Hasta La Gadget!

There are a lot of dumb, pointless apps out there that make it hard to put our smartphones down. That’s what makes Unicef’s new project for World Water Month doubly brilliant—it raises funds to provide clean drinking water to needy kids, by encouraging smartphone users to take a break from the touchscreen. Sounds like a true win-win.

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Stickers are a fun way to communicate with your friends when you use apps like LINE and Facebook Messenger, and now it looks like BBM wants to get in on the sticker fun as well as the company has recently announced that stickers will soon be arriving for the messaging platform. As it stands the stickers are currently in a limited beta and there’s no telling when it will be made available to the masses, but we’ll definitely keep our eyes peeled for more information regarding its release! (more…)

BBM Will Be Getting Stickers In The Near Future original content from Ubergizmo.

This week the folks behind the smartphone hardware and software brand Jolla have decided they’d be invading the world through Android. Before Sailfish 1.0 is launched across the whole world … Continue reading

There are almost 900 million active cell-phone users in India now, and from newer startups to some of the biggest companies in the world, everybody is chasing the next mobile disruption that could potentially result in a business model for all of the emerging markets.

One such startup is Ezetap, a mobile payment company backed by some of the biggest names in the VC industry, including Chamath Palihapitiya, a former Facebook executive and founder of Social+Capital Partnership, and Angelprime, an Indian seed fund run by serial entrepreneurs.

Today, Ezetap is raising $8 million in Series B funding led by Helion Advisors, Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. This round takes the total fund raised by Ezetap to around $11.5 million (including $3.5 million it had raised in Series A funding in November 2012). The fresh capital will be used to expand Ezetap in Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa. 

Ezetap is much like Square, at least in terms of the basic model. It uses a rectangular device that can turn any mobile phone into a point-of-sales terminal when plugged in. The device including a card reader and chip, costs around $50, and Ezetap has been able to sell around 12,000 of them to date. The startup is aiming to have over 100,000 such devices installed across Asia-Pacific, Africa and Middle East in a year.

“From day one, we wanted to go global and really felt that mobile payments in general is a great opportunity for emerging markets. There’s disparity in cash versus electronic payments leading to the challenges of financial inclusion,” Abhijit Bose, CEO of Ezetap, told TechCrunch.

Ezetap was incubated in 2011 by Angelprime, a $10 million seed fund backed by Mayfield Fund, Palihapitiya and several others in the Silicon Valley. It’s run by three veteran entrepreneurs — Sanjay Swamy, Shripati Acharya and Bala Parthasarathy. With the latest round, Ashish Gupta of Helion is joining the startup’s board. Helion is an India focused, $600 million fund. 

Ezetap is the second attempt by Abhijit and Sanjay to build a mobile payment company in India. In 2006, Sanjay was the CEO of mChek which had raised around $10 million by 2009, and Abhijit worked with another venture-funded payment startup called Ngpay. 

Back then, mChek and several others fizzled out because of several challenges.

“I believe there was nothing wrong with mobile payment back then, it was just the timing,” said Bose.

Indeed, the environment has changed dramatically. Back then, there were only 10 million credit cards. Today there are around 316 million credit and debit card holders in India. More importantly, the telecom infrastructure has improved tremendously, allowing users to do much more than just voice calls and texting.

“For us, Android and iOS are the game changers, too. Moreover, consumers are much more willing to use mobile payments for ease of use,” said Bose.

After building the product for one year, Ezetap officially launched with a Citibank mobile payment pilot in January 2013. Since then, the startup has signed up several banks and newer e-commerce companies, including Flipkart and online grocery retailer BigBasket. In Kenya, Ezetap partnered with Mastercard and Equity Bank to launch its services in March last year. Later in May 2013, Ezetap’s solution received global certification from EMVCo, an organization that specifies processes and gives approval for chip-based payment cards. 

Both Ezetap and Square are using similar models to enable mobile payments, but for completely different target markets, which is perhaps why Bose doesn’t like being called “the Square of India.”  Ezetap’s merchants include India’s biggest e-commerce company Flipkart and even much smaller mom-and-pop shops.

“I always hate it when people call it that [Square of India]. Fundamentally, we are attacking underserved markets and are both similar in thinking about mobile payments. But we want to build a business that makes us number one mobile payment platform in emerging markets,” said Bose.

To be sure, Ezetap is not the only mobile payment startup that’s beginning to do well. With around 2 million customers using its mobile wallet, MobiKwik is aiming to reach the 100 million mark in two years. While MobiKwik and at least two dozen others are offering mobile wallets, startups such as Mswipe are more similar to Ezetap. Mswipe raised its Series B funding earlier this year from investors including Matrix Partners. All these startups are shaping an ecosystem of mobile payments in India that goes beyond just creating a non cash economy.

Mobile gaming company Pocket Gems is taking a new approach to telling stories on smartphones with the launch of a new platform called Episode.

CEO Ben Liu hinted at this last month when he talked about the company’s growth, saying that this year would see a big launch focusing on what it means to “experience a story on mobile.” Apparently, Episode is what co-founder Daniel Terry has been working on since he stepped down as CEO and became the company’s chief creative officer at the end of 2012.

Terry told me that he saw a big opportunity in mobile storytelling. After all, stories drive many forms of entertainment media, and even at Pocket Gems, when the company added story elements to its games, he said, “Players just love it, and it really enhances engagement.” Yet stories are either minimal or nonexistent in mobile games.

With Episode, Terry and his team have taken an approach that’s really focused on stories, to the extent that some might not even consider the app to be a game at all. At points in our conversation, Terry compared the approach to an interactive, animated TV show and to a “modern, mobile-first Choose Your Own Adventure.”

The demo that he gave me was pretty simple. Two animated characters were having a conversation at a club, which the player mostly just watches, but at one point the other character offered to buy me a drink and I got to choose what kind.

More exciting than the individual story is the platform that Pocket Gems has built. Using Episode, story writers can choose their settings, customize their characters, then use a simple scripting language to determine what happens, what choices the players will face, and how those choices will affect the rest of the story. Each individual chapter should only take a few minutes to finish, but as the name implies, they’re usually just pieces of a larger narrative. Users can what chapters are available in the Episode smartphone app, which functions as a sort of library.

Pocket Gems has been testing out Episode on iOS, and the company says users have already read 10 million chapters. Today, however, marks the official launch, which includes the release of an Android app and the opening of the scripting platform to anyone who wants to use it. For now, Terry said user-generated chapters will only be shareable with friends, while the public content will still come from professional writers paid by Pocket Gems. But eventually, the company could create a tiered system and start recruiting paid writers from the broader user base.

Players can read a limited number of chapters every few hours, and will have to pay to consume more. However, Terry suggested that the business model is still very much in the experimental phase. He added that the Episode platform could potentially be used to create content for other Pocket Gems games, though there are no specific plans in that area.