Social bed and breakfast startup Airbnb is in the process of closing a $100 million round of funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that would raise the company’s valuation to more than $1 billion, according to TechCrunch.

This is a significant investment for Airbnb, which has previously raised $7.8 million, and comes days after actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher invested a significant amount of money in the company.

Kutcher, who was an early investor in Foursquare and the deal to purchase Skype back from previous owner Ebay, is increasingly being looked at in the investment world as someone to watch when it comes to predicting the next hot startup company.

Airbnb offers a service in which travelers looking for a unique experience (similar in scope to a bed and breakfast) can rent a living space from locals for a fee.  The service has seen incredible growth of 800 percent in the last year and had over 1.6 million local homes booked since it launched in 2008.

An investment this large may seem drastic, but Airbnb looks to be fulfilling a need in the marketplace. And while business trips and conference attendees will likely stick to booking hotel rooms, Airbnb could make a real splash with recreational travelers .

Tags: funding

Companies: Airbnb, Andreessen Horowitz

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Social bed and breakfast startup Airbnb is in the process of closing a $100 million round of funding led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz that would raise the company’s valuation to more than $1 billion, according to TechCrunch.

This is a significant investment for Airbnb, which has previously raised $7.8 million, and comes days after actor-turned-investor Ashton Kutcher invested a significant amount of money in the company.

Kutcher, who was an early investor in Foursquare and the deal to purchase Skype back from previous owner Ebay, is increasingly being looked at in the investment world as someone to watch when it comes to predicting the next hot startup company.

Airbnb offers a service in which travelers looking for a unique experience (similar in scope to a bed and breakfast) can rent a living space from locals for a fee.  The service has seen incredible growth of 800 percent in the last year and had over 1.6 million local homes booked since it launched in 2008.

An investment this large may seem drastic, but Airbnb looks to be fulfilling a need in the marketplace. And while business trips and conference attendees will likely stick to booking hotel rooms, Airbnb could make a real splash with recreational travelers .

Tags: funding

Companies: Airbnb, Andreessen Horowitz

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

Saygent, a company the uses voice response and analysis to figure out customers emotions, today announced it has secured a first round of funding for $1 million. The funding will be used to hire engineers and secure new customers.

The company targets Fortune 500 companies, like Comcast and the Royal Bank of Canada. It offers the ability to reach a large set of customers via telephone and analyze voice responses through crowdsourcing techniques. The results are meant to help companies figure out audience emotions, like sentiment and intent, towards things like products, services, or customer service. Thus, helping to market easier to these consumers without the expenses of a call center.

As noted by TechCrunch, investors include 500 Startups, Innovation Endeavors, Juvo Capital, Kapor Capital, Kima Ventures, Orefa Investment, PG Ventures, Ty Danco and Matthew Grodin.

The Mountain View, California-based company, founded in 2009, is lead by co-founder Guy Hirsch, a serial entrepreneur who has founded three companies to date, as well as co-founder and chief technologist Mariya Genzel, an MIT graduate.

Tags: analysis, call center, customer emotions, intent, sentiment, telephone, voice, voice response

Companies: Saygent

People: Guy Hirsch, Mariya Genzel

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Shares of electric car maker Tesla (TSLA) are up $1.60, or 6%, at $27.95, a combination of a positive note today from Pacific Crest’s Erik Olbeter, and also word that the U.S. Department of Energy said it will cooperate with Tesla and other firms to accelerate the development of energy-efficient vehicles.

Pacific Crest’s Olbeter started the stock at Outperform and a $38 price target, writing that it is “well positioned to be a highly profitable, niche luxury car company.”

Everything, he writes, rests on a successful introduction of Tesla’s “Model S” and “Model X” cars, beginning in mid-2012.

“Tesla’s primary advantage, and part of the reason they are considered an innovator in this nascent market, is its proprietary battery and powertrain system,” writes Olbeter. The choice of a familiar form factor for the battery — it’s about the size of a AA battery — means the company should have much lower development costs than it would otherwise, on the order of $400 million to develop the Model S, he thinks.

The Model S, which may cost $60,000 to $90,000, depending on subsidies, “is very appealing and the price is within the range of luxury ICE competitors,” writes Olbeter. He expects it may become, “the new ‘green status symbol‘ in places like Northern California and elsewhere.” Question is, even if venture capitalists buy ‘em, will the broader public. The question is not how well the initial 20,000 units of the Model S do next year, but what comes after, whether, as he puts it, “the executives in Shanghai, Beijing and Vancouver, B.C., be driving them.”

The financial performance of the company for the next five quarters, until the Model S comes out, is irrelevant, he writes, because only then will the Street get a good handle on what Tesla may be able to sell in high volume.

As for the DOE announcement, it said the Department will form something called “U.S. Drive,” combined what had been “FreedomCAR” and “Fuel Partnership” programs in one, in order to “bring together top technical experts,” and identify “critical R&D needs.”

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Datameer, a company that allows users to analyze massive amounts of data without technical know-how, today announced a second round of funding for $9.25 million. The money will be used to hire additional employees for its engineering, sales, and marketing teams.

The company created a user dashboard to easily feed and analyze data into Apache Hadoop, an open-source software that processes large amounts of data sets and spits out analytics as well as reporting. The benefit of the tool comes to those that don’t have a technical background and thus wouldn’t be able to use Apache Hadoop.

Companies in several industries have needs to process large amounts of data, including

Money keeps pouring into a new wave of e-commerce startups. The latest news: A big $40 million round for fashion deals website ShoeDazzle.

While a number of companies are trying to add a social element to online shopping, Santa Monica, Calif.-based ShoeDazzle sounds a little more traditional — in some ways, it’s a fashion-focused, personalized spin on the book of the month club that I belonged to in high school. Users fill out a style profile, then the website recommends different shoes, handbags, and jewelry. They can purchase one item each month for $39.95, and if nothing grabs their fancy they can skip the month or request alternate items. Users also earn credits for making purchases and inviting friends.

The company was founded by celebrity Kim Kardashian and LegalZoom co-founder Brian Lee and has 3 million subscribers.

ShoeDazzle has now raised $60 million in funding. The new round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, the firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz that has quickly become one of the biggest names in venture capital. Existing investors Polaris Venture Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated.

Companies: Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Polaris Venture Partners, ShoeDazzle

People: Ben Lee, e commerce, Kim Kardashian

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » deals

Microsoft (MSFT) shares are down 2 cents at $25.65 in early trading following yesterday’s 0.6% decline after the announcement the company will buy Internet calling firm Skype for $8.5 billion.

The day after stories, and the analyst notes seem largely to take a positive tone despite the sticker shock the Street experienced yesterday.

The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Wingfield writes this morning that Microsoft’s deal is a sign of the consumerization of technology, and makes passing reference to Cisco Systems’s (CSCO) failed effort with Flip video cameras. And Wingfield ends with a quote from Meg Whitman, who bought Skype when she was head of eBay (EBAY) in 2005. “Is Skype worth $8.5 billion? I don’t know, but it depends on how big the platform grows.” Wingfield notes that eBay will make a profit of about $1.4 billion on the deal.

Steve Lohr writes in The New York Times this morning, “by stitching Skype technology into Microsoft products, used by hundreds of millions of people, the software giant could hasten the mainstream adoption of video communications, especially in businesses.”

DealBook’s Evelyn Rusli writes that Microsoft settled on the $8.5 billion price in mid-April, after CFO Peter Klein travelled to private equity backer Silver Lake’s offices and the parties involved had discussions about valuation for several weeks.

A Reuters’s Breaking Views column by Richard Beales and Agnes Crane write this morning that, “the transaction is unlikely to pay off.” They note that past deals have floundered: the $6 billion purchase of aQuantive in 2007, “hasn’t borne any noticeable fruit in the battle with Google. Neither has the software giant’s search deal with Yahoo.”

Ann Winblad, a venture capitalist with Hummer Winblad, was on Bloomberg television last night, saying, “It’s the kind of bold move microsoft should be making … I think it’s a brilliant strategic move for Microsoft. It’s a chess move they need to remain competitive with Apple and Google, and it gives them an opportunity to partner further with Facebook, one of their core partners.”

And Bloomberg’s Dina Bass, Douglas MacMillan, and Joseph Galante this morning write that Skype refused to settle for less than $7 billion in its talks with Microsoft, citing anonymous sources.

The Financial Times’s Lex column writes that it’s all about Nokia: “If voice and video over the internet is going to become a big presence in mobile, it makes sense for Microsoft, desperate to differentiate its mobile operating system from Apple’s and Google’s, to buy the dominant brand. Will the network operators play along?”

And what of the analysts?

Walter Pritchard with Citigroup reiterates a Buy rating on Microsoft and a $35 price target. The deal “makes sense,” he thinks, and he lays out some possible “leverage”: the Kinect line becomes the “killer home video conference system / Win phone”; the business division, where it can integrate with Microsoft’s “Lync.” “Some of these integrations could potentially drive meaningful competitive advantage and augment existing Skype revenue that today is almost all based on calls to landline and mobile phones.”

Tavis McCourt with Morgan Keegan sees benefit to Nokia (NOK), Polycom (PLCM), Logitech (LOGI) and Plantronics (PLT) as “video and voice services will require more headsets and video bridging hardware. Nokia may benefit if Microsoft builds in any unique features not available on other handsets.” McCourt thinks Microsoft’s negotiations with telcos will become tougher as they view Skype as a threat, but, “Ultimately, we believe carriers will lose this battle.”

On that score, Craig Moffett with Sanford Bernstein this morning observes that Skype threatens the most valuable portion of the telco economy: basic connectivity. Voice service produces about $1 per megabyte in wireless services, whereas data service — Web browsing, etc. — commands only about 5 cents per megabyte. Undercutting that rich voice goldmine is an “arbitrage opportunity,” he writes, and tech companies love arbitrage. “Perhaps it was the threat of Facebook acquiring Skype that moved Microsoft to pay 10 times revenues,” writes Moffett. “Just don’t expect the carriers to be amused.”

Adam Holt with Morgan Stanley notes that while Microsoft has been developing unified communications with Lync and Xbox Live and Win Phone 7, Skype has 13 patents and over 400 patents pending “in areas from video delivery to data compression.” Moreover, though the valuation is rich, Skype’s metrics have been improving, the company is gaining more importance in social networking, and anyway, there are a lot more M&A deals being done in the $6 billion to $8 billion range, so what could Microsoft do? Use of foreign cash, he notes, is “found money.”

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily

Paulson Plays the Lehman Bust (WSJ)
Mr. Paulson’s fund has been snatching up Lehman debt at steep discounts since the day the investment bank collapsed, betting prices would rise while panicked investors fled. Now, as Lehman’s estate prepares to wind down, Mr. Paulson’s fund could reap profits between $350 million and $726 million on the Lehman trades…Over two and a half years, Mr. Paulson’s fund, Paulson & Co., purchased more than $7 billion worth of Lehman bonds in about 1,800 transactions. The average cost of those trades was just 13 cents on the dollar, according to the Journal’s analysis.

PIMCO raises bet against U.S. government debt (Reuters)
PIMCO’s Bill Gross, the manager of the world’s largest bond fund, raised his bet against U.S. government-related debt in April to 4 percent from 3 percent, according to the company’s website on Monday.

Morgan Stanley Trading Gains Topped $100 Million on 10 Days (Bloomberg)
The firm’s trading division lost money on 3 days during the period, compared with 13 days in the fourth quarter, New York- based Morgan Stanley said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

BofA to cut $850bn bad loan book in half (FT)
Bank of America plans to shrink its $850bn portfolio of troubled home loans by about half over the next three years as it seeks to quicken the pace with which it resolves problems related to the housing crisis and its disastrous purchase of Countrywide Financial. Terry Laughlin, who is spearheading BofA’s mortgage modification and foreclosure programmes, told the Financial Times he had been given leeway to act quickly to tackle the growing number of bad loans that threaten to overwhelm the bank’s overall performance and tarnish the reputation of Brian Moynihan, its chief executive.

Microsoft Said to Discuss Buying Internet-Call Provider Skype (Bloomberg)
A deal would value Skype at about $8.5 billion and may be announced as early as today, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the talks are private.

Alan Simpson Attacks AARP, Says Social Security Is ‘Not A Retirement Program’ (HuffPo)
At an event hosted by the Investment Company Institute, Simpson delighted the finance industry audience members by aiming a rude gesture at the leading lobby for senior citizens.

CME raises crude futures margins 4th time since Feb (Reuters)
Margins will climb by 25 percent as of the close of business on May 10, boosting the cost of holding positions for hedgers and speculators, a factor some traders said helped bring oil prices down by as much as 2 percent on Tuesday following a $5 a barrel spike a day earlier…The cumulative increase in margins on U.S. crude benchmark West Texas Intermediate CLc1 positions since February is 67 percent, from $3,750 to $6,250 per contract.

China Has Bigger-Than-Forecast Surplus on Record Exports (Bloomberg)
China reported a trade surplus that was more than three times larger than forecast in April as exports surged to a record, bolstering the U.S. case for faster yuan gains as officials from both nations meet for annual talks in Washington. The surplus widened to $11.4 billion and exceeded the forecasts of all 27 economists in a Bloomberg News survey. Exports climbed 30 percent to $156 billion while import growth slowed to 22 percent, the customs bureau said today.

Euro wobbles, haunted by commodities and debt worries (Reuters)
The common currency, which hit a six-week low against the Japanese yen and a one-month low against the British pound, was also hobbled by fears of a commodities rout after oil prices fell in the wake of the CME Group’s hike in trading margins for U.S. crude futures.

BNP Paribas chairman to retire (FT)
Michel Pébereau, France’s most influential banker, is retiring as chairman of BNP Paribas, the domestic bank he helped transform over two decades.

Reports of Mortgage Fraud Reach Record Level (WSJ)
Reports of mortgage fraud, which have been increasing since the housing boom, rose to their highest level on record in 2010, Treasury Department figures showed. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a Treasury agency, reported 70,472 “suspicious activity reports” related to suspected mortgage fraud, up from 67,507 in 2009, or a 5% increase. That’s the highest number recorded by the government since tracking began in 1996.

A Venture-Capital Newbie Shakes Up Silicon Valley (WSJ)
As a newly minted venture capitalist, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, aimed for nothing less than big… Like other investors here, he’d been eying Web companies with explosive growth and global star power. But acquiring shares in tech titans like Facebook is tricky…So Mr. Andreessen set out to make his own rules—maneuvering his way into hot private deals at huge cost.

U.S. Braced for Fights With Pakistanis in Bin Laden Raid (NYT)
President Obama insisted that the assault force hunting down Osama bin Laden last week be large enough to fight its way out of Pakistan if confronted by hostile local police officers and troops, senior administration and military officials said Monday. In revealing additional details about planning for the mission, senior officials also said that two teams of specialists were on standby: One to bury Bin Laden if he was killed, and a second composed of lawyers, interrogators and translators in case he was captured alive.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, Maria Shriver announce separation (LA Times)
Shriver has been residing apart from the actor-turned-politician for the last few weeks. The former first couple confirmed the separation in a joint statement released Monday after questions from The Times…Over the years, the marriage between the international celebrity and the daughter of the Kennedy dynasty has come under close scrutiny, especially during the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis, when The Times reported on Schwarzenegger’s lengthy history of groping women. At the time, Shriver defended her husband, helping lift him to victory in the free-for-all contest.

Article courtesy of Dealbreaker

Chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) this morning said it will purchase Icera, a maker of baseband chips for 3G and 4G handsets, for $367 million in cash.

Icera, based in Bristol in the U.K., has some of the top venture capital names behind it, including Accel Partners and Atlas Venture. The firm closed its first round way back in 2003.

Nvidia said the deal will help it offer both of the most important two chips in the handset, the application process, which it already sells, and the baseband processor, which it has not been able to offer up until now. Nvidia said the baseband chip market is one of the fastest-growing tech segments, at $15 billion annually.

The deal could conceivably help Nvidia in its battle against Qualcomm (QCOM) for business in tablets and smartphones and other gadgets. Qualcomm already sells both applications processors and baseband chips. The company has been working on pushing its own graphics processing circuitry to compete with Nvidia, which, obviously, has a deep history in the graphics chip business.

Intel (INTC) last August agreed to buy the baseband chip business of Infineon Technologies AG (IFNNY) for $1.4 billion. Texas Instruments (TXN), however, is in the process of getting out of the baseband chip business.

Nvidia shares are up a penny in early trading at $19.33.

Article courtesy of Tech Trader Daily