The Austin TC Meetup + ...

We’re less than a week out from our Austin TC Meetup + Pitch-Off , and I can already smell the barbeque in the air. Austin, are you ready to rumble? The Austin Meetup + Pitch-Off is going down on Thursday, May 30, at The Stage On Sixth . The event begins promptly at 6pm and runs until 10pm. Tickets are $5 each , and include booze. But, you ask, what exactly is this fabled TC Meetup + Pitch-off that I’m pushing? Well, at its core its a gathering of your city’s local VC, entrepreneurial, startup and general tech crowd. Attendees can socialize, drink booze (21 and up please) and maybe even meet a few really cool people. But that’s not all. The TC Meetup + Pitch-off is equal parts meetup and pitch-off, which is a competition that lets entrepreneurs and founders pitch their products to a panel of judges with only sixty seconds to make their plea. Even if the ideas aren’t interesting (which they totally are), there’s real entertainment value in watching someone battle against a clock. We will talk to local Austin luminaries Bijoy Goswami and Noah Kagan on stage and then we’ll run the pitch-off with more locals to pass judgement on your startups. I’ll be MCing. It’ll be great. Our NY Meetup + Pitch-Off was a smashing success. PaddleYou was spotted in Hardware Alley after coming in third at the Pitch-Off, while runners up Talkz and winner 3DLT both made it into the Disrupt Battlefield. Applications are currently closed for the Austin pitch-off, but tickets to the event are still available here . We still have some startup tables left where you can demo your product to the attendees and TC staff. If you have any questions about the tables, please email Megan Lehn . Our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com .

Cubic Telecom Secures $...

We’re all familiar with the bill shock associated with roaming abroad with our cellphones. There are plenty of players that allow you to swap out your SIM card and use cheaper traffic, including Cubic Telecom . However, that process is tedious. So Cubic has secured new funding to enable a range of tablets and notebooks to have their technology built into partner devices. To do this they’ve raised a further $5.2 million in funding from Enterprise Ireland, Qualcomm Incorporated, ACT Venture Capital and TPS Investments. The money will be used to expand globally, and invest in the technology which essentially allows Cubic to operate like its own global mobile phone carrier, not an MVNO. As a licensed mobile network operator (MNO), Cubic Telecom partners with Tier 1 mobile operators to provide coverage in 230 countries. Its Software Defined Network (SDN) works across multiple technologies (3G, 4G-LTE, CDMA and WiFi). The Dublin based company has also secured contracts with a number of leading Fortune 100 tablet and notebook manufacturers to be in-built into their devices, though these partners have yet to be announced. The embedded nature of the service means any changes to the internal SIM can be Over The Air (OTA). Barry Napier, CEO of Cubic Telecom, says they will “enable the latest devices and applications to be always connected anytime anywhere.” In plain English, that means Cubic Telecom devices can integrate with content and apps. Thus, imagine a word where an app provider asked Cubic to allow its use to be free on Cubic dvices. All it would require would be a simple OTA update form Cubic to its customers. That could be a very powerful place to be. The company also announced that it will create a total of more than 70 new jobs over the next 3 years, as part of an investment supported by the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation through Enterprise Ireland.

AngelPad’s Sixth ...

AngelPad , the San Francisco-based accelerator founded by former Googler Thomas Korte, held its sixth demo day yesterday. I wasn’t there (I know, it’s super-embarrassing), but I did get to meet with Korte and partner Carine Magescas today to talk about the newest batch of companies. Magescas said that in the three years since AngelPad was founded, “the premise of what we had in the beginning has been validated.” That premise breaks down to three main ideas, she said. First, she and Korte “push [the startups] really hard.” That’s particularly important in the company’s early stages, Korte said, because it can be hard for the founders to get honest feedback from their family and friends, and because making a relatively small change can have a big effect on a startup’s ultimate trajectory. Another reason the partners might be particularly tough on the startups is because they’re investing their own money. There’s no separate fund — at least not yet. (When I asked, Korte said, “There hasn’t been a fund to date,” followed by what may or may not have been a significant pause.) Second, Magescas said, “We are a really small family.” Twelve startups were chosen from thousands of applicants. The first AngelPad group had eight companies, and there was one with 15, but they’ve settled on a dozen for the last few classes. That allows the AngelPad team to spend a lot of time working one-on-one with each company. “I feel like it’s better to spend more time with less companies,” Korte said, adding that he’s realized that having a long list of well-known mentors isn’t as useful. There are outside experts who come in and give talks on a specific subject, but it really falls to Korte and Magescas to work closely with the founders. When you have too many different people offering “cookie cutter advice,” Korte said, “It hurts more than it helps.” Third, they said AngelPad has always had a strong focus on business-to-business companies. In fact, there’s not a single consumer-focused company in the current class, according to Korte — some of them might offer consumer products as part of their business, but none of them are focused on building large-scale, free services that make money from advertising. At the same time, Magescas said they’re open to consumer startups, they just have to be “really good.” So that’e the vision. Here are the companies, in alphabetical order: Audience.fm uses data from existing music services to help bands and marketers reach their desired audience. For example, if a band was making a tour stop in San Francisco, Audience.fm could identify the band’s biggest fans, and they could offer free or discounted tickets. Boxbee is a storage startup that delivers boxes to its customers. You fill the boxes with whatever you want to store, then Boxee picks up them up. It won the best new startup prize at this year’s Launch conference. Chasm.io is a content marketing network, where influencers and brands share content that they want to see promoted. Rather than getting paid for sharing sponsored content, it’s more of a quid pro quo system, where influencers are rewarded for successful sharing with points that they can redeem to share content of their own. DroneDeploy has built software for commercial drone operators (just to reemphasize — commercial drone operators, not military ones). The founders are former Googlers with machine learning PhDs from Cambridge and Edinburgh. We covered the company here . Fieldwire is a mobile task management system designed for workers who are out in the field. For example, it could be used by a team of construction workers while they’re on a construction site. HumanAPI aims to build an API for accessing all the data that’s being gathered on various health devices, sensors, and services. So instead of figuring out how to work with dozens of different devices, a medical provider could just pull data from HumanAPI. Iterable is an email marketing startup founded former Google and Twitter engineers. Customers can test different emails and also personalize the messages to each user without any coding. Pogoseat integrates with existing ticketing solutions and apps, allowing them to offer seat upgrades. Partners already include Ticketmaster, the Golden State Warriors, and other NBA teams. Roobiq aims to build a layer of voice commands and natural language processing on top of existing CRM systems, so a salesperson who’s out taking meetings could update their CRM from their phone without slowing down to type. SensorTower has built a marketing platform for mobile app developers, allowing those developers to track and improve their rankings on different search keywords. TheShelf is a collaboration platform where fashion brands can interact with fashion bloggers. There are already 1,500 bloggers on the platform. TrulyWireless has built an enterprise phone system that’s cheaper than traditional systems and runs entirely on smartphones. Interested investors can find the AngelList profile of each startup here .

Adly Raises $2M More As...

Adly , a startup that connects advertisers with celebrities willing to post promoted messages on social networks, recently raised $2 million in additional funding. The new funding came from previous backer GRP Partners and new investor Siemer Ventures . Adly has now raised a total of $7.5 million. The company also launched a new product this week. It’s the first thing you’ll see if you go to the Adly website — a button that says “Match Me Up!” which allows Adly to analyze a business’ existing content and followers, then find publishers who are a good match to “amplify” their content. For example, when I signed in with my personal Twitter account , Adly said it found six celebrity publishers who, collectively, could increase my reach 61x and my engagement 31x. They include a blogger/entrepreneur with 103,000 followers, an analyst with 180,000 followers, and a podcaster with 199,000 followers. (I also tried to analyze TechCrunch’s account, but we have too many followers.) Who are these people? Well, you don’t actually get to find out until you actually start a campaign with Adly. Walter Delph, who became Adly’s CEO a little more than a year ago, said this is part of his larger strategy. One of Adly’s big selling points is the fact that advertisers aren’t just getting access to a lot of eyeballs. By enlisting celebrity endorsers, they’re hopefully prompting lots of conversation and engagement, i.e. reach that’s “earned” rather than paid for. The company’s next step is building more tools to ensure that the conversation and engagement is happening. To that end, Adly has been adding analytics to track the results of each campaign — the full reach of the message, the replies, the shares and the clicks. That dashboard, however, is really about looking back at a campaign (though customers get the data in real time, so they could adjust their spending accordingly). On the other hand, Delph said the celebrity matching tool is all about looking forward — it’s a way to get people started with Adly campaigns. He added that we can expect more features to come that take advantage of the company’s “reams and reams of data.” By the way, even though Adly is known as a celebrity endorsement network, it’s actually broader than that. The company has relationships with 75,000 influencers, and Delph estimated that only about 2,000 of them are celebrities in the traditional sense — “By celebrity, what I mean is, if you walked down the street you would recognize them.” The other 73,000 aren’t at that level, but they have influence that’s valuable to advertisers (at least when it comes to certain topics).

A Vibrator Called Limon

No longer just an oddly flavored potato chip , the Limon is also a new sexy-time vibrator from a startup called Minna . The company is looking for backers for its “couples’ vibrator”, which just so happens to look like a pink lime-lemon hybrid. However, the Limon is no lemon or lime. It’s an ultra-powerful bullet vibrator that is controlled by how hard you squeeze it. That is, the harder you squeeze the lime part of the Limon, the harder the lemon-style tip will vibrate. Minna claims that it’s the strongest vibrator of its type in the world, thanks to the fact that they squeezed a motor made for larger toys into a lime-sized bullet vibrator. Of course, I’m sure the Jimmyjane Form 6 or the Hitachi Magic Wand beg to differ. The Limon also has a customizable memory, meaning that you can record and playback the vibration levels exactly how you did before. Interesting, right? Consider the scenario: Two lovers are chilling with their Limon and one has to go away for a week on some business trip. They can use the Limon the night before, and the lonesome lady will then have a recording of her partner giving her the good stuff. Sexy. Minna Life – Limon Couples Vibrator from BENT LENS Productions on Vimeo . The Limon battery will last anywhere between 90 minutes and three hours, depending on how aggressive you are. It’s waterproof, charges by USB cable and comes in both teal and pink. Of course, we’ll have to conduct a complete review, lest we shamefully leave these claims unverified. But for now, the Limon is looking for backers so that it can be made into a reality. It’s expected to go for $120, but donations start at $25. Want in?