Pinch Media

Pinch
We’ve made an early stage investment in a company called Pinch Media which launched their first tool for iPhone developers today – free analytics for iPhone apps.

My partner Brad, who has joined Pinch’s board, posted our reasons for making this investment on the Union Square Ventures blog today.

#VC & Technology

Comments (Archived):

  1. Bill Davenport

    Congrats on the investment. But I thought you were a BB fan? Personally I’ve stayed with the BB in order to wait till iPhone 2.0. But I think the combo of 3G, better camera, GPS, and Exchange/ActiveSync on this release gives iPhone the edge and outweigh the keyboard issue. High speed mobile web on that screen should be killer. Just my two cents. Will be buying one or more this Summer.

    1. fredwilson

      I am a BB fan. But the iPhone is clearly an important platform and will hopefully lead the rest of the industry in a direction that will make it attractive for Pinch to support other platforms.Fred

  2. hypermark

    Analytics for iPhone developers is a great wedge application in the sense that it is both integral for the developer, not generally a core competency/core differentiator and an area that seems to lend itself to freemium segmentation. Plus, this will be a heavy M&A space.Mark

  3. zachlandes

    There is clearly a need for this kind of technology. I will be interested to see how this one pans out. On a related topic, in my blog, I asked the question of whether or not it is a good thing that the cell phone world shift to a hardware, instead of service, centered model. The main points being, 1. When power is in the hands of the carrier, consumers have more, not less choices.2. When hardware rules, software suffers.There are pluses and minuses, but I guess I’m not convinced I like the trade-offs that consumers are being forced into.

  4. Dan Cornish

    Fred,WIll Pinch send advertising to my users? We are building an enterprise app. Will this service make use of the data which might be viewed as breaking confidentiality between my service and my users? Is this service just useful for consumer apps?

    1. gyardley

      Dan,We haven’t released any advertising products yet, but I can assure you that we’d never send advertising to an application that didn’t want it – if you don’t want to show it, your users won’t see it. And the data we collect is only used in aggregate. I very much hope the service we’re building is useful to all application developers, including those building enterprise applications.Best,Greg YardleyPinch Media

  5. anon

    I think development for iphone is going to be big

  6. Dan Cornish

    Great news Greg. I will sign up! W hope to have something to release by July.