TechCrunch
Viki Moves In On Chinese Audiences With Two New Video Deals
Video sharing site, Viki, is continuing its push into China with two new video distribution deals with Chinese video-on-demand sites, LeTV and Xunlei Kankan.
This move follows its first distribution deal, set up last July, with Renren—also known as the Facebook of China. That deal with Renren was Viki’s first such agreement with a third party to serve videos on an external site, and saw Renren setting up a dedicated channel called VikiZone on its site.
This new deal with LeTV and Xunlei Kankan will also have VikiZones created on the Chinese sites.
Viki’s video community is quite unique, in that it puts users together in real-time so that they can help to translate videos on the site. The open-source style of working means hundreds of translators can lay subtitles on a video quickly.
The company said in April this year that 30 percent of its views are now coming from mobile phones. It serves 1.5 billion videos to 22 million viewers a month, with over 320 million words translated.
The startup was launched in 2007, and its founders moved the headquarters from the US (at Harvard, to be specific) to Singapore in 2008, following a funding injection from Singapore-based Neoteny Labs.
In its early days, the founders spent a lot of time setting up licensing deals in Korea, and started expanding that effort out to Bollywood movies and Japanese anime.
Last year, Viki partnered with Indonesian telco Axis to deliver its apps to Axis subscribers’ phones. Viki also syndicates its content with crowd-sourced subtitles to sites like Hulu and Netflix. It also has an ad deal with the BBC.
Viki raised a Series A round in 2010 of $4.3 million, and another round of $20 million in 2011. It has offices in Palo Alto and Seoul as well.
Google invested $5 million in Xunlei Kankan in 2007, netting it 2.8 percent of the company. Xunlei Kankan was going to list on the Nasdaq in mid-2011, but didn’t go through with it in the end. LeTV is listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange and recently started selling smart TVs.
The DEA Seized Bitcoins In A Silk Road Drug Raid
In the underground world of the deep web there are few places as nefarious as Silk Road. The site, hidden on the Tor network has long been one of the primary venues for buying and selling contraband using Bitcoin. Now, it seems, the DEA has caught on. On June 23, the organization posted in their standard forfeiture announcements that it had seized 11.02 Bitcoins from a Silk Road user named Eric Daniel Hughes aka Casey Jones after charging him with intent to distribute drugs.
The notification (which has since been updated) notes a BTC wallet “account number” and the price – $814.22 based on the spot price at the time.
13-DEA-581051, 11.02 Bitcoins, Acct.#1ETDwGUC1QcjYuehFr3u1FD3MvDaUs7SFy,
VL: $814.22 which was seized in Charleston, SC from Eric Daniel Hughes AKA Casey Jones on April 12, 2013
The folks at LetsTalkBitcoin did a quick search to follow the coins as they moved through the BTC block chain and found that the 11.02 moved into a new Bitcoin account on April 12. Hughes allegedly distributed Clonazepam and marijuana and is out on $10,000 bond.
What is fascinating is that the DEA has already moved to cover all of the cryptocurrency bases. They they have their own account to where the 11.02 BTC was moved is one thing. However, that they discovered Hughes’ stash is entirely another. It suggests that the DEA, in the case, was aware of the Silk Road and Hughes’ activities – he was described in some postings as being an incautious drug salesperson – and that the sting went down online rather than, as they say, in real life.
Wrote one customer on a Silk Road forum:
While seizure of cash isn’t unusual in itself, it’s definitely the first time Bitcoin users have seen a significant chunk of the cryptocurrency disappear into a government evidence book.
Call It The 25% Rule, ShareMyPlaylists Renamed Playlists.net To Reflect That Most Users Consume Content Only
The well-worn theory known as the 1% rule dictates that the number of people creating content within an Internet community represents only about 1% of the people consuming it. In other words — shock! horror! — most people consume a lot more content than they ever contribute. Reflecting a similar pattern, whereby only 25% of its users are uploading playlists versus the 75% who use the service purely for music discovery, is Spotify community ShareMyPlaylists, which today is being renamed Playlists.net to better represent that proposition.
“The main difference in how people use the site is we’re seeing more people using us purely for music discovery, which we’re fine with by the way,” Playlists.net founder and CEO Kieron Donoghue told me in an email. “Hence the name change, to reflect this.”
In a sense, however, the name change seems a long time coming. Presented with a chicken and egg situation, it made sense back in 2009 for the then-named ShareMyPlaylists to originally launch with an emphasis on users uploading and sharing playlists. But once the site amassed enough content to begin to scale — it now boasts 139,000 playlists uploaded — flicking the music discovery switch seems a no-brainer. Thousands of curated playlists uploaded and listened to gives you all sorts of interesting data to plug into.
A relaunched ShareMyPlaylists in October 2010 saw a playlist generator powered by EchoNest introduced. The launch of dedicated iOS and Android apps (if a little rough around the edges) also emphasised consuming playlists rather than sharing them. This was followed by the launch of Spotify’s own app platform which saw an opportunity for ShareMyPlaylists to further push its music discovery features with its first Spotify app launched in May 2012.
So, name change or no name change, it’s really just business as usual.
To that end, today’s rebranding coincides with the revamp of the Playlists.net Spotify app that sees its music discovery functionality getting a boost, including adding the recently introduced Moods feature.
I’m also told that the new version of the app is built on Spotify’s new API so that it’s compatible with the new Spotify web player, and should see it integrated into Spotify’s own recently revamped music discovery feature — Discover — once Playlists.net finishes the development needed. “We’re still working out what parts of our app will be included in Discover but one possibility is that our playlist reviews will be surfaced,” says Donoghue.
Aiming At Small Business And Headed By Ex-Yahoo Head, NumberFour De-Cloaks In Berlin With A $38M Series A, Europe's Biggest In Two Years
NumberFour, founded in 2009 by former senior Yahoo executive Marco Boerries in Berlin to re-engineer small business processes, has secured an enormous $38 million in Series A financing led by Index Ventures, specifically Mike Volpi. Volpi Participating in the round is Allen&Co, T-Venture/Deutsche Telekom, Andreas von Bechtolsheim, former Yahoo founder Jerry Yang, Klaus Hommels and Lars Hinrichs among others. Unusually, the company has remained almost completely quiet since its foundation four years ago. It will obviously compete against a number of players, not least Salesforce among them.
Also participating in the round was German entrepreneur Andy Bechtolsheim who co-founded Sun Microsystems and Simon Levene, a former partner of Accel Partners, and executive at Excite@Home and Yahoo!.
Perhaps oddly, its business platform and apps are not yet publicly available. The company said “an announcement will follow at an appropriate time.” The startup is producing apps on smartphones, tablets and PCs. It has offices in Berlin, Hamburg, Germany and Palo Alto, California.
The round is Europe’s biggest in the last two years since Rovio raised $42m in 2011. Out of the largest Series A rounds in the last few years, Spotify raised $21.6m in 2008 and iZettle raised $11.2m in 2011 (also led by Index Ventures).
NumberFour’s long-in-the-tooth history is in marked contrast to many other businesses that raise similar rounds, such as the ill-fated Color which, with $41m to play with, rushed out a widely-derided product.
Colour’s Peter Pham recently revealed that he was pushed to get a product out along with the funding announcement and that it simply wasn’t ready. A salutary tale.
NumberFour says it has a platform that provides productivity, communication, sales, production, procurement, delivery, reservation and financial tools for offline and online businesses. Boerries’ vision is that in the future, most small businesses should have the efficiencies and scale effects that large enterprises enjoy. Why NumberFour? It’s his fourth company, as I explain below.
In statements, Boerries said: “I deeply care about enabling small businesses to become more competitive and successful. Having started four businesses myself, I know how hard and rewarding it can be at the same time. Small is beautiful!”
Mike Volpi, Partner, Index Ventures said: “From a technology perspective, small businesses are the most underserved market in the world. NumberFour is the first comprehensive business platform that offers amazing technology, wrapped in apps with a stunningly simple user interface.”
Klaus Hommels an investor in NumberFour said: “NumberFour combines huge market potential, scale effects and passion – paired with the powerful and meticulous leadership of one of the best and most experienced entrepreneurs. It is a truly special opportunity.” Klaus Hommels is one of Europe’s leading business angels and has invested in Skype, Facebook, Xing and Spotify, among others.
Lars Hinrichs, Founder of XING and investor stated, “NumberFour has the potential to become the leader for small business software, a multi-billion opportunity. Marco is a successful serial entrepreneur and has proven multiple times that he can make big ideas work.” Hinrichs founded LinkedIn competitor Xing and is now best known for founding the startup accelerator HackFwd.
Inspired by a high school visit to Silicon Valley as an exchange student Borries founded Star Division out of his family garage Lüneburg . There here developed the software StarWriter which became StarOffice and later developed into OpenOffice, as an alternative to the office suites from Microsoft. In 1999 he sold eventually StarDivision to Sun Microsystems, where he stayed briefly.
His Hamburg-based Star Financial created StarMoney and developed into a major supplier of home banking software. In early 2001, he sold his shares and founded founded Borries VerdiSoft.
This developed software for the Yahoo! Go mobile product and was picked up by Yahoo in 2005, where Borries became executive vice president in the Connected Life division, until he left in to 2009.
It was after this that he returned first to Hamburg and then moved to Berlin to start NumberFour (fourth after StarOffice, StarMoney and VerdiSoft).
The full press release is here.
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