Startups

Baby Songs is your ultimate baby bedtime companion! Let your baby enjoy a full night's sleep with this magical app that will automatically play soothing lullabies & melodies as soon as it detects ambient sounds and slowly fade out until your baby falls sound asleep!

Adii Piennar, founder and CEO of Woothemes was one of last year’s Business of Software Conference speakers. Watch his talk (with transcript) about running a global business from the edge of the world here. Adii’s company, Woothemes celebrated it’s 1,000,000th download this week but Adii has moved on… Adii Pienaar… When I was a kid, my dad always told me “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”. I never really understood that until the day that I quit my day job in the pursuit of a new startup. But before I made that decision (and before I tell the story), I attended BoS – as a speaker – in 2012. I had intended to already attend BoS in 2011, but as the gods would have it, the dates coincided with the birth of my firstborn son. (Whilst the BoS crew made a compelling argument for me to attend, I would not have missed my son’s birth for anything. ) At this stage, I can tell you about my wonderful and memorable experience at BoS 2012. I can tell you that I found all of the talks super interesting and that Mikey Trafton’s talk about hiring for cultural-fit was mind-blowing (and my favourite one at that). I can also say that the catering was superb and that my tummy never felt more loved. And so much more. Of course. The one thing that however turned BoS (from being a great) into a spectacular conference was the friendships. The fact that BoS (purposefully) doesn’t attract thousands of attendees means it’s small, intimate and super-connected. For me, it wasn’t just about networking (something which I’m not great at to be honest), but about the relationships that I made and still have today. I met some incredible people; both fellow speakers and attendees. Many of these have become friends, with whom I interact daily. In fact, some of these friends have become mentors and advisors along my entrepreneurial journey. I found that everyone I met were so gracious with their time, passion and ideas. Which in turn meant that I had so many fascinating and stimulating conversations that my brain was literally fried at the end of each conference day. But what’s the value of those friendships? If you’re like me, you’re trying to quantify the value you’ll get from attending a BoS conference in future and you’re benchmarking that against what a conference ticket costs. And BoS isn’t the cheapest conference around either. To answer that question, I’d like to tell you a story. I recently made the decision to take a less hands-on role at WooThemes (the company I co-founded in 2007) to pursue a brand new startup adventure with PublicBeta. PublicBeta aims to help other entrepreneurs by sharing the knowledge and experience of other, successful entrepreneurs. So the BoS audience is pretty much exactly the same audience that I’m targeting. Whilst I’ve not yet launched PublicBeta and most of the work is still behind-the-scenes, I’ve already learnt a few things since I started work on the new venture: There was no way that I’d be able to launch PublicBeta without having the audience or network I have today. This is best evidenced in the fact that I’ve got commitments from 40+ entrepreneurs already (some of whom I met at BoS last year) to teach courses on PublicBeta in the next 6 months. In taking early signups for PublicBeta, I’ve seen so many friends and people that I met at BoS sign up. I can only assume that this is partly due to us meeting (entrepreneurs support each other). When I set out to work on PublicBeta, I was reminded about all the stories I heard at BoS where the entrepreneur had a vision and were working incredibly hard in their pursuit of that vision. That’s some inspiring stuff and working with people like that is a big part of my vision for PublicBeta. I’m not suggesting that that BoS is the only reason that I’m in the position to work o

BIG DATA costs big bucks. Perhaps then, it should be no surprise to see ERN, the London-based startup that’s planning to use Big Data to enable banks and merchants to create loyalty-based offers for cardholders, has announced that it’s raised more funding before actually managing to launch. Following a $2 million funding round raised last December, the company has added another $1.6 million in seed funding to its coffers. Once again, ERN is remaining tight-lipped on who its backers are, only to describe them as “high net worth individuals”, the majority of which I understand are new investors, and that the additional capital will be used to further develop its platform. In addition to its headquarters in London, the Fintech startup has an office in Silicon Valley and Singapore, and currently employs a team of 14 people, a head-count that it’s planning to ad to. Two noteworthy hires earlier this year include former Mastercard executives Anant Patel and Brian Eagle-Brown. Patel is now ERN’s Head of UK Sales, while Eagle-Brown is the startup’s UK Merchant & Acquiring Sales Director. ERP’s analytics platform, dubbed “Looop”, enables banks (or more specifically, card issuers) and participating merchants to boost customer loyalty by creating new products and offers based on the analysis of their card transactions. The idea is that by drilling into the Big Data around a customer’s transactional history — after they’ve opted in, of course — individually-tailored offers can be pushed to their smartphone via the Looop app, in the form of an e-coupon redeemable in-store. From the merchants point of view, these offers can be segmented using the Big Data that the system is able to make sense of, as well as being based on things like time and location. So, for example, only push an offer when a customer who has previously bought a dress is within a certain radius of the participating store. In addition to receiving highly targeted offers — the Looop system is designed to be non-spammy and is self-learning based on how a consumer interacts with the platform (i.e. which offers they take up) as well as their card transactions — the Looop smartphone app lets consumers track spending on their credit and debit cards in “real-time”. The pull being that they can budget more effectively — the trojan horse needed to push those enticing loyalty-based offers. Meanwhile, although yet to launch, ERN says it’s now in a position to conduct wider customer trials, which have begun already. What banks or merchants it’s working with, the startup isn’t saying or can’t say. However, I understand them to be household names.

To celebrate the 1,000,000th download of Woothemes, we thought it would be nice to share Adii Pienaar’s Business of Software Conference talk from 2012. Stay tuned to the blog too as Adii shared some news with me last week when I caught up with him in London that he will share in a guest blog post shortly. This is a story about the pros and cons of building a global business from the edge of the world. My favourite line was in the Q&A in answer to a question about how he deals with software piracy: “I don’t deal with it. I think piracy is one of those things that if someone wants to pirate your software then they should do it. If they email you for support, you laugh at them.” BUSINESS OF SOFTWARE – FOR PEOPLE BUILDING GREAT SOFTWARE BUSINESSES. This year will be the 7th Business of Software, a three day conference for founders who want to build sustainable, profitable software businesses. BoS has always been a special conference for our delegates and we want to keep it special. Attendance is restricted to just 400 attendees in 2013 and we have over 200 places taken and the next 80 tickets (as of 1st June) will be sold at the second Early Bird Rate. Next 80 tickets (as of June 1st) – save $800 on full rate. If you want to see all of the action from Business of Software 2012, the videos of the talks are available in one place now: How to access BoS 2012 talks Adii Pienaar transcript of talk, ‘Going global from the edge of the world’ ADII: So I’ve never been afraid of much in my life but having that kind of introduction and a standing ovation before I even start, that’s you know, scary as hell. So the first thing I’d like to say is thank you so much for having me Mark, Neil. I’m going to tell everyone else I was invited to speak last year and since I have about a 3 hour transit to get to any place in the States I decided not to come because it was too close to the birth of my son. So I was bummed to miss out but you know that’s one of the best things or best reasons to miss out on a conference. And then secondly today is also a significant day for me personally. My wife and I are celebrating. I’m getting emotional. We’re celebrating our second wedding anniversary and she doesn’t follow me along physically that often so she doesn’t get to see me speak at conferences. But, I’m so happy she’s here and she can actually see me and share this privilege and honor to speak with you guys today. Happy Wedding Anniversary! So you guys is my thingy supposed to work? First thing you’ll see is you’ll see me moving up and around the stage. I walk a lot with a Nike fuel band. I’ve got fuel points to earn. And the second thing I can tell you about myself before I get into the actual presentation is, I’m really bad at memorizing anything. So I’ve not memorized much in terms of my presentation but, I think I’m pretty good at telling stories and that’s what I hope to do today. I literally just hope to share a few little bits of my journey that got me to where I am today. So, my talk is titled “Creating A Global Business From the Tip of Africa.” And for those that don’t know. Okay, so that doesn’t work. For those that don’t know, I’m CEO and co-founder of Woothemes. We build products built on or powered by WordPress in the end and we hope just to help businesses be better when they’re using WordPress in various different ways. We started out in 2007. I designed and developed the very first product and the scary thing is, I knew nothing back then. So, stuff like MVP was something I learned much later so that didn’t apply. I literally took every single feature that I thought someone would want and I tried to jack it in there. For technical minded people in the audience, my biggest challenge with the first product was figuring out why a jQuery

Company / App Name: EmailOcean http://emailocean.com Twitter – EmailOcean What does it do? EmailOcean is a mass mailing application which provides an app that not only creates but also sends and tracks a campaign at the lowest prices available online,ever.One can send a 1000 mails using EmailOcean for just $0.10. Why do we need it? It is a complete mass mailing solution. We have a beautiful web-app that would help you in getting the analytics for your campaign. Who is it for? We are helping people from all aspects of the professional world-teachers,marketing firms,activists,e-commerce,subscription,bloggers and almost anyone who wants to get their message across in an efficient and economical manner. What makes it stand out from the crowd? We have two competitors and our USP is that we provide a web app that is extremely simple to use,even an amateur can create,send and track a campaign and that too at the lowest price available in the market. What’s next? We intend to a grab a fair share of the market for mass mailing. Pitch Video http://emailocean.com

In this article we will tell you how to turn twitter into a gmail notifier. Here’s the complete procedure. Gmail is an email service of Google frees of cost. It is the most used online email-service in the world. Users can not only send mails but use instant messaging service to chat with their contacts in real time. It also comes with integrated search through which you can search your entire Gmail account. Gmail has become an integral part of every internet user today. Twitter is a micro blogging site which allows its users to post and read short messages. It is one of the most visited websites having more than 500 million users. If you have account on both the sites, it will be very convenient for you to turn your Titter account into a Gmail notification application. It is very easy to set up and no programming is required. If you don’t have a twitter account, create a new account by signing up on the website. Once, signed in to Twitter, follow your Gmail account and you will get notified for every new email that arrives in your Gmail inbox. As these tweets are private, only you’ll be able to see it. You can also activate the SMS alerts for your Gmail account from your Twitter’s settings page to get all the notification on your mobile phone instantly. Set up Google’s Apps Script Google’s Apps Script keeps a check on the Gmail mailbox at the back-end and sends a tweet when a new email arrives. Create a New Twitter App Create a fresh twitter account for the Gmail mailbox by signing up and give it a name. It will prompt you to confirm the email address of your account. Once confirmed, go to the settings page of the twitter account and click on the checkbox against ‘Protect My Tweets’. This makes the Gmail notifications confidential and no one else can see your tweets or Gmail notifications. Open the twitter’s developer page,  by signing in with your newly created twitter account for Gmail mailbox and click on ‘New Twitter App’. Give it a name and description and the Callback URL should be Accept the license agreement and submit your form. If everything is right, the twitter app will be created. Again, go to your twitter’s settings and look for ‘Access Mode’. Change it to ‘Read and Write’ from ‘Read Only’ because the app will write tweets from Gmail account. Save your settings. Go to the ‘OAuth Tools’ tab note down the consumer key as well as the consumer secret key. Link your Google Docs with Twitter Create a Google Script’s copy in your Google Drive by typing the following address in your address bar https://script.google.com/d/1E4SRtWgO2CpezAFKUBojdnQs4b1Y_AKAfkJzJ1utw9eTIdKUelmO0JPA/edit?newcopy=true Enter the actual values of the consumer key and consumer secret key in place of the  and Select Run to initialize and obey the instruction for authorization of the script. Again, select Run and run the program and it will prompt you for another authorization, click on ‘Authorize’ to let Google Script post tweets on your Twitter account. Follow your Gmail Account on Twitter Now, Sign in to the main Twitter account to follow your Gmail account on Twitter. Since your new account is protected, you have to send a request to follow your new account. Approve this request from your new account. Now, you’ll be able to see your emails from Gmail account when they come in your inbox as your tweets. The post How to Turn Twitter into a Gmail Notifier appeared first on Startup news.

Video services provider Ooyala is setting up an R&D operations in Singapore, and is hiring researchers and data scientists for the facility. The company provides video technology to media companies and telcos, enabling them to stream their content online such as the Australian Open, or helping ESPN embed videos in tweets.It claims to have a collective viewership of about 200 million across 130 countries each month. Ooyala has had a small staff of four in Singapore since last year, but the new facility will bump up its presence here to about 20 when it’s operational in 2014, said CEO, Jay Fulcher. The center here will focus on researching localized products for Asia, as the company expands outside of the US. Ooyala will keep its core engineering team in Mountain View, where most of its 300 staff are. It also maintains offices in Sydney, Tokyo, LA, New York and London, with teams of about ten in each of them. Fulcher wouldn’t say how much the company is ploughing into the center here, but said it is making “significant” investments into its growth. Last year, the company raised a massive $35 million round, led by Australian telco, Telstra. It was its fifth round to date. The company isn’t profitable, but Fulcher said Ooyala can make its books positive “at any given point”, but is choosing to spend aggressively on expansion in the meantime. 45 percent of its revenue comes from North America, with Asia, Latin America and Europe after, in descending order. When I pointed out that it’s generally unusual for companies to have Asia as their second-largest revenue contributor, Fulcher said it’s because Ooyala landed a large client in the Times Group of India. “In fact, that was our first client ever,” he said. As Ooyala expands in Asia, it’s also chasing the growing audience watching video on mobile devices here. According to its latest video index report, Singapore viewers had the longest live viewing sessions at 52 minutes on average. 57 percent also watched online videos to completion, indicating that they were engaged with the content. And more viewers in the region are watching videos longer than ten minutes—considered “longform” for videos, said Fulcher. A third of viewers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and Thailand watch these longer videos. Other video networks focusing on mobiles are making an active play for the region, too. California-based Vuclip just reported that its mobile video network has 80 million monthly viewers, with most of them in the emerging markets in Asia and Latin America. It has raised $35 million to date, and earlier this year acquired another mobile video player, Jigsee, to expand into India.

Company / App Name: pentotype http://www.pentotype.com Twitter – pentotype What does it do? Pentotype gets you quickly from an idea in your head to an interactive wireframe that can be shared and discussed with others. Simply sketch by hand on a tablet and simulate on your phone, desktop, or iPad. Why do we need it? Especially in the early idea stage you need a tool that doesn\’t get in your way. You want to quickly express your idea, discuss it with others, and iterate on the concept. Who is it for? UX people, developers, managers, anyone with an app idea What makes it stand out from the crowd? None of the other tools are so easy, fast, and direct. With pentotype you just draw like on paper. What’s next? Support for sketching larger screens (desktop/webapp, iPad, etc.). Many other things are in the pipeline… Pitch Video http://www.pentotype.com

Teambox has added high-definition video conferencing, adding to a list of providers that are adding video to their collaboration platforms. The Teambox offering is of particular note, as it fully integrates video conferencing and screen sharing directly into the collaboration platform through Zoom, a video-conferencing service. The service allows for video conferencing of up to 25 people across desktops, tablets and mobile devices. It supports iCal, Outlook and Google Calendar. Teambox has earned recognition for its capability to integrate third-party apps for an inline experience. It’s in some sense a framework for aggregating apps such as Box and Evernote. But is it that much better than using third-party services in conjunction with a collaboration platform? Tibco’s Tibbr activity stream product now integrates third-party web-conferencing tools. A customer can start a live meeting by choosing their own platform. The intent is to allow enterprises to leverage the platforms they have invested in. So there are benefits to both ways of integrating video conferencing with a collaboration platform. Most of the services, such as Microsoft Office 365,  have integrated video conferencing, mostly as an add-on. But the tide is shifting. Services such as Unison now offer video chat through WebRTC, the real-time communications technology that is native to the browser through a JavaScript API. Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera now support the open-source project. Then there are the services like Pexip, which I looked at last week, which is making video conferencing available as a software. In all of this, there is one theme. Video conferencing is now moving to software, making integration into collaboration services easier than ever before.

Design-focused commerce company Fab has raised that round of funding we scooped a few months ago. Fab is announcing today that it has raised $150 million in the ?rst tranche of the company’s Series D round of ?nancing. We’re told that $150 million is the ?rst part of a larger Series D round that Fab expects to complete over the next few months. New to this round is Chinese Internet giant Tencent, who will also have a board seat at Fab; and Japanese conglomerate Itochu. Previous investors Atomico, Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, RTP Capital, Pinnacle Ventures, Lars Hinrichs, and Docomo Capital also participated in this latest round of ?nancing. This brings Fab’s total funding to $310 million. We’re hearing from multiple sources that the pre-money valuation of the company was $1 billion, as we had reported in April (a spokesperson for Fab has confirmed the valuation). And we’ve also heard from a source that Fab will be raising another $100 million or more in the later part of this round. At Fab’s last round of financing in 2012, the company was worth around $600 million. Past investors include First Round Capital, SoftTech VC, Baroda Ventures, Ashton Kutcher, Guy Oseary, Thrive Capital, Kevin Rose, SV Angel, The Washington Post, VTB Capital, Phenomen Ventures and the Times of India. Founder and CEO Jason Goldberg said the company started down the fundraising route in March to raise enough capital to have several years of runway, at least until 2015. He added that for this round there was $400 million worth of interest coming from investors. Growth, International And Another Pivot Fourteen million users strong, Fab is continuing to grow at a fast clip after its initial pivot. Last year, the company saw $150 million in revenue, and revealed in February that sales were up by nearly 300 percent in January 2013 over January 2012. In fact, January was Fab’s third-highest sales month ever. According to the company, Fab should reach $250 million in 2013 sales. Fab’s now achieving 43 percent gross margins, up from 29 percent in 2011. Interestingly, Fab says that most of its revenue is not derived from flash sales, which was the initial model Fab adopted after its pivot in 2011. As we wrote in this profile of the company, Fab infamously pivoted from Fabulis, which was a social network for the gay community, into a flash sales site. Fab says that two-thirds of sales are currently not from the flash-sales on the site, and the company recently rebranded to reflect this change. And 50 percent of Fab’s sales are in home categories. In May, Fab debuted its new design store, which makes it more of an integrated e-commerce site. You can access design pages by room, type of furniture, color, designer and more. International is also a huge potential growth area for the company. Fab has 1 million members in the UK, which is generating nearly 40 percent of its sales in Europe and is its fastest-growing market outside the U.S. Asia is the next frontier, which is why Goldberg and Fab are bringing on Tencent and Itochu as partners. As Goldberg explains, there are currently only four e-commerce companies in the world that are valued at more than $10 billion: Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and Rakuten. He believes that Fab has a legitimate chance to be the ?fth by leading in what he calls Emotional Commerce. This basically means that Fab helps people discover the items they love and want. Part of Fab’s plan to take over emotional commerce involves making its own line of products and home goods. Fab is also partnering with designers to manufacture and sell home furnishings exclusively through Fab. Additionally, Fab is experimenting with brick and mortar stores, with the first store debuting in Hamburg, Germany. Mobile is also a huge growth area, with one-third of sales being placed via mobile. And international will also be a major strategic focus for Fab, which just acquired German custom furniture store Massivkonzep