TechCrunch
Valve To Launch A Prototype Steam Box And Multiple Steam Machines In 2014
Following the announcement of SteamOS, Valve just unveiled the long-anticipated Steam Box — sort of. Instead of releasing a Valve-branded Steam Box, the company will actually work with multiple manufacturers to release a series of Steam machines for your living room.
Yet, Valve also presented a specific prototype, a Steam machine designed by Valve. This particular machine is closer to what everyone expected. For now, only 300 copies will be produced and sent to lucky beta testers. The company doesn’t say whether those prototypes will eventually become the Steam Box, but it wouldn’t surprise anyone.
As for the Steam machines, Valve promises “an array of specifications, price, and performance.” It could be pretty similar to the Chromebook lineup. Customers will be presented with multiple performance tiers — it should make it easier to buy a traditional gaming computer. Hardware will be hackable and you will be able to install another operating system for example.
As a reminder, SteamOS is a Linux-based operating system for your living room. It is optimized for gaming, movies and music. While many games are not available on Linux, SteamOS allows you to stream your games from your Windows or Mac machines using your local network
Today’s announcement is very short and doesn’t say which OEM will actually build Steam machines. All we know is that they will ship in 2014. The Valve-branded prototype could come to beta testers earlier as the company will select beta testers on October 25th.
On Steam’s website, users can find a teaser page with three icons that represent three different announcements for the living room — SteamOS and the Steam machines were only the first two announcements. Valve hints at a new input method for the third one. On Friday, Valve should answer the last standing question — which game controller will ship with the Steam machines?
Social Events Platform DoubleDutch Raises $10 Million Series C Led By Bessemer
Rapidly growing mobile events application platform DoubleDutch raised $10 million in Series C funding TechCrunch learned, in an oversubscribed round led in large part by Byron Deeter of Bessemer Venture Partners, who will now join the company’s board. Previous investors from DoubleDutch’s A and B rounds, Floodgate Fund, Bullpen Capital and others also participated.
The funding comes at a time when DoubleDutch has moved to singularly focus on developing its mobile event technology, while abandoning its other products including a fairly popular mobile CRM application known as Hive. When speaking with CEO Lawrence Coburn this morning about the funding, he characterized the decision to shutter Hive as one of the toughest he’s ever had to make – especially considering that previous rounds were raised based on Hive’s promise and potential. Ultimately, however, Coburn said it was the right thing to do.
Hive, which closed this January, had 1,000 or so free customers and a small number of paying users. Meanwhile, the events product had been growing at 40 to 50 percent per quarter, including deployment, users and revenue.
“On the CRM side, we were squarely in Salesforce’s radar,” explains Coburn. “The one thing I couldn’t get my head around was how did our mobile CRM give us a defensible position against Salesforce? Really, it was a beautiful UI [user interface] that sat on top of Salesforce,” he says. “It was a presentation layer over their tech.”
The concern was that if Salesforce decided to focus on this, DoubleDutch could be dead in a year. So Hive closed down, and the business which did have both growth, revenue, and “a similarly sized market with better characteristics,” as Deeter puts it, remains.
A SOCIAL, DATA-DRIVEN EVENTS APP
The DoubleDutch Events application is sold to event organizers as a white label product with a bit of co-branding (“powered by DoubleDutch”), allowing customers to not only transition away from paper-based event guides, but also to do more with the data collected within the mobile technology platform. From a product perspective, the app’s architecture has been built from the ground-up with a focus on social and networking, which differentiates DoubleDutch from some of its competitors.
“Every event has a dedicated activity feed. We have game mechanics deeply built into the app. We have the concept of user profiles and connections – all these things you would expect to see in a social networking platform – are the foundation of our app,” says Coburn. “Every other player in the category, their inspiration was the paper event guide.”
By having an event platform built in this way, DoubleDutch’s app can take advantage of the data it has on hand to do other sorts of things, too. For example, since users have profiles and make connections using the app, DoubleDutch is able to make recommendations of people to follow. It’s also developing a business model around leads data, by transitioning exhibitors away from clunky, hardware-based badge or business card scanners to mobile.
The company’s leads package has been used at over half a dozen events so far, letting exhibitors use a scanning feature in the app that also does real-time scoring around the value of the leads using a variety of signals. This tells the booth rep immediately who they’re talking to, and whether or not they should grab a senior exec, for example. But what’s even more interesting, is that DoubleDutch is able to surface leads of those who didn’t actually come to the booth, as well. To do so, it figures out who may be good leads based on things like who you’ve traded contact info with in the app, what sessions you’ve attended and nearly a dozen other signals.
While pricing for the lead package in an app varies, revenue from this data-based upsell is a multiple from the data made by licensing the app. For instance, at a recent event with 50,000 people and 500 exhibitors, 200 exhibitors bought lead packages at $300 each. That means the customer (the organizer) made $60,000 in revenue just off the data. DoubleDutch takes a revenue share of this data, which it doesn’t disclose.
A SAAS PLATFORM, NOT A THROWAWAY APP
Leads are only the beginning of DoubleDutch’s plans, too. Coburn says that the goal is to make DoubleDutch more of a platform, where its APIs and SDKs allow developers to build other custom features. Deeter adds that there are also huge opportunities for the company to monitor and manage other event-related sales and marketing activity, and tie into communities beyond the event to keep them engaged. “In those two broad buckets, there’s a decade of product roadmap here,” he notes.
While the company isn’t revealing revenue specifics, DoubleDutch is reporting 40 percent quarter-over-quarter growth and nearly 500,000 event participants who have used its apps to date in north of 1,000 events. Its clients have included many big-name brands, including Cisco, American Express, Box, IDG, SAP, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and others. Revenue is “deep in the millions,” and growing well over 100 percent year-over-year.
The event business is a competitive space, with incumbents like QuickMobile to take on, companies like CVENT going public, acquisitions aplenty including EventBrite’s snatching up of Lanyrd, apps building networking tools around the experience (e.g. Bizzabo, Bloodhound, etc.) and several freemium offerings.
But Deeter sees huge potential in what DoubleDutch in particular has on hand. “Paper is just going to go away in that business. The transition over the next couple of years will be massive…there’s no reason to go back,” he says. “It’s a massive market that’s ripe for transition, and DoubleDutch has the opportunity to play in the leadership position right out of the gate.”
With the new funding, the plan is to continue the product development described above, expand to Asia via a Hong Kong office opening this year, transition to a SaaS-based business model, and grow the 62-person team to about 90.
Wealthfront Debuts Wealthfront.org To Give Web-Based Investment Tools To Non-Profits
Automated investment services company Wealthfront has made its name as an alternative to traditional financial advisory services for individuals, especially “Generation Y” techies just starting to pull their nest eggs together.
Today, the company is looking to expand its user base in a different direction with the launch of Wealthfront.org, a site that will provide investment advisory tools to non-profits. While Wealthfront’s core product gives free services to accounts with less than $10,000 in assets, the non-profit product bumps that up to the first $1 million in assets. Above that, Wealthfront.org will charge its standard 0.25 percent fee.
Wealthfront COO Adam Nash said in an interview this week that while Wealthfront.org is not itself a non-profit, the company is looking at this as a philanthropic endeavor. “This is not a revenue-motivated play. This is not build to be new business line for us,” he said. “We look at this as one way for us as a company to give back.”
While major non profit organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation often have their own asset managers on staff, there are hundreds of small- to medium-sized 501 (c)(3) organizations who have endowments that could benefit from being professionally managed. But because non-profits must be conservative with their capital, it’s a space that most traditional financial advisory firms don’t work to address.
At launch, Wealthfront.org has signed up several non-profits including the Wildlife Conservation Network and R.U.S.H for Literacy, among others.
The .org launch comes as Wealthfront is seeing solid growth in its core product. The company, which has raised $30.5 million in venture capital, now has $350 million in assets under management — a nice ratio for a startup with a full time staff of just 30.
There are, of course, a number of competitors in the space who are looking to become the next-generation financial advisory platform of choice, including Betterment, Personal Capital, and SigFig. But today, the launch of Wealthfront.org is a nice way for this company to show that it’s thinking of more than just its own profits as it looks to grow.
Twitter Alerts Lets You Opt-in On Push Notifications From Emergency Organizations And NGOs During Crises
Twitter is rolling out a new system called Twitter Alerts today that lets you choose to receive special alerts from emergency accounts, government organizations and NGOs. The system is designed to expand on Twitter’s ‘Lifeline’ service which was offered to those in Japan suffering from the earthquake last year.
That service connected users to emergency twitter accounts during the earthquake, and Twitter says that it’s now expanding this kind of emergency function out to the rest of the world. Twitter says that this will help users to get “important and accurate information from credible organizations during emergencies, natural disasters or moments when other communications services aren’t accessible.”
The system is available now, and a few organizations are already participating in the U.S., Japan and Korea. But anyone anywhere can receive the alerts. Some of the US agencies include the American Red Cross, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Federal Emergency Management Agency and the US Geological Survey.
The move is an interesting one from Twitter, and fits in with the general uses that people are already putting it to during emergencies and natural disasters. The US Department of Homeland Security has already recommended networks like Twitter and Facebook over phone lines in order to keep those clear for emergency workers. Building out the uses of Twitter as an emergency channel is as safe, publicity friendly and clear a bet as you can imagine. It’s not part of Twitter’s TV or social agenda, but it dovetails nicely with its standing as a secondary communication channel. Establishing Twitter as an indispensable communication channel and emergency alert system couldn’t hurt when it makes its pitch to shareholders.
To subscribe to alerts, you can visit the alert page of an organization at Twitter.com/[account]/alerts/. If you want to see if an organization is enrolled, check their profile page to see the alerts badge along the left hand side. A link there will let you sign up.
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