Glu Mobile To Invest Up To $7.5 Million In QuizUp, With Option To Acquire

QuizUp, the Icelandic company that put trivia in an app, has announced that it is receiving up to $7.5 million in funding from Glu Mobile, with an option to call to acquire.

This comes in the wake of a partnership forged between NBC and QuizUp, announced in October, with the network looking to turn QuizUp content into a proper TV show played both in studio and at home through the app.

The extra work calls for some extra cash, and Glu Mobile’s CEO and Chairman Niccolo de Masi explained that the option to acquire makes sense given QuizUp’s current monetization strategy.

“Glu is looking to consolidate once our partnership proves out the monetization capability of the QuizUp audience and app,” said de Masi. “At the moment the company has yet to begin monetizing significantly and as such would not be accretive to acquire outright.”

Though QuizUp has more than 31 million registered users, who have played more than 5 billion games on the platform, the company has yet to take off on the revenue front. Currently, QuizUp makes money through branded partnerships with movies, books, and TV shows.

For example, QuizUp’s big break came in the form of a deal with the Twilight film saga to develop trivia content around the movie series.

Glu and QuizUp will be working on the NBC programming together, with the hope that it will significantly increase QuizUp app downloads, according to the release.

In May of last year, QuizUp changed its platform significantly from being a true game to more of a social network, complete with people search, user profiles, threaded comments, forums, and it’s own private chat system. Of course, the QuizUp trivia game was laid over the social network as a way for people to make new friends, connect with current friends, etc.

Though the valuation of QuizUp is still unknown, the company has received a total of $27 million, excluding this new round from Glu. The previous round closed in December of 2013.

Comments

The EHang 184 Is A Human-Sized Drone Taking Off At CES

We’ve seen some pretty cool stuff on day 1 of CES 2016, but probably nothing more eye-catching than the EHang 184, a human-sized drone built by the Chinese UAV company EHang . Yes you heard right — a giant autonomous drone that fits a human. It’s basically what you would expect to see if someone shrunk you down to the size of a LEGO and stuck you next to a DJI Inspire. Except no one was shrunk, and the giant flying machine was sitting smack in the middle of the CES drone section. EHang, which was founded in 2014 and has raised about $50M in venture fundingto date, was pretty gung-ho about telling everyone at CES that the 184 was the future of personal transport. And for the most part, people were too in awe to question them. But the reality is that the company probably was using the 184 as more of a marketing tool for their standard-sized drones like the Ghost . Not that we’re saying that the 184 will never be a real thing, just that it probably isn’t co...

Iron Man Galaxy S6 Edge Arrives With An Arc Reactor Charger

Samsung’s Iron Man-branded Galaxy S6 Edge arrives tomorrow, with a custom paint job, 64GB of on-board storage and a limited edition wireless charger accessory with an appropriate arc reactor graphic included on top. It ships with a clear cover, too, so you can protect your precious “armor” when ticketing around in the real world. The box it comes in is also red and gold, and there’s a big ol’ Iron Man helmet stencil graphic on the back of the device, too, as well as a software theme to match. I probably would’ve left off the face personally, letting the colors speak for themselves, but this was a partnership with Marvel with the intent of promoting the new Avengers film oversees, so they probably could’ve been a lot less tasteful with the branding overall. The sad news for those of you who were hoping to advertise their Stark fandom on their phones is that availability is listed as only Korea as of tomorrow, with sales beginning in China and Hong Kong...

Western Union Brings Money Transfer And Its Tricky Fees To Chat Apps

Remittance has always been a shady business. Migrant workers need to send money they earn home to their families, but get hit with fine print fees so less cash comes out the other side than they might assume. Remittance companies earn extra by keeping the margin between their own made up exchange rate and the real one. Western Union is the best known remittance company, with 500,000 brick-and-mortar locations around the world. But tech startups like TransferWise, Azimo, and WorldRemit are gunning for the business. They hope to increase convenience and reduce fees to lure customers away from Western Union, Moneygram, and other old-school remittance providers. So Western Union is going digital thanks to partnerships with big messaging apps. It launched its Western Union Connect system in October last year, followed by a partnership with WeChat for sending up to $100. Now it’s getting into bed with Viber , which has over 664 million “unique” users, thou...

NVBOTS Wants To Make 3D Printers As Easy As Toasters

Right now 3D printing curriculums, if they exist, are fairly sparse. Putting a two thousand dollar machine in front of a grade schooler usually ends up in a lot of 3D printed Yoda heads and not much education while the learning curve for most 3D design tools is steep. That’s what the founders of NVBOTS, AJ Perez, Forrest Pieper, Christopher Haid, and Mateo Peña Doll, are looking to solve. Their product, the NVPRO , is a 3D printer with a few interesting features. The two most interesting are the automatic removal system which pops parts off of the build plate when they are done and a built-in print server that allows you to print from any device. This means you can run large batches of prints from different users with each part popping off as its printed. This means a class of students can send jobs to a printer and then pick them up just as they would a laser printer. The printer also supports a central “admin” who can check jobs before they are printed as and offers a ...

Party Like It’s 2003 As PlayStation 2 Emulation Is Coming To PlayStation 4

If you’re into big pixels, Sony has a treat for you. The company has secretly been working on a fully functioning PlayStation 2 emulator for the PlayStation 4. It is taking advantage of this emulator for classic PS2 Star Wars games. But the company also confirmed to Wired that it is working on bringing more PS2 games to the PS4. You can buy a Star Wars Battlefront bundle that comes with a PlayStation 4, EA’s latest Star Wars game and a bunch of old games — Super Star Wars, Star Wars: Racer Revenge, Star Wars: Jedi Starfighter, and Star Wars: Bounty Hunter. Eurogamer tried these games and got a nice surprise. These games weren’t updated for the PlayStation 4. Instead, they run inside a PlayStation 2 emulator. You’ll find much of the PlayStation 2’s classic iconography starting with the start and select buttons, virtual memory cards and the good old PlayStation 2 logo when you boot these games. It also means that there will be a lot of upscaling and things...

Exciting Technology

Search This Blog