Well, this is … unexpected. Jonathan Kaplan, who previously led the company that created the Flip camera, just announced his new company on-stage at the D9 conference — and it’s a grilled cheese company.

Specifically, Kaplan said his new company The Melt will offer be a “next generation fast, casual restaurant.” Users will be able to order grilled cheese sandwiches and soups via the Melt mobile website. Then they receive a QR code, redeem the code in any Melt restaurant, and receive their freshly made order in minutes.

This may seem like more of a lark than a serious business, but Kaplan has ambitious plans. The Melt will open five restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area between August and November, and Kaplan wants to open 500 locations in the next five years. And The Melt has even raised venture funding from famed firm Sequoia Capital — Kaplan wouldn’t specify how much, but he said it was enough to open 20 stores, which cost between $500,000 and $1 million.

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Mobile application discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million funding round from French investors Idinvest, according to a Gigaom report.

Helping consumers easily find new applications that interest them is increasingly important to developers and businesses looking to distinguish their product from competitors

And considering the multitude of apps emerging from Apple’s app store, the Android Marketplace and Amazon, there is a large opportunity to make money from an app discovery platform like Appsfire.

Appsfire, which is available for both iOS and Android devices, seeks to provide some clarity to the sea of new apps. It works by scanning a user’s catalog of downloaded applications and then generating lists of recommended, featured and hot apps based on their interests. The company’s first discovery app launched last year and now has over 2 million users.

The company’s new funding will likely go towards hiring additional employees (it currently has seven) and branching out onto other mobile platforms, according to the Giagom report.

Tags: app discovery, apps

Companies: Appsfire, Idinvest

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Sean Maloney, Intel’s newly appointed president of Intel China, plans to deliver a keynote speech at the Computex trade show in Taiwan next week where he will unveil a heavy-duty effort to steer Intel into the production of low-power microprocessors.

Maloney is expected to say that Intel will accelerate its efforts to make chips that are more appropriate for tablet computers, smartphones, laptops, and low-power desktops. Intel has been doing that for some time. But Maloney, a well-respected executive who recovered from a stroke that kept him sidelined last year, is expected to push that even farther, according to a source familiar with the matter.

This shift within Intel is similar to the shift that occurred when it launched its Centrino laptop processors in 2003 — which Intel referred to as a right-hand turn. This is another right-hand turn, since the current roadmap isn’t as ambitious when it comes to low power consumption.

Most of Intel’s mainstream desktop chips target power consumption of about 40 watts or so. That allows for very fast microprocessor performance, but such a chip generates enough heat that it can’t be so easily used in a laptop and has no chance of making it into a tablet or smartphone. Now, Intel plans to target mainstream chips that consume about 15 watts.

That’s a big difference, but it doesn’t mean Intel will cancel a bunch of chips in development. Rather, the company will modify the roadmap over the next couple of years so that the center of its efforts focuses on 15 watt or lower wattage chips.

The company has already been moving in this direction for a number of years. Intel recently announced a new manufacturing innovation dubbed Tri-Gate transistors that will allow it to use lower power and smaller circuits in its 22 nanometer microprocessors. (Intel’s current Sandy Bridge chips use 32-nanometer manufacturing; the smaller the number, the faster, lower power, and lower cost.)  At its recent annual investor meeting, Intel showed a working 22-nanometer microprocessor code-named Ivy Bridge that is one of the flagship chips for this new low-power strategy. The Tri-Gate transistors take advantage of three dimensions and allow for a 50 percent power reduction at a given level of performance with only a 2 to 3 percent increase in costs. Ivy Bridge will be followed by a chip code-named Haswell that will represent the fruition of Intel’s efforts to reduce the average wattage of its mainstream chips.

Intel is also accelerating development of its lowest-power Atom microprocessors, which are targeted at smartphones, tablets and ultrathin laptops. The Atom chips have been shipping for a number of years, but Intel will turn up the treadmill now. It will shift from 45 nanometer Atom chips this year to 32 nanometer chips and then 22-nanometer chips in 2012. With every manufacturing shift, Intel can make its chips cheaper, faster, smaller and lower power. That pace of innovation is faster than the pace of Moore’s Law (observed in 1965 by Intel chairman emeritus Gordon Moore), which says the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years.

Intel is also designing a brand new Atom single-chip computer architecture, code-named Silvermont, from the ground up. Those chips are also going to be designed for low power, and the cadence for introducing new chips will become increasingly faster. The 22-nanometer Silvermont chips are expected to be introduced around 2013.

“Intel will completely focus a huge percentage of consumer microprocessors toward mainstream, low-power, ultra-thin, no-compromise computers,” said the source. “The center point of the roadmap will be all about ultra-mobility.”

By the end of 2012, a large percentage of consumer laptops will be in the ultrathin category — think MacBook Air laptops that cost a lot less than they do today and have a lot more performance and all-day battery life. That’s the kind of machine that will use the chips that Intel is placing at the center of its efforts.

Asia is a good place to make the announcement since China is expected to be the largest PC market in the world starting next year. Maloney’s assignment to that region is significant. Maloney was considered the heir apparent to Intel chief executive Paul Otellini. But a stroke threw him off that path. He returned to work in January and is regaining control of his motor skills.

Intel’s Atom processors are beginning to appear in tablet computers and about 10 of them will be shown off at the Computex show in Taiwan.

Tags: Atom, chips, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, low power consumption, microprocessors, Sandy Bridge

Companies: Intel

People: Paul Otellini, Sean Maloney

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Reply.com on Thursday announced it had acquired fellow Bay Area firm MerchantCircle for $60 million cash and stock. The deal is expected to go through in Q3 of this year.

The deal makes good sense, as MerchantCircle acts as a business directory for more than a million small businesses and Reply.com is an ad firm that targets advertising for local businesses. MercantCircle’s incredible network will give Reply a huge roster of businesses to which they can potentially sell ads.

MercantCircle was founded in 2005 and has raised $14 million in funding to date. The company claims to have businesses listed in 95% of U.S. cities with a population over 200.

Reply says the combined company expects more than $100 million in revenue in 2012.

Tags: deals, online advertising

Companies: MerchantCircle, Reply

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Here’s a “kaboom” for all those social game skeptics out there. Kabam has raised $85 million in a fourth round of funding to fuel its business making hardcore games for social networks such as Facebook. The backers include Google Ventures, Pinnacle Ventures, Performance Equity and SK Telecom Ventures, as well as earlier backers.

It’s as good a sign of disruption in games as any. Based on the funding from such heavy-duty backers, Kabam is now one of the most valuable independent companies making games on Facebook. In terms of users, it is far outgunned by market leader Zynga (poised for a possible initial public offering), which has 247 million monthly active users on Facebook. Kabam has just 7.2 million monthly active users. Zynga has raised hundreds of millions of dollars, but Kabam is holding its own, raising $125 million to date.

People will shake their heads at the amount of money here and what it says about the likely valuation. But as we noted in a review of Kabam’s games, the investors here aren’t crazy. Kabam clearly has users who are far more valuable than the standard social game player, because Kabam’s users are willing to pay Kabam a lot of money for a hardcore game experience on Facebook. Kabam’s four active games include Dragons of Atlantis, Kingdoms of Camelot, Glory of Rome and Global Warfare (below).

They’re all hardcore role-playing games where users play for four hours at a session, compared to maybe 10 minutes for a Zynga game. About 90 percent of Kabam’s players log into their games six or seven times a week. That’s what Kevin Chou, chief executive of Kabam, calls engagement. Those gamers are running the game in the background while they’re multitasking. That allows them to have lots of time to play all day long, even as they do other work. Such gamers would never have a four-hour stretch to play a console game.

Chou says that about 80 percent of the company’s players say they play hardcore games on the consoles or the PC. And now they are spending less time with those games and more time with Kabam games. This had to happen. With nearly 700 million users, Facebook has become a mirror of society. And society includes a lot of hardcore games. Kabam is one of the few companies to realize this and to target those gamers, who are accustomed to spending a lot of money on games. Kabam blends the immersive game play of massively multiplayer online games with the social satisfaction of social networking games.

Kabam was founded in 2007 as Watercooler and funded by Betfair and Canaan Partners. It had around 20 employees for quite a while as it experimented on Facebook, making sports fan pages and sports games. It had a big hit with its first major role-playing game, Kingdoms of Camelot, which quickly pulled in millions of users. The game still has 1.5 million monthly active users 19 months after its launch. Kabam also acquired WonderHill, a San Francisco game company that developed Dragons of Atlantis, which has become Kabam’s most successful game to date.

Kabam’s games are free-to-play, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods such as more Centurions for the Imperial Roman Army in Glory of Rome. While many users play for free. There is a sizable percentage of users who pay money for the time-saving aspects of the game. And the funny thing about hardcore gamers is that they’re willing to pay more than $60 to get their fix. Whenever Microsoft launches a new $60 version of Halo, it often creates a $125 “legendary” version for the biggest fans.

Ken Pelowski, managing director of Pinnacle Ventures, said Kabam’s typical user numbers are similar to the number of hardcore fans for each console game hit.

“Those console fans are migrating online to free-to-play games, and that is what Kabam is seeing,” Pelowski said. “But here, you don’t have to pay $250 for a box and $50 for each game. Here, you could play the game for free. You could pay hundreds of dollars. You could pay thousands of dollars. The high growth and high value of the user base justifies a higher valuation for the company.”

Kabam’s users are as dedicated as console gamers. They’re willing to spend more than $60 sometimes, just to get a much-needed advantage that will make them look good in front of their fellow alliance members (as many as 100 players can band together in alliances). Chou has said that Kabam isn’t really going after Zynga. It’s the anti-Zynga. It’s going after Activision Blizzard and Electronic Arts instead, with the aim of disrupting their traditional business, Chou said.

This is the place in the story where traditional game company executives cackle at the audaciousness of Chou. But there are a lot of former game industry veterans working for him.

Kabam doesn’t disclose its financial results. But the tea leaves are there. With just four games and $125 million in funding, Kabam has been able to grow from 25 employees to more than 400 in the past 16 months. Chou said the team will be shipping more impressive games, including five later this year.

Console gamers may laugh at the low interactivity of Kabam’s games now, but Chou says there’s a full pipeline of games coming, and each one will reflect learnings from Kabam’s direct observation of millions of gamers. Traditional video game executives would kill to get that kind of feedback. Global Warfare, Kabam’s newest game, has minimalist, cinematic-style cut scenes (as much as Facebook can handle) and it takes the game play from Glory of Rome to a higher level. The game forces players in an alliance to be more social by requiring them to coordinate assaults on strategic resources in the game. I’ve been playing it since it debuted on May 3, and I’ve spent most of that time getting ready to do real battle. That might bore other players, but I consider it to be a fun investment of my time.

There is some precedent for Kabam’s funding. The game industry took notice of the Kabam-style model of getting more dollars out of hardcore gamers when China’s Tencent bought the majority of Riot Games for nearly $400 million in February. Riot Games had only 1 million users playing one game, but those dedicated gamers spent a lot of money. In January, Kabam raised eyebrows and fears of a “bubble” in social gaming when it raised $30 million.

EA, for its part, has its own online role-playing game Lord of Ultima online on Bigpoint.com. But there’s an opening for Kabam to get big in this niche because many of the big traditional game publishers have left the PC game market to focus on the consoles. And the traditional game publishers who have entered the Facebook market are focusing on competing with Zynga for the new demographic of casual gamers on Facebook. No one is really competing directly with Kabam, except other startups such as Kixeye.

But Kabam has to walk a delicate balance with its users. It can get the games to monetize better by making ordinary tasks take longer and longer to do, like sending scouts on a recon mission. The users may get fed up and pay Kabam some money so that it can eliminate the wait. But if the users feel like Kabam is holding them up at every turn and deliberately trying to frustrate them, then they will move on to another free-to-play game that doesn’t treat them that way.

There are some risks for Kabam. The company can stage some massive battles where users send reinforcements to stop attackers from looting a city. But it takes a lot of computing power to make sure that the game doesn’t crash or make the wrong calculation in this kind of scenario. And overall, Kabam needs more servers because its users are online so much. Kabam has to make sure that it doesn’t hit a wall with Facebook’s infrastructure, which wasn’t really built for real-time engagement.

Over time, the social network platform will become better at running online games. And then Kabam will likely try to create games that include the animations and 3D graphics that hardcore gamers want. Chou says the company will also expand into new markets such as Asia, where there is a lot of potential among hardcore gamers. Pelowski acknowledges that there is still a gap where the best console games have a higher quality bar, but Kabam is starting to close that gap. And in the meantime, the company is still monetizing its current games very well.

All of that adds up to a lot of  value, says Pelowski. As to whether Kabam is part of a giant social gaming and social networking bubble, Pelowski says the underlying metrics of the business justify the investment.

Existing investors Intel Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and Canaan Partners also participated in the deal.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Tags: Dragons of Atlantis, Global Warfare, Glory of Rome, hardcore games, Kingdoms of Camelot, video games

Companies: Activision Blizzard, Canaan Partners, Electronic Arts, Google Ventures, Intel Capital, Kabam, Performance Equity, Pinnacle Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, SK Telecom Ventures

People: Ken Pelowski, Kevin Chou

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Turkish game publisher Peak Games has raised $5 million to make social games for emerging markets.

The deal shows that investors are looking beyond established markets to emerging countries where social games are still catching on. Peak Games, which has more than 10 million monthly active users on Facebook, is targeting its games at Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa.

The investment comes from Earlybird Venture Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Munich, Germany.

Sidar Sahin, chief executive of the game company in Istanbul, said in an interview that it hopes to expand its roster of social games into markets such as Brazil and the broader Middle East region.

“We believe the next big Facebook games will come from an emerging market,” Sahin said.

While other companies try a one-size-fits-all approach for international markets, Peak Games focuses on making local versions of games that are culturally relevant to the people in the region. That’s key to getting a higher monetization than normal for an emerging market, said Rina Onur, co-founder and chief strategy officer.

Michael Pachter, analyst for Wedbush Morgan, said Peak Games shows that the social gaming market is a global one and that it may already own a leadership position in markets such as Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa.

Sahin founded the company in October, 2010, and it already has 50 employees and 10 games. The company has 10 million monthly active users playing traditional Turkish and Arabic card and board games on Facebook.

Onur said the company’s method is to understand its audience and make games directly for them. She noted that Turkey is the fourth-largest market for Facebook, with more than 28 million users. The number of Facebook users in the broader region grew 78 percent from a year ago.The company says it can reach as many as 56 million Facebook users now and expects that to grow to 250 million by 2015.

Previously, Peak Games raised $2.5 million from Hummingbird Ventures and serial business angels Evren Ucok and Demet Mutlu, bringing its total fundraising to date to $7.5 million in six months.

On a daily basis, 2 million people play the company’s games across five time zones, four continents, and five languages. The titles include Okey, Okey Plus, Poker Star, Komşu Şehir, Komşu Kabile, İkon Kız (FabGirl), Bizim Dünya, Komşu Çiftlik and Petiler. Okey, a card-based game, has more than 4.5 million monthly active users.

The company develops its own games and has also partnered with several leading social game developers in the West, including The Broth and MagnetJoy.

Rivals include Zynga, Disney-Playdom and EA-Playfish, as well regional players such as Brazil-focused firms Mentez and Vostu.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Companies: Earlybird Venture Capital, Peak Games

People: Sidar Sahin

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Finnish game developer Supercell has raised $12 million in funding for its hardcore real-time social gaming business.

The investment shows the increasing appetite for investments in social games, especially those that hope to one-up dominant social game companies such as Zynga by providing a next-generation style of game play on platforms such as Facebook.

Accel Partners, which led the $42 million investment in Angry Birds developer Rovio, led the round. Klaas Kersting, founder of Gameforge and chief executive of Flaregames, also participated.

Ilkka Paananen, chief executive of Supercell, said the company is focused on making games that are bigger in scope than most social games but are less involved than massively multiplayer online games or console games. The Helsinki company’s first title is Gunshine, a crime-fighting game where players shoot criminals and other enemies in real-time in a place called Dawnbreak City. It is played from an overhead view. While the action is fast, the graphics aren’t that complex. The game has been in closed beta testing since February and is going to open beta today.

The company uses Adobe’s Flash 10 platform to create its games. That allows the games to run in a web browser with no need for a download. And while Supercell uses Facebook Connect to help gamers find friends to play with, Gunshine itself is hosted on its own web site, not Facebook. The company also has a way to convert the games to run on just about any platform.

While the company is very late to the social gaming party, Paananen said that Supercell has new features such as the ability to play synchronously, or in real time, with three other friends. You can also play with friends asynchronously, or when they are offline and each takes a turn one at a time.

“We have more immersive and deeper games than most Facebook games,” Paananen said. “Our game is also better when you play it with friends.”

The games will all be free to play, where users can play for free and pay real money for virtual goods in small transactions.

Previous investors include London Venture Partners, Initial Capital, Cerval Investments and Lifeline Ventures.

Supercell was founded in June 2010 and has 20 employees. Kevin Comolli, a partner in the London office of Accel, will join Supercell’s board. The company acknowledges it has hundreds of rivals in online games, from Bigpoint to Gameforge and Innogames. Rivals targeting the hardcore audience on Facebook include Kabam and Kixeye.

“The market is hot now, but you have to do something unique,” Paananen said.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

Tags: Gunshine

Companies: Kabam, Kixeye, Supercell

People: Ilkka Paanaanen

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

GigaOm already stands out as one of the most heavily-funded sites in the tech news world — and today it nearly doubled that funding, announcing that it has raised another $6 million.

Back when the San Francisco-based company had “only” raised around $8 million, I already found the funding “kind of remarkable”. The new total, $14 million, isn’t a huge amount for a tech startup, but it certainly dwarfs the amount raised by most competing sites. (VentureBeat, for example, has raised less than $1 million, while Business Insider has raised more than $6 million.)

When I asked GigaOm chief executive Paul Walborsky about the decision to raise more money, he responded, “We are big believers in building out a big company.”

GigaOm is certainly one of the most-respected names in the field, but thus far, tech blogs haven’t been acquired for enough money to justify a higher level of funding — the biggest deal has probably been AOL buying TechCrunch for $40 million. Walborsky said that he and founder Om Malik (pictured above) are confident that they’ve figured out a model that works and can continue grow. Rather than limiting its monetization efforts on GigaOm sites (which include GigaOm itself, as well as sites like video-focused NewTeeVee and cleantech-focused Earth2Tech), it sounds like the company sees the blogs as a way to build its brand. The sites also draw in potential new customers for its conferences and the research and reports sold through GigaOm Pro. The new money will mostly go towards building out the technology infrastructure behind Pro, Walborsky added.

“We believe that the growth of GigaOm is going to be driven by our research platform and GigaOm Pro,” he said. “That does not minimize the importance of our online audience. What we write about on the blog is what brings people to read GigaOm on a daily basis.”

GigaOm now claims more than 4 million unique monthly visitors across its sites, a number that’s growing 30 percent annually. According to Walborsky, the company doubled its revenue in 2010, thanks largely to GigaOm Pro. It’s on-track to double that revenue yet again this year, and to become cash-flow positive by the end of 2011.

Tags: tech blogs

Companies: Alloy Partners, Gigaom, Reed Elsevier Ventures, True Ventures

People: Om Malik, Paul Walborsky

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

2011 seems to be the year that mobile payments go mainstream with everyone from the big mobile carriers and handset manufacturers to scrappy new startups scrambling on to the payments bandwagon.

sQuid and ACT, which together cover 85 percent of the UK’s smartcard-based, contactless payments market, announced a merger today. The new company, Smart Transactions Group is valued at $87 million and expects to generate revenue of $15 million in 2011.

ACT specializes in retail reward programs and transit solutions for public transport. It handles 50 million transit transactions a month. sQuid supplies low-value, pre-paid payment cards for the education and retail sectors. sQuid payment cards are expected to be used in 10 million transactions this year. Neither payment system relies on existing bank or credit card infrastructure.

Smart Transactions Group’s payments business is growing at a double digit monthly rate, while transit transactions are expected to grow 50 percent in 2011. The new company will continue to expand its deployments in the UK and will target emerging markets such as Kenya and the United Arab Emirates. But more interestingly it also plans to launch NFC and mobile phone-based payments and ticketing.

Both companies are privately funded. ACT was formed in 2002 and sQuid in 2005.

Tags: contactless, mobile, payments, smartcard

Companies: Applied Card technologies, squid

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

2011 seems to be the year that mobile payments go mainstream with everyone from the big mobile carriers and handset manufacturers to scrappy new startups scrambling on to the payments bandwagon.

sQuid and ACT, which together cover 85 percent of the UK’s smartcard-based, contactless payments market, announced a merger today. The new company, Smart Transactions Group is valued at $87 million and expects to generate revenue of $15 million in 2011.

ACT specializes in retail reward programs and transit solutions for public transport. It handles 50 million transit transactions a month. sQuid supplies low-value, pre-paid payment cards for the education and retail sectors. sQuid payment cards are expected to be used in 10 million transactions this year. Neither payment system relies on existing bank or credit card infrastructure.

Smart Transactions Group’s payments business is growing at a double digit monthly rate, while transit transactions are expected to grow 50 percent in 2011. The new company will continue to expand its deployments in the UK and will target emerging markets such as Kenya and the United Arab Emirates. But more interestingly it also plans to launch NFC and mobile phone-based payments and ticketing.

Both companies are privately funded. ACT was formed in 2002 and sQuid in 2005.

Tags: contactless, mobile, payments, smartcard

Companies: Applied Card technologies, squid

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals