Transmedia Capital

Buddy and Aviary Partnership Enables Image Editing Capability for App Developers on any Mobile Platform

chris — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 16:34:35 +0000

Mobile developers can integrate image processing and manipulation functionality into their apps via Buddy.com APIs powered by Aviary

SEATTLE – February 20th, 2012 – Buddy Platform, Inc. today announced a partnership with popular image editing and processing platform Aviary, Inc. that will enable a new generation of applications to support user-generated image editing on any mobile device or web platform.

In addition to the photo album support offered by Buddy today, developers will be able to have app users perform image manipulation, apply photo correction or special effects across all OS platforms overlaid with Buddy’s analytics. Best of all, developers need only manage a single administrative account at Buddy.com.

“We’re delighted to be joining with Aviary to deliver this functionality to users across all mobile platforms”, said David McLauchlan, CEO of Buddy. “One of our most requested features is the ability to support photo editing in-app. By working with Aviary to deliver this solution, we’re powering this feature with the best mobile photo editing engine in the business.”

Aviary provides SDKs for web, iOS and Android with Windows Phone coming soon. The Aviary SDK allows developers to support inline photo editing as a seamless component of their apps. The partnership with Buddy brings that powerful technology to developers who also need support for other common connected-app scenarios such as user accounts, location services or messaging/chat.

“We love the ease and simplicity Buddy brings to building cloud-connected and engaging apps, and we believe that the most engaging apps let users reach their creative potential”, said Paul Murphy, VP at Aviary. “With photo editing powered by Aviary soon available to Buddy developers worldwide, we look forward to the creative results from developers and users alike, as this new generation of apps emerges.”

Support for image editing powered by Aviary in the Buddy Platform is expected to be available to developers mid-Spring.

About Buddy Platform, Inc.

Buddy Platform, Inc. is a Kirkland, Wash. based company that provides publishers of mobile applications high fidelity analytics, and developers of mobile apps a fully hosted and managed toolset of web services to power the cloud-connected pieces of those apps.

Buddy’s high fidelity analytics for mobile apps are powered by the “Buddy Platform”, a set of hosted cloud services mobile developers can use to quickly and easily add cloud-connectivity to their apps. Developers on any platform build their apps using Buddy Platform APIs that support such scenarios as user accounts, friends & group lists, messaging & chat, geo-location services, photo albums, metadata, push notifications and crash reporting. Simple usage of the platform auto-generates amazingly detailed analytics for the publishers of those apps. More information is available at www.buddy.com orholler@buddy.com.

About Aviary, Inc.

Aviary’s mission is to power the world’s creativity. More information is available at www.aviary.com, or email contact@aviary.com.

Good Things Come to Good People

chris — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:18:34 +0000

We had the good fortune to work with Luke and Sid, co founders of Real Gravity for the past 18 months, leading up to their recent acquisition by Scripps Networks. It was a great outcome for all involved, and a credit to the Real Gravity team for their focus, determination and relentless work ethic. In the current environment of the young tech phenom, (Young CEOS, Are They Up To The Job?) Luke and Sid leveraged their experience (their third exit), and extended networks to get this deal across the line.

We received this note from Luke shortly after the deal closed:

“Thanks so much…this was a good one…not just for the financial result, but because everyone attached was a pleasure to work with….it seems like there is always a bat-shit crazy, out of control investor, or employee, or customer attached to these things that makes life miserable for everyone else, but not this time. It was a good idea, and everyone we worked with to make it a reality was not only super competent, but good people who have a sense of humor, even when things were not going well. I wish it was like this all the time, and maybe it will be: We may yet get a chance to do it again!”

For us at KickLabs and Transmedia Capital, the Real Gravity acquisition was a great case study for our business model and an example of a methodical approach, collaborative work environment, and acceleration process through KickLabs leading to seed and follow-on investment through Transmedia Capital. Real Gravity has set the bar for the rest of our portfolio and we look forward to ringing the bell again in the near future.

Cheers!

Peter and Chris

Bread Man Cometh

bev — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 01:03:49 +0000

We had the privilege of hosting Dave Dahl, Founder of Dave’s Killer Bread (www.daveskillerbread.com) at a KickLabs event last week. Dave has an inspiring story and he is an amazing man. He reinvented himself after being incarcerated for 15 years, in his mid 40s. Many of us have experienced difficulties as entrepreneurs, but never to the extent of what Dave experienced. Yet, he persevered and created a company that employs over 250 people and generates over $40 million in annual sales, growing 50% per year. I was not sure how he would be received at the KickLabs event, bread man meets techies. Actually his message was spot in for any entrepreneur whether they are baking bread or writing code. Here are some of Dave’s core convictions (no pun intended):

Product quality – Don’t concern yourself with cost, just create the best product you can create. People pay for quality and service.

Passion – You can’t sell your product and mission effectively if you are not passionate about what you are doing.

Culture – Every person within your organization counts and should be recognized. Building a culture is as important as building the right product. The ability to maintain quality is directly related to maintaining a positive culture in your company.

Focus – There are lots of things that companies can do that are not critical to the core mission of the company. Stay on track and listen to your instincts.

Surround yourself with talent – Dave recognizes that he has a talent for creating a great product and spreading his message. He appointed his nephew (28), educated in finance, as his CEO, and he has built a solid operationally oriented executive team.

Turn negatives into positives – Dave is the ultimate example of turning a negative story into a prime marketing tool that has provided media opportunities and access that he would never have without the transparency of his story.

Do good – Dave dedicates many hours to community work and encourages many people from all walks of life to try to become successful, and never lose hope. Dave visited San Quentin and The Last Mile program and provided an insight into what is possible if you stay clean and focus on your personal mission.

We look forward to Dave’s return to San Francisco. This chapter has just begun.

Dave Dahl with the men of the Last Mile at San Quentin

KickLabs featured on BNN

bev — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 16:22:29 +0000

Interview with Chris Redlitz on BNN @rocketspace:

http://watch.bnn.ca/the-close/december-2011/the-close-december-28-2011/#clip592401

Percolate Raises $1.5 Million To Turn Brands Into Tumblrs

chris — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 19:04:46 +0000

Percolate, a startup that helps brands curate relevant content for social media outlets, has raised a $1.5 million seed round.

First Round Capital led the charge with participation from Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Transmedia Capital, Advancit, Dave Morin and Rick Webb.

Percolate helps brands become Tumblr-like feeds. “The number one question brands ask today is ‘How do we create content for the social web?’ Our answer is curation,” says the startup. It finds relevant content for the brands and sends it back to them to publish to their followers. Percolate essentially does all of the work a social media manager would do.

Cofounders Noah Brier and James Gross bootstrapped Percolate until now. It’s already profitable thanks to partnerships with major advertisers like American Express, GE and MasterCard. “We raised the round because we feel confident in our product-market fit. Now we’re going to go to market aggressively,” says co-founder James Gross.

“To be relevant, brands must communicate with consumers. We believe the most valuable way to do that is through content. Every brand in the Fortune 500 suffers from not being able to create enough content as social sharing continues to grow.”

Brian Wong from Kiip Extends His Message to The Last Mile

chris — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 17:25:33 +0000

Posted: December 11, 2011 in Champions

The men of @thelastmilesq had the opportunity to meet an extraordinary young entrepreneur on Thursday night, Brian Wong. Brian’s story has been well chronicled: graduated four years early from college, the youngest person to ever receive venture funding at 19, highly sought after speaker (presented in 10 different countries). We asked Brian to visit The Last Mile and share some of his experiences of overcoming challenges as a young entrepreneur and how he has built his personal brand in a very short time. Brian was apprehensive when he was initially asked, and questioned whether his message would resonate to an audience of men that have been incarcerated for over 10 years. This has been a common reaction when people are first exposed to the realities of prison life and the perceived lack of awareness and curiosity that exists behind bars.

On December 8th Brian spoke to the men for about an hour and had a very engaged Q&A session at the end of his presentation. Brian was clearly surprised at the level of engagement and the depth of the questions that were asked. The most revealing question came from Kenyatta, asking “…if any of us were free tomorrow, would be you be open to hiring us.” Brian did not hesitate to say that he would be very willing to consider them for a position, no BS. Brian walked away with a new appreciation of what The Last Mile program is trying to accomplish and a new awareness that our prisons have many problems, but they also have many people with passion, presence and perseverance, and they can be successful members of society if given the right direction and a chance to prove themselves.

Learn more: www.thelastmilesq.com

Get Into The Action

chris — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 16:27:22 +0000

From ReadWriteMobile channel:

The team at Socialize has released a new action bar that centralizes the user interface of its mobile engagement platform. Developers can now drop the Socialize SDK into their app and create an bar where users can interact within the app through Facebook, email, text and Twitter and also use in-app commenting.

The new action bar can either be a stand-alone feature within an app or developers can strip the UI from the bar itself and just place the functionality of the action bar within an app. As the Socialize SDK is open source, developers can add the social engagement layer that the startup provides in whatever way they want. This is a significant step for the startup but the team has more up its sleeves coming soon.

Socialize is a 10-person startup based out of San Francisco that grew out of a consulting and development firm that CEO Daniel Odio and partners sold to boostrap AppMakr, the beta channel for Socialize products and kind of parent company. Socialize has doubled its end users from 45,000 or so to 95,000 in the last 30 days and the beta channel has a significant presence with more than 3.7 million end users. Socialize has raised $1 million in angel funding and has been focusing on building its core product and revenue sources before taking any more money.

The action bar is a good step for Socialize as it gives developers and users a more tangible UI to use that will in turn generate data that developers can act upon. Socialize has 25 million activity records on file and growing quickly between the apps that 2,000 developers have created after downloading the SDK.

What Socialize did not announce in its blog post today but is coming down the road soon is an activity bar to match the action bar. The activity bar acts as the in-app notification system of what users have been commenting on, liking and sharing on Facebook and Twitter. The activity unit rests above the action bar and can be seen in the image below.

Socialize has worked with several large organizations to create engagement layers within apps for particular example surrounds the San Diego Chargers, a National Football League franchise that used Socialize to engage the fan base. Charger fans now have a dedicated mobile social network that can be tied to a community, a location or and event (like a home game) through the app. Predictably, it seems that fans are using to call for the ousting of the coach.

Developing a social community can be a great avenue of growth for startup application makers trying to gain users and traffic. It is a cheap way to acquire users outside of paid acquisition channels and keeps users coming back to app. Social layers also create data that developers can act upon to make changes to their apps based on user behavior and community feedback.

Developers – what tangible benefits do you see in adding a social layer to your apps? Let us know in the comments.

Socialize Picked by CNBC as One of 15 Hottest Startups

chris — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 18:31:37 +0000

Socialize was chosen by CNBC as one of the 15 hottest startups worldwide (slide #5) in its recent Global Entrepreneurship special report.

Joining 14 other companies doing everything from online job interviews to helping Congolese farmers, Socialize is in great company. As CNBC puts it:

“Innovative Entrepreneurs: The motivation to create new products — and start companies that will make those products — come from a variety of places. Some entrepreneurs are interested in making processes more efficient. Some are looking for ways to save people money. Some are hoping they can save the world. Whatever the motivation, entrepreneurs inspire with their creative way of taking a problem and finding a solution.”

Writing that Socialize makes an app “social, not solitary”, they highlight that Socialize brings users back to the app while traditional apps see a 99% engagement decline just 90 days after the app is downloaded. And while they note that 1,400 apps are currently Socialized and 4,000 apps have been made withAppMakr, those numbers are actually much higher! There are over 2,000 apps live with Socialize and 10,000 AppMakr apps in the marketplace.

Check out the article here to see Socialize and 14 other startups that are sparking change in their industry.

Android App has Users Socializing Spanish Stock Market Style

chris — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:49:16 +0000

Now you can check your stocks and brag to everybody about all those Euros you’re raking in. A new Android app that lets users check in on IBEX 35, the Madrid Stock Exchange’s benchmark index, has just implemented Socialize. ¡Impresionante!

Developer Hexahis, who has several other stock and finance-related apps, designed IBEX Droid PRO to apply commissions automatically when the user selects their broker from a list. App users can also create their own custom broker commissions and compare broker commissions against each other when charging for the same operation.

Now that the app is infused with Socialize, it’s been upgraded to allow commenting and liking. One look at the commenting stream and you can see people are really embracing this new feature. Besides letting users talk to one another, it also gives Hexahis a chance to speak to them directly within the app—Google Translate (thanks Google!) tells us he’s letting user Edu know that he can customize profiles with this new version.

You can download the IBEX Droid PRO from the Android Market here. Though some of you might

Real Gravity – Shakin’ It Up

bev — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:17:00 +0000

VideoNuze

Thursday, October 13, 2011, 10:10 AM ET

posted by: Will Richmond

Newcomer RealGravity is looking to shake up online video platform/publishing and syndication with a no-commitment, risk-free, all-in-one solution.RealGravity hit my radar recently as it is poweringCineSport, which has become one of the top online video sports properties this year (recently with more viewers than Yahoo Sports, ESPN and SI Digital) by focusing exclusively on syndicating its content to larger 3rd-party publishers.

As VideoNuze readers know, online video syndication has been a focus of mine for several years, as I’m a big believer that it’s critical for generating audience and revenues, particularly for smaller content providers that lack well-trafficked destinations. RealGravity is providing important infrastructure for fueling syndication, and recently I caught up with Luke McDonough, co-founder and CEO to learn more about what makes RealGravity different.

As Luke explained, RealGravity’s goal is to offer a robust video platform solution that content providers can use across their own site(s) and 3rd-party publishers. The RealGravity player can be custom-branded and skinned so that it fits into any 3rd-party environment. RealGravity’s analytics allow the content provider to get a complete view of how 3rd parties are performing as well as its own site(s). A big differentiator from other online video platforms (OVPs) is that RealGravity doesn’t require a commitment or charge a monthly fee. Rather, it charges a flat, CPM fee against streams that run with ads (there’s also a CPM option for streams that run ad-free). RealGravity believes its cost is 50-90% lower than other OVPs.

RealGravity also includes an ad server to support publishers’ direct sales efforts and is also integrated with all of the largest video ad networks. RealGravity does not have its own ad sales team, a distinction that Luke notes is important because it keeps the company from being perceived as competitive with its own customers’ and 3rd-party publishers’ sales activities. In addition, RealGravity offers a content marketplace, currently with over 500K videos, where content providers can upload their video and publishers can browse and select what they want. Content providers can set the terms of usage and ad sales responsibility.

Universal Sports is a good example of how RealGravity is being used by a specialized content provider to distribute to 3rd-party sports sites that have narrower but passionate audiences. In a call with Universal Sports’ VP/GM, Digital Media Elliot Gordon and Director, Streaming Operations, Gus Elliott, they explained how they’ve used RealGravity to cherry-pick over a dozen key partners and deliver them exactly the video that’s appropriate to their audiences, in a Universal-branded player that’s skinned for each site (one example here). Elliott and Gus noted that it would take multiple relationships to achieve what RealGravity’s doing for them, and they’re able to work flexibly with each partner depending on their ad sales capabilities. Other RealGravity customers include Maxim, Metacafe, NBC, Howcast, VIBE and others coming soon.

With its cost-effective model and comprehensive solution RealGravity looks poised to become a key player in the growing syndication space.