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Tuesday, January 21, 2014
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kabam

Kabam, the San Francisco-based social and mobile game maker that bought itself naming rights to UC Berkeley’s stadium, said it doubled its annual revenues to $360 million this year.


That gives another revenue benchmark for top-grossing game makers. Kabam, which made a hard pivot from Facebook to mobile a few years ago, has two games into the top grossing 50 on the iPhone in the U.S. For comparison, other top mobile game makers like Supercell reported making $2.4 million per day early last year. About 70 percent of Kabam’s revenues come from iOS and Android, while the remainder is from Facebook and a destination site at Kabam.com.


While the company is profitable, it’s not clear how profitable they are. They ended last year with $70 million on hand in cash, about $25 million up from the cash they had on hand at the end of 2012. But they also made some acquisitions too, like Exploding Barrel Games out of Vancouver, Canada.


The company is touting these numbers at an interesting time in the gaming industry. (Maybe this is for recruiting? To attract buyers? To keep investors aware of the brand if they ever decide to go public?)


Since Zynga went out to market in a late 2011 IPO and saw its valuation decline by more than half, no other big social gaming companies in Western markets have tested the waters with public investors.


There have been rumors that European gaming company King is exploring an IPO, but we haven’t heard about additional progress on this front. Meanwhile, Supercell found a very lucky and unusual deal when it sold more than half the company to carrier Softbank and Japanese gaming company GungHo for roughly $1.5 billion last year.


But most everyone else has decided to stay private. So there are several profitable, self-sustaining companies like Kabam and Kixeye waiting in the wings. To give its employees liquidity, Kabam held a secondary offering that let current and former employees, along with early investors, sell $38.5 million of their holdings. The company, which has raised more than $125 million in venture funding, was valued at $700 million in this last round.







1:09 PM

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Mail startup Outbox just announced that it’s shutting down its current service.


The company has one of those ideas that’s both intriguing and slightly crazy sounding — it sent people by your home to pick up your physical mail, then it digitized that mail, all for $4.99 a month.


After a pilot program in Austin, Outbox launched the service in San Francisco a year ago, and it raised a $5 million Series A led by Floodgate over the summer.


The company itself isn’t going away. Instead, the blog post says it’s “focusing our team and resources on a totally new product.” Outbox says there just weren’t enough people signing up to pay for the service, at least given the company’s costs:



However, after an extensive email marketing campaign to our waitlist, total yield from the waitlist was under 10 percent. And as we started marketing outside of this network, we had difficulty finding a repeatable and scalable acquisition channel. Across all of our efforts, our acquisition numbers were over $50 per lead.


As our marketing efforts lagged behind schedule, our density numbers remained consistently flat, causing us to spend about double our projected cost to service each customer. Even our most dense routes cost us approximately 20 percent more than our break-even target.


After several months of testing and refining, we reasonably concluded that we were executing well and collecting good data—it told us that there wasn’t enough demand to support the cost model.



That may not come as a huge surprise to the critics who found the idea impractical or downright creepy. I tried it out myself for a few months, but eventually canceled my subscription — I wasn’t bothered by Outbox employees opening my mail, it just wasn’t as useful as I’d hoped, and it was a pain for me to coordinate with a roommate who didn’t subscribe.


As for current customers, the company says they’ll will be able to download a copy of their digital archives until February 28.


For nostalgia, if nothing else, here’s a video we made of the actual mail pickup service.








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Mail startup Outbox just announced that it’s shutting down its current service. The company has one of those ideas that’s both intriguing ...

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Microsoft is rolling out a fix for a troubled firmware update for Surface Pro 2. Many of those who installed the December patch saw battery-life issues and trouble with the sleep and shutdown functions on the tablets. Some users reported that battery power drained more quickly, and that their Surface either did not charge fully or did not show it was actively being charged. Others said their tablets shut down completely when closing the cover rather than going into sleep mode, or that they failed to go into sleep mode when the cover was closed.


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In late February, TechCrunch is heading to Atlanta and New Orleans, and we’re looking for a handful of undiscovered startups. If that’s you, and you’re comfortable pitching to 1,000 people and a panel of judges, apply below. If not, you could still apply and we’ll help you along.


General admission tickets are also available for $5 and grant the holder a couple of beers and entrance into what will surely be a fantastic night. Buy them below.


We’re excited to get out of the cold Northeast and visit New Orleans and Atlanta. Two years ago, John, Jordan and I hit Atlanta and, with the help of the amazing Dave Moeller of CodeGuard, held our biggest meetup to date at the SweetWater Brewing Company. This time there will be a pitch-off competition, too. Hopefully there will be another gigantic TC Rice Krispies treat.


Participants interested in competing in the pitch-off will have 60 seconds to explain why their startup is awesome. These products must currently be in stealth or private beta.


Office hours are for companies selected for the pitch-off. These 15-minute, one-on-one talks will be held on the day of the event. We’ll hear about your company, give feedback, and talk about the best pitch strategy for the 60-second, rapid-fire competition. Think of us as Adam Levine on The Voice.


We will have 3-5 judges, including TechCrunch writers and local VCs, who will decide on the winners of the Pitch-off. First place will receive a table in Startup Alley at the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt NY; second place will receive two tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt NY; and third place will receive one ticket to TechCrunch Disrupt NY.


See you there!


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Atlanta tickets


New Orleans tickets







11:54 AM

In late February, TechCrunch is heading to Atlanta and New Orleans, and we’re looking for a handful of undiscovered startups. If that’s you,...

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It was one of those coincidences that social media types call serendipitous. There I was, wandering around the basement of Las Vegas’ Venetian hotel at CES, innocently minding my own business, when who should I bump into but Indiegogo co-founder and CEO Slava Rubin. It was too good an opportunity to turn down. With Marius Klausen a product developer at Airtame, one of Indiegogo’s most popular recent campaigns, acting as spontaneous cameraman, I finally got the chance to drag the elusive Rubin onto my show.


So, I asked him, is Indiegogo blowing up capitalism?


Yes, a silly question. But Rubin was typically gracious in his response. Rather than actually blowing up capitalism, he explained, Indiegogo was improving it – enabling startups like Airtame and Panono to sidestep the traditional gatekeepers and get crowdfunding for their innovative ideas and products.


I followed up with an equally silly question. So how big can Indiegogo get?


Given that the six-year-old Indiegogo is already featuring campaigns in 70 to 100 countries per week, Rubin explain, it was already pretty big. That said, however, he did make one mildly ambitious projection. Indiegogo, he predicted, would be around in 100 years. Meaning, of course, that Indiegogo can get seriously bigger. So big, in fact, that by 2114, crowdfunding might, indeed, have reinvented capitalism.







11:39 AM

It was one of those coincidences that social media types call serendipitous. There I was, wandering around the basement of Las Vegas’ Venet...

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Y Combinator, a major Silicon Valley accelerator, announced that they are holding a Female Founders Conference that aims to bring women together to discuss their entrepreneurial journey in tech. The event, to be held on March 1 at YC’s Mountain View campus, is a one-day event hosted by YC’s female leaders — Kat Manalac, Kirsty Nathoo, Carolynn Levy and Jessica Livingston. Female founders will share their experiences and offer startup guidance.


“Back in December, Paul sent me an email pointing out that there are now a lot of successful female YC alumni and suggested we put on an event where they could share their experiences to encourage other female founders,” said YC co-founder Jessica Livingston. “I’d been thinking about similar ideas, so we said, ‘Let’s do it!’”


“If I were considering starting a startup, I know I’d be very encouraged by hearing how other women did it,” she said.


Female entrepreneurs versed in startup life will appear, including Eventbrite founder Julia Hartz, Homejoy founder Adora Chung, VMawre founder Diane Greene, and YC’s own Jessica Livingston.


The application deadline to attend is February 3.


Outside of Startup School, Y Combinator holds conferences every year or so. Most of them focus on educating and equipping the young startup founder. In 2011, the startup accelerator had an Ad Innovation Conference, and in 2012 YC held a couple of events, “Let’s Talk Startup” in Canada and “Work At A Startup” in Mountain View.


The conversation around “Women In Tech” has been going on for what seems like ages, with no real end in sight.


One school of thought believes that bringing more attention to female founders separates them even more from male founders, as it gives off the sense that a successful female is news whereas a successful male is expected. Still others believe that the only way to inspire more women to get involved in tech entrepreneurship is to show the success of the few who have come before them.


Whether there’s a right or a wrong isn’t clear, but it is obvious that the conversation isn’t ending any time soon.


Here’s the full speaker list for the Y-Combinator Female Founders Conference:



Adora Cheung, Founder, Homejoy

Diane Greene, Founder, VMware

Julia Hartz, Founder, Eventbrite

Elizabeth Iorns, Founder, Science Exchange

Ann Johnson, Founder, Interana

Jessica Livingston, Founder, Y Combinator

Jessica Mah, Founder, inDinero

Kathryn Minshew, Founder, The Muse

Danielle Morrill, Founder, Mattermark

Elli Sharef, Founder, HireArt

Jamie Wong, Founder, Vayable








11:24 AM

Y Combinator , a major Silicon Valley accelerator, announced that they are holding a Female Founders Conference that aims to bring women to...

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So now is the time for top execs at middle stage technology companies to trade titles with each other, apparently: GitHub has just announced that co-founder Tom Preston-Werner will be taking over the role of President from fellow co-founder Chris Wanstrath, who is moving into the CEO position made vacant by Preston-Werner. It sounds familiar because WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg just did essentially the same thing with Toni Schneider at Automattic.


For GitHub, the switch seems designed to shake things up a bit in terms of giving Preston-Werner time to take a more hands-on approach to R&D and “growth opportunities within the company,” according to a blog post he ran announcing the news. Preston-Werner will also remain the primary face of the company, he says. Wanstrath, for his part, will be handling more top-level strategy and overarching company vision.


As did Mullenweg and Schneider, Preston-Werner downplays the significance of this shift, nothing that there’s a lot of fluidity when it comes to roles and duties within GitHub’s corporate structure. He even goes so far as to say that they’ve already made the switch in practice, and are only now catching up to doing so in name.


We heard from Preston-Warner back in September at TechCrunch Disrupt, when he discussed the company’s 4 million user milestone, and the shifting nature of the traditionally code-focused platform as a more broadly targeted collaboration platform. At the time, Preston-Warner also denied that the company’s recent $100 million raise wan an immediate precursor to IPO plans.



It’s possible that Wansrath is stepping in to help prepare the company for that transition, but it looks more like companies that deal in highly collaborative tech like GitHub and WordPress with young executives are getting more comfortable with a shifting definition of executive roles. Less rigidity at the top could allow for greater adaptability throughout an organization, so it’ll be interesting to see how companies embracing these moves continue to perform in 2014.







11:24 AM

So now is the time for top execs at middle stage technology companies to trade titles with each other, apparently: GitHub has just announced...

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