motorola droid tablet, ships 6.5 million units in Q1 2014

With less than a month at the helm of Motorola Mobility, Rick Osterloh took to the twitter-sphere to announce that Motorola has shipped 6.5 million devices globally in the first quarter of 2014. It was a simple announcement of a number that struggles to compare to the top producers, but 6.5 million is a respectable number for big M.
There are no specifics to speak of, but we suspect these results are in large part thanks to the success of their affordable Moto G Android smartphone that has been setting sales records for the company. Other devices that make up Motorola’s sales would have included the Moto X and a slew of DROID brand devices, like the DROID Maxx and DROID Ultra.

In February, Motorola opened the Moto G for sales in India; exclusive vendor, Flipkart, reported selling out of all stock in the first 15 minutes. With a starting price of $179 in the U.S. for the standard and unlocked versions for the Moto G, it has proven an affordable unit, possibly the best bang for the buck device on the market. And if $179 is too pricey, there is a carrier specific version of the Moto G at Verizon and U.S. Cellular that runs for just $99 ($89 if you catch special deals.)
Compared to some of the larger smartphone manufacturers around the globe, Motorola’s 6.5 million units feels a little small. Samsung loves to announce when it has reached certain milestones, such as 10 million Galaxy Note 3s sold in two months, or 10 million Galaxy S4s sold in only 30 days. However, if we look at some of Motorola’s own history, we see a company that delivered just 3.9 million units for the same period in 2013, and only shipped half a million of their ‘flagship’ Moto X devices in its first quarter on the market, which means that 6.5 million units is something to celebrate.

What’s next for Motorola?

Motorola Mobility has been known as “Motorola a Google Company” since Google purchased the company less than 3 years ago. This is all about to change as we are seeing the final stages of the sale of Motorola over to Chinese based Lenovo. Only Lenovo knows what Motorola will look like by the end of the year, but until the sale is finalized, Motorola is pushing forward with more rumored devices. The Moto X+1 is expected to replace the Moto X, and the XT1021 series may come soon as well for a fraction of the cost of the Moto G. Aside from the rumors, it is a safe bet that the officially announced Motorola Moto 360 smartwatch (pictured above) has captured the attention of many, promising the best that Android Wear has to offer in its innovative, yet oh-so-classic, round watch face design.
Is Motorola’s pending sale to Lenovo making you hold off on purchasing a Motorola smartphone?

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AppDirect Raises $35 Million From Mithril To Grow Its Enterprise Cloud Marketplace

AppDirect raised $35 million in a fresh round of financing for its service selling a white-label marketplace for business applications in the cloud.

Led by Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital, the new financing will be used to expand the company’s international presence and continue its product development. Existing investors, including iNovia Capital and Foundry Group, also participated.

Founded in 2009, the company sells its online services marketplace as an unbranded platform to companies like Staples, Comcast, and AT&T, enabling them to then sell software as a service applications through to small and medium-sized businesses.

“For the developer, it’s easy to integrate into one standard platform and distribute across the board [and] businesses see value in centralizing around a single platform,” said AppDirect’s chief executive Daniel Saks. “We sit at the intersection of the developers and the businesses by enabling distribution.”

The San Francisco-based company generates revenue from a monthly subscription service that customers like AT&T and Comcast pay for its application platform and through a revenue share with applications that are accessed through its white-label service, according to Saks.

Given the growth of companies selling software as a service, AppDirect saw significant demand from investors for its latest fundraising. The company closed its latest Series C round within six weeks of launching its fundraising efforts, Saks said.

Part of the demand was based on the company’s growth, which has led to revenues of $9 million in 2013, according to Saks.

Now that the company’s round has closed, AppDirect is focused on growth in Europe and Latin America. The company is in the process of establishing an office in Munich, in addition to locations in Montreal, San Francisco, Boulder, Colo., Ottawa, and London.

The company is also on the hunt for new acquisitions, building off of its last two purchases. In 2012 it bought jBilling, a billing service for cloud applications. And last year it acquired StandingCloud, which sells a service packaging applications for cloud services, in a September 2013 acquisition.

Both acquisitions continue to operate as independent brands, while AppDirect has folded their technologies into its own suite of services, Saks said.

Given the company’s new cash position, additional acquisitions may also be in the cards. “The categories that we always look at are billing, identity management and security, and finally data management,” said Saks.

Photo via Flickr user Megan McCormick

Freelancer Marketplace Ooomf Becomes Crew, Grabs $2.1 Million

Ooomf, the one-time app discovery startup which last year relaunched as a freelancer marketplace to connect mobile and web developers with projects that fit their skill set, is now changing its name to Crew, and announcing new funding. The company has raised an additional $2.1 million in a new round led by Fred Destin of Atlas Venture, investors in other marketplaces like Moo.com, Creative Market, CustomMade, and AngelList.

Also participating were Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList; Real Ventures; iNovia Capital; Boldstart Venture Capital and others.

Before starting Crew, the founding team were independent developers and designers themselves, which is why their shift to this type of business made sense. Plus, as co-founder Mikael Cho explained last year, helping companies build quality apps is really the first and most important piece to app discoverability, anyway.

As of a year ago, Crew (then Ooomf), had burned through half of its earlier $500,000 in funding as it shifted its focus to the freelancer marketplace. The team went “super lean,” says Cho, and began connecting its creatives to temporary gigs using simple tools, like a Wufoo form and Mailchimp newsletter.

Though there are several other freelancer marketplaces, including services like Elance (now merged with oDesk) or Freelancer.com, for instance, what makes Crew different is its high bar in vetting quality developers and designers. Currently, there are 350 creatives available through Crew, and Cho says they’re only accepting around 1 in 20 applicants.

“In order to be accepted, you must have a personal portfolio, three examples of live projects, and what you’ve done on each project,” he explains. “For example, if you’re applying as a mobile developer or designer, you must have worked on an app that’s 4 stars or better and in the App Store.”

Mobile developers and designers are heavily requested on Crew, in fact, as around 60% of the projects on its site are mobile. Generally, these fall into two categories: those with websites who are trying to go mobile, and those with a native app on one platform who are trying to build for another (e.g. iOS app needing an Android version.)

In addition to vetting the talent, the projects themselves are vetted for quality, too, in order to make the line up of work appealing to the developers and designers using Crew. Today, the average project budget is about $8,000, which is around 10 times the size of many competitors, Cho claims. That’s because not only are businesses using the service paying higher for quality work, they’re also often longer-term projects – like building a mobile app from scratch – that can stretch out over a couple of months.

Shortly after launching the marketplace last year, the team had around $120,000 worth of projects on its site, but as of today the company has matched over $3 million in paid projects. Now growing at 30% month-over-month, Crew has signed up developers and designers who have worked on apps like Path, Mailbox, and who have done work for Facebook and Google. On the customer side, companies like Eventbrite, IDEO and others the company can’t disclose due to NDA’s, have used its service to find talent.

The company takes a 15% fee to generate revenue, and of its approved projects on the site, around 50% of those are approved and filled right away.

Meanwhile, Crew has a member waiting list of around 4,000, but is waiting for there to be enough work in the pipeline to invite others in. Quality Android developers would probably have a good shot, though. “We’ve noticed it’s pretty hard to find the right fit sometimes – with Android, we’ve seen a lot in terms of both development and design,” says Cho.

Going forward, the new funding gives the company another 18 months in runway, and will allow it to double its team of 4 to 8. Crew’s next big focus will be on automating its matching technology – something which currently requires more of a human touch, but as its collection of data grows, could be done more algorithmically.

And yes, Crew will be going mobile itself, but likely not until year-end.

Gowalla Founder Josh Williams Raises $2.1 Million To Have Another Go At Local Mobile Discovery Apps

Gowalla founder Josh Williams is nothing if not consistent.

After several years spent building location-based mobile apps and products for his own company, as well as Facebook, he’s back with another venture that’s focused on improving the way we explore our everyday world.

As you probably recall, Gowalla was one of the early location-based social check-in apps, aimed at helping users to pinpoint where they were and what they were doing, so that friends may find them.

Later, using the data that users had volunteered, the company pivoted slightly to be about creating guides and tools for discovering new things in the world around you. But soon after the launch of Gowalla 4.0, the team was acqui-hired by Facebook.

Last summer, after working on Facebook Pages, Location, and Events products, Williams left the company. And shortly after that he founded a new venture that they called The Last Guide Company along with former Dropbox and Facebook designer (and Gowalla alum) Adam Michela.

The idea was to use all the things that your mobile phone knows about you to make it fun to go out and explore the world. Since being launched, the brand name has been shortened to Last, and Williams and Michela recruited front-end Developer Tyler Stalder, illustrator and designer Brian Brasher, and photographer Daniel Agee to help them out along the way.

While Williams is staying mum on what the initial product created by the team will be, he did tell us that, like Gowalla and the Facebook products that he worked on, Last would be focused on harnessing the power of mobile phones and physical location to improve the way that users interacted with the world around them.

“How do we take your phone and what we understand about you and where you are in the world to make it easier for you to go out… and explore?” Williams said.

That functionality will be at the heart of whatever Last comes to market with later this year. And, whatever it is, will come as a bit of a departure from what Gowalla was more than five years ago.

In part, that’s because the world has changed. As Williams told us, the idea of using your mobile phone to pinpoint your location is not quite as novel today as it once was.

“When we first built Gowalla, it was on the first smartphone the masses had access to. Location was novel, and… coming out of the gate, there were a lot of people who hadn’t seen anything like it before,” Williams said. “Now everything uses location, even the things you don’t think of as being location-based.”

Our phones now also know a lot more about us these days, including our likes, dislikes, relationship status, where we’ve been to, and where we’re going. With all that data, Last could theoretically provide much better local discovery and recommendations than what’s currently available.

To push its vision forward, the Last team raised $2.1 million in seed capital led by Freestyle Capital. Along with its investment came money from firms that had previously put money into Gowalla, including Greylock Partners and Founders Fund.

Other investors in the round include Google Ventures, Sherpa Ventures, Designer Fund, BoxGroup, Launch Fund, SV Angel, Fuel Capital, Slow Ventures, Ruchi Sanghvi, Pete Cashmore, Tom Conrad, Todd Jackson, Tom Watson, and Semil Shah.

PluralSight Buys Digital-Tutors For $45 Million To Add Media Software Training

PluralSight, a purveyor of online training tools for software professionals, is expected to announce the acquisition of creative software training services company Digital-Tutors in a $45 million deal.

With the Digital-Tutors purchase, PluralSight adds a suite of 1,500 courses focused on media and design to its already formidable array of online training tools for professional developers. The company now boasts over 3,000 training modules in its catalog.

It’s the latest shot in the battle for dominance in the market for software training content – a sector that is increasingly consolidating around larger, better-funded companies.

Tech professionals face a constant struggle to keep up with the latest and greatest in software, so it’s no wonder that training and education services for information tech have become big businesses. In fact, Global Industry Analysts projects that spending on professional training for software and information technology will hit $107 billion by 2015.

And PluralSight isn’t the only e-learning company cutting checks. Earlier in April, Lynda.com announced the acquisition of Compilr in a roughly $20 million deal to add the Halifax, Canada-based company’s services for in-browser learning, writing and testing code to its own education offerings.

“The trends in the space are starting to really develop more clearly for investors as well as for customers in the market,” said PluralSight chief executive Aaron Skonnard. “The [massive open online courses]  have gotten a lot of attention but people are struggling to see how a lot of them make money. The companies that have a very solid financial grounding and good ideas are starting to group together.”

At PluralSight, the deal for Oklahoma City-based Digital-Tutors represents the company’s fourth acquisition in eight months. Digital-Tutors already counts some of the largest entertainment tech companies like Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, and Rockstar Games among its clientele of corporations, universities, and professionals.

In all, the company has spent under $100 million on acquisitions including PeepCode, which offers open-source developer courses; the screencast publisher for developers, Tekpub; and TrainSignal, an information technology training company PluralSight acquired in a $23.6 million deal.

Based in Salt Lake City, PluralSight began as a classroom-based training company in 2004 before establishing its online presence in 2008. Since then the company grew its user base and took a single, $27.5 million round from Insight Venture Partners in December 2012.

That round was the starting gun for PluralSight’s acquisition tear, and it also helped boost the company’s revenues from $16 million in 2012 to over $32 million in 2013, and the company is heading for another year of triple-digit growth.

As a result of the acquisition, customers of both Digital-Tutors and PluralSight will have access to both companies’ libraries at no additional charge, and the 30 employees on Digital-Tutors staff will join the PluralSight team. Additionally, Digital-Tutors chief executive and founder Piyush Patel will join PluralSight as senior vice president of creative operations.

“The whole online e-learning space is going to go through quite a period of consolidation over the next several years,” said Skonnard. “We can raise debt financing and we can pay for a lot of these deals with cash on the books. That’s why you’re seeing [consolidation] happen sooner in the skills oriented training before you’re seeing it happen elsewhere.”

Flayvr Raises $2 Million To Help Us Make Sense Of Our Growing Photo Collections

Before Apple’s iOS 7 update began organizing your photos into “moments” based on time and place, there was Flayvr. The Tel Aviv-based startup has built automatic organization technology which takes your smartphone’s photos and videos and places them into albums that you can quickly share with your friends and social networks. Today, the company has raised another $2 million in funding to continue to grow its company, whose app now reaches 2 million smartphone users.

The new funding comes mainly from regional investors, including Kaedan Capital, former Microsoft Corporate Vice President Moshe Lichtman, Aviv Venture Capital, iAngels, and angel investors Rafi Gidron, Zohar Gilon, Yariv Gilat, and Partam Hightech.

The company had previously raised $450,000 from Israeli angel investors.

Available on both iOS and Android, Flayvr has outlived several competitors in the photo organization space including much-loved Everpix, Evernote acquisition Snapjoy, long gone Batch, Google acquisition Flock, and others.

Once installed, the app can serve as something of a replacement to a user’s default photo gallery. It analyzes contextual data around the photos and videos saved on the device, using social, behavioral, user-generated, geolocation, computer vision and time-based signals. After the photos are organized, you can tap to share an album to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, WhatsApp, iMessage, or email.

The app is well-designed, too. In the album, the photos thumbnails are somewhat animated, slowly fading in and out from one picture to the next, as the layout is subtly rearranged with thumbnails that change from a rectangle to a square and back again, and more. This gives you an easy way to the see the album’s photos at a glance, without having to flip through a million photos one-by-one.

Led by technology veteran and former military intelligence officer Ron Levy (CEO) and Adi Ashkenazi (CTO), previously of Fring and Modu, Flayvr has now processed 1 billion photos since launching in 2012.

With the additional funding, the company plans to double its team to 10, and expand operations in the U.S.

In terms of the Flayvr product itself, the longer-term plan is to extend the platform and technology into the cloud, says Levy.

“Right now, we are focused on creating a new mobile photo and video gallery experience, built around memories rather than a never-ending scroll of thumbnails,” he explains. “There are obvious opportunities to take this same kind of innovation to the large, disorganized shoeboxes in the cloud, but the focus today is on perfecting the mobile experience. Flayvr technology can do for photos and videos what Waze did for maps and WhatsApp did for messaging,” Levy adds.

Bringing Flayvr to other platforms will also help the company begin to generate revenue, he also tells us, but declined to offer details about those specific plans at this time.

As for the iOS 7 elephant in the room – the introduction of a similar, if simplified organizational system built in Apple’s mobile operating system could mean fewer users will go in search of alternative technologies. But Levy says that Apple’s improvements bring more attention to the space of photo and video gallery organization, and that Flayvr will benefit from this increased focus.

“Apple took a great step in the right direction, and at the same time they have shown time and time again that they work with independent developers and encourage them to create improved experiences that complement and re-invent the native apps, such as Waze and WhatsApp,” he says. “We were actually happy to see the changes in iOS 7…There’s plenty of room for both of us to innovate and improve.”

Flayvr is available on iTunes and here on Google Play.

SCIenergy Partnering In Over $400 Million Fund For Efficient Building Retrofits

On the heels of its $12 million round of funding, SCIenergy, a provider of software and project development services for energy efficient building retrofits is partnering with an undisclosed investor to deploy a new $400 million fund for what it calls managed energy service agreements.

The new fund builds on the company’s existing strategy and mirrors a similar partnership that SCIenergy has with its investor Mitsui USA. The American arm of the Japanese conglomerate became an investor in the Dallas-based company’s latest financing round, according to a person familiar with SCIenergy.

Through the partnership between the two companies, SCIenergy has had access to a $100 million fund to finance energy efficiency projects in buildings, according to a person familiar with the arrangement.

Since merging with Transcend Equity Development in 2012, SCIenergy has kept a fairly low profile and has gone through a series of executive changes, not the least being the appointment of Transcend Equity Development’s Steve Gossett Jr. to the position of chief executive.

Property owners have always been interested in energy efficiency measures as a way to save money, but have been loath to invest significant capital up front to upgrade their buildings. Now, building efficiency software companies are providing access to capital to boost the growth of energy efficiency projects. In March, Noesis Energy announced a $30 million fund to provide financing for building efficiency retrofits.

To date, SCIenergy has raised $62 million from previous investors including The Westly Group, DFJ Core, DFJ Growth and Triangle Peak Partners. The company’s latest round was led by Braemar Energy Ventures and included Edison International, in addition to Mitsui USA’s investment.

Since its overhaul, SCIenergy has steadily gained traction, including a recent deal signed with Drexel University for a $6.6 million project to upgrade energy efficiency in 430,000 square feet wroth of science labs and academic buildings. The company is also working with Mitsui USA on a project to reduce energy consumption by 23.6% at 125 Maiden Lane, a 320,000 square foot condominium office property.

“Our goal is to essentially deliver Energy-Infrastructure-as-a-Service. Building owners and tenants get the benefit of building upgrades without the complexities or financial risk. Contractors and financial institutions, meanwhile, will see a huge increase in opportunities and deal flow,” said Gossett Jr., in a statement about the company’s financing. “In a few years, property owners are going to stop thinking of their utility bill as a pain and start thinking about it as a vehicle to get needed improvements done.”

Photo via Flickr user National Nuclear Security Administration

QuizUp gets over a million downloads in its first week on Android

Kamran Farooqui 2014-03-21T12:00:01Z23 hours ago

QuizUp, the uber popular trivia game, has racked over a million downloads in only its first week since its release on the Android platform. While already boasting millions of players on iOS on which QuizUp was first released, a strong launch on Android would only serve to further boost its popularity.

The Icelandic startup Plain Vanilla Games is behind this addictive trivia game, and with securing $22 million in funding within just 4 months of its release, I think it’s certain that QuizUp is here to stay, and the figures revealed by Plain Vanilla Games can probably back up that claim. With over a million signups in a week on Android and over 100,000 signups every day on both iOS and Android combined, QuizUp sure seems to have managed to strike a chord with its audience.

While there is no dearth of trivia games and apps such as Quizoid and Icomania on both Android and iOS, I think the reason that QuizUp is proving to be more popular is that the folks over at Plain Vanilla Games have managed to get the gameplay right. QuizUp makes you feel as if you are playing against a human opponent on the internet in real time, when in fact the opponent’s actions are a simulation of their pre-recorded answers that they probably gave when they played the game.

Also, the ability to send messages to your friends or just random people that you played against, and the ability to post trivia topics of your own liking give the game a social feel as well. With thousands of questions already in the database and over 400 topics to choose from, you will surely be spoilt for choice for a trivia topic of your liking.

So have you tried out QuizUp yet? Share your experience with it in the comments below.

Source: TechCrunch

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QuizUp for Android attracted 1 million new signups within its first week, averaging 100,000 new users a day

After first launching on iOS in November, Plain Vanilla game’s popular trivia game QuizUp finally landed on Android earlier this month. At the time, there were whispers about how QuizUp could be the next super-hit (fad) app taking the crown from Flappy Bird.

So how well has QuizUp done since its Android debut? According to Plain Vanilla Games, the app saw a million new signups during its first week on Android and has been constantly grabbing 100,000 new daily signups ever since. Combining its iOS and Android users, the trivia app has 12.6 million users and has seen over 40 million trivia matches. Here’s a fun fact: Plain White Games says that all its users combined have reportedly spent a total equivalent of 176 years playing the game since its original debut.

There’s no denying that QuizUp has been a run away success so far, and in our official review we found that the game was largely enjoyable, though not without its faults including occasional factual errors in questions, spelling mistakes and other minor issues.

The big question is whether QuizUp can hold onto this success in the long-term, or if it’s user base will eventually lose interest and move on — as we have begun to see with Flappy Bird and the many clones that followed it.

Have you tried QuizUp yet, if so what do you think of the trivia platform based on your experience with it?

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