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With Profitable Operations And 100K Stores On Its Platform, Retail Tech Startup Erply Shifts Into High Gear
Apr 11, 10:15PM
Erply, the company that makes cloud-based and iPad-centric point of sale and inventory management software for retailers, is up against big competition: Microsoft, Oracle, and RetailPro are just some of the behemoths in the same space. But three years after its US debut, Erply tells us it is still in the game and seeing encouraging growth -- and has hit some new milestones that show its progress. The New York City-based Erply now has 100,000 stores on its platform, with customers including names such as Elizabeth Arden Retail, The Athletes Foot, and UNICEF, co-founder and CEO Kristian Hiiemaa told me in an interview today. The company has grown its staff from four full-timers to 40, split between New York City and Estonia. While 70 percent of its customer base is in the US, Erply's client reach is spread worldwide across 15 countries.eBay-Backed Ecommerce Software Company ChannelAdvisor Files For $86M IPO
Apr 11, 9:37PM
The latest technology company to join the IPO bandwagon is e-commerce optimization company ChannelAdvisor. The S-1, filed with the SEC today, indicates that ChannelAdvisor could raises as much as $86.25 million in an offering (but this is a placeholder amount).Flipboard Adds 3 Million Users Since Launch Of Personalized Magazines, Over 500,000 Magazines Created To Date
Apr 11, 9:11PM
Mobile magazine Flipboard revealed today that over half a million personalized magazines have been created on its platform since the launch of the new feature just two weeks prior. During this time, the company also added 3 million new users to its service, bringing its total user base to now 53 million.Unfazed By Bitcoin's Wild Swings And Mysterious Origins, Silicon Valley VCs Place Their Bets
Apr 11, 9:04PM
Bitcoin's record highs and the ensuring surge in hacking attempts and thefts may be grabbing headlines. However, beneath the chaos, Silicon Valley's best-known venture firms are finally starting to make real bets around the crypto-currency.Sqwiggle Makes Working Remotely Less Lonely, More Awesome
Apr 11, 8:59PM
Hey Marissa! Check this one out. Sqwiggle is browser-based group video chat built with work-from-homers in mind. It's got the office-like immediacy that Skype lacks, but without the noise of a Google Hangout. As someone who's worked from home for much of the last 5 years, I'm kind of in love.Creative Market Previews Its API For A Digital Asset Marketplace With Photoshop Extension
Apr 11, 8:29PM
Creative Market, the online store for creative digital assets, including graphics, themes, templates and fonts, this week introduced a new Photoshop extension that's designed to preview the power of its upcoming API. Creative Market already offers a central web-based store that acts almost like an Amazon for digital creative professionals, but its ultimate vision is much broader – it hopes to give pros the opportunity to buy and sell their wares right where they're already doing their work, which is what the API is all about.LinkedIn Acquires Pulse For $90M In Stock And Cash
Apr 11, 8:26PM
LinkedIn today announced that it has acquired Pulse, the popular newsreader for the web and mobile. The transaction, LinkedIn says, is valued at approximately $90 million in a combination of about 90 percent stock and 10 percent cash. The acquisition is expected to close in the second quarter of 2013. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a total surprise, given that there had been rumors about talks between the two companies for a few weeks now. LinkedIn argues that it is acquiring Pulse because it wants the site to “be the definitive professional publishing platform – where all professionals come to consume content and where publishers come to share their content. Millions of professionals are already starting their day on LinkedIn to glean the professional insights and knowledge they need to make them great at their jobs.” "We are thrilled to be able to add Pulse's considerable talent, technology, and products to our growing ecosystem of content offerings, and we believe that they will help us accelerate our ability to deliver to our members the insights they need to be better at what they do, on any device," said Deep Nishar, LinkedIn’s SVP of Products and User Experience, in a statement today. "To continue to deliver that value to our members, our vision for content is that LinkedIn will be the definitive professional publishing platform, and Pulse is a perfect complement to this vision." Pulse was founded in 2010 by Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta while they were still students at Standford University. The service started out as an iPad app, but quickly expanded to other platforms, including the web. Just recently, Pulse started to dip its toes into social by adding a number of social features to its apps. Given today’s acquisition, chances are Pulse will put a stronger focus on this in the near future. The service currently has about 30 million users in more than 190 countries. Approximately 40 percent of its users are outside of the U.S. Kothari writes in his announcement today that the “Pulse apps will remain the same, and our two teams are excited to work together to create cool and useful new offerings.” Pulse raised an $800,000 seed round in October 2010. Redpoint Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Mayfield Fund, e.ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners participated in this round. In June 2011, Pulse raised a $9 million Series A round from New Enterprise Associates, GreycroftAnnouncing Disrupt NY Hackathon Judges And Another Wave Of Tickets
Apr 11, 8:05PM
TechCrunch Disrupt NY is only a couple of weeks off, and before the curtain rises on the main conference, we're running our famous 24-hour Hackathon. It's a great way to connect with amazing people, launch your hack in front of thousands and possibly follow in the footsteps of GroupMe, a hack from Disrupt 2010 that went on to be acquired a year later by Skype. Today we're releasing more tickets and announcing our incredible panel of Hackathon judges who'll be responsible for choosing the winners that will be featured on the main stage during TechCrunch Disrupt as well as share in the prizes from our 13 partner companies.eBay's PayPal Acquires IronPearl To Fuel Growth Beyond 123M Users
Apr 11, 8:00PM
About a month ago, I wrote about a stealthy company called IronPearl, led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed. In fact, they don’t even really like the word “growth hacker.” For years, Chudnovsky had been advising companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how to acquire users. His stealth startup, IronPearl was systematizing that advice. He and his partner have been building a set of optimization tools that will track a user through a site or app and test which combinations work best to keep them coming back after a week or a month — although the goal can be whatever you want it to be. PayPal, along with GoodReads (which was recently bought by Amazon), were early testers. Apparently, IronPearl’s product and the pair’s expertise was so valuable that eBay’s PayPal unit decided to just outright buy the company before launch. We hear the price in the “double-digit millions,” although neither company is talking about the price. With the deal, Chudnovsky becomes Paypal’s vice president of growth while Currier will be a growth advisor. (Currier won’t be coming on full-time.) “Creating a growth group is foundational for us,” said PayPal president David Marcus. “PayPal has grown to almost 125 million users almost organically, and we’ve never pulled the levers to grow much faster. There are only very few, world-renowned growth hackers in the world and Stan is one of them.” Chudnovsky and Currier were behind a Web 1.0 company called Tickle that did personality quizzes and tests. It was later acquired by job site Monster for about $100 million. He then got into gaming and sold Wonderhill to midcore developer Kabam. Then he got into advising before starting IronPearl. “The main reason I decided to sell is because I’ve built companies before,” Chudnovsky said. “I know what that path looks like. When you look at something like PayPal, it’s different. It’s more of a marketplace than just a sheer network. There are merchants and people transacting with each other.” Chudnovsky will lead a growth team that will focus on building out PayPal’s customer base beyond 123 million registered users.Like A CarWoo For Used Cars, AutoRef Raises $850K Seed Round Led By European Car Buying Marketplace, AutoScout24
Apr 11, 7:32PM
Pittsburgh-based startup AutoRef.com, which is something like a CarWoo for used vehicles, has raised $850,000 in seed funding. The round was led by an interesting, strategic investor: the large European online car marketplace, AutoScout24, which is owned by Deutsche Telekom. T-Venture, the venture arm of Deutsche Telekom, also participated in the round alongside Innovation Works, plus local angels and other investors."In The Studio," SoftTech's Charles Hudson Has Game When It Comes To Gaming
Apr 11, 7:00PM
"In The Studio" rolls on this week by welcoming a long-time Valley operator, founder, angel investor, venture capitalist, and now general partner at one of the first "super angel" funds. Charles Hudson, now a partner with SoftTech VC, has sat on every side of every table in the startup world. With stints as an operator at Google, as an investor with In-Q-Tel (the CIA's venture capital arm), and founder of companies in the gaming space, Hudson brings a wealth of experience and insights -- particularly around the gaming industry -- to the table. Hudson is a familiar face in the Valley's startup ecosystem as an active angel investor, speaker, and commentator, as well as penning a great blog with nontraditional insights, such as this one which suggested beleaguered Zynga may consider going private after going public.Following Kleiner Perkins Lawsuit, Former Partner Ellen Pao Joins Reddit To Build Strategic Partnerships
Apr 11, 6:49PM
It's been a while since we've heard about Ellen Pao, the former Kleiner Perkins partner who'd sued her firm for alleged gender discrimination. After she disclosed that she'd been fired from her position (followed by a bit of a debate on what being "fired" meant), the story went quiet. Today, we're finding out her next steps: she's joined team reddit.Sticky Raises $3M To Improve Ad Accountability With Eye Tracking
Apr 11, 6:42PM
Sticky, a startup using eye-tracking technology to measure ad effectiveness, has raised $3 million in new funding. The company is a rebranding of EyeTrackShop, a webcam-based eyetracking service which spun out of Tobii Technologies. The big selling point is the ability to determine not just whether an ad was served and rendered on a consumer's screen, but whether they actually saw it.Rockmelt Will Shut Down Social Browser To Focus On Funneling The Web Into Its New Content Feed Site
Apr 11, 6:36PM
“Distributing a desktop browser is hard and expensive (especially if you don't have an operating system or the world's most trafficked website to promote it)” says Rockmelt, so today it announced it will soon stop supporting its social browser. As consolation, existing users (and those with TechCrunch’s invite link) can access the private beta of its new site that ports its content feed apps to the web. Rockmelt was founded in 2009 with an ambitious mission: to reimagine the web browser for the social era. As an alternative to bookmarks, the left and right edges of of the Google Chromium-based browser housed a buddy list of online friends to chat and share with, and a stack of icons for your favorite sites and social networks that displayed counters for how many times they’d be updated since your list visit. The idea was to relieve you of having to manually check your Facebook, Twitter, and bookmarked page for new content in an endless loop. Losing The Browser War Users who picked up Rockmelt had strong engagement with tons of clicks to these app edges each day. But it just couldn’t seem to make a dent in the marketshare of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Meanwhile it was burning money trying. Luckily a formal product development partnership that some believed was a pre-cursor to an acquisition helped the startup raise a $30 million Series B from a A-list investors Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, and First Round Capital. By October 2012 it only had 4 million registrations, and decided to refocus on a new concept, that content should be delivered to you rather than hunted for, and a new medium, mobile. It launched Rockmelt For iPad and later for iPhone, which fed social updates from friends and posts by sites you subscribe to into a Pinterest-style masonry grid of visual tiles. This apps harnessed the strengths of the small screen, offering a laid-back content browsing experience where you never have to type. While they didn’t rocket to the top of the charts, the team tells me they have hundreds of thousands of users that are highly engaged. In the end, Rockmelt realized it had lost the browser war. While it knew gaining traction for a desktop browser would be tough, the team writes it didn’t foresee it would end up spending 50% of its development time on keeping Rockmelt up to date with theEarly Bird Disrupt NY Sales End Today, And We're Giving Tickets To The First 10 People Who Donate $500 To TFA
Apr 11, 6:35PM
Thank you readers, you helped us kick Path to the curb in our Teach For America challenge. Muahahahahahaha. Now let's see if we can get to that number one slot. Fear our TechCrunch power, Jessica Lessin. To sweeten the deal we're offering free Disrupt tickets for the first ten people who donate $500 and over to the cause. In case you missed it, we're having a SF TechCrunch Meetup to benefit TFA, with a minimum donation fee of $15, though the more generous among you can donate in $50, $100, $500, and $1000 increments.IBM To Invest $1 Billion In Flash Technology Research, Reflecting Obsolescence Of Hard Disk Drives
Apr 11, 5:35PM
IBM plans to invest $1 billion in research to design, create and integrate Flash into its servers, storage systems and middleware, a reflection of the changing requirements needed for companies to manage massive amounts of data. As part of the news, IBM also announced a new line of Flash appliances. These storage appliances are based on technology acquired from Texas Memory Systems. IBM says the appliances can run 20 times faster than spinning hard drives and can store up to 24 terabytes of data. The move comes as more companies need better ways to manage the high volume of data resulting from the influx of mobile apps, the web and the ability to create data with updates in pictures, video and trillions of text messages. All that data makes for major bottlenecks in systems that have long depended on mechanical hard disks to process information. Those hard disk systems did just fine in an age when vendors built vertical stacks for transaction-based systems, such as ERP and business-management solutions. Today, the market is shifting to a more distributed horizontal mesh where data is spread over tens of thousands of servers. IBM has a deep history in the server market and middleware and is showing a new focus on storage. But who is this for? If you look at the news, it’s apparent this move is to support its existing customer base, which has long-term investments in credit-card processing, manufacturing and operations that require large enterprise resource planning environments. IBM’s Flash investment shows how companies are calibrating their strategies according to the data they process. Facebook uses Flash to process Internet-scale applications. IBM will apply Flash to software installations inside data centers at big banks, factories and other large-scale operations. These are two different uses tied together by the universal need to manage data and integrate it into the way we live and work.Piki.fm Goes From Beta To Public As TurnTable Launches Its New Social Network For Music Lovers
Apr 11, 5:21PM
Today, Turntable.fm's latest mobile venture is launching out of beta as a free iOS app to the public. Music lovers, meet Piki.fm. Piki.fm is the asyncrhonous counterpart to Turntable.fm's real-time social music experience. Where Turntable requires that you and your friends (or randos) all be in the same room at the same time, Piki lets you enjoy a steady stream of your friends' music at your own leisure and under your own conditions.Accel Adds Yelp Communications Exec Stephanie Ichinose As First Marketing Partner
Apr 11, 5:00PM
VC firm Accel Partners is bringing on its first marketing partner with the addition of former Yelp Senior Director of Communications Stephanie Ichinose. In her new role, Ichinose will be responsible for managing the Accel Partners brand and advising entrepreneurs in the Accel portfolio on their strategic positioning and communications strategies.Is An Always-On Xbox Indefensible Or Is Taking To Twitter Just The Wrong Way To Defend It?
Apr 11, 4:59PM
After a very public defense of rumors about the next Xbox's always-on Internet requirements, a new report claims that Microsoft creative director Adam Orth is no longer with the company. In a series of Twitter posts, Orth defended the move by countering that "every device" is now constantly connected, and then delivered a low-blow when someone responded suggesting always-on connectivity might not work great for customers in rural locations.Perks-Focused Hotel Startup 'Want Me Get Me' Gets A New Search-By-Map Feature
Apr 11, 4:52PM
Members of Want Me Get Me, a startup promising its members a VIP experience at any partner hotel, should have an easier time finding the right hotel starting today. The site connects travelers with luxury and boutique hotels looking to attract new customers and build loyalty. Every booking through Want Me Get Me includes a spot on the hotel's VIP list, free WiFi, and a room upgrade when available. Users can search for other free perks too. And the startup even sends users' Facebook profile photo to the hotel so that they can be greeted by name when they arrive.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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