Weekly News July 30, 2011
Brazil:
· Challenge: Brazil hosts its final competitions in Belo Horizonte and Campinas August 5th-8th. The competing groups will be evaluated by VCs and entrepreneurs with the winners moving on to the national competition. The event is open to the public.
· Airbnb, a vacation rentals site, has raised $112MM in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz at a $1.3B valuation. The new funds will be used for international expansion with Brazil as a priority market.
· Innovation Institute has launched StartupFarm, an unpublished acceleration program for digital entrepreneurism. The program promises to accelerate digital startups in 30 days. Applications for the Sao Paulo program are open.
· Daniel Capobianco of the Center of Entrepreneurialism and New Business of FGV has started “Estagio em Startup”. This program facilitates start-ups to find and hire interns from FGV.
· Communications Minister Paulo Bernardo believes that with the beginning of the federal government’s broadband plan internet costs will drop. Furthermore, he stated that the government plans to construct another submarine international communications cable.
United States:
· New York City based advertising company Yext just closed a $10M series D round led by WGI Group. Yext’s main service is pay-per-call ads for local businesses. The new funds will be used to integrate 100 more local sites and apps.
· Hearsay Social, an SaaS dashboard for national businesses and their local branches to manage social madia pages, has raised $18MM from NEA and Sequoia Capital. The company will add more features to the program including a hierarchal structure.
· Thinknear, a New York startup that uses mobile banner ads to create hyper-targeted daily deal offers for local merchants raised $1.6 M in a series A round led by IA and Google Ventures.
· Google acquired facial recognition service PittPatt, as it begins to explore opportunities with the new technology.
· In an effort to court advertisers, Facebook has introduced a new site called Facebook for Business. According to a company rep, the site “provides step-by-step guidance for how to best use Facebook’s marketing tools.”
· Tokyo-based DeNA, and its subsidiary, ngmoco, launch new social networking platform, mobage. Using the Adroid OS, the services allows developers to deploy their games so that they can be discovered and shared by gamers.
· Zynga has teamed up with Jordanian payment hub, Gate2play, to bring their games and services to Africa and the Middle East without credit cards.The partnership creates prepaid Zynga Game Cards.
VC/Industry:
· According to a recent report from Nielsen, based on June data, Android now controls 39% of the smartphone market. Apple has 28% of the market, while RIM is down to 20%.
· Smartphone (phones that support app creation) sales are expected to reach 420MM units this year or 28% of the total phone market. IMS expects this figure to reach 1B units by 2016.
· New York based RRE Ventures is raising a $250MM tech-focused fund with a $300MM hard cap. This is the early-stage firm’s fifth fund.
· Professor Mark Cannice of the University of San Francisco has published a VC confidence survey that shows a drop in confidence by venture capitalists. He attributes this drop to macro concerns, capital availability, and inflated valuations.
· Softbank Capital has announced a series of fund updates that include a shift in investment focus toward seed and early series A rounds and in smaller doses. Moreover, more investments are being made in New York City based startups.
