Startups

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.

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

Months after Hurricane Sandy left New York scrambling for power, the city is unveiling 25 solar powered charging stations in parks and public spaces throughout the five boroughs, starting today. The pilot project between AT&T and the city of New York is officially called AT&T Street Charge. (DUMBO firm Pensa handled design, and Goal Zero provided the solar technology, AT&T handled the cash.) The stations will move to new locations at the beginning of July, rotating throughout the city until September. After that, we’ll see what becomes of them. Most are a little out of the way for those who don’t go to Fort Greene Park, the Brooklyn Bridge Park, or Riverside Park on the reg, but solar powered, public, and free is a pretty great thing. Definitely better than those public charging stations that also charge you money. Since the Union Square location won’t open until tomorrow, I headed up to Riverside Park to see what the good people of New York thought of it. If I was hoping for a rare Upper West Side mob scene — and I was — I was sorely disappointed. To be fair, it was an overcast Tuesday at 2:30pm. On a sunny Saturday afternoon when the adjacent Pier 1 Cafe is busier, I’m sure the station will be getting more love. Joggers, cyclists, dog-walkers, and people who were otherwise not at work stopped by the charging station regularly and gave the attendant an “I’m just taking a look” or “I just wanted to see what it was” before moving on. It is a 12.5′ metal pole with six phone chargers at hip height and three arms at the top that resemble whimsical helicopter blades, so that is a valid reaction. The most enthusiasm came from a group of 16-year-olds, who rushed the pole going, “Ooohhh, coool.” When I asked them if they’d feel safe leaving their phones there, all five of them gave an immediate and decisive no. “Are you guys from New York?” “Yes.” So there you go. But two of the boys did stick around for a few minutes to plug in their phones. “It’s okay if you’re standing right next to it.” “I’d pull up a chair.” Another man checking out the pole said that while he wouldn’t feel comfortable stepping away from his phone — “I hardly like to leave the house with it” — he could see imagine huge lines in the event of another blackout. The attendant, who works for a company hired by AT&T for the launch, estimated that about 20 or 25 people had charged their phones on the pole in the four hours since she arrived at 11am. In the hour that I was there, only three did, teenage boys included. A 24-year-old cyclist named Shana reclined in a nearby cafe chairs waiting for her iPod to charge. Asked if she felt comfortable sitting 15 feet away from it, she replied, “Well, it’s about 6 years old, so…” Most people seemed to think it was a great idea, especially in light of Sandy, but no New Yorker is going to leave their stuff lying around. I think a nearby Park Enforcement official put it best: “Never leave anything unattended.” And so the charging stations stood in the June drizzle waiting for the public to stand right next to them. [Image: AT&T]

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now FindTheCompany launched out of beta today to give you the lowdown on businesses. The business research site provides information on more than 30 million US companies. Consumers, business owners, investors, analysts, sales people etc… can use the engine to learn more about a company before doing businesses with them or refine searches with filters for location, industry, employee count, annual sales etc… The engine aggregates information from various sources. Financials for public companies come from Xignite, information on government contracts from the US government, business histories, and product and service listings from sister site FindTheBest. All this data is collected into profiles and then turned into visualizations based on the data, so consumers are looking at more than just spreadsheets of statistics. “We’re putting the power of knowledge in the hands of consumers and small businesses – people who normally don’t have easy access to all the incredible information that’s available on US companies,” said FindTheBest founder and CEO Kevin O’Connor in an email. “Now it’s simple to make informed decisions about companies, products and services based on the facts.” O’Connor said that people now expect better,  more-tailored search portals for finding the information they need. He founded FindTheBest.com in 2009 after growing tired of all the sites claiming to tell you what was best, whether it was colleges, credit cards, or insurance, when often they were eating paid to promote certain products and services. FindTheBest is meant to provide an objective comparison tool for consumers, and FindTheCompany is the next extension of that idea. Competitors include Manta, MerchantCircle, Yellow Pages, and YellowBot. To a lesser extent, the company also competes with social networking sites like Yelp, LinkedIn, and Facebook Pages and paid providers like LexisNexis, Factiva, and Bloomberg. O’Connor said FindTheCompany has better data and a platform, and is free while still providing the same caliber of information as paid providers. The site currently monetizes through display advertising and affiliate revenue, and will soon release a sponsorship product. Before founding FindTheBest, O’Connor founded DoubleClick which sold to Google for $3.1 billion and was an initial investor in ISS which sold to IBM for $1.4 billion. FindTheBest raised $11 million in March from Keliner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New World Ventures, bringing its total capital raised to $17 million. It is based in Santa Barbara, California and has 90 employees. Photo Credit: Shutterstock Filed under: Big Data, Business .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%, #1862ae 100%); background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,#1f80e4), color-stop(100%,#1862ae)); background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae 100%); background: -o-linear-gradient(top,  #1f80e4 0%,#1862ae

From their work ethic to their idealism, people in Silicon Valley tend to do things a bit differently. Turns out those differences extend to the way many of Silicon Valley’s newly rich think about generational wealth. So suggests Jim Cody, a managing director of estate, trust and philanthropy advisory services at Harris myCFO, a wealth management firm that caters to ultra-high-net-worth clients, or people with $25 million in investable assets and a net worth of about $100 million. Though the firm has seven offices nationwide, including in Seattle, Chicago and New York City, Cody says there are disparities between the clients the firm sees in the Bay Area compared to elsewhere. In California, for example, high net worth individuals tend to be slightly younger, with 27% under age 40, compared to 24% nationally. (The data comes from BMO Private Bank, the parent company of Harris MyCFO.) Also, less than 1% of California’s ultra-rich individuals inherited their wealth, compared to 3% nationally. Perhaps most meaningfully, Cody says that in Silicon Valley, the super wealthy think there’s always another home run around the corner. We talked with Cody yesterday. Following is our conversation, edited for length and clarity. How do  venture capitalists differ in the ways they manage their wealth from your other customers? The VCs vary. Some are younger people who are just getting started and getting their first carried interest and who are more akin to entrepreneurs who are having their first wealth event. Then you have VCs who have been around 10, 15, 20 years and who’ve seen liquidity events and are, by necessity, more diversified, given that their wealth has come from different funds with different maturities. [The latter group] tends to be more savvy from a business point of view and taking holdings off the table. We see them distribute to themselves when they distribute shares to their [firm’s] investors, and often, they’ll use those shares – which are often very low basis shares – for charitable giving. Or they may have a standing order with us to sell the shares right away when the shares hit their account. Many entrepreneurs and former VCs have become angel investors. How much of their overall wealth is it safe to invest in startups? The percentage of overall wealth that someone can afford to put back on the table depends on their individual risk level and the magnitude of their wealth. Billionaires only “need” several hundred million dollars to live off of, so they can invest more. If someone’s wealth is between $10 million and $20 million, we wouldn’t counsel those folks to put a meaningful percentage of their wealth into high-risk investments. The person with $20 million might considering [reinvesting] $1 million or $2 million [into startups]. Our advice is: You’ve hit a grand slam. These types of events should be considered once-in-a-lifetime. Let’s make sure this money lasts throughout your lifetime to accommodate your needs and your family’s needs and, if possible, your philanthropic desires. Do you see differences among your clients nationwide? Across the U.S., we have clients who have what we’d call more mature and multi-generational wealth, where the clients aren’t necessarily the first-generation wealth creators, as they tend to be in the Bay Area. In the Midwest, and in the Chicago area, where it’s inherited wealth, the clients treat [the money] more like they are stewards and like it has purposes beyond their immediate needs, meaning for family members, future generations, and philanthropic organizations. Older wealth is more conservative and less risky. In the Bay Area, you meet these young entrepreneurs who are very bright and who, when we tell them to consider a wealth event as a one-time [happening], they tell us that one of their friends has [hit a home run] three times. So their experience tends to be clouded by what they see others doing. We also see people who’ve made it and lost it and get back on the horse

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now You’ve got a fever and the only prescription is more Funding Daily? We think we can help you with that. We had another whopping 11 funding announcements today, but of all of them, the top two biggest deals went to health startups. We think health is one of the biggest topics of this year. So much so, that we held an entire conference around it. But you don’t need to believe us; the money speaks for itself! For more funding news as it happens, subscribe to our Deals Channel feed. You can also follow VentureBeat on Twitter, @venturebeat, to view funding news as it’s published. Health care tech startup COMS Interactive grabs $21M COMS Interactive, a startup that produces an SaaS products for the health care industry, has secured a new $21 million round of funding, the company announced today. COMS’ main product is Daylight IQ, a software suite that manages health and disease profiles for elderly residents at senior living facilities. The software suite helps track changes in a person’s condition and alerts attendance and doctors accordingly, which basically helps patients from going to the doctor multiple times before finding what’s actually wrong. Read the full story on VentureBeat. CareCloud raises $20M to vanquish ‘walking dead’ and ‘dinosaurs’ of health IT CareCloud has raised $20 million to break the healthcare system out of the Jurassic era. CareCloud offers cloud-based electronic health record (EHR) software. It provides tools for practice management, EHR, and medical billing that connect providers to each other and to patients, creating a complete digital healthcare ecosystem. Tenaya Capital led this round, with participation from existing investors Intel Capital and Norwest Venture Partners. It brings CareCloud’s total funding to $44 million. CareCloud is based in Miami. Read the full story on VentureBeat. FiftyThree raises $15M to unleash your creativity with Paper FiftyThree is going on fifteen. Fifteen million dollars, that is. FiftyThree is the company behind Paper, an iPad app that Apple named 2012 iPad App of the Year. Today FiftyThree closed a $15 million deal led by Chris Dixon at Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angel, and Jack Dorsey. Read the full story on VentureBeat. Personetics raises $11.5M to improve bank customer service Personetics has raised $11.5 million led by Lightspeed Venture Partners for its predictive analytics solutions for the banking industry. The technology aims to predict customer needs and provide quick resolutions so financial institutions can improve their customer experience and reduce their operational costs. This funding will be used to drive sales and scale operations. Existing investors Sequoia Capital and Carmel Ventures also participated in this round. The company has offices in New York, Barcelona, and Tel Aviv. ‘Big data’ startup SpaceCurve raises $10M SpaceCurve — a startup that lives to suss out massive amounts of location, social, sensor, and timeline data — has just raised $10 million. This round, led by Triage Ventures, is the company’s second institutional round of funding. Since it was founded, the startup has taken a total of $17.3 million, including a $3.5 million Series A last summer. The startup is trying to organize and make useful just about every kind of data imaginable. Read the full story on VentureBeat. Nok Nok Labs improving 2-factor authentication with $4M in debt financing Nok Nok Labs, a security startup focused on making two-factor authentication even stronger, raised a $4 million round of debt financing today from existing investors Onset Ventures and DCM. Nok Nok is working on its Unified Authentication Infrastructure product — a form of two factor authentication that companies can build off of. The technology takes advantage of existing features in the devices their employees already have. For example, if an employee is trying to access so

Company / App Name: FAQ Robo http://www.faqrobo.com What does it do? Providing accessible knowledge to the world in the form of FAQs Why do we need it? There is no one place for all the FAQs on the internet. We provide summarized answers to simple questions, this saves everybody’s time. Who is it for? For information evangelists. People who wants to see the world as a better place. What makes it stand out from the crowd? Our way of presenting the information: new, fresh and to the point. What’s next? Launch Pitch Video http://www.faqrobo.com

The Information Hub for Immigrants - Green Cards, H1B, F1 visa database.

This sponsored post is produced by Silicon Beach Fest. Los Angeles has long been associated with the iconic Hollywood sign that overlooks the expansive city, and a kitschy style that lights fire to fashion and glossy entertainment trends worldwide. But big plans are surfacing across the city near the blue water and popular beaches. It’s not just start-ups, established companies are vocalizing their support to building this community, as an earlier post from Cornerstone OnDemand CEO, Adam Miller illustrates in how to build a “killer tech company outside the valley.” The community is called Silicon Beach and it’s focused on integrating a new industry and perception into the city’s DNA: technology. The community is taking its biggest step yet to integrate technology into the city’s core with its third Silicon Beach Fest, which kicks off this Wednesday, June 19th. For four days, the brightest minds in tech, fashion, and entertainment are gathering in sunny Santa Monica for insightful panels, rousing parties, and cross-industry inspiration. What will you experience at Silicon Beach Fest? The event is split into a dozen tracks, encompassing a variety of panels, meet-ups, and showcases that represent the broad industry verticals within Los Angeles. Some of the most popular tracks from last year’s event include: Investor, Entrepreneur, Hollywood, Gaming, Digital Content, Advertising, Social Media, Software Development and Design, and Arts and Education. Keynotes include top Los Angeles venture capitalists such as Mark Suster; CEO of Cornerstone OnDemand, Adam Miller; and Nely Galan, former president of Telemundo. Speakers include esteemed executives from: Warner Brothers, Disney, Fox, Rubicon Project, United Online, Virgin America Brand Marketing, Crosscut Ventures, Amplify.la, OMD, Machinima, Demand Media, CAA, GOOD, Upworthy and more. VentureBeat readers can join the fun by registering with the code VB30 code here and receiving 30% off of the normal registration. Come find out why The Genome Project rated Los Angeles as the second biggest tech market in the United States and why investors poured more than 3.2 billion into the bubbling Southern California startup ecosystem last year. Don’t miss your chance to become part of the discussion about the biggest innovations and disruptions taking place in entertainment, fashion, and tech. [Image credit: trekandshoot -Fotolia.com] Sponsored posts are content that has been produced by a company, which is either paying for the post or has a business relationship with VentureBeat, and they’re always clearly marked. The content of news stories produced by our editorial team is never influenced by advertisers or sponsors in any way. For more information, contact sales@venturebeat.com. Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, Mobile, Small Biz