Joe Gebbia shares the story of how Airbnb was founded at The Next Web Conference 2012. Founded in August 2008, the San Francisco-based company is a community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique spaces around the world via the web or mobile phones. It has over 110,000 unique listings available in more than 13,000 cities and 181 countries. Airbnb has raised US$120M from investors such as Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners.
Singapore-based iGlobe Partners has participated in a US$12 million Series-B financing round in Unity Technologies, it was announced yesterday. The company has developed a 3D game development platform and counts Cartoon Network, Electronic Arts, LEGO, Microsoft, and NASA among its users. Read more
Here you can find some interesting startup news from China, not only in its capital, Beijing, but also other startup hubs such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and many more.
Mobile social communication company Bubble Motion has just raised a USD 10M (SGD 12.6M) round of funding led by SingTel Innov8, the communications giant, SingTel Group’s corporate venture capital fund. This round also includes IDA’s Infocomm Investments (IIPL), Sequoia Capital, Palomar Ventures, and NGC. Read more
Sometime back, I was invited by Preetam Rai to attend the launch of Ogywawa, an interesting web service integrating with the mobile phone for users to buy drinks for friends. If this is not interesting, Sunil Coushik, the co-founder of Ogywawa, started the company BubbleMotion (funded by Sequoia Capital and based in Singapore). We managed to get him to come on board to talk about Ogywawa and the challenges ahead for this festive season if you are thinking of gatherings and meetings with friends from clubs to pubs.
Mobile social communication company 
