Doodle Jump, a game on the Apple App Store that was #1 for a very long time has hit over 4 million downloads at a $0.99 price. They did not have a lite free version of a “free for a day” promotion at all according to game co-creator Igor Pusenjak of Lima Sky. The game passed the 3 million mark in March and was released in fall 2009. Lima Sky is also preparing to develop the game on the iPad. [Kotaku]
Zong.com is a mobile payments company that has raised $15 million in a round of funding led by Matrix Partners. Zong is essentially a company that allows you to make purchases through mobile devices and cell phone bills. Zong is often times used to pay for goods on Facebook. Dana Stadler, a General Partner at Matrix will be joining the Board of Directors at Zong as a result of the funding.
ShoeDazzle.com, a women’s fashion website co-founded by Kim Kardashian has raised $13 million as part of a growth financing round. The lead investor was Lightspeed Venture Partners and previous investor Polaris Venture Partners also participated. ShoeDazzle’s previous round of funding was $7 million. The other co-founder of ShoeDazzle is Brian Lee, who also co-founded LegalZoom.com. ShoeDazzle.com asks users to fill out a survey and based on the answers, the website will recommend you certain shoes to buy from them based on your fashion preferences. [soCalTech]
Classifieds website Craigslist will be seeing their revenue increase 22%. One of the reasons for the substantial revenue increase is because of ads used for illegal ends according to The New York Times. These ads are expected to bring in about $36 million this year according to a projection. The projections were provided by The Advanced Interactive Media Group (AIM). The estimate was based on the number of sex ads counter on Craigslist over the month of February and the fees associated with them. Each sex ad costs $10 initially and $5 for re-posts.
At the Wireless Enterprise Symposium, Research In Motion announced some significant numbers today. RIM has sold a total 90 million of BlackBerry devices in total thus far. In the last quarter, RIM sold about 10.5 million BlackBerry devices. Currently BlackBerry devices are available across 550 wireless network operator partners. There are over 250,000 registered developers on the BlackBerry platform and over 250,000 registered active developers on the BlackBerry Enterprise Servers. The company said that they have seen a 200,000% growth since their IPO in 1998. RIM has about 14,000 employees.
In terms of the App World, there are over 6,500 applications available for download and 41 million active users of BlackBerry smartphone devices. Around 1 million applications are being downloaded per day on App World. About 20% of the total BlackBerry community is running OS 5.0. BlackBerry currently owns 44% of the U.S. smartphone market. [InformationWeek]
How do planes get made? Southwest Airlines made a time-lapse video showing exactly how they do it. In 2 minutes and 30 seconds you can see exactly how they built this Boeing Specialty Plane.
TheWrap.com is a Hollywood news gossip blog that has raised $2 million in a second round of funding. The first round of funding was raised by Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s VC firm Maveron. The Wrap is led by Sharon Waxman and features a team of veteran entertainment writers including Josef Adalian, Lew Harris, Josh Dickey, and Dylan Stableford.
Here is a video of Virginia Campbell using an iPad. Virginia is 100 years old and she was born around the same time that Thomas Edison showed the first talking motion picture. The video below has over 400,000 views.