Apple News

Filed under: iPhone

I’ve lately been guessing that Booyah might eventually hook up with Ngmoco, since they’re both iPhone gaming/app companies with somewhat similar goals that could help each other out. But it looks like Booyah doesn’t need any help any more — it’s just raised a whopping $20 million from investors in a new round of funding. Booyah was originally included in the iFund investment, but that contribution pales in comparison to this one, which sets Booyah up as one of the heaviest single-brand hitters in the app market.

Booyah is made up of a few ex-Blizzard developers (we interviewed CEO Keith Lee back at GDC), and the growth of its second app, MyTown, has been amazing — a little while back, they said the app was growing by 100,000 users a week, and they’re aiming to hit 6 million users by the end of the summer (presumably with a new app coming as well, not all inside just MyTown). Their user investment is huge as well — they say that average usage of the app was over an hour a day, and they’re now hitting 8.3 million virtual item impressions a day. Along with selling virtual items, they’re also putting together high-profile partnerships with companies like H&M and The Travel Channel.

And they’ve done all of this while still standing in the shadow of more well-known check-in services like Gowalla and Foursquare. There’s a heck of a lot of activity and potential coming out of Booyah, and with this big chunk of funding, they’re set up to do some more amazing things with their next app. We’ll have to keep an eye on them.

TUAWBooyah raises $20m, aims for 6m users originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 18 May 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Booyah – Unofficial Apple Weblog – MyTown – Foursquare – Keith Lee

Filed under: Apple Financial, Apple

Back during the earnings call a few weeks ago, it was mentioned that Apple has a jaw-dropping almost $40 billion just sitting around in cash. In the chat, we started talking about other companies that might have that much money in the hopper — Google came up, but I don’t think we were able to guess another one. But it turns out Apple isn’t even the most flush company out there, and the name of the first might surprise you: According to this chart on Silicon Alley Insider, Microsoft is currently sitting on just slightly more money than even Apple, with Google and Intel coming close behind; although Apple briefly pulled ahead of MS at the end of 2008, the Redmond Revenue Racers had more cash through most of ’09 than Apple did.

Well how ’bout that. Of course, the current curves are not so favorable to Microsoft (after the Win7 update push slows down a bit) so it may not be long before Apple’s pile grows even bigger. We can probably look for some significant acquisitions from all of these companies very soon — with the rest of the economy down and lots of interesting ideas looking to sell, odds are we’ll see some of this money spent on worthy purchases.

[via Cult of Mac]

TUAWMicrosoft still beats Apple in cash and investments, for now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple – Microsoft – Google – Cult of Mac – Unofficial Apple Weblog