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DailyWorth Raises A $1 Million Series A2 Financing Round
Apr 22, 11:06PM
DailyWorth, an online community for financially minded women, is closing another strong round of funding by raising a Series A2 of $1 million. This round comes sixteen months after raising $2 million in their Series A last January. This round was led by DFJ Gotham, while additional investors include Gabriel Investments, 500 Startups, Robinhood Ventures, Investors’ Circle, Bullet Time Ventures, Patient Capital Collaborative, Joanne Wilson, Rebecca Saeger, Carol Chow, Diego Canoso, and Mark Censits. The money raised in their Series A2 will be used for "growth and key hires" as DailyWorth continues to expand their readership. DailyWorth was founded in 2009 as a daily email newsletter geared towards women, offering tips and advice on money management and investment. Their newsletter quickly amassed more than 55,000 subscribers within two years of launch, and in January last year that number ballooned to 250,000 subscribers. DailyWorth estimates that their site will hit two to three million monthly readers by the end of 2013. DailyWorth’s website is populated with editorial content from their writing staff, which is helmed by MP Dunleavey, a former contributor and columnist for Money Magazine and the New York Times. In addition to their editorial content, DailyWorth has begun to offer an assortment of online courses called “Money Clarity”, which provides a four week program with YouTube videos and online workbooks that teach their registrants how to better manage their money. DailyWorth also recently scored partnerships with Charles Schwab, Fidelity, and Nestwise, in addition to their preexisting partnerships with ING and H&R Block.Web App Tutorial Tool Kera Heads For The Deadpool
Apr 22, 10:18PM
When Kera launched out of Toronto last year, their goal was to "teach the world how to use software". Alas, it seems Kera has taught its last lesson. In a farewell post on their blog, the company has announced that they'll be shuttering their products in one month.3 Awesome And Inspiring Inventions From The White House Science Fair
Apr 22, 9:58PM
Some of the nation's young brainiacs were honored today at the annual White House Science Fair. Every spring, the White House invites children to show off life-changing innovations that have mostly been constructed in MacGyver-like fashion from commercially available materials. Even though I cover this story every year, it's hard not to be inspired by brilliant young kids motivated to tackle the world's problems. "Let me just say in my official capacity as president, this stuff is really cool," said President Obama.Twitter #Music Catches Emerging Artist Frances Cone By Surprise, Calls It A "Meet And Greet" For Bands And Fans
Apr 22, 9:40PM
When Twitter #Music launched last week, it wasn’t a surprise at all to those following tech stories, since rumors had been kicking up about its existence for months. However, it was a surprise to the Frances Cone Band, which is popping up in the “emerging artists” section of the app. In a world where we focus so much on “big stars,” especially ones with millions of followers on Twitter, it’s important to remember that these platforms can make all the difference for those who are just getting started and are waiting and hoping to be discovered. I spoke with their lead singer, Frances Cone, who didn’t get a chance to play with the app before it was launched. She wasn’t a big Twitter user before, but has been pleasantly surprised thus far: “I was a pretty light Twitter user before the music app because I felt like it should be reserved for jokes. Only the best jokes. Or original feelings, of which there are few.” She says that “Twitter and I are in love” when discussing the new experience, giving us some insight into what it’s like to start getting tweets, and more importantly new listeners, from a group of people that have never heard of you before: It’s been really, really great. I wasn’t sure how to engage potential followers/fans and they basically just perfectly did it for me… like they set up a meet and greet and I get to hug all of these music lovers. The “meet and greet” aspect is an interesting one, as we knew that Twitter could be a massive distribution platform if some order was brought to it. Twitter #Music pulls in all of the tweets that include links to music that people are listening to, and then drops them into pages in the app that show trending information in order to get people engaged. More than likely, you’re not going to catch every song that the people you follow are listening to, so this is a way to trap all of that to go back to at any time. The mix of new fans and the devastating news out of Boston gave Cone mixed emotions, but reminded her that people can rely on music to get through tough times: It’s been so nice to be able to engage with actual people all over the world. It started happening simultaneously to the Boston newsMeet The Greenest Home In America
Apr 22, 9:00PM
In the surrounding hills of Silicon Valley stands the impressive Tah.Mah.Lah, the "Greenest house in America." The home is also the brainchild and abode of Foundation Capital partner and longtime VC Paul Holland and his wife, Linda Yates. We were lucky enough to be invited into their home to hear about why and how they built the most sustainable home in the country. So what makes the "Greenest" house in America? First, every aspect of the house, whose name draw origins from the Native American Ohlone word for puma or mountain lion, has been built to have minimal environmental impact. Second, the house has the highest LEED certification, which is the defacto third-party verification of green buildings.Nest Labs Teams Up With Regional Power Providers For New Energy-Saving Services And Rebates
Apr 22, 8:30PM
The Nest thermostat has already gone through a hardware revision or two and found its way onto plenty of physical and virtual store shelves, but parent company Nest Labs is eager to get it into even more households in short order. The Palo Alto company has just announced that it has teamed up with energy providers from across the country that will see new climate-control services (not to mention some rebates) go live for customers in a handful of markets.Netflix Says Fewer Than 8,000 People 'Gamed' Its Free Trials To Watch House Of Cards
Apr 22, 8:23PM
Netflix released its first-quarter earnings report today, and the company saw another period of strong growth, adding more than 3 million streaming members, bringing its total to 36 million. Domestically, Netflix saw 2 million new streaming members, which was relatively equal compared to last quarter and up from 1.74 million in Q1 last year.Netflix Beats Analyst Estimates, With 29.2 Million US Subscribers And $1 Billion In Q1 Revenue
Apr 22, 8:07PM
Netflix reported positive first-quarter numbers, including revenues of $1.02 billion during the first three months of the year. The company also announced that it added 2 million domestic in the quarter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 29.2 million.Limor Fried AKA Ladyada Will Join Us To Talk Hardware On The Disrupt Stage
Apr 22, 7:45PM
We often give short shrift to hardware at Disrupt mostly because investors are afraid to look at companies that can't pivot without trashing 30 days of inventory. No longer. Limor Fried AKA Ladyada will join me on stage to talk about what it takes to build a profitable, cool, and amazingly popular hardware company out of a dorm room.Powerhouse Facebook Ad Platform Nanigans Raises $5.8M Series A.1 For Predictive Modeling R&D
Apr 22, 7:21PM
Do you target kids with cheap ads or more expensive adults? Nanigans has just raised a $5.85 million "Series A.1" from Avalon Ventures to build SaaS technology that predicts which audiences earn advertisers more money. With revenue up 6x in 18 months, Nanigans hopes to keep up with Facebook's progress by pouring its funding into R&D. It's already discovered a surprising trick to supercharging ROI.The Ressence Type 3 Is The Liquid-Filled Watch Of The Future
Apr 22, 7:18PM
Because I like sharing cool watches with you guys I decided to share this cool watch with you guys. It's called the Ressence Type 3 and it's actually a liquid-filled mechanical watch with a nearly featureless face. Each of those dials - registers in the parlance - look like they are seamlessly embedded in the face surface and the watch, being suspended in synthetic oil, has no crown and is wound automatically.Google AdWords Enhanced Campaigns Now Let Advertisers Highlight Their Google+ Follower Count, Get Improved In-App Targeting
Apr 22, 7:10PM
Google+ is finding its way into every Google product, and AdWords is no exception. Starting today, AdWords advertisers can easily highlight their Google+ follower counts in their enhanced campaigns. On average, Google says, ads with these follower counts have “a 5-10% higher click-through rate” than regular ads. The company, it seems, tested these new ads with the help of a number of major brands, including Red Bull, National Geographic and H&M. Here is what these ads look like: To be eligible to show these annotations, businesses need to have a Google+ page with a verified URL, and the Google+ page needs to have “recent, high-quality posts and a significant number of followers, meaning 100 for most businesses.” These new social annotations are automatic for all enhanced campaigns and won’t incur any additional cost. Showing follower counts in ads isn’t totally new, of course. Google launched its “social extensions” for AdWords last year. Those, however, have to be set up at the campaign level while this new integration into enhanced campaigns is automatic. Enhanced In-App Ad Targeting Enhanced campaigns, it is worth stressing, are still a pretty new feature in AdWords, and the focus here is on creating ads that businesses can run on desktop and mobile without the need to set up multiple campaigns. With today’s release, Google is also making some general improvements to these enhanced campaigns. Specifically, it’s making it easier to target in-app ads “based on people's context like location, time of day and device, with enhanced campaigns.”Keen On… Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock – When Everything Happens Now [TCTV]
Apr 22, 7:00PM
We all suffered from something called Future Shock - a condition that, according to best-selling writer Alvin Toeffler, made us unable to deal with the pace of technological change. Today, however, our shock with the future has been replaced with present shock. That, at least, is the view of the contemporary Toeffler, Douglas Rushkoff, who has just written the much lauded Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now.Kik Raises $19.5M Series B, Bets On Its Cards Platform Play To Take On WhatsApp And Others
Apr 22, 6:17PM
Kik has raised a $19.5M Series B funding round, the company revealed today, led by Foundation Capital and including RRE Ventures, Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures. The Waterloo-based messaging app company will be using the funding to help continue to support its growth, and the new injection of cash comes at a crucial point for the company as it sets its sights on broader platform ambitions with the recently-introduced Cards feature.Eventbrite Raises $60M Round Led By Tiger Global Management
Apr 22, 6:11PM
Event registration and ticketing service Eventbrite announced earlier today that it has raised $60 million in new funding. The round was led by Tiger Global Management, which previously led Eventbrite's $50 million Series E. New investor T. Rowe Price also participated. In the funding press release, CEO Kevin Hartz argues that "live experiences are the new luxury good" and describes the round is "the most efficient way" to scale Eventbrite globally "while remaining totally focused on our users."WordPress.com Launches New Vertical And Theme For Hotels, Inns And B&Bs
Apr 22, 5:45PM
WordPress.com now offers hotel, inn and bed and breakfast owners and managers the ability to showcase their properties with the help of a new responsive theme just for hotels. In addition, the service also today launched a special site dedicated to showing hotel owners how they can use the service to promote their properties. For WordPress.com, adding this hotel vertical is part of a now-familiar pattern. Over the last few months, WordPress.com has been making a concerted effort to launch special verticals for businesses like restaurants and use cases like sites for schools and personal portfolios for photographers and designers. The emphasis here is clearly on showing how WordPress.com can be more than “just” a blogging tool and emphasizes the service’s overall content-management features. The new responsive theme is fully customizable and specifically geared toward hotels. It uses WordPress’ page template feature to allow owners to add the details about their rooms and amenities and also features a reservations widget that allows users to easily contact the owners with their travel plans. This widget, it is worth noting, does not allow users to directly book a room, however, and isn’t currently integrated with any payments solution. Typically, WordPress uses these announcements to highlight some of its paid upgrades like custom domains, extra storage and custom design features. Most hotel and B&B owners probably don’t need these, so the company doesn’t highlight them in today’s release, but chances are, WordPress.com’s overall strategy of launching these verticals is mostly geared toward adding more professional users to the platform, given that they will also be more likely to pay for these upgrades.CA Acquires Layer 7 Technologies To Connect Cloud, Mobile And Internet Of Things As API Market Starts To Consolidate
Apr 22, 5:33PM
CA Technologies announced this morning that it has acquired API management company Layer 7. It is the second major acquisition of an API management company in the past week, signaling a consolidation of a market that larger companies see as vital for closing the gap between on-premise and online infrastructure and apps. Last week, Intel acquired Mashery for $180 million. The acquisition price for Layer 7 was not disclosed but the Mashery price serves as a good guide for what CA was ready to pay. CA also announced it is buying Nolio, a company that provides continuous application delivery. In a press release, CA said its solution combined with Layer 7 will help organizations to better manage and secure APIs and better deliver applications in the cloud across mobile and web environments. CA said the acquisition will help: Securely enable strategic cloud, mobile and "Internet of Things" initiatives through API security and management Accelerate service delivery and increase profitability by externalizing and monetizing existing application assets that are securely offered via APIs Expand the network of API developers by offering a convenient API development platform that provides all the tools necessary to discover, publish and test APIs Govern API activity in order to enforce SLAs, improve operational performance and monetize big data transactions Secure the externalized API business through authentication, authorization, auditing and threat protection. Layer 7 is considered one of the leaders in the API management space. It competes with Mashery and providers such as Apigee, which remains an independent company. The space also encompasses back-end-as-a-service (BaaS) providers such as Kinvey, Parse and Stackmob. APIs have long been a staple for app developers. With the advent of REST-based APIs, the web and mobile app space boomed, providing the means to integrate multiple services in one application. With today’s enterprise, the need is to integrate online and on-premise architectures. It becomes important to build a layer around applications that can be connected with APIs to pull out relevant information that feeds into other systems. That strategy seems to be a part of what makes Layer 7 appealing to CA. The acquisition appears complenentary to the Nolio purchase, which “reinforces the enterprise evolution of DevOps – the confluence of application development and deployment via IT operations", said 451 Research Senior Analyst Jay Lyman. He goes on to explain "how more enterprise and service-provider customers are implementing automation, continuous deployment and DevOps more broadly.” That puts CA in a spot to provide a next generation of ITWant To Help Archive Upcoming.org Before Yahoo Shuts It Down? Try This.
Apr 22, 5:28PM
The Archive Team, the same group who once saved around 900 GB of Geocities content before Yahoo shut it down, later releasing it in torrent format, is now focusing on archiving content from another Yahoo property preparing to hit the chopping block: Upcoming.org. The collective's involvement in saving the index of the events database follows an impassioned plea from creator Andy Baio, who recently explained how Yahoo's security made it difficult to back up the site's content by simply scraping pages.First Look At iMFL, Joe Montana's Social Fantasy Football App [TCTV]
Apr 22, 5:21PM
Football is a sport that brings everyone together, even if you’re not a diehard fan or have never played the game yourself. The rush of energy that comes with rooting for your favorite team and arm-chair-quarterbacking an entire game is something people around the world do every Sunday. For those who need to live, eat and breathe football throughout the week, fantasy football is an essential part of the pageantry leading up to every week’s packed NFL schedule. It’s a packed space, with Yahoo!, ESPN and the NFL itself having online leagues you can join with your friends and strangers. The model hasn’t changed though, with the premise being selecting the players that you think will perform the best throughout the season, collecting points as they play games week after week. A familiar name and face, four-time Super Bowl champion quarterback, Joe Montana, has his own spin on fantasy football, and will be releasing an app called iMFL prior to the start of this year’s NFL season. The app is part fantasy football, part predictive social “game,” with the ability to place bets with friends as games play out in real-time. For example, you could guess that the next play will be an interception. If you’re right, the points are yours. The hope is that you’ll be playing around with iMFL on your iPhone or iPad while you watch the game with friends, no matter where they are. Montana and his co-founder Damon Grow, CEO of Crowdmob, came into the office to give us an exclusive preview: The app isn’t available yet, but it will be out on Apple’s App Store, so get ready. It’s a crowded space, but I think with the in-app purchases and constant real-time engagement, iMFL could do well. This isn’t a one-time thing for Montana, as he tells me that there are a few other projects that he’s working on which he’ll share with us soon. Bonus: This isn’t Montana’s first “game,” as fans will remember Joe Montana’s Sports Talk Football for Sega Genesis. It was impressive back in 1991, but the Madden series won out and become a blockbuster success:Recruit.net Revamp Lets You Ping Friends About Their Jobs
Apr 22, 5:00PM
Recruit.net just rebuilt its site and underlying engine, in the hopes of attracting new users. The job search site is an aggregator pulling listings from job databases and individual job listings on corporate sites. This is how it hopes to differentiate from larger competitors like Monster and JobStreet, which display listings that companies have specifically taken out on the job sites themselves. Recruit.net’s founder, Maneck Mohan, said the revamp was done in order to make the backend search quicker, and so that the site can keep users coming to it. He said Recruit.net attracts about 500 new sign-ups and spits out results for about a million job searches done per day. It has a database of a million registered users right now. With the revamp, the site is also launching a feature called Social Connections, which allows users to “discreetly” find contacts and friends of friends, up to second-degree connections, that work at specific companies. With the feature enabled, job searches will show relevant social connections underneath job ads, and you can message contacts about those jobs in order to find out more. It doesn’t compete with social networks like LinkedIn (which also relies on recruitment as a revenue pillar). Recruit.net uses both LinkedIn and Facebook APIs to “supplement” its social layer, and any contact with users found is done on their sites, said Mohan. LinkedIn has over 200 million members as of end-2012, and reported that over half of its revenue of $304 million in the fourth quarter last year came from the company’s Talent Solutions business. This includes the company’s recruitment business, as it tries to become the go-to place for job seekers. The new revamp showing popular companies with job openings Recruit.net was created in 2006 as a side project for Mohan, who was working as a recruiter at Morgan Stanley before setting up a recruitment consultancy business catering to IT professionals. He hired two developers four-and-a-half years ago for Recruit.net, and decided to tend to the project full-time about ten months ago. Mohan and his current team of eight are based in Hong Kong. The site relies on sponsored listings for revenue, with pay-per-clicks at US$0.40 (S$0.50), and US$0.81 (S$1) for people to register and submit resumes to paying sites.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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