Kleiner Perkins is now ready to take money for its new early-stage and digital funds

Above: KPCB partner John Doerr

Image Credit: Doc Searls/Flickr

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Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers is making its 16th early-stage fund and its second Digital Growth fund official.

The firm is raising $1.2 billion to invest in startups, with $450 million for an early-stage fund and $750 million for the digital growth fund, according to documents filed today with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Neither fund has raised any money yet. The firm declined to respond to VentureBeat’s request for comment.

Several other high-profile venture firms have been raising new funds lately. Last week, Khosla Ventures submitted a filing for its next $1 billion fund. Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, and True Ventures have closed funds of their own in recent months.

Some of Kleiner’s recent investments include Crossbar, ClearStory Data, CloudPhysics, mCube, Puppet Labs, and ZenPayroll.

Google has brought Kleiner some good news in recent months. First, in January, Google said it was buying Nest. And last week, Google, through Nest, announced plans to buy Dropcam. Together, the purchases of the two Kleiner portfolio companies came out to more than $3.75 billion.

Such exits could give a positive spin to Kleiner after questions about roles within the firm and the value of Kleiner’s series of cleantech startup investments.

The filing for Kleiner’s newest early-stage fund lists Michael Abbott, John Doerr, Randy Komisar, Ted Schlein, and Beth Seidenberg as the partners leading fund No. 16. The new fund was first discovered back in October, thanks to leaked memos to the limited partners explaining the firm’s decision to move to raising a smaller, more focused fund, and naming those five partners.

The digital fund lists John Doerr, Mary Meeker, and Ted Schlein as the fund’s partners.

Reporter Jordan Novet contributed reporting.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) is a world-leading venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park in Silicon Valley. The Wall Street Journal has called it one of the "largest and most established" venture capital ... read more »

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Amazon gives 30 Android apps away for free

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The Amazon app store is hosting an app giveaway for Android users.

Even if you don’t have a Kindle Fire, you can still take advantage of this giveaway.

This generosity isn’t surprising from Amazon, considering the company already gives away a free app from its app store every day. But now it’s giving away a total of 30 apps, worth $100 combined. This deal is available for Android users in the U.S., U.K., Australia, and India.

The Amazon Fire phone may not be shipping for another month or so, but the company is eager to generate lots of buzz for the new phone, and what better way to do so than with lots of free apps?

The Amazon app store has been growing in popularity on Android devices, and Amazon wants to keep it that way. Head of the Amazon app store in India, Parag Gupta, told indianexpress, “Our Free App of the Day programme is hugely successful and makes users come back to us. We just want them to continue using our store and that is where bundling of apps is also coming popular.”

It’s only a two-day giveaway, so users will need to download Amazon’s app store quickly.

You can check out the free apps here. Some game highlights include Sonic the Hedgehog 2, which usually costs $3, and Dungeon Village, usually $4.40. Plex (normally $4.99), an app that helps you organize data across various devices, AccuWeather (normally $2.99), and Travel Interpreter, normally $9.99, are other notable apps in the bundle.

Here’s the full list:

Card Wars — Adventure Time

Plex

Sonic The Hedgehog 2

Notepad+

The Room Two

Dr. Panda’s Bus Driver

AccuWeather Platinum

Wedding Dash Deluxe

Root Explorer

Ravenswood: Shadowlands

Sudoku 10’000 Plus

Pho.to Lab PRO

Informant 3

Business Calendar

Jump Desktop

CrossMe Premium

Enigmatic: The Ghosts of Maple Creek

EZ Money Manager

MobiLearn Talking Phrasebook

Splashtop Remote Desktop

CLARC

Dungeon Village

aCalendar+

Travel Interpreter

MyBackup Pro

Pinball Deluxe Premiere

Loco Motors

2Do: Todo List

PUZZINGO Puzzles

League of Heroes Premium

Real Shanghai Mahjong

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ: AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth's Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc. seeks to be Earth's most customer-centric company, where cu... read more »

Apple updates Final Cut Pro X and other pro tools

Above: Apple's Aperture

Image Credit: Apple

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On the same day that Apple said it would drop further development of professional photo-editing tool Aperture, the company has announced a variety of enhancements for other key professional tools.

The tech giant today released upgrades to its video editor Final Cut Pro X, motion graphics creator Motion, video compressor Compressor, and live music application MainStage.

The updates include the ability to store optimized, proxy, and rendered media at any location outside the library for Final Cut Pro X, improvements in Sequence Text behavior for animation in Motion, and bug fixes in Compressor and MainStage.

Some might interpret today’s news as an attempt to show professionals that the company still cares about them, even after dropping updates for Aperture.

“Usually you kill a software product when it's not making enough to pay for its upkeep or doesn't create any incentive for users to purchase additional products,” Forrester VP and principal analyst Jeffrey Hammond told VentureBeat.

“In this case,” he said, “I think Aperture saw a lot competition from other products, like Adobe's Lightroom, and it didn't make sense to keep evolving it as a standalone product.”

“I don't read a larger issue [with regard to] Apple not being in the software business for pros,” Hammond added. “[It's] more that they will produce software where they can make money, and they won't when they can't.”

Via TechCrunch

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Apple designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Apple software includes t... read more »

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Google hands out $500 in cloud credit to all I/O attendees

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Google had plenty of gifts for folks who went to its I/O 2014 developer conference.

In addition to some wearable goodies — attendees could choose between an LG G Watch or a Samsung Gear smartwatch — the tech giant doled out $500 in credit for its Google Cloud Platform, according to an email Google sent out to attendees today.

It’s a cute way for developers to feel more compelled to try out the Google public cloud services they heard about during the conference, with forthcoming features like an on-the-fly data-processing service, an application debugger, and a monitoring tool.

Google has been trying to add customers quickly as it competes hard with the likes of Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure as a service and the leader of the market, Amazon Web Services.

At the bottom of today’s “thanks for coming” email, Google left a bit of a treat for developers who dropped as much as $900 on their I/O 2014 tickets:

P.S. Google Cloud Platform is offering all I/O participants $500 in credit to build your web or mobile app. To get started, follow the three steps below:

1. Go to g.co/cloudstarterpack
2. Click Apply Now
3. Complete the form with code: GoogleIO

Google clarified that the credit expires after three months and — sorry, Bitcoin fans — can’t be used to mine some sweet, sweet cryptocurrency. It can, however, be used to manage your database and storage servers, assuming you want Google to handle that.

Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major glob... read more »

Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service that lets you run your large-scale computing workloads on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google's infrastructure.... read more »

CrowdTwist hauls in $9M for SaaS data intelligence

Above: CrowdTwist chief Irving Fain leading his troops

Image Credit: CrowdTwist

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CrowdTwist, a Manhattan-based SaaS intelligence data platform, has taken in $9 million in venture cash, the company announced today.

CrowdTwist focuses on collecting data intelligence, which it then buttresses with analytics so its clients can better understand their customers’ buying behavior. The company was launched in 2009 and has raised $20 million in total venture funding to date.

Providing data intelligence for enterprise brands is a huge business. Companies want details on their customers and their spending behavior in order to better launch targeted ad campaigns. Good back-end data analytic firms are numerous. The space is crowded.

No matter. At least to CrowdTwist chief executive and founder Irving Fain, who told VentureBeat his SaaS solution has multi-channel functionality that some of his competitors lack.

Another cornerstone for CrowdTwist is helping clients with their increasingly important loyalty rewards programs. Loyalty is a huge deal not just for big enterprises but for smaller service-industry companies too.

“In the last 12 months there’s been lots of buzz about customer retention. In other words, ‘how do I keep my clients?’” Fain said.

Current customers include Pepsi, Purina, VIZIO, and Zumiez.

StarVest Partners led the new round. Fairhaven Capital and SoftBank Capital also participated.

 

 

 

 

 

Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers finally lets you make your own decks (preview)

Above: Magic 2015 lets you create your own decks from scratch.

Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast

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The digital version of Magic the Gathering sometimes feels more like a teaching tool than a full version of the actual thing. Yes, you could play against computer or real opponents with decks of cards filled with spells, creatures, and lands, but you couldn’t actually create your own decks. Instead, you had to use sets that the game had constructed.

The newest entry in the series changes this. Magic 2015: Duels of the Planeswalkers will let you craft your own decks when it comes out sometime next month for Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. I recently had a chance to take a look at the in-game deck constructor.

Above: Magic 2015 can automatically find you cards that play well together.

Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast

It has all of the features you’d expect. Every card in your catalog shows up on the top of the screen. You can then click on which cards you want to add to your deck. You could also use a series of filters if you’re looking for something specific, like certain rarities or creatures that cost a certain amount of energy.

The things the deck-builder can do for you are actually the neatest features. You can click on any card in your deck and use it to search for others that would play well with it. For instance, maybe a creature can give extra attack to other bests. In just a couple of clicks, you can find a list of cards that could take advantage of that ability.

You can also use an autocomplete feature that fills out your deck with cards that have synergy between each other, which is a nice tool for Magic the Gathering newbies. It’ll also automatically add land cards to your deck (you need them to play spells and creatures), but you can also turn that off if you’d rather mess with them yourself.

Above: Magic 2015′s deck builder is as complicated or automatic as you want.

Image Credit: Wizards of the Coast

It’s a great-looking tool, and it adds a feature to the series that fans have wanted for years. It also gives it more parity with its biggest competitor, Blizzard’s Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which features a deck-builder from the start. However, unlike in Hearthstone, you earn most of the cards for your library by playing through the campaign. Hearthstone has you earn most of them by buying booster packs either with real or in-game money (you can also craft cards with dust you earn in the Arena, the draft-deck-building mode, or boost your collection with packs you win in such runs).

You can buy packs of cards in Magic 2015, but only for a limited pool of the total catalog. You can’t unlock every card with just money. To do that, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time playing against computer opponents.

Of course, Hearthstone is also a free-to-play game, so it depends more on micr-transactions like booster packs. Magic 2015 will have an initial price of entry when it launches next month.

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