partnership, it moves into doing the same kind of predictive analytics with any company’s existing Salesforce or Radian6 data stream. That combo is a powerful one, according to Zohar.

“The traditional social analytics companies like Radian6 have really set the market standard for collecting and processing tons of data around your topic profiles, keywords and so on,” he said. “But to date, most of that is actually used for retrospective analysis. Where we’re adding value is by showing when things start to tip, when is the data that I’m looking at starting to show interesting things that will grow in importance.”

The Salesforce partnership is indicative of TrendSpottr’s larger goals, as it transitions from a company dealing mostly in public social media data to tackling more specialized streams. Zohar says that there’s not really any limit to the kind of information its platform can process, in terms of being able to provide predictive analytics around a stream of constantly refreshing real-time information.

“We are agnostic in terms of what real-time data streams we analyze. So we started off with the open social APIs like Twitter and Facebook, we partnered with DataSift, and now we’re working with Salesforce data,” he said. “You’ll see more and more of that where we’ll be integrating into enterprise data streams, transactional data streams, business intelligence streams, ad click streams, etc. In all those cases we’re using our data and pulling out those insights that can predict their trajectory and their future growth.”

In terms of financial arrangements, TrendSpottr’s Salesforce product will retail separately from its main offering. It’s a volume-priced offering, so that Salesforce users will pay more if they’re passing more data through the service, and the revenue is shared between TrendSpottr and Salesforce. TrendSpottr will continue to offer its own main product separately on a subscription basis. It’s a big win for TrendSpottr in terms of getting its product out there, which should help it with its larger goal of becoming the predictive analytics tool powering all kinds of enterprise data insights.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

2011 was an impressive year for mobile exits: according to investment bank Rutberg  & Co. it topped out as the biggest-ever for mobile IPOs and acquisitions: $15.5 billion in total transactions, 63 percent higher than previous record holder, 2007. But halfway through 2012, Rutberg believes that this year could be either just as big or bigger: in the year to date, there have been $6.5 billion in transactions, according to new research out today.

Led by the (still pending) $1-billion acquisition of Instagram by Facebook and the $1.093 billion IPO of mobile ad company Millennial Media, 2012 has rung up exits totaling nearly as much as all of 2010. 2007 saw $7.1 billion in mobile exits, with values split nearly equally between IPOs and M&A. In contrast, 2012, up to now, has been much more uneven: $4.6 billion in M&A, with $1.9 billion in IPOs.

That is a trend that Rutberg’s MD Rajeev Chand believes will continue as investors continue to ruminate on the “dark cloud” of Facebook (and, perhaps to a lesser extent, Groupon and Zynga’s debuts) in the public markets. “Facebook’s IPO will have a delay effect on all tech IPOs,” he says, including those for mobile companies.

Over the last 11 years, as you can see from the graphic below, Consumer mobile services appear to have grown the most as IPO targets, although some of that may have been related to activity during the big dot-com bubble at around 2001.

The fact that Millennial Media and Instagram are the most valuable exits so far in 2012 point to another trend: the shift in value from infrastructure to other sectors like apps and services — a growth that Chand traces back to the rise of Apple’s iPhone in 2007 and the effect that it had on the whole ecosystem, spurring the development of apps and services catering to that business (such as mobile ads).

But infrastructure is still there, and ironically the two acquisitions Apple has officially confirmed in 2012 speak to continued attention to both sides of the equation: Israeli semiconductor and flash memory maker Anobit, reported to be bought for between $400 million and $500 million; and app discovery and analytics giant Chomp, reportedly for $50 million.

Among other non-infrastrcuture exits, after Millennial Media and Instagram, the next two most valuable exits were by operators acquiring to pick up new business and expertise — part of the trend Chand describes as “inorganic growth strategies” by businesses wanting to have more fingers in the mobile pie: the $321 million sale of mobile marketing and ad company Amobee to Singtel and mobile content company Buongiorno’s sale to Docomo for $289 million.

Funzio’s sale to Gree for $210 million, OMGPOP’s acquisition by Zynga for $180 million, and Clairmail’s acquisition by Monitise round out mobile content exits in the top 10.

Chand believes that mobile, along with other innovations in cloud and social media technologies, are fundamentally changing how consumers behave and businesses operate. Like others, Chand believes mobile is also gradually ceasing to be a category unto itself.

“In our view the PC Internet was a ‘dress rehearsal’ for what will come with mobile,” Chand writes. “We are ‘half a shade’ away from a time when the term mobile as an identifier will disappear.”

Even so, Rutberg has chosen to not include companies like Facebook in its mobile IPO tally, despite it having some half its 900 million+ users already accessing the site using mobile devices, and clearly focusing on the mobile platform as an engine for future growth.

“Our exits analysis focuses on private companies which are mobile first or principally mobile (revenues, users, usage),” Chand explains. “Facebook did not start as mobile first or principally mobile and is not included in our numbers.”

Ditto for one of the biggest M&A mobile plays, the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google for $12.5 billion, which closed in May. This, he says, is not included because Motorola is a longstanding public company, and “this chart focuses on venture-backed exits, to show the opportunity for entrepreneurs and venture investors.”

Judging from the graphic below, however, there seems to be a slight tailing off in terms of VC funding versus exits, perhaps a sign of how the space is maturing and attention is going elsewhere?

Image: 401k, Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch. Follow him on Twitter @kteare.

Facebook’s Week In Wall Street Hell

This week Facebook did a virtually unprecedented thing. In the middle of its IPO roadshow it modified its S1 filing in reaction to questions it had been being asked by analysts. The modification I refer to stated that Facebook wanted to acknowledge a trend; that trend is the declining ARPU (average revenue per user) being seen in its current quarter. This trend is being driven, Facebook said, by the growth in its usage on mobile platforms and its inability to monetize those platforms in the same way, or at the same rate, as its desktop/laptop offerings.

The previous iterations of the S1 had all contained the possibility of this trend. Even the likelihood of it. But the actuality of the trend was noted here for the first time in the S1.

The Street Knows The Truth

This is a company about to sell shares at a multiple of earnings that dwarfs companies with massive revenues, profits and growth rates – like Apple’s. Facebook’s multiple is of a size that is traditionally only justified by high growth rates. And now “the street” has picked up on the fact that the rate of revenue growth is declining as traffic migrates to mobile. It is even feasible, if this rate accelerates that revenues could fall in absolute terms, as they did in Facebook’s most recent quarter. The street is not happy.

This is a historic event. A high growth company entering its IPO whilst its revenue growth decelerates amidst a huge and structural change in the usage patterns of its product is not the norm. Especially when it is the biggest IPO in US history.

Amidst the rhetoric that the IPO is over-subscribed, one wonders if the shares can possibly be worth what people are being asked to pay for them. I am not a stock analyst but I think buyer beware is not an unreasonable conclusion to draw from these events and the fact that more than $5 billion of insider money is selling at the IPO price may mean that there are some smart insiders who know the risks.

It isn’t about Facebook, or the IPO, its about Mobile and the future.

Yet, this weeks events are about more than Facebook’s IPO and the issues are far from new. Here on TechCrunch we have documented the impact of the rise of mobile and the end of Web 2.0 for some time, stressing that Web 2.0 era companies, running SAAS like cloud services, will be threatened by Apples success in driving large numbers of us to primarily use mobile devices, in an app-centric, message-centric world. In Google’s case they are contributing to and suffering from the problem simultaneously through the success of Android.

On August 27th 2011, I wrote “Smart Mobile and the Thin Cloud” in which I said that there is a trend in play that:

“…will transform the entire software ecosystem over the next 5 years. The changes will be so dramatic that the current discussions of a bubble will appear silly. Huge companies will fail and even bigger new companies will be formed”.

The article predicted Facebook will be challenged by the growth of mobile devices and the impact of that on the way users interact with data.

On January 26th this year, in “Google, Look out Behind you” I said:

“Apple has a platform that will soon be numbered in the hundreds of millions. Every device has communications built-in, personalization built-in, media capture built-in. And with iCloud, there is now a place to store the output of each device. How relevant is the Facebook hosted social graph in that world? How relevant is the web ecosystem that Facebook connect has helped penetrate? It seems likely that Facebook will have many of the same challenges as Google as it contemplates the rise of Apple, and the rise of mobile.”

A few days later – on February 4th – in “Facebook – Run from the Bulls” I said:

“Google’s present – and Facebook’s future – involves the painful fact that the very success of mobile platforms in helping human beings be productive, on the go, has a negative impact on the desktop-based advertising programs of the past 10 years. Mobile growth impacts web advertising revenues, except of course for Apple who make money from hardware and software and so benefits from these trends. The reason is simple. We do less ad-centric activities on mobile than we did on the web. And we are less likely to click away on an ad when we are focused on a specific goal on a largely single window device.”

Then, on April 15th in “The Mobile Paradox” I wrote:

“I believe what we are seeing here is the start of a secular trend that represents nothing less than the end of the web 2.0 era where we all consumed services through a browser on a computer. Replacing that era is a new, app-based, message-centric mobile Internet. In this new era the essential unit of advertising (a page based ad, whether text, display or anything else) is simply the wrong monetization vehicle. Something new has to emerge.”

Death or Mobile?

Facebook is not alone in being threatened by these trends. Google has missed its “Cost Per Click” numbers two quarters in a row now – for similar reasons.

The real question is whether Facebook and Google understand the scale of the problems and how to address them.

There are only two possible answers.

1. Despite all of the above Facebook (and Google) know well what the problems are and will figure them out in time.

Or

2. Facebook and Google go the way of the Dodo (as predicted in Forbes last week). Just as Web 2.0 killed Yahoo as a growth company –  due to its inability to adapt – so Mobile will kill the Web 2.0 giants

I think 1 is more likely than 2.

Why the belief? Facebook did another thing this week that is highly relevant to this issue. It launched its own app store. Facebook’s app store enables an app developer on either Android or iPhone to use Facebook to trigger users to visit the iPhone app store, or the Google Play app store, and install an app. Facebook becomes possibly the primary way that happens. It may drive millions of app installs across many platforms. These installs are not free, they are pay to play.

I think of the app center as providing Facebook with a new type of advertising format – an ad, with an action (an install), and a price on success.

As Larry Page noted on Google’s earnings call this quarter, mobile demands new types of ad format. He cited “click to call” as an example. Both Facebook and Google will begin to evolve ad units that are a better fit with the user experience on mobile, and ones that reflect the customer goals or the advertiser better. So far, ad formats on mobile have been simply copies of tried and trusted web formats, poorly suited to the new environment.

Option 2 – death of the Web 2.0 giants – only seems to be likely in a scenario where these companies fail to understand that their web pasts count for nothing in this new mobile world. This week, if anything, has served as a huge reminder of that.

Facebook (and Google) will most likely, by building or buying, evolve their monetization strategies to better suite the mobile future. It may take time, it may be painful, they may even fail. But try they will and try they must. Facebook 2.0 will try to kill Facebook 1.0 and Google 2.0 will try to kill Google 1.0. It’s not a good time to be going public, or to be public. But, mobile is the future – they can’t live with it, and they surely can’t live without it.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

EA shares slipped 9.5 percent in after-hours trading to $13.70 as the company said it expected losses of 40 to 45 cents a share for the next quarter. It said it expects to make $4.1 billion for the year and will lose 16 to 36 cents a share, on a non-GAAP basis.

Another piece of data that might have dragged down performance were subscriber numbers for Star Wars: The Old Republic, the title that was going to going to help it take market share away from World of Warcraft. EA said it had 1.3 million active subscribers, compared to the 1.7 million subscriber estimate analysts like Lazard’s Atul Bagga had anticipated.

On the positive side, EA beat earnings estimates for the quarter ending in March with $977 million in total net revenue on a non-GAAP basis. Analysts had expected net revenue of $959.6 million or 17 cents a share. One other positive is that digital revenue continues to creep up as a share of EA’s overall earnings as the company transitions away from selling games like packaged, consumer goods. Digital revenue was nearly double was it was a year ago at $419 million.

“Digital growth drove our margins in fiscal 12 and we project this trend will continue in fiscal 13,” said  Ken Barker, the interim chief financial officer, in a statement. “We saw more than 20 percent non-GAAP diluted EPS growth in fiscal 12, and are guiding to more than 30 percent growth in fiscal 13 based on the midpoint of our guidance.”

Mobile revenue was also up to $87 million from $70 million a year ago, according to generally accepted accounting principles. Non-smartphone handheld devices basically negligible now with PlayStation and Nintendo at $6 and $5 million for the quarter respectively.

Here’s the release. We’ll be updating as we go:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)– Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) today announced preliminary financial results for its fourth fiscal quarter and fiscal year ended March 31, 2012.

“We are proud to report a strong quarter and a fiscal year highlighted with $1.2 billion of digital revenue,” said Chief Executive Officer John Riccitiello. “In the coming year, we break away from the pack, with a very different profile than the traditional game companies and capabilities that none of our new digital competitors can match.”

“Digital growth drove our margins in fiscal 12 and we project this trend will continue in fiscal 13,” said Interim Chief Financial Officer Ken Barker. “We saw more than 20 percent non-GAAP diluted EPS growth in fiscal 12, and are guiding to more than 30 percent growth in fiscal 13 based on the midpoint of our guidance.”

Selected Operating Highlights and Metrics:

*On a non-GAAP basis

Strong results driven by the successful launches of Mass Effect™ 3, FIFA Street 4, SSX™ and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning™.

FIFA 12 established the best year in franchise history – with downloads and micro-transactions totaling $108 million*. FIFA Ultimate Team — a pure digital companion to recent FIFA titles was the second best-selling EA offering in the UK in fiscal 12.

Battlefield 3™ had a record year, establishing itself as one of EA’s premier game services and in the process successfully took share in the growing First-Person-Shooter market.

Battlefield 3 players are still deeply engaged — 6.3 million MAUs in March. New content downloads available in May and June.
Q4 full-game downloads were up 76 percent* year-over-year, contributing $60 million* in the quarter, driven in part by Mass Effect 3 and STAR WARS®: The Old Republic™.

STAR WARS®: The Old Republic™ active subscribers are 1.3 million. Two new content packs — Legacy and Allies, available in Q1.

EA’s Play4Free brands are generating an average of nearly $2 million* per week. Several more EA brands will be introduced in the Play4Free portal in fiscal 13.

EA shattered its goal for digital revenue growth — generating more than $1.2 billion* in fiscal 12 for a 47 percent year-over-year growth, and driving operating margin to 10%. Another 40 percent increase in digital non-GAAP revenue and continued operating margin expansion is forecasted for fiscal 13.

EA’s Origin™ platform for games and services has registered 11 million players and generated approximately $150 million* in just ten months. EA’s Nucleus database has registered 220 million consumers.

Casual game leader PopCap™ — acquired by EA in August — is growing on mobile and social platforms with new games like Solitaire Blitz™ and Lucky Gem Casino™. A new version of Bejeweled™ is EA’s top grossing game on the Apple® App StoreSM.

EA repurchased 27.7 million shares for $529 million through March 31, 2012, and as of the call, the $600 million share repurchase program has been completed.
In fiscal 13, EA will invest $80 million in development of games for Gen4 console systems.

Q4 and Full-Year FY12 Financial Highlights:

For the quarter, non-GAAP net revenue of $977 million was slightly ahead of our guidance of $925 million to $975 million. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.17 was in line with our guidance of $0.10 to $0.20. Non-GAAP net revenue in Q4 fiscal 2012 was slightly lower as compared to Q4 fiscal 2011 due to a reduction in the number of package goods titles in the quarter.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Divya Gugnani is the co-founder of Send the Trend, a New York based startup that was recently acquired by QVC, just a year-and-a half after launching in 2010.

Gugnani, whose founding team includes Project Runway winner Christian Siriano, describes Send the Trend as “an online destination that offers curated and customized woman’s fashion accessories and beauty.” Items are priced at $29.95, and every month users have the option to purchase everything from earrings to bracelets specifically tailored to their taste.

Gugnani tells Founder Stories host Chris Dixon, that the idea for Send the Trend struck her after she left a career in finance to become an entrepreneur. No longer armed with a budget to shop at high end retail stores and receive the personalized assistance that goes with it, Gugnani wanted to “create the Saks like experience, but have it be done online.”

She adds, “the reason I chose accessories is that accessories are light to ship, have a very low return rate and they are pretty much size agnostic so a woman who is 300 pounds can wear the same earrings that a woman who is 90 pounds can, and so the whole model works very cost efficiently because you don’t have very high returns and sizing is not a real issue.”

After wrapping the topic, the two go on to discuss issues surrounding the subscription commerce space at large, before Gugnani tells Dixon lessons she’s learned while building her business.

She says of paramount importance is having strong technology infrastructure. Noting that had Send The Trend positioned itself correctly, the site may not have crashed coast-to-coast after being featured on the Today Show.

Make sure to watch the entire video to hear additional insights and be sure to catch past episodes of Founder Stories featuring founders of ZocDoc, TripAdvisor, Kayak, Tumblr and Instagram.

Part II of this interview is coming up.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

In a world where content wants to be free, the publishing industry is searching for a saviour.  Could it be social commerce?  ELLE Magazine has launched two parallel social commerce experiments on Pinterest and on Facebook – based on the concept of editorially curated and shoppable trend catalogues.

In a nutshell, ELLE is using Facebook and Pinterest to create trend catalogues that could be monetized through affiliate payments.  Speaking about the Facebook Trend Reports, as they’ve been branded, chief revenue officer Kevin O’Malley for ELLE, says the first step of the experiment is to see whether it works without affiliate monetization;

“In iteration 1.0 we didn’t want to do a rev share and we said this to all participating brands… No one really knows if Facebook is a platform for transactional commerce,”

ELLE’s Facebook Trend Reports are notable for their Open Graph integration, using 8thBridge’s Graphite solution for custom Facebook buttons (Love Want and Own), But Mashable takes the magazine to task for not giving the Trend Reports the same care and attention they give to the trend reports on their website; indeed it’s unclear why a $895 diamond dress earrings are the headline of the sports-look trend…

Already with a commercial relationship with flash e-commerce sales site Rue La La, could ‘social catalogue curation’ provide a new business model for the publishing industry?

QVC, a home shopping network and e-commerce site, has acquired Send the Trend, a recently launched e-commerce site that brings personalization to the world of fashion accessories. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Send the Trend had previously raised $3 million from Battery Ventures and Founder Collective.

Send the Trend offers its customers personalized, affordable accessories such as fashion jewelry, sunglasses, scarves and more. The site takes you through a very short survey of what kind of accessories you may want, and it then provides stylist-curated customized recommendations for five different accessories for you. You can then buy any of the items for $30, with free shipping included for U.S. customers.

As we’ve written in the past, Send The Trend aims to differentiate itself through curation and personalization features. Last year, the startup launched MyStyle, which allows you to create an online Send the Trend store filled with your favorite accessories from the site. You can upload your picture, choose the words that describe your style and Send the Trend will pre-select products based on your preferences. You can also manually add items you like to your MyStyle page.

The startup was founded by Divya Gugnani, Mariah Chase and Project Runway winner Christian Siriano.

So what does QVC want with Send The Trend? According to the company, QVC’s e-commerce could be paired with Send the Trend’s use of customization and personalization. Additionally, Send the Trend will continue to operate as a separate e-commerce site. The New York Post reported a few days ago that the startup was set to be acquired by a TV company but it was unclear who the acquirer was.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch