NFC mobile advertising startup Tapit raises seed funding

Tapit is a new mobile advertising startup, founded in March 2011, that facilitates the sharing and delivery offer NFC-enabled phone by simply clicking anywhere Tapit, you can find the logo.

The company is currently raises seed round of financing from Sydney angels in record time – just 22 days from the field until the round was signed to. This is the quickest investment to date for Angels, Sydney, not-for-profit membership Organization for Angels, which usually invests in Sydney-based startups.

NFC (near field communication), short-range wireless technology, is often associated with mobile payments and mobile wallets these days, as a new way to enable the purchase to the cash. But this is just one of many cases of possible uses for technology that can also support things like file sharing and media between devices, advertising, ticketless deals and much more. It can even be used to perform an action in a NTT DOCOMO TAP "follow" offer, which allows two Twitter users to each other simply by clicking the phone.

The idea is to use the Tapit NFC for use in marketing campaigns, working with agencies, brands, handset manufacturers and carriers. Marketing services include mobile commerce, coupon distribution, ticket sales, surveys and reviews, content delivery, contests and social community (e.g. tap here to "like" us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter).

The company is already involved in several campaigns this year – one for a group of radio Nova Australian radio network billboard JCDecaux and another for Australia's channel 10 TV show "LATVIA" and the third with NFC-based sales in shopping malls.

Says director Jamie Kaninghèm Tapit, speed, which was closed in this round is the approval group Tapit, and business models that we have created around our unique NFC technology. All whom we meet likes the idea of Tapit, it is addictive.

NFC, indeed, will step up from the now ubiquitous barcode scanning technology, which involves the use of Smartphone applications to scan QR codes via camera phone. Unfortunately the NFC usually requires accompanying chip, built into the phone itself. Due to this requirement, it is now back, a limited number of supported phones.

Nevertheless, analysts bullish on NFC in the future, with ABI, predicting 35 million phones to 2012, and Frost & Sullivan, assessment of about 868 million by the year 2015.

Tapit conditions in seed investment were not disclosed, but the Fund normally invests sidecar Angels Sydney between $ 100 K-$ 500 K in its portfolio companies.

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Russian giant Yandex search gets social news startup Tweeted times»

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired a startup enterprise "Times" Tweeted that lets people create custom online "newspaper" of their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but ESPN Sports said it aims to continue to offer social news service and that the whole team "Times" Tweeted to join search engine company.

Tweeted once co-founded Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and others.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg Alyssa Milano and Lance Weiler.

Yandex, which became public in May and is currently estimated at just shy of 10 billion dollars, plans to use the technology acquired from The Times, Tweeted to increase its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third Company Yandex acquired in the past nine months – his most recent purchases include single sign-on plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor in technology of analysis of behaviors and commands.

Tweeted once, formerly called the Twitter times competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which itself has raised more than $ 2 million in funding.

Another company operating in this space — Summify.

Yandex is an Internet technology company that operates in Russia and CIS countries. This is the largest Russian and seventh largest in the world of Internet searching. "Yandex" is an acronym for. ..

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Music search startup SoundHound partners with Spotify for instant streaming

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Music search and discovery company SoundHound has signed a contract with the provider of digital music Spotify to allow SoundHound in Europe with instant access to the last directory (more than 15 million tracks). From the sound of it partnership does not allow users outside Europe to bridge this specific just yet.

Today, SoundHound iOS users and Android devices that also subscribe to Spotify premium will be paid to the option "Play now in Spotify" after identifying a song via the service discovery and music recognition. This goes for users, both free and paid apps SoundHound.

SoundHound users in Europe do not subscribe to the Spotify premium will be redirected to a page inviting them to become Spotify users before listening to the track.

Direct competitor Shazam (bis), SoundHound "Sound2Sound» tech looking for sound against sound, thus bypassing the traditional transformation sound in text.

Headquartered in San Jose, California, SoundHound is backed by global catalyst partners, TransLink capital, Walden venture capital and other investors, Silicon Valley.

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Sequoia and Nexus to invest $ 12 million in laptop backup startup Druva

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Druva, creator of data protection solutions for SMEs, announced this morning that he raised $ 12 million in series b funding. Nexus venture partners led the round with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital. Jishnu Bhattacharjee Nexus venture partners will be joining Druva Board of Directors of these investments, joining Sequoia Capital's Managing Director, Shailendra Singh, Ramani Kothandaraman, co-founder and Chief Operating Officer Druva and Yoram Novick, CEO and founder of Topio.

Series b round adds up to $ 5 million Druva raised in April 2010, bringing total investment to the North of the $ 17 million. Start a new capital infusion will be used to expand sales across North America, Europe and Asia.

Founded in 2007, the company based on the Mountain view company now has more than 800 clients, protecting more than 300000 portable computers and devices worldwide and is beginning to thrive in the marketplace, in which she faced competition from the likes of EMC Avamar, Symantec and autonomy.

Druva inSync software (its flagship product) allows companies to use laptops, smartphones and tablets, automated backups, protection of corporate data in both the Office and remote users. The software also allows enterprises to retrieve data and do one click Restore any file or volume backup from your browser or iOS and Android devices, in accordance with the command Druva.

Start value that it provides backups over LAN, WAN and VPN network and makes backups more efficient way to de-duplicating data — in other words, storing only one copy of files and data uploaded by network users. This deduplikacii allows Druva in backups for ranking at speeds 10 times its competitors and allows companies to save 90% on bandwidth and storage, while maintaining a high level of accuracy for Outlook and Office. Druva software also gives businesses the opportunity to store their data locally in the cloud or through data centers connected to the web.

According to Sheila Childs, Vice President of research at Gartner, business organizations are beginning to become aware of inadequate protection of important data on corporate laptops and mobile devices. Mobile workers are an integral part of the success of many enterprises and will hold the data that would be almost impossible to recover, if their corporate device were stolen or damaged, she said, a solution like this offer Druva are essential for SMES looking to protect sensitive data.

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Lean startup thinker Eric Ries: "don't be in a hurry to get big, be in a hurry to have a great product"

Eric Schonfeld is currently working on TechCrunch as co-author. He joined in 2007 and based in New York. Schonfeld oversees the editorial content of the site, selects and edits guest posts, conference program helps Disrupt and CrunchUps, produces some TCTV shows and daily wrote in a blog post. He is also the father of three. ? Read More

Each tech founder thinks he or she works lean startup. But what does this mean exactly? In a video interview above, Eric Ries, who coined the term Lean startup and is the author of upcoming book of the same name, explains his theory of learning by a small number of the first clients to enhance and improve your product before exposing it to a wider audience. "Don't be in a hurry to get big", he sums up the results at the end of our conversation, "to be in a hurry to have a great product."

RIES argues that the greatest advantage of the entrepreneur is their obscurity. If your first product sucks, at least not too many people will know about it. But this is the best time to make mistakes, provided that you learn from them, to make the product better. "It is inevitable that the first product is going to be bad in a sense," he said. Lean startup methodology is to systematically test product ideas company.

Fail early and often. "Our goal is to learn as soon as possible," he says. He also claims that launches start their products quietly until they figure out what clients really want. We discuss how color could use these recommendations. RIES also gives me a crash course in some of the more popular Lean startup, terms such as "minimum viable product", "product market fit" or "construction measure know feedback loops."

But you can build lean run in bubble (if we still have one)? "This is even more important," he says, go meat, when each throwing money at "the success of the theatre and to demonstrate vanity metric. "Vanity metrics are the numbers that you want to post on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad," he says. Don't believe their own propaganda, or run your company on these metrics. Useful metrics that actually allow you to understand what drives your growth are much more important.

RIES of lean startups in writes startup lessons and will serve to break the SF.

Eric Ries is the author of the book, [Lean Startup] (http://theleanstartup.com). Previously, he was one of the founders and served as the Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of ...

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Startup Accelerator TechStars hatches 12 new companies in Boulder (here's a peek)

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Today, seed fund and accelerator, TechStars, will be hosting its “Demo Day” in Boulder, where it will showcase its 12 newest startups. The accelerator expects over 500 people to be on hand, including investors and venture funds, who will be on hand to vet the young founding teams and potentially take out those checkbooks.

Founded in 2006 in Boulder, TechStars has expanded its operations to include New York City, Boston, and (most recently) Seattle, where the accelerator holds seasonal programs for 10 to 15 startups, investing up to $18,000 of seed capital in each team at a 6 percent equity stake. And, so far, TechStars has proven valuable to its entrepreneurs; according to TechStars’ website, 81 percent of its alumni remain active or profitable, 10 percent have already been acquired, with 8 percent having gone out of business.

Yesterday, TechStars announced an upcoming reality TV series that will follow a recent batch of New York City companies through the trials, tribulations, and pivots they experience as part of the accelerator program. Many of TechStars’ New York mentors, like Dennis Crowley of Foursquare and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, make cameos, which will no doubt make for some good startup TV.

Yet today’s Demo Day is all about Boulder startups, so without further ado, here is a look at the 12 startups launching today in Colorado:

Creative Brain Studios is a game development engine that solves many of the common problems facing game engineers. Their turnkey solution offers easy management of audio and visual files, incorporates game play, analytics, hosting, and monetization, as well as leveraging HTML5 to publish the game once and deploy it across smart phones, tablets, and desktops.

Because tours and activities don’t have a mature distribution system, online travel companies are losing out on a $20+ billion opportunity. FlexTrip offers its API to online travel companies to monetize one of the most profitable areas of travel: tours and activities. The startup claims to boast “the world’s largest selection of tours and activities” as well as a unique recommendation engine to ensure the traveler gets matched with activities most suited to them. FlexTrip has already tallied a few cool integrations, including one with TripIt.

FlixMaster creates technology that enables anyone to build what they call “branching-path video mash-ups”. This allows people to pull videos, audio files, forms and images from all over the web, enabling viewers to travel different paths through the video — all right within the video player. Their branching path video mashups provide a richer and more engaging experience for the consumer.

FullContact is an API that keeps contact information current. Developers can easily tap into FullContact’s database of more than 100 million contact records to quickly turn partial, out-of-date contact records into fresh, complete contact records. They use a crowdsourcing model to update the contact information, only share contact information that’s publicly available on the web, and unlike competitors like Plaxo and Jigsaw, they allow any software application to leverage their contact database via their API.

GoSpotCheck is crowdsourced secret shopping for brands. They provide brands with realtime insights, such as price checks, shelf positioning, photos, and videos of in-store displays via a smartphone-weilding mobile workforce. Shoppers get paid cash to conduct these ‘missions’ simply by completing these simple tasks in the stores they’re already visiting. Unlike GigWalk, which allows for a range of activities, GoSpotCheck delivers a customized solution for brands in their retail settings.

InboxFever is a platform and marketplace to build and sell email-powered applications. Email-powered applications are a new breed of applications to help people do common tasks faster on the web. They allow you to control your web applications simply by sending an email – no logins, no new user interfaces, no downloads. Test it by sending any word document to pdf@inboxfever.com and watch it return to you in seconds as a PDF.

MealTicket provides a mobile, social web platform for foodservice distributors to better engage with their restaurants. They do this via a deals and promotions social marketing tool that foodservice distributors pass on to their restaurants. The deals and promotions are distributed via MealTicket’s mobile app, Twitter and Facebook apps, and most importantly, their API partners, who ensure the offers are distributed across many web channels. The foodservice distributor and restaurant can collaborate on creating deals and promotions, ultimately protecting the restaurant’s bottom line, leveraging the salesforce of the foodservice distributor, and enabling the restaurant to leverage the social web with little-to-know social media expertise.

According to the startup, Mocavo is “the first and largest free genealogy search engine”. Previously, genealogists and family-history enthusiasts had to visit dozens of disparate websites to conduct searches, or pay an expensive monthly fee to find limited content. Today, people can now start an ancestral search for free at Mocavo.com.

ReportGrid provides an API that makes it easy for SaaS vendors and technology platforms to give their customers deep analytics and insightful reporting. Different than normal analytics tools — this API plugs into a SaaS vendor’s product, allowing visualizations and analytics to become part of the product offering to their customers.

Simple Energy is changing how millions of people save energy by changing how utilities engage their customers. Their web and mobile application uses game mechanics to compare real energy usage to friends and neighbors, making energy efficiency social, fun and simple while addressing an $11 billion-a-year problem for utilities.

SocialEngine turns any company into a “social engine” through an array of products. Their flagship product, a downloadable social networking platform, is in use by over 7000 customers today. The newest addition to their toolset is a recommendation engine that gives tactical and practical suggestions on what to post, who to follow, what to read, what to reply to — in effect turning anyone into a social media guru.

TruantToday instantly contacts parents when students skip school, bringing students, and funding, back to the classroom. Current truancy products contact parents too late, at the wrong locations, or in a non-native language to the family. Because TruantToday contacts parents instantly, they have the ability to return the student back to the classroom and keep funding in schools. TruantToday is founded by Zak Kukoff, the 16 year old who is the youngest founder ever to participate in TechStars (and yes, he does plan to go back to school while operating the startup).

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