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Ruzzle-maker MAG Interactive Raises $6M From Nokia Growth Partners
Nov 13, 8:00AM
MAG Interactive, a Swedish app maker that went on to create Ruzzle, a game that’s been downloaded more than 45 million times in the last 18 months, just picked up $6 million in funding from Nokia Growth Partners. While U.S. investors may have cooled a bit on mobile gaming, it continues to be incredibly hot in Europe with Supercell recently picking up more than $1.5 billion from Softbank and Gung-Ho and U.K.’s King on the road to a potential IPO. Nokia Growth Partners also recently backed what’s considered Finland’s most promising emerging game startup, Grand Cru. MAG Interactive makes for another bet in the gaming space. The company, which started making apps the day that the iOS app store launched, originally was a studio-for-hire that built apps for other clients. They moved away from the agency model and started building apps for themselves. Eventually they put their first game, Ruzzle, out in March of last year. It’s a take on classic word-finding games, where players compete to find as many words as possible on a four-by-four grid by sliding their fingers from letter to letter. Daniel Hasselberg said his team started thinking about mobile Internet services and games a couple of years ago. They initially soft-launched Ruzzle, but it took off in late 2012 and early 2013 and hit the #1 spot in the U.S. “If we want to grow to the next level, we thought that we needed someone with experience in scaling an organization and that could externally challenge our ideas and thoughts,” Hasselberg said. They didn’t need the capital, because like many successful gaming studios, they were already profitable. In the deal, none of the team took money off the table though. The investment went into MAG Interactive’s parent company. The company plans to hire more staff to grow beyond their current headcount of 22 people. They also want to make it more of a proper free-to-play experience. Right now, the app uses a premium model where users can pay for an experience without ads.
Netflix Builds A More Visual, Universal User Experience For TV Apps From The Ground Up
Nov 13, 5:01AM
Netflix is rolling out a new user experience for its TV apps today, which represents the biggest single product update in the company's history. The update introduces a whole new way for users to browse, search, and discover titles on a wide range of devices, from the Playstation 3 to Xbox 360 to Roku and everything in-between. The whole thing is a lot more visual, and is designed to entice users with more information about shows and movies on the platform, along with the reasons why those are titles have been suggested.
Confirmed: Microsoft's Belfiore To Take On Some Internet Explorer Duties, Will Retain Windows Phone Role
Nov 13, 2:41AM
Sources familiar with the situation have confirmed with TechCrunch that Joe Belfiore, current corporate vice president of the Windows Phone project, will pick up some Internet Explorer duties in addition to his current role. Earlier reports indicated that Belfiore would take on some of the Internet Explorer responsibility left open by now departing corporate vice president of that effort, Dean Hachamovitch. At that time, TechCrunch was unsure if Belfiore would relinquish his Windows Phone duties in part or full as part of the change. Instead, Belfiore will, as reported previously by The Verge, pick up user interface work on Internet Explorer (TechCrunch has confirmed this as well), but is not set to step down from the Windows Phone team that he has been part of for some time. Belfiore has worked on the user interface of Internet Explorer releases in the past, including Internet Explorer 4. The exit of Hachamovitch from Internet Explorer makes sense from a product perspective, as Internet Explorer 11 recently shipped for both Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. The move expands Belfiore’s responsibility matrix, and can thus be viewed as promotion of sorts. Hachamovitch will, in his own words, “start a new team to take on something new.” Microsoft is in the midst of a large reorganization, as well as a business model shift and the search for a new CEO, making it a liquid moment for the company. Expect more transfers and expansions such as the one above in the next few months. Top Image Credit: Flickr
Amazon DynamoDB Serves Trillions Of Requests Per Month While Counterpart SimpleDB Is No Longer A Listed Product On AWS
Nov 13, 1:22AM
An Amazon executive said today at AWS re:Invent that NoSQL database DynamoDB now serves trillions of requests per month to its users. The news is in contrast to SimpleDB, another AWS NoSQL database, which is no longer listed on AWS product page, a sign that the world's largest cloud service is phasing it out in favor of its newer counterpart.
Charitable Donation Platform, JustGiving, Launches Yimby, A Crowdfunding Platform For Social Good
Nov 13, 1:05AM
The crowdfunding space has just got a little more crowded in the UK, with the official launch today of a platform for crowdsourcing donations aimed at doing social good. Yimby.com -- an affirmative play on the phrase nimby (aka 'not in my back yard') -- is a new business from online charity donation company JustGiving, a 12-year veteran of the digital giving space. 
Report Indicates That Windows Phone's Joe Belfiore May Return To The IE Team
Nov 13, 12:10AM
Microsoft's Joe Belfiore will absorb some of the responsibilities formerly executed by Internet Explorer's corporate vice president, according to sources speaking to The Verge. Microsoft declined to comment to TechCrunch on the potential move. The role was vacated by Dean Hachamovitch, who announced his internal transfer yesterday. Belfiore's current job title is "corporate vice president and manager for Windows Phone Program Management."
Cyanogen Launches Installer App To Bring Aftermarket Android To The Masses
Nov 12, 11:51PM
Cyanogen Inc. revealed a few months back that it closed a $7 million seed investment from Benchmark Capital. The vision it laid out at the time was no small one: it wants its cooked version of Android to become the third most-used mobile OS behind iOS and Android proper. Naturally, that involves getting CyanogenMod onto as many devices as it can, and today the company took one giant leap in that direction. They've just made it easier for average folks to flash their software onto their smartphones with an installer app available in the Google Play Store.
TC Cribs: Wooga, Where Addictive Social Games Are Made In The Heart Of Berlin
Nov 12, 11:09PM
Last month, a number of us TechCrunchers grabbed our passports and jetted to Berlin for our first-ever Disrupt Europe conference. The tech scene in Berlin is very hot at the moment, so while we were in town, we knocked on the doors of a couple of the city’s startups for TechCrunch TV’s Cribs series. Now, if you were somehow under the impression that tricked-out startup offices are only found in Silicon Valley, this episode will show you just how wrong you are. The headquarters of social gaming startup Wooga in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood are just as colorful and creative as any place we’ve toured — with the added bonus of being filled with a much more multi-lingual staff (and arguably better beer) than you’d find around these parts. Check out the video embedded above to see Steve Gilmore take us on a tour to see the monsters, robots, swings, nap pods, and Neil Patrick Harris cut-outs of Wooga’s HQ.
Photobucket Is Releasing A New App, Looking To Close The Loop On Their Storage Services
Nov 12, 10:32PM
When Photobucket redesigned its site and user experience with better uploading and new social features last fall, it did so in the hope of reestablishing itself as the go-to site for photo sharing and storage after falling in popularity relative to its competitors. The ten-year-old company, which filed $5.67 million in equity funding in May, is now launching a mobile app that extends the full capabilities of its service to smartphone users. Recognizing that photo taking and sharing is fractured between people’s devices and services, Photobucket’s plan is to create one cohesive ecosystem to incentivize users to convert (or reconvert) to the system. “Photobucket has a history of being an open, highly scalable [platform], and we wanted to build on that. We looked at two real market problems: photos are everywhere on multiple devices and services and platforms, and people are losing photos because it’s too hard to back them up,” said David Toner, Photobucket’s head of marketing. Photobucket relaunched its mobile web app last month. It now serves as an onramp to the native app, which allows users to back up, edit, organize, and share their photos. While the app can serve as a quick organizational tool, users are still going to want to do major organization on the website. In a few weeks time, Photobucket will be rolling out the next phase of their development: use as a social hub for event-specific photo uploads, for which people may be using various services like Instagram, Facebook, and Google+. They remained fairly quiet about the specifics, but the aim is to allow people to discover each other’s photos in a way that doesn’t require people to change their uploading behavior. Photobucket’s U.S. monthly uniques stood at 20.85 million in October, up from 20.2 in September and 16.5 in April. But it still has a long way to go relative to other leading photo sites like Flickr, Instagram, Pinterest, and Shutterfly. Of those sites, it showed the highest bounce rates during April through September of this year, according to numbers from SimilarWeb — likely the result of bad traffic from search. It’s also behind Shutterfly and Flickr in page views per visit (Instagram is too, probably because its scrolling feed doesn’t require much clicking). On average time spent per visit Shutterfly and Instagram also came out on top of Photobucket. [Image: Flickr / Pedro Ribeiro Simões]
Justin Bieber-Backed "Shots Of Me" Launches Selfie Sharing App
Nov 12, 10:26PM
Sunsets? Landscapes? Latte art? Look back at your old photos and you'll notice they're boring unless there's a human face in them. Now think about teens on social media. Immaturity fuels bullying and drama-filled comment reels. So RockLive has taken funding from Justin Bieber to solve these problems with Shots of Me, a self-portrait photo sharing iOS app that launches today.
Skytap Now Ports To The Amazon Cloud
Nov 12, 9:17PM
Cloud automation company Skytap has launched advanced integration capabilities with Amazon Web Services (AWS) that allow customers to develop and test on Skytap Cloud workloads that mirror AWS production environments. The company provides a platform that has until now been used for VMware-based environments. Companies export their virtual machines to Skytap and then provision accordingly. With AWS, customers will pull Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) into Skytap and then adjust according to instance size. Once they export and set the parameters, they can then export templates. The data stored behind the scenes is AWS metadata and AWS images.
Quora Signals It's Favoring Search Ads For Eventual Monetization, Launches Author Stats Tool
Nov 12, 9:05PM
30% to 40% of Quora's traffic comes from people searching for specific things, so it tells me it's likely that search ads that leverage intent will be how it eventually monetizes its Q&A service. The news comes alongside the launch of Quora Stats, a new analytics tool that shows authors exactly how much traffic their Quora questions, answers, and blog posts are getting.
Windows Phone, Android Gain Market Share While Apple Slips Despite Growth In iPhone Shipments
Nov 12, 8:24PM
IDC published its third-quarter 2013 smartphone market share and sales estimates today. Winners this quarter are Windows Phone and Android. Apple was mixed, while BlackBerry managed to implode at a clip so incredible, it reminds me of what happened to Longhorn's dreams.
Microsoft Updates Surface Firmware, Patches IE Zero-Day Exploit Among 19 Total Flaws
Nov 12, 7:47PM
We don't cover Patch Tuesday much here at TechCrunch because the majority of you know how to leave Windows Update on and suck down the new software each month direct from the source. This month is a bit more special, however, as it heavily impacts the Surface line of tablets. Up front, among the updates are a set of Internet Explorer fixes that are worth checking into if you manage PCs. For a rundown of what is in the security side of this update cycle, the genial Larry Seltzer at ZDNet has a good rundown.
Microsoft Ditches Its Employee Ranking System For Something Less Internally Destructive
Nov 12, 6:51PM
This morning an internal memo inside of Microsoft detailed a new employee ranking system that will replace former policy. Microsoft's former method for judging performance was widely considered backwards, poisonous, and generally a bad apple. Tom Warren of The Verge published the memo this morning, and TechCrunch independently confirmed its veracity. A Microsoft spokesperson released the following statement to us: "These changes will encourage greater speed, creativity and teamwork to help us bring innovation to market faster and better serve our customers."
The former system used a method of rating employees that encouraged strong employees to surround themselves with weaker workers to ensure that they would stay at the top of their cohort, with the requisite performance incentives and job security. That's hardly a system that is conducive to strong teams and big new products.
Airbnb Launches New Mobile Apps, Introduces 'Host Home' To Provide Smarter Tools For Managing Listings
Nov 12, 6:28PM
Airbnb is hoping to get more of its hosts and guests on mobile, as it has launched a "reimagination" of its iOS and Android apps. Today at an event in Airbnb's new San Francisco office space, the company announced the new versions, which include an improved host dashboard, a more immersive design, and host groups, to help hosts connect with one another.
Airbnb Touts 500K Homes And 350K Hosts Around The World, Launches Groups To Share Best Practices
Nov 12, 6:18PM
Airbnb continued its pitch to regulators and hosts about the benefits of the new sharing economy, touting some new stats about the number of hosts and lodgings available on the company's platform. Five years after launch, the company now has more than 500,000 homes and 350,000 hosts in 34,000 cities around the world. 
Twitter Announces Custom Timelines For Hashtags Or Topics On Tweetdeck, Launching API Too
Nov 12, 6:12PM
Twitter will let you create custom timelines based on topics, hashtags and more from Tweetdeck, it announced today. Twitter is also providing an API to allow developers to build this functionality into their products. This will allow people to create powerful streams of information out of Twitter’s public firehose, effectively allowing anyone to curate individual streams of data tailored to a topic. The topics could be literally anything that’s contained in a tweet, including hashtags, a phrase like ‘drinking coffee’ or event-specific keywords like ‘Superbowl’ or ‘TC Disrupt’. The ability to create custom timelines in Tweetdeck is rolling out slowly, so not everyone will have it right away. This is apparently in an effort to educate people about the new capabilities of custom timelines and to see how people are using them. Not all of Twitter’s consumer products will get this feature right away. If it’s successful, however, it could definitely expand to other products. Twitter’s Brian Ellin says that the custom timelines are ‘entirely new’. “You name it, and choose the Tweets you want to add to it, either by hand or programmatically using the API…This means that when the conversation around an event or topic takes off on Twitter, you have the opportunity to create a timeline that surfaces what you believe to be the most noteworthy, relevant Tweets.” Every timeline will have its own permalink page that you can refer users to on Twitter.com. That makes it easy to share and shuffle them around and refer people to them. They’re also completely embeddable. Over the past few months, the ‘tweet collection’ tool Storify has been expanding to other networks like Facebook in an effort to allow people to create stories around all kinds of social media. That seems wise at this point as many of the use cases of Storify appear to be covered by Twitter’s new custom timelines. You’re able, for instance, to create a custom timeline in Tweetdeck and drag-and-drop individual tweets to it if you wish. Any custom timelines you create will show up in your profile card in Tweetdeck, and users can view them from there. Each timeline is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share so others can follow along in real time as you add more Tweets. And since custom timelines are part of our Twitter for Websites toolkit, you can embed these timelines on
Makerbot Wants To Put A 3D Printer In Every School
Nov 12, 6:12PM
3D-printer company Makerbot is leading a crowdfunding drive to buy 3D printers for every school in America. The push, called Makerbot Academy, will begin with CEO Bre Pettis personally pledging a Makerbot to every public high school in the company’s home town of Brooklyn. “MakerBot Academy is a big thing. It is epic. There are around 100,000 schools in the USA and we want those students to be ready for the future,” Pettis wrote. You can donate at the DonorsChoose.org page. “As a former teacher, I believe strongly in creating a new model for innovation. A MakerBot is a manufacturing education in a box," wrote Pettis in a blog post. "We need to encourage our teachers and our youth to think differently about manufacturing and innovation.” Makerbot is working with America Makes, part of the The National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute that is “kickstarting” the 3D printing industry in the U.S. Teachers can request printers here and designers interested in building educational models can register their designs on Thingiverse.
Retina iPad Mini's A7 Runs At 1.3GHz, Same As iPhone 5s And Slightly Below iPad Air's 1.4GHz
Nov 12, 6:07PM
Early benchmarks, like this one at Geekbench, noted by Primate Labs founder John Poole, are getting posted for Apple’s new Retina iPad mini and they’re looking pretty good. The A7 in the smaller tablet appears to perform nearly as well as its larger sibling, but is clocked in about 100MHz lower at 1.3GHz. The larger iPad Air’s A7 processor runs at 1.4GHz and the iPhone 5s runs at around 1.30GHz. The lower clock speed in the mini (very slightly lower) will likely not affect performance much overall. The reduction may be due to thermal profiles which prevent the device from getting uncomfortably warm to the touch, a complaint with some previous models of iPad. Many iPad Air owners and reviewers have noted that the tablet does not have the same warming issues even with heavy use. Any true test of iPad mini performance will likely not come as a result of the maximum clock speed but instead as a result of how Apple handles throttling the processor both under load and in idle states. This kind of careful power management is how Apple extends battery life and reduces heat. As long as that’s done carefully, and more along the curve of the iPad Air vs. the more battery conscious iPhone 5s, it’s unlikely that users will see much of a difference between the two tablets. Apple’s iPad mini with Retina display went on sale last night, in a somewhat surprisingly casual launch for a new model.
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