Google Earth Tops 1 Billion Downloads Since Launch

Jordan Crook studied English Literature at New York University before entering the tech space. Prior to joining TechCrunch, Crook dabbled in mobile marketing and mobile apps as well as doing device reviews for MobileMarketer and MobileBurn. Crook is fascinated with alternative energy production and greentech. She is now a writer for CrunchGear. ? Learn More

According to the official Google Blog, Google Earth downloads have topped 1 billion since it’s 2005 launch. Yes, 1 billion.

After acquiring Keyhole, Inc in 2005, Google was able to launch Google Earth and “never imagined our geospatial technology would be used by people in so many unexpected ways,” writes Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering for Google Earth and Maps. To celebrate, Google is aggregating all of the interesting ways people across the globe have used Google Earth and posting them on http://www.oneworldmanystories.com/.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Palantir Technologies Raises $70 Million At $2.5 Billion Valuation

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

Palantir Technologies has raised $70 million in Series F funding, we’ve confirmed with the company. This brings Palantir’s total funding to nearly $200 million. While the company declined to reveal the valuation in the round, we’ve learned from sources that it is around $2.5 billion. Two unnamed New York-based hedge funds anchored the round, and multiple early investors and university endowments participated in the round.

Founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir offers a high-powered data analysis platform. Palantir Government and Palantir Finance both integrate, visualize, and analyze information in these sectors. The company analyzes a variety of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial content. The virtue of Palantir is that it accepts huge databases and allows users to slice and dice this information.

Palantir says its platform works at any scale while also promising security and civil liberties protections. Clearly this makes it ideal for governments and financial institutions, who need to analyze large amounts of classified, secure data.

While the company’s technologies has been popular amongst government agencies (including the FBI), Palantir has revealed that 60 percent of its business actually comes from the commercial sector. In fact, the company closed a number of recent deals in the commercial space, including a deal with financial giant JP Morgan Chase.

Palantir told us last year that revenues have at least doubled every year for the last three years. And in the company’s last round last year (in which it raised $90 million), its valuation was pegged at $735 million; so clearly the company has taken a big jump in value in the past year.

Early investors include former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel (who is the Chairman of Palantir’s board as well), and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel.

We had originally reported on an SEC filing revealing some of this most recent round in May, and AllThingsD reported a few weeks ago of another SEC filing that showed additional fundraising. As the company confirmed to us today, this round has closed and Palantir now has another $75 million in its coffers.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Greylock, IVP And Benchmark Capital Are Part Of Dropbox’s $4 Billion Valuation Round

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... ? Learn More

A month ago, we revealed that Index Ventures will lead Dropbox’s new, massive funding round, which values the company at $4 billion. Now TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington has revealed in a Tweet that venture firms Greylock and Benchmark Capital are also part of the round. We’ve also heard from sources that IVP is part of the round as well. We’re still unclear how large the round will be.

As Michael reported in August, the company was reportedly valued at one point at $5 billion or more. But the uncertainty in the financial markets and Dropbox’s desire to get specific investors on board resulted in a lower valuation.

We’ve also heard there’s a relatively large investor syndicate, so perhaps more firms will be participating in the round. Dropbox previously raised $7.2 million from Y Combinator, Hadi Partovi, Ali Partovi, Pejman Nozad, Accel Partners, and Sequoia.

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Report: Android Market Nearing 6 Billion Downloads; Weather Apps Are Makin’ It Rain

Rip Empson is a writer at TechCrunch. He’s not here to make friends, he’s here to WIN, and don’t you forget it. You can reach him at rip[at]techcrunch[dot]com ? Learn More

The Android Market continues to explode. Recent statistics published by research firm Ovum predict that app downloads in Android’s marketplace could reach 8.1 billion this year, compared to 6 billion for iOS, with total growth in app downloads expected to be as much as 144 percent this year. Today, mobile research firm Research2Guidance is releasing a report that gives a detailed look into the Android marketplace’s current escalating growth, what’s trending, and what categories of apps are making the most money.

Traditionally, free, ad-supported apps have gobbled up most of the share in the Android Market. But what about those paid apps, how much are they making, and are they worth it? The research firm found that, in August, cumulative revenue from each category varied from $300 to $21,000, with the average Android app having generated $2,500 since publishing. While this isn’t a mind-boggling average, it’s not so bad either. What’s more the research firm said that, just by “choosing the less competitive and more price intensive category, developers can increase their potential revenue by 900 percent”.

In terms of categories, unsurprisingly, nearly a quarter of all apps downloaded on the Android Market are games, as this has long been the largest and fastest growing category on the app store, preferred by developers across the board. However, it seems the intense competition in the gaming space has led to diminishing revenue as monetization potential slipped over the last few months.

On the other hand, what may be a bit more surprising is the most lucrative category of apps in the market: On average, weather apps have generated the highest total revenue from paid downloads. Part of the reason for this is that the selection is limited, and it’s really a must-have app for every smartphone user — we want to know whether we’re about to walk into a tornado or not. Of course, the use case is very specific, and most are loathe to use (or develop) yet another weather app. There are only so many possibilities.

The research firm, instead, advised developers to consider innovating on business tools — users are not as opposed to paying a price for a good business app that helps improve efficiency, for example, and the space, the firm said, is far less crowded than the rest.

But how about the app store’s growth? According to the report, the Android Market remains ahead of Apple’s App Store in terms of additions of content. During August, the store grew by more than 20,000 apps, during which time Apple added another 15K apps to its iPhone App Store. As of the beginning of this month, the total number of apps in Android Market was 277,252, and the share of paid apps remains at 35 percent, with the average selling price of those paid apps being $3.13.

Android Market is nearing 6 billion total downloads, which should be reached by the middle of September, the report said, and every week nearly 1,500 new publishers join the store.

For more, check out Research2Guidance’s free August report here.

Android is a software platform for mobile devices based on the Linux operating system and developed by Google and the Open Handset Alliance. It allows developers to write managed code in Java that utilizes Google-developed software libraries, but does not support programs developed in native code. The unveiling of the Android platform on 5 November 2007 was announced with the founding of the Open Handset Alliance, a consortium of 34 hardware, software and telecom companies devoted to advancing open standards...

Learn more

research2guidance is an independent mobile industry market research and consultancy provider. We provide market reports, bespoke research and strategic consultancy helping our clients to be successful in the mobile industry. Our services include: regional market analysis, developer surveys, expert interviews, app store evaluation and comparison, mobile application strategy development, market entry strategy, etc. For all our engagements we leverage our broad contact base into the industry to the benefit of our client.

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

In One Year, Tumblr Goes From 1 Billion Posts To 10 Billion

MG Siegler has been writing for TechCrunch since 2009. He covers the web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, essentially everything. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch, he covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where... ? Learn More

This morning, I logged into Tumblr (where I run my personal blog) and saw confetti flying everywhere on the screen. Was Tumblr hacked? Were they converting the platform to be Geocities-powered complete with animated GIFs? No, they were celebrating. They just hit 10 billion posts across the network.

The numbers are staggering. It was only a year ago that they hit 1 billion posts. Since then, they’ve 10x’d that number.

The traffic numbers are just as impressive. In July of last year, Tumblr was seeing 1.5 billion pageviews a month — that number now stands at 13 billion. Yes, they almost managed to 10x that number as well. And unlike numbers from Compete or Alexa which tend to be utter crap, Tumblr uses Quantcast data which is fairly solid (though still not perfect) because it’s directly measured.

The service also now says it has just under 28.5 million blogs. And those blogs are doing around 36 million posts a day (that’s up from 4.5 million last July).

Amid this insane growth, Tumblr has run headfirst into some major scaling issues. That remains a priority for the team right now. Well, that and the massive round of funding they’re about to close that should value them near $1 billion.

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is...

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Next Jump Shoppers Have Burned More Than 1.6 Billion WOWPoints, Each Worth A Penny

Erick Schonfeld currently works at TechCrunch as Co-Editor. He joined in 2007 and is based in New York. Schonfeld oversees the editorial content of the site, selects and edits guest posts, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces some TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three... ? Learn More

Next Jump CEO Charlie Kim wants you to earn and burn his company’s WOWPoints, a loyalty reward currency that can be used to pay for real merchandise. WOWPoints are redeemable for thousands of offers on Next Jump’s OO.com at a rate of one penny per point. Since it launched WOWPoints two years ago, more than 1.6 billion have been burned. Currently, people are burning WOWPoints at the rate of 100 million a month, which translates to $1 million worth of discounts every month across thousands of products not only on OO.com, but also on corporate rewards sites which Next Jump operates.

Next Jump is making it easer to earn points with a concept called Family Points, which lets families pool their points together to encourage even bigger purchases. That could come in handy for travel discounts. The points can be applied to any offer across the various marketplaces Next Jump operates, including daily deals from LivingSocial. But the points aren’t really about daily deals, they are more about loyalty.

A daily deal is usually an attempt to acquire new customers by offering a huge discount. Points can also be seen as discounts, but at a smaller scale. Instead of a 50 percent discount, WOWPoints typically amount to a 2 to 3 percent discount, sometimes as high as 10 percent. Kim believes there is aplace for daily deals, but that the vast majority of deals should be smaller rewards for loyalty. “Profits come with loyal customers and it is the hardest thing to build,” he notes.

The idea behind WOWPoints is a loyalty reward system that works across merchants. As Next Jump adds new ways to earn points, more people are using them. The points drive the purchase loop and the company hopes will make them loyal to OO.com or other Next Jump properties. For more background on Next Jump, read this post.

Headquartered in New York City, Next Jump is building the next generation of e-commerce and advertising technology, and revolutionizing the way consumers and marketers interact online. The company has...

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Index Leads $4 billion Valuation Round In Dropbox

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995), and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... ? Learn More

Dropbox is finally moving to close that massive valuation venture round we’ve been talking about all summer. According to multiple sources, Index Ventures will lead the round, which values Dropbox at around $4 billion.

At some point I hope that the entire story comes out about this round. Nearly everyone in Silicon Valley has taken a look. There was early interest at valuations of $8 billion or more, although one source says that it may have been firms who threw out huge numbers just to get a look at the company’s financials. As of a couple of weeks ago I had “firm” information that the round would close at $5 billion or more.

As far as I can tell, that information was accurate at the time. But the valuation ended up lower. Why?

I’m hearing two reasons. The first is the U.S. government debt uncertainty and general financial market uncertainty, which has spooked VCs. The other reason, say sources, is that Dropbox really wanted the involvement of certain investors, and they needed to drop the price to get them on board.

There’s a relatively large investor syndicate, say our sources, with involvement from a variety of firms beyond Index.

We’ve also spent a lot of time trying to track down Dropbox’s revenue numbers, a closely guarded secret at the company. Speculation was that they’d hit $100 million in revenue this year. Our best guess based on discussions with sources is that revenue will be more like $30 million in 2011. But this is still largely a guess.

More as this develops. Prior to this round, Dropbox had raised just $7.2 million.

Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring...

Learn more
Financial-organization:
INDEX VENTURES

Index Ventures is a leading venture capital firm specializing in investments in information technology and life sciences companies. The firm invests in seed, early and growth stage start-ups across...

Learn more

View the original article here

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.