I’m pretty sure I know what you’re thinking: Huh? Wtf ? Why would any Americans in their right mind want to leave the happiest business place on earth to launch anything in France?! Maybe the wine?
Ok, maybe you’re not thinking that. But it doesn’t change the fact that 25-year-old American entrepreneurs Anton Bernstein and Joshua David hopped the Atlantic to launch Groupon clone Lookingo in France.
Weeks after announcing its acquisition of social browser Flock, Zynga is continuing its shopping spree today with the purchase of New York-based social gaming developer Area/Code. In conjunction with the acquisition, Zynga is also announcing its first New York office with the launch of Zynga New York. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Based in New York City, Area/Code has developed a number of games on Facebook and for mobile, including CSI: Crime City with partner Ubisoft, Facebook game Parking Wars and Drop7 for the iPhone. According to the startup’s site, the developer focused on highlighting “the connections between the interactive systems and imaginary landscapes inside of games and the real world around them.” These connections could include, “online games that respond to broadcast TV in real time,” “game systems that explore real-world social issues,”
“urban environments transformed into spaces for public play,” or “game events driven by real-world data.”
Area/Code was co-founded by Frank Lantz and Kevin Slavin, and interestingly Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley was the third partner in the startup in between leaving Google and starting Foursquare.
Area/Code general manager Demetri Detsaridis and Lantz will be General Manager and Creative Director, respectively for Zynga New York.
This is Zynga’s 9th announced acquisition in 8 months, including, Texas-based NewToy, XPD in Beijing, Unoh Games in Tokyo, Conduit Labs in Boston, Dextrose AG in Frankfurt, Germany,Challenge Games in Austin, and Bonfire Studios in Texas.
Bill Gross is up to something. The CEO of PostUp, who previously founded (and sold) Overture, answers.com, and a number of other companies, has just acquired his second Twitter client in as many weeks. On January 5 PostUp acquired EchoFon, and today the company has announced that it’s acquired UberTwiter, which makes Twitter clients for iPhone and BlackBerry.
In addition to the acquisition, PostUp has another piece of news: it’s changing its name to UberMedia. This is the third name for the company, which was originally called TweetUp, but changed its name last summer to PostUp as it added support for Facebook and LinkedIn.
So what is UberMedia’s strategy here? The company now has a new homepage, which includes the following description:
UberMedia is the leading independent developer of applications and web-based services that make it easier for users to find, follow and communicate with others on Twitter and other social media platforms. The company is focused on driving innovation in user experiences across a range of online and mobile platforms. UberMedia also provides advertisers and brands with new ways to engage and communicate with consumers via Twitter through its family of apps.
In other words, it wants to offer a variety of third party services that are complimentary — and in some cases, directly competitive — with what Twitter offers.
MyNines, an aggregator of private sales sites, is relaunching today with a number of new features and a more streamlined user experience.
Launched in March of 2010, MyNines aims to help consumers sort through the daily flash sales sites. MyNines aggregates products from various online sample sale sites and allows shoppers to find them all in one location. Users can search and filter by designer, category, highest discounts, as well as deals ending soonest, most viewed items, deals under $100, and newly listed. MyNines currently aggregates from over 80 sites, including eBay’s Fashion Vault.
With the relaunch, MyNines has rolled out a complete redesign of the site and a new feature called “Boutiques,” which includes sets of products from various sample sale sites curated by stylists, fashion bloggers and celebrities (this is very similar to Google’s Boutiques.com).
One of the most useful additions to MyNines is the sample sales calendar, which will aggregate the sale events from pretty much every sample into a calendar format to see which designers are featuring their sales on flash sale sites each day. You can also subscribe to the Sample Sales Calendar via Google Calendar, Outlook, or Apple iCal and you can set sale reminders for specific sales and MyNines will email you when those sales start.
While MyNines does aggregate actual products from a massive number of flash sales sites, some of the biggest players in the space, like Gilt Groupe, have not signed in to be included in the site’s feeds (although Gilt’s sales are included in the Sample Sale Calendar). The site’s founder, Apar Kothari, seems optimistic, however; that eventually all private sales sites will sign on to give MyNines a feed of their daily sales. Kothari adds that MyNines will soon start rolling out more personalized shopping features and will suggest certain sales and items to members based on what sales they click on.
