FiftyThree Lands $30M From NEA To Build Creation Tools For Enterprise And Education Users

Dataminr Confirms $130M Raise To Take Its Social Media Data Analysis To New VerticalsFiftyThree has spent the last several years making products to increase creativity among users. Now the company has an eye on producing new tools not just for the consumer market, but that enterprise and education users could also leverage. To help with that, the company is also announcing it has raised $30 million in new financing from New Enterprise Associates.
FiftyThree started out with an iPad app called Paper that was built to give users new tools to unlock their creativity. It followed that up with Pencil, a stylus designed to interact with Paper and make it easier for creators to use the app. Most recently, the company released Mix, which provides a new way for them to collaborate.
Each of those products has been pretty successful on its own: Paper has had more than 13 million downloads and more than a million users have begun using Mix to work on projects together. And while the company doesn’t break out sales numbers for Pencil, that product has apparently sold well and has retail distribution through channels like Amazon and Apple Stores.
Part of its products’ growing popularity is the recent decision to make the Paper app free and explore other ways to make money. That includes sales of hardware (i.e., Pencil) and plans to sell new in-app creation tools.
Paper ships with what FiftyThree calls its “Essential Kit” — a set of tools that lets users draw, write, color, and outline within the app, among other things. Think Kit will give users new tools, which FiftyThree CEO Georg Petschnigg says will enable them to sketch presentations, diagrams, and flow charts, among other things.
“Our insight is that in companies, in the long run innovation always trumps efficiency,” Petschnigg told me by phone. To increase innovation within organizations, Think Kit will take all of the previous technology that the company has built and add what it calls an “intention engine” into the mix.
The company’s inspiration for the new product comes from analog tools like the whiteboard, sticky notes, and legal pads, which Petschnigg says are still some of the best ways for businesspeople to collaborate with one another. The hope is that by providing them with digital tools that perform similar functions, FiftyThree will be able to make it even easier for them to do so.
FiftyThree sees a big new set of potential users for the product, and as a result has brought on a new investor to help it tackle that market.
With NEA leading its $30 million Series B round and partner Dayna Grayson joining the board, the company believes it gets the best of both worlds — an investment firm that understands enterprise, along with a partner who understands designers. Petschnigg notes that he met Grayson three years ago, and that he was impressed by her focus on design-led companies.
The new investment comes on top of $15 million in Series A funding that FiftyThree raised from Andreessen Horowitz, Highline Ventures, Thrive Capital, SV Angels, and Jack Dorsey two years ago.
The company has grown to more than 50 employees in New York City and Seattle, and it plans to add 20 to 25 more, according to Petschnigg. It will focus on hiring more designers, engineers, and some marketing people, but despite its new focus on enterprise and education, he says the company isn’t planning on adopting a big sales force.
“50 percent of people use Paper for professional use,” Petschnigg told me. He also noted that the app has more users on the iPad than Excel, which is one reason he believes the company is well-positioned to take advantage of its built-in install base. The app has also seen a huge amount of downloads in the education space after it went free.
Could it convert them into paid users? By launching Think Kit as a premium set of tools inside Paper, FiftyThree sure hopes so.

By: Unknown On 13:39

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Google Launches New Analytics, Monetization Tools For Android Game Developers

Hello Again, NASDAQ 5,000Google today announced a couple of new tools for game developers on its Android platform. These include new analytics to help developers better understand in-game player behavior, as well as a number of new monetization features through its AdMob platform. Google also launched a new game-centric Nearby Connections API for Android TV, its nascent smart TV platform.
On the analytics side, Google’s new Player Analytics, which will roll out in a few weeks, is meant to help developers get a better grip on what their players do inside a game. In addition, this new report also looks at how much players are spending and what their churn rate looks like. The tool also makes it easier for developers to track average revenue and sessions per user. Google says BombSquad tested this feature and used the data it gathered to more than double its revenue per user — but then, Google wouldn’t use a game that lost users and revenue during the beta test as an example, would it?
On the monetization side, Google is launching native ads, house ads and a new “audience builder” tool. Just like native ads are slowly taking off in the publishing world, Google hopes to bring a similar experience to games. These new ads will be styled to “match the visual design of the game” — so you basically won’t immediately realize that you’re looking at an ad (which has long been the Holy Grail of advertising now that we’ve all learned to ignore it). This feature is currently in limited beta.
“In-App Purchase House Ads,” the second new feature, allows AdMob to predict which of your users are mostly likely to spend their hard-earned cash on virtual goods because you’ve made it impossible for players to finish your game without it in-app purchases so you can show them customized ads for promoting those in-app items. This feature is now in beta and will roll out to all AdMob users in the next few weeks.
The last new AdMob feature is the so-called “Audience Builder.” While that sounds like a tool for building audiences, it’s actually a “powerful tool that enables game developers to create lists of audiences based on how they use their game.” Using that, developers will be able to customize their games for different kinds of users.

By: Unknown On 23:20

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Docker Launches Its Container Orchestration Tools

Last December, Docker previewed its plans to launch a comprehensive set of orchestration tools for its container platform and, starting today, developers will be able to download and use all of these tools.
Together, Docker Machine, Swarm and Compose are meant to make it easier for developers and system administrators to create and manage their portable applications on top of the Docker platform.
Docker Machine, for example, allows developers to quickly spin up Docker on a variety of cloud platforms, including Amazon EC2, Digital Ocean, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, OpenStack, RackSpace Cloud and most of VMware’s platforms. Getting started with Docker on those platforms doesn’t take more than a single command. Without Machine, this whole process would have involved a number of manual steps.
Similarly, Docker Swarm provides developers with a native clustering and scheduling solution. The company argues that this allows developers to scale a Docker-based application “with the application development life cycle from one laptop to spanning hundreds of hosts in production.” Swarm supports existing host discovery solutions like ZooKeeper, Consul and etcd. It also integrates with other third-party orchestration tools, including Mesosphere. Support for Amazon’s recently launched EC2 Container Service, IBM Bluemix, Microsoft Azure and Joyent Smart Data Center is coming soon.
When Docker first announced this set of tools, a number of critics argued that it was building tools that compete with existing companies in its ecosystem.
“The truth is, Docker as a platform is about enabling the ecosystem because its core value is in application portability,” Docker’s VP of Marketing David Messina told me, adding that Docker’s list of partners really speaks for itself. He also noted that nobody is forced to use Docker’s own tools. Its APIs are open, after all, and Docker’s own orchestration tools use them, too. The company likes to call this approach “batteries included but swappable.”
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SHARES0Share0Tweet0Share0000AdvertisementAdvertisementCrunchBaseDockerFounded2010  OverviewDocker is an open-source engine, launched and maintained by dotCloud, that automates the deployment of any application as a lightweight, portable, self-sufficient container that will run virtually anywhere.Docker containers can encapsulate any payload, and will run consistently on and between virtually any server. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop will run at scale, …LocationSan Francisco, CaliforniaCategoriesDevelopment Platforms.

By: Unknown On 07:34

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BrightEdge Launches New Data-Driven Writing Tools For Content Marketers

If you’re a marketer cranking out blog posts to promote your brand, BrightEdge has released new tools that should help you keep an eye on the competition while you’re at it.
When the company raised its $42.8 million Series D back in 2013, it was already expanding its focus beyond search engine optimization to content marketing

By: Unknown On 13:29

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