Zynga is expected to follow Nexon out later this week, and is seeking to raise $1 billion in a U.S.-based public offering.

The two companies have a lot in common.

Nexon, which is known for games such as MapleStory, has profited off the “freemium” model, in which games are given away for free and monetized through virtual goods. The 17-year-old company operates mostly in Asia today, but increasingly it is launching games on Facebook and Apple’s iPhone and iPad in the U.S.

Zynga, which has only been in the market for four years, is on target to have the largest Internet IPO in the U.S. since Google. Nexon’s IPO was the largest in Japan this year.

But today, Nexon received a less-than-stellar public reception, with shares falling marginally in early trading.

Still, it’s not clear that Zynga will share the same fate.

Many analysts attributed Nexon’s early morning decline to general economic weakness, which has plagued the Tokyo stock exchange for a while. Another analyst told Reuters that Nexon was priced fairly and therefore a big lift wasn’t expected.

In many respects, Zynga has very similar ambitions to Nexon. Not only is it seeking to raise about the same amount of money, it is also asking for the same valuation.

Following its public offering, Nexon’s market capitalization totaled at 553 billion yen, according to The Wall Street Journal. In U.S. dollars, that translates to about $7 billion. If Zynga is able to sell one billion shares at the top end of its range, it would be valued at the same amount.

Still, that’s down from earlier this year, when Zynga was privately valued at as much as $10 billion.

The latest title in the adventure series will be called Escape From Ravenhearst, and even though its arrival is highly anticipated, the company doesn’t consider it to be one of its big hits.

That’s because Big Fish doesn’t really have one clear hit.

Mystery Case Files has been played by 100 million people on the PC over the past two years, but the game series can’t really be considered a hit, because it did not generate more than 2 percent of the company’s overall revenue.

In fact, not one of the company’s other approximately 300-plus titles released each year made up a greater percentage, according to a spokesperson.

For comparison’s sake, look at pop-culture phenomenon Angry Birds, which has been downloaded 500 million times. And then there’s Zynga, the top game maker on Facebook. It reported that at one point last year, three of its titles — Mafia Wars, FarmVille and Zynga Poker — comprised 32 percent, 29 percent and 20 percent of its online game revenue, respectively.

If you want to play Ravenhearst, expect to pay for it and then download it to your PC.

Mystery Case Files, which uses dark graphics and rich storytelling, will cost $14 to those who subscribe to the Big Fish game portal, and $20 for non-subscribers. (Note: Not all of the 100 million players paid for the games, since there’s the option to try before you buy.)

Here’s the company’s trailer for the game:

Many industry pundits have talked about the Consumerization of the Enterprise — the idea that enterprise users expect the mobility, integration and ease of consumer technologies in their work lives. People often cite the move to user-purchased mobile devices like the iPhone or user-provisioned collaboration services like Box, DropBox and Yammer as evidence of this phenomenon. And because many of these services have freemium models, IT departments are finding that huge numbers of their employees are already using these services for business purposes in addition to personal ones. So in many ways, consumer expectations are driving the ways enterprise CIOs think.

But what about the other side of the phenomenon? Eddie Murphy’s character Billy Ray Valentine influenced Dan Aykroyd’s character, Louis Winthorphe, III, as much as the reverse. What’s less discussed — but equally fascinating — is the impact of enterprise requirements on the consumerization trend.

Many of the aforementioned start-ups initially focused entirely on end-user needs, providing simple user interfaces and sign-ups, and building multi-million user customer bases in the process. But as these vendors switched focus from user acquisition to monetization, they realized some IT department requirements are legitimate, and more importantly, are barriers to sale.

The most recent example: Box. Box founder Aaron Levie probably never imagined his company would be working with enterprise IT directors in designing his product roadmap when he started his file sharing company, but nonetheless it recently announced partnerships and integrations around identity federation, mobile security, e-discovery, and other IT-centric areas.

In contrast, DropBox has continued to focus heavily on end-user adoption with limited IT focus. Indeed, their total reported user counts dwarf those of Box or any other service. Yet the CIOs I’ve spoken with had a proliferation of users on DropBox and Box when they decided to standardize on a collaboration service. Despite the fact that their companies may have had more DropBox users, Box’s enterprise functionality tipped the scale in its favor. So while user adoption gets you in the door, without some enterprization you don’t get the sale.

Similarly, for Google’s Enterprise team, bringing Gmail to companies involved a lot more than just learning how to charge for the service. Google has spent the past several years trading places with Microsoft, investing in policy management, security, compliance and other IT-centric functionality to address early inhibitors to adoption. And it has worked. Analyst firm Gartner now sees Google as a viable alternative to Exchange for enterprise collaboration.

Indeed, even in the truly consumerized world of mobile devices, iPhones and Androids don’t roam free in most large companies. Many security-sensitive organizations are investing in Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions like those from Good, MobileIron, Zenprise and Symantec, to bring enterprise manageability to smartphones.

The Enterprization of these traditionally consumer apps is going to center around three legitimate enterprise requirements:

1. Data ownership: While enterprises are excited to leverage the flexibility and fluidity of cloud apps, the idea of an enterprise’s intellectual property spread across hundreds of cloud services, many times in user-provisioned accounts where the enterprise has no access, is scary. What if the company is involved in a lawsuit and has to put a user’s data on legal hold? How can the company recover data if the cloud service loses it? And most importantly, how can the company get its data back if it wants to change services? Tough questions if the data is trapped behind a user’s personal cloud account.
2. Data security: Similarly, the thought of sensitive customer information living in cloud accounts where users choose passwords like “password” or, for the more secure, “password1,” is nerve-wracking to a security officer. How can the company ensure that its data is protected with strong passwords? When an employee leaves, how can the company revoke access to all cloud apps at once? Without company administrative rights, the enterprise is dependent on the judgment of the user.
3. Data compliance: Whether data is stored on your G:\ drive or in Gmail, if it’s work-related, for the most part the same compliance rules apply. While SOX, FRCP and GLBA are not as sexy as FourSquare, Angry Birds and AirBnB, they are still critical for most companies. How can companies meet regulatory requirements around searchability, records retention, logging and other areas?

The real challenge as start-ups address the needs of enterprises is to maintain the core value that earned users in the first place. If they add every feature IT asks for, will the products lose their usability? If they make it easier to lock down access to the systems with two-factor logins when you can’t remember one factor, will users revolt? If these tools were used to get around IT, will the fact that they can now be monitored scare users away?

Time will tell. But this grand experiment would make the “Trading Places” brothers proud. And a lot more than $1 is at stake.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

Then we found out that a very small number of people were willing to spend money (although it might be as much as $50 a game), and that they mostly spent their money on a whole lot of nothing.

And now the dissection of the freemium games business continues, based on a series of reports by Flurry, which has a clue about the major trends because it tracks more than 110,000 apps across all the major smartphone platforms, including Android and iOS.

The latest installment reveals that while younger players between the age of 18 and 24 spend more time playing games, it is an older group — between the ages of 25 and 34 — that spends the most money.

That makes sense, since younger people generally have more time to spare, while older people have more money to spare.

This is particularly the case since most freemium games allow people to pay small amounts of money in order to accelerate game play. So you could see how younger people might be more willing to wait, while older people would pay to continue playing.

The San Francisco-based company announced the acquisitions — Kirkland, Wash.-based Griptonite Games and Toronto-based Blammo Games — as part of its second-quarter earnings yesterday.

Over the past year or so, Glu has aggressively been trying to reinvent itself as a company that develops free-to-play games for mobile devices with features similar to those found on Facebook. Previously, the company was known for selling feature phone games around the world.

Following several acquisitions in the space — including the agreement by Electronic Arts to purchase PopCap for $750 million, and Zynga’s healthy appetite, which has included purchasing more than one company every month for the past year — Glu has been named as a potential acquisition target.

In this case, it appears to be getting out in front of the trend.

Over the past year, Glu has been fairly successful with such hits as Contract Killer, Bug Village and Gun Bros, mostly on the iPhone and iPad, but also increasingly on Android.

In the earnings call yesterday, Glu’s CFO Eric Ludwig explained that the acquisitions were due in part to Zynga’s competitive threat as the social games giant increases its mobile acquisitions. “Glu already has scale in sales, marketing and G&A function, but we have been capacity constrained in our development studio side,” he said, according to a SeekingAlpha transcript of the call.

Both of the acquisitions were paid for in stock.

Griptonite, which has about 200 employees, has been focused on developing titles for multiple platforms including consoles, Nintendo’s DS and the iPhone, but will switch over to making freemium games this year. Glu issued a total of 6,106,015 shares of common stock for the company, which, based on yesterday’s stock price of $4.60 a share, is close to $28 million.

Blammo Games, which was already developing two titles for Glu as a partner, will receive 1 million shares of stock with the potential to earn up to 3.3 million if it hits certain revenue milestones. Blammo is run by Christopher Locke, who was one of the creators of Smurf’s Village and Zombie Café, two very popular games.

As far as the earnings report, revenues totaled $17.7 million in the second quarter, increasing from $15.9 million in the year-ago period. The company also narrowed its losses to $1.8 million, or 3 cents a share, compared to $3.2 million, or 10 cents a share, in the second quarter of 2010.

For the first time, smartphone revenues from free-to-play games exceeded revenues from its legacy feature-phone business. It said that in the quarter, smartphone revenues totaled $9.4 million to leapfrog feature-phone sales of $8.3 million.

That’s a fact.

But a new study conducted by Flurry, an analytics provider for mobile games on Apple and Android devices, provides a fairly compelling argument as to why a developer should continue to give away his or her games for free.

Ultimately, it’s because consumers are willing to pay much, much more — if given the option.

After evaluating the spending habits of 3.5 million consumers across both iOS and Android, Flurry found that among those who pay for in-app transactions, greater than five percent will spend more than $50, which rivals the amount paid at retail for top console and PC games.

What’s more, consumers are spending $14 per transaction on average, which easily exceeds the price tag of most premium games being sold on smartphones today.

Since $14 sounds high, Flurry’s GM of Games Jeferson Valadares explains the logic behind it in a blog post today. The findings are also a continuation of a report issued earlier this month that generically found that mobile games generate more revenue if given away for free.

Valadares explains that only three percent of consumers are likely to spend money at all, but that at the high end, there are some very big spenders who are bringing up the average and generate a bulk of the revenue. Additionally, the number of consumers who pay very little remains fairly low. In fact, consumers spend only 99 cents less than two percent of the time.

“Why then would so few consumers spend just $1 in freemium games when this price point is so popular among premium games?” Valadares writes. “Because freemium games drive a different decision-making mindset for consumers. They simply are deciding whether or not to spend.”

The study found that 71 percent of all transactions are for amounts under $10; 15 percent are for spends between $10 and $20; and 13 percent are for amounts greater than $20.

The higher-end buyers are considered the “whales” of the industry.

Flurry’s advice to game developers is to focus on the whales: “If you’re a game designer, your main take away is that very few transactions — and consumers who complete those transactions — make up the bulk of your revenue. Therefore, your ‘meta-game’ should be about whale hunting.”

The New York-based company has acquired gamerDNA Media, a videogame ad network; and BrandPort, an advertising platform. The terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Now game developers can partner with Live Gamer to monetize games both through virtual goods, which users must pay for, and through advertisments, such as videos that users must watch to earn virtual goods within a game.

Andrew Schneider, president and co-founder of Live Gamer, said advertising can make a difference to a game developer that may only be getting 10 percent of its players to pay for games. “How many players aren’t monetizing? It’s a dramatic uplift in revenue, and brand marketers love this because they [gamers] are engaging in ads,” he said.

Under the acquisition, BrandPort will be renamed Ad Elements and will provide a video platform, which allows a player to watch a video to earn an in-game item. GamerDNA Media is one of the larger game-focused ad networks in the U.S., reaching more than 48 million unique monthly visitors worldwide. It works with advertisers such as Blizzard, Best Buy, KFC, Sony Computer Entertainment, Wal-Mart and Namco, to insert pre-roll ads into games.

After users watch a video, they often have to answer a question about the clip or rate the video in order to be awarded the virtual good.

Other companies are in this space as well, including WildTangent and hi5, which are both promoting their own social networks; and AdColony on mobile.

As it turns out, game developers are finding it is easier to make money on the iPhone if they give their applications away for free and sell virtual goods inside the game, instead of expecting users to plop down 99 cents on a game they’ve never played.

According to Flurry, which tracks the performance of more than 90,000 apps that use its analytics service, more than half of the top performing games on Apple’s iOS are making money by using a free-to-play model, up from only 39 percent in January.

In a blog post, Flurry’s general manager of games, Jeferson Valadares, who worked previously at EA’s Playfish and Digital Chocolate, writes that when the game is free, two things can happen: “First, more people will likely try your game … and second, you will likely take more total money since different players can now spend different amounts depending on their engagement and preferences.”

In other words, if a user really likes your game, he or she may end up spending more than 99 cents.

Flurry said that can represent a lot more money, even though more than 90 percent of players never spend a dime.

Valadares writes that the number of people willing to spend money in a free game ranges from 0.5 to 6 percent.

The freemium model has been well demonstrated on Facebook, where game companies like Zynga are making millions of dollars from users willing to pay for small items inside of games, such as crops for the farm or energy boosts to continue playing.

Zynga has disclosed that a majority of its revenues come from a very small percentage of users.

While many independent game studios have embraced freemium models, it’s been more difficult for other companies. Nintendo is perhaps the most vocal company speaking out against the trend.

But no such luck. We won’t be seeing Super Mario Bros. on an iPhone or Android phone any time soon.

The speculation was triggered by the announcement that Pokemon was launching a game on the iPhone this summer, and Nintendo owns 32 percent of Pokemon.

But the stock lost nearly all of its gains after a Nintendo spokesperson clarified to Bloomberg that the company’s strategy to develop software only for its own hardware “hasn’t changed and won’t change.”

In June, Nintendo’s Global President Satoru Iwata was very clear about that policy in an interview with AllThingsD at E3.

The company may be experimenting with new hardware, like the new tablet-shaped controller for the upcoming Wii U, but it draws the line at leveraging emerging platforms, like mobile or social, or new business models, like free-to-play games.

“I’m not interested in offering software for free of charge,” Iwata said through a translator. “That’s because I myself am one of the game developers, who in the future wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.”

Iwata said the revenues that Zynga — and platform-makers like Facebook and Apple — are generating will not change his mind.

“If we are going to destroy the value of the game software — once we have done so, it’s a difficult job to recover from that situation,” he argued.

Nintendo traded 1.2 percent higher to close at 15,610 yen this morning on the Osaka Securities Exchange.

But Nintendo draws the line at using emerging platforms, like mobile or social, or new business models, like free-to-play games, to attract a larger user base.

In an interview with Nintendo’s Global President Satoru Iwata at E3, he passionately explains why he will continue charging for games and is reluctant to get caught up in the social and mobile game frenzy that is fueling such companies as Zynga, or platform-makers like Facebook and Apple.

Yesterday, I posted the first part of the interview that covers his thoughts on the Wii U. Today’s section focuses on his opinions on emerging games platforms and other trends.

Here’s excerpts of the interview as conducted through an interpreter:

Over the years, there have been many references to the console wars between Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft. Are they still alive?

Often times, we have heard such terms as console wars, but we are actually always pushing ourselves and we are not engaged in such limited competition. For example, have we really been battling against only Sony and Microsoft?

With the Wii, Nintendo has been trying to expand the game population. … In that sense, I have said in interviews in the past, that we have been fighting against the indifference from consumers.

And also, as you know, videogames can be played many other ways today.

They are available on iPhone, iPad and Android, so today it does not make any sense to discuss console wars between the three platform holders. In fact, our thinking has always been in trying to grab the limited amount of spare time people have and always try to offer some unprecedented attraction to the consumer.

In February, you talked about how you disagreed with the emphasis of mobile and social games because they are free or 99 cents. But as mobile phones and Apple compete with Nintendo’s core business, which is casual gaming, would you consider a freemium model, where you’d monetize with virtual goods or advertising?

Nintendo has been a very unique company because it’s not just hardware, but also one of the major software publishers. Because it is in a unique position, it’s given us a unique advantage. We have no intention to provide a property to any other platforms, or making them available in a mode that does not require consumers to pay at all. Nintendo is a company, which is trying to maintain the overall value of video games.

Of course, if Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it’s Nintendo’s mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else. Something new, something fun and some surprise.

If we were simply going to say OK, the only the way we could sell more products is by decreasing the price, then there wouldn’t be a bright future and the entire industry will fold. When we look at the entire system of freemium, it’s not always that everyone is happy with the offers. Actually, there’s only a limited number of people who are willing to pay and many others are not paying for game titles at all.

Nintendo is not interested.

If we are going to do something similar, we would come up with a completely unique environment.

Please clarify. You would come up with something completely unique that is free?

I’m not interested in offering software for free of charge. That’s because I myself am one of the game developers, who in the future wants to make efforts so the value of the software will be appreciated by the consumers.

But a lot of companies are making a lot of money on advertising and virtual goods inside of the games through microtransactions.  It seems like the game quality can still remain high if the revenue comes in some other way.

It’s a little different. It’s not just the end result. We can’t simply compare the total revenue generated at the consequence of developing one thing. My point is about how we can keep the public’s perception of the software.

If we are going to destroy the value of the game software — once we have done so, it’s a difficult job to recover from that situation.

Yes, it is true. There are great examples of advertising and doing the microtranscactions, and several companies who have come up with that kind of system. But on the other hand, if you ask me, is this the system that can be sustatined for the long time? I don’t know the answer. And, my point is that I’m not willing to go that direction, as well.

But your competitiors will…

We have many challenges. Challenges to come up with new business models and challenges against emerging models, and above all, we have to do a better job to come up with unique and unprecedented ideas that have to be more attractive than other devices and companies.

Please understand. For Nintendo, the most important thing is to create something unique and unprecedented. Many people often try to find and compare a company to us. But we can do better. We can do more. But that’s not something Nintendo is interested in.

For example, when you asked me if I’m interested in this kind of system or that kind of system, I have to say, ‘No I’m not. No, I’m not interested.’ And, if we do something similar, we are going to come up with something completely different ourselves.

To clarify, when you said “this kind of system,” did you mean mobile and social games?

Yeah. To clarify, if you say mobile and social games, why don’t you do the same, I say because they are already doing it and we aren’t doing the same.

If you say freemium is somewhere you can spur new revenue, once again, the answer is the same. Just because many other people are thinking that way, we aren’t thinking that way.

While lots of music services are still trying to figure out how to make money by distributing copyrighted music you’ve heard of, SoundCloud is taking a different tack. As I wrote last fall:

It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud for less enlightened purposes, like sharing music you don’t own. But the company has recently implemented an audible “fingerprinting” service, like the ones Google’s YouTube uses, which allows copyright owners to take down files they don’t want on the Web. And that should give the company legal cover, unless the YouTube/Viacom case takes a very different turn.

In a blog post announcing the funding, SoundCloud says it will use the money to scale faster and “be more present in the US.” It also posts short clips, using its service, from its new investors–Index’s Mike Volpi and Union Square’s Fred Wilson.

Here’s Wilson:
Thoughts on SoundCloud by fredwilson. Uploaded with SoundCloud Android

And Volpi:
Mike Volpi Audio Blog on Friday morning by mvolpi. Uploaded with SoundCloud iPhone

And if you’d like something more entertaining, here’s a very long mix of classic hip-hop, via Cut Chemist:

Cut Chemist – Hip Hop Lives (1985-1996) by Cut Chemist

Today, the Web media staple is releasing, and demoing live onstage, its newest product–named Unifi.

The cloud media service automatically catalogs your collection (a la iTunes) and lets you stream it to any device, on demand.

Live Blog

11:35 am: RealNetworks CEO Bob Kimball and VP Peter Kellogg-Smith take the stage to introduce Unifi.

11:36 am: Kimball says Unifi is “a cloud media management service that treats every device as a first-class citizen.”

11:37 am: Now they are demoing the Web interface. This view is heavy on the album art, but separates out different devices you have synched–so you can see what you have on your iPad or your Android phone from the same device.

11:39 am: Now we are seeing albums playing on the network.

Interface merges media that’s on a device to the cloud. You can also pull content from one device to the cloud to another device.

So, if you have a song on your iPad, and were away from it, you could call the song to the cloud from your Android phone–as long as that device is on and connected.

11:42 am: Walt and Kara pounce on the DRM implications. The RealNetworks guys say they will respect the DRM rules, barring multiple copies when they apply.

11:43 am: Now they turn to photos.

11:43 am: The photo is snapped, and it uploads to the cloud, much like taking a picture inside DropBox.

There is a connection issue, but the intent is to show how the photo would quickly appear on all the connected devices.

11:45 am: Now they open iTunes and are showing how iTunes playlists are synched to the application.

The RealNetworks guys keep using the “librarian” metaphor for the process they use to organize the cloud-synched data.

11:47 am: They say the “librarian” only synchs things every five minutes, unless you force a synch. They say it is a processor-intensive application and so they “put her to sleep.”

11:48 am: Connection issues plague the demo, but the RealNetworks team says the service will be available in Q1 of 2011 and it will be freemium.

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]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101207/dive-tech-realnetworks-unifis-media-in-the-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:10:01 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=37969

LastPass, a cross-platform password manager, has acquired the social bookmarking and browser synchronization service Xmarks.

The San Francisco-based Xmarks has been in the midst of some tumult of late, as it closed down in September and then quickly opened back up again in an effort to keep its service running for a large group of active users.

That happened after user outcry, spurring the company to try to stay afloat.

SInce then, Xmarks has been trying to land itself safely.

The start-up had multiple offers to keep the operation running, as well as pledges from almost 30,000 fans willing to pay $10 to $20 a year for a new “freemium” business model.

Enter LastPass, based in Vienna, Va., whose CEO Joe Siegrist said in an interview that he wanted to help keep the service operating.

“They had a large dedicated audience, but their free offering and advertising model was not working,” he said. “We really want to figure something out that could keep it going.”

Siegrist said LastPass offered a robust free service, but relied on a small group of users who pay to upgrade to a premium offering.

The browser add-on for cross-platform synchronization operates in the cloud.

And that is going to be the fate of Xmarks–which had been called Foxmarks initially.

It had been seed-funded in 2006 by well-known entrepreneur Mitch Kapor and also got an additional investment from First Round Capital.

Xmarks garnered another $5 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures in 2008,

That year, it also hired Silicon Valley entrepreneur James Joaquin as CEO, whose job it was to carve out a business with Xmarks’ assets, including using its mass of data.

Xmarks had certainly been growing its user base and bookmarked Web addresses strongly, via a browser widget that recorded bookmarking information.

Earlier this year, it tried out an advertising product called SearchBoost, which gave advertisers additional analytics about their ads, as well as organic search results.

But all that ultimately did not translate into a viable business for Xmarks.

“We think this will make a great ending and beginning for Xmarks,” said Joaquin.

Both Xmarks and LastPass declined to provide financial details of the transaction.

Here is the blog post by LastPass and Xmarks about the integration:

Today we’re excited to announce that Xmarks has been acquired by LastPass, makers of a leading cross-platform password manager. It’s a great opportunity that ensures the survival of Xmarks as the same service that you know and love.

In the last few years, we’ve attracted over 4.5 million users syncing more than 1 billion bookmarks across 5 million computers. Most importantly, we’ve provided a simple solution to help people easily access their bookmarks, wherever and whenever they needed to. We’ve had thousands of users tell us that Xmarks has become an integral part of their browsing experience. You can rest assured that LastPass will continue to build upon the service in the coming months.

We’re also committed to keeping Xmarks free while implementing a viable long-term plan. Xmarks is transitioning to a “freemium” business model, the same model that allowed LastPass to grow into a thriving, profitable business. The browser add-on and the vast majority of what users have enjoyed remains free. Users can then opt to purchase Xmarks Premium for $12 per year, which includes new enhanced features like Android and iPhone mobile phone apps, priority support, and more. The Xmarks and LastPass Premium offerings are also available bundled together at a reduced subscription rate of $20 per year. For those of you who pledged your financial support, you can make good on your pledge today and upgrade.

The restructuring of the Xmarks offerings will accelerate the introduction of new features and service improvements. The two services will continue to require separate downloads and will be administered through two distinct extensions and websites, although there are plans to integrate them in the future.

We believe the acquisition will prove to be a success because of the common mission shared by LastPass and Xmarks. Xmarks complements LastPass’ vision of secure, universal access to the information that gives you entry to your digital life. By joining LastPass, Xmarks will also be able to accelerate the introduction of new features and developments. As the ultimate cross-browser, cross-platform team, Xmarks and LastPass will work together to help more people simplify their digital lives and access their data from anywhere, at any time.

We’re excited to join forces with LastPass and be a part of a team that will continue to provide the best data-syncing tools out there! We hope you will support both of these great services through your business and your Premium subscription. For more information, please see the FAQs.

The Xmarks & LastPass Teams

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/password-manager-lastpass-acquires-xmarks/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101102/casual-games-startup-omgpop-raising-a-serious-funding-round/ http://allthingsd.com/20101102/casual-games-startup-omgpop-raising-a-serious-funding-round/#comments Tue, 02 Nov 2010 20:55:12 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=25420 Does the casual games boom have more life in it? Here’s another bet that it does: Investors are pouring more money into OMGPOP, via a round that could bring in more than $10 million for the game site.

The New York-based company is still closing the round, but I’m told existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Spark Capital will re-up, and that Softbank Capital NY will also come aboard. There’s at least one other significant investor likely to join, but I don’t have their name (feel free to tell me, though–I keep all correspondence anonymous: peter@allthingsd.com).

OMGPOP has raised $6.5 million during its four-year history, which saw it start out as a sorta-dating site. But for the past few years it has focused squarely on free-to-play casual games, and has recently been trying to generate revenue via a freemium model, as well as some forays into advertising.

And like many casual games start-ups, it is getting a big boost by integrating its games into Facebook. It integrated with the social network this summer, and CEO Dan Porter says that move has doubled the company’s user base from three million to six million. Porter declined to talk about funding news.

Interest in casual games has sparked a flurry of deals in the past year, including Electronic Arts’ purchase of Playfish, Disney’s purchase of Tapulous and DeNA’s purchase of Ngmoco. But the big player remains Zynga, which is both tightly integrated with Facebook and often described as an obvious IPO candidate.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101102/casual-games-startup-omgpop-raising-a-serious-funding-round/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101019/evernote-raises-20-million-from-sequoia-capital/ http://allthingsd.com/20101019/evernote-raises-20-million-from-sequoia-capital/#comments Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:54:34 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31264 Evernote, the cloud-based platform for note-taking, has raised $20 million in a series C round of funding led by Sequoia Capital. The company’s success makes it the go-to example of the “freemium” business model–its premium product recently started paying for its current day-to-day operations, and there’s still $9 million left over from its B round. CEO Phil Libin aims to use the new infusion of cash to expand into more countries and into corporate and educational markets.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101019/evernote-raises-20-million-from-sequoia-capital/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101015/index-union-square-like-soundclouds-web-based-tune/ http://allthingsd.com/20101015/index-union-square-like-soundclouds-web-based-tune/#comments Fri, 15 Oct 2010 16:25:17 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=24601 Here’s another bet on Web-based music: SoundCloud, a start-up that makes it easy to share streaming music, is about to land a funding round from high-profile investors.

Sources tell me that Index Ventures and Union Square Ventures are leading a “significant” new round for the Berlin-based company. I don’t have a dollar amount, but I’m told that VCs were competing fiercely to get into the three-year-old company, which raised a $3.3 million round from Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures in 2009. The round hasn’t closed yet.

Online music has been a black hole for investors for a very long time. So what’s the attraction here?

In large part, it’s because SoundCloud isn’t dependent on deals with the major music labels. It’s designed to let professional and amateur musicians share their own music with each other and the public, via cloud-based files that the company hosts.

Once the tunes are on SoundCloud’s servers, the service makes it easy to move the stuff around the Web, via its own widget and an API that’s showing up on lots of interesting sites, apps, services and devices, including Facebook and Apple’s iPad. You can load SoundCloud files into Spotify, the streaming music company that Index has also invested in.

The service uses the freemium model, offering most of its capabilities for free, and charging up to $700 a year for more storage and extra features.

You can also use SoundCloud to share music you didn’t create and don’t own–and a “private sharing” option makes it easy to do so discretely. That could leave the service open, theoretically, to copyright claims, a la YouTube.

But so far the company has signed up a million users without attracting the ire of the big labels. And recent court decisions in the Veoh/Universal Music and Google/Viacom cases seem to give user-uploaded services like SoundCloud a lot of legal leeway, at least in the U.S.

I’m told that the company also plans on using Audible Magic’s “fingerprinting” technology, which will make it easier for copyright owners to pull content off the service.

SoundCloud, Index and Union Square all declined to comment.

Here’s an example of SoundCloud at work–a 43-minute (!) mix that Beck has posted to his Web site, which we can also embed here:

Melted Lemons by planned_obsolescence

SoundCloud: The Tour from SoundCloud on Vimeo.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101015/index-union-square-like-soundclouds-web-based-tune/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20101008/xmarks-may-not-exit-after-all/ http://allthingsd.com/20101008/xmarks-may-not-exit-after-all/#comments Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:23:35 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=30855 Looks like Xmarks, the popular cross-browser, cross-platform bookmark synchronization service, will be saved from extinction. The company, which announced late last month that it was folding the free service for lack of a viable business model, now says it has “multiple offers” to keep the operation running, as well as pledges from almost 30,000 fans willing to pay $10 to $20 a year. Next steps: Settling on a buyer and a freemium model.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101008/xmarks-may-not-exit-after-all/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100629/wired-ipad-app-boasts-a-new-feature-a-price-cut/ http://allthingsd.com/20100629/wired-ipad-app-boasts-a-new-feature-a-price-cut/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 05:50:16 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=21194 The second edition of Condé Nast’s much-praised Wired magazine iPad app is out, and it boasts some new features. The biggest one: A 20 percent price cut.

The magazine publisher sold some 95,000 digital copies of its June issue at $4.99, the same price the ink-and-paper edition commands. So why sell the July issue at $3.99–while also knocking down the price of the first issue to the same level?

Condé says it will be experimenting with digital magazine pricing for months to come. But Wired Editor Chris Anderson, who wants us to know that he doesn’t control his magazine’s sales price, makes the common-sense argument: Digital editions should cost less than physical ones because there’s no distribution cost.

“I would say that right now, all of us have opinions about the perfect price,” he says. “My feeling, my own personal instinct, is that digital should be at slight discount to print.”

Actually, Anderson says, in an ideal world he would prefer to offer it at an even steeper discount. The man who wrote “Free” would like to make Wired a freemium product: Offer some of the issue for no charge, and then upsell for the full thing.

“If there’s any one kind of tub I’m thumping, that’s the one,” he says. And then once again reminds us that he doesn’t control the magazine’s price. Noted!

Meanwhile, a few of the features to pay attention to:

• Clicking on a Web link–whether in an ad or on an editorial page–will now open up a Web page without kicking the user out of the app and into Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser.
• The app itself is now a free “wrapper” that you’ll use to purchase, view and store different issues of the magazine. If you purchased the first edition of the magazine and want to buy another one, you’ll have to go through the slightly cumbersome process of downloading the new app, then reloading the old issue back into the wrapper. There’s no cost to reload the issue, but it will take time, as it’s a really big file.
• The new issue isn’t quite as big as the old file, which came in at whopping 550 megabytes. The July app is a mere 340MB, but that’s in large part because the issue itself is smaller than the June issue. Condé and Adobe (ADBE), which is handling all of the technical heavy lifting on this, are going to have to figure out how to get the app much slimmer, or people won’t be able to subscribe to the thing.
• Subscriptions, social networking features and all sorts of other goodies are still on the drawing board.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100629/wired-ipad-app-boasts-a-new-feature-a-price-cut/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100202/yammer-grabs-10-million-more-in-funding/ http://allthingsd.com/20100202/yammer-grabs-10-million-more-in-funding/#comments Wed, 03 Feb 2010 05:24:50 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=23966

Yammer, the enterprise equivalent of Twitter, said it had grabbed another $10 million in financing.

But the question for the San Francisco-based microblogging service for businesses and closed groups is: “What are you working on?”

Yammer has both free and a paid–the gold level is $5 per user, per month–versions and is essentially a useful productivity tool.

Emergence Capital took the lead in the Series B round for Yammer, along with ubiquitous Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway and previous investors.

Yammer previously raised $5 million from Charles River Ventures and The Founders Fund.

Here’s the release:

Yammer Secures $10 Million in Series B Funding from Emergence Capital and Previous Investors

Investment To Fuel Product Innovation and Sales Coverage

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., February 3, 2010–Yammer, Inc., the leader in Enterprise Microblogging and Real-time Communications, today announced that it has received $10 million in its Series B round of funding. Emergence Capital leads the round; with general partner Jason Green joining Yammer’s Board of Directors. SV Angel, led by seasoned Silicon Valley investor, Ron Conway, is also participating as are previous investors, including Charles River Ventures and Goldcrest Investments from Dallas.

Yammer launched its solution in September 2008 and has experienced rapid user adoption with over 60,000 organizations globally having adopted the solution. Drawing on this momentum, Yammer will use the proceeds to accelerate product innovation and increase sales coverage.

“Yammer is revolutionizing the way employees communicate and collaborate, filling a need that email has failed to deliver,” said Jason Green, general partner at Emergence Capital. “Yammer has a passionate and proven executive team, a compelling freemium business model, a loyal customer base and a huge market opportunity. We are thrilled to be joining them in the next phase of their rapid growth.”

Companies and organizations of all sizes across a wide range of industries benefit from Yammer. They use Yammer for a multitude of reasons, including improving workforce productivity, connecting a geographically dispersed team, getting new employees up to speed, and increasing the flow of content and knowledge.

“Yammer is focused on improving the way employees communicate and stay connected to critical information about their company and job,” said David Sacks, founder and CEO at Yammer. “We’re pleased with the rapid growth and market adoption we’ve achieved and are poised to accelerate it with exciting enhancements to our product and with broadened sales coverage. We’re eager to work with Emergence Capital and leverage their expertise in building world-class Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies and are gratified that proven technology investors such as SV Angel and Charles River Ventures are also participating in the funding.”

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