Mobile media ad network Mojiva released a report finding the iPad's unique user audience grew by a jaw-dropping 537% between November 2010 and January 2011.
ComScore released its first ever Mobile Year in Review report for 2010, and the findings point to interesting trends in smartphone adoption.
Coupa, developer of cloud spend management (CSM) solutions, closed a $12 million Series D round of funding led by Mohr Davidow Ventures.
Foursquare announced that its location service is now available in French, Italian, German, Spanish, and Japanese.
GetJar, the largest open app store with over 1.5 billion downloads to date, raised $25 million in Series C funding from Tiger Global Management and Accel Partners.
A survey of merchants and their marketing methods found that 55% of merchants who have run a deal through a group buying service like Groupon or LivingSocial would not do so again.
Content recommendation engine Outbrain secured $11 million in a Series C round in which previous investors Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners all participated.
Solvate, a platform that matches employers with independent professionals, raised $4 million in Series B financing from Michael Paolucci (Solvate’s CEO), RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham.
Songkick, a website for tracking tour dates for your favorite musicians, has raised $1.9 million in its fourth round of funding.
Twitter just launched the new Twitter Translator Center (along with its own Twitter account) as a place for any Twitter user to sign up and start translating the site's Web and mobile offerings.
Yoyi Media, a provider of targeted online advertising and marketing solutions, completed a $20 million Series B financing led by Oak Investment Partners with participation from existing investors, Steamboat Ventures and Gobi Partners
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Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
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Founded in 2008 and based In New York City, Mojiva, Inc. is a mobile technology company that operates two industry-leading business units:
- Mojiva (www.mojiva.com) is the world’s premiere mobile advertising network. Mojiva has grown faster than any other advertising platform, and currently helps advertisers reach their target mobile audiences in 190 countries. Mojiva recently closed a $7 million second round of venture funding led by UV Partners, Pelion VP and existing investors Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, the venture capital arm of the international media company Bertelsmann. In its first round in 2008, Mojiva raised $3 million, primarily from Bertelsmann.
- mOcean Mobile (www.mOceanMobile.com) is the leading independent mobile ad serving and analytics platform, currently managing billions of ads for mobile websites, ad networks and applications. Most recently, the platform announced a partnership with Intel to power their Intel AppUp(SM) center on more than 70 million netbooks.
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comScore is a global Internet information provider to which leading companies turn for consumer behavior insight that drives successful marketing, sales and trading strategies.
comScore’s experienced analysts work closely with clients to identify their business objectives and determine how they can best apply and benefit from comScore’s vast databases of consumer behavior. comScore maintains massive proprietary databases that provide a continuous, real-time measurement of the myriad ways in which the Internet is used and the wide variety of activities that are occurring online.
Meet Your Objectives with Proven Research Based on Superior Technology
Whether your focus is online or multi-channel, direct response or long-term branding, domestic or global marketing, comScore provides the knowledge you need to achieve your objectives.
This capability is based on a massive, global cross-section of more than 2 million consumers who have given comScore permission to confidentially capture their browsing and transaction behavior, including online and offline purchasing. Through its proprietary technology, comScore measures what matters across a broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes. comScore panelists also participate in survey research that captures and integrates their attitudes and intentions. Through this approach, comScore delivers seamlessly integrated behavioral and attitudinal research that marketers have long sought.
comScore analysts apply this deep knowledge of customers and competitors to help clients design powerful marketing strategies and tactics that deliver superior ROI. comScore delivers solutions that focus the company's unique technological and methodological strengths on meeting client needs through two divisions:
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Outbrain (www.outbrain.com) is the leading content recommendation platform, reaching a highly engaged audience through distribution on top publisher sites, including USA Today, iVillage, Boston.com, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, TheStreet, The Boston Globe and Slate. Outbrain provides publishers a service for recommended links to increase traffic and generate revenue, and marketers a way to their distribute content alongside publisher’s own editorial recommendations. Outbrain acquired content recommendation platform Surphace (formerly known as Sphere) in February 2011. Founded in 2006, the company is headquartered in New York with R&D in Netanya, Israel, and is backed by Carmel Ventures, Gemini Israel Funds, GlenRock Israel, Rhodium and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Startup/Business
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Launched October 2007 by co-founders Ian Hogarth, Michelle You and Pete Smith, Songkick is dedicated to providing the single best concert resource online for music enthusiasts. Using web indexing technology, the company is building the world’s most comprehensive directory of live music events, aggregating ticketing information from over 25 global ticket vendors such as Ticketmaster and Tickets.com. Songkick also powers concert listings on Qloud and Songbird. The site has received funding from Index Ventures, and a select group of angels including Saul Klein, (The Accelerator Group), Alex Zubillaga (former EVP of Digital Strategy and Business Development at Warner Music Group), Jeff Clavier (Softech VC), Dan Porter (co-founder of Ticketweb), Peter Read (Music Nation), Andrew Weissman and John Borthwick (Betaworks), Stefan Glaenzer (ex-Chairman Last.fm), Daniel Miller (founder of Mute Records), Mike Heneghan (former MD Mute Records), and Y Combinator.Startup/Business
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Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
