08Feb

TastemakerX, The App For Hipsters Who Totally Heard That Band First, Raises $1.8M

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TastemakerX, an about-to-launch startup that will help music fans get credit for discovering the next big thing, has raised $1.8 million in Series A funding.

The company plans to launch its mobile app in early March, at South by Southwest — which seems perfect, given the event’s strong representation from both the music and tech worlds. Co-founder and CEO Marc Ruxin describes TastemakerX as “fantasy sports for music lovers,” a service where users can share their favorite music with their friends and where gaming elements encourage people to discover new musicians first.

It’s not the first company trying to give fans points for discovering new artists. For example, there’s also RockStar Motel, which bills itself as a site where fans can play the promotional role of record labels, earning a higher ranking as they create more fans for a certain artist. Asked via email about the comparison, Ruxin wrote:

TastemakerX is more like the Hollywood Stock Exchange for bands meets fantasy sports for music. We surface vertical influence, like Klout for bands, and have a multilevel game dynamic more like Foursquare. TastmakerX is a social mobile experience where photos, geo-tags and comments publish to a feed around getting credit for discovering bands early. We are focusing on building a taste graph not a record label. We focus on bands not songs.

The company says Ruxin and his co-founder Sandro Pugliese both started their careers in the A&R department at EMI records in the early 1990s. Since then, Ruxin has worked at a number of ad agencies, while Pugliese co-founded several startups

Investors include Guggenheim Partners, Baseline Ventures, True Ventures, Tekton Ventures, and AOL Ventures (which, like TechCrunch, is part of AOL), as well as angels Andrew Anker, Mich Mathews, Paul Bricault, Ted Rheingold, Michael Kassan, and Mike McGinley. TastemakerX’s advisors include John Battelle, Marc Geiger, and Ian Rogers.



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07Feb

Dwolla Raises $5 Million Series B From Union Square Ventures & Others

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Disruptive payments network Dwolla confirmed today it has raised $5 million in Series B financing in a round led by Union Square Ventures. Also participating in the round are Village Ventures, Thrive Capital, Artists and Instigators and Paige Craig of Betterworks. As a part of the deal, Albert Wenger of Union Square Ventures will join Dwolla’s board.

The company says that additional funding will be used to continue product development, expand its API and “maybe buy some Doritos.” (Yeah, you gotta love these guys).

Dwolla, which offers both an online and mobile payments platform, is primarily a new payments network, not a tool for enabling payments through the existing credit card network. In other words, it’s not the new PayPal. It’s an all-new payment option.  The idea behind the company is to rethink what a payments network would look like if it was built today using web technologies. By eliminating the legacy issues, fraud and overhead, it can lower costs for end users and merchants alike.

Explains founder Ben Milne, “Dwolla’s network isn’t just about mobile wallets and sending money to your friends with Facebook, it’s about creating an entirely new network architecture to disrupt the $332 trillion electronic payments landscape.”

The company has had a busy year, rolling out new features and services like Spots, FiSync, Proxi, GRiD and Instant, among other things.

Over the course of 2011, Des Moines-based Dwolla says it increased its userbase by 3,200% to over 80,000 accounts and increased its merchant community by 3,000% to over 7,500 accounts. It now processes between $30 and $50 million per month in transactions, both online and on mobile. Due to its lower fees, users end up saving 2%-8% over traditional transactions as well as the typical 30 cent processing fee.

Last month, BetaBeat reported that Dwolla was raising $10 million in financing, but today’s confirmation of the Series B is at half that.



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06Feb

Appoxee Raises Funding, Helps Mobile App Developers Boost User Engagement

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appoxee

Israeli startup Appoxee has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from early-stage investment firm Cyhawk Ventures.

The company offers a service that helps app developers and publishers increase user engagement through rich push notifications and helps them with things like audience segmentation, targeting, analytics and reporting.

Read more over at TechCrunch Europe.



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06Feb

Pedestrian Map App, Lumatic, Raises $800K From Joi Ito And 500 Startups

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Lumatic screen

All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago.

He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels.

Lumatic has an Android app which works right now only in San Francisco. When it gives you directions, it chooses routes which are optimal for walking, cycling or public transport. As you walk through the streets, the app displays a street-view with photos and arrows pointing in the right direction.

The app is built on top of Open Street Map , but the user experience is centered heavily on using photography, landmarks, and visual cues to help people navigate cities. Fighting Google Maps in this category is going to be a tough slog, but if the app can gain a following there plenty of money in local commerce and advertising to make it a worthwhile pursuit.



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01Feb

Garage Sale App Rumgr Raises $500K From Zappos CEO (And Others)

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Three Zappos alums are trying to replicate the garage sale experience on your smartphone — and their startup Rumgr just raised a $500,000 seed round from a group of investors that includes Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.

Co-founder Dylan Bathurst says the basic idea came from his own attempts at selling furniture before a move. When users open the app, they’re presented with a list of goods that people nearby are offering for sale. If they see something they like, there’s a public chat associated with each item, where they can ask the owner questions. And if you’re ready to make a purchase, you can negotiate the price, then go to a private chat to work out the hand-off details.

An early version of Rumgr is already live, but the startup is launching an update today that includes a separate screen for making offers, a map of nearby sales, and new tabs for tracking what you want to buy and sell. (It’s currently iPhone-only.)

Now that Bathurst and his team are actually launching a company, they’ve discovered that there are, in fact, other garage sale-type services out there — and of course there’s always Craigslist. The difference, says co-founder Ray Morgan, is that Rumgr wants to fundamentally reinvent the experience for a new device.

“We’re not trying to replicate Craigslist on the phone,” he says.

For one thing, Rumgr is trying to make the listing process as easy as possible. You just upload a photo and that’s it — no description necessary. And the app doesn’t allow users to search for a specific category, like couches or beds. It sounds like the company isn’t completely ruling out a search feature in the future, but Morgan says that’s not the point. Instead, users are supposed to stumble on random, cool stuff, just as they would at a garage sale.

Bathurst and Morgan admit that it may be a challenge to attract enough people in each location for the app to be useful, but they say Rumgr can become a vibrant community with a relatively small core of engaged, connected users — which is what happened in early tests, with only 40 or so of the team’s friends and colleagues.

In addition to Hsieh, Rumgr’s investors include Zappos CTO Arun Rajan, Fred Mossler, and Andrew Donner, CEO and owner of Resort Gaming Group. Following Hsieh’s vision of revitalizing downtown Las Vegas and turning it into a startup hub, Rumgr is based in Las Vegas. (After all, as former Zappos employees, Bathurst, Morgan, and their third co-founder Alex Morgan already live there.) Among the items in their office? A whiteboard purchased off Rumgr.



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