Josh Constine
Featured Picks from Josh Constine
Latest from Josh Constine
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Veeva Systems’ Life Science Cloud IPO Is A Hit, Raising $217M And Closing Up 85%
Veeva Systems, an enterprise cloud provider for life sciences companies like Pfizer, IPO'd on the NYSE this morning, raising around $217 million by upping its share price $20. Veeva saw a pop of 83.5% in initial trading after starting at a value over $2.4 billion. Veeva's public debut follows huge IPOs for fellow cloud providers Workday and Rocket Fuel, which are now both trading at over 2x… Read More
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URX Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Customers Right To Ecommerce App Product Pages
Mobile deeplinks open specific pages within apps, and they're about to transform ecommerce. URX is a new deeplink mobile advertising startup that's raised $3.1 million from A-list investors to help ecommerce companies get existing users back in their apps and spending money. URX places ads on other mobile properties that deeplink to purchase pages in apps like Hotel Tonight and LivingSocial. Read More
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Twitter User Growth Decelerating: +6% In Q3 To 231.7 Million Now Vs +10% In Q1
Twitter's percent user growth is slowing. In a new S-1 amendment to its IPO filing, Twitter notes it hit 231.7 million monthly users by at the end of Q3 2013, up 6.13% from 218.3 million at the end of Q2. If you look back, you'll see Twitter had 6.86% growth in Q2, 10.27% in Q1, and 10.77% in Q4 2012. The slowing growth could indicate trouble signing up new users or retaining older ones. Read More
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Virb Website Builder Jettisons From Media Temple As It’s Bought By GoDaddy
GoDaddy acquired Media Temple today. As part of the deal, the easy website building service Virb that was bought by Media Temple in 2012 is being spun out and sold back to its founder Brad Smith, and early investors and Media Temple’s co-founders Demian Sellfors and John Carey. Smith told Virb users there should be no disruption to service, describing the deal as "You = Win!" Read More
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WillCall Adds Ticket Gifting To Grow Its “Live Music Logistics Company”
Today, WillCall is a concert ticket sales app aiming to grow by adding the option to gift tickets to friends. But founder Donnie Dinch's ambitions are more akin to that of Travis Kalanick. Dinch has been staffing up and raising money to transform WillCall into an Uber for nightlife -- one that makes everything from attending shows to buying drinks and merchandise much easier. Read More
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Twitter Plans To Use What You Follow And Tweet To Target MoPub Ads On Other Apps. Here’s How
Everything that happens on Twitter could become fuel for targeting off-site ads run through its recent ad network acquisition MoPub, according to the Financial Times' sources. In theory, users logged in to Twitter could see ads related to who they follow and words they tweet on sites with MoPub-powered ads. Twitter could then earn money on its data rather than by showing more ads on its service. Read More
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Yahoo Acquires Bread, Will Shut Down The URL Shortener That Earned You Money
Yahoo has just acquired Bread, a 2.5 year old startup that had raised $3.5 million [Update: and we hear was low on cash and shopping itself around to several companies]. Bread let people make money or generate donations by designing interstitial ads. These ads could promote a product or cause and would be shown to people who click links the designer shared through Bread's URL shortener. Read More
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You’re Not Just The Product, You’re The Ads (And Your Friends Should Thank You)
Word of mouth, sponsored. Trusted recommendations, promoted. Reviews from friends, endorsed. This is the new lexicon of advertising. As the world learns to ignore traditional advertising online, tech giants have found a way to grab people's attention: using your name, face, and words. Are we okay with that? Maybe we should be. Read More
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Facebook Removing Option To Be Unsearchable By Name, Highlighting Lack Of Universal Privacy Controls
“Who can look up your Timeline by name?” Anyone you haven't blocked. Facebook is removing this privacy setting, notifying those who had hidden themselves that they'll be searchable. It deleted the option from those who hadn't used it in December, and is starting to push everyone to use privacy controls on each type of content they share. But there's no one-click opt out of Facebook search. Read More
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Who Will Be The First Snapchat Stories Celebrity?
Each sharing medium has its virtuosos. YouTube celebrities, Instagram artists, Vine comedians. And soon, thanks to the private ephemeral messaging app's new public broadcast feature Stories, we may see Snapchat superstars take the spotlight. Their creations could make Snapchat less about intimate conversations and more of place where the whole world gathers in one person's shoes for a few seconds. Read More
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A GitHub For Musicians, GroupMe Founder’s ‘Splice’ Aids Collaboration With Song Version Control
Music production can be a nightmare. If you don't save after every change, you can't go back, and it's tough for collaborators to know who tweaked what. Splice wants to redefine the musician workflow. The new startup from GroupMe co-founder Steve Martocci opens its private beta today that lets artists auto-backup every update to a song, and share a timeline of changes and comments with their team. Read More
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Basis Fitness Watchmaker Raises $11.75M To Build A Cross-Device Health Data Hub
Fitbits, FuelBands, and Jawbones don't matter and neither does their data unless they make us healthier. That's why Basis wants to build a platform that unites our fragmented quantified self data and mines it for healthy ways to improve our behaviors. So today Basis announced an $11.75 million extension of its Series B and the hire of Ethan Fassett, former head of platform at gaming giant GREE. Read More
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BranchOut Launches Talk.co To Expand From Networking Into A WhatsApp For The Workplace
BranchOut's professional network cratered when Facebook muted its virality. Today the $49 million-funded startup is hedging its bets with the launch of Talk.co, a mobile-first web, iOS, and Android messaging app for coworkers that looks like Yammer and WhatsApp's white-collar love child. Talk.co ditches Yammer's passive feed for a list of message threads that get your colleagues to respond faster. Read More
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Twitter Quitters And The Unfiltered Feed Problem
At its heart, Twitter is a firehose. Everything you tweet shows up to every one of your followers. It's what makes Twitter feel like the real-time pulse of the world. But it could also be preventing Twitter from growing. Follow too many people, and you lose track of those you love and stop following anyone new. Read More
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How Many Of Twitter’s 218 Million Users Are Just Blind-Tweeting From Other Apps?
Being a communication backbone of the web has its pluses and minuses. Twitter gets lots of content syndicated from other sites, but those contributors don't necessarily visit Twitter or see its ads. That last part is a problem, especially since these blind tweeters count as some of Twitter's 218.3 million active users. Read More
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MyTime’s Amazing App Lets You Book Haircuts, Massages…Any Appointment
There's a rare breed of app like Uber, Pocket, and Venmo that make life so much easier, it's hard to remember how things worked before. That's how I feel about MyTime. It helps you discover nearby businesses from salons to dentists to auto shops, and instantly book an appointment without ever picking up the phone at no extra cost. MyTime's new app could redefine local commerce. Read More
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Facebook And Cisco Let Brick-&-Mortars Demand Customers Check-In To Get Wi-Fi
Restaurants, hotels, and other businesses are spending a lot to provide customers with free Wi-Fi. Today Facebook and Cisco roll out a way to help them recoup their costs by asking users to check-in to get Internet access. Those who oblige get dropped on the business' Facebook Page, and their anonymous, aggregate demographic info is passed to the merchant. Read More
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RadiumOne Finalizes IPO Plan As It Hits ~$100M In AdTech Revenue
RadiumOne is completing selection of which bankers will underwrite its IPO, which it plans to secretly file for soon, according to a source close to its Wall Street negotiations. The advertising tech company is said to have nearly $100 million in yearly revenue, and hopes to draft off of successful IPOs by fellow adtech provider RocketFuel and Twitter, which also filed a secret S-1. Read More
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Facebook Starts Rollout Of Graph Search For Posts, Comments, Check-Ins To Reveal The Past And Present
What's everyone saying about Breaking Bad? What about just my friends? What do my old photo comments say about me? A trillion posts full of this info start getting unlocked today as Facebook begins rolling out Graph Search for posts to a small subset of US English users. It will allow us to see what the world thinks of anything, but could also dredge up the past, defeating 'privacy by obscurity'. Read More
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Email Is The Godfather Of Native Ads, So TellApart Makes AdStack Its First Acquisition
It's dark days for email marketing. Gmail's new tabbed filters are hiding messages from brands. Email promotions have to be highly personalized in order for opens to equal clicks and conversions. TellApart wants to sell that personalization, so today the four-year-old, big-data, ad tech player announced its first acquisition: email targeting, A/B testing, and personalization startup AdStack. Read More
