Finalists In VC Bill Tai’s New Startup Contest Will Pitch Branson On Necker Island

Extreme hobbies lead to extreme places.

Bill Tai, the partner at Charles River Ventures who took up kitesurfing and turned it into a multi-annual gathering of Red Bull athletes and entrepreneurs called MaiTai, is taking it to the next level.

He’s launching the third in a series of startup competitions that scout for teams from around the world. This time, the top 10 finalists will get to pitch on-stage at the Consumer Electronics Show next year in Las Vegas, then the top three teams will go on to pitch Sir Richard Branson and other mystery judges at Necker Island. The winner will get seed investment but the size of the final prize isn’t being released yet since commitments are still coming in.

In a previous Latin American startup challenge, the winner got $1,000,000 in angel investor funding. More than 500 companies competed and the winner was a veterinary pharmaceuticals startup. A finalist out of the Australian startup challenge, Canva, went on to raise $3 million from the MaiTai community.

Now Tai is making the third competition global. Contest guidelines, more prizes and details will be available March 31 at the contest’s website.

“We’re in a world today where startups can begin from anywhere,” Tai said. “During the last generation, unless you were in Silicon Valley, you really had no chance.”

Tai picked up kitesurfing more than a decade ago. It became an all-consuming hobby. When he learned that Red Bull-sponsored athlete Susi Mai had a rhyming last name, he sent her an e-mail saying that they definitely had to do something cool together.

That evolved into MaiTai, an organization that brings together athletes and founders around the world.

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Image Recognition Startup Slyce Raises $10.75M To Be The Amazon Flow For Everyone Else

Toronto-based startup Slyce has raised a new round of $10.75 million in funding, led by Beacon Securities, and including PI Financial, Salman Partners, Harrington Global and more. The company builds image recognition tech, and wants to be the Amazon Flow for every other retailer on the planet, enabling point and shoot shopping with smartphone cameras.

If you’re not familiar with Amazon Flow, it’s the app from the retailer (now integrated into its main mobile app too) that lets shoppers point their mobile device camera at products and find the Amazon listing. That’s useful for comparison shopping, and for driving purchases to Amazon’s mobile platform. The Amazon tech has some limitations, however: it requires that a product be in its original packaging to work effectively, since it leans heavily on OCR, logo identification and other visual shorthand cues.

Slyce, according to Chief Digital Officer Mark Elfenbein, doesn’t have that limitation, and can identify products wherever they are, as well as outside of packaging. That’s a considerable advantage, and one that it’s hoping will help its customers drive more purchases to their retail operations since it’s useful for ID-ing products in more settings.

“We have to rely more on what are the unique attributes of the item, so that we have to rely more on the item itself versus a logo or text,” he said. “Which, if you think about it, is not really present 95 percent of the time in the real world.”

That’s true, but Amazon’s logic is likely that products will be in packaging when shoppers are out at stores, and their image recognition is based on the so-called ‘showrooming’ effect, whereby shoppers check out products at physical retail outlets and then go online to find better prices. For that use case, the in-package recognition is perfect. Slyce is targeting more than just retail, however, and wants to be a resource no matter where you are.

Besides partnering with major retailers, including proof-of-concept pilots with five of the top twenty retailers in the U.S., as measured by revenue and sales volume, Slyce is also exploring opportunities with using image recognition to tag items for mobile gift registries, and to receive coupons for products ID’d or for equivalents looking to better compete.

“We have combined machine technology with a pretty robust human crowdsourcing element,” Elfenbein explained. “So the machine does 85 to 90 percent of the work, if not 100 percent of the work, but in the cases where it can’t come down to a 1-to-1 match, we then rely on a human crowdsourcing element, which is like our own employee doing the finishing touch and making a 100 percent determination.”

Slyce has a decent amount of bank to rely on, but it plans to accrue even more: Elfenbein says it’s going out to raise another ‘significant’ round over the next two to three months that will be larger than this most recent round, to help it continue its pace of hiring and acquisitions (it recently picked up both some emerging computer vision tech from York University, and a desktop visual image search startup called Hovr.it).

This is bound to be a competitive space, and Slyce is clearly arming itself to help defend its early mover advantage. Key now will be how its tech works in live integrations, as it seeks to spread its presence through the addition of more platform partners.

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Janus Friis’ Next Act Is A Hardware Startup Called Aether, And A “Thinking” Music Player Called Cone

Janus Friis made his name founding a series of disruptive software startups such as Skype, Rdio, Joost and (much earlier) KaZaA — some more successful than others.
Now the Swedish entrepreneur is moving into new territory: a hardware startup called Aether (formerly known by its in-stealth working title, The Morse Project) which today is debuting its first product, a 6.3-inch high, megaphone-esque music player called Cone.

Cone draws on music from streaming music platforms, along with Internet radio stations and potentially other sources, and the aim is to be as inclusive as possible. For this launch, Friis’ previous venture Rdio will be among the early integrations, “but we are in talks with several others,” Aether co-founder and chief product officer Duncan Lamb (who worked with Friis at Skype and also spent years at Nokia) tells me.

For an entrepreneur who has had many hits in the world of software, why the shift to hardware — a notoriously difficult and capital-intensive space? And why music, where we have plenty of huge consumer electronics companies and smaller upstarts like Sonos already playing? Lamb says the move was borne out of frustration with what is on the market today:

“We looked at all the innovations in AI, with things like IBM’s Watson playing Jeapordy, but at the same time when it comes to consumers, we still have to tell our computers what we want them to do. And a lot of the “smart” electronics out there today still require a lot of effort to get them to work,” he said. “It’s a digital orphanage. We could clearly see the direction that things should go. So we basically set out to solve these kinds of problems by founding a company to make thinking things.”

The idea here is to present “physical objects which live in our everyday lives around but have the ability to think and process the data that is freely available and make decisions and to make this choice and selection in a human way.”

The team of designers and hardware specialists working at Aether — who come from Apple, SGI, Google, NASA, Twitter, Nokia, Motorola, Ideo, Skype, Logitech, Intel, Motorola, Frog and more are starting with a music player, but the intention is to take this to other areas, too, Lamb says.

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The New Age Of The Security Startup

Last month Apple disclosed and fixed a massive bug in its operating system that left users’ information exposed to theft; faith in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin is eroding; and revenues at the retailing giant Target fell 46% on a quarterly basis over the Christmas season last year, all because of security breaches.

There is no doubt that the profusion of technology designed to make personal and professional lives easier has left people around the world personally and professionally more exposed to potential threats like identity theft, unwanted surveillance, and corporate espionage.

To combat these growing threats the entrepreneurs and investors that helped to seed this technology revolution are going back to the well to finance a new generation of security startup.

Since 2009 investors have spent at least $2.9 billion on security technologies, according to data from CrunchBase. And so far this year investors have spent at least $150 million in 26 new investments in security technology companies.

Investors are also valuing these companies more highly now. In the first quarter of 2013 investors made 44 investments with roughly the same amount of capital, the CrunchBase data shows.

The need for new security technology is also driving up company valuations at the earliest stages of their development, the CrunchBase data shows. In the first quarter of 2013 16 seed stage companies raised $4.9 million. For 2014, less than half the number of companies raised roughly the same amount.

“This has always been an interesting area and there have been hundreds of security companies being funded,” said John Walecka, a founding partner at Redpoint Ventures. What’s new now, according to Walecka, is the fundamental change in the nature of security threats.

“In the past there were really only a couple of entry points that you needed to guard,” Walecka said. “But the current enterprise has thousands of applications that they’re running that are connected up to the Internet.”

Investors group the types of security challenges companies and individuals face in three main categories: securing data, securing the software applications that businesses use to manipulate, store, and manage that data, and finally securing the perimeter, or the networks through which all of this information flows.

Companies like CloudPassage, which raised $25.5 million in a Series C round of funding in February, tackle the network problem from a cloud computing perspective, according to company co-founder and chief executive, Carson Sweet.

As more businesses move to providing their software as a hosted service, a lot of the technology tools corporations use no longer run on servers behind the company’s firewall.

The idea for companies like CloudPassage or the seed stage Forty Cloud, is to provide corporate IT departments with the ability to manage, monitor and control their hosted networks. Meanwhile, startups like the Redpoint-backed Lastline are developing new ways to detect and prevent malware from entering enterprise networks.

Meanwhile San Francisco-based Bluebox Security, which raised $18 million in financing from Andreessen Horowitz in January and launched its first product earlier in February has its sights set on securing applications.

“There are two problems that need to be solved,” said Caleb Sima, Bluebox co-founder and chief executive. “With all the mobile devices data goes everywhere. When it goes on

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Yahoo Acquires Virtual World Gaming Startup Cloud Party, Will Shut It Down

Yahoo is doing more than just throwing shade at Google on Twitter today and then taking it back – the company has acquired Cloud Party, a browser-based game creation engine. In a blog post today, the Cloud Party team shared that they will be joining Yahoo after two years of operation, and that the service will shut down on February 21, 2014.

Cloud Party is the work of a founding team of MMO and console game industry vets, including Sam Thompson (formerly of Cryptic and Pandemic), Jimb Esser (also ex-Cryptic), Conor Dickinson (ex-Facebook, Tomb Raider dev and Cryptic alum) and Jered Windsheimer (Cryptic, natch). They built Cloud Party as a sort of free-form virtual world experience, similar to Second Life, but with an updated view of what an online virtual world might look like with more emphasis on user-generated 3D content.

It’s not exactly clear what the team will be working on at Yahoo, but it will definitely be games related, as Thompson notes in his farewell blog post that the Cloud Party squad is “excited to bring

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The Rise Of The Hedge Fund Startup Investor (Again)

The first question I thought of when I read that San Francisco hedge fund Coatue Management was the backer behind Snapchat’s $50 million round of funding was which VC firm lost the deal. My second question was why take money from a hedge fund?

In the past two years or so, you have seen more hedge funds dabbling in tech investing. As one venture investor put it in 2011, “They are the antichrist of patient, supportive early-stage investing. But increasingly, hedge funds are scoring some of the deals you would expect traditional VCs to get. Case in point — Snapchat. Over the past few weeks, I spoke to a dozen or so public and private market investors around this trend, why it is taking place, and what it means for founders.

Coatue isn’t the first “cross-over” fund (an investment fund that crosses over to the private from the public markets) to emerge in technology investing. Integral Capital Partners, co-founded by Roger McNamee and John Powell, was one of the first to start doing this in the nineties. Hedge fund Tiger Global has been doing it more recently, with a venture arm that has backed Warby Parker, Nextdoor, Redfin, Eventbrite and Pure Storage, among many others.

This wasn’t Coatue’s first mid-stage private tech backing. Last year, the firm established a $300 million growth fund for this purpose, as reported by Pando’s Sarah Lacy. The fund recently led mobile travel startup Hotel Tonight’s $45 million round in September. Coatue also participated in Box’s funding round in 2012.

And Coatue and Tiger Global aren’t the only hedge funds to jump into the private markets tech-investing game of late. Altimeter has been backing private tech companies for the past few years. Valiant Capital Partners has backed Dropbox, Evernote, and Pinterest in the past two years. Maverick Capital has participated in a few seed deals, including Zenefits in 2013. And the fund isn’t just going after growth-stage funding. In December, the firm participated in a seed round in Estimote, which develops beacons.

As one investor explained to me, hedge funds are once again seeing the potential for greater returns by dabbling in the private markets. Much of this is due to the fact that tech companies are waiting longer to go public. It used to be that the benchmark to go public was a $100 million revenue run rate, and the strategy would be to go public and then use that money to expand to international markets.

Now companies are hitting this revenue and seeing international growth happening in the private markets. Twitter and Facebook both had this type of growth before their respective IPOs. Employee liquidity, which is another benefit to going public, is also an event that can be accomplished by private offerings. You’ve seen Twitter and other companies allow for this pre-IPO.

By the time hedge funds start investing in these companies when they are public, there is not much upside in a two-to-three-year time frame. So to achieve some of the upside that VCs are seeing with hits like Twitter, Facebook and others, hedge funds are starting to go upstream in the investment stage.

It’s important to note that we’re seeing this happen mostly among hedge funds that focus on tech. By engaging in crossover investing, hedge funds can use the expertise they’ve gained from the private markets (e.g. more knowledge on mobile advertising) and apply it to their public market investments, and vice versa. For example, Altimeter Capital has been investing in the travel industries across both public and private companies.

As I heard from a few investors, the Goldman Sachs Private Internet Company conferences (as well as the other investment-backed private tech gatherings) over the past two years have been packed with hedge fund investors who want to see if they could gain access to the hottest, fastest-growing early and mid-stage companies in tech. “In 2008 and 2009, no one was showing up,” one investor told me. But in the past two years, these conferences have been oversubscribed and packed with hedge fund managers.

For early-stage entrepreneurs, especially those looking for Series B/C and growth funding, more capital is always a good thing. Hedge funds can afford to be flexible on pricing, and tend to give founders higher valuations. Many hedge funds are willing to give founders valuations that VCs would balk at, one investor told me. This is where the negative effect could take place.

Because hedge funds are often flexible in their mandates, they have the capacity and permission from their LPs to fund private deals. Also, hedge funds aren’t beholden to returning money in the same way VCs are. They can be flexible on pricing and valuations, because a 10 or 20 percent return is stellar. Last year, hedge funds returned an average of 7.4 percent. VCs aim toward a much higher percent return — and need to price and value startups to optimize for that. And because of this flexible structure, hedge funds can give founders cash more quickly than a VC. Hedge funds have their cash on hand and can liquidate faster. VCs operate on a commitment basis and don’t collect their entire funds at once. One investor referred to hedge funds as ideal for “easy, quick cash.”

But some in the industry caution against going the Snapchat route and taking entire rounds from hedge funds. Because hedge fund managers tend to be passive investors, they probably aren’t going to get as actively involved in operations or board-level decisions as a seasoned VC might. In the case of Snapchat, CEO and co-founder Evan Spiegel had already taken money from a number of well-known VCs, including Lightspeed, General Catalyst and Benchmark Capital. If a founder is considering taking money from a hedge fund, expect a hands-off approach for the most part, we hear.

The downside to this lack of accountability, some investors say, is that they are not long-term holders of stock. These funds, say investors, will have little problem selling the stock after a company goes public. Or, as one investor warns, he’s seen funds that have tried to unload private stock when a company encounters strife of some sort, or if user numbers plummet. ” Most VCs are in it for the good and the bad, and that may not be the case for hedge funds, advised one source.

As one investor tells me, hedge funds getting into private-company investing at the early stage is part of a greater trend of the unbundling of company building, which VCs tend to be good at, from actual capital. This year will bring more money to startups, but likely in the form of the non-traditional funds, whether that be hedge funds, family funds, and other alternative assets.

It’s hard not to also acknowledge the effect of outside investors on the whole bubble perception issue. VCs caution that more hedge funds could drive up valuations, which in turn creates more of a bubble around these valuations. But unlike the craziness of the bubble, hedge funds don’t necessarily represent “dumb money” any more. The hedge funds investing in tech startups these days seem to be doing their due diligence, for the most part, and convincing entrepreneurs that they add some value.

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Prim Laundry Startup Throws In The Towel

Sometimes “the future” just isn’t financially viable. Y Combinator-backed door-to-door laundry service Prim is shutting down. The startup just emailed customers saying “After washing thousands of pounds of clothes, our team has decided to change course to pursue other opportunities.” Maybe there was just no way to make money picking up, washing, folding, and delivering laundry at $25 a bag.

We’re awaiting a response from the Prim founders about exactly what happened and what they’ll do next. For more info on how the startup functioned, check out my launch story on Prim from July.

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BlackBerry Files Lawsuit Against Seacrest’s Typo Keyboard Startup For Infringement

BlackBerry has today filed a lawsuit against startup Typo Keyboards, which is backed by Ryan Seacrest. The company alleges that Typo copied BlackBerry’s patented and “iconic” keyboard design. Updated with statement from Typo below.

“We are flattered by the desire to graft our keyboard onto other smartphones, but we will not tolerate such activity without fair compensation for using our intellectual property and our technological innovations,” Steve Zipperstein, BlackBerry’s General Counsel and Chief Legal Officer, said in a statement today.

Seacrest invested $1M in the accessory, which encloses an iPhone in a case with a keyboard attached to the bottom half. The keyboard covers the iPhone’s home button but offers an alternate home button on the bottom right corner.

BlackBerry says that the Typo Keyboard violates its intellectual property rights, and that it will protect those rights from “blatant copying and infringement.”

“BlackBerry’s iconic physical keyboard designs have been recognized by the press and the public as a significant market differentiator for its mobile handheld devices,” the statement concludes.

The design certainly bears some resemblance a strong resemblance to BlackBerry’s signature rounded-corner keys and sloped corner design — right down to the placement of the back and return buttons. But one does have to wonder how many ways you can arrange keys on a keyboard.

Here’s the BlackBerry Q10 keyboard:

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Video Syndication Startup Vidible Raises $3.35M Round Led By Greycroft

Vidible, a startup connecting buyers and sellers of video content, is confirming that it has raised a $3.35 million Series A led by Greycroft Partners.

The round was first revealed in a regulatory filing in late December, but the company is only confirming the news and sharing details now. In addition to Greycroft, IDG also participated in the new funding, according to Vidible co-founder and President Tim Mahlman (pictured).

Mahlman give me a quick demo of the product. He said that the current methods of syndicating videos are “archaic,” with very little control or transparency. For example, he said publishers looking for videos usually have to go through an unsorted Media RSS feed.

With Vidible, on the other hand, content buyers can search for different kinds of videos, or they can just include the Vidible tag on their site and relevant videos will be played automatically. The content creators, meanwhile, have control over where their videos get played, and both sides have access to analytics.

Greycroft’s John Elton argued that Vidible is taking advantage of three broad trends — the growth in video consumption, the “increasing demand from content sites for video,” and the “increasing demand from advertisers for video impressions.” When asked if he thinks we’ll see a growing number of sites choosing to syndicate videos created by others, rather than create the videos themselves, he noted that most newspaper companies (for example) didn’t create TV channels either, “So why do we think they’re going to be able to do that for online video?”

“I think it’s a new medium,” Elton added. “There are people that do it very well, that are looking for more distribution, and there are publishers looking for content that’s appropriate for their site.”

He also said that he’s impressed by Vidible’s focus on monetization. The content buyer pays a set rate based on impressions, then they can either run their own ads with the videos or run ads from one of Vidible’s network partners.

Mahlman and his co-founder/CEO Michael Hyman both have ad tech experience (Hyman’s company Oggifinogi was acquired by Collective, while Mahlman has held positions at companies like Turn and BlueLithium), and apparently they’ve been working on Vidible for the past year. Mahlman said the beta version of the product launched over the summer, with 100 video providers now signed up and more than 1 billion impressions served each month.

“We’ve been focused on R&D until now,” Mahlman said. “Now it’s a matter of building out the business arm.”

He added that Vidible is also looking to expand internationally.

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Indian Ad Retargeting Startup Vizury Is Raising $20 Million

Vizury, a Bangalore-based ad retargeting startup, is in talks with investors to raise an additional $20 million by March this year, with existing backer Inventus leading the round, according to sources familiar with the company.

The Series C investment is being done reportedly at a $60 – $70 million valuation — perhaps low-sounding to a Silicon Valley ear, but a typical figure for an ad tech company of this size in India. As a point of comparison, rival Criteo is currently valued at $1.86 billion.

The financing will be used to expand aggressively in China and Japan, Vizury’s co-founder Chetan Kulkarni said in an interview.

Kulkarni would not share current revenue details for Vizury, but he said the company helps generate $300-$400 million in annual sales for its customers including Virgin Airlines and Chinese e-commerce company Yintai. Vizury is likely to raise one more round before it goes public, expected in about a year’s time.

Vizury has already raised $11 million in funding, including a $9 million Series B round in October 2012 from Nokia Growth Partners, Ojas Venture Partners and Inventus Capital Partners. The startup had raised Series A funding of $2 million from Ojas Venture Partners and Inventus in November 2010.

This upcoming Series C round will likely be the last but one round of funding for Vizury before it lists on an exchange in about an year’s time.

Vizury is among a bunch of fast growing Indian adtech companies such as InMobi and Komli Media that are beginning to take on global rivals including Google.

Companies such as Criteo and Vizury are seeing huge growth in business from e-commerce customers who want to woo back their online visitors. These startups target ads at people who visit e-commerce sites but move on before buying anything. Retargeting means that when they visit other sites, they will continue to see ads for products from those e-commerce sites. Vizury’s online ad platform now counts around 500 million monthly users.

While online advertising continues to grow, there is an increasing emphasis on more sophisticated technology to make sure that the investments being made in it are providing the best returns, by making sure to match ads better with people who will be most receptive to them.

InMobi showed signs of its ambitions to go beyond just being a mobile ad network when it acquired Overlay Media in January last year to improve ad personalization, after raising some $200 million from SoftBank. Komli Media has raised around $97 million in funding so far from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, Helion Venture partners and Draper Fisher Jurvetson.

“We’ll invest in building local products for markets like China, because that’s the only way it can become a billion dollar market,” Kulkarni told Techcrunch. China currently contributes around 20% of Vizury’s business, but Kulkarni aims to make the country contribute nearly half of its total revenue within next few years.

Vizury, which also counts Chinese online travel agency Ctrip among its top clients, currently generates annual revenues of about $20 million, according to one of the potential investors. The startup’s closest rival is French ad retargeting company Criteo, which raised $251 million after its IPO on NASDAQ last year.

Kulkarni of Vizury, who co-founded the startup along with Gourav Chindlur and Vikram Nayak in December 2008, said he will evaluate options to IPO in about 18 months.

“We could consider a listing in Hong Kong apart from the U.S., especially given Vizury’s growth ambitions in Asia,” he said.

Vizury, and other adtech startups are also betting on a growing base of mobile users in markets such as China, India and Japan. India’s online marketplace Snapdeal, which is backed by eBay, is seeing mobile users account for over 30% of its total traffic. Around 20% of the traffic that visits Flipkart, India’s biggest e-commerce site, comes from mobile devices.

“Despite this growth in mobile traffic, the key question is how much of this actually converts into sales. And that’s where we are seeing divergent trends–sales conversions on mobile are lower in India when compared with those in China for instance,” Kulkarni said.

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Dell portrays itself as a feisty startup in its first ad after going private (video)

Now that Dell is once again a private company, it's trying to shake off its reputation as a member of the status quo. Appropriately, the PC builder just unveiled a new TV ad that suggests it has all the energy and vision of a technology startup. The minute-long spot connects Dell's mindset to that of companies like Dropbox, Gilt and Skype, which started out in modest places but went on to accomplish great things. We're hopeful that the ad reflects fresh thinking in Round Rock's offices, but actions will speak louder than words -- it's hard to believe that a tech giant can be as nimble and innovative as a tiny outfit with something to prove.

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Source: Dell (YouTube)

Tags: ad, advertising, commercial, computer, dell, desktop, laptop, marketing, pc, video Next: Want to stream ABC shows the day after they air? Better get cable .fyre .fyre-comment-divider

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Startup Hackathon In Kiev Today Hopes To Build Tools For Euromaidan Protest

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Earlier this year I attended Startup AddVenture 2013 in Kiev. Normally tech startup conferences consist of speeches, pitches, panels and networking events. This time, however, there was an added element – major social upheaval just around the corner.

In nearby Independence Square, there was a massive protest in favour of the Ukraine joining the European Union. It was ironic. Only a couple of hours away by plane Greeks had been rioting to get OUT of the European Union, with its heavy austerity measures. But what was happening in Kiev was different, and closely affected by the politics surrounding Russia in the 21st century. The Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had, at the last minute, reneged on negotiations for the Ukraine to strengthen commercial and political integration with the European Union, to opt instead for closer ties with the Moscow-dominated Russian trading block. That brought thousands of protesters onto the streets.

It certainly charged the atmosphere of the conference, and many of us went down to see the protests on the Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) to take in the atmosphere. Technology has become an intimate part of social movements, and already the #EuroMaidan hashtag on Twitter had sparked international interest and media coverage of the movement.

Since then the protests have continued, and the waves of social media around the protests have exposed police beatings of protesters and journalists alike.

Involved from the beginning, now technology people are rallying. Today, hackers from across Ukraine have gathered for the “IT Hamet” Hackathon being organised by the “IT tent” based at the Euromaidan protest, the Kiev co-working space Chasopys, and the startup community in Kiev.

You can tune into the live tweets, in English, on

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The Consumer Electronics Startup Show

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The size and scope of the Consumer Electronics Show is unfathomable for the uninitiated. CES has been called a cesspool. It’s been called a shitshow. And those descriptions are accurate. It’s a clusterfuck of consumer electronics companies, big and small, vying for attention. That’s why TechCrunch attends.

For the 2014 show, which is just two short weeks away, TechCrunch is, for the first time, breaking out its Startup Battlefield event from Disrupt. Called Hardware Battlefield, this startup competition has been tweaked and reworked to focus on, and celebrate, the brightest and most promising unlaunched hardware startups. And what better place to host it than CES?

CES is the largest startup show in the world, and to say that it takes over Las Vegas is not hyperbolic. The city is consumed by CES: Nearly every hotel room is booked; almost every conference room is used. For every Samsung and Microsoft, there are at least 100 smaller companies — the best and brightest of which often do not have an official spot on the CES show floor.

For years, CES has been held at the Las Vegas Convention Center. This massive facility has four exhibition halls nearly large enough to hold air shows within. But in recent years, with the LVCC bursting at its seams, the show expanded next door to the Hilton, The Venetian and Palazzo. If that’s not enough, companies and startups often save a bunch of cash, forgoing the traditional CES experience and rent suites in other casinos. Then there are hackathons, press events, and more lame parties than one can possibly attend.

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Backed By Steve Blank & More, Startup Genome Founders Launch Next-Gen Benchmarking Tool For Startups

Three years ago, a team of researchers, entrepreneurs and data geeks set out on an ambitious mission: To put the world’s technology startups under the microscope in an effort to better understand why some succeed and why 90 percent eventually go the way of the dinosaur.

Fast forward to today, and The Startup Genome (as it’s now called) has analyzed data from over 100,000 startups around the globe and has conducted hundreds of in-depth, qualitative interviews with entrepreneurs and investors. The results provide an exciting look into not only what characteristics and qualities make for a successful formula, but how different startup ecosystems stack up with each other.

The team behind the project has also begun to leverage its unique data sets to create a benchmarking tool to enable entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress compared to their peers and help them make more informed product and business decisions. This month, after more than a year of testing and tweaking, the team finally released Compass into the wild.

Compared to prior iterations, Compass founder and CEO Bjoern Herrmann (who is also one of the co-founders of The Startup Genome Project) tells us, the now fully-baked startup benchmarking tool offers automated data collection from a host of tools and services popular among SMBs, including services like Salesforce.com, MailChimp, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, PayPal, Quickbooks and Stripe.

Using data derived from the sources, Compass then funnels your startup’s business metrics into its revamped dashboard, allowing them to view company benchmarks across a range of categories, configure an alert system to stay up to date on company revenue, churn rate, user growth rate, acquisition costs and so on, while offering visualizations of that data in correlation charts, graphs and via tailored, supplemental analysis.

But the real key to the new Compass product, Herrmann says, its the new dynamic system its team developed to generate benchmarks based on large data sets. Up until today, most benchmarking solutions have relied on 50-year-old methodologies to collect and analyze data, so, the team has instead developed a methodology designed specifically for Big Data analysis.

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Mobile Rewards Startup Kiip Upgrades Its User Contests With New “Challenges” Product

When Kiip announced last week that that it’s powering rewards in Zepto Labs’ popular Cut the Rope mobile games, co-founder and CEO Brian Wong said it didn’t share one of the key details (because, uh, reasons) — that this is the debut of a new Kiip product called Challenges.

The company is best-known for allowing advertisers to sponsor rewards in games and other apps at key moments, say when players beat a level. With Challenges, instead of just giving each user a reward, brands can run contests and sweepstakes and give prizes to the winners. For example, Wong said Cut the Rope players will have a chance to win plush toys today (and you’ll see them on the Kiip rewards site tomorrow).

That concept may sound familiar to readers who have been following Kiip, because it first started offering these types of user contests about two years ago, through a product called Swarm. (At the time, Wong told me that Swarm would allow Kiip to enlist advertisers in new industries like automotive, where “you can’t give away a million cars.”) Since then, however, Kiip has been relatively quiet about Swarm — Wong told me this week that the product is doing fine, but it’s really meant to be integrated with games, and he’s been spending more time talking up Kiip’s efforts to bring rewards to other non-gaming apps, such as Any.Do, 8Tracks, and Recipe Search.

Challenges are supposed to address several of the main limitations to Swarms. For one thing, they could only be activated at a specific point in the game, which meant that if a player wanted another chance to win the prize, they’d have to go back and play that same level again. Now, however, Wong said that contests can now be “run dynamically” on any game level. He also said they can now be triggered server-side, which means they can be updated more easily, without requiring any changes to the software development kit.

Even though Wong describes Challenges as a specific product within the broader umbrella of Kiip’s Swarms, he also suggested that all Swarm campaigns would have access to the new features. This might seem like a pedantic point, but honestly, going back-and-forth with Wong about the relationship between the two products made me a little nuts. So I asked Wong why he didn’t just call it Swarm 2.0 (or, you know, something like that), and he replied, “That’s great feedback. Challenges just stuck. We might rename it.”

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Startup advocates spar with French minister over job laws

Entrepreneurs at the LeWeb tech conference tell minister Arnaud Montebourg that the country is discouraging entrepreneurs and holding back employment. He responds, "We are not California. We are French."

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Endemol Bets On Real-Money Gaming, Leads $13 Million Round In Social Casino Startup Plumbee

Endemol, the Netherlands-based TV production house known for game shows like Fear Factor and Deal Or No Deal, is now making a bet on online gambling. The company today announced that it has made a strategic investment of $13 million in social casino startup Plumbee, as it plans to raise its digital profile by investing in online gambling and going beyond the traditional video production business.

Founded by former Playfish executives, Raf Keustermans, Gerald Tan and Jodi Moran, Plumbee started in 2011, and has more than one million monthly active users. Prior to this, Plumbee had raised $2.8 million in funding.

As part of the strategic investment, Endemol will be working with Plumbee to build on its existing digital gaming projects, according to chairman Lucas Church.

“Social casino gaming is a fast emerging market and Plumbee is one of the most innovative and dynamic operators in this space. This new partnership will allow us to accelerate the growth of Endemol’s digital gaming business around the world, whilst capturing more of the value created by our entertainment brands,” Church said in a statement.

The investment comes at a time when we have seen mixed fortunes both for social gaming companies and real-money gaming ventures. Zynga had high hopes for it, but earlier this year, after much lobbying, decided to drop its pursuit for a real-money gaming license in the U.S.

Zynga, of course, hasn’t had the most stellar record of late in social gaming, either. But others like Supercell continue to bring in the punters in droves.

Plumbee, with its Playfish heritage and new focus on a mix of free-to-play and real-money games, wants to tap into both areas. And now Endemol is hoping to cash in on that, too.

Keustermans, the CEO of Plumbee adds: “Endemol will become a strategic shareholder and this will enable us to leverage the company’s international network and globally recognised brands. This will significantly boost the growth of our worldwide user base as we create gaming experiences that stand out from the competition.”

So far, Endemol has been building its digital gaming business internally, mostly by launching gaming apps based on popular shows such as “Pointless” and “Deal Or No Deal”. And it is making other inroads into pure-play online content. In November, it announced a $40 million investment in Endemol Beyond, a new online video network.

Endemol’s recent digital gaming projects include The Money Drop second screen game, which has so far had over 30 million games played worldwide and The Million Pound Drop app in the UK, which has had over 2.5 million downloads to date.

Idinvest Partners, the existing investors in Plumbee, also participated in this round of funding.

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Buffer Social Scheduling Startup Launches Buffer For Business, After Beta Drives 10% Of Revenue

SF-based Buffer, the social media scheduling tool has officially launched its Buffer for Business product after a small private beta that ran during the past few months. Buffer lets users schedule updates and deliver messages via Facebook, Twitter and other social channels, which has become a key ingredient for any brands with an online presence. It arguably always appealed to business users, but the new Business product offers detailed analytics, collaboration with entire teams and easy export of your data for use in other applications.

Buffer for Business has already had a material impact on Buffer’s bottom line, even in its limited beta release form. Co-founder Leo Widrich says that over the course of the beta, they’ve signed up 400 paying users already, which amounted to $23,000 in revenue in a single month, or roughly 10 percent of their overall revenue. Business clients offer a significant revenue opportunity for Buffer, since it can sell better to institutions and organizations with deeper pockets than it could with its original product.

According to Widrich, Buffer took a consumer turn last year as part of a concentrated effort to attract individual users, and that resulted in partnerships with various companies including Feedly and Echofon. To a certain extent this worked (individual user growth was on a roll partway through last year), but the company also determined that a specific focus on business would also be beneficial to its bottom line.

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