Fab Expands Into Beauty...

Over three million users strong, design-focused flash sales platform Fab is expanding to a new vertical on Monday, with the launch of a beauty-focused pop-up shop in collaboration with Conde Nast glossy Glamour Magazine. As we wrote earlier this year , the fast growing site expanded their product offerings through the launch of the new Fab Shops, which incorporated verticals of Kids, Pets, Food, Fashion and Vintage. Fab co-founder, design guru and chief curator Bradford Shellhammer explains to us that Fab’s mantra is that design lives anywhere in the world at all price points, in all categories. While one wouldn’t necessarily associate beauty products with design, Shellhammer explains that when it comes to packaging and brands, design is a key component to the allure of certain beauty products. The new pop-up shop, which has been curated by Glamour and Fab editors, launches on Monday morning with high-quality make-up, luxurious skincare products, conditioning lip care, aromatic candles and more. Brands featured include Nest Fragrances, Philip B. Botanical Products, Oscar Blandi, Pangea, Demeter, josie maran, and malin + goetz. Fab is pretty stoked that an established media company like Conde Nast is willing to partner with the new guard for e-commerce and curation. Glamour Fashion Development Director Susan Cernek says of the new partnership, “The bulk of our 25,000 comments each month take place within our beauty vertical, so there’s a strong community there. Partnering with Fab.com—a site that has an equally robust and engaged community—on a pop-up beauty shop is a natural fit.” Shellhammer adds that beauty will become a more permanent vertical for the site and will be featuring more products soon. Clearly expanding to new verticals are only going to help Fab hit that $100 million in 2012 revenue. As Shellhammer says “there are only so many sofas you want to buy,” and beauty happens to be a vertical that has higher margins. Fab was also featured yesterday in Facebook’s developer spotlight, revealing growth trends for the e-commerce site from Facebook’s social functionality. Fab says it has seen a 100% increase in the referral traffic from Facebook since launching its timeline app. And membership has grown from 1.8 million to more than 3.2 million users. While these stats are impressive, it’s important to note that referral traffic could also have been increasing pre-timeline because Fab has been exploding in growth over the past six months.

Angry Birds Space Lands...

Bird-lovers and pig-haters, today is your lucky day: Rovio has finally pushed the button on the launch of its newest installation of its hugely successful Angry Birds franchise: Angry Birds Space. The game — which Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka told us last week will be its biggest launch yet — is marked by new characters, a new physics engine to account for the “no-gravity” concept and a whole new setting that will take the familiar gameplay of catapulting birds to destroy pig houses to a whole new frontier. The iPhone/iPod Touch version is on sale now for $0.99 The iPad HD version is on sale for $2.99 The Android version for now seems to be via the Amazon Appstore and selling for $0.99 The Mac version is selling for $4.99 And here is an animation put together by Rovio to give you a taste of the game:

Boxcar Raises $150K, Pr...

Real-time push notification service Boxcar , currently available on both iOS and Mac OS X, has just closed on a $150,000 seed round with Kima Ventures , bringing its total raise to date to $211,000. The additional funding will be used to grow the company’s consumer-facing services, expand to other platforms ( Android in 2 months! Windows Phone!) and will aid in the company’s development of B2B products, we’re told. And yep, that means what you think it means: Boxcar will soon offer push notifications as a backend service for mobile developers’ use. In addition to the funding, Boxcar has added  Brian Alvey (CEO of Crowd Fusion ), Loic Le Meur (CEO of Seesmic ), Greg Yardley (Former CEO of Pinch Media ), and Sean Byrnes  ( Flurry’s co-founder), to the company’s advisory board. In other good news: Kima Ventures is shareholder in Sparrow , the hot, new iOS mail client that serves as a worthy replacement to Apple’s own mail app. Not entirely coincidentally, Boxcar says it now works with Sparrow to provide the push notifications feature Sparrow currently lacks. (Well, that’s good enough reason to download the Boxcar right there, if you haven’t already, I’d say. And Sparrow, of course, I heartily recommend. Go read all about it over on Techmeme .) For a little background, Boxcar received a lot of attention prior to the launch of iOS 5. When MG covered the iOS version of Boxcar back in March 2011 , for example, he begged Apple to copy its notification system immediately. It was that good. But back then, Boxcar was filling a hole in Apple’s OS by providing support for a notifications center where all your app’s messages could be reviewed at a glance. Remember, this was a time before you could just pull down a drawer from the top of your iPhone’s screen. Instead, your notifications appeared as pop-ups, then disappeared, forever lost in the ether. Apple, of course, since overhauled its notifications with the launch of iOS 5  in fall 2011, seemingly leaving much of the need for third-party systems like Boxcar in its wake. Except for the rare app like Sparrow, which launches prior to supporting push, the need for an alternative system (albeit a more configurable and more powerful one) is somewhat less pressing. Then there’s Boxcar for Mac. Even though Boxcar serves as a viable counterpart to the ever-popular Growl , both services are now finding themselves in the position of having to compete with core OS features, thanks to the forthcoming release of Apple’s latest version of OS X (Mountain Lion) , which is introducing its own push notifications feature. So where does that leave something like Boxcar? And why is it getting funding now, of all times? As it turns out, those “B2B” features in development are the big news here. Boxcar will soon be introducing a cross-platform push notifications service designed for developers’ use. This puts it in the same space as competitors like Urban Airship , Xtify , StackMob , Parse and others. The idea with the new service is to not only provide push and “heavy lifting” for developers, but also help them create sustainable app businesses. To be clear, this is different from what most of the competition is doing today – instead of simply providing developer tools to power backend services like push, Boxcar will allow developers to offer push as an option to their customers – for a fee . The app’s end users will be able to pay for push notifications for the app on either a 6-month or yearly subscription basis, if they choose. Already, one flagship implementation of this offering is in the wild: Twitterlator Neue , a Twitter app for iOS, is now delivering push notifications that are powered by Boxcar. The move hasn’t been without some pushback from users, of course. As a review of the app on ZDNet notes, Neue received some negative App Store reviews for its decision to charge $1.99 per year for push notifications. (The horror.) But developer Andrew Stone explained the decision, saying that the decision was about sustainability. “We have to pay for servers,” he said. “That people expect stuff for free will eventually become a problem for most developers.” Developers in unison: damn right . Boxcar CEO Jonathan George tells me that several other Twitter apps are in the works, and the company will soon be doing the same with other apps, too. “Any push that requires a backend, we want to power it,” he says. Originally, the plan was to announce the service for Twitter app developers next week, but a little funding news got in the way, it seems. Although the business offering isn’t officially live now, though, I’m sure interested developers can find a way to get in touch .

StarStreet Launches A D...

You may remember StarStreet from last year’s launch – it’s the TechStars and SV Angel-backed sports investing game that turns fantasy sports into a stock market system where you build up portfolios of top players as if they were stocks. Today, the company is launching a new, more addictive game that lets you play head-to-head with other players on a daily basis, both for fantasy wins or for real cash. The new game will run alongside its older counterpart, offering a more casual gaming experience for those not interested in the commitment of building a season-long portfolio. In traditional fantasy sports gaming, setting up a team, adding and removing players, and continually tracking their performance often continues throughout the season, whether it’s for the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or another sports market. StarStreet originally wanted to offer a twist on that type of gaming experience, by allowing users to make stock market-like portfolios, where gamers “invest” using real money, instead of playing in fantasy leagues. To date, that effort has only been moderately successful – the company says it has gained 1,000 registered users playing with real money on the site. But with the launch of the new daily gaming option, users can now play the same type of game for a day, betting on who will earn the most fantasy points by night.

Former McAfee CTO Debut...

George Kurtz, who was formerly the CTO of McAfee, has launched a new security technology company called CrowdStrike. The company is still in stealth mode, but has revealed a $26 million series A investment from Warburg Pincus (Kurtz was previously an EIR at the private equity firm). Details are still minimal, but as Kurtz explains in a blog post announcing the launch, CrowdStrike is a security technology company focused on helping enterprises and governments protect their most sensitive intellectual property and national security information. CrowdStrike, which was co-founded with Dmitri Alperovitch and Gregg Marston, is trying to use big data mining to help companies and organizations battle cyber-security challenges. Considering Kurtz’s expertise, it’s not surprising that his next venture involves security. Kurtz joined Warburg Pincus in November 2011, after resigning from McAfee . Kurtz joined McAfee in 2004 when his IT security company Foundstone was acquired by McAfee. Stay tuned for more on CrowdStrike.