TechCrunch
Game-Streaming Platform Twitch Lands $20M Series C Ahead Of Its Xbox One, PS4 Integration
Twitch, a popular video game streaming service, announced today that it has raised a $20 million Series C round led by Thrive Capital. WestSummit Capital participated in the funding, as did, notably, well-known game publisher Take-Two Interactive.
According to its release, Twitch currently sees 45 million monthly unique viewers on its service. Twitch allows gamers to stream their play, which might sound niche, but as competitive gaming grows in popularity, the company has been riding its wave.
Tournaments for larger titles, particularly League of Legends, Dota 2 and Starcraft 2, can attract six-figure audiences, all streamed by Twitch. The content that Twitch dishes out live, and serves later via VOD, hits a demographic that advertisers covet: Young males with disposable incomes.
For notes on scale: League of Legends is currently holding its Season 3 finals. I tuned in briefly to watch a semi-final match between Chinese and Korean teams. I was among 450,000 others watching the players wage war on each other. The grand finals are expected to attract millions of concurrent viewers.
Twitch announced two deals this summer that should expand its streaming and viewing ranks. The company has landed integration in the coming Xbox One and PlayStation 4 consoles. Gamers will be able to quickly stream their console play, adding two platforms to Twitch’s overall content mix.
The company needs more servers. Twitch’s key weakness in its life thus far has been uneven global performance. Sending high-definition video around the world in bulk is not a simple task, and Twitch has been occasionally swamped by demand. The new $20 million is partially to grow Twitch’s infrastructure.
I spoke to the company, and they were blunt in that they expect the coming console integration to grow their viewership, and for that they need more silicon and iron. They now have the cash needed.
Something that we don’t know: Twitch’s financial performance. The company has been more than happy to share its growing viewer figures, but hasn’t said much if anything about its business operations. Twitch noted that its new funding will support its internal sales team. How much those folks are selling will hopefully shake loose soon.
Finally, Twitch’s recent growth in viewership is due in no small part to the massive success of League of Legends as an eSport. Though, without services such as Twitch, League of Legends couldn’t be an eSport. The thing to keep in mind is that if one or more key Twitch titles lose interest, Twitch could see its growth rates hampered. But with coming console support, it appears that Twitch should have no trouble setting new traffic records by the end of the year.
Top Image Credit: artubr
ShopLocket Launches Pre-Order Platform To Help Bridge The Gap Between Crowdfunding And Shipping
There’s an increasing opportunity in helping hardware startups bring their products to market, and Toronto ecommerce startup ShopLocket has identified a key area in that process where they might be able to help out, and pick up some new business in the process. The company is introducing its new pre-order platform at the Glazed Wearable conference in San Francisco today, giving hardware startups and product-based companies a way to book sales of devices before they ever hit the production lines.
Often companies like Pebble will launch on Kickstarter, bringing in considerable interest from an early adopter crowd during a campaign that could span a month or two. But then there’s a big gap between the end of those campaigns and the actual ship date of their product, and in that gap you run the risk of losing a lot of the publicity steam built up during the crowdfunding phase.
Pebble launched its own pre-order portal, and others like the Thalmic Labs MYO armband just started right out the gate with an open-ended pre-order period, but often that can take a lot of work and building your own platform, as Lockitron did. ShopLocket wants to make all of those things easier, adding support for pre-order campaigns to its lightweight storefront platform.
“ShopLocket can either be used as an alternative to Kickstarter or Indiegogo for an initial launch, [or] it can be used after a crowdfunding campaign to allow companies to continue collecting pre-orders,” ShopLocket founder and CEO Katherine Hague explained in an interview. “When used as a replacement to traditional crowdfunding platforms, ShopLocket could be considered an elegant plug-and-play alternative to something like Selfstarter [Lockitron's in-house tool, which it released for others to use].”
Already, ShopLocket’s platform has been quietly helping companies debut and build continued interest in their products. ECG identification tech wearable Nymi used it to fund their device Kickstarter-style, and others including Nomiku and GlassUp are now running their pre-order campaigns with it, after having successfully raised funds on other platforms. Selfstarter campaigns require ample setup and knowledge of code, while ShopLocket’s system is fully customizable with a graphic interface that even total coding amateurs can manage.
To power the payments part of its new service, ShopLocket has turned to Stripe, which it chose over competing options like PayPal and Amazon Payments for a number of reasons.
“For our sellers, the process of creating a Stripe account is incredibly easy [and] we are in the process of further optimizing the seller flow, so that sellers don’t even have to sign up with Stripe until they actually want to start charging on pre-orders — something not possible with PayPal or Amazon,” Hague said. “For buyers, Stripe is actually a more accessible platform than PayPal or Amazon, which generally require accounts to make a purchase. Stripe will allow buyers to checkout with a simple credit card form, no account required.”
Stripe also offers native design integration, so buyers aren’t shuttled away to a separate site and then shuttled back in to complete the transaction, which is a big advantage in terms of decreasing cart abandonment rates and generally providing an experience that businesses can control in every respect.
I wondered whether this emerging market segment might not be a little too niche for ShopLocket to focus much attention on, but Hague says there’s plenty of interest already, and that’s also growing at a rapid clip. So far, they’ve found over 500 projects launched launched in products and hardware every month, which represent tens of millions of dollars raised.
“This represents only a small segment of the overall market,” Hague adds. “For these companies, ShopLocket is a better solution than a traditional hosted storefront for the next phase of their business. We let them use any website, including their existing one, to grow from pre-orders to a full shopping cart over time. We believe that the next billion dollar storefront platform will be born from serving this rapidly growing market of new product creators.”
The Good, Bad, And Ugly Of Obamacare's Online Price Comparison Site
Tomorrow, for the first time, Americans will be able to easily compare health insurance plans. President Obama’s signature piece of legislation to overhaul the healthcare system, The Affordable Care Act, is betting that price comparison websites will disrupt health insurance the way Travelocity disrupted airline prices. It’s a nice theory, but crippling IT glitches, political roadblocks, and sneaky insurance options may throw a wrench in the President’s plans.
Here’s what you need to know about the online comparison program and how it could impact prices.
Basics
On October 1st, The Health Insurance Marketplace opens up to the public. Each state presents prices and features of various health plans in a (hopefully) easily comparable layout. Every health plan covers the basics like catastrophic insurance and prescription drugs; premium plans layer on features like physical therapy. If everything goes to plan (it hasn’t), enrollment begins Tuesday and health insurance coverage begins January 1st, 2014.
The Good
Since the early days of the Internet, economists found that easy price comparison online reduced the costs of all sorts of goods, from airline tickets to health insurance. The “growth of the Internet has reduced term life prices by 8 to 15 percent and increased consumer surplus by $115-215 million per year and perhaps more,” wrote Austan Goolsbee in 2000, a University of Chicago Professor of Economics and former Chairman of the President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers
Unfortunately, hospitals and insurance companies have been quite skilled at obfuscating medical costs, even in states that required price disclosure (upon request by each individual patient).
At first blush, Obamacare’s mandatory transparency rules are a run-away success. Even before the health exchange officially opens, insurance providers are already racing to offer competitive pricing. in New York, price plans have already dropped a whopping 50%.
Before Obamacare, “If you’re in the individual market, you get screwed” says Ezekiel Emanuel, former healthcare advisor to President Obama and one-third of the Emmanuel brother triumvirate. “The brokers have an interest in steering you to a high price plan”.
Ideally, Obamacare will cut out the screwy incentives of insurance brokers and let consumers find the cheapest plans for themselves and their family.
The Bad
Having more choice doesn’t always result in sunshine and rainbows. Just walk down a grocery isle brimming with 20 different types of peanut butter, and it’s easy to see that when consumers are deluged with options, they take mental shortcuts that result in poor choices. “The Internet is very good at comparing single prices,” says MIT professor Glenn Ellison, who finds that complicated pricing structures can blunt the positive effects of side-by-side comparison.
Plane tickets are relatively simple: most people just want to get from Point A to Point B in the shortest amount of time for the lowest cost. Choosing a healthcare plan purely on price, however, could result in dangerously poor coverage.
“People may be totally motivated by the cost of the policy and spend not an adequate amount of time looking at the deductibles and the co-pays and what is covered,” says Kenneth Davis, CEO of Mount Sinai hospital.
The Health Insurance Marketplace is shaping up to be a complicated mess of options. “Individuals will have an average of 53 qualified health plan choices in states where HHS will fully or partially run the Marketplace,” boasts the Department of Health and Human services.
That’s a lot of choices to sift through.
When I walk into a Whole Foods trying to find a jar of nut better, I’m forced to mentally juggle a combinatorial nightmare of almond, cashew, macadamia, or peanut, and raw, organic, roasted, and honey glazed. After I realize I’ve wasted 20 minutes of my life trying to select a breakfast spread, internally I scream “I JUST WANT SOME F****ING PEANUT BUTTER”, grab the cheapest jar and rush to the register.
Health insurance could suffer from the Whole Foods nut butter quandary, only instead of getting a sub par bagel schmear, a family of 4 finds it has to choose between college and healthcare for their chronically ill daughter.
“We need transparency about quality,” says Emanuel, “how do I know the cheapest or second cheapest is good or crappy?”
Emanuel predicts that “towards the end of next year”, there will be a cottage industry of websites offering better ways of comparing plans. “I would not tell my children to go become an insurance broker”.
The Ugly
Prepare yourself to be shocked: a massive government IT project is experiencing glitches. Technical problems will prevent both small businesses and the fine citizens of Washington D.C. from signup on the Tuesday launch.
Part of the problem is that the insurance exchanges are being run by the States themselves, unlike the airline industry which releases prices to the public, so that comparison websites can develop their own systems. I reached out to the HHS last week to understand why the government decided to handle this completely on their own and have yet to receive a response.
More experienced government agencies, such as the Presidents’ Office of Science and Technology Policy, have learned not to develop their own websites, and instead just release data to the wisdom of the Internet masses.
Perhaps more strange, the White House is turned into a mini version of Tiger Beat magazine to attract young invincibles. “Thanks for spreading the word. #ROAR,” Prezi O-B tweeted his BFF, Katy Perry, thanking her for spreading the word about the new healthcare exchange.
Thanks for spreading the word. #ROAR MT @katyperry: RT @BarackObama: Get affordable coverage starting Oct. 1 OFA.BO/Healthcare
—
Barack Obama (@BarackObama) August 26, 2013While Obamacare mandates coverage, it doesn’t mean that youngins will sign up in a timely manner or choose not to pay the fine ($95 or 1% of their income, whichever is bigger). Currently, 26.5% of 18-34-year-olds are uninsured. In order to bring down costs overall, Obamacare is betting on healthy young citizens to subsidize the costs of their elders.
On top of spicy tweets, the White House penned a high-profile partnership with viral video maker, Funny or Die, for a celebrity-fueled promotional video. Much of this hinges on Obama being able to make insurance cool.
And, of course, that’s not the only problem. There’s also politics. Several Repubican-run states have flat-out refused to cooperate with Obamacare implementation and help inform consumers, all while the House of Representatives has voted (unsuccessfully) 40 times to repeal or defund the measure.
18% of America’s GDP is hangs in the balance of this mess. All of these promises (and issues) are hypothetical; ultimately it all depends on your faith in a government-regulated free market and the ability of semi-educated consumers to make the smart choice.
[Image Credit: Adorable Care Act]
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