Makers Wanted: Are You ...

We’re about to launch a new video series called Makers here at TechCrunch and we’d love to hear from any and all hardware based startups. I want to hear about robots, toys, and railguns. I want to hear about new distilling methods, winemakers, and electric vehicles. I want to hear about anything that whirrs, chops, grates, goes, or crashes into a fireball. Over the next few months Jordan Crook, Josh Zelman, and I will try to cover every hardware startup we come across. If you think you’re worthy of inclusion, please drop us a line at john@techcrunch.com with the subject line “MAKER WANTED.” Describe your product and maybe send a photo of your facility? Are you building in the US or Europe? Asia or Mexico? Let us know. We’re accepting submissions for the next few weeks, so there is plenty of time. Just let us know where you are and what’s up and we’ll try to do the rest.

Pandora Competitor Senz...

Miami-based streaming music startup  Senzari , which aims to take on Pandora by targeting the markets Pandora misses (i.e., the rest of the world), has just closed an additional round of funding totaling $1 million. The round includes investors in both Miami and Silicon Valley, including, notably Dave McClure’s 500 Startups. The company had previously raised $2 million from undisclosed angels in Silicon Valley and Boston (mainly friends and family) and a private equity group in Southern California. Senzari , the fourth startup from serial entrepreneur  Bill Hajjar , offers an online music streaming radio service with a catalog of 11 million songs – a big jump over Pandora’s 900,000. As a radio service, Senzari is not trying to compete with startups like Spotify, Rdio or MOG, which let users program playlists and download tracks for offline listening. Instead, its value proposition is that it has a bigger database containing the “right” songs (meaning, the good ones), and, most importantly, that’s it’s available outside the U.S. Also unlike on-demand services, Senzari doesn’t have to make deals with record labels to gain access to music – just distributers like SoundExchange, ASCAP, BMI and SESAC in the U.S., and others in different countries. The company rolled out into beta in Spain back in February of this year in partnership with MTV, following its beta launches in the both U.S. and Brazil (where VH1 is its partner) in December 2011. Another unique feature to the service is how it integrates social. Using Facebook’s Open Graph, Senzari aims to do for streaming music radio services what Spotify did for on-demand music services – that is, it will help you discover what your friends are into. Of course, Pandora offers some Facebook integration too, but Senzari plans to go further, not just showing you who listened to what, but combining data from both your own listening habits and those of your friends to serve up personalized music recommendations. It also offers something called “Around Me,” which combines check-in data from Facebook to algorithmically suggest tunes based on what people at a particular location (like a bar, coffeeshop, etc.) tend to listen to. In other words, a social,  local , Facebook-based radio service. The new funding will be officially announced tonight as the Geeks on a Plane (#GOAP) Latin American Tour  kicks off in Miami. The 10-day tour includes stops in Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. “We are excited about joining the 500 family as it allows us to leverage its impressive mentor network and global relationships,” says Senzari COO Demian Bellumio. “As a matter of fact, we created a special section in Senzari with radios for each of the stops of the tour with music that represent current and classic hits.” The company plans to use the funding to expand its core team, strengthen and add features to its service, and continue its rollout to other regions. Although Senzari won’t reveal its expansion goals right now, the company will announce more countries and partnerships in June at the LeWeb Conference in London.

Assured Labor, The Mobi...

Assured Labor , a mobile-centric job networking startup that was founded at MIT four years ago, is breaking into another Latin American market. The company is launching in Brazil with a localized service called  TrabalhoJá . This adds to its reach in Mexico and Nicaragua. “Most of the job sites in Brazil charge job seekers, sometimes up to $50,” said Assured Labor’s CEO David Reich. “We’re totally free and job hunters don’t have to be extorted.” Assured Labor is a feature phone-based service that helps job seekers land work. The company targets workers that might only have cell phones and lack personal computers or a broadband connection. You can kind of think of it like a LinkedIn for the developing world. Workers often sign-up in Internet cafes and then the product texts them whenever there are relevant work opportunities that match their skills or what they’re looking for. The service also just started doing voice pre-screenings with candidates. That lets them answer some questions so that employers can vet them before bringing them in for interviews. Reich started working on the company while in business school at MIT. The company started with a pilot in Nicaragua and then expanded to Mexico. It now has about 250,000 candidates and 5,000 employers and earns revenue from employers, who pay to reach prospective candidates. The company has raised more than $1 million in funding from angels including former Skype chief executive and chairman Michael Van Swaiij, Kima Ventures and Nexus Venture Partners.

Research: $1.5 Trillion...

The mobile industry will reel in more than $1.5 trillion in revenues in 2012, with 28 percent of that, $400 billion, attributable to mobile data, according to new research out from analyst Chetan Sharma . He notes that within the revenues expected for mobile data, non-messaging revenues led by apps, mobile web browsing and streaming media have finally overtaken those of traditional messaging like SMS as smartphone usage continues to grow. Non-messaging, he says, will account for 53 percent of the total: in other words, some $212 billion will come from apps, music and video streaming, games and mobile web browsing. Still voice is still accounting for a huge part of the value in mobile, and “OTT” services provided by third parties — be they Apple or others — are still only a small piece of the pie: Sharma’s report also notes in the U.S. smartphones now account for 69 percent of all mobiles sold — the highest rate with the global average at about half that, 32 percent. He notes that some operators are even more bullish than that and expect 90-95 percent of all sales to be smartphones this year (O2 in the UK led that charge last year as you can see in the slides below). In the meantime, the adoption rate will lead the U.S. finally to be able to claim that more than half of all consumers will own smartphones. The U.S. is also, overall, accounting for about 40 percent of all smartphone sales worldwide. The total worldwide base of mobile subscribers now stands at 6 billion, and while it took 20 years to reach the first billion, the speed at which this has accelerated is pretty remarkable: Sharma notes that it took only 15 months for that number to go from 5 billion to 6 billion. As you would expect, a lot of the growth now is coming from developing countries but still the numbers are astounding. He notes that together China and India are adding 75 million new subscribers every quarter to the global base, and points out that China alone already has 1 billion mobile subscribers, the first country to reach that milestone, and that India currently has the highest subscriber growth rate. But India may, at best, be an opportunity for the future rather than today. Sharma points out that India monthly ARPU is an “anemic” $2.50. “Even with a signficant subscriber base, there is going to be a general lack of opportunity in the market for the next couple of years relative to other markets,” he writes. In contrast, the early adopters of Japan have helped that country remain in the lead for mobile data usage, with some 60 percent of ARPUs attributable to data. And because the U.S. has nearly the same proportion, but is significantly bigger, it is currently leading the world in terms of data revenues as well as overall ARPU revenues. Still, the tide is turning: A number of emerging nations are now in top 10 mobile nations by subscribers, he says. They include Brazil, India, Russia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Mexico, while Korea, UK, Italy and Germany “have dropped off or slipped in rankings.” Patents . Although we’ve had a lot of noise about patent acquisitions, purchases and lawsuits around internet and (specifically) social media patents, Sharma points out the mobile continues to lead the field with patent applications, and that mobile companies are filing more in the U.S. than in Europe — on average 1.7 times more. He notes that in the U.S., the biggest patent holders are IBM, Microsoft and Nokia. In Europe they are Alcatel-Lucent, Nokia and Samsung. Nokia also appears in the list for top-three device patent holders, along with Samsung and Sony. And among carriers, AT&T, NTT Docomo and Sprint lead the charge. That gives pause for thought about what Nokia has and what kind of value the company holds, beyond the cash that has been mentioned several times in the last week as ratings companies continue to downgrade the company. Full slide deck here: Annual state of_global_mobile_industry_2012_Chetan_Sharma_Consulting [Image: .m for matthijs, Flickr ]

500 Startups Raising Ne...

It’s a big day for 500 Startups — you know, the seed-stage accelerator and capital fund founded by rabble rouser and geek on a plane, Dave McClure . Back in July 2010, McClure filed for the accelerator’s first fund, raising $30 million to begin officially investing in startups under the new venture capital fund. Today, we’ve learned via SEC regulatory filing that round two is officially on the books, and 500 Startups is going bigger for its second round, raising $50 million. McClure and company are also today announcing an expansion of the team, as Paul Singh and Christen O’Brien have been promoted to partners. Singh will continue to lead investments, running the accelerator program, and acting as head Data/Metrics guru, while O’Brien continues on her role as head of business development, leading events and conferences, like Geeks On A Plane , Warm Gun , etc. Bedy Yang and George Kellerman have also joined as venture partners. Yang will be overseeing investments in Brazil and Latin America, while Kellerman will be scouting emerging talent in Japan. The group of four join existing partners Christine Tsai and McClure, and highlight not only the fact that 500 Startups is no longer a one-person show, but that the team has been diversifying and increasing its focus on identifying and investing in international talent. In speaking with the Tsai and McClure, the founder was quick to point out that 500 Startups is no longer just an accelerator, but also a set of conferences, and a fund that invests not only in companies of its choosing but those of other accelerators as well. Of the some 257 investments 500 Startups has made to date, McClure says that more than 50 of those have been in other accelerators, including 25 from Y Combinator, 15 from TechStars, 5 from Seedcamp, 3 AngelPad companies, and 3 from Startmeet. While 10-15 percent of the fund’s current investments are in international startups, the partners said that, with the new $50 million fund, this will be increasing in the future, as it looks to build upon its investments in accelerators in Mexico City and Beijing, and beyond. For example, the team held a Geeks On A Plane trip to India in December of last year, and intends to continue focusing on Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe, both for Geeks On A Plane and in terms of investments, looking to build ties in those ecosystems. In October, the accelerator and fund peeled back the curtain on its third batch of startups, which included 34 companies, making it the largest roster to date (the initial batch consisted of 12 startups and the second came in at 21). Our coverage also touches on 500 Startups’ growing domestic and international diversity . You can also check out 500 Startups video here. The accelerator’s fourth batch kicked off a few days ago, and we’ll have more on those companies soon. But another interesting thing to note is that the accelerator is rolling out a new program that enables its mentors to co-invest in its accelerator companies — something that not many other accelerators or capital funds are doing at this point. Co-investing is not required for mentors, and all startups get the final say on which mentors can participate, but it’s a great opportunity for startups to get strategic angels on board, and conversely, an opportunity for mentors to invest in fast-growing stages early in their trajectory. 500 Startups is also adding to its conference brigade, with a new event to be held on Friday April 20th, called MamaBear , which will be a one-day even focused on new technology for moms, kids, and families, with speakers representing companies like BabyCenter, Disney, Sesame Street, Plum District, MindSnacks and more. For more on 500 Startups current metrics, check out the infographic the team prepared below. Can also find a conversation with the partners here .