TechCrunch
Yahoo To Acquire Sports-Centric Mobile Developer Hitpost
Yahoo is set to acquire Hitpost, the maker of a handful of sports-centric mobile apps, to beef up its own sports offerings on iOS and Android, say sources familiar with the deal. The company’s team of seven or so is heading over to join Yahoo.
The company was co-founded by Aaron Krane, who learned the science behind making social games at Slide. He wanted to marry that knowledge with products that appealed to sports fans. The idea was that there was an unexploited sweet spot in between freemium games like Zynga Poker and sports media. (We hear that Krane, who shifted into an executive chairman role from the CEO position, isn’t joining Yahoo. But Courtland Alves, who took over, is.)
Indeed, betting on sports is probably as old as sports are to human civilization. But an analogue to this behavior hadn’t really existed on mobile platforms.
So for the last two years, Hitpost has made a series of apps that support live discussions and polls on sports. They also supported virtual currency bets (not real-money gambling though). The biggest one, SportsBet, appears to have between 1 and 5 million installs on Google Play.
In the app, players can make bets on who will win games, or which player might end up having more rebounds in basketball or strikeouts in baseball.
Their expertise in building these sports apps enticed investors like Floodgate’s Mike Maples, Khosla Ventures, RRE Ventures and Quotidian Ventures to put in more than $2 million into the company.
So now Yahoo is pulling the team in to augment its own mobile sports offerings. This actually comes on top of another fantasy sports-related acquisition earlier this year, with Yahoo picking up a one-man sports app shop called Bignoggins. The company also unveiled a new sports app in the second quarter.
The company’s mobile acquisition strategy has been to pick up talent to bolster six or seven different core product areas like mail (Xobni), weather, Flickr, search (Qwiki), sports, news (Summly), and the main Yahoo! portal.
US Angel Investing This Year Likely Won't Pass 2012 Levels
Angel investing in the US this year looks like it’s falling back towards 2011 levels, after a record 2012. Meanwhile, there are more Series A rounds than ever, based on our latest CrunchBase data. The much-feared ”Series A Crunch” has yet to materialize.
Early-stage founders and investors have been mulling the possibility of a flood of new angel investor money overwhelming the venture industry’s ability to fund all worthy young startups. But here’s what we’re seeing.
In the first three quarters of 2013, the enormous annual growth of Angel investments has been falling, especially in relation to first venture rounds. From the period of 2007-2012, the number of Angel investments grew by almost 6x, while Series A rounds only grew by about 1.6x. However, according to our dataset the total number of 2013 Angel investments are unlikely to reach the 2012 peak of 1,520 deals, while 2013 Series A investments are already very close to eclipsing the 2012 total at over 960 and counting.
In total dollar terms, the trend reversal is equally striking. In the first three quarters of 2013, Series A rounds have amassed $5.43B, nearly surpassing the 2012 total of $5.96B while year to date Angel investments of $545M are well under the $707M total of last year.
At this point, we’ll pause to note the various caveats with early-stage funding data. Not all early-stage funding data shows up here immediately, because financing mechanisms like convertible notes let startups legally delay announcing the money until they raise a venture round. Some seed and angel rounds have also gotten quite large, in the millions range similar to a traditional first venture round. Large outlier rounds in any category can also make them skew large.
This said, our data is based on a composite of data provided by companies and investors, cross-referenced with public filings and news reporting. We believe it’s the most accurate public data set out there.
So what’s happening with angels? We can speculate that they’ve been scared off by a Series A Crunch concerns, or anything else. But instead how about you take a look for yourself using our latest data set — download the September 2013 Data Export and let us know what you find.
littleBits' Exploration Kits Will Make You Think Differently About Building Hardware
Whole worlds have been built out of LEGO and K’Nex and Meccano and a seemingly endless supply of childhood wonder, but the world is changing and so too are our toys. That’s where an ambitious New York hardware startup comes into play — littleBits is trying to create a sort of LEGO for a new generation of tinkerers.
The company just recently launched its new batch of Exploration Kits to bring its vision of clever, fun hardware education to the masses, and founder/CEO Ayah Bdeir joined us in our office to show off what people have managed to create with those cutesy components.
But let’s back up a moment first: what exactly are littleBits? They’re a bunch of color-coded components — think motors and lights and buzzers and sensors and batteries — that can be snapped together (thanks to magnetic connectors) to create honest-to-goodness circuits and systems. The beauty of these little things though is that they require precisely zero expertise, and encourage blind experimentation — I spent a few moments snapping a few of them together while shooting the video above, and I wished I had the rest of the day to just muck around further.
What happens when you connect a battery bit to a light bit? Or a light-sensing bit to a motor bit that can drive a small set of wheels? All it takes a few clicks to assemble those rudimentary designs, and just a few clicks more to refine and augment them further. And perhaps best of all, since the team are strong believers in the power of the open-source community, you could always download bit schematics from Github and modify those too.
That family of bits is growing by the moment, too.The startup raised a $3.65 million Series A last year and since then it’s been dutifully chugging along, configuring new kits to introduce to the masses and developing new bits to extend the value of the littleBits ecosystem. Bdeir also offered us a very quick peek at some of the more interesting new bits that are currently under development — expect to see a number bit and bits that enable wireless communication sooner rather than later.
As our own John Biggs noted while playing a with a very early version of the littleBits kit, these things don’t always come cheap. The most basic Exploration Kit offers up 10 bits and the accoutrements to make them work, and will set tots and tinkerers back $99. Meanwhile, the $149 Premium kit comes with 14 bits and the $199 be-all-end-all Deluxe kit ships with 18 bit modules. For some though, it’ll be a small price to pay into get their young ones and the people around thinking about hardware in a different light.
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