Kim-Mai Cutler is a technology journalist who has worked for Bloomberg, VentureBeat and The Wall Street Journal. Before she joined TechCrunch, she led mobile coverage at Inside Network, a six-person media startup that was acquired by WebMediaBrands in 2011 for $14 million in cash and stock. She specializes in covering gaming, distribution and monetization of mobile applications and venture financing. She attended UC Berkeley and was editor of the student paper The Daily Californian. She has lived in London, New York, Buenos Aires and Hanoi and speaks Spanish and some conversational Vietnamese.
Do you want know whether cannibalism existed amongst Tyrannosaurus Rexes or whether specific viruses contribute to lung cancer risk? Better yet, do you want to be part of making this research happen faster? A Y Combinator-backed startup called Microryza is positioning itself as a “Kickstarter” for science research. The idea for Microryza sprouted when Cindy Wu, then an undergraduate at… → Read More
Facebook is deepening its relationships with carriers in emerging markets today with a deal that would bring free or discounted data access for people who use Facebook Messages. The company has done these types of win-win deals in the past. Carriers get to give their customers access to what is probably the most widely-used app in the world, gaining an edge over competitors in the same market. → Read More
Yes, you can fix that smashed iPhone on demand now. That means no visits to the Apple store, or intensive DIY efforts. A YC alum called iCracked launched a real-time, iPhone or iPad repair service a little over a month ago. Think of it like an “Exec” or an “Uber” for your broken iPhone that you can order straight to your door. With hardly any publicity at all, the service… → Read More
Even though Facebook admitted that its detour into HTML5 didn’t fully pay off for its mobile strategy, a host of startups like Ludei and GameClosure are still betting on the technology. They’re hoping that increasing complexity of dealing with all those Android devices plus new iOS formats, along with improvements in HTML5 standards will eventually make it viable for game developers. → Read More
Execution Labs, a Montreal-based gaming incubator, is teaming up with mobile game advertising and monetization startup Chartboost to create a new matchmaking program that will help indie game developers promote each others’ work. It would allow smaller developers to tap into cross-promotion, a strategy that has helped bigger game developers hold on to their millions of players as they get… → Read More
Playhaven, a startup that had to do three major pivots before finding traction in helping other mobile gaming studios monetize their existing players, just scored another major hire. They just poached Rovio’s senior vice president of brand marketing Ville Heijari, who joined the Finnish game developer when it had just 15 employees. He grew Rovio’s marketing team as the entire company… → Read More
With Sony’s presser on the PlayStation 4 yesterday, it’s time to ask questions again about how console stalwarts like Sony and Nintendo are responding to an onslaught of Android and iOS devices that are cannibalizing their businesses. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the handheld category where the Sony PSP, PS Vita and Nintendo 3DS face substitution by smartphones and… → Read More
At just about a year of age, Referly may be a tad young to be making its first acquisition. But the San Francisco-based startup is doing just that today with the purchase of 500 Startups-backed LaunchGram. Basically, LaunchGram was a service that kept people up-to-date on upcoming product releases. Because Referly also appeals to people who like to curate products and earn extra cash off… → Read More
Playnomics, a San Francisco-based startup that helps mobile game developers earn more from their existing players, just picked up another $5 million in funding from Vanedge Capital and existing investors including FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Vanedge is a Vancouver-based fund co-created by a couple Electronic Arts veterans including former president of worldwide studios Paul Lee. The… → Read More
It can be a tough life out there for mobile-social gaming platforms. With Apple’s Game Center covering the bare basics and GREE’s recent shutdown of OpenFeint, it’s arguable that there isn’t that much room for another mobile gaming platform. Yet there are a few startups that are trying to do it by offering something differentiated. Nextpeer launched about a year and half… → Read More
Now that the number of tablet and smartphone gamers outnumber console players, there’s a race to see who will establish the big franchises and gaming companies of the mobile generation. In the early years of the iOS platform, makers of basic simulation games experimented with making their apps free, giving rise to several nine-figure-a-year businesses. But other genres like first-person… → Read More
While education startups like Khan Academy and Coursera are democratizing access to primary and secondary-level instruction, there are plenty of other hobbies where face-to-face teaching could be disrupted (or enhanced) by software. Music could be one of them — at least at the beginner level. Playground Sessions, a New York-based startup that spun out of a ventures division of creative… → Read More
Instead of spending to grow virtual crops faster, Facebook gamers can turn those purchases into donations for cattle donations and fistula operations in the developing world. A new Facebook game coming to the platform in a few weeks is all about women’s rights. Based on The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book about women, it’s called Half the Sky… → Read More
GREE, a Tokyo-based mobile gaming company worth $2.8 billion, is deepening its partnership with Yahoo! Japan through the creation of a joint venture that will build social games for smartphones. The new venture will have about 200 million yen or $2.2 million in funding and will be named GxYz. The point of the new company is to marry GREE’s strength in building games with Yahoo! Japan’s… → Read More
Like a terrible San Francisco tech party in a poorly lit SOMA bar filled with awkward khaki- or T-shirt clad guys, men outnumber women by almost 2:1 in dating apps, mobile analytics startup Flurry found. They ran an analysis on the 20 top dating apps, which had about 17 million active users and 2.1 billion sessions last month. Dating apps have taken a longer time to mature on Android and iOS, but… → Read More
It can be such a headache trying to figure out what internal collaboration tools a company should use. Even at TechCrunch, where we have a few dozen writers, product and sales people, we’ve switched tools many times and have gripes with all of them. Imagine how it must be for a company with more than 1,000 people, or even 10,000. G2 Crowd is aiming to solve that with a site of user reviews… → Read More
Applifier, a Helsinki-based mobile gaming network, wants to see your game face. Their product Everyplay, which records players at their best (or worst) moments inside mobile games, is launching a new feature today that uses the iPhone’s front-facing camera to record your reactions. Yes, the videos are maybe a little awkward. See the one above. There’s probably a viral video montage… → Read More
A U.S. District Court in New York dismissed a shareholder lawsuit that claimed Facebook executives including Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg didn’t disclose enough about risks to the company’s advertising business as consumers shifted to mobile devices. In a separate Facebook-related case against NASDAQ, the same judge denied a motion to move the case to a different court. → Read More
Verve Mobile, an advertising network that focuses on delivering geo-fenced or geo-targeted ads, just picked up a third round of venture funding from Nokia Growth Partners and Qualcomm. BlueRun Ventures, an earlier investor that specializes in mobile deals, also participated in the $14 million round. That brings the company’s total funding to at least $21 million on top of a previous $7… → Read More
Nexon, the freemium gaming company that went public around the time that Zynga did, saw its fourth-quarter revenues jump 39 percent to 30.9 billion Japanese yen ($331.4 million). It still posted a net loss of 94 million yen ($1 million) because of writedowns in various investments and higher tax expenses in South Korea. Founded in Seoul almost 20 years ago, Nexon built a strong business in… → Read More
Exec — the Y Combinator-backed app that does your errands on-demand — just launched a cleaning-only app. It’s a decision that makes sense as housework has ended up being about 50 percent of the startup’s overall gross sales. Cleaning has a totally different user experience inside Exec. Unlike Exec’s other tasks, which you can call up whenever you want (like Uber)… → Read More
After a couple early stumbles in building out a mobile gaming platform in the West, GREE did a bit of a pivot with its San Francisco office over the last year. Initially set up after the $104 million acquisition of mobile gaming network OpenFeint, the office is now entirely geared toward building first-party games. It’s a turnabout for the $3.5 billion Japanese gaming company, which built… → Read More
With innovations like Square’s iPad register, small businesses and retailers face a slew of options for how to manage in-store sales without having to pay thousand of dollars for older point-of-sale terminals. But many of these newer offerings don’t do the tracking that many small retailers need after the transaction happens. That’s where a new Y Combinator and Start Fund-backed… → Read More
One of the problems I’ve always run into as a reporter covering the app ecosystem, is that it’s so hard to find actual data about how well apps are doing. There are the top free and grossing ranks, but those tend to measure downloads or volume of in-app purchases. They aren’t good at displaying retention, or whether apps actually keep the users they attract. Then for non-gaming… → Read More
Over Christmas, employees at ModCloth, the indie and vintage fashion site founded by a husband and wife team, noticed that about 30 percent of the site’s visits were coming from mobile devices. The staggering shift in consumer habits from desktop devices to smartphones and tablets that caught companies like Facebook off-guard was starting to affect smaller online retailers, too. So ModCloth… → Read More
Here’s yet another sad turn in the story of one of social networking’s also-rans. Bebo, the early U.K.-based social network that AOL bought for $850 million only to turn around and sell for less than $10 million later, may see its current CEO Adam Levin go. The company’s shareholders, who include the original co-founder Michael Birch, filed a motion today in California superior… → Read More
A year ago, fresh off raising $1 billion from an IPO and the $180 million acquisition of red-hot gaming company OMGPOP, Zynga’s Mark Pincus did an interview with talk of doing “a few” OMGPOP-sized deals in the next few years. But after a tough transition year and a more than 75 percent decline in the company’s share price, Zynga is speaking much more conservatively about… → Read More
Now that Zynga beat the street with a surprisingly positive $311 million in revenue, here are the highlights from the earnings call. Zynga shares are up about 13 percent since yesterday’s close on the results. -Zynga is now a “mobile-first” company: Yes, this sounds familiar. Zynga now has 72 million monthly active users on mobile platforms, which is about one-quarter of the… → Read More
Zynga’s revenue was flat year-over-year amid a tough fourth quarter that saw layoffs and a continuing series of executive and mid-level departures.
The company’s revenues came in at $311 million and the net loss was $48.6 million for the quarter, with non-GAAP earnings at 1 cent per share. Analysts had estimated that Zynga’s fourth quarter revenue would come in at $212.1 million with a loss of… → Read More
Usually, when an entrepreneur pitches me something about the need for a more “private” or “intimate” social network because Facebook has gotten too cavalier about privacy settings, I kind of roll my eyes. Not only have there been numerous casualties and acq-hires as a result of this strategy (like YC’s The Fridge, Drop.io or take a look at Path’s implied growth… → Read More
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