Latest VatorNews stories

• Funding roundup - week ending 1/30/15

  by Steven Loeb, January 30, 2015

  Xenex, Iora Health, AutoBot, Beckon, CloudBees, UserTesting, Lootsie, Final, Nilas, Earnest, Ossia

  Seed stage Lootsie, a loyalty and rewards platform for mobile apps, raised $3.5 million in seed funding from Tim Kendall, Michael Liou and Brad Schwartz. Credit card startup Final raised $1 million in seed funding from Ludlow Ventures, T5 Capital Partners and Y ­Combinator. Fuse, a platform for creating apps on iOS and Android, raised $2.8 million in a funding round led by Northzone. Pushbull

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• Gaming studio Kabam reaches $400 million in revenue

  by Steven Loeb, January 30, 2015

  Despite record growth, the company says it missed the mark, will scale back third party publishing

  (Updated with comment from Kabam) Mobile gaming company Kabam is often mentioned as a potential IPO candidate, and with its latest revenue numbers I have a feeling that conversation might become more heated. Kabam earned $400 million in revenue in 2014, the company revealed in a press release on Thursday, up from the $360 million in revenues it saw the year prior. The company has now grown for five

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• Reddit jumps on the transparency report bandwagon

  by Steven Loeb, January 29, 2015

  The site only received 55 requests from the government in 2014, complied with more than half

  I have mixed feelings about Edward Snowden (that's a topic I won't get into here) but if there is one good thing he did (and I'd argue that there were many) it was to increase the level of transparency that our biggest Internet companies feel they owe their users. Companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google have all started issuing transparency reports, finally showing that the government does wa

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• Cargomatic gets $8M to modernize the trucking industry

  by Steven Loeb, January 29, 2015

  The company wants to be "Uber for trucking" by giving both truckers and shippers mobile tools

  The round was led by Canaan Partners, and was joined by other investors including Volvo Group Venture Capital, Rob Estes of Estes Express, Morado Venture Partners, SV Angel, Sherpa Ventures, Winklevoss Capital, Structure Capital, Nicolas Berggruen, Scott Banister, Fritz Lanman, and Hank Vigil. This round brings the company's total financing to $10.6 million. It had previously raised a $2.6 million

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• Uber isn't done with the delivery business just yet

  by Steven Loeb, January 29, 2015

  The company has to be hoping that adorable puppies will make up for all the recent scandals

  Uber announced on Wednesday that it has teamed up with Animal Planet to bring over puppies for people to play with during the Puppy Bowl on Sunday. The Puppy Bowl, for those of you who don't know, is the alternative to the Super Bowl, with puppies playing instead of giant, roided up men. I've never watched it, because I've always had the game on, but with the Seakhawks playing the Patriots this

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• Zuckerberg: connecting the world means more than money

  Facebook CEO pushes back against investor who questions company's commitment to Internet.org

  As he typically does after each Facebook earnings release, Mark Zuckerberg got on the company conference call and talked about Internet.org and "connecting the world." I listen to every single one of these ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Facebook has 1.39B MAUs, 69% of ad revenue from mobile

  Facebook beats in Q4, posts $12.47B in revenue for the full year

  In the earnings report, Facebook posted fourth quarter revenue of $3.85 billion, beating Wall Street's estimates of $3.77 billion. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.54 cents in the quarter, higher ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Slack acquires screen sharing platform Screenhero

  Work communication platform looks to stay ahead of the competition, including Facebook At Work

  With Facebook and other well-established players, potentially hot on its heels, workplace collaboration company Slack is looking to up its game, and add more features to stay ahead of the competition. ...
  By Ane Howard
  

• Shasta Ventures makes Sean Flynn a managing director

  Flynn has been with Shasta since 2008, he became a partner in 2012

  Shasta Ventures has promoted one of its partners, Sean Flynn, to managing director, the firm announced on Wednesday. With this promotion, Flynn becomes the fifth managing director at the firm, joining ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Spotify and PlayStation team up for new music service

  PlayStation Music will launch this spring, replacing Music Unlimited, which will shut down in March

  When you got up this morning, was the first thing you thought to yourself, "You know what the world really needs? Another music streaming service! Because the five bajillion we have already just aren't ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• FCC tells hotels to stop blocking personal Wi-Fi

  Interfering with hotspots is illegal and the FCC vows to go after those who are caught doing so

  It's not looking good for the major hotel chains who want to be able to block their guests from using their own Wi-Fi hotspots, as the agency involved with deciding the issue just came out strongly against ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Google chooses four new areas, and 18 cities, for Fiber

  The high-speed service will be coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham

  It's no secret that the United States used to lead in a lot of categories, and how it doesn't. If you ask me, that is probably because the rest of the world pretty much destroyed itself, while the U.S. ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Get ready: ads are coming to your Pinterest homepage

  Pinterest is testing out Promoted Pins as the first thing users will see when they come to the site

  Pinterest has been very successful with its ads rollout so far, enough so that it felt comfortable opening them up to all advertisers earlier this year. Partially that has been because Pinterest has not ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Snapchat partners with media companies for Discover

  Discover features content on 11 channels from ESPN, Comedy Central, People and CNN, among others

  With all of its success, there always seemed to be un undercurrent of trepidation over how exactly Snapchat was going to make money. Sure, the idea of self-destructing messaging obviously stuck a chord ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Xenex raises $25M to make it safe to go to the hospital

  Xenex's disinfection lamps can kill germs that cause hospital infections, saving thousands of lives

  Nobody really likes going to the hospital, do they? Part of the reason for that, I think, is that hospitals just feel inherently unclean. And that is not an illusion: they generally are. in fact hospital ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Iora Health raises $28M to overhaul primary care

  Iora Health builds practices focused on small communities, giving them better care and attention

  Since I started diving into healthtech to prepare for Vator's Splash Health event in Oakland next month, what has most intrigued me are the number of different sectors within that space. There are tools ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• European venture capital hits 13-year-high

  While investments were up, the amount of VC funding fell 18% to €3.4B

  Amid debate about whether Silicon Valley is in a bubble or not, fresh numbers keep coming in that show significantly higher amounts of funding being thrown about into newly-minted startups, or private ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• Today's Entrepreneur: Hoang Nhu

  No. 1 mistake: They underestimate the amount of energy.

  Today's Entrepreneur is Hoang Nhu, Founder of KoolTechs, Inc. a company that has a mission to bring to the marketplace unique consumer and health & wellness products and inventions that enhance all ...
  By Mitos Suson
  

• Uber shutters on-demand delivery experiment

  UberEssentials is dead, but that doesn't mean Uber has completely given up on the space

  In December, the on-demand car service rebranded its delivery service, then called Corner Store, as UberEssentials, calling it "a limited-time-only experiment." And that experiment, presumably, failed ...
  By Steven Loeb
  

• WePay becomes first provider to integrate Google Wallet

  WePay will offer Google Wallet as a payment option to its 1,000 platform partners

  In the last few years, we have seen the rise of both mobile, and of online payments. So, it would stand to reason that the two could come together, meaning that more people would start using their phones ...
  By Steven Loeb
  
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