Smarkets, the UK-based peer-to-peer betting exchange, has raised a fresh $2.3 million round of funding led by Deutsche Telekom’s T-Venture, along with existing backer Passion Capital. This brings the London startup’s total funding to $3.3m.

The addition capital will be used to “accelerate technical and product development”, specifically through staffing up in engineering and other developer positions to help deliver a roadmap that includes things like new markets for punters to trade on, a dedicated mobile app, and price history and trading charts.

Meanwhile, Randeep Wilkhu, Senior Investment Manager at T-Venture, and Robert Dighero, Angel Investor and Partner at Passion Capital, will join the Smarkets board.

Smarkets, which was founded by Jason Trost in 2008 but didn’t publicly launch until early 2010, is aiming to disrupt the lucrative and highly competitive betting industry with what it claims is superior technology and a better deal for punters through lower commissions on each bet — just 2%, which is an “industry-low”, says the company.

Competing most directly with incumbent Betfair, Smarkets enables peer-to-peer betting in which users set their own odds and bet against one another, mainly on various sports. It’s currently seeing £30m in transactions traded per month.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/21/smarkets/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Steve OHear TechCrunch

04:57

Well that was quick. Bang With Friends, the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate who in your fiends network you want to hook up with and alerts you if they feel the same, has got itself some competition. Would Love 2 has emerged with a similar proposition: After downloading the iOS app, you select who you’d like to date from your Facebook contacts and add your selection to the app’s ‘locker. This information is then kept private until such time when the recipient of your undeclared admiration puts you in their ‘locker’, at which point the app declares a match and sends you both an iOS notification. What you do with that information is up to you, of course, although undoubtedly there are a number of ephemeral messaging apps that can help with that, too.

But joking aside, despite having similar functionality it would seem that Bang With Friends and Would Love 2 come from slightly two different places. The former is U.S.-based, and while little is known about the Facebook app’s makers it’s been reported that they are Californian college-age males — and certainly the frat boy-esque language of the app speaks to this. In contrast, Would Love 2 is a UK-based startup and the brain child of female entrepreneur Phillipa Adam. It’s pitched very differently, too. Instead of offering to “anonymously find friends who are down for the night”, Would Love 2 claims to be “taking the rejection out of dating”, which sets a very different tone. If fact, the language of both apps couldn’t be further apart.

Another key difference is that Would Love 2 is sexual preference agnostic, whereas Bang With Friends has been heavily criticised for catering for heterosexual dating only at launch, something that its makers have had to backtrack on, with an update said to be in the works.

Would Love 2 also predates Bang With Friends, though not its current form. It was originally tentatively launched last November as iLove FB, but has since been rebranded and tweaked in terms of UI and pitch, with this week’s iOS app the result.

But with the rapid rise of Bang With Friends and the tsunami of publicity the U.S. rival has got, it’s fair to say that Would Love 2 has some serious catching up to do. Bang With Friends has set the bench mark at a reported 30,000 ‘installations’ in about a week since launch, with 10,000 matches being made through the app, apparently.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/05/would-love-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Steve OHear TechCrunch

04:17

Following a significant reboot late last year, cloud-music player AudioBox has released a new app for iPhone that lets users stream their cloud-stored music collections on Apple’s device. It supports most of the features found in the startup’s desktop HTML5-based offering, including the ability to access music stored on a home PC or via an array of 3rd party cloud storage services, such as DropBox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, and Box.com, in addition to support for SoundCloud and YouTube streaming — an approach we’ve previously described as ‘bringing everything but the kitchen sink’ to the cloud-music market.

As well as being broadly agnostic to where a user’s music files are stored, thanks to that multiple cloud storage service support, the AudioBox iPhone app enables the creation of what it dubs ‘smart’ playlists, which can be made up of tracks stored across different cloud services or on a user’s private cloud via the AudioBox Desktop app running on their own PC. Playlists also support caching for offline playback so that users can play their music collections without being connected to the Internet, which is a must-have feature of any mobile music streaming app.

Other neat features include being AirPlay-ready for streaming to AirPlay compatible devices, background streaming with automatic pause/restart during calls, album cover art and track info display when the iPhone is locked, and lyrics integration courtesy of musiXmatch.

Finally, the iPhone app has the same social sharing functionality as its desktop cousin, whereby “Now Playing” notifications are shareable on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Twitch.tv. In addition, the app pulls in artist information from Last.fm, related videos from YouTube, and concert listings from SongKick.

via TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/04/audiobox-ios/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

johalputt Steve OHear TechCrunch

03:57