After acquiring FabKids earlier this year, JustFab announced today the acquisition of another “Fab” brand – The Fab shoes – for an undisclosed amount.

The Fab Shoes is a European-based e-commerce shoe club with over 500,000 members in France and Spain. And that fits well with JustFab’s plans. With its newest acquisition, the subscription-based online store from California adds fuel to its European expansion blueprint. It launched operations in Germany and U.K. last year, and this deal provides it a way into Spain and France.

“With our success in Germany and the U.K., we were ready to take JustFab into new territories. After getting to know the team at The Fab Shoes, we saw a natural fit for the businesses; it enables JustFab to quickly extend its European reach and gives The Fab Shoes a new way to distribute quality products to customers through our flexible subscription plan,” noted Don Ressler, a cofounder and co-chief executive of JustFab, in a statement.

JustFab has quickly grown its European presence to 1.5 million members, and it is adding more than 100,000 new customers every month. The Fab Shoes will take this toll to well over the 2 million customer mark.

Its competitors include companies such as H&M and Forever 21.

JustFab has raised $109 million in venture capital from Matrix Partners, Technology Crossover Ventures, Rho Capital Partners, and Intelligent Beauty. After accomplishing $100 million in revenue for the year, the e-commerce website is looking at 2013 as “another high-growth year.”

“We continue to surpass our goals, month after month,” said Adam Goldenberg, the other cofounder and co-chief executive, Adam of JustFab. “With more than 13 million members in the U.S. and Europe growing at such a fast pace, we are on track to reach $250 million in revenue by the end of this year.”

Image Credit: JustFab

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook is becoming a mobile app platform — and you’ll be able to use it even if you have no interest in building Facebook apps.

That’s driven partly by Facebook’s recent acquisition of Parse, a company that helps app developers by providing backend services such as database management, sync protocols, data serialization, and other technical issues.

But it also reflects Facebook’s changing view of itself as a platform spanning platforms of all kinds: mobile phones, tablets, the Web, and even Windows 8.

“We live in this world of heterogeneous devices. We’re trying to build a platform where third-party developers can create applications that span across all of those devices so they can really focus on people,” said Doug Purdy, an engineer who works on the Facebook platform, during a press briefing today.

Facebook acquired Parse on April 25 to bring its “mobile backend-as-a-service” (mBaaS, believe it or not) into Facebook’s developer platform.

One of the questions raised at the time was whether Parse would continue operating independently. It’s a mobile development tool, not a Facebook development tool, so some of its customers may be creating iOS or Android apps that don’t link into Facebook at all — and that’s OK, according to Facebook.

“Parse is not going away,” said Ilya Sukhar, Parse’s founder [above]. It is his fourth day working on the Facebook campus, so he acknowledged that he was still learning his way around the company. But he was quite clear on the future of Parse.

For instance, Parse currently supports Twitter for user authentication, and it will continue to support that, Sukhar said. “That’s not going away,” he said.

Additionally, all Parse services currently run on Amazon Web Services, and that’s not changing, either, despite that Facebook owns huge data centers of its own. And the pricing model won’t change: Parse will still offer a free tier, a $200/month tier for more serious users, and an enterprise tier for high-traffic customers.

All this should be quite reassuring to Parse’s current 80,000 developer customers, whose apps run on 200 million different devices, Sukhar said.

Naturally, Facebook hopes that mobile app developers integrate their apps with its platform, and many of them do. According to Purdy, 80 percent of the top-grossing iOS apps integrate with Facebook, and 70 percent of the top-grossing Android apps do, too.

The company is also encouraging developers to utilize Facebook as an app discovery tool. With 800,000 apps in each of the major mobile app stores, just getting noticed is a major challenge for devs. Facebook is building tools to help with that, starting with Facebook ads. Currently, if you click on an ad for an app within the Facebook iOS app, it takes you directly to the Apple App Store — without leaving the Facebook app — so you can install the advertised app.

Facebook has also made some tweaks to other parts of its platform. It’s splitting the “read and write” permissions that apps have to ask users for — so each app now has to get separate permissions from the end-user for reading their Facebook profile and friends list, and for posting to Facebook on their behalf. The change has been well received by end-users, according to Purdy.

And the company will soon enable Facebook apps to show up in Facebook Open Graph search results, something they don’t currently do.

“One of the things Parse does really well, and does it better than anyone in the world, is that it makes it really easy to create an iOS app and then move that to Android, move it to Windows Phone, and so on,” said Mike Vernal, another senior Facebook platform engineer (he was the lead engineer on the Facebook Connect project in 2008).

“We want it to be about people, and not the devices that they’re on.”

Photo: Ilya Sukhar, the founder of Parse, at the Facebook campus. Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

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Loyal3 makes buying stock more social and accessible for people who don’t have much experience with the stock market. In three steps, you can invest as little as $10 in well-known companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Starbucks, Disney, Google, Coca Cola, Walmart etc…

Loyal3′s core philosophy is “own what you love.” Buying stocks can seem daunting for people without financial expertise. Loyal3 wants to make this process more user-friendly by providing fee-free investing and enabling the purchase of stock through a brands’ Facebook page. Loyal3 is a registered broker-dealer and offers stock in publicly traded companies, stock in Initial public Offerings (IPOs) and stock in follow-on offerings.

Consumer engagement is a major buzz word in the brand world right now as companies try to deepen their bonds with consumers and build loyalty. Loyal3 serves companies that want excited shareholders, as well as consumers who want to feel a strong connection to the brands they use everyday.

DNS-L3, LLC, an entity owned by Michael and Gigi Pritzker Pucker, led this round, along with existing investors Cris Kelly (former Chief Privacy Officer of Facebook) and Barry Schneider, Loyal3′s CEO. This is the company’s third round of financing. Loyal3 is based in San Francisco.

SimpleRelevance’s platform gathers customer data and then personalized emails to specifically target individuals. The technology looks at information like past purchase behavior and combines it with geographic, social, and demographic’ data to send highly targeted emails. The goal is to make emails ‘smarter’ so the right message is automatically delivered at the right time, with custom subject line, content, and delivery times.

The company claims that this degree of customization can increase conversion rates by 51 percent, increase open rates by 21 percent, and increase click rates by 29 percent. It also said that companies integrating the technology into their marketing have seen revenue increases ranging from 40 to 400 percent, as well as better customer engagement.

The solutions are comparable to those provided by Sailthru, another digital marketing company that raised $19 million in February for its Smart Data platform that personalizes communications through targeted emails, onsite and in-app recommendations, and text messages.

SimpleRelevance is a newer, smaller company that recently graduated from TechStar’s Chicago’s inaugural 2013 class. Hydpe Park Angels and Hyde Park Venture Partners led this round with participation from i2A Fund and additional angels. The funding will be used for recruiting and hiring, and to expand its enterprise-level solutions.

Folders is an application developed in France by Martin Destagnol. It provides (in true French form) “the most elegant client for your cloud storage.” Using its “amazingly polished user interface,” people can manage multiple accounts like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive; copy, move, delete, or transfer files; sort, search, and share files; and view them clearly on your smartphone.

In a blog post about the news, Box’s VP of Engineering Sam Schillace said the acquisition is all part of Box’s mission to make enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” and make Box’s applications as user-friendly as possible.

“I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design,” he said. “They have to be “consumer-grade” in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users.”

Earlier this month Box announced the acquisition of Crocdoc, a YC alum that turns documents into interactive, entertaining experiences. Both Folders and Crocdoc are part of Box’s effort to make enterprise products more engaging, well-designed, and fun to use. Folders will be integrated into the next version of Box’s iOS application.

Photo Credit: Flickr user/benoit_D

Wibidata builds and sells big data applications that companies can use to uncover consumer insights and react in real time. Large organizations like Google, Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and Facebook have built their own technology that gathers data about users and delivers personalized content based on the result. Wibidata provides an option for smaller companies, without the same engineering resources, to do the same thing.

CEO and cofounder Christophe Bisciglia was one of the founders of Cloudera, and cofounder Aaron Kimball created Apache Sqoop. They are data experts, and Wibidata is designed to make data more accessible to all businesses, not just those that can afford data scientists.

Bisciglia said in a statement issued this morning that big data applications are “mission critical” solutions that businesses need to stay competitive. Every industry, vertical, and company  has a unique set of needs, and Wibidata’s products are customizable. The company has built four, industry-specific application suites– retail, finance, mobile, and SaaS — that include data integration, analysis, and predictive modeling.

This technology enables companies to deploy apps that incorporate content personalization, search relevance, predictive recommendations, and anomaly detection. The idea is that by providing consumers with a tailored experienced, they will be more engaged.

Wibidata’s applications are based on the open source Kiji Project, which shortens development and deployment cycles, and the system is built on Apache Hadoop and HBase. Clients include Opower, Mobile Posse, and Atlassian. Canaan Partners led this round with participation from existing investors NEA and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt. According to the statement, this investment demonstrates a shift in the big data ecosystem towards “applications that deliver direct value to businesses.” This second round of financing will support recruitment and hiring, product development, and expansion.

Wibidata is based in San Francisco. It was founded in 2010 and has raised $20 million to date.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, and coming hot on the heels of a massive image-buffing retrofit of the photo-sharing community Flickr, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

Finally, after years of virtual irrelevance at the search/media company, Mayer has Yahoo doing huge and interesting things again.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid – CEO Jesper Jensen said the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And the move seems to make sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

This week’s Seattle tech news roundup features a hefty venture round for mobile ad tracking startup HasOffers, the new STEM-focused chancellor of University of Washington Bothell, an Avanade study of social collaboration tools use in the enterprise, and a Seattle AWS Direct Connect service from Equinix:

—HasOffers, a Seattle startup tracking and managing mobile advertising campaigns, has $9.4 million in new investment to continue growing. Accel Partners led the round, which was joined by RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Chris DeVore of Founder’s Co-op. The 79-person company took pride in bootstrapping its growth to this point and “didn’t need to raise money based on our current cash flow and ability to keep growing,” CEO Peter Hamilton says in a statement.

However, HasOffers will be able to grow more quickly by hiring engineers to build out its two products: one for ad agencies and networks to manage performance advertising programs, and the other to track app business back to advertising partners. Accel Partners’ Rich Wong is joining the company’s board. More details on the company’s decision to take funding and how the deal went down are in a blog post by Hamilton.

—The new chancellor of the University of Washington Bothell, Bjong Wolf Yeigh, has a background well-suited to the branch campus’ development as a center of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Yeigh, an engineer by training, comes from the State University of New York Institute of Technology at Utica/Rome, where as president he led capital expansion efforts and grew STEM faculty positions. His appointment is effective Sept. 1, pending UW Board of Regents approval.

—The consumerization of corporate IT is alive and well when it comes to social collaboration tools, according to a new poll from Avanade. The Seattle IT consulting and services firm—established by a Microsoft-Accenture joint venture in 2001—asked 1,000 business and IT leaders and 4,000 employees in organizations around the world about their use of social collaboration tools. Facebook was cited by 74 percent of respondents, followed by Twitter (51 percent) and LinkedIn (45 percent).

All of these outperformed social collaboration platforms built for the enterprise by the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Salesforce. Avanade says the use of consumer social collaboration platforms is giving corporate leaders “a false sense of accomplishment in social collaboration” because they lack enterprise-level tools for things like document editing and knowledge search.

—The new Equinix data center in Seattle, which we toured in March, is now offering direct connection to Amazon Web Services, which promises very low latency for applications running on the Amazon cloud relative to a public Internet connection to the service. Seattle joins Equinix locations with AWS Direct Connect in Virginia Silicon Valley, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.

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It was just two weeks ago that fast-growing enterprise cloud storage company, Box, went out and acquired document embedding service and Y Combinator grad, Crocodoc. Apparently Aaron Levie sees what Yahoo is doing and he wants to show that Box is ready to do a little acquiring of its own.

Today, Box followed up with its second acquisition in as many weeks, scooping up the tech behind French mobile app and Box, Dropbox and Google Drive client for iOS, Folders. Developed by Martin Destagnol, Folders and its tech will be integrated into Box’s new iOS app, which is currently in development (now with support from Destagnol).

Again, Box already has a version of its storage service on the App Store, but like many other companies of its ilk, the service hasn’t necessarily been putting its best foot forward on mobile, so to speak. Folders, on the other hand, was developed by Destagnol exclusively for mobile and to simplify file-sharing and complementary functionality for users on the go. And it shows: Folders is a good-looking, elegant app. I say that in the creepiest way possible, obviously.

In its announcement today, Box revealed that it’s planning to release a new version of its iOS app “later this year,” and Folders’ design and optimizations appear to be a big part of the mobile revamp. Furthermore, the motivation behind the Folders (and Crocodoc) acquisitions is not only to upgrade mobile, but the big “impact they can have” on the overall “Box user experience.”

VP of Engineering Sam Schillace explains:

I’m a firm believer that even applications developed primarily for the enterprise, like Box, need to be pushing the leading edge for user experience and design. They have to be ‘consumer-grade’ in terms of their usability, simplicity, speed and performance. This definitely raises the bar for enterprise software design and engineering, but there’s no doubt that the higher standards are a big win for users and a massive opportunity for Box.

With the service now used by 15 million people at 150,000 businesses across healthcare, financial services and retail, the company is at a key point in its growth cycle. (Though who isn’t, let’s be honest.) Thanks to building enterprise software “that doesn’t suck” (it’s a low bar in enterprise, people), the company is moving across industries and will probably show up on the public markets in the next year or so.

Box has established itself, but in doing so, it’s now competing with the big boys, and although innovation in enterprise tends to move at the pace of a speeding glacier, the company has to keep pushing forward if it wants to take that next step. The consumerization of enterprise is nothing new at this point; companies and, more importantly, end users expect applications and services that are easy to use. That look familiar and “social.” Whatever that means.

Levie is a champion of this new generation of usable, consumer-friendly enterprise tech, so Box needs to lead there. And, at this point, there’s nothing that embodies the consumerization movement better than mobile and the BYOD trend. Box has to work (and look) better on mobile than the old set of Enterprise leaders.

To wit:

When we saw Folders we saw a beautiful experience and set of design patterns that we had to bring to Box’s users. Adding the Folders technology and Martin’s expertise to Box will help us to continue to improve how people collaborate and engage with their content on Post-PC devices. In the near term, Box for iOS will become cleaner, faster and more beautiful throughout 2013.

Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba (acquired by LivePerson for $40m), Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload (acquired by ironSource for $28m), and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload.

Imonomy said it will be using the new seed funding for product development and initial marketing and sales activities.

The startup was founded in the middle of last year by Oren Dror and Amit Halawa who previously held senior R&D and engineering positions at Yedda, an online Q&A service that was acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL, back in 2007.

Imonomy targets its software at smaller-sized web publishers who have a pool of online content but don’t necessarily have the means to spice it up with illustrations — either lacking the production staff to spend the time hunting down royalty free images or the licensing money to pay to display copyrighted images. Imonomy says its semantic software is being used by more than 500 medium-sized websites (with up to 10 million monthly impressions) at present, including AOL Answers and Articles Base.

Imonomy’s software scans web content to figure out relevant images to serve up from its database of copyright-free images, and also determines the optimal place to position them on the page to improve user engagement. Inserted images support hover over links to other articles and also displaying ads, giving publishers (and Imonomy) a way to monetise the added eyecandy. It’s effectively a more aesthetic version of inline text link ads.

“The idea behind Imonomy is that publishers of content-heavy web sites need to tools to help their sites be visibly attractive,” the startup tells TechCrunch. “High quality copyright-free images are hard to come by and the time and effort required to locate such pictures is a hassle. Imonomy created its content enrichment and monetization system to automate this process in order to help publishers save time, improve user engagement and create monetization opportunities.”

Here’s how it describes its system on its website:

Our database contains millions of images that cover every possible topic. Our system scans your webpage, finds the best fitting image and automatically insert them into the published page. Thus making content more interesting and informative. Our technology brings our customers greater user engagement and lower bounce rates, which has been in proven to result in significantly increased revenues. imonomy also creates intelligent links between pages, which encourages visitors to easily navigate to additional relevant content. The visual semantic engine can be implemented easily on any website, and we also provide a free API that expands the functionality and the systems abilities.