Electric Cloud Closes $12M Series E Round For Its Continuous Delivery Service

Electric Cloud, a company that offers continuous delivery products, services and support to businesses that want to adapt this software design practice, today announced that it has closed a $12 million Series E round with participation from Siemens’ Venture Capital, US Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, RRE Ventures and Rembrandt Venture Partners. The company previously disclosed this as an $8 million round in September 2013, but today announced that it has added an additional $4 million to this over-subscribed round.

Steve Brodie, Electric Cloud’s CEO, said in a statement announcing the funding that closing the over-subscribed Series E round will help to accelerate company growth and create new ways to help customers deliver better software more efficiently.

The company says the additional funding reflects its “continued growth and market leadership.” Electric Cloud’s services are currently in use by a wide variety of businesses, ranging from Shell Oil to Epic Games, Panasonic Automotive Services, Splunk and SpaceX. Its staff has now grown to 120 employees, and its products include services for agile software development, Android life-cycle management and automotive software.

Continuous integration (that is, ensuring that all developers are synced up by checking on their code regularly) has been commonplace since the 90s. Continuous delivery, however, which goes beyond integration and focuses on the deployment pipeline, is only now really catching on in the enterprise. Already, though, it is a surprisingly competitive field; incumbents like HP to ThoughtWorks and startups like CloudBees’ Jenkins and the increasingly popular Chef are vying for users.

Apple closes the gap on Samsung’s advertising budget

The US smartphone market is a big competitive business, to keep yourself ahead of the pack you have to spend big bucks on making sure that consumers know about your products. Samsung is still the biggest spender on advertising in the US, but it’s rival, Apple, is quickly closing the gap.

Research conducted by Kantar Media shows that Samsung spent a $68 million more on advertising than Apple in 2012, but last year the gap closed to just $12 million. This swing came from a combination of Samsung dialing back its ad spending, whilst Apple embarked on an expensive TV-led campaign.

As for the actual figures, Samsung splashed about $363 million on US phone ads, down 10 percent from 2012’s cost of $401 million. Samsung was also the only smartphone company to cut its advertising budget last year. Apple, on the other hand, spent around $351 million on phone advertising in 2013, up 5 percent from $333 million in the previous year. As a side note, Apple spent more on TV ads in 2013 than it spent on all advertising in 2012.

To give you an idea of just how big the smartphone advertising market is, seven of the biggest smartphone manufacturers spent a little over $1.3 billion on advertisements in the US last year. This covers a wide range of advertising mediums, including TV, print, radio, and online ads. Total spending for 2013 was up a staggering 33 percent from 2012, when manufacturers spent roughly $1 billion on advertising.

It probably comes as no surprise in this day and age that spending on telecommunication ads — that’s TV and internet content — is growing the fastest. Spending in this sector grew by 8 percent through 2013, which is nine times faster than the wider US ad industry’s growth figure of just 0.9 percent.

Samsung’s and Apple’s ad budgets dwarf those of the five other largest spenders.

As for the other big US spenders, Nokia came in third place and was the company which increased its spending by the largest amount year over year. Nokia paid out $221 million in 2013, which is 15 times the amount that the company spent in 2012. Motorola was a similarly high spender, throwing $189 million into the advertising pot. The company tripled its ad spending following the acquisition by Google in mid-2012.

Blackberry, HTC, and LG form up the lower ranks of the seven largest spenders, purchasing $90 million, $76 million, and $46 million worth of advertisements respectively.

With such huge budgets dedicated just to advertising products, it’s easy to see why many smartphone companies are starting to feel a pinch in their profits. But I suppose the most important thing is that all this money spent on advertising appears to be working. Well, at least most of the time.

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Nuji, A U.K. Wanelo, Closes $2M Seed To Splash On Making An iOS App For Social Shoppers

Nuji, a U.K. competitor to Wanelo and Lyst which also offers its users a platform to curate and share fashion and lifestyle products they reckon are worth buying, has closed a $2 million seed round with investment coming from TAG, Seedcamp, Samos and various unnamed angels.

The round also includes money from a large European retail investor whose name is not currently being disclosed.

Nuji is using the funding to launch an iOS app, having previously concentrated on developing its website (after an abortive initial attempt to go mobile first). The app is due to launch in April, with no plans for an Android version at this point.

“Now that the website is more mature, it’s the right time to tackle mobile based all of our learnings,” says co-founder Dean Fankhauser.

“It was very important that we focus on web or mobile in the beginning, not both. We wanted to make mistakes on one platform and once we were confident in our product strategy based on data we had, we were more comfortable to dive head first into mobile.”

“Mobile traffic is surging. Every week we look at the stats, it’s increasing. 30% of our traffic is mobile and that’s with a non-mobile optimised website,” he adds. ”80% of that is iOS, so it was very clear what we should be developing for.”

The social shopping curation startup, which launched its service in 2011 and did a stint at Seedcamp — taking in funding from the incubator at that time but otherwise bootstrapping development until now — is not currently breaking out any user numbers so presumably has a job of work to do on growing usage. It says its main markets are the U.K. and the U.S.

One way Nuji has been trying to grow is by updating its website. In recent weeks the site has had a makeover and Nuji claims the new look has doubled its engagement metrics — including time on site, pageviews (up from two per visit to four) and clicks through to retailers. The prior 80% bounce rate has also halved, according to Fankhauser.

“We completely re-built the infrastructure and made quite a few design changes. It now feels more like a classic ecommerce website that happens to have a social layer built on top. Our user’s have responded well to that,” he added.