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Exclusive: Cumulogic snags seed money from Crunchfund

Barb Darrow — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 16:53:34 +0000

Cumulogic, the erstwhile Java Platform-as-a-Service company that is morphing into a broader cloud platform services provider, has new seed funding from Crunchfund that it will use to build out its sales channels. CEO Michael Soby would not disclose the amount of the round but said it brings total funding to about $1 million.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company has also signed deals with a handful of integration partners that give it broad geographic coverage. They are: Redapt, based in Redmond, Wash.; Cloud Technology Partners out of Boston: CloudOps of Montreal; Shapeblue in London; Cloud Niners in Egypt with another integrator in Asia to be announced soon, Soby said.

Cumulogic’s rather ambitious pitch is that it will enable companies to mix and match cloud services from many providers and run them on the cloud infrastructure of the customers’ choice whether it’s VMware’s vCloud Director, Cloudstack (Citrix was an early investor), OpenStack or Amazon Web Services. Cumulogic also claims that service providers or enterprises themselves can manage all of those choices from the proverbial “single pane of glass.” That’s a big promise.

“If a developer wants to deploy MongoDB against Amazon and a load balancer against Rackspace, he can do that through our platform,” Soby said in an interview.

And, for the many companies still nervous about deploying critical applications in the public cloud, it will also let them re-create AWS-style pay-as-you-go services inside their firewalls, Soby said. A pre-release version of Cumulogic Cloud running on HPCloud is available here.

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955 Dreams gets $3.25M to re-imagine mobile publishing

Ryan Kim — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 11:00:34 +0000

955 Dreams has gotten plenty of praise for its stunning iOS apps, which present music albums and magazines as interactive multimedia applications. Now, the company is getting the love from investors, who are pouring in $3.25 million in a seed round for the small Mountain View, Calif. start-up.

The funding comes from 500 Startups, m8 Capital, Kapor Capital, Felicis Ventures, and CrunchFund, with 500 Startups’ Dave McClure joining the board. The company plans to use the money to put out more products, expand to other mobile operating systems and grow internationally. 955 Dreams is also taking its Band of the Day iPhone app and bringing it to the iPad.

I’ve been a fan of 955 Dreams because of its uncompromising attention to design, making apps that are built from the ground up to shine on mobile devices. The company is really re-imagining what publishing looks like in a tablet and smartphone era. And it’s creating optimism that digital magazines and interactive books can flourish when given the right treatment.

The secret for 955 Dreams has been the publishing platform it has used to build the History of Jazz and On the Way to Woodstock iPad apps and Band of the Day. All of the releases have been selected by Apple as App of the Week, and Jazz and Woodstock are in the iPad and iPhone Hall of Fame. Band of the Day was named iPhone App of the Year Runner Up by Apple.

Kiran Bellubbi, the founder and CEO of 955 Dreams told me the company was intent to just make a good app itself at first. But then they realized that the platform they created was capable of creating some stellar apps that are not only very fluid but also very lightweight. For 2012, Bellubbi said the company is looking to partner with one or two content companies, who will get access to 955 Dreams’ publishing platform to build their own products. He said they are looking at companies that can reach 10 to 20 million users, and are dedicated to putting out an uncompromising user experience.

“Our goal and vision is to enable users to get beautiful published content on a daily basis. The experience you have when you look at a magazine, the beautiful topography and layout that used to go into a magazine, it somehow got bastardized on the web. We want to build brands on the iPad that brings that back to publishing,” Bellubbi said.

Instead of a Flipboard approach, which he said creates a similar experience for reading all kinds of different content, Bellubbi said he wants 955 Dreams to help give rise to unique apps that reflect the styles and content of each brand.

Bellubbi said in addition to an eventual move to Android, 955 Dreams is also looking at ways to further monetize the platform. Right now, it charges a flat fee for each of its first two iPad apps while Band of the Day is free.

955 Dreams doesn’t appear to be in a big rush to go big or invite a lot of partners to use its platform so it may not get as much attention as some other solutions. But I’m hoping that people take note of what it’s doing. It’s pushing the boundaries of what publishing looks like on tablets and smartphones, and it’s making apps that are ultimately quite valuable to users, who have proven willing to shell out for what 955 offers.

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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The Latest From TechCrunch (You Cannot Make This Stuff Up)

Staci D. Kramer — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 04:14:10 +0000

Well, you could if you’re the Daily Mail but barring that, who would make up a post about a tech writer who leaves to become general partner in a VC fund but will become a columnist dedicated to writing about one of the highest profile companies out there?

Without going into all the plot points, that’s exactly what’s happening in this episode of As TechCrunch Turns. MG Siegler, one of the writers who went public with their threats and angst over Michael Arrington’s status, and an admitted star in the TC constellation, is leaving, sort of, to be a general partner in the $20 million CrunchFund.

Arrington’s CrunchFund raise, which included $10 million from TC owner AOL (NYSE: AOL) and $10 million from investors TC covers, set off the chain events that led to him leaving AOL and TC; public drama with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong and Arianna Huffington; columnist Paul Carr quitting and getting an investment from Tony Hsieh for a Las Vegas startup; Arrington writing as an “unpaid” blogger (with that $20 million fund) at his new Uncrunched; and so on.

Turns out, according to TC’s Erick Schonfeld, Siegler has spent the last few months not only warding off other media outlets, but being wooed by VCs. The solution: Siegler (aka @parislemon) will work at TC for another month, then join Arrington as a VC and continue after that as an outside columnist:

The scope of what he will write about will be very narrow: Apple (NSDQ: AAPL). He won’t write about startups or venture capital. And just like he has always done, he will continue to follow our editorial standards, which require strict disclosures for any kind of conflict whatsoever-financial, business, or personal.

It’s part of a change that will bring more columnists to TechCrunch, according to Schonfeld. With the loss of Arrington (amplified by his new competition with TC), Carr and Siegler leaving and Sarah Lacey on maternity leave, it makes sense that he would want to add more strong voices. He also promises to add more full-time writers (I almost wrote “journalists” but maybe he used writers on purpose given the potential heavy meaning of the J word).

I can’t wait to see who gets the AOL beat.

Update: Siegler, who already has changed his Twitter bio to “partner at CrunchFund, columnist at TechCrunch, has his say on his personal blog.

Then there was the not-so-inside joke of being able to reach Arrington’s Uncrunched through an obscene url aimed directly at Huffington, functional last night but broken now.

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Peer-to-peer car sharing startup Getaround raises $3.4M

Katie Fehrenbacher — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:37:22 +0000

Neighbor-to-neighbor car sharing startup Getaround has raised a seed round of funding of $3.4 million. Investors in the round include TechCrunch creator Michael Arrington‘s Crunchfund, Redpoint Ventures, General Catalyst, and a group of angel investors including Netflix founder Marc Randolph, and WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. The news was reported first on TechCrunch, and the investment is one of the first investments by the CrunchFund.

Getaround is one of the growing number of startups that are building businesses around collaborative consumption, or using the web and mobile to share “stuff,” from cars to tools to apartments (Airbnb). We’ve covered this topic at our Green:Net event and will be looking at the trend further at our Roadmap event in November. Getaround says they have signedup 5,000 car owners to participate in the network.

The idea behind peer-to-peer car sharing, or car sharing 2.0, is that car owners rent out their cars by the minute or hour to members of the network. In contrast, a more traditional car sharing company like Zipcar owns the cars in its fleet and rents those out to members of the Zipcar network. For peer-to-peer car sharing, the car owners can make thousands of dollars from renting out their cars. Frost and Sullivan has estimated that car owners can earn an average of $2,000 a year.

Another big difference between traditional car sharing and car sharing 2.0, is that startups building businesses off of peer-to-peer car sharing don’t have the high overhead costs of actually owning the car fleet. Zipcar hasn’t been profitable, largely because of the sizable costs of maintaining and buying cars, and Zipcar also includes the cost of gas in its service, which could rise considerably.

Getaround competes with startup RelayRides, which itself raised millions from Google Ventures and August Capital. Getaround and RelayRides are mainly different because Getaround sends its car owners a kit that they install themselves, which enables users to rent out and unlock cars using a mobile app. RelayRides installs that system for its users.

Here’s the full list of angel investors in Getaround that the company provided to me:

Marc Randolph (Netflix founder)
Barney Pell (Powerset founder, ex-Microsoft)
Matt Mullenweg (WordPress founder)
Vivi Nevo (Time Warner largest shareholder)
Simon Rothman (eBay Motors founder, Early Tesla board member, Glyde founder)
Bruno Bowden (Early Googler)
Fabrice Grinda (OLX founder), Thomas McInerney (Klout)
Farhad Mohit (Shopzilla founder, Bizrate founder)
Adam Schwartz (Articulate founder, Screenr founder)
Ken Keller (Cadence founder, IGN founder)
Angus Davis (Tellme founder, Swipely founder)
Lucas Nealan (Early Facebooker)
Brian Shire (Early Facebooker)
Tom McInerney

See our videos of Getaround, which showed us its new iPhone app last month, and RelayRides below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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TechCrunch’s Arrington Steps Down To Start CrunchFund

David Kaplan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 03:31:43 +0000

TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington may be raising a $20 million venture capital fund focused on early-stage technology companies, reported, citing unidentified sources. Arrington, who sold TechCrunch to AOL (NYSE: AOL) in September, is said to be teaming up with VantagePoint Venture Partners’ Patrick Gallagher.

Updated: AOL has issued a statement intended to head off any charges of conflict of interest related to Arrington’s new endeavors: “In light of Michael’s new responsibilities as a partner in CrunchFund, Arianna and Michael are announcing a search (both internal and external) for a Managing Editor to oversee day-to-day editorial operations and editorial standards at TechCrunch. Michael will remain founding editor and when he writes he will continue to transparently and openly disclose any conflicts of interest.”

The duo is reportedly looking to assemble an all-star team of Silicon Valley’s major VC firms and high profile tech executives. In particular, some of the firms being talked about include Kleiner Perkins, Greylock and Sequoia Capital. AOL also appears to be part of the arrangement.

Before he started TechCrunch six years ago, Arrington had been an angel investor. He ceased actively investing in tech companies about two years amid sundry accusations of conflicts of interest. But that moratorium didn’t last long, as he began investing in companies this past year. Arrington was also named a limited partner in funds managed by Benchmark Capital and SoftTechVC.

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