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With $1.3M In New Funding, CodeGuard Launches Its Free Website Backup, Monitoring Service. At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last May, the unanimous winner of the “Audience Choice” award was a young, Atlanta-based startup called CodeGuard.
The startup caught the audience’s attention based on a simple value proposition: To become a “time machine for your website.” In other words, CodeGuard’s free service allows any site owner to back up their website and revert to earlier versions, while monitoring for infections. Doxo Now Lets You Receive & Pay Bills From Your Mobile Device. Since launching in mid-2011, doxo has been on a mission to make your life paperless.
With its “digital filing cabinet” software, the Seattle-based startup aims to create a single place for users to manage their bills, be they phone, cable, or credit card. Of course, the world is quickly going mobile, and payment solutions are going right along with it. So, in an effort to close the loop between web and mobile services, Doxo is today launching a new mobile payment and management solution, along with a new Android app, to finally allow users to both receive and pay bills from their mobile devices.
Doxo’s new Android app complements the updated iOS app the startup launched last summer so that the pair of apps now allow users to take advantage of mobile bill payment and management on top of its flagship “digital file cabinet” and secure backup offerings. That being said, Doxo has the potential to significantly mitigate a huge pain in the ass for consumers. ComparaOnline.com Raises US$5M, Receives Investment from Kaszek Ventures (en español) (ComparaOnline.com) May 28, 2012 – ComparaOnline.com, a platform that compares insurance, financial and telecommunications products, received a significant investment from Kaszek Ventures, a Latin American venture capital firm focused on supporting technology startups.
With the support of Kaszek, ComparaOnline.com completed a US$5M round of financing that also included investments from six private investors and angels. The capital will be used to fund the company’s expansion plans. ComparaOnline.com levanta USD 5 millones para financiar plan de crecimiento (ComparaOnline.com) 28 de mayo de 2012 – ComparaOnline.com –comparador de seguros, productos financieros y de telecomunicaciones– recibió una importante inversión de Kaszek Ventures, la principal firma de venture capital de la región, enfocada en apoyar startups de tecnología que cuenten con un alto potencial de desarrollo.
Interactive Outdoor Ad Startup smartDIGITAL Raises $2.7M. SmartDIGITAL, a startup that makes interactive ad displays, has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round of funding. smartDIGITAL displays are already available in Chicago and Miami, says co-founder and CEO George Burciaga, with plans to roll them out to 10 markets over the next 36 months.
They’re essentially large kiosks with multi-touch screens that allow consumers to interact with an ad rather than simply staring at it as they walk or drive by. Badgeville Levels Up With $25M From InterWest & More To Gamify Enterprise. When Badgeville launched at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco back in 2010 and took home the “Audience Choice Award,” its mission to help companies big and small leverage gamification elements like leaderboards, badges, leveling-up, experience points, etc. to increase customer engagement seemed intriguing — if not a little gimmicky.
Fast forward to today, and some may still cringe at the word (and its overuse), gamification is reaching the tipping point. As Mayfield Fund Managing Director Tim Chang recently wrote in a must-read post, gamification is now moving beyond its early adopting verticals, like media and fitness, and is no longer content to just play in the realm of consumers and end users. It’s ready to play in enterprise. Junar raises $1.2M from Aurus, Austral Capital, Angel Investors.
(Junar) May 29, 2012 – Chile-based Junar, a leader in open data platforms, announced that it has raised $1.2 million in initial funding.
The round was led by Aurus, Austral Capital and top angel investors from Latin America and the US. To view this press release in Spanish please click here. Full press release:JUNAR RAISES $1.2 MILLION AND LAUNCHES THE EASIEST-TO-USE OPEN DATA PLATFORM TO POWER THE DATA ECONOMY Palo Alto, California – May 29, 2012 – Junar, the Open Data platform leader for the Data Economy, today unveiled the Junar Open Data Platform, a next generation data management system. Its cloud-based platform enables businesses, governments, and other organizations to take the complexity and guesswork out of having to develop their own proprietary open data software and makes it easy to unlock the hidden value of Big Data. The platform provides a simple workflow that allows users to streamline entire Open Data projects. iPad Only No More: Inkling Debuts HTML5-Powered E-Book App For The Web. Inkling, the San Francisco-based startup that’s known for making super slick interactive digital versions of college textbooks and other educational titles for the iPad, has debuted its first ever platform for the web browser.
‘Inkling for Web’ requires no Flash or other plug-ins, and is powered entirely by technologies such as HTML5, CSS and Javascript, Inkling CEO Matt McInnis said in an interview this week. This means that Inkling titles, which had previously been viewable only through Inkling’s native iPad app, can now be viewed on any up-to-date webkit-based browser such as Chrome or Safari by anyone with an Inkling account. All current and future Inkling titles are now available through the new web interface — with things such as 3-D graphics, videos and audio features fully included. Every part of each title will have its own unique URL so that instructors can send out links to certain sections. Increasing Its Potential Market By 10X — In A Snap The Open Web: Pros Outweigh The Cons. Here’s Johnny! SkySQL Raises Another $2.5m To Give Oracle Nightmares.
SkySQL plans to be something of a thorn in Oracle’s side.
As you’ll recall MySQL, which as a free database platform annoyed Oracle, was sold to Sun and then Oracle bought Sun. That was supposed to keep a lid on things. Now with MySQL under its wing, Oracle plans to move those MySQL users over to Oracle databases in due course. But it can’t push things too hard due to EU competition rules in place for the next five years. So guess what? Site Consulta Remédios Recebe Investimento. 1M Students Strong, Echo360 Secures $31M From Steve Case, Ted Leonsis To Flip Higher Ed. As the old school gives way to the new, technology has begun to play an increasingly active role in the learning process — from primary to higher education.
This has given rise to “blended learning,” or the strategic blending of face-to-face instruction with learning environments mediated by technology — be that by way of digital textbooks, video, learning management systems, social networking, and more. Another enabler of this shift to blended learning comes in the shape of “lecture capture” solutions, which allow educational institutions to convert their professors’ lectures into digital media so that students can later have access to that content, on desktops and mobile devices.
Last week, The Washington Post reported that one of the leaders in this area of blended learning, the Washington D.C. -based Echo360, had taken on a big chunk of capital to fuel an ambitious mission to “reach 50 percent of U.S. college students in the next five years,” said CEO Fred Singer. Death To Powerpoint! Piccsy Rethinks The Pitchdeck, Gets Tons Of Pageviews. Your Powerpoint pitchdeck is so boring. So. Freaking. Boring. Zillow Completes Its $40M RentJuice Acquisition. Zillow, the popular online real estate search engine, just announced that it has closed its previously announced (and rumored) $40 million acquisition of RentJuice. With RentJuice, Zillow now owns a rental relationship management service for landlords, property managers and rental brokers that helps them market their inventory and client relationships.
RentJuice is currently being used to manage one million rental units and their rental listings. As the U.S. real estate market slowed down over the last few years, Zillow started to focus more on rentals, too. Now, Zillow considers rentals to be one of its three core businesses besides real estate and mortgages. Gartner: Over $172B In Mobile Payments In 2012 With 212M Users; SMS, Web Most Popular Transaction Methods. No, NFC still hasn’t come to the iPhone — or many other devices, for that matter. But this does not appear to be stopping the momentum in the world of mobile payments. Research out today from Gartner says that this year will see more than $171.5 billion in mobile payment transactions — a rise of over 60 percent on 2011′s $105.9 billion — with 212.2 million people (up 32 percent from 160.5m in 2011) using some form of mobile payment service. And what’s fuelling the rise? Despite the rise of smartphones, it’s legacy-based services like SMS and web-based transactions.
Longer term, Gartner believes that transactions will reach a volume of $617 billion by 2016 — with average growth slightly slowing down to around 42 percent — with 448 million users using such services. HoozTrippin Helps You Find Travel Buddies. If you’ve got a vacation coming up, a startup called HoozTrippin is aiming to make it more fun by connecting you with other travelers. Co-founder and CEO Steven Oh (who was formerly the head of product at Rotten Tomatoes and Movielink), describes the site as “Match.com for travelers,” except broader: “We don’t limit ourselves to just singles.” In some ways, it sounds like a complement to a service like Triptrotting, which connects travelers to locals. Local guides can make for a better trip, for sure, but so can hanging out with fellow travelers — for example, that’s one of the big reasons many of my friends prefer staying in hostels. So when you enter your trip information into HoozTrippin, you can see a list of other members who are going to be in the same location at the same time.
If you enter the specific hotel, you can even see who else has said they’re going to stay there. HoozTrippin is self-funded. With $5.5M From Google Ventures, Opus, Crittercism Launches An App Performance Management Solution. Last summer, after graduating from AngelPad, San Francisco-based Crittercism announced that it had raised $1.2 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures, and AOL Ventures. Today, the startup has received further validation for its diagnostic and management tools for mobile developers, as Opus Capital, Shasta Ventures and Google Ventures have all re-upped, investing $5.5 million in the startup’s series A financing.
Not, in fact, $7.2 million as the company’s SEC filing stated this morning. Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy tells us that the filing included the convertible note from the startup’s seed funding. YC Alum/Construction Disruptor PlanGrid Nails $1.1M Seed Funding From Box, 500 Startups, And More. One more Y Combinator startup from the March 2012 class has bagged a seed round of funding. PlanGrid, which has created a groundbreaking app for the construction industry, has raised $1.1 million from a notable list of backers. They include Suleman Ali, founder and CEO of TinyCo; Sam Altman, founder of Loopt; Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail; Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, Ray Levitt, Director of Stanford University’s Construction Engineering department; building-sector-focused Navitas Capital; as well as 500 Startups and Y Combinator itself.
Plus, here’s a twist: the funding marks the first investment in a startup (outside of acquisitions) by the cloud-services company Box, as part of its /bin Box Innovation Network initiative. Ryan Sutton-Gee, one of the co-founders and CEO of PlanGrid, tells me that the motivation for Box is to foster cloud-based enterprise apps. The funding will be used to expand PlanGrid’s team and add more features to the app. Emotion Measurement Platform Affectiva Wins $500K NSF Grant. Dropcanvas Offers Up Free, Dead Simple File Sharing, But Can It Last?
MongoDB Developer 10gen Raises $42 Million Round Led By New Enterprise Associates. 10gen, the company behind the increasingly popular NoSQL database MongoDB today announced that it has secured a new $42 million financing round let by New Enterprise Associates. This round also includes participation from existing investors Sequoia Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners and Union Square Ventures. 10gen says that it plans to use the financing to “invest in product development for MongoDB and the MongoDB Monitoring Service and to better support its rapidly growing community and user base worldwide.” Ace Metrix Raises $8M For Smarter TV Ad Testing. Appsplit Is Crowdfunding For Apps. If Appsplit is any indication, either crowdfunding is the future of everything or there’s a crowdfunding gold rush. I’m going to bet it’s a little of both. This new service allows programmers to crowdfund their projects.
Salesforce Lines Up Against Oracle On Social Push; Buys Buddy Media For $689M. Diffbot Raises $2 Million Angel Round For Web Content Extraction Technology. Diffbot, the super-geeky/awesome visual learning robot technology which aims to “see” the web the way that people do, is today announcing a new infusion of capital. Datahero Wants To Democratize Data Visualization And Analysis, Raises $1M Round Led By Foundry Group. Data visualization isn’t always easy, especially if your data is coming from a wide variety of sources. A/B Tester Optimizely Raises Funding From Battery And Google Ventures, Plans Mobile Launch. Marketplace For Event Venues ‘Eventup’ Brings In $1.8M From Lightbank, NEA And More. Flikdate Announces The World’s First Mobile Live Video Dating Service. SEO Was Yesterday. 500 Startups’ PostRocket Fires Up $610K For Facebook News Feed Optimization. Solar Mosaic Raises $2.5 Million Series A To Be The “Kickstarter For Solar” Big Data For Higher Ed: With $4.1M From First Round, Floodgate, Former Kaplan Exec Launches Civitas Learning.
UK Daily Deals Aggregator Coupobox Sells Up To DealCollector In Another Sign Of Consolidation. MoneySupermarket To Acquire MoneySavingExpert For £87 million. First Impressions On Fluent, The Startup Promising “The Future Of Email” Business-Focused Ad Startup Bizo Launches Self-Serve Retargeting. More Cloud Investment: Sonian Picks Up $13.6M For Cloud Archiving And Search. YC-Backed GoCardless Launches PayLinks, A Bitly For Payments. IT Services Consolidation: CGI To Buy Logica For $2.6B (And Crashes Logica’s Site In Process) Educational App Maker Mindshapes Picks Up $4M Round Led By Index; Adds Big 5 Publishers To Magic Town.