On the web, there’s plenty of room to throw a scattershot of ads at people and hope one resonates. On mobile, where there’s reduced real estate, you have to make every pixel count by targeting ads with surgical precision. That’s how Facebook succeeded in Q4 2012 and why the social network is actually well equipped to weather the shift to mobile. There’s no room for the shotgun approach on the small screen.
“Most people underestimate how fundamentally good the trend...
Urturn Raises $13.4M Series A, Led By Balderton, For Its Social Expressions Platform That Lets Teens Create Memes & MovementsComments Off
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Airtasker Wants To Be oDesk Of Southeast AsiaComments Off
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SumUp, One Of Europe’s Many Mobile Payments Startups, Launches In Russia – Now Operating In 11 MarketsComments Off
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Aiming To Be The Mobile Banking App To Rule Them All, Numbrs Stashes $7.7M Of Fresh FundingComments Off
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Rando’s 5M Anti-Social Photo Shares Could Be The Canary In The Social Networking CoalmineComments Off
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Urturn, the social expressions platform that soft-launched as stealthily as possible last year by intentionally hiding under a really boring name, is getting ready to turn the volume up to 11 to start seriously recruiting teens and trend-setters to its meme-stuffed, fashion-friendly, music-loving platform. Today it has announced a $13.4 million Series A funding round, led by Balderton Capital with a $10.7 million investment. The private equity arm of Debiopharm Group invested the remaining $2.7 million. As part of the investment, Balderton founding partner Barry Maloney will join the Urturn board. The London-based startup, which also has an office in the Valley, is also launching an iOS app today, funded by its Series A, to extend its web-based platform to mobile. An Android app is also in the works, due later this year. Prior to the Series A, Urturn had raised around $500,000 in friends/family funding. So what exactly is a social expression platform? Urturn — pronounced ‘your turn’ — is best described as a viral meme-generator. It offers both a social toolbox for creating and sharing ‘expressions’ with other users, with support for sharing these out to other social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, and also a space to hang your creations and browse others (and/or follow celebrity users or your friends). It also has its own bookmarklet browser button to make grabbing source material for meme-making purposes even easier, as Pinterest does. Expressions is Urturn’s term for the visual composites that are its social currency. These often start with a photo but can also include multimedia elements like video and audio, which are then augmented with text or doodles or other graphical elements, by a user selecting the relevant template. So, instead of having to go to Google to copy and paste the meme du jour to post to Facebook or Twitter, Urturn gives its users the tools to make their own version of that meme. Or something else entirely. The image at the top of this post is a basic example of an expression created with Urturn — by first uploading a photo and then adding a series of pointers to the image. Other templates currently available on the site include doodles, collages, quotes, speech bubbles, hashtag tags, cartoon elements (such as the Bunnify expression, below right) and more. There are also templates that support interactions, such as love it/leave or this/that which ask other users to vote on whether they like
Australian startup, Airtasker, is keen to expand out of its home country into Southeast Asia, which it says hasn’t been touched by large competitors yet. The year-old startup provides job matching for freelancers and employers, similar to what oDesk and Elance do. For its first steps outside of Australia, its first port of call will be Singapore, where it wants to hire two country managers. Airtasker joins a scene that already has a few huge competitors. oDesk, for example, has been around since 2005. Last year, the company raised $15 million, making its total funding $45 million to date. The site processes $300 million in jobs on an annual basis. Some early oDesk employees also founded Rev.com, which in March announced $4.5 million in Series A funding. Another big competitor, Elance, raised $16 million in funding early last year as well, as its business has continued to grow in the past two years. 650,000 new job postings were listed on the site in 2011, it said. But big as these sites are, they don’t seem to have made a huge impact on freelancers in Southeast Asia. A quick search for freelancers in Singapore on oDesk showed 248 listings out of 742,113. Hong Kong showed a dismal 84, Kuala Lumpur 7 and Bangkok 31. While it appears indeed untouched by the large sites, it could just mean that the freelancing scene is a lot less vibrant in Asia, with the majority of workers preferring full-time jobs. It could also be that fewer freelancers rely on online matching sites to get their jobs, as well. Airtasker’s founder and CEO, Tim Fung, said temp jobs in the region are less organized into verticals. He said some common jobs in Asia include handing out flyers at a train station, or a one-day PA. These can’t really be categorized by industry, and Airtasker has organized its job ads and job seeker profiles in a broader fashion, so that more matches can be made by both sides. The bulk of Airtasker’s workers, for now, are based in Australia, and its upward trajectory does indicate some sort of pent-up demand on the freelancing scene. Airtasker now processes about $120,000 worth of jobs per month. Fung hinted that Airtasker will announce a partnership with a global jobs network soon. “I think that’s an indication that the larger ‘mainstream’ job scene is taking part-time job listings more seriously,” he
SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an 11th European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and Russia, giving it a larger geographical footprint than other European rivals including iZettle and Payleven.
Chalk this up as one to watch closely in the world of consumer fintech. 
Rando only launched in March but the anti-social photo-sharing app that deliberately eschews the standard social network clutter of likes and comments and connections — simply letting users share random photos with random strangers and get random snaps in return — has blasted past 5M photo shares after a little over two months in the wild. It is now averaging around 200,000 shares per day.
