TripIt, the travel startup that consolidates all of your travel information into a single itinerary, has raised $7 million in a third round of funding.



The idea behind San Francisco-based TripIt is to give travelers all the information they need for their trip in one place — their flight itinerary, hotel, maps, weather information, and more. The company has also introduced a groups feature so that you can collaborate with colleagues on travel plans, and a pro service with real-time alerts.

TripIt has also taken steps to integrate with other services and applications, like introducing an application for professional networking site LinkedIn, and allowing other companies to build applications on top of TripIt data and services. (The company shares in the revenue from those apps.)

The round was led by new investor Azure Capital Partners and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, which also participated in TripIt’s first and second rounds. The company has now raised $13.1 million in all.






What is TripIt ?

With today's myriad of travel sites, even the most experienced traveler has their hands full managing all the details of a typical trip. Booking airline tickets, hotels, rental cars and restaurants leaves you with lots of separate pieces of paper. Throw in maps, directions, things to do, and weather and the chaos multiplies.

TripIt turns chaos into order by making it easy for anyone to:

• Organize trip details into one master online itinerary -- even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites
• Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary
• Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary
• Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary

[venturebeat]

[image from openreflections]

Three months ago, Freeverse founder Ian Lynch Smith boasted to The New York Times that the iTunes App Store "is the future of distribution for everything." Moving forward, the developer of numerous best-selling iPhone games including "Skee-Ball," "Flick Fishing" and "Moto Chaser" will no longer be marketing-paid iPhone apps. The future, it appears, is all about freemium.


'Model of the Future'

After 16 years of developing games for the Macintosh, iPhone and other platforms, Brooklyn-based Freeverse was just acquired by relative upstart ngmoco. Founded in 2008 and based in San Francisco, ngmoco in concert with the acquisition also raised $25 million in its third round of venture capital financing. Unlike Freeverse, which would typically charge 99 cents to download its applications, ngmoco lets consumers download hit games like "Eliminate Pro" and "Touch Pets Dogs" for free. Players are then required to make in-app purchases after a certain number of levels are completed. All Freeverse games will eventually migrate to this new pricing model.

With the new venture round, ngmoco to date has raised more than $40 million in financing. The latest transaction was led by Institutional Venture Partners (a backer of Twitter, Zynga and TiVo), and included follow-on commitments from existing investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners and Maples Investments.

Increasingly, the iPhone app developers who are embracing the freemium business model are the ones attracting serious capital. All of the developers that comprise the $100 million Kleiner Perkins iFund -- which invests exclusively in companies that make applications for the iPhone and iPad development platforms -- participate in in-app commerce, said partner Matt Murphy.

"Freemium is the model of the future," said Murphy, in an interview earlier this year. "It's all about finding a mass audience and learning how to monetize it. There will be a lot of experimentation around this."

Murphy added that games are not the only types of iPhone applications that will succeed by offering free initial downloads and then further transaction opportunities down the road. He pointed to utility apps as well as the iconic music identification app "Shazam" (which applies charges after five music tags per month) as wider examples of in-app commerce.


Freemium on the iPad

As Apple (AAPL) begins shipping its iPad tablet computer next month, traditional media companies are paying close attention to how consumers embrace in-app commerce. Magazine publishers in particular are experimenting with ways to give away free sample downloads and then later convert a significant percentage of those users to paying and perhaps recurring customers. Sports Illustrated's "SI Swimsuit 2010" app, for instance, has been downloaded more than 400,000 times since its debut on February 9. To date, Time Inc. has converted nearly 8 percent of those users to customers of the $1.99 premium version.

With a 10-inch diagonal screen, many hope that the iPad will be a more natural place to consume premium magazine and video content.

"If you're looking for content on the small screen, you likely won't be flipping through from cover to cover," explained Jeanniey Mullen, chief marketing officer for Zinio. More than 20 magazines currently use Zinio's publishing technology to distribute content on the iPhone, and eventually the iPad. "Publishers will be able to do a lot more with this page-through device."

Maybe they can even make a living charging for digital content.





[yahoo.finance]

It was back in 2003 that we began covering nethoods, as our sister site calls them, and since then GPS and mobile technologies have greatly increased locally focused possibilities. BlockChalk is a new site that aims to provide the online equivalent of a neighbourhood bulletin board where residents can use their mobile phones to leave location-based messages for other people in their community.

Billed as “the voice of your neighbourhood,” BlockChalk lets mobile phone users leave messages (“chalks,” as the service calls them) on their block, their street, at the coffee shop or anywhere they happen to be. Neighbourhood tips, restaurant recommendations, pothole alerts or even lost pets are all perfect candidates for location-tagged message topics that can be left on BlockChalk, which allows other users of the service in the same area to reply either publicly or privately. No signup is required to use the service, and BlockChalk never reveals a user's identity or exact location unless they specifically request it. The mobile application is now available for iPhone, Palm Pre and Android-based handsets, with Blackberry and Nokia support coming soon. Launched early this year, BlockChalk is now used in more than 114 countries, 8,700 cities and 13,700 or so neighborhoods. The Bay Area startup is also in the process of integrating its service with Twitter's new geo-enabled API, it says.

Besides helping to connect neighbours with each other and with a wealth of hyperlocal information, BlockChalk also promises a world of advertising opportunities for local businesses; for developers, an API is already available. One to partner with in your neck of the location-based woods...? (Related: Connecting neighbours and landlords online — More neighbourhood problem-solving: SeeClickFix.)

[springwise]

How Korea, a onetime digital trendsetter, became a laggard in an era of smartphones—and amazing apps






For more than a year, Bae Jae Hyun wondered why her friends were so excited about the iPhone. She was happy with her Korean-made handset and puzzled by the desire for a phone that wasn't even available in the country. But when the iPhone arrived in Korea in November, it didn't take long for Bae to change her mind and buy one. "I now understand why they were so obsessed with it," says the 22-year-old student.

In December, Koreans bought some 200,000 iPhones—the best month ever in Korea for any handset model. In a country where domestic giants Samsung (005930:KS) and LG (066570:KS) together control 80% of the cell-phone market, that's quite a coup for Apple (AAPL). "The iPhone is so much better than any Korean phone I've ever seen," says Kim Ho Heok, a schoolmate of Bae.

The iPhone's popularity is a sign that Korea may be losing its edge in the international market, despite its reputation as the epicenter of digital cool. The country still rules in hardware, but it is stumbling in software. Samsung and LG, the No. 2 and No. 3 global handset makers, together manufactured nearly a third of the world's mobile phones last year, but their share of the smartphone market was just 4%. That's important because smartphones offer greater profits than traditional handsets, and they are increasingly popular with customers. The Koreans have rolled out models featuring touchscreens, high-resolution cameras, and TV. But they're often clunkier to use than rivals from Apple and Research in Motion (RIMM), maker of the BlackBerry.

Korea's software shortcomings are of growing concern to the country's political and business leadership. On Feb. 4, President Lee Myung Bak convened a special Cabinet meeting to address the issue. Ministers were told the country accounts for only 1.8% of the world market for software of all kinds, even though it dominates sales of memory chips, liquid-crystal displays, and flat-screen TVs. While Samsung sold 227 million handsets last year—10 times as many as Apple—its earnings were lower because its profit margins are much slimmer. "The government had been preparing to shift our focus to software from hardware for about a year, but the iPhone sensation provided a wake-up call," says Lee Sang Jin, who oversees the software division at the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, known until two years ago as the Ministry of Commerce, Industry & Energy.


"The Policy Backfired"

Seoul, which has long played a big role in guiding important industries, has launched a state-funded program to nurture software startups. The Ministry of Knowledge Economy is budgeting some $880 million to back software companies over the next three years. It aims to double the number of Korean software engineers to 300,000 in 2013 from 2008 and triple software exports to $15 billion.

A previous government attempt to boost the software industry was something of a dud. Seoul in 2005 required handset makers and content providers offering products or services in the country to use a Korean technology for Internet access instead of the programs used in most other countries. The rule was rescinded last year, but it clearly slowed the foreigners: The iPhone hit Korea more than two years after its U.S. debut. The downside is that Korean software writers were left with programs that worked only in their home market. As a result, they received scant exposure to the rigors of the global marketplace. "The policy backfired for Korea by stopping competition for innovation," says Chung Tai Myoung, an engineering professor at Sungkyunkwan University.


Software Successes

Samsung and LG say they intend to expand their smartphone lineups and offer more applications to run on them. "We have tremendously strengthened our software, which has been our weak spot," says J.K. Shin, president of Samsung's handset business. On Feb. 14, Samsung unveiled a software platform called bada ("sea" in Korean) to let outside developers create programs for its devices. And LG last December set up a unit with more than 800 programmers focused only on smartphones. This year the company expects to introduce about a dozen models using Google's (GOOG) Android operating system. "We are trying to offer more than the iPhone," says Skott Ahn, LG's mobile phone chief.

Despite the government's software worries, Korea has had some notable successes. Lineage, an online fantasy game made by Seoul-based NCsoft, has a cult-like following across Asia. Social networking service Cyworld, which was launched earlier than Facebook, is dominant in Korea. After eight years of offering Korean-language search, Google has just 2% of the market, compared with 64% held by Naver, headquartered in a Seoul suburb. And Qualcomm (QCOM) on Feb. 1 announced plans for a research center in Seoul to work on multimedia applications. "We see great potential in Korea," Qualcomm Chairman Paul E. Jacobs said at the time.

Yet when it comes to smartphones—perhaps the most important new sector in the technology business—young Koreans don't expect much from homegrown alternatives to Apple or BlackBerry. "I don't think I'll want a Korean phone in the next few years," says Yoon Ju Hwan, a 30-year-old fund manager who bought an iPhone in December. "We simply don't have the capabilities to create the kinds of things Apple does."

"South Korea Launches Land-Based Mobile Television Service"
Life Magazine, Dec 2005

[businessweek]