Deezer Launches in 35 Latin American Territories. Back in December, we reported that Spotify competitor Deezer was to begin rolling out in 200 countries (but not the USA).
And it has taken a big step towards this goal today by launching in 35 Latin American territories. Deezer was launched in France in August 2007, and it reached agreements with the French copyright societies, major and independent labels between 2007 and 2009. Today, the music-streaming service has somewhere in the region of 20m users and offers 18m tracks. Back in August, we first reported that Deezer was planning to hit the UK and it eventually revealed its pricing structure there prior to launch in September, whilst a partnership with Orange was to gain traction in the country. As of December, it was available in France, Belgium and the UK. Bedoo, um fast shopping baseado em comportamento do consumidor. Nova versão da Conta Azul, startup catarinense de soluções para gestão empresarial que foi incubada no vale do Silício. Engarte.com chega ao mercado com modelo de crowdsourcing na área de engenharia.
Bebê Store Recebe Segunda Rodada de Investimentos do Atomico. CellScope Nabs $1M From Khosla Ventures To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Microscope. Founded in the mobile microscopy lab at UC Berkeley, a young startup called CellScope is on a mission to turn your smart, mobile devices into a microscope, giving parents the ability to perform easy, at-home diagnoses.
Graduating as part of Rock Health’s inaugural batch of startups, CellScope is preparing to launch its first product, an otoscope — that strange-looking device doctors use to look in your ears — that can be attached to smartphones to enable anyone and everyone to perform remote diagnoses of, say, pediatric ear infections. (Which, by the way, create 30 million doctor visits annually in the U.S.) How Summit could bring some class to Rocket’s Westwing — European technology news. With iOS 6, The iPhone Even Becomes A Better Phone. Good news for those of you who actually use your iPhone to, oh, let’s say, make phone calls, perhaps?
Apple just announced that the iPhone’s phone app is getting a major update with the new version of iOS 6, which will actually make the iPhone more useful as a telephone. Imagine that! The phone app will receive new features including reminders, do not disturb settings, call screening and more. These features are going to particularly thrill business users to whom making phone calls, not texting and Facebooking, is still the most critical feature offered by their phone of choice. And the update brings many of the settings you would find in corporate phone systems today.
Rewards To The Beat Of A Different Drum: Tango Card Gets $1.8M From Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, WTI. Tango Card, the Seattle startup looking to disrupt the loyalty/gift card space by acting as a low-cost aggregator and innovator on delivery formats, has picked up a couple of new dancing partners.
Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt’s early-stage investment firm; and Maurice Werdegar, CEO of WTI, the venture debt firm that has counted companies like Google and Facebook among its portfolio, are investing $1.8 million in the company. The investment comes on the back of a strong period for three year-old Tango Card. The company is on track to reach 600,000 users by the end of this year, with key clients like FedEx, ShutterFly and Microsoft (more on that below) among those behind the growth in an overall industry projected to be worth $20 billion this year.
Wibbitz Raises $2.3M Series A For Technology That Turns Text Into Videos. Wibbitz, a company whose tagline once called it the “play button for the web” (it’s now just “text-to-video”) has closed a $2.3 million Series A round headed up by Horizons Ventures, the internet and technology investment fund belonging to Li Ka-shing.
Also participating in the round were previous investors, Initial Capital and lool Ventures. The service is somewhat similar to former TechCrunch Disrupt winner Qwiki, as it also automatically generates videos based on the content found on websites, but the twist is that it’s designed for use by publishers who want to offer quick, digestible video summaries of their articles’ content. .Choice: With $100M+ Raised, Donuts Launches A Registry For New Top-Level Domain Names. Shoes Of Prey Lands $3 Million Series A To Scale Its Custom Footwear Design Site. Shoes Of Prey, a Sydney, Australia-based startup whose website lets women design and order customized footwear, has closed on $3 million in its first round of funding, the company is announcing today.
Shoes Of Prey has been bootstrapped since its launch in 2009. Airtime Launches A Video Chat Network That’s The New Place To Hangout Online. Ready your arsenal of funny viral videos, Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning have just launched their video chat and sharing network Airtime.
Built on Facebook with a stunning $33.5 million in funding, Airtime puts you onstage with a friend or matches you with an interesting stranger. There’s no application to install, it works straight from your browser. [Update: And today at the celebrity-filled Airtime launch party, Parker told me that iOS and Android apps are "coming very soon".] You could call it a more fun version of Skype, a one-on-one Google+ Hangouts with your Facebook graph, or the evolution of Chat Roulette. But what you’re going to call it is fun. As I wrote this morning, Airtime will re-humanize the Internet. But Airtime doesn’t just reinforce your social network, it expands it. Once you’re connected, you’ll see the Likes from your Facebook profiles below the video feeds with your mutual interests highlighted in green. Startup Launch As Celebrity Bonanza: Airtime’s Ritzy, Glitzy, Glitchy Debut.
Once upon a time, a humble click of a button could send a web service live.
A couple of e-mails out or a post on a message board might be sufficient to draw the interest of a few early adopters. No longer. Somehow, somewhere along the line, certain startup launches and demo days have become more like celebrity-studded movie premieres or gallery openings. We all go and gawk. We might stay. And nowhere is the shift of technology industry from mainstream culture’s periphery to its center more evident than in the story of Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning — who are debuting their much-anticipated (and more family-friendly!)
Fast-Growing App Search Engine Quixey Raises $20 Million Series B. App search company Quixey is today announcing it has closed a $20 million round Series B funding.
The round includes previous investors WI Harper Group, U.S. Venture Partners and Innovation Endeavors as well as new investors Atlantic Bridge, SK planet and Translink Capital, which the company says it chose with internationalization in mind. The additional capital will be primarily used to help continue fund Quixey’s growth, and specifically to help it deal with its increasing overhead.
With More Than 2M Downloads, HotelTonight Raises Another $23M From US Venture Partners. Last-minute hotel booking startup HotelTonight just announced that it raised a $23 million Series C round led by U.S.
Venture Partners (USVP). The financing includes existing investors Accel Partners, Battery Ventures, and First Round Capital. No Resumes, Just Skills: Smarterer Grabs $1.75M From True, Google Ventures; Tony Conrad Joins Board. Resumes, they say, are ineffective but Boston-based startup Smarterer believes it has the solution. The company’s platform provides job searchers with a simple way to show employers what they know by taking quizzes in subjects that range from engineering to music. Smarterer then crowdsources its test designs and employs a smart ranking system to give job searchers a score. Finally, it allows them to broadcast their successes to the world. After launching in late 2010, the gamified test-taking platform struggled to find growth early. It has turned that story around of late, especially after launching “Skill Sets,” which allows companies to offer Smarterer quizzes as part of their online job applications. A complement to gamified job platforms like Gild (which specifically targets developers), Smarterer leveraged Skill Sets into 1,250 percent growth in a single week, as it became clear that Smarterer offered candidates an opportunity to turn their skills into jobs.
Ringadoc Virtually Connects You With A Doctor Anytime, Raises $750K Seed From Founders Fund’s FF Angel. Ringadoc lets you pay a flat fee to instantly talk to a real doctor at any hour of the day, and its big vision to be “the frontline of primary care” has landed it a $750,000 seed round led by FF Angel. So if its 2am and you’ve got some weird rash, you can call Ringadoc’s toll-free number, record a quick description of your condition, and get matched with a doctor who’ll give you medical advice or a diagnosis, write you a prescription, and tell you whether to wait until you doctor’s office opens or go to the hospital immediately.
The money comes from from Founders Fund’s seed investment vehicle as well as Ringadoc board member Ryan Howard, CEO and founder of electronic medical records startup Practice Fusion. Right now Ringadoc is just a phone number and app for patients, but the seed will pay for key hires as well as development of a direct-to-doctor product physicians can distribute to their patients. Ringadoc costs just $39.99 per consultation with no time limit. Loosecubes Secures $7.8M From NEA, Accel To Become The Airbnb For Shared Office Spa. Loosecubes, the community marketplace for shared workspace, has today announced that it has secured $7.8 million in series A financing, bringing its total funding to $9 million. The round was led by New Enterprise Associates and Revolution Ventures, with participation from previous investors, Accel Partners and Battery Ventures.
As a result of the round, Tige Savage of Revolution Ventures and Alex Kinnuer of NEA will be joining the startup’s board of directors. Men’s Subscription Service Bespoke Post Partners With Details Mag, Grabs 500 Startups As Investor. Bespoke Post, a new e-commerce startup using the subscription-based “box of the month” model, is making a splashy public debut next week thanks to a new partnership with Details magazine, a Condé Nast property. Although the service has been open to the public since the beginning of April, the deal with Details is going to put the subscription club for men in front of a much wider audience.
Stealthy Startup Gumhouse Raises $6M+ For A “Social Stream Video Shopping Network” Custom Jewelry Startup Gemvara Raises $25M In Oversubscribed Series D Round. Profitable San Francisco Financial Company Launches New Form Of Payment [TCTV] San Francisco has had an awesome few weeks of 75th anniversary celebrations. The Golden Gate bridge celebration was pretty obvious, as there was a lot of fanfare with fireworks etc., but another celebration went on rather quietly and TechCrunch was fortunate enough to be part of it. The 75th anniversary of the Herman Street US San Francisco Mint. One of the most mysterious buildings in San Francisco, The Mint is located behind a Safeway on Market Street, nestled between the Mission, Castro and Lower Haight communities. I pass by the ominous building all the time and I see the guards, but I’ve never seen anyone go in or out.
Acquire, Be Acquired, Or IPO: $15M From FTV Lets Social Marketer Shoutlet Choose Its Destiny. Movile Launches Zeewe TV, A New Social Video Service Aimed At The Latino Market. Movile has spent the last decade providing content to Latin American audiences primarily on feature phones through partnerships with mobile carriers. Now Movile, which is based in Brazil, is looking to target Latino audiences globally, including in the U.S. and Europe. It’s doing that with an office in Mountain View, Calif., which expands its presence in the U.S., as well as through the launch of an HTML5-based video service called Zeewe TV.
Zeewe TV is a Facebook application that will combine both short-form and long-form content aimed at the global Latino market. Webs.com Revamps Its DIY Site Creation Tools, Ditches Banner Ads For Free Users. Behold, Facebook’s New App Center Leaks Into iOS. Card-Linked Customer Loyalty Company Cartera Commerce Raises $12.2M Series D, Readies Expansion Into Local Offers. Gamifying The Job Search: Identified Hits 10M Users, Nabs $21M In Series B Funding. Y Combinator Alum Flutter Raises $1.4 Million For Gesture Recognition Tech. LevelUp Grabs $12M From Highland, Google Ventures To Take Its Mobile Payment Solution National. Creative Market Nabs $1.3M From SV Angel, CrunchFund To Become An Etsy For Digital Design. SocialFlow Lets Marketers Double-Down On Popular Tweets With Real-Time Analytics. Threadflip Raises $6.5M From Shasta, Chris Sacca And Others, Launches Mobile App.
Eventster Brings Crowdsourced Event Discovery To iPhone & iPad. With A Focus On Childcare Centers, Mom Trusted Raises $1M+ For Its Early Education Marketplace. Wanelo Raises $2M … But Is Distilling Pinterest To Products The Right Idea? Like PhoneGap In The Cloud: Icenium Debuts A New Cross-Platform Mobile App Development Platform (Invites) Enterprise Cloud Security Firm Qualys Files For $100 Million IPO. Mobile Payments: A Trillion Dollar Industry… Once Everyone Can Actually Make A Payment. With $20 Billion In Consumer Debt Under Management, Credit Sesame Closes $12 Million Series B. Gigya Grabs $15.3M From Benchmark, Adobe To “Socialize” Your Business. Big Data Analytics Startup Datameer Brings Hadoop To The Desktop. Social Maps App CityMaps Arrives Boston, Rolls Out Local Recommendations.
More On Meebo: Price Is Around $100M, Product Team To Work On Google+ Publisher Tools, Layoffs Hit Sales. Meet The Next 10 Startups To Join NYC-Based Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Clarizen Raises Another $12M For Project Management. New Social eBooks Retailer Zola Books Launches Private Beta, Raises $1M From Prominent Authors. MapMyFitness Works Out $9M From Austin, Milestone Ventures For Better Fitness Tracking. Accel-Backed Payments Gateway Provider Braintree Goes International With Expansion Into 30 New Countries.