TechCrunch
Old Enough To Remember Paperboy For NES? Now You Can Live It With Oculus Rift
Old school gamers will remember Paperboy, an arcade game — later ported to home systems like the NES and Atari ST — that let you savour the pleasure of virtually breaking your neighbours’ windows by tossing a rolled up newspaper through their front room as you powered past on your bike. Because that’s what passed for entertainment in 1984. Well, time and technology has moved on but creative tech company Globacore, which builds these sort of gaming mash-up installations, has decided to do an updated version of the Paperboy concept, because, well, why not?
PaperDude VR — as it’s called its updated creation — has been hacked together using an actual bike, a Wahoo Fitness KickR indoor resistance bike trainer, an Oculus Rift virtual reality head-set, and Microsoft’s gesture-recognising Kinect peripheral as the key parts of the puzzle. This set up — combined with a Lego-esque 3D game world built in Unity — lets the PaperDude VR gamer actually peddle and actually toss (or at least make a throwing gesture) as they play the game.
What’s the point of all this? Well it’s mostly for the fun of it — and for Globacore to showcase what they can do — and it sure looks like a neat way to gamify a bike ride. But with the proliferation of connected and increasingly specialised gizmos, fuelled by crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, these sorts of reality simulations are only going to get easier and cheaper for people to hack together. Which is only a good thing for the creative future of gaming.
With 1.5M Users In Total, Wave Begins Mobile Payments Beta Via iOS App For Its Free Accounting Software
Toronto-based Wave, the free cloud accounting platform that has since expanded into payroll and other business-focused applications, today announced the beginning of its mobile payments beta program. Interested users can sign up via their website today, and Wave will start sending out invites next month. The mobile expansion follows the introduction of direct payments on Wave’s web-based accounting tool, and both are powered by partner Stripe.
Wave founder and CEO Kirk Simpson sees the mobile payments push as a way to help his customers collect payments from their clients even faster and more reliably, citing the fact that on average, their users get payments around 12 days earlier when using the web-based payment platform, which should mean that mobile provides an even bigger boost. Customers will be able ask for payments on the spot right after a job is done, for instance, and the app supports either manual credit card entry or snapping a photo of the card to pay.
“A huge component of that is ensuring they get paid in a way and at a speed that works for their business,” Simpson explained in an interview. “This is an extension of that mission. Not only do we get a lot of requests for it but we are also anticipating where small businesses want to go. As an example, if a photographer can get paid right after their shoot versus going home, sending out an invoice and then waiting for a check then we will have helped to make their business stronger.”
The app is initially going to be available on iOS only, but that’s just a temporary limitation; Wave intends to use the launch on Apple’s platform to gather feedback and make changes before launching on Android, with an app for that platform that is already in the early stages of development.
The app is a value-add for existing users, but Simpson also believes it should help the company attract even more users, to help it continue to grow past the 1.5 million user mark, a milestone that’s also new alongside this announcement.
“For our existing customer base it’s a value-add that allows them to replace some of the payment mobile apps that they are using today that don’t have a seamless end-to-end experience for the transactions they are creating,” he said. And we definitely believe that it will be a compelling feature for new Wave customers to know that they can accept payments wherever they are and that all of their accounting will be handled automatically behind the scenes.”
Wave has done well so far with its free, ad-supported accounting model, and subsequent expansion into other business functions. The 2010-founded company isn’t resting on its laurels, however, and this push into mobile payments is just the latest example of how it continues to focus on product in a way that should help it compete well with other offerings in the space.
As Earlybird Closes New €150m Fund, LPs Warm To European Tech Valuations
The Berlin-based Earlybird Venture Capital has today announced the €150 million ($200 million) final closing of its fourth early stage technology investment fund. This will be geared towards European investments, from early to growth stage companies. The new fund brings the firm’s total capital under management to €650 million ($800 million). The firm says its fourth fund was “oversubscribed” and included previously participating LPs from its previous fund and a small number of new investors.
Earlybird has already made 10 investments out of the new fund in the last year. It’s also made initial commitments from the seed to Series B stage, with first investments ranging from €300,000 to €10 million. If you like infographics, here you go or see their special site.
Earlybird’s portfolio now covers SaaS companies like B2X Care, SocialBakers, Traxpay and Wunderlist, market-places such as Auctionata, Carpooling.com and Videdressing and consumer startups like The Football App, Versus.IO and EyeEm.
But what this new fund raise indicates is that LPs and institutions that back VCs in Europe may well be coming back to the fold after cooling off for a while from Euro tech investments.
Indeed, Earlybird partner Ciarán O’Learly told me that “we could have easily raised another €50-100m given some more time – the sentiment has really changed. This is key, because ultimately if asset managers around the world don’t believe that European tech is an opportunity – European VCs will struggle to be sustainable. But that has totally changed.”
He believes the reason for this is that Europe is becoming known as a place capable of producing global category leaders in quantity and quality.
On the flip side, the fact that the the US market is saturated with capital means that LPs are now realising that Europe could have some very attractive value and ultimately great returns because it remains under-capitalised in terms of investment.
As an indication of this, the rate of large US VCs investing in Berlin and London startups and growth companies has increased, while at the same time, European VC funds are closing new funding rounds, such as Accel and Amadeus recently.
A third trend is that older European VC partnerships that did not adapt or perform are running on empty now. If you look at DFJ Esprit’s loss of Nic Brisbourne to a faster moving Forward Venture Partners, or of Paul Jozefak from Neuhaus Partners to LiquidLabs – it’s clear this is a trend.
The survivors are becoming more entrepreneur friendly and taking more risks with early stage tech ideas in the same way US funds operate. A case in point is Earlybird’s funding of the bizarre but very addictive DingDong app.
By way of comparison to the rest of the European scene, we threw together some quick and dirty facts and guesstimates about the latest in VC funds in Europe.
You’ll notice that while the biggest funds are in the UK, the Nordic and German funds are moving quickly.
Nordics
Creandum
Latest Fund: €135m
When: 2013
Total funds under management: €210m
Northzone
Latest Fund: €130m
When: 2010
Total funds under management: €350m
Sunstone (EU WIDE)
Latest Fund: €85m
When: 2011
Total funds under management: €700m
Germany
Earlybird (EU WIDE)
Latest Fund: €150m
When: 2013
Total funds under management: €650m
Target Partners
Latest Fund: €113m
When: 2008
Total funds under management: €225m
Wellington (GLOBAL FUND incl US)
Latest Fund: €80m (life sciences though) – last “all in” fund was €265m – global fund
When: 2012 – last tech fund was 2008, global approach
Total funds under management: €800m
UK
Accel (EU WIDE, some US)
Latest Fund: €359m
When: 2013
Total funds under management: €1.5bn in Europe (guesstimate)
Atomico (GLOBAL)
Latest Fund: €215
When: 2012
Total funds under management: €340m
Balderton (EU WIDE, some US)
Latest Fund: €328m
When: 2009
Total funds under management: €1.5bn (guesstimate)
DN Capital (EU WIDE, some US)
Latest Fund: €52m
When: 2012
Total funds under management: €150m (guesstimate)
Index (GLOBAL)
Latest Fund: €350m
When: 2012
Total funds under management: €2.5bn
Flywheel Gets $14.8 Million To Double Down On Bringing Tech To The World Of Taxi Drivers
Flywheel, the San Francisco-based company that operates the mobile and web taxi-hailing app formerly known as Cabulous, has raised $14.8 million in a new round of venture funding.
The round, which serves as Flywheel’s Series B, was led by new investor Craton Equity Partners as well as continuing participation from Series A investors, RockPort Capital and Shasta Ventures. This brings the total amount invested into the company, which currently has around 30 staff, to about $25 million.
The funding comes at an exciting time for the transportation space in general, as companies in the space tussle with traditional governmental regulators about how public and private transportation should work. Flywheel has operated on the safer side of the spectrum compared to companies such as Lyft, Sidecar, and Uber, as Flywheel only deals with fully licensed taxi cab drivers — there’s no peer-to-peer angle here, period. That may have meant slower growth in some markets, but Flywheel maintains that is model will prove to be the best as it’s playing the long game. And the fresh round of funding shows that there is a group of investors who are keen to be part of Flywheel’s model.
It’s a strong company in an interesting space, so we met up with Flywheel CEO Steve Humphreys to take the latest version of Flywheel’s app for a spin and to talk about the new funding and how it will steer the company’s future. Watch us talk about all of that — while riding in a Flywheel enabled taxi — in the video embedded above.
Data Focused Underwriting And Credit Analysis Platform ZestFinance Raises $20M From Peter Thiel And Others
ZestFinance, a company founded by former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglas Merrill to legitimize the payday loan industry using machine learning and large-scale big data analysis has raised $20 million in Series C financing led by Peter Thiel with Northgate Capital, Matrix Partners, Kensington Capital Holdings, Eastward Capital Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating in the round. This brings the company’s total funding to nearly $100 million.
For background, ZestFinance takes an entirely different approach to underwriting by combining Google-style machine learning techniques and data analysis with traditional credit scoring. As a result, the company can help financial service providers better understand credit risk in their own businesses and better understand the creditworthiness of their borrowers. The ZestFinance decisioning infrastructure can run dozens of models in parallel, returning loan decision results within seconds.
While traditional lenders determine credit-worthiness based on 10-15 pieces of data, ZestFinance uses tens of thousands of data points and machine-based algorithms to better assess credit risk. Last year, the startup debuted a new underwriting model provides a more accurate depiction of a person’s ability to pay back loans.
This new model not only increased the quality of underwriting analysis but was also ale to give more loans to people. In fact, the approval rate has doubled. For example, in the case of bankruptcy (a strong signal used in underwriting decisions), a traditional underwriting model can quickly calculate the number of years since a person filed bankruptcy, but wouldn’t know that people are only allowed to declare bankruptcy once every seven years. So, ZestFinance is making its algorithms smarter to be able to determine variables like this.
“Getting credit into the hands of more people is one of the financial service industry’s biggest hurdles. We’ve found that big data done right — machine learning, combined with human inference — can solve this problem,” says Douglas Merrill, founder and CEO of ZestFinance.
Merrill explains further that having Thiel as an investor makes a lot of sense because the PayPal founder transformed the online money transfer and payments space, and disrupted the data-mining space for many financial institutions with Palantir. “I feel like we’ve done the same thing in underwriting, and that’s why Peter is interested in us,” he says.
Since the company’s inception, ZestFinance has increased net repayment by 90 percent over industry scores and more than doubled the number of underbanked Americans the company serves.
It’s no secret that one of the major areas where large-scale data mining is going to be hugely disruptive is in the financial services industry. It’s unclear yet whether some of the incumbents (i.e. large financial institutions) will start adopting some of ZestFinance’s models in underwriting, but the company is certainly an interesting acquisition target for any of this giants.
Remote Video Startup Dropcam Raises $30M, Plans To Use The Funding To Better Compete – With Itself
San Francisco-based video monitoring hardware and software startup Dropcam today announced the close of a new $30 million Series C funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and with participation by new investor Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and existing backers Accel Partners and Menlo Ventures. I spoke to Dropcam CEO Greg Duffy about the funding, which, by his own admission, the company wasn’t in a position to really need. It’s about staying two steps ahead of the game, is what he essentially told me.
Dropcam has raised a total of $47.8 million for its connected home monitoring solution, which pairs signature Dropcam HD hardware with a web-based platform for remotely monitoring, recording and playback of live video feeds. It’s ideal for a home or office security solution, with relatively inexpensive setup costs and extensibility, and features like off-site storage that get around limitations with locally-managed installations.
I asked Duffy why raise if Dropcam didn’t need the cash injection, and he said that in part it’s because the funding will help the four-year old company accomplish a lot of its goals for 2014 by the end of this year. It’s about anticipating the market and making sure that Dropcam inures itself against the kind of disruption it has itself accomplished in its chosen market.
“We had actually a ton of inbound interest on this round, and when this started happening I kind of said ‘What would be the amount that I would raise if I were competing against a radical, kind of Dropcam-like competitor? How could I use additional capital to beat them?” he said. “I used this from talking to friend of mine who are also running highly successful companies [...] like Dropbox, for instance, they’re competing against a lot of great companies right now but back when they were going through periods of insane growth that wasn’t the case, and they had to imagine how best to compete with a theoretical Dropbox competitor.”
For Dropcam, that means investing heavily in product pipeline, and one of its key areas of its investment is in computer vision. This is about making the entire platform much more capable of taking advantage of the data it collects, according to Duffy.
“One of the things that we decided to invest a lot in, which has been a big project for us, is the computer vision side of things,” he said. “A lot of these guys [potential Dropcam competitors] are really focused on the hardware, and are offering basically just a camera you can access with your iPhone. You certainly can access Dropcam with your iPhone, but that’s about where the similarities end. We have started a computer vision team here, and since we take in more video than YouTube, we decided it would be a good way to figure out how to use that data to get better video analysis for users.”
Dropcam has been working on their computer vision system for just about a year now, and they plan to start releasing features around it and hiring more engineers to develop on top of it, and they can do both much sooner now than if they’d not taken more money. These are designed to leverage data gathered from Dropcam’s network, while preserving user anonymity and privacy, Duffy said.
Given the amazing volume of inbound video Dropcam’s servers parse, the big data aspect of this could be Dropcam’s most interesting achievement in a year’s time. And depending on how the startup attempts to monetize it, also a big revenue booster; already, Dropcam is seeing a 39 percent conversion rate in terms of users who opt in to its paid subscription services, and additional value-add features derived from data analytics should push that number higher.
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