Accel Partners Leads Investment Round in UberMedia, Jim Breyer Joins Board of Directors

PASADENA, Calif.–February 14, 2011–UberMedia, the leading independent provider of applications for reading and posting to Twitter and other social media platforms, today announced that it completed a financing round led by Jim Breyer of Accel Ventures. Existing investors Steve Case of Revolution Ventures and Danny Rimer of Index Ventures also participated.

“At UberMedia, our goal is to enhance the Twitter experience with functionality in our clients and to be the best partner with Twitter in growing and enhancing their ecosystem,” said Bill Gross, Founder and CEO. “In particular, the addition of Jim Breyer to our board will really enable us to succeed at this mission. His experience on the boards of Wal-Mart, Facebook, Marvel Entertainment, Dell and so many other high-profile consumer brands will be particularly helpful.”

“We’ve been watching closely Bill’s efforts at UberMedia to build upon the ground-breaking communications platform created by Twitter,” said Jim Breyer of Accel Partners. “We see a tremendous business in the kinds of innovations in user experience being developed at UberMedia. The result of these efforts will be an expansion in the number and variety of people engaged with Twitter as well as a method for advertisers to reach consumers in highly targeted and relevant ways.”

All Deck.ly posts will be hosted by TweetDeck. TweetDeck users will simply see the longer tweet. Dodsworth said that TweetDeck is competing with Twitter on a daily basis and they are fighting for users that use the same service.

Jobs then turned the focus on Google. He said that Eric Schmidt reported that Android was activating over 200,000 devices per day and have around 90,000 apps in their app store. Jobs said that in comparison Apple is activating 275,000 iOS devices per day for the last 30 days with a peak of over 300,000 per day. And Apple has over 300,000 applications per day. Jobs said that there is no solid data from Android manufacturers about how many units are shipped each quarter.

“Google loves to characterize Android as open and iOS and iPhone as closed,” said Jobs. “We find this about a bit disingenuous and clouding the real difference between our two approaches.” Jobs pointed out that the Android OEMs install their own proprietary software on top of Android and users have to figure it all out. Every iPhone works the same.

Jobs said that Twitterdeck [He actually meant Tweetdeck] recently released an Android application. In that process, they said that they had to contend with over 100 different versions of Android software on over 244 different handsets. He said that this is a daunting challenge for developers because of all the fragmentation involved.

Jobs then commented on tablets that use 7-inch screens while the iPad has a 10-inch screen. He said that you would think that 7-inch screens offer a 70% benefit of the 10-inch screen. But he said that the 7-inches is a diagonal measurement so a 7-inch screen is only 45% as large as an iPad 10-inch screen. “This size isn’t sufficient to create great tablet apps in our opinion.” Jobs concluded by saying that 7-inch tablets are going to be DOA.

Below are some of the responses to Jobs
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1. Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM disagreed that 7-inch tablets will not be a part of the tablet market. Below is the statement that Balsillie made (notice the reference to Adobe Flash):

For those of us who live outside of Apple’s distortion field, we know that 7-inch tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience,” Balsillie said in his response. “We also know that while Apple’s attempt to control the ecosystem and maintain a closed platform may be good for Apple, developers want more options and customers want to fully access the overwhelming majority of web sites that use Flash.

Balsillie also criticized Jobs reporting of the BlackBerry sales numbers:

RIM has achieved record shipments for five consecutive quarters and recently shared guidance of 13.8 (million to) 14.4 million BlackBerry smartphones for the current quarter. Apple’s preference to compare its September-ending quarter with RIM’s August-ending quarter doesn’t tell the whole story because it doesn’t take into account that industry demand in September is typically stronger than summer months, nor does it explain why Apple only shipped 8.4 million devices in its prior quarter and whether Apple’s Q4 results were padded by unfulfilled Q3 customer demand and channel orders.

2. Tweetdeck CEO Iain Dodsworth sent out the following messages on Twitter:

“Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing on Android? Errr nope, no we didn’t. It wasn’t.”
”We only have 2 guys developing on Android TweetDeck so that shows how small an issue fragmentation is.”

3. Google Vice President of Engineering Andy Rubin, also known as the “father of Android” sent out the following tweet:

the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.

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Joe Hewitt seemed to agree with Jobs on why Google should not claim that they are an open platform. Hewitt helped create Firefox, development tool FireBug, and is currently a prominent executive at Facebook. He developed some of the first few versions of the Facebook iPhone application. Below are some of the tweets that Hewitt sent out (via TechCrunch):

Compare the Android “open source” model to Firefox or Linux if you want to see how disingenuous that “open” claim is.

Until Android is read/write open, it’s no different than iOS to me. Open source means sharing control with the community, not show and tell.

I think it is the lack of visibility into daily progress that bothers me about Android more than the lack of write access.

Refusing to share your vision and progress until the big event… how very open.

@mclazarus true open source projects have a process for earning checkin privileges.

Point I am trying to make is, Rubin bickering with Jobs is a farce, because both refuse to share the one thing that matters: control.

@risaacs99 I am saying they are doing the bare minimum, but boasting as if they are on the level of Linux or Firefox, or even Chrome OS.

@risaacs99 like Rubin bragging about how downloading a months old code dump is the definition of open.

What makes TweetDeck unique is that when the company first started it was a one man show.  That man is Iain Dodsworth and now he is fully armed with VC money to take TweetDeck to the next level.  If you don’t have a Twitter account and TweetDeck, get it now!  you will not regret it.

[via TechCrunch]

At the end of March, TweetDeck raised $300,000 in funding from Betaworks.  That is a good amount of funding for a company that is a one-man show.  And now that one man has even come up with a revenue model for TweetDeck.

TechCrunch has picked up a rumor that Iain will be charging $50,000 for a service that wants to be added on to TweetDeck.  If he gets 6 companies to pay that amount, his revenue will be able to match his first round of funding.

There are already several link shortening services built in to TweetDeck, but Iain may start charging some of the new link shortening services that would like to be added to the Twitter-supporting software.  The URL shortening services that come pre-installed in TweetDeck as of right now include bit.ly, digg, is.gd, tinyurl, tr.im, and twurl.

TweetDeck also recently has created branded versions of TweetDeck including a promo for rock band Blink 182.

[via TechCrunch]

Basically TweetDeck takes all of the information contained in Twitter and places them into manageable columns. For example, you can have a column that displays all the tweets your friends recently sent out, replies that you were tagged in, and direct messages you have received. You can also organize your Twitter contacts into groups using the software.

Most recently the software added a support for Facebook. You can directly update your status on Facebook using Tweetdeck and monitor a column of all the status updates that your friends have sent out. Currently TweetDeck is offered as a free download, but a Pro version may be created down the line.

Yesterday Betaworks announced that they have raised $2 million for Bit.ly. Part of Bit.ly’s growth is responsible by the automatic shortening URL feature built into TweetDeck.