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Ludei Raises $1.5M To Expand Its HTML5 Platform To Mobile App Developers
Ludei has received $1.5 million in funding from Kibo Ventures, Vitamina K and several angel investors to expand its JavaScript/HTML5 engineering team and bring its development platform to app developers beyond the gaming industry.
Back in February, we covered Ludei’s mission to prove that HTML5 standards are viable for game developers even after Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook’s mobile strategy relied too much on HTML5 rather than native applications. Now Ludei says that it is growing its team in order to answer increasing demand from technology and entertainment companies for its HTML5 multi-platform development products.
“This funding further validates our approach to HTML5 development. HTML5 has taken a lot of criticism in recent years and it’s true that on its own, it performs poorly on mobile,” Ludei CEO Eneko Knorr said in a statement. “But our team and the world-class developers using our platform are proving every day that with the right support, HTML5 is ready for primetime, and we’re positioned to take on the biggest players in the app industry.”
Ludei faces competition from Game Closure for gaming clients, but Ludei says that it has the only HTML5 platform that brings native performance and features to mobile app developers.
More than 6,000 developers, including three of the top 20 game publishers in the world, currently use the Ludei platform to power HTML5 applications, which enables them to code once, then monetize and market applications across multiple platforms with native-like features. More than 500 iOS and Android games have been developed using the platform, including ScribbleMix, Lunch ZBug, Bubble Soccer and Rhino Hero. Ludei is the only platform that supports WebGL on iOS and Android devices. It also supports new platforms like Ouya and Tizen.
Ludei investors Kibo Ventures and Vitamina K are both based in Spain. Kibo Ventures supports Spanish startups in the Internet and mobile space and is currently investing in Amerigo Innvierte Spain Technologies FCR Fund, part of the Amerigo network sponsored by Telefonica and CDTI. Its other portfolio companies include international education payment platform peerTransfer and film and production directory Visualnet. Vitamina K invests in Internet-based companies around the world, including video monetization platform The Mad Video.
Ludei’s initial funding came from Knorr, a serial entrepreneur who sold his previous company Hostalia, to Telefonica in 2007. This round brings Ludei’s total funding to $4.5 million.
YC-Backed Sponsorfied Becomes Partnered, Launches Platform For Brands To Find The Best Partnerships
Sponsorfied, a Y Combinator alum from last summer, is re-branding itself as Partnered to help brands choose the best partnerships with artists and other creative endeavors.
The company’s CEO Baldwin Cunningham says the old name, which centered around sponsorships, was too limiting.
“In addition to people just saying our name wrong, the next generation of these relationships aren’t going to feel like a one-way street,” Cunningham said. “With sponsorships, people are expecting things for free. But with partnerships, brands and actors have to mutually benefit each other.”
With the new name, they’re launching two new sets of tools for brands to manage their partnership requests. Partnered DIRECT is a curated service where Partnered will recommend opportunities to support creative cultural events and projects. Cunningham compares it to a Fab.com-like flash sales model for possible brand sponsorships.
The other new product is called Partnered MANAGE, where brands can replace all of their messy paperwork with a simple dashboard to evaluate possible sponsorships.
“One of the biggest problems for brands is handling communication with sponsorship requests. Usually, they’re getting them through e-mail or even physical proposals that are sent to a P.O. box,” he said. “What we’re doing with Partnered MANAGE is allowing them to have a standardized process.”
He said that some companies like American Airlines were receiving as many as 300 requests per week, so that created a messy flow of PDFs and spreadsheets that these companies usually have to manage.
The startup, which has raised funding from investors including Mike Rothenberg, Dave McClure, Shervin Pishevar, and Gary Vaynerchuk, has kept quiet for the last six to eight months while building the new services.
Cunningham says the company has set up sponsorships in the past with brands like Samsung supporting Instagrammers like Ike Edeani, who has 360,000 followers, with trips to the SXSW Interactive conference in Austin.
TokBox Launches OpenTok For Customer Service And New Tools For Managing WebRTC Calls
TokBox today launched OpenTok for Customer Service and a number of new WebRTC-based services for OpenTok that will bring advanced audio and video chat capabilities to developers that aren’t natively supported by the increasingly popular real-time file sharing and audio and video chat protocol.
TokBox’s OpenTok can now, for example, dynamically shape audio and video traffic to maximize the experience of everybody on the call. WebRTC has some of these capabilities by defaults, but as TokBox CEO Ian Small told me, OpenTok now keeps an eye on network conditions for every stream that’s going out and when a connection gets too bad, it will automatically drop the video from the call and switch to audio-only. This is surprisingly hard to do for developers, Small noted, but because OpenTok handles all of this in the cloud, the developers don’t have to do anything to support this.
With today’s update, Tokbox is also introducing its Cloud Raptor SDK. Essentially, this gives developers the ability to get a real-time feed of events when people join calls, signals change or when connections are interrupted. Developers can then take this stream of information and use it to manage the business logic of their apps or enforce certain policies. Right now, for example, you can’t easily track how long a WebRTC call actually was unless you do it all on the client side, which is not exactly secure and prone to errors. With Cloud Raptor, however, developers can get a clear picture of all of this data.
It’s important to note that this is just about event data. Developers can’t listen in to calls or see what’s happening in a video chat.
OpenTok For Customer Service
The third piece of today’s update – and one that’s different from most of TobBox’s recent updates – is the launch of OpenTok For Customer Service. This service bundles together a number of pre-configured WebRTC-based tools that allow developers to quickly implement face-to-face video chats for customer service applications.
This, Small told me, could be integrated into existing call center solutions, especially because OpenTok allows developers to create solutions for adding additional parties to a call when you need to bring an expert into a sales call, for example. Small believes this solution will be especially interesting for call centers, but also for schedule booking systems and similar services. Developers, of course, could also take this solution and use it to start building their own small call center themselves.
Now that Firefox 22 – the first version of Mozilla’s browser with built-in WebRTC support – is available, Small believes, we’ll see another uptick in interest from developers. With the addition of Firefox and Chrome’s support for WebRTC, after all, there are now a number of countries where 50% to 70% of the install base can natively run WebRTC apps.
Educational Tech For Tots Grows Up With LeapFrog's Summer Releases
Two years after LeapFrog launched its first kid-friendly learning tablet, the educational toy company in August will release the third iteration of the LeapPad: LeapPad Ultra. Hold on to your tiny plastic seats, kids. This one has Wi-Fi.
Yes, things are bigger and better than last summer’s LeapPad2: 8GB of memory instead of 4, a 7″ high res screen rather than a measly 5″, a “Pet Chat” app that enables kids to chat between tablets with pre-programmed phrases, and access to web pages and images approved by LeapFrog.
It is sweet to be a six-year-old in 2013.
LeapFrog prides itself on mixing fun with education. My theory is that the LeapPad Ultra is mixing education with gadget one-upmanship for the preschool set. Just kidding. This is all about fun!
There is also a price bump, from $99 to $149.99.
LeapFrog is also parlaying the success of its popular Tag Reading System into the July release of its new LeapReader, a pen tricked out with touch technology to help kids sound out words, practice writing letters, and play games. At $49.99, the LeapReader puts Tag to shame with its library of 150 books and audio storage for 40 books — or 175 songs. Good news for Kidz Bop!
And finally for the littlest of LeapFroggers (ages 2-5): purple and green plushie dogs named Violet and Scout that read books to their wee friends. The point is to encourage active reading, by asking kids questions along the way. You can deactivate the pups’ voice boxes at bedtime, because they’re meant to transition from learning friends to stuffed animal friends, aka formative childhood memories of LeapFrog products.
But this is education, so it’s all good.
Danish Company Creates Software That Will Stop You From Printing A Gun
A Danish company called Create It Real has built a software package that recognizes digital gun part models and prevents them from being printed. The software compares each piece you are attempting to print with a database of potential firearm parts and, the company notes, “for safety reasons, there are no models of firearms stored on the user’s computer but rather a list of characteristics.”
The CEO, Jeremie Pierre Gay, has created a proof-of-concept add-on to his turnkey, OEM 3D printing software that he is using to offering to other firms who would like to brand and sell a 3D desktop printer. “It will be possible make it as a service or integrate into another platform,” he said.
The program shuts down the modeling software if it senses that the user is trying to print a gun. Presumably this functionality can be shut down by the user and similar prohibitions – the algorithms that prevent the printing of currency in Photoshop – are often easily avoided. In short, Gay’s creation reduces liability for the printer manufacturer.
They have thus far input the data for the Liberator 3D printed handgun created by Defense Distributed as well as DefDist’s lower receiver part. However, they’re ready to add more parts to the package as they appear.
“We’ve made a test to make sure it will scale up to a much bigger database of parts,” said Gay. “It should be quite fast to actually check the model against the database.”
To Gay, the issue is less about gun control and more about management of risk. The system, for example, will allow a child to print a water gun but will stop him or her before they can print a real gun. It also allows Gay’s clients to add warnings to 3D printing processes so the printer maker can’t be held responsible.
“We are in the business of selling technology to quickly launch a desktop 3D printer,” said Gay. “If a buyer wants to print a gun, we want to be sure the 3D printer makers are not the ones responsible for it.”
The company is quite small and they are working with partners to bring their solutions to market. However, it’s an interesting solution to a thorny problem and shows just how complex the issue of 3D printing may soon become.
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