Transmedia Capital Portfolio Company Tello Acquired
From ReadWriteWeb: By Nick Statt December 4, 2012
In a move that enhances its mobile management toolkit, push notification service Urban Airship has acquired Tello, a Palo Alto-based company that helps businesses and app-makers create passes for Apple’s Passbook.
The move comes on the heels of Urban Airship’s purchase last year of mobile location service SimpleGeo. Urban Airship’s acquisition of Tello could potentially double its market given that it can now help businesses without apps create digital coupons, tickets and loyalty cards through Passbook.
Since its founding in 2009, Urban Airship, based in Portland, Ore., has specialized in offering high-quality push notifications and a slew of other services that come bundled with tiered plans. The company has raised more $20 million after three rounds of funding–including an injection from TrueVentures, which also invested in Tello–and earned it a list of impressive clients like Airbnb and ESPN.
With the acquisition of Tello and its PassTools product, Urban Airship is banking on the rise of the digital wallet and opening itself up to everyone from mom-and-pop shops wanting to offer local deals to big-name companies currently seeing poor results from age-old paper coupons.
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Soniqplay Won First Place in the Music Industry Blog Start-up Showcase.
From music industry blog – October 9, 2012
Soniqplay won first place in the Music Industry Blog Start-up Showcase among the 23 finalists. Judges scored us early stage start-ups on 8 criteria: Product Idea, Business Model, Uniqueness, Competitive Positioning, Market Need, Strategic Vision, Team, and Execution. The judging panel consisted of Mark Mulligan, Martin Goldschmidt, Chairman of the Cooking Vinyl Group, Davin McDermott, Director and Head of Music at RSM Tenon and Keith Jopling, Leading Music Industry Consultant.
The Judges commented, “We liked Soniqplay because Soniqplay have great looking products coupled with good market traction and an impressive team that gets the music sector. Their combination of vision, robust business model and solid execution impressed the judges. The only concern that the panel had was whether Soniqplay was able to differentiate sufficiently in what is a relatively crowded market segment. But with already impressive traction, Soniqplay look well placed to meet this challenge head on.”
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TOP 15 US STARTUP ACCELERATORS RANKED: KICKLABS #3
Read the full story at Tech Cocktail
KickLabs Ranked among the 10 Best Startup Accelerators in the World
From TheBestSchools.org – August 15th, 2012
The 10 Best Startup Accelerators: Boot Camps for the Internet Entrepreneur explains about startup accelerators and profiles the companies offering the 10 best programs out there right now. A startup accelerator (or incubator) is a school where would-be Internet entrepreneurs turn their vision for an online business into a reality.
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KickLabs is like an ordinary accelerator/incubator in that it provides access to advisers and mentors, as well as providers of special services that startups need, including banking, human resources, marketing, and public relations.
However, KickLabs typically works with startups that are farther along in development—ready to start acquiring customers and generating revenue. Kicklabs helps to match them with investors, and provides access to brand and technology partners.
As such, KickLabs does not directly compete with traditional, seed-fund accelerator/incubator programs. Rather, companies that have already completed a traditional program may then move on to KickLabs as a next step.
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Buddy Selected as One of the First Investments for Bing Fund
In addition to funding, Microsoft will provide Buddy with access to technology assets, data, and its global network of partners and customers.
SEATTLE, WA – August 9th, 2012 – The Buddy Platform (http://buddy.com) announced today that it was selected as one of the first investments for the recently launched angel fund and incubator program, Bing Fund. Teaming up with Bing Fund will enable Buddy to harness the global horsepower of Microsoft technology assets, technical expertise, and Bing APIs to bring an array of new data and tools to market.
With over 8,000 developers building applications across nearly every mobile OS and device type in the market, Buddy provides backend services for app developers to more easily build high volume, large scale applications on any connected device, running any operating system. Publishers of apps use Buddy to derive high fidelity demographic and geo-location based usage data. With access to Microsoft resources that Bing Fund will facilitate, Buddy will be able to offer developers on a variety of platforms unprecedented new scenarios and datasets, and will offer publishers additional metrics that will help them to understand the usage of their applications and better monetize their apps.
“We’re delighted to be able to transform such incredible support from Microsoft directly into Buddy customer value – across a very wide range of devices and scenarios,” said Buddy CEO, David McLauchlan. “As a direct result of support from Bing Fund, we will shortly introduce new product features that developers and publishers will be excited to leverage.”
Buddy was the first backend as a service (“BaaS”) to provide a native SDK for Windows® Phone and Windows 8. Although its support for developers building apps for some of the newest Microsoft products is exciting, Buddy’s ability to solve immediate challenges facing professional app developers across various platforms is one of the strengths that attracted Bing Fund.
“We’re really looking forward to working with Buddy,” said Rahul Sood, General Manager of Bing Fund. “They’re a cool bunch of people who make it super easy for developers to create unique mobile apps. We want to help them reach not just the next level, but beyond that. Interplanetary heights, if you will.”
Developers can learn more, create an account and start developing at http://buddy.com. To celebrate Buddy’s recent public launch, Buddy is offering free access to the Platform up to 2MM API calls per month, through August 31st, 2012.
