The news comes at a time when Appia is hitting another notable milestone: its network has passed 500 million mobile consumers worldwide.

 

To give you an idea of their growth, when we covered the launch of their PPD service in April 2011, the company was reporting more than 200 million mobile subscribers. In addition to this 250% growth in terms of network reach, the company also claims to have driven more than 15 million sponsored app installs over the past 12 months, with an average of more than 25 million total app downloads per month, and more than 400 million app downloads since its debut.

 

The new support for Google Play allows developers to now run both Pay Per Download and Pay Per Install campaigns. Plus, it offers advanced reporting which will show campaign activity by platform, device, and geography (country). This allows the developers to really see where their campaign is working and where it isn’t.

 

For more information on Appia, please visit Appia’s website, or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

Mountain View-based Shape Security is announcing this morning that it has raised $6 million in Series A financing, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures. Accel Partner Peter Wagner, Sequoia Limited Partner Guarav Garg, Vodafone CTO Chris Burke, Baseline Ventures, and unnamed executives at LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook also participated in the round.

 

As a result of the new financing, Kleiner Perkins Managing Partner Ted Schlein and Sequoia’s Guarav Garg will be joining the startup’s board of directors.

 

Shape Security is still operating in stealth mode, so it’s keeping its cards close to its chest and not sharing many details, but this much is clear: Its goals are ambitious. Shape CEO Derek Smith said that his startup is looking to change the web security paradigm by shifting costs from defenders to hackers. Generally speaking, companies are forced to rely on identifying and classifying malware and botnets attack signatures that have occurred in the past, with the hopes of easily finding and shutting them down in the future.

 

But sustaining this kind of security requires a lot of human and financial capital, so Shape has developed military-grade technology that doesn’t rely on past attack signatures, and instead forces hackers to “spend more and more to achieve less and less.”

 

For more information on Shape Security, Inc., please visit Shape’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

Baird Venture Partners led the round, making it the fresh face of the group. The other investors have participated in BrightTag's previous rounds and include New World Ventures, TomorrowVentures, EPIC Ventures, I2A and Silicon Valley Bank.

 

New World Ventures, which is based in Chicago, led a $5 million round that BrightTag completed last year. Baird Venture Partners and I2A are also local, though Baird's parent — financial firm Robert W. Baird & Co. — is headquartered in Milwaukee.

 

TomorrowVentures is the investment vehicle of Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. Eric Lunt, BrightTag's chief technology officer, was a co-founder of FeedBurner, a Chicago technology firm that Google acquired in 2007.

 

BrightTag Chief Executive Mike Sands said his company will use the fresh financing to expand in the U.S. and overseas, where it is gaining customers. BrightTag, which recently moved into new offices in River North, plans to boost its staff to 50 from 35 this year, with most of the new hires in technology and sales.

 

For more information on BrightTag, Inc., please visit BrightTag’s website, or read the entire article on the Chicago Tribune.

 

Goldfarb's experience in direct marketing, international business development and operations will help drive growth objectives in the U.S. and around the world, establishing The Fullbridge Program as a must-have credential for those young professionals and recent graduates who seek a meaningful high-end career path. The transformational outcomes of The Fullbridge Program address a critical need expressed by college students, their parents, and prospective employers as well as the blue chip firms that engage Fullbridge to work with incoming new hires.

 

For more information on Fullbridge, Inc., please visit Fullbridge’s website, or read the entire article on MarketWatch.

 

Under its new moniker, Playsino will look to leverage its traction in the tournaments and virtual rewards space and double down on another emerging vertical: social casino games. Ambitiously, Playsino is setting out to build “the world’s largest social gaming casino platform,” and is naming a new CEO to help lead the way. Brock Pierce, who will be the startup’s CEO, is the managing Director of the Clearstone Global Gaming Fund, and a serial entrepreneur, having founded eight companies and acquired 30 more in various capacities.

 

Pierce played an early role in the development of virtual goods, founding Internet Gaming Entertainment (IGE) in 2001 and Zam in 2003. In addition to new leadership, Playsino is also announcing today that it has raised $1.5 million in venture capital as part of an ongoing round. The investment was led by IDM Venture Capital, a Singapore-based venture capital firm, Pacific Capital Group, Siemer Ventures, and a number of angel investors, including Jordan Simons of GCP and Wicks Walker of W4 Ventures. Existing investor Tomorrow Ventures also participated in the round.

 

For more information on Playsino, please visit Playsino’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

The funds will be used to further product development as the company moves towards public availability, currently slated for Q3 2012. The company says the first market being targeted is the Philippines.

 

Beamit CEO Matt Oppenheimer formerly ran Barclays Bank’s mobile banking unit in Kenya, which has given him first-hand experience in both mobile banking and the challenges that come from working in developing markets.

 

“Before starting Beamit, I was living in Nairobi, Kenya where I was running Mobile and Internet Banking Initiatives for Barclay’s Bank Kenya,” explains Oppenheimer. “Many Kenyans received money in an old and antiquated way using a cash-based system on both ends but it was an expensive and a painful customer experience. I knew that there was the opportunity to leverage digital channels, including mobile phones, to improve the lives of our customers, so I returned to the USA in May 2011 to start Beamit.”

 

For more information on Beamit, Inc., please visit Beamit’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.

 

“This opportunity to work at the intersection of media and technology was too good to pass up,” Lissack says. “Also, it’s a hell of a lot more fun working on consumer-facing products than enterprise.”

 

Maker is essentially the Millennial Generation’s answer to traditional Hollywood studios. It offers its content partners development, production, promotion, distribution, sales, and marketing services. This soup to nuts approach has made it home to many top online video stars, including YouTube’s all-time most-subscribed personality Ray William Johnson, Nice Peter’s infamous “Epic Rap Battles of History,” KassemG, The Game Station, and actress/comedian Lisa Donovan a.k.a. LisaNova (also a co-founder).

 

Lissack is actually the third highest profile addition to Maker in recent months, joining former MySpace Music President and new Maker COO Courtney Holt, as well as former Disney Executive and new Maker Chief Programming officer Chris Williams.

 

For more information on Maker Studios, Inc., please visit Maker’s website or read the entire article on PandoDaily.

 

As Xfire’s new CEO, CasSelle brings more than two decades of experience transforming Internet and new media businesses, having served as founder at NetNoir (AOL was primary investor) and PCCW (SEHK: 008), a Hong Kong-based provider of telecommunications services and key executive at Groupon (Nasdaq: GRPN)'s joint venture in China with Tencent (SEHK: 700). In his new role at Xfire, CasSelle will continue to drive the company’s expansion into Asia while maintaining a focus on Xfire’s audience of core gamers.

 

For more information on Xfire Inc., please visit Xfire’s website or read the entire article on Yahoo Finance.

 

Additionally, Legendary simultaneously closed a new $150 million round of debt financing structured and arranged by JPMorgan, Bank of America, Royal Bank of Canada and UBS who all served as co-leads and, Goldman Sachs Lending Partners LLC also participated in the bank financing.

 

Legendary will use the proceeds of these transactions to retire and refinance debt incurred in connection with Legendary's 2010 recapitalization, more than 18 months prior to its scheduled maturity. Plans for the monies also include adding investment and working capital as Legendary readies projects across its filmed entertainment, publishing and television business units.

 

For more information on Legend Pictures, LLC, please visit Legendary’s website or read the entire article on Yahoo News.

 

It’s not a huge surprise that Google Ventures and Eric Schmidt are involved in the financing, as AppStack is Google’s biggest reseller of mobile ads, according to founder Steve Espinosa. What the startup basically does for a $60 monthly fee is provide small to medium-sized businesses with hosted mobile websites in addition to optimized Google mobile AdWords ads for those sites.

 

AppStack, which won “Best Business Model” at this year’s Launch conference, has amassed over 2,500 SMBs on the platform in a little over three months. And the company is on track to generate $1 million a month in revenue by the end of this year, Espinosa tells me.

 

What differentiates AppStack from ready-made mobile site competitors like Duda Mobile is its novel Google mobile ad optimization component, which takes into account AppStack’s granular network data in order to better target customers and campaigns. For example, AppStack has discovered that people who search for the key words “haircut and color” are more likely to call a store for directions than people who search for just “haircut.”

 

For more information on AppStack, please visit AppStack’s website or read the entire article on TechCrunch.