TechCrunch
Kamcord Nabs Another $1M In Seed Funding To Help Build A Community Around Mobile Game Recordings
These days it seems like mobile gaming is entering a sort of golden age — developers are getting ambitious about the experiences they want to create, and hardware has grown powerful enough to help bring those lofty visions to life in your pocket.
And all the while, a YC-backed startup called Kamcord has been working to help players record and share video of their in-game exploits. The team has already accrued just north of $1.5 million of capital, and they announced today that Kamcord has locked down another $1 million in seed funding from Tencent and InnovationWorks (among others).
But with this latest infusion of capital comes a peculiar change in direction — according to co-founder and CEO Matt Zitzmann the team is working to flesh out its SDK with social features like profiles and commenting in the hopes of turning Kamcord.com into a destination for mobile gaming content.
“We’ve seen what Twitch.tv and Machinima have been able to do and we’ve gotten a lot of email from users who just want to see more video content,” Zitzmann pointed out. “So we’re building a solution that’s more of a one-stop shop and rolling it out later this week.”
It certainly seems like a weird shift for the small San Francisco startup to take at first glance, but Zitzmann says the 11-person team has been mulling the move for a while. In its current state, players of Kamcord-enabled games can share their content through the usual spate of social channels and email. This approach has been serving the team (not to mention developers antsy for userbase expansion) pretty well so far, and Zitzmann wants amp up engagement by giving players the ability to more easily see how their remote opponents are doing too.
In the year or so since Kamcord first popped up at a Y Combinator Demo Day, Zitzmann has liked to skirt around the topic of monetization. It’s a common refrain from some early stage startups — they’ll try to focus on solely on building and proving the value of their products and chug along on the backs of seed investors until they figure out how to make their own money. With its new social push, it’s not hard to see how Kamcord may be gunning for some new revenue streams. Zitzmann noted in our conversation that he wants to build up a community of players who watch this sort of content and “provide access to those eyeballs” — perhaps a subtle nod to future ad revenue or brand interactions.
Of course, Kamcord’s new trajectory as a destination for video content all depends on its ability to convince game developers to fold the recording feature into their works. Fortunately for the time, things still seem to be going well on that front — Kamcord in-game recording has been built into over 115 games, and users have recorded one billion game sessions since the startup launched last year. I suspect the team could blow up those figures in a huge way if they ever get around to pushing out an Android version of their dev tools, which Zitzmann says is still in the works.
Restaurant Recommendation Service Nara Expands To Hotels
Nara, a Cambridge, Mass.-based recommendation service, today announced that it is expanding its service from restaurant recommendations to also include hotels in about 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada.
Nara, which calls itself a “computational neuroscience company that analyzes and personalizes Web data,” always had the ambition to be much more than just a restaurant recommendation services, as its CEO Thomas Copeman told me when the company announced its $4 million Series A round last year. Its aim is to create a fully personalized web for its users and its current recommendation systems are essentially just a proof-of-concept for the company.
The company, which recently landed Singapore’s SingTel as its first telco customer, uses the Expedia Affiliate Network to power its online bookings engine and TripAdvisor ratings and review to give its users more information about hotels. At the core, however, Nara uses its neural networking-based recommendation engine to learn about its user’s tastes and create what the company calls a “Digital DNA” profile for each on of its users.
“From its inception, Nara.me was built to be a 21st century personal Internet portal,” said Thomas Copeman, chief executive officer and founder of Nara in a statement today. “Today’s announcement demonstrates our commitment to delivering more personalized and relevant content to our users across essential consumer lifestyle categories on the web. Our initial foray into restaurants and, now, hotels is just the beginning of Nara’s capabilities. We are excited to bring the next generation of search to the hospitality, travel, and leisure markets.”
Apple Seeks Patent For Skype-Style Away Status For Phone Calls, But Set Automatically
In a new patent filing published by the USPTO today (via AppleInsider), Apple describes a system for setting essentially an “Away/Available/Busy” style status for receiving phone calls on a smartphone device, but one that updates said status intelligently and automatically using data gathered about the device and its settings.
So the basic premise is this: Just like you can on Skype and most IM services, you’d be able to display a status to contacts that would indicate whether you’re available to field a call or not, which could avoid embarrassing moments like having your phone either ring or buzz loudly while in a meeting.
The system would take into account user preferences, determining what information it can share as set by a user, and filter inbound calls against a phone’s contact list to help preserve privacy before sharing any information. But then it could do things like send the inbound caller information about whether the user has the ringer turned on or set to vibrate, their current location, the strength of their current signal and their device’s remaining battery life.
The patent isn’t so much about letting a user set their own universal status for all inbound calls (which seems quite useful), but instead about letting them set and forget preferences around just how much they’re willing to share and with who, and letting the automated system do the rest.
This is one of a number of patents that Apple has filed detailing changes to the essential phone operations of a smartphone device, which would change the calling experience in a significant way. Combined with iMessage, you could see how Apple could further modify basic in and outbound communication experiences with inventions like these.
On the other hand, allowing your phone to automatically send out information about you would be a big pill to swallow for most in terms of privacy concerns. Apple could introduce this system, but it would be far more useful to invent a system that essentially just allows a user to set a status instant messenger style to automatically be displayed in the Contacts app of other users.
Wine Retailer NakedWines.com Savors $10 Million In New Funding
NakedWines.com, the customer-funded online wine retailer, has raised $10 million in a third round of investment from WIV Wein International AG, a German group of direct wine-selling companies and founder shareholder. NakedWines.com will use its new funding to accelerate the company’s expansion into the U.S. and Australia.
Based in Norwich, England, NakedWines.com’s business model allows customers to sponsor independent winemakers in return for about 25% to 50% off a wine’s retail price and exclusive promotions. The site currently has 150,000 Angels (customers who fund winemakers) who have invested over $40 million in 130 winemakers around the world and ships over 10 million bottles of wine each year.
Sales grew to over $50 million in 2012, the year the company declared its maiden profit of $1.5 million (which it says was distributed to staff “as a thank you for working their nuts off.”)
Naked Wines was launched in Britain in 2008 by Rowan Gormley (the former CEO of Virgin Money and Virgin Wines) and became available to buyers in the U.S. and Australia last year.
In a statement, Gormley said: “WIV’s latest investment will really help us step up the quality of our wines in a way that our customers can taste. Winemakers don’t get the recognition or the rewards they deserve, and we want to see that change. In the restaurant industry, individual chefs have become much more famous than the restaurant. We’re helping to do the same thing for the wine business.”
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