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Update: TechCrunch Ad Hoc Meet-Up In Hong Kong And Shenzhen | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | I’ve been able to finalize the TechCrunch Shenzhen and Hong Kong meet-ups and thought I’d post here for folks who RSVPed and didn’t get an email response. ( ) will be held at 7pm on November 2 at in Central Hong Kong. I may be slightly late – I’m landing at 6:30 and will take the train straight there, but I look forward to seeing you all. Thanks to for setting this up and thanks to our first sponsor, , for supplying some of the booze.
We’ve confirmed the spot for the TC Meet-Up in Hong Kong next week. will be held on Friday, November 4 at 7pm at . Thanks to Michael Michelini for setting things up and I look forward to seeing you there. You can contact me at or OR text me at +16462515666. My week will be fairly packed in both cities but I’ll be around on Thursday during the day in Hong Kong (until I head over the border) and Saturday morning (until I head back to Hong Kong.) If you have a start-up or product you wanted to discuss, please prep a card with some information and a website with images etc. and pass it to me during the meet-ups. I can’t carry much paper. |
Who Will Win The TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Startup Battlefield? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | What’s most amazing about is that our Startup Battlefield format has proved applicable internationally; There’s something universal about giving your all in a pitch to people with money I guess. After watching the seventeen companies take the stage yesterday (and blogging all day), TechCrunch’s John Biggs, Greg Kumparak and I went backstage, exhausted and inspired, to discuss our favorites and who we thought had the best chance of winning. Because startups are serious business, the three of us tried our best to be professional. Unfortunately (or fortunately) a maintenance woman accidentally walking through our set about one minute in put the kibosh on that plan. The resulting hilarity was so good we couldn’t help but post it exactly how it happened. This is how the sausage is made folks. |
Kickstarter: TILT, The Cooling Pad That Matches Your MacBook Pro | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Anyone who has ever used a MacBook Pro can tell you that they can get awfully toasty after a little while. Countless laptop cooling solutions have hit store shelves over the years, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one quite as handsome as the . Designed by Clinton and Spencer Yee, the TILT is a cooling pad designed specifically for use with the unibody Macbook Pros. To their credit, using a TILT with a Macbook Pro looks completely natural thanks to the cooling pad’s slim profile and the faux-aluminum look of the TILT’s polycarbonate body. Setup is both simple and secure — just latch your MBP into place with the TILT’s patent-pending locking mechanism, and plug a cable into your USB port. Easy peasy. There’s a lot to like about the TILT, but my favorite feature is probably the most easily overlooked. Flip the thing over and you’ll find a tiny screw hole that fits a standard tripod mount. The TILT’s locking latch is apparently robust enough to keep the whole package stable and usable even if you lash to the the top of a tripod. It’s a thoughtful if minor addition that’s sure to please videographers and fans of standing desks alike. The Kickstarter project currently has 77 backers, and those looking to get in on the ground floor need only pitch in $45 to score a TILT when they’re released. Be warned though: the brothers Yee have only seen fit to design the TILT for the 15-inch model, so 13 and 17-inch users will have to look elsewhere for their well-designed cooling fix.
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Watch The Last Day Of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 Here! | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | We are kicking off the last day of at 6pm PST. Thanks to Ustream, we’ve embedded the livestream of the event here. Be sure to tune in and don’t forget to follow along by searching for the hashtag on Twitter! The agenda for today is below. Tuesday, November 1st 9:00am – 9:10am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch 9:10am – 9:40am
Fireside chat with Lei Jun (Angel Investor, Co-founder of Xiaomi), with Sarah Lacy 9:40am – 9:50am
Xiaomi Demo 9:50am – 10:15am
Founder Stories with Kevin Systrom (Instagram), with Gang Lu (Editor of TechNode.com) 10:15am – 10:40am
Attack of the Clones: How Some of the Largest Group Buying Companies are Killing Groupon in China: Yinan Du (24quan), and Xing Wang (Meituan), with Bill Bishop 10:40am – 11:00am
BREAK 11:00am – 11:30am
Ecommerce Panel: Ecommerce Finally Takes Off In China, Lu Dong (La Miu), Ye Haifeng (Mbaobao), Fangfang Wu (Greenbox), with Bill Bishop (Digicha) 11:30am – 12:00pm
Why do Westerners Always Fail in China? With Fritz Demopolous (Qunar.com) and Sarah Lacy Startup Battlefield with Richard Robinson 12:00pm – 1:15pm
Final Session Judges:
Peter Fang (Innovation Works)
Steve Ji (Sequoia Capital)
Hurst Lin (DCM)
Hugo Shong (Accel-IDG)
Greg Tseng (Tagged) 1:15pm – 2:30pm
LUNCH 1:45pm – 2:30pm
Lunch-time Startup Marketing Roundtable; experts provide tips for best marketing practices
Hosted by Ogilvy & Mather 2:30pm – 3:00pm
Building the Anti-Zynga: Founder Stories with Phil Libin (Evernote), with Sarah Lacy 3:00pm – 3:30pm
Is the IPO Party Over? The Future of Returns In China: Steve Ji (Sequoia Capital), Rocky Lee (Cadwalader), Hugo Shong (Accel – IDG), Hans Tung (Qiming Ventures), with Sarah Lacy 3:30pm – 3:45pm
BREAK 3:45pm – 4:15pm
Founder Stories with David Li (YY.com) and John Biggs 4:15pm – 4:45pm
ShoeDazzle: Where Chinese Manufacturing Meets Kim Kardashian: Brian Lee (ShoeDazzle), with Sarah Lacy 4:45pm – 5:15pm
Internet Memes and How Everyone is Ruining Content with Ben Huh (Cheezburger) 5:15pm – 5:45pm
Closing Awards Ceremony |
Republic Wireless: An Android-Powered, VoIP/Cellular Hybrid Carrier That’ll Cut Your Phone Bill In Half | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Talk about good timing. Over the weekend, I wrote pleading with Google to please, finally, bring VoIP capabilities to Google Voice — namely, with an app for Android. The app would have some major benefits: it would let you make and receive calls over your home and work Wifi networks whenever they’re available (that means fewer dropped calls at the office, even if you’re deep inside a large building). And whenever you aren’t around Wifi, you could fall back to your carrier minutes. Unfortunately, while Google was actually working on building a VoIP-powered app for Android long ago, it shelved it, likely because it was concerned about infuriating the carriers. But shortly after that post ran, I started hearing some whispers. Turns out I’m not the only one with the idea — there’s another big (albeit less well known) fish that’s about to make a splash. Get ready for , a new mobile phone service from that will be launching on November 8, and could truly be the phone carrier you’ve always wanted. First, a little background. If you’ve placed a call on Twilio, Skype, Google Voice, or one of myriad other services that use VoIP, there’s a very good chance that Bandwidth.com was involved. The company’s extensive VoIP infrastructure handles much of the heavy lifting for these services, and it also offers some of its own products, like , a premium VoIP service for businesses. Which brings us back to , which is the latest of Bandwidth’s own products. The service will essentially be a mobile virtual network operator — in other words it’s an alternative to the likes of Verizon and AT&T. And unlike devices on those carriers, it will switch between VoIP over Wifi and a normal cellular connection, depending on where you are. The product’s homepage was recently updated with a cheeky note promising a “new kind of wireless network” on November 8th. A link at the bottom confirms that it is, indeed, made by Bandwidth.com. The rest of the site is short on details, but we have many more thanks, in part, to a slide deck the company has been showing to its internal beta testers. Here are the basics, some of which are gleaned from the slide deck, others which come from other sources: : GigaOm that the service will be $19 a month, which will include unlimited voice, text, and data. In short, it sounds totally awesome, provided there aren’t any pitfalls we haven’t heard yet. I’ll keep poking around for more details. In the mean time, it’s worth checking out the Republic Wireless site — if you scroll to the right, you’ll find a long photo to likely contains hints as to what to expect come November 8. I’m wondering if the phone shown below (albeit in many pieces) is what the first device on the network will look like. [scribd id=71069267 key=key-g9aiaa7t8ouahm3ko9o mode=list]
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Airbnb Is Thinking About Partnering With Car-Sharing Services | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | , a marketplace that allows people to rent their homes and apartments via the web, is considering entering the car-sharing space. In a survey sent to us by an Airbnb host, the startup is asking hosts if they would rent out their cars along with their residences. As shown in the screenshots below, Airbnb asks if owners allowed a guest to use a car during a stay, and if owners would rent a car to guests if there is insurance provided. The survey also asks hosts whether they would rent a car to a guest that is not renting their home. The survey also asks hosts how concerned they would be about car theft and inconvenience when offering a car sharing service. And Airbnb asked hosts if there are any other items they would rent to guests. A customer survey does not mean Airbnb is launching a car-sharing service any time soon. But it is a logical market for Airbnb to move into. Especially with the the service could be using this to expand to other verticals. Of course, this would be competition for a car rental community (and ) at TechCrunch Disrupt. Or Airbnb could just buy or partner with Getaround. We’ve contacted the company for confirmation. Update: Airbnb says it is thinking about partnering with existing car-sharing services and issued this response: |
Battlefield 3 Sells 5 Million Units In First Week, Becomes EA’s Fastest Selling Title | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Battlefield 3 is here and in a major way. The latest shooter in the long-running franchise hit the interweb and retailers last week and EA that they moved 5 million units within the first week. For anyone that cares, that makes Battlefield 3 the fastest selling title in EA’s 29 year history. And for good reason. EA and DICE conducted a flawless marketing campaign for Battlefield 3. The marketing first targeted those that really care — dedicated gamers — as the game was first revealed this year (read: the game came out in the same year it was announced) in GameInformer magazine. Then the videos hit. EA systematically released gameplay footage of the stunning first level Fault Line. These videos, originally just a couple quick minutes, pieced together the entire first level for the view and perfectly showcased not only the game, but the brand new Frostbite 2 game engine. By the time E3 hit in June, gamers and the press were very familiar with Battlefield 3 where it stole the show partly thanks to playable demos. The marketing ramped up over the summer in preparation for the much-anticipated open beta. Invites first went out to players who bought Medal of Honor: Tier 1 edition and those that pre-ordered Battlefield 3: Limited Edition. But soon, EA opened up two maps for anyone that wanted to try Battlefield 3. And try they did. More than 8 million players during its 12 days. That resulted in 47 billion shots fired and 1.5 billion kills. But despite the extensive testing, EA’s new servers couldn’t hand the opening rush and faltered the first few days. Still, Battlefield 3 is a hit but will its popularity diminish after Modern Warfare 3 launches in the coming days? |
Trouble Hiring? Create A Cult. | Justin Kan | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Everyone knows there’s a war going on today in Silicon Valley: a war for talent. Startups are competing for a limited supply of engineering and product design labor, largely constrained by the failure of the US to invest in STEM education and a terribly restrictive immigration process for work visas. Meanwhile, big companies like Facebook and Google are paying out millions to either retain or rehire engineers through talent acquisitions. This system is under even more pressure from seed funds (Sorry: I’m a part-time partner at , so I’m probably contributing to the problem). Not only do you have to worry about your engineers going to your competition, you have to worry about them getting seeded to run off and start their own company. It’s often hard to compete against the “grass is greener” dream of being a founder, especially when the theoretical upside of doing your own thing is nearly infinite and there are investors ready to write you a convertible note check today. No cap necessary! If you want to attract and retain the best talent, you’re going to have to work hard at it. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned in the past couple months: When our main product was JustinTV, no one wanted to work at our company. Well, that’s a slight exaggeration, but few talented engineers said to themselves “Oh my god! My dream has always been to work at a general live video platform: you guys are the perfect fit!” We hired several talented people, but mostly because we were a YC company, had a few interesting technology scaling challenges and we seemed really cool. When we launched , a community around broadcasting and watching video gaming, everything changed. We started to get a LOT more inbound candidates: it turns out the overlap between programmers and pro-gamers is pretty high. We had a new vision to bring competitive gaming to the masses, and there are many people out there who share that vision and want to be a part of making that world a reality. By communicating a vision that harnesses the passions of a certain group of people, we tapped into a talent pool we wouldn’t otherwise have had access too. If you want a job as a programmer at a social media site, all you have to do is walk down the street in San Francisco waving your front-end engineer resume and you’ll be employed in 30 seconds. The competition to be the best social network, photo sharing platform, event discovery engine, or Facebook for X is fierce… and everyone is losing to Facebook. I remember reading an Elon Musk interview where he claimed that if you were an engineer that wanted to innovate in rocketry or electric cars, there really wasn’t anywhere else to work but Space X or Tesla. Consequently, they attract the top engineering talent in those industries. For every industry, there are some set of talented people who are passionate about innovating and solving the difficult problems. If you’re the company that happens to be innovating and solving difficult problems, then you’re going to end up the the default “Best place to work in X.” My recommendation: pick an industry where that title will be possible to achieve. The buzz over perks, salary and fancy benefits wears off. Every time you give someone a raise or new title, she feels good… for a week. Soon after, it settles in and becomes a new baseline, and worse still it becomes leverage for her to get a higher paying job somewhere else. Instead, focus on providing an environment that builds community within your company. Often heard example: provide company lunches. It isn’t just efficient, but it increases opportunities for serendipitous discussion over meal times and employees will be more likely to become friends. The more friends at a company, the more enjoyable the job and the more you want to stay where you are. My friend Matt Brezina’s company, , creators of postcard sharing app , goes beyond that. The entire company takes week-long workcations in Mexico. They heavily recruit within social circles and when a candidate flies in for an interview they will put him up in an Airbnb in a neighborhood he would be likely to live, and the team will spend the weekend hanging out with him. By building a sense of family, you build lasting connections between your employees that will keep them motivated and around. — Your talented team is the most vital part of any startup. The way to retain the best talent is by having a clear vision, working in an area where you’re the only company and creating a place where people connect with each other. |
And Here It Is: The New Google Reader Revealed | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Today, Google is out its update to Google Reader which features the user interface overhaul, and, more importantly, the new Google+ integration. Now, Google Reader users can “+1” items directly from Google Reader to share it with their friends on Google+. This feature now replaces the “Share” and “Share with Note” options previously present. As , Google has ignored the cries of the niche community of Google Reader sharing enthusiasts (as well as what seems to be ), and has pushed forward in its plans to remove Google Reader’s native sharing features to promote deeper integration with Google+. While the ability to share with Google+ is an obvious important step forward for Google’s social agenda, it will be disappointing change for at least some of the Google Reader community – a community that even went so far as to create a to save the old features. The petition is now pushing 10,000 responses. It didn’t have to be this way. Kevin Fox, who helped design Google Reader back in the day, that Google rebuild Reader’s social sharing feature using the Google Plus API as a foundation. That would have kept existing users happy while also allowing others to broaden their reach through social sharing to Google+. But that didn’t happen. Even the “ ” (from Google Reader’s creators, no less!) didn’t seem to help. Google at least acknowledges that it heard the outcry, saying: We hope you’ll like the new Reader (and Google+) as much as we do, but we understand that some of you may not. Retiring Reader’s sharing features wasn’t a decision that we made lightly, but in the end, it helps us focus on fewer areas, and build an even better experience across all of Google. And if you don’t like it? Well, too bad – this is the future of Google Reader. For those not happy, . #DoNoEvil? “If you do decide to stay,” writes Alan Green , Google wants to hear your feedback. An Android app update will follow, says Google. |
iPhone 4S Battery Life Bugs Got You Down? Try This | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | It hits you when you least expect it. It slips away under a mask of dormant inactivity. And it can ruin your entire day. It’s your iPhone 4S battery life, and it . It’s been 17 days since the iPhone 4S was released — 19 since iOS 5 — and just like the madness that was Antennagate, complaints are churning out left and right. As Erick so clearly pointed out, the iPhone 4S is meant to offer 8 hours of talk time, or “up to 6 hours” of Internet use on 3G. For so many of us — including iPod touch and iPhone-not-4Ses running iOS 5 — that simply isn’t the case. But there may be hope. To start, there are a few possible bugs in iOS 5 that may be sucking an inordinate amount of life out of your battery: a calendar bug and a time zone bug (one of which can be summarily blamed on location services, as can most of the other battery life killers in iOS 5/iPhone 4S). is still somewhat unclear, but has been reported in . Basically, when your calendar app is turned on in the Notifications Center, events are “re-ordering themselves near-constantly,” which sucks the life straight out of the phone. The only fix as of now, unfortunately, seems to be disabling the calendar app within the Notifications center. , however, seems to be solved (although again, by disabling things). Oliver Haslam over at noticed, like many of us, that iOS 5 was sucking his iPhone 4 battery dry. He realized that by going into Settings > Location Services > System Services (all the way at the bottom) > Setting Time Zone, and toggling off the location services, his battery life nearly doubled. According to Haslam, iOS 5 probably has a bug that constantly pings the servers to update location, and thus update time zone settings. in cases of random battery life drainage for no apparent reason. It allows your apps and other services to ping for your location way more often than before, but in many cases it’s totally unnecessary (like TapTap Revenge, for example). Just head into Settings > Location Services and browse through the various apps using the phone’s location. The option to turn it off for some apps but not others is there for a reason; use it. (yep, all the way at the bottom), and disable anything you deem unworthy. Diagnostics & Usage should fall into that category, as it merely sends back information to Apple about the way you use your phone and where. And, any one of the services you turn off can always be turned back on. No harm done. since the Mail app can be set to ping mail servers almost constantly. An easy way to help spare some green bar is to really take a look at your account(s) and what you need out of them. If most of your emails tend to be about daily deals or new book releases, do you really need them pushed immediately to your phone? Axe push if you can, and if your accounts don’t support it anyway, play with your update timings and try to find the right balance between being in the loop and being able to use your phone. , but I wouldn’t kill her for it. Siri is one of the iPhone 4S’s best features, and other sacrifices can be made to save her. : turn off Wifi and Bluetooth, turn down screen brightness, and keep the phone out of the sun and/or heat. Oh, and if you have such crappy service that you’re not really able to use your phone much anyway, you might as well just switch it to Airplane mode. It’ll stop the phone from working so hard to connect and maintain that connection, and should last you much longer once you’re in a place you can actually use it. The truth is there isn’t some quick fix or magical solution to this problem. It’s a question of priorities. Which apps, which notifications, which location services are worth a speedier death for your iPhone? In the end, it’s your decision. At least until Apple rolls out an update to iOS 5 and squashes a few of these issues. |
Gemvara Aqhires Former Zappos/Gilt UX Guru Brian Kalma | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | What do you do when you have more than a billion potential product combinations on your site? You hire a user experience (UX) guru. , a jewelry e-commerce site that lets consumers custom-design their own jewelry, just acquired , a one-man startup founded by , who will now be in charge of the customer experience team at Gemvara. Kalma previously headed up UX design at both Zappos (as one of its first employees) and Gilt Groupe. Kalma will tackle the challenge of helping customers narrow down a billion choices down to something they will actually buy. Gemvara uses no photographs. All of its images are virtual inventory (computer generated renderings), since customers can mix and match gemstones and metals to create their own rings, necklaces, and earrings. The Boston-based company is , on track to triple its revenues this year from “several million last year,” CEO Matt Lauzon tells me. (Boston, apparently, is this week). While this was very much an acqhire (the acquisition price was not revealed), Snipwits will continue to exists a sa stand-alone product and parts of it may become integrated into Gemvara. Snipwits is a peer-to-peer learning platform. Getting gem-browsing customers to teach each other about different kinds of gems and rare metals could be one way to get them more comfortable about parting with $840 for a ring they never get to touch before it arrives in the mail. |
Urban Airship’s Strategic Partnership With SimpleGeo Turns Into An Acquisition | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | Back in November of 2009, former Digg Chief Architect Joe Stump and Social Thing founder Matt Galligan first publicly unveiled their new startup, , which was slated to become the new infrastructure for location-based services. They called it the “Amazon Web Services” for location, offering products that make it easy for developers to build location-enabled web and mobile apps, including storage, context, API features, and polymaps. Less than a year later, in March 2010, SimpleGeo was closing in on a terabyte of geodata stored, had grown their staff to 13, and . A year later, the startup initiated their “grand unveiling”, which revealed what they’d been focused on over the last year, : A hosted database that allows developers to store and retrieve location data. And since it was hosted, it allowed developers to outsource their infrastructural issues issues and was distributed using Cassandra, so there’s no single point of failure. But, then in August, , deciding to take some time off to do his own thing as well as become a West coast advisor to the TechStars incubator and launch , which asks founders to give 1 percent of their earnings to charity in the case of a liquidity event. Well, SimpleGeo now has that opportunity, as has been acquired by for approximately $3.5 million. In July, the two companies formed a strategic partnership which was intended to, put simply, provide better ways for developers to offer location-aware push notifications in their applications. Geo-targeted notifications were expected to be a big source of revenue for both startups, but it seems that it just made more sense for the companies to move forward as one rather than as two separate entities. SimpleGeo has raised $10 million in outside investment since 2009, with its first angel seed round including quite a few big names like Ron Conway, Kevin Rose, Chris Sacca, Timothy Ferriss, Shawn Fanning, and Gary Vaynerchuk. Urban Airship, which was founded at about the same time as SimpleGeo, has from the Foundry Group and True Ventures to make it easier for mobile app developers to offer push notifications. As Mike points out, this is indeed a “soft landing” for SimpleGeo and most of the proposed cash will likely go towards paying off the last round of investors. It seems a low exit for a startup that was once very promising, especially as it is being led by current CEO and serial entrepreneur Jay Adelson. It also remains to be seen what Urban Airship will be doing with that terabyte-plus of data SimpleGeo has in stock. SimpleGeo has — as . Scott Kveton, the CEO of Urban Airship, will remain the Big Kahuna, and Jay Adelson, Matt Galligan, and Joe Stump will join as advisors. Urban Airship, Kveton tells me, has seen revenue grow 600 percent in 2011, has a team of 38, which will now become 51. The teams will be meeting this week to discuss plans for the future and finalize the acquisition. But Kveton said that Urban Airship, as a Portland-based company, is excited to establish a presence in the Bay Area. And with the businesses bearing so much resemblance, it was a “natural extension” for Urban Airship. Kveton declined to comment on numbers, but all signs point towards $3.5 million being, at least, in the ballpark. |
VC Dollars Rise 84 Percent In China, As They Slide In Europe | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | As is abundantly clear from all the entrepreneurial activity on display at TechCrunch , China is growing as a startup center. In the third quarter of 2011, $1.3 billion in venture capital poured into China, up 84 percent, according to . At the same time, VC dollars slid 12 percent in Europe to almost exactly the same amount: 951 million Euros or $1.3 billion. (For comparison, U.S. VC dollars rose 29 percent to in the third quarter). Are we at a crossroads where more venture capital will end up in China than in Europe? One quarter’s data is not enough to draw any conclusions, but if this pattern continues we could see China supplant Europe in terms of total capital available to startups. The median deal size is already bigger: $11.7 million in China versus $2.8 million in Europe. VentureSource tracked 89 deals in China last quarter, and 219 in Europe. In terms of potential exits, China is still booming as well, There were 29 Chinese startups which IPOed last quarter, raising a total of $4.4 billion |
TCTV: A Fireside Chat With Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | The Mighty Eagle himself sits down with us at Disrupt BJ and talks about Rovio’s plans for the future, Rovio’s desire to become more than a games company, and why the Birds won’t end up like Pac-Man. |
The Entire $1.65B Acquisition Of YouTube Took A Week, Was Negotiated At Denny’s | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | In an interview at today, YouTube co-founder reminisced about selling his company to Google. “Was there any way you could not have sold?” Sarah Lacy asked? Hindsight is 20/20 Chen replied. Chen revealed that the entire $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition was completed in one week’s time. Chen met with executives from both Google and Yahoo, including Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, at a Denny’s in Palo Alto, “We didn’t want to meet at offices, so we were like, ‘Where’s a place that none of us would go?’” Chen said he ordered the Mozzarella sticks. The deal was set to be announced at the closing of markets on Monday, so Chen and company were up until the last-minute completing paperwork at Wilson Sosini’s offices. In a historic moment for TechCrunch, our own Mike Arrington ended up Chen said that his meeting with then Google CEO was instrumental in the decision to go with Google. Schmidt basically promised the founders unlimited resources in return for an “infinite amount of happy users” and an “infinite amount” of good content; “Here are all the resources that Google has around the world, and you can pick and choose” “For twelve months, whatever we wanted to do, we were allowed to do,” Chen said “It was tremendous courage from Eric, allowing this group of 20 year-olds to run the company.” |
TC Disrupt Beijing: A Fireside Chat With Tencent CEO Pony Ma | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing kicked off with a bang this morning: , founder, Executive Director, Chairman, and CEO of Chinese giant Tencent took the stage for a fireside chat with our own Sarah Lacy. Tencent, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is one of the world’s biggest Internet giants. The company sees $3 billion in revenue and $1 billion in profit annually, with services that include web portals, games, social networks, and IM. According to Forbes, Ma is the 9th richest person in China. The interview spanned many topics, ranging from Tencent’s past to the role China will have as the web continues to grow and mature. And it was notable for another reason: this was the first time Ma agreed to be interviewed on stage by a foreign journalist. You’ll find my takeaways below, and a recording of the whole interview above — it’s well worth watching. Lacy began the interview by asking about the criticisms that Chinese entrepreneurs are “just copycats” — a notion she thinks is overstated (Google wasn’t the first search engine), but that is widely held nonetheless. Ma said that it’s a difficult topic, explaining that China has a relatively short Internet history compared to the US and Silicon Valley (he notes that Europe is in a similar situation). And he said other sectors have seen a similar mimicry process. But in the long term, he doesn’t see it as a continuing trend — if you don’t have innovative applications and innovative cultures, and you aren’t attracting talent, then the industry won’t be sustained. In other words, it sounds like he believes we’ll see more creativity coming out of China over time. The conversation then turned to Tencent. The company, while immensely succesful, has also developed a reputation for squashing competition — Lacy pointed out that there’s a saying among Chinese startups: “Life, Death, or Tencent”. Ma didn’t do much to dispute this idea (he mentioned that Microsoft had a similar reputation in the past). But he said that the company is working hard to change things by embracing a more open platform approach, following in the footsteps of Facebook’s application platform and Apple’s App Store. Ma explains that there’s no way for one company to produce all the applications that its users want, and that the demands of these customers are specialized. Which is why creating ecosystems where many developers and applications can thrive is beneficial. Lacy then asked about the lack of success many Silicon Valley-based startups have when they try venturing into China, pointing out some of the stumbles Groupon has had along the way. Ma declined to criticize Groupon too much (he said they’re a Tencent partner), but he said that in general it’s proven that the Chinese market is vastly different compared to America and elsewhere. Sometimes companies don’t have particularly solid integrations and try to get started too quickly. Another issue he points out: in the US, when a company starts to get traction, they often have a 3-6 month headstart compared to the competition. In China, as soon as someone launches a site, hundreds of other people have started working on the same idea within the hour. “You need to have extraordinary wisdom to be the forerunner,” he said. Some other key takeaways: Asked what keeps him up at night, Ma recounted the myriad ways Internet companies can fail — everything from server outages to data loss. But in the long term, it’s the fact that the company is always looking to make sure it’s on top of the next great business opportunity. Ma said that, as he set about building Tencent, he learned from many of the articles written in and about Silicon Valley. “I think Steve Jobs is my idol”, he said, explaining that the integration of technical products and art is something everyone should aspire to. He added, “wealth won’t give you satisfaction, creating a good product that’s well received by users is what matters most.” |
Android Winning In China, But The Market Is “Going Through A Chaotic Phase” | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | At the Android Fever panel here at Disrupt Beijing, Wang Hua of Innovation Works, , Director of Android Global Partnerships at Google, and David Chao of DCM. These folks are bullish on Android, noting that there are currently 40 million android phones in country and that China is number three in terms of development kit downloads. “The Android market in China is going through a chaotic phase,” said David Chao. He, like Hua and Lagerling, is betting that Android is going to win the day in China, especially in the lower end of the market. “Nokia is dying much faster than we expected,” said Hua. In the lower-price space, Android is quickly replacing feature phones in the entry-level segment of the phone market. Lagerling said the that one of the goals of making android open source was to encourage new entrants and that a number of Chinese OEMs who used to depend on custom OSes and stacks, are switching to android. “There’s a focus on customizing, unifying experiences,” said Lagerling. Chao mentioned his $100 million fund for app development in China. “Nobody is making money on Android software in China,” he said. “But over the next two or three years it’s going to be one of the most lucrative properties.” “I used to work for Apple and I understand the shortcomings of Apple,” said Chao. “I believe Android is the MS DOS/windows vs. Mac in the 80s and the 90s. Android surpasses the iPhone and iOS and for the ecosystem to thrive it’s all about the numbers.” “The Chinese market is much more chaotic, more open. It favors the Android ecosystem much more,” he said. He believes Android tablets will become the go-to gaming consoles in the country. And what about the Google Android Marketplace? As it stands there are almost 70 independent marketplaces right now. Google is working to change that, but refused to say when. In a third swing at getting a direct answer to the question, moderator Greg Kumparak asked “Do you think the Android Market to launch in China? And if so, when will that happen?” Lagerling balked. “I can’t predict the future,” he said. [slideshow] |
Kai-Fu Lee On Why China Isn’t Ready For The Next Mark Zuckerberg | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | founder and former Googler took the stage at TC Disrupt Beijing today with to talk about the startup ecosystem in China. InnovationWorks is a Chinese incubator focusing on early stage internet companies in China – interest in startups is exploding, and InnovationWorks saw 7,000 resumes in response to open applications for its first batch, “There’s nothing that matches the Chinese entrepreneurs desire for success,” he said. Lee sees the future of InnovationWorks, which started out as sort of a Chinese IdeaLab, as a combination Andreessen Horowitz/Y Combinator. The incubator is moving increasingly towards VC, with a new fund totaling almost $200 million dollars. Lee wants to put a Chinese spin on Andreesen’s strategy of completing everything in house, ”We take advantage of a high valuation and low cost of building. Disadvantage is that we don’t have ten years to wait. “ Lee said that InnovationWorks currently looks for three characteristics in its Chinese startup founders in addition to the prerequisites of being hardworking, tec, a) doing their homework b) previous experience — real skillset and value add in spaces c) the characteristics of being a leader On the “previous experience” point, Lacy brought up that Lee’s belief that China isn’t ready for an entrepreneur with a disruptive, “lightbulb on top of head” type idea — a Zukerberg, Andreeseen or even a Jerry Yang or Steve Chen. “Chinese society is not as supportive of failures,” Lee explained, and because of that “in the current state it is very difficult to find that 20 year old dropout with the novel idea.” Lee did not preclude the idea of a Chinese Mark Zuckerberg (a.k.a. a young kid that changes the world) but implied that Tencent founder Pony Ma was an exception and instead Innovation Works was banking on people like Renren’s Jack Shiu, Vincent Tang and Jeff Ma, “all experienced people.” “We think our hit rate is very high,” he said “and we need to spend that time with people who will increase that hit rate.” |
With Angry Birds Merchandise, Rovio’s Peter Vesterbacka Plans To Out Pirate The Pirates | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | As proven by the massive success of the Angry Birds plush line, the world has a hungry for real-world Angry Birds wares. No where is that more apparent than Beijing, where the halls of countless toy shops and electronics stores are filled foot to ceiling with sundry Bird-themed goods, from sweatshirts and jeans to candy and balloons. The catch? Rovio didn’t authorize any of it. Where others may see a problem, Mobile’s Mighty Eagle (read: CMO) Peter Versterbacka sees opportunity. He roams these aforementioned shops in search of unauthorized goods — but not to complain or throw around legal orders. He’s there to find the best unofficial Angry Birds items… so he can copy them. Vesterbacka joined our own John Biggs on stage at Disrupt Beijing for a fireside chat, bringing a trio of Angry Birds balloons along. When questioned about the balloons, Peter responded: “I’m going to take these balloons back and tell our guys to make these.” This act of out pirating the pirates, it seems, is something of a habit for Peter. And why shouldn’t he do it? The intellectual property being utilized is, after all, his company’s. If someone’s looking to make a quick buck off of his team’s work and creativity, there’s really no reason the tables shouldn’t be turned. [slideshow] |
Live from Beijing – Watch TechCrunch Disrupt! | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 10 | 30 |
First up, Tencent CEO Pony Ma, and then YouTube’s Steve Chen. |
New MobiUs Browser For iOS Makes Mobile Web Apps Act More Like Native Apps | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | Mobile development firm is launching a new HTML5-powered browser for iOS on Monday which will bring additional capabilities typically found only in native apps to the mobile Web. The , as it’s being called, works both as a standalone browser alternative or in conjunction with Apple’s mobile Safari, similar to the way browser extensions work on the desktop Web. Although HTML5 can already tap into some of a smartphone’s sensors, like the GPS and accelerometer, for example, appMobi’s MobiUs Web App Browser will go beyond HTML5’s current capabilities to provide access the smartphone’s camera, the ability to scan QR codes and barcodes, support for augmented reality, accelerated graphics, the ability to lock the rotation of the device and more. The browser integrates two full sets of APIs from both appMobi and from PhoneGap (1.0) to give the Web apps a native look-and-feel, plus the ability to access all the hardware features of the smartphone. Like native apps, the mobile Web apps can work online or off, deliver push notifications and offer in-app purchasing capabilities. AppMobi’s DirectCanvas game acceleration technology is included as well, for optimized HTML5 gaming. Users won’t have to switch from using Safari as their primary Web browser in order to take advantage of the new functionality, says appMobi. Instead, when a user encounters a webpage that requires the capabilities provided by MobiUs, the Web app in question will prompt you to install the MobiUs iOS app from iTunes. The experience is similar to how online users are prompted to install the Flash plugin to watch online videos. Except in this case, the additional software is not a browser plugin – it’s an app. After the initial installation, any future Web apps requiring MobiUs’ technology will be able to seamlessly switch over from Safari to MobiUs as need be, without any user intervention. Mobile Web app developers will be able to configure various settings affecting the user experience during the transition, including the customization of the splash screen. And when MobiUs launches, it will be in full-screen mode. AppMobi knows that, eventually, HTML5 will be able to do what its MobiUs browser is doing today, but those APIs won’t be added to the standard for years. Other solutions, like the HTML5 capabilities chipmaker , operate lower in the stack than what appMobi offers, and will be provided to OEMs to be sold on new handsets. That’s another way to solve the problem, but on a slower cycle than what appMobi is now doing. The company had a few developers testing the technology pre-launch, but unfortunately, we couldn’t go hands-on. It remains to be seen how truly seamless the experience is for the end user or how “native-like” the apps really feel. However, the launch is interesting in terms of its potential to bring that long sought after “write once, run anywhere” ability to Web developers. Now they can write for the desktop, Facebook, iOS and soon, Android, using HTML5, without having to sacrifice so much functionality when porting the codebase to mobile. The MobiUs app is available . The Android version will arrive early next year. |
Disrupt Beijing Kicks Off with Tencent CEO Pony Ma. Watch the Livestream Here! | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | After many sleepless months, our first ever will be starting at 9 am Beijing time/6 pm PST. Even if you didn’t make the trip over, you can still catch all the excitement on our livestream thanks to Tudou and Ustream. In case you can’t watch the whole event, check out Alexia and my top picks for today in the video above. We are kicking off the first day of TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing 2011 at 6pm PST. We’ve embedded the livestream of the event below. You can also keep up with the action by searching for the #disruptbj hashtag on Twitter. Stay tuned and be sure to tune in! The full agenda for today is below. 9:00am -9:10am
Opening Remarks by TechCrunch 9:10am – 9:40am
Fireside chat with Pony Ma (Tencent), with Sarah Lacy 9:40am – 10:10am
Fireside chat with Peter Vesterbacka (Rovio), with John Biggs 10:10am – 10:40am
Why Silicon Valley Needs China To Survive: Hosain Rahman (Jawbone), with Sarah Lacy 10:40am – 11:00am
BREAK 11:00am – 11:40am
Fireside chat with Kai-Fu Lee (Innovation Works), with Sarah Lacy 11:40am – 12:10pm
Android Fever: Why China Is Betting So Heavily on Android: Wang Hua (Innovation Works), John Lagerling (Google), David Chao (DCM), with Greg Kumparak 12:10pm – 12:40pm
Founder Stories with Steve Chen (YouTube), with Sarah Lacy 12:40pm – 1:50pm
LUNCH 1:50pm – 2:20pm
Fireside chat with Niklas Zennström (Atomico, Co-founder of Skype), with Sarah Lacy Startup Battlefield with Richard Robinson 2:20pm – 3:20pm
Session One Judges:
John Lagerling (Google)
Rocky Lee (Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP)
Wallace Pai (Motorola Mobility)
Hans Tung (Qiming Ventures) 3:20pm – 3:30pm
BREAK 3:30pm – 4:30pm
Session Two with Duncan Clark (DBA) Judges:
Robin Chan (GX Groupe)
Elton Jiang (NLVC)
Derek Ling (Tianji.com)
Benjamin Joffe (+8*) 4:30pm – 4:45pm
BREAK 4:45pm – 5:45pm
Session Three with Duncan Clark (DBA) Judges:
Chris Evdemon (Innovations Works)
Sebastian Kübler (Taishan Angel Fund)
Matthew Prince (CloudFlare)
Si Shen (Papaya Mobile) |
Up Close With Two Disrupt BJ Hackathon Winners | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | Although most of the Hackathon Hackers escaped before we could interview them, we corralled two interesting groups backstage and asked them about their products and experience at TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing. First we had Tianji Connect, an interface to the local LinkedIn clone that allows you to look up anyone on the Internet and see their experience and skills. Next, we talked to Shareware, a project that could potentially fixed TechCrunch in China. This projected replaces blocked social networks with their local equivalents, cutting out Twitter where Wiebo is only supported, for example. In all, these were some amazing projects and I’m glad the teams took the task seriously and the brought loads of skill and experience to the table. Impressive stuff. |
Weekly Watch Round-Up | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | It is hard to pull of a good futuristic dive watch design as more traditional looks tend to be more timeless. Clerc however has done well with their Hydroscaph collection. Check out a review of the watch here. For another (and much more expensive) take on futuristic divers we thought the had a suitably vague but fun sounding name. It has a mechanical depth gauge and some other neat features. Did we mention it is about 55mm wide on the wrist? Those looking a clean looking . It has a retro-inspired look but a modern size that is easy to read and very well designed. The ultimate is personalization is getting a watch with custom art engraved on the mechanical movement surface. High-end brands like Blancpain offer services such as this. To showcase their work they are making special versions of the for certain cities around the world. New English brand Schofield releases their first watch in honor of a lighthouse. With a design that is both modern, minimalist, and masculine the is an attractive first offering. For a lot of people mechanical watches with open dials and skeletonized movements are the ultimate in horological fascination. Probably the best simple high-end Skeletonized watch for next year will be the record holding (for thinness) . [slideshow] |
Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If I Were Starting A Company Now, I Would Have Stayed In Boston | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | Yesterday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at Y Combinator’s in a candid interview with Y Combinator Partner You can watch the full interview and it starts around the 43 minute mark, and lasts for roughly 40 minutes. If you have some time to spare, it’s well worth a look. Zuck revealed a number of fascinating things about entrepreneurship, founding Facebook, and product development, but one of the more interesting (and surprising points) came at the end of the interview when Livingston asked him what he would do different if he could go back in time. Zuck replied: He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. “There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.” “There’s this culture in the Valley of starting a company before they know what they want to do. You decided you want to start a company, but you don’t know what you are passionate about yet…you need to do stuff you are passionate about. The companies that work are the ones that people really care about and have a vision for the world so do something you like.” Zuckerberg also talked about the early days, when he was at Harvard, thinking of the idea for what would become Facebook. , he explained When Zuck moved out to Silicon Valley in his sophomore summer, he thought that maybe one day he and his team would develop a startup, but didn’t think Facebook was that startup. “It was not like in the movie, there was no drinking. We all just lived in a house, iterated, kept going,” he said candidly. “It wasn’t until we got our first office in Palo Alto where things became more like a company. We never went into this wanting to build a company.” But a company is the best vehicle in the world to align a lot of people to achieve a mission, he said. Livingston asked Zuckerberg about how he pitched Facebook when he first pitched the business to Battery Ventures in Boston in 2004. “I barely remember that but I agree that it happened,” he recalled. “I don’t think I said anything and Eduardo said some things but it was fine because I didn’t want to do that anyway.” Zuckerberg said that Eduardo early on said that Facebook needed to raise money, and he was skeptical of VCs. “That was one of the reasons that we accepted from , because he could relate to us on a founder level,” he explained, referring to Thiel co-founding his own companies, including PayPal. Zuck said that in Silicon Valley, everyone was talking about flipping companies and he found that to be unattractive. Another potential investor Zuck really was passionate about was Donald Graham, CEO and chairman of The Washington Post. He explained that he came close to taking money from Graham, but Graham actually encouraged Zuckerberg to take money from Jim Breyer at Accel Partners. Zuck saw this as the “best of both worlds.” He also gave startup founders advice how to guide on how to handle acquisition offers, and gave interesting insight on how he look at Facebook’s own acquisition offers. he said. It’s not clear that you should turn down offers, he explained but you should take it if it means the company can go in the direction you want it to go on. “If you go through some big corporate change, it’s just not going to be the same,” Zuck said.”If we sold to Yahoo, they would have done something different, if you want to continue your vision of the company, then don’t sell because there’s inevitably going to be some change.” One of the key parts of operations is a ‘growth team,’ which is a centralized team Facebook set up to help its users stay connected an engaged. For example, Zuck said that through this team, the company found that members need to have at least ten friends to have enough content in the news feed to come back to the site. So Facebook reengineered the whole flow of the site when someone signs in to focus on having people find other people to connect with, so that people can get connected with friends (and meet that minimum) right away. Zuckerberg said that the company has exported this idea to another startups, including Dropbox. “Once you have a product that you are happy with, you the need to centralize things to continue growth.” When Livingston asked what surprised Zuck most in the history of building Facebook, he replied honestly, “most things were surprising.” “I don’t pretend that I had any idea that I was doing. I always felt like we were so close to dying in the first years, and were afraid that Google was about to build our product and we were going to be screwed, and look how long it took for them to build our product,” he said laughing, referring to Google’s newly launched social product Google+. “You are going to make a ton of mistakes, you don’t get judged by that.” As for what Facebook’s future is, Zuck shed some light on his vision for the network. “I think the story that we look back will be the apps and things that are built on top of Facebook. The past five years have been about being connecting people and the next five to ten years are about what are all the things that can be built now that these connections are in place.” And I’ll leave you with one of Zuck’s more memorable quotes from the talk, “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…In a world that changing really quickly, the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” |
Weekly Wrist Watch Round Up | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 8 | Those looking for a high-end made timepiece with looks and practicality should check out . They have fancy high-accuracy Swiss quartz movements accurate to within a few seconds per a year. Mechanical watches by comparison are accurate to within a few seconds per day. Special made as a limited edition for the Japanese market to celebrate their F1 races, all teched-out and done up in the colors of the Japanese flag. Remember slide-rules? It is OK, neither do we – though this watch does. which reminds us of how much we need digital calculation in our lives. Very few mechanical watches have complications that indicate the temperature. Ball watches is among the few that do and they have released two retro looking . Typically modern watch brand MB&F takes a step and imagines what it would have been like to produce a futuristic timepiece 100 years ago. The result in the lovely and intriguing almost steampunk . Certainly an oddity, but still fun – this from Israel plays with the idea of having a see-through dial that isn’t really see though. Ah yes, over engineering at its finest. About $80,000 and a lot of gumption will get you this that uses a very complex mechanism for mechanically cycling through its various dial functions. We want one of these. You can enter to win a brand new . [slideshow] |
We Came, We Saw, We Hacked #TCDisruptBJ | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 30 | What fuels Silicon Valley is a never-ending desire to solve problems, make things work and get things done, no matter what the obstacles. If anything is testament to the universality of this spirit, it is the emergence of a fervent strain of entrepreneurship in China — most recently evidenced by the 46 hacker teams that into their computers at the While the hackathon has passed and the winners have been announced, the aftermath of those 24 hours will be felt for much longer. Click through the slideshow below and watch the interview of former employee and current founder Tian Li above for what hath TC Disrupt China wrought, already. [slideshow] |
null | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 31 | null |
Gillmor Gang 10.8.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 8 | The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — take the first tentative steps in the post-Jobs era. As a showman, technologist, and business leader, he was unparalleled. But as a teacher, he gave us something even more valuable than ideas, products, and opportunity. Fired, he rebuilt. Dying, he lived even larger. Gone, he connected us to the power within ourselves. @dsearls, @dannysullivan, @scobleizer, @@kevinmarks, @jtaschek, @stevegillmor |
You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 10 | 8 | “I hate almost all software. It’s unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer … you don’t understand how fucked the whole thing is,” Ryan Dahl, the much- (and rightly-) lauded creator of . “It really, truly, is all crap. And it’s so much worse than anybody realizes,” Zack Morris, who to add, “The industry has backed itself into a corner and can’t even see that the way forward requires thinking outside the box.” Investors and managers may not realize it, but the coders who do their work are in a collective state of angry ferment. Complaints about the state of modern software engineering multiply everywhere I look. , the state-of-the-art project-management methodology, is under attack: “I can only hope that when Scrum goes down it doesn’t take the whole Agile movement with it,” Robert Martin, complaining about elitism and the rise of meaningless ‘Scrum Master’ certifications. Pawel Brodzinski software certifications from a different angle: “It seems certification evaluates people independently and is objective. Unfortunately it’s also pretty much useless.” Even test-driven development — the notion that a development team’s automated tests are even more important than the actual software they write, and should be written first — is being criticized. Once this belief seemed almost sacrosanct (although in my experience most of the industry paid it only lip service.) Now, though, Pieter Hintjens , “The more you test software, the worse it will be.” Peter Sargeant : “The whole concept of Test-Driven Development is hocus, and embracing it as your philosophy, criminal.” None of the above are wrong. Morris’s exegesis of the problematic process of iOS app development is spot on: beneath the slick exterior of Apple’s environment and language lie squirming Lovecraftian horrors from the 1980s like preprocessor macros, forests of cryptic compile/link flags and paths, scheme/project/target confusion, etc etc etc. Android development is better in some ways, but its recommended environment is ugly, clunky and sometimes only barely comprehensible. Certifications seem to me (with some exceptions) mostly to be red flags that warn: “This person thinks that merely learning a new toolset is a significant feat that deserves recognition.” Test strategies need to be customized for the problem, not the other way around. But I’m struck by how the anger and frustration cited above is so out-of-sync with my own experience. I’ve been writing code for money for twenty years, with a six-year interregnum from 2003 to 2009, because I got a book deal and spent that time full-time. When I got back into programming two years ago, I was struck by how much things had gotten. Ham-handed languages like Perl and C++ have been largely replaced by elegant and , at least among startups. solves many problems before they even begin to grate. Instead of futzing around with server configurations and dealing with trainwrecks like , anyone can easily deploy and run code on the or clouds — for free! Take . (Please.) People have been criticizing it since its birth; witness Jamie Zawinski’s fourteen-year-old of the language. But also note that he praises it for being much better than its predecessors, and that Heroku this week support for its most likely successor, . The rants above aren’t wrong; the state of the art isn’t great; but it’s important to recognize that it’s a lot better than it used to be. Some improvements, like test-driven development and agile methodologies, need further iteration. Others simply aren’t cost-effective to deploy right now. Consider wind and solar power. They’re the future of energy generation, everyone knows that, but because we’ve already sunk into fossil-fuel infrastructure, we can’t switch over to them immediately. Instead we’ll have to suffer through a bumpy, painful, decades-long transition — but at least we’re on a path to get there eventually. Similarly, , , and other innovations may be the future of software, but it’s delusional to think that we can or should move to their wholesale adoption tomorrow. Today’s software is generally a mess, yes, but the important thing is that we’re moving in the right direction. Let’s remember that — and remember that until we get there, the best will remain the enemy of the good. : Dana Robinson, (slightly repurposed) |
Daily Crunch: Blimp | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 10 | 8 | Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets:
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Help Scout Draws Funding To Bring Affordable Email Collaboration And Support To Startups | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 8 | After graduating from TechStars Boston this spring, , a startup that makes web-based productivity tools with an emphasis on customer service, launched a new product called that aims to bring quality email collaboration and support to small businesses. The problem the startup hopes to address, as Brightwurks Co-founder and CEO Nick Francis sees it, is that, while the majority of companies feel that great customer service is mission critical to their business, on the Web, most still fail to interact with customers effectively. Part of the problem is that current solutions for customer relations offer a user experience that is automated and inherently impersonal. Furthermore, in the customer service market, there is a growing gap, Francis says, between email and help desks. Solutions like Zendesk and Assistly (the latter is now part of Salesforce) end up being too wide-ranging and complex for small businesses to integrate. It doesn’t make sense for a 10-person startup or online retailer to use a help desk, for example, when the team just wants an easy way to scale their email support. As well-known players like Salesforce and NetSuite target the enterprise, Help Scout intends to cut down on the noise and focus on the one thing every online business needs: Email support. “Focusing on one area allows us to do that one thing really well, and be versatile there, as opposed to offering 50 different features that just lead to a complicated and mediocre overall user experience”, the Brightwurks CEO said. Thus, Help Scout is going for a help desk-CRM hybrid (that will soon sync with the CRM solution your business is already running), designed for any team of two or more that needs to share an email inbox, keep everyone on the same page, and offer personalized, high-quality customer support. According to Francis, 27 percent of emails sent by customers to online retailers are answered incorrectly, and most often that’s a result of the agent being unfamiliar with the customer. To solve this problem of familiarity, Help Scout allows agents to see every conversation that’s ever taken place with the customer, along with a public profile of that customer compiled from data on social networks, etc. (Similar to what Rapportive does for teams.) Emails from Help Scout look like one-on-one email threads, as they actually come from a real person with a personalized signature — not like the correspondence one would receive from a help desk. What’s more, to the customer, Help Scout is invisible; they don’t have to log in to an account or go through a complicated process to talk with a real person. As to how it works? Help Scout is compatible with any email address, the startup simply gives a business a unique email alias, to which it can forward copies of all incoming emails. This gets a copy into Help Scout, and businesses can then set up their own outgoing server or use Help Scout’s for sending replies. Typically, setup takes about 4 minutes, Francis says, which gives it a bit of a leg up over the big players in the space, which often requires weeks of customization. For all businesses, great customer service is essential, but because it can be time-consuming and complicated to manage, there’s a prevailing sense that the ROI is marginal. They instead turn to web-based and cloud services to automate and make CRM easier to deal with, in hopes of seeing more of a return on the time and energy invested. Across the board, companies are investing more and more in online customer service (Salesforce acquired Assistly for $50 million in September), and there’s an abundance of opportunity in this market. As a testament to this fact, Help Scout is announcing that it has raised $435,000 in seed funding from a full roster of 17 angels and VCs, including Dharmesh Shah, David Cancel, Dave Balter, Zelkova Ventures, TechStars, and more. Help Scout launched in May and has signed up over 500 companies so far. It’s still early, but part of the reason the service is attracting 100 companies per month is that its affordable at $10/month for individuals and $20/month for businesses. For startups and small businesses, this pricing makes it an appealing alternative to the bigs. For more on Help Scout, . |
“For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe” | Jon Evans | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | I feel uncomfortably like a prophet. In , and again , I wrote about the prospect of UAVs used as weapons by terrorists; yesterday a man was arrested who “planned to attack the Pentagon using ‘small drone airplanes’ filled with explosives and guided by GPS.” In August I wrote about omnipresent mobile phones turning the world into a ; today’s NYT has an about ordinary Koreans paid by the government to snitch on scofflaws with photo evidence. Last year I wrote a for about the crucial importance of online pseudonymity for bloggers reporting on the Mexican drug war, now that the traditional media there has been into ; yesterday the headless corpse of one such journalist, a woman named Marisol Macias Castaneda, was warning people not to write about the drug cartels on social media sites. These are not three separate subjects. Cheap and/or ubiquitous cameras and facial recognition make surveillance ever more omnipresent; the dangers and uncertainties of other new technologies, like hobbyist UAVs, lead to calls for even greater scrutiny; and eventually online anonymity/pseudonymity will be the only kind there is. That isn’t entirely a bad thing. It’s because of crowdsourced surveillance that New York police lieutenant Anthony Bologna after apparently gratuitously pepper-spraying protestors. But it means the ability to remain pseudonymous online will only become more and more important in the years to come. Do the services that connect people online seem to realize this? Sadly, the answer mostly ranges between “No” and “Hell, no.” Twitter is the only major social network that doesn’t have a real-names policy, and the with a history of going to bat for its users’ privacy. But while the online journalists in Mexico who dare to report on its brutal drug wars are after their real identities are connected to their online bylines, while Syrians are because of their Facebook accounts, Vic Gundotra has idiotically Google Plus’s real-name policy to “wearing a shirt to a restaurant,” and both Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg’s sister Randi have real identities to be attached to all online activity. There’s really not much one can do about that level of monstrous cluelessness. There are downsides to online pseudonymity, yes, but those are outweighed by the advantages. Unfortunately, the kind of people who head major online services live such incredibly cosseted existences that most of them seem basically incapable of understanding — or caring — that “even though have nothing to hide and live your life like an open book, pseudonyms are really important to people who do not lead the cozy existence that you do,” to legendary hacker Jamie Zawinski. (To say nothing of the fact that defining what a real name even is a than most Westerners appreciate.) So I’m not hopeful that Google Plus’s Gundotra or Bradley Horowitz, much less Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Sandberg, will see the light and change their policies anytime soon. And that’s bad news for everyone. True, nobody to use either service, but it’s incredibly disingenuous to claim that they aren’t increasingly important. Social media are , these days, and they’re how both truth and falsehood spread when the traditional media fail. The sign next to Castaneda’s headless body was addressed, “For Those Who Don’t Want To Believe.” That’s a pretty good description of anyone who thinks that online pseudonymity is no big deal. “liryon”, |
One Up: Gamers Help Scientists Solve Molecular Puzzle That Could Lead To AIDS Vaccine | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | So, this isn’t exactly breaking news, but it’s so awesome that it’s worth sharing again in case you missed it. HIV/AIDS and scientists have been working diligently since the virus was discovered in 1981 to find a cure. While a cure still eludes researchers, several protease inhibitors have been developed to slow its progress. But last week, HIV/AIDS research took a huge leap forward, . Yes, gamers. About three years ago, a team of researchers at the University of Washington created a game called to allow gamers to contribute to scientific research by playing with the shape and structure of proteins. Why proteins? Well, there are more than 100,000 kinds of protein in the human body, and understanding the structure and makeup of these proteins is key to understanding how they work and as well as to designing drugs that target them. As proteins are found in the majority of diseases we suffer from, they are also key to developing cures, and so FoldIt enables gamers to design new proteins and fold known proteins into their most workable forms in an effort to contribute to disease prevention. According to FoldIt’s website, “Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins”. And last week, FoldIt became more than just a cool idea, or an exercise for scientifically-minded gamers. Scientists have been attempting to decipher a protein called “retroviral protease” for over 15 years, as the protease is one of the key proteins that allows HIV to multiply and replicate itself in living cells. Using FoldIt, gamers were able to identify the structure of the protein — within a matter of 10 days. With the structure of retroviral protease unlocked, scientists can now begin taking the necessary steps to build a drug that could significantly slow the speed at which HIV develops. The findings were initially published in a Nature article, . “Following the failure of a wide range of attempts to solve the crystal structure of M-PMV retroviral protease by molecular replacement, we challenged players of the protein folding game Foldit to produce accurate models of the protein”, the University of Washington research team said in its findings. “Remarkably, Foldit players were able to generate models of sufficient quality for successful molecular replacement and subsequent structure determination. The refined structure provides new insights for the design of antiretroviral drugs”. , the gamers describe the way in which they were able to work together cooperatively to solve a puzzle that has confounded scientists for more than a decade. And what’s so cool is that, while some of the most important progress in the game was made by those with biomedical academic backgrounds, the majority of active players playing with FoldIt did not have this kind of scientific background. Many of them were just average gamers like you and me. “The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels”, Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington told MSNBC. “My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases”. What a remarkable win for the non-shallow end of gamification. We hear so much about how game layers are being added to consumer tech products to encourage engagement and interaction with products and apps, but with FoldIt, we have a real example of how gamification can help solve some of the trickiest of scientific problems and help make the world a better place. Way to go, gamers. |
Chamath Palihapitiya To Airbnb CEO: “If You Want Liquidity… Make It Available To Everyone” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | Should founders take money off the table in later venture rounds, and if so under what circumstances? An extraordinary private email to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky from investor and former Facebook exec which was to Kara Swisher at brings this question into sharp focus once again. The email is reprinted below, you should read it in it’s entirety. Palihapitiya doesn’t take issue so much with the founders collecting $21 million of the for themselves, but rather with the way that they did it. “My basic principle on this stuff is that if you want liquidity, that’s fine, but you should make it available to everyone. Otherwise, no one should get it,” he writes. They took it as a straight dividend which, notes Palihapitiya, “allows you guys to take money out of the business and not dilute yourself.” Airbnb isn’t the first hot startup to take money off the table during a big venture round. Groupon insiders famously took from a $950 million round back in December, 2010, before things started getting . And half of Twitter’s recent went specifically to buy out employees shares. But there is a difference between how Airbnb and Groupon founders rewarded themselves and how Twitter did it. Twitter spread the money more evenly to employees and early shareholders instead of funneling almost all of it to the founders. A new class of investors is stepping in to provide liquidity to founders, employees, and early shareholders. With the rise of what I call mezzanine venture capital (DST-type deals that function as a bridge between late stage growth deals and an IPO) it has become increasingly common for startup founders and employees to cash out before an IPO or acquisition. In general this is a good thing as it rewards those who take the risk to build successful startups, but if the rewards are not spread equitably it can backfire. Palihapitiya warns, “If you are viewed as self-dealing and shady, it will only hurt your long term prospects.” Read his entire email below and weigh in with your thoughts in comments: From: Chamath Palihapitiya
Date: Sat, 1 Oct 2011 11:16:05 -0700
To: Brian Chesky
Subject: Airbnb financing…
Brian,
Cc Marc, Reid, my deal team Thanks again for giving me the chance to participate in your latest financing. I had a chance to review the docs at length yesterday and I wanted to follow up as, quite honestly, I’ve never seen a deal like this over ~60 investments I’ve done and I’m pretty concerned. I’m all for getting the best valuation you can, minimizing dilution and maximizing control. We did this brilliantly at Facebook…all of our financings (except our first $$$ from Peter Thiel) were done not out of necessity but opportunity. As such, our investors had virtually no control and it resulted in a much better outcome. As we’ve discussed, I generally don’t believe investors add much to a success story and so minimizing their impact is a great strategy when you are onto something that is working. This said, while several of these concepts are reflected in the current deal, there is one big thing that I am fundamentally against and violates my principles and will prevent me from participating in your round. When I saw that you guys were taking $31M out of the company, I didn’t think much of it as I just assumed it would entirely be via a secondary sale. But as I understand the deal, it seems that you are doing only $9.6M in secondary and $22.5M as a dividend to common (of which $21M goes to you and your co-founders). I am really uncomfortable with this and don’t think its in the spirit of building a good, long term business. Effectively, it is a strategy that allows you guys to take money out of the business and not dilute yourself — I’m not sure why this is such a big deal when you guys are almost 90% vested and the financing is at $1.2B where your dilution is marginal. Further, it excludes many of the employees that probably have helped you and your co–founders get the company to this place as most of these folks probably don’t have any stock but have unexercised stock options and thus won’t get a dividend.
My basic principle on this stuff is that if you want liquidity, that’s fine, but you should make it available to everyone. Otherwise, no one should get it. Your current deal is the farthest away from this principle that I’ve seen in a while…this strategy has been done once before — at Groupon. We can see how “well” they are doing and how short term the investor community is now viewing their motives. I really think you can do better than this…and that you are better than this. Separately, when you look at successful tech companies, it seems that dividends are an approach used by cash rich operations to distribute excess earnings — in fact, the most successful, cash rich tech company in the world, Apple, hasn’t issued a dividend and they have more than $75B in cash! Again, while I think Airbnb will be a good company, this is nowhere near the truth now — you guys still need to scale and build this thing for the future. I really think you are onto something but I would implore you to not take the easy way out. Treat your employees the same as you’d treat yourself. Do things that you will be proud of and can defend to anyone including your Board, employees, prospective hires etc. In such a competitive hiring market, you are competing with not just your obvious competitors, but also any successful tech company who is also looking for great talent. A principle that treats your employees as well as you’d treat yourself is a huge strategy for differentiation, retention and long term happiness of the exact types of people you will need to be successful. In contrast, if you are viewed as self-dealing and shady, it will only hurt your long term prospects… In summary, I’m passing on this financing because I strongly disagree with what’s going on. I’m not sure who advocated this approach but I did mention this to Reid [Hoffman, another Airbnb investor via Greylock Partners] last night and he was of a similar mind to myself and surprised this was the approach being taken. If you want some good advice — I would ask that you consider pinging him about different ways to think about going about the liquidity portion. If you change your mind on how to close this financing, let me know and I’d love to reconsider. Otherwise, good luck and lets keep in touch. Take care, Chamath
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Infographic compares Facebook in US and UK – Burberry beats Starbucks | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | BLiNQ Media and created creating the below infographic comparing Facebook in the U.S. with Facebook in the U.K. It seems we’re more obsessed with Facebook in the UK than in it’s cournty of origin (49% penetration against the US 48%). |
Fly Or Die: The Compex Sport Elite | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | With Halloween around the corner, what better way to celebrate than to watch us animate my desiccated, lifeless limbs with jolts of fiery electricity? In this episode of Fly or Die, Erick and I look at the . It zaps muscles to improve fitness, recovery, and general strength and it can, in a pinch, stand in for a massage. It also looks wildly freaky when turned on. At $849 it’s a pretty hard sell but I found that it did help my shin splints and, when set to strength training mode, I noticed a definite improvement in tone. I figured the TC audience tries to stay in shape and had I had this device back when I was training for a marathon (long story), I wonder how much better my recovery would have been? Regardless, it looks hilarious when turned up to about 50. Erick doesn’t agree with my assessment but does love watching me jump around like frog muscles sprinkled with salt. |
Buy This Movie Or Legally Download It For Free: Your Call | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | , an award-winning documentary about our new digital culture, earlier this year. It is playing at film festivals and you can buy it on , , and other digital pay sites. If you don’t want to pay for it, you can now via a torrent for free. This free option was essential to the filmmakers. As says in the film, ideas that are free spread faster. The movie examines the impact of today’s technology advances on our culture and the digital artists, musicians, and filmmakers who create it. In the film, Godin says “there has never been a better time to be an artist.” Taking a completely different view, technology pessimist, , host of TechCrunch TV’s “ “, says “we may well be on the verge of a new dark age… where the creative world is destroyed.” Watching parts of the movie, I thought I was watching an Apple promotional video, showing the power of what a Mac can do. The music and videos that can be produced on computers, almost exclusively Apple computers in this film, is simply amazing. As the musician Moby says, because of software, “now any kid … in about 5 minutes can do what took 6 months or years, 20 years ago.” But that doesn’t mean it’s any good. See . Moby adds “If everyone is a musician and everyone is making mediocre music, eventually the world is just covered with mediocracy.” As the filmmakers say, “the digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent of people in an unprecedented way, unleashing unlimited creative opportunities.” But, Keen questions whether a young Hitchcock or Scorsese would make it today, as they “slap up their early stuff on Facebook, on YouTube, it would get lost in the ocean of garbage.” The movie also addresses the troubling dichotomy that the same technology artists use to create their work also allows for easy pirating and destroys existing business models. The documentary doesn’t provide any easy answers, but it raises important questions about the impact to our culture. You can find the free download options at , including an interactive Adobe Air version with deleted scenes and additional and longer interview clips. For the standard downloads, you get a .torrent file and use a free software like to get the movie file. So far, there have been 4,000 downloads. Why have both a free version (with even more interactive content) and paid version at the same time, with links just inches away from each other? When the filmmakers signed their distribution deal, they say it was always their intention to eventually give the film away for free online. The goal was never to make money, but instead make a film people would share and think about. Andrew Keen was interviewed for the film, but he got to turn the cameras around on the filmmakers in Austin. Here’s the interview Keen did with the Swedish co-directors David Dworsky and Victor Kohler, at SXSW:
Here’s a movie trailer:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFTllIk3skg] |
European Pirates declare war on cloners and copycats – Arrrr! (TCTV) | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | I recently attended the in Cologne, Germany. Held in a sort of art-house scrapyard where artists sculpt out of old cars, and ravers dance into the night, the venue itself was a fitting place for what many began to feel was a sort of re-birth of the tech startup scene in Europe. Suddenly we all realised what was happening: Europeans are as mad as hell that they’ve been branded cloners and ‘copycats’, and they’re not going to take it any more. In fact, the event featured the literal burning of a effigy of a startup clone. This was a gathering of Pirates, the kind of startup Pirates who ascribed to the philosophy only last year. The one-day event had a mix of panels and speakers, but the best thing about it was everyone’s attitude. Shouting an “Arrr!” when a speaker made a good point was positively encouraged. Going on at the same time was the brand new Advance Conference. There I chaired ( ) and the in Europe. I think we all came away with the feeling that Europe is ready to let loose its innovation now. We’ve had it with the cloners, as evidenced by the recent declaration by 6wunderkinder, . At the end of the evening at the Pirate Summit a new manifesto was read out, talking about the “copycat guy” that European founders just won’t want to tolerate any more, reproduced below. The CopyCat Guy was then burnt. This was based on the “Nubbel” tradition in Cologne where a ‘Nubbel’ figure is put above the door to a bar and a priest shows up and raises uncomfortable questions for all the sins that have been committed. Everybody blames the ‘Nubbel’ and a short trial is held with the priest as the judge, then they burn it. Yep, it was a different kind of event all right. Here’s a video wrap I put together which give you a flavour of the event. Arrrrrrr!!!! II. Funeral Speech on ‘ze copycat guy‘ “Dear moarners and moarning pirates. A tragedy has happened. While we slackers, hackers and posers were contemplating about the ‘next big thing’ throughout the day here in the freestate of Odonia, a long well-known coeval of our times, ‘ze copycat guy’, suddenly and rather unexpected, has passed away. He leaves us with us an enormous mass of now deeply depressed business administration graduates, esp. from WHU, who now will have to find other ways to make a living than researching Paul Graham’s latest startup investments. They will be accompanied in their grief by dozens of Berlin Inkubators, who now just can’t clone a silicon valley startup in 18 months and sell it back to the idea-owner any more – they might in the end finally have to start thinking and coding themselves. As we all know, many sins seem to have occured in the last ten years. Looking for somebody to hold responsible for those sins, I ask you, fellow comrades, for advice: 1. Who is responsible for those approximately 17.000 groupon clones in Berlin Mitte?
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy!’ 2. Who forgot to delete the word ‘facebook’ in the StudiVZ code?
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy! 3. Who made our brave, bold and risk-friendly investor’s giving their money only to bmodels that already had a proof-of-concept in the US?
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy! 4. Who killed John F. Kennedy?
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy! 5. Who forgot to invite the nerds to the party with the great girls?
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy! 6. Who is responsible for we didn’t have our multi-billion exit yet???
Crowd: ‘Ze copycat guy! If these sins all were the copycat guy’s turn,there only one thing is to rule: let him burn! Dear Moarners – you are forgiven. Amen.” text by
Moritz Delbrück, European Pirate Summit 2011 Cologne
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European Pirates Declare War On Cloners. Arrrrrr!! (TCTV) | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | I recently attended the in Cologne, Germany. Held in a sort of art-house scrapyard where artists sculpt out of old cars, and ravers dance into the night, the venue itself was a fitting place for what many began to feel was a sort of re-birth of the tech startup scene in Europe. Suddenly we all realised what was happening: Europeans are as mad as hell that they’ve been branded cloners and ‘copycats’, and they’re not going to take it any more. In fact, the event featured the literal burning of a effigy of a startup clone. This was a gathering of Pirates, the kind of startup Pirates who ascribed to the philosophy only last year. |
Daily Crunch: Hunter | Bryce Durbin | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | Here are some of yesterday’s Gadgets stories:
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The9 Launches Mobile Gaming Platform & SDK To Give Developers Access To The Chinese Market | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | , the sizable NASDAQ-listed Chinese game publisher and developer, has made quite a few investments in the U.S. gaming market over the last year. ( .) As part of its international strategy, The9 has been full-steam ahead on creating better ways for international gaming companies and developers to make inroads into the Chinese mobile and social gaming markets, which have been traditionally difficult areas for non-Chinese developers to access effectively (and profitably). In May, The9 teamed up with Intel and Time Warner , for example. Earlier this year, it also created a $100 million fund (called Fund9) to focus on investments in Chinese gaming companies, as well as those overseas. with Aurora Feint to allow it to use the company’s OpenFeint mobile social gaming network software (which operates on both iOS and Android) in China. , in partnership with OpenFeint, to bring select games from international Android developers into the Chinese market. Today, The9 is adding the remaining piece, again utilizing its OpenFeint licensing agreement and sizable gaming fund — but this time with iOS. The company today announced that it is releasing the an iOS software development kit (SDK) for its mobile and social gaming platform, called The9 Game Zone ( which is, of course, powered by OpenFeint). This is of interest for the very reason that Game Zone on iOS enables international developers to “implement social features in online and mobile games” that are tailor-made for “China’s 800 million-strong gaming market”, said The9 VP of Mobile Business Chris Shen. When it comes to entering the mobile gaming market in China, U.S. and international developers are met with a number of obstacles, including localization requirements and fragmentation. Compared to that of the U.S. and the Western World, said Shen, the app market in China is complicated, as there are more than 100 app stores in operation, and each of the big Chinese OEMs along with tons of third parties are trying to enter the market. So there’s the issue of accessing these many app stores to guarantee large-scale distribution, localization of foreign apps for the Chinese market, monetization for that specific market, and so on. The advantage then, of The9’s platform and SDK is that the company already partners with more than 30 of the largest Chinese app stores (which according to the team make up about 90 percent of the country’s apps), including the app stores launched by the three major Chinese telecom carriers. So, by using the9 Game Zone on iOS, mobile game developers can revamp their standalone mobile games into interactive, social games optimized for the Chinese market. And soon, developers will also be able to cross-promote their games on those 30 app stores, monetize with virtual goods and currency, take advantage of display advertising, etc. The9 is really attempting to provide international developers looking to access a Chinese audience with a one-stop solution. Because the majority of China’s app stores have different requirements for game packaging, The9 helps developers to localize and package their games, publishing them to these various channels, giving them access to a much larger section of the market than they’d be able to access otherwise. The9 has also developed a consulting service for game developers, which is free to use, that will provide them with the various social and interactive integrations, as well as assisting them in translating China’s in-app microtransactional models into their games. Chinese gamers predominantly avoid paying for games, Shen said, which makes it essential for game developers to monetize through in-game ad solutions, virtual currency, etc., which their consulting service will help developers undertake more effectively. The9 (and the distribution channels, i.e. app stores) then apply a revenue sharing model, taking a cut of the game’s revenues, which will be around 50 percent. Not exactly favorable, but with access to the enormous mobile/social audience in China, likely worth the price of entry. Thanks to The9’s partnership with OpenFeint, developers using Game Zone on iOS will be able to access the company’s gaming features like leaderboards, achievements, challenges, forums, and chat — and integrate them into their Chinese versions. The9 also allows integration with Chinese social networking sites, like Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter), Tencent, and Renren. There are currently over 120 game developers and publishers collaborating with The9, publishing more than 500 games in China. Game Zone is available both on iOS and Android, both of which offer features from OpenFeint. Considering the platform enables developers around the world to cut through the fragmented Chinese mobile gaming market, accessing the second largest app market in the world, and is a one-stop shop for American developers looking to get free packaging and localization services for the Chinese market, this is a pretty sweet solution. , and let us know what you think. |
Binksty Wants To Give Students A One-Stop Shop To Manage And Pay Off Their College Loans (Invites) | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | I don’t want to be hyperbolic or hysterical (even though I’d like to be), but the student loan situation in this country is awful. The number of students who default on their student loans continues to increase, and has . from colleges and universities borrow money — with an average of more than $23,000 of debt. (And one-in-ten graduate with more than $40K in debt.) , Peter Thiel (the Paypal co-founder and well-known hedge fund manager and venture capitalist) predicted that the next big bubble the country faces is not in tech, housing, or finance — but higher education. Whether or not one agrees, there’s really no doubt that a new focus on the costs of education and the growing burden of student debt (and loan default) is long overdue. This is the thinking employed by Brendon McQueen, who is today launching in private beta a web platform called that aims to give students a comprehensive one-stop shop to manage loans, pay off debt, as well as educate them on the best ways to save money. For those familiar with the current web landscape, there are some other awesome companies tackling this problem, like , Simpletuition, , and PeerTransfer, all of which are tackling specific aspects of the student loan life span — namely, finding and supplying loans and making international education payments easier. Binksty, on the other hand, wants to go one step further, aiming to facilitate the student loan process from filling out FAFSA paperwork and finding the right loan to organizing and paying off said loans. According to McQueen, the startup is currently in discussions with lenders (who, as mentioned above, are facing the highest default rates in years) to create a mutually beneficial solution that will help curb defaults by offering students a simple way to view their loans and find an alternatives to default, ramp up sales via the startup’s loan marketplace, and cut back on the lender’s customer service costs by way of Binksty’s automation process. McQueen, who himself graduated from Columbia with 12 loans and over $100k in debt, knows that the goal isn’t easy to achieve, but the value proposition is enormous: “What we’re doing is saving students and graduates time and money while working with the lenders to streamline the entire process so that everybody wins”, he says. Thus, the startup’s revenue streams are part of the very process of saving students money, since they’re already burdened with debt. For example, loan aggregation on Binksty is entirely free, while features like prepared tax documents will come at a small price. (Though McQueen assured me that the costs of these features will remain competitive — and below — with that of its competitors.) The startup is also putting together an algorithm that will help students better manage a series of loans, so that, for example, when they enter their loan information, the platform will tell them that loan 1, 2, and 5 are qualified for repayment. Or that consolidation is an option and that if they do choose to consolidate, Binksty will tell them what the plusses and minuses are of doing so. Pretty cool. An all-in-one service that lets students gather their (multiple) loans online, analyze their debt, set reminders for payment, etc., and realize financial goals while saving money obviously has great appeal for students and graduates alike, many of whom continue paying off debt through their twenties. If Binksty can bring on a wide array of lenders, its value will be two-fold. The startup currently counts Ophir Tanz, Co-Founder and CEO of GumGum, as well as John Weir (CEO Planning for College), and David Harmon (President and CEO of Education Loan Servicing Corporation) as members of its advisory board. Oh, and we’ve also heard word that the startup has raised the interest of a high-powered director at one of Silicon Valley’s most well-known companies. We can’t say who, but let’s just say, the startup is attracting some great advising talent. For readers interested in receiving early access to Binksty, and enter this code: De.1r5ieZ. And for a multimedia introduction, check out the video below: http://vimeo.com/25419409 |
Swype, The Maker Of Speedy Virtual Keyboards, To Be Acquired By Nuance For $100 Million+ | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | has been blowing minds back in September of 2008. For those unfamiliar, Swype is the maker of an awesome app that allows users of touchscreen mobile devices to type messages with one swipe of the finger or stylus motion across the screen keyboard. The alternative (and patented) input method has proven to be super speedy, allowing data entry at over 40 words per minute, and has swept across Android devices. Today, , we’ve learned that Swype has been acquired by (the makers of voice recognition technology) for over $100 million. The deal was , which pegged the numbers to be between $100 and $150 million. The official announcement is expected to be made tomorrow. Nuance, which has a market cap of about $6.7 billion, has been on an acquisition roll of late, snatching up , at the same time announcing the close of its $157 million acquisition of software developer Equitrac. The speech recognition giant has also been in the news of late, as it is has been . What’s more, while Apple did not confirm, is also a large part of the technology behind Siri, which will be native on all iPhone 4Ses. As MG wrote yesterday, “even if Apple wanted and tried to come up with their own voice technology backend for Siri, they would have a hard time doing so without infringing on some of Nuance’s patents. Patents which Nuance CEO Paul Ricci is very well known to enforce to their maximum extent”. What’s more, it will be interesting to see how Nuance resolves the fact that it now owns both Swype and T9, another predictive text app. And, as Mike wrote, it just so happens that T9 “competes directly with Swype” and was also founded by Cliff Kushler, the very same guy who co-founded Swype. Will the two products join forces, or is T9 headed for the trash heap? I’m sure Nuance will have more information on that tomorrow, or in the coming weeks. Swype had raised just under $14 million in outside investment since 2008 and just closed its series C back in July. The acquisition is a big win for the startup, its investors (Samsung Ventures, Nokia Growth Partners, Benaroya Capital, DoCoMo Capital, Ignition Partners, and more), and for Nuance. With Swype’s app appearing on (what will soon be) 100 million devices, and smartphone and touchscreen adoption skyrocketing, these technologies will no doubt be a big part of our mobile future. : The exact amount paid for Swype, according to an , is $102.5 million. |
The Entire World Commemorates Steve Jobs | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | The thing about Steve Jobs is that conceptually he never really said anything that Henry David Thoreau (or Emerson or Nietzsche) hadn’t already said about being self-reliant, but he managed to package it up real nicely for modern mainstream consumption. His ingenious way of making something as complex as transcendentalist philosophy accessible to the masses mirrored the way he brought personal computing to the masses, by making it seem accessible to all. The world would be a drastically different place if each of us woke up thinking, “Would I be filing an Excel spreadsheet today — or doing whatever sundry mundane task — if today were the last day of my life?” As I’ve , I would probably be on a beach somewhere instead of writing this or any post. In his famous , Jobs explained that having the answer be “No” for too long was a signal to change course; The only problem is that most of us don’t know immediately whether that answer is “Yes” or “No.” The best we can come up with is a weak, “I don’t know.” But even if we don’t quit our jobs or move away or start a startup or take a vacation immediately after reading his words, Steve Jobs challenged us to experiment with something that seems more interesting than our current monotony, experiment within the boundaries of our daily lives to see if there’s more there. Because of that influence, many of us decided to pay our respects a day after his death, vicariously being a part of Steve Job’s life and contributing to his legacy — whether it was by changing our Twitter avatar to a rainbow Apple, or writing a personal eulogy on our blog, answering a Quora question, setting up (!) or using humor to process the loss (my friend’s Macbook crashed, and she told the Genius at the Apple store that the computer probably got sick because its Dad had died). Here is a collection of my favorite Steve Jobs-related homages, both online and off … : “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.” This Instagram by Apple designer , of Jobs walking away from work. This post by Gizmodo’s Brian Lam. These photobooth pics posted by Push Pop Press co-founder . This unaired video of Steve Jobs narrating that “Think Different” commercial. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA&feature=player_embedded The Post It Note shrines at various Apple Stores (pic ). The Onion’s Steven Levy’s
Cnet’s Wired’s xkcd’s (which happens to be one of the few xkcd’s I’ve ever liked). s redesign. Apple’s own minimalist/maximalist tribute.
John Gruber’s . . Mint Digital’s parts. This iOS spellcheck photo meme. Walt Mossberg: The Google homepage (the “Steve Jobs” links back to Apple’s homepage). The Fix’s The Woz remembers his partner and friend. Oh Amazon homepage, you’re . Jobs’ neighbor Lisen Stromberg: Architect Sir Norman Foster: Designer Jonathan Mak’s Steve Jobs/Apple “10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash – Now we have no Jobs, no Hope and no Cash.” /via . Kids writing on the sidewalk outside Job’s house/via Steve and Bill /via . Portrait of Jobs made out of Mac Products /via . “Turtleneck Section of Heaven” /via . George Lucas: “The magic of Steve was that while others simply accepted the status quo, he saw the true potential in everything he touched and never compromised on that vision. He leaves behind an incredible family and a legacy that will continue to speak to people for years to come.” Flag at Microsoft at half staff via . |
David Kirkpatrick: Steve Jobs Was Energetic, Confident, And Uncompromising | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | It’s been a sad twenty-four hours. This afternoon, I sat down with longtime technology journalist — who wrote and founded the conference — to talk about Steve Jobs. Kirkpatrick met with Jobs many times throughout his career, and he had some insightful anecdotes to share on how Jobs conducted himself both at NeXT and during Apple’s resurgence over the last decade. |
Mysugr wins TechCrunch Vienna, as the city proves its startups mettle | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 6 |
Until recently Vienna hasn’t generally been known in Europe as a startup hub, but this week has blown that perception out of the water. What appears to be going on is the clear emergence of Vienna as kind of bridge between Eastern and Central Europe on the one hand and the gravitational pull of London and Berlin’s startup ecosystems in Western Europe. The evidence was clear this week, as over 500 people and 50 startups packed into an 18th century ballroom for five days in the combined conference and startup competition billed as . There are plenty of pretenders to that nom du clure, but Vienna has proved an awesome hub for the region and the event is sure to take its place in the panoply of European tech conferences now emerging – and appropriately, a minute’s silence was held today in honour of Steve Jobs. The eventual winner of the startups competition was , a startup which appears to have captured the zeitgeist of mobile, health and social gaming. This Vienna-based startup is developing a mobile health app addresses the roughly 350m people worldwide suffer from diabetes. It’s their view that the prime factor for a successful diabetes therapy is behavioural change and plans to apply games, friends and data to the problem. In a process which filtered down 500 entrants (yes, this just goes to show the explosion of startups coming out of the region) to 50 and to a final 10, the other two finalists in the competition were , a social school network designed specifically for primary schools that automates the management of grades and attendance. It’s killer feature is an analysis of a kid’s performance in school where parents can compare their child’s grades with others. Oh yes. Also a runner up was  , a City Guide GPS application that guides the user through a city with audio cues, so that they don’t have to fiddle with their phones. Users can create photos, videos and audio notes and the app then creates an impressive 3D video that they can share. Users can try PocketGuide for free but then have to pay for additional content. Other startups of note included  , designed to make viewing ads “fun” and therefore sticky (well, we’ll see). is a member-only real-estate marketplace where top market renters find the best apartments in cities. is a sales and productivity app. is for spontaneous purchasing of cds, dvds, video games by snapping pictures. is a mobile phone tracking startup. is quite a slick looking app for something normally kinda boring: RFPs. Nice execution though. is a paid-content aggregator aimed at old world publishers like newspapers. Thanks to for the of a champagne-soaked TechCrunch editor. More photos of the event are , , , , and . |
Scribol Surges To 26 Million Uniques (But You Didn’t Mean To Go There) | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | , a London-based bootstrapped startup, is less than a year old, and there’s a good chance you haven’t heard of it. But it’s already getting a of traffic. As in, 140 million page views and 26 million uniques per month. But many of those users never meant to go there in the first place. Here’s how it works. Head to one of their publisher sites, like Break.com, and you’ll notice a widget beneath the video (or article) you’re viewing. This widget offers a series of thumbnails of related stories — which are pretty standard on content sites these days. But these related links have a catch: when you click on one, instead of being directed to the article you’re expecting, you’ll actually see a page hosted at Scribol.com. This Scribol page will include a large thumbnail for whatever link you just clicked on. Click thumbnail, and you’ll arrive at the article you thought you were clicking on in the first place. Alongside this large thumbnail, you’ll see thumbnails of other content that Scribol thinks you’ll like. In other words, Scribol is inserting an interstitial page, oftentimes when users aren’t expecting it. And why it’s getting so many views. Personally, this sort of thing bugs the hell out of me. None of this is news to 23-year old founder Chris Ingham Brooke, who has heard my complaints before. He says that the company doesn’t view their tactics as misleading — they’re trying to provide users with content that they’ll find interesting and helpful. He points out that some users actually visit Scribol.com directly to find interesting articles when they’re looking for something to read. And many users wind up clicking on multiple thumbnails once they hit the Scribol site. Which sort of explains things, but not really. I still think it’s annoying. But while this tactic might irritate some users, publishers have a big reason to like it: it can drive a lot of traffic back to their sites. Say TechCrunch integrated one of these widgets at the bottom of our articles. Scribol would monitor how many links our readers clicked (not just how many uniques we drove, but also how many articles they eventually clicked on from Scribol.com). For each time our visitors clicked on an article, Scribol would return the favor by driving a different user to TechCrunch. In other words, if you clicked on four articles on Scribol.com, they’d send four new visitors back here. To boost the number of clicks users click on, Scribol shows thumbnails that are related to whatever they were originally reading (so, if you arrived there via TechCrunch, you’d probably see other tech-related articles). Other categories include Comics, Sports, and Humor. Scribol isn’t the only service that offers publishers this sort of traffic boost, but Brooke says that the site differentiates itself by working exclusively with high quality publishers, rather than spam sites. And Brooke says that the service may do other things to add value to users, like providing more engaging features (like voting and comments). To cut back on the annoyance factor, he says publishers may want to start making it more obvious that they’re directing users to a different site — I doubt they’ll do this, though, because it would probably reduce the number of clicks they drive. |
Shawn Fanning And Sean Parker Talk About Airtime And “Smashing People Together” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | The last company and started together was Napster, over a decade ago. Now they are teaming up again to create a new startup called (previously ). The two have completed an $8.3 million series A financing from Founders Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, will.i.am, Scott Braun, and TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington. Fanning will be CEO and Parker will be executive chairman. Parker will be spending more time in California to take an active role in the company, and changing his position at the Founders Fund from Managing director to a general partner. “I had to figure out a way to step back from the venture fund in order to dive full time into this,” he tells me. Parker also has a “quasi-operating role at Spotify,” where he is a board member and helps with everything from product design to negotiating with the music labels and its recent Facebook integration. The third founder is CTO Joey Liaw. The company has about a dozen employees already and is looking for a founding engineer with experience in scaling a high-availability site that can handle a ton of realtime, concurrent users. Inspired by Chatroulette, Airtime will be random, realtime and include a live video chat component. Fanning and Parker are still vague on specifics, but don’t expect it to look too much like Chatroulette. Parker originally helped recruit Fanning from Path, where he was CEO, to at the behest of Yuri Milner, who is now one of Airtime’s investors. “They lacked a clear vision and a management team. Yuri asked me where would you take this thing and who should run it,” says Parker. The collaboration with Chatroulette’s young founder didn’t work out, but it got Fanning and Parker thinking about a larger problem. “With all due respect to Andrey,” says Fanning, “it was just scratching the surface of what it could be—a universal host that is introducing people, smashing people together.” “It was fascinating to watch in the sense that it was not a virally engineered product,” says Parker. “Here you have a product growing through organic word of mouth. It looked like Napster in 1999.” Chatroulette also eliminated the anxiety of meeting new people by randomly pairing users. It ended up being too extreme and attracting a lot of naked dudes, but there it was obviously tapping into something essential. “We are trying to address the problem of what has happened the last 10 years of social media,” says Parker, who was also the founding President of Facebook. “Your social network has become more rigid and constraining.” Airtime, it seems, will be more about meeting new people. “Facebook is about identity, the people you already know,” says Parker. “It has little to do with people you don’t know.” So how will Airtime help you meet new people? Fanning and Parker won’t say. But if I had to guess, I’d bet that it will be around interests. Think about it. If you combine the random smashing together of people that Chatroulette was so good at with an interest graph that matches up people based on topics and activities they care about, you’ve got the beginnings of an online party with Airtime playing the host. The name Airtime, though, suggests that it could also be a platform for personal broadcasting as well. Will these live video chats be one-to-one, group chats or public broadcasts like on , a live video startup that ? Stay tuned. |
Gillmor Gang 10.1.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 1 | Whether the move proves a win or a challenge to Google depends on your perspective about Android. For some (@dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks) it augurs good times for Android. For others (@stevegillmor) it puts significant pressure on Google to minimize the difference between Android open source and Android +. For all of us, it means significant challenge to a number of different strategies and market force pressure to make streaming the new Web OS. @dannysullivan, @jtaschek, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @stevegillmor |
Google’s Own YouTube Channel Confirms Ice Cream Sandwich’s Oct. 11th Debut | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | If you had lingering doubts that Samsung’s upcoming would serve as a launching pad for Ice Cream Sandwich (the next major build of Android), let them be cast away: Google has just gone and confirmed it themselves. Early this morning, the Android Developer YouTube channel (which serves as the official video repository for Google’s ) for the livestream of the October 11th event. Nothing unusual there. What unusual, though, is the name of the placeholder. Rather than “Samsung Unpacked!”, or “A Special Event From Samsung And Google”, or anything else even somewhat vague, they just come right out and say it: it’s the . Between Ice Cream Sandwich and the unveiling of the Galaxy Nexus (the device formerly known as the ), this event is absolutely shaping up to be one to watch. We’ll be there bringin’ back all the details as they break, so be sure to tune in next week. |
Fujifilm’s X-Series EVIL Camera To Be “Premium,” Not Micro Four Thirds | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | captivated the world during its hype period, and though it wasn’t the ultimate camera some expected (I loved the device but took issue with its controls), it represents an interesting new brand strategy for the company. But they’re still figuring it out. The cheaper but still cool X10 is the logical mid-range version, though the X-S1 superzoom appears to have nothing in common with the brand but the letter X. Some news broke earlier this week, though, that seems more in line with the X series vision. There were almost no details, so we didn’t write it up at the time, but a bit more info from the company’s Twitter account makes things a little clearer for their new interchangeable-lens system. https://twitter.com/#!/fujiguys/status/121950934426337280 We heard they were doing an EVIL or at least interchangeable-lens camera, but now we know that it’s going to be “premium,” presumably like the retro/metal X100 and X10. That also means it will carry a premium price. The glass was an expensive part of the X100, though, and that won’t factor into the body cost of the new system. I would speculate that body-only this thing is going to go for a thousand bucks. They also say that it won’t be micro four thirds. That’s a technical decision, but also a branding one — the micro four-thirds sensor size is a popular compromise and no one would have blamed Fuji if they went for it. But it sounds like they’re going for a larger sensor, perhaps the APS-C one found in the X100 — or more likely, an updated version that will launch with that camera’s successor. As for availability? https://twitter.com/#!/fujiguys/status/121949562003922944 We’ll hear more two months from now at CES. Yes, it’s almost that time of year. We got a nice hands-on with the X100 last year well ahead of its release, so we’ll see what we can do to cajole Fujifilm into doing the same this time around. [via and ] |
Dear Sony: Just Buy Out Ericsson’s Stake Already | Chris Velazco | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | As it stands, Sony Ericsson is the 6th largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, but Sony may be looking into going it alone. According to a new report from the Wall Street Journal, Sony is close to in their joint venture. According to the usual unnamed sources, current talks are tenuous at best. That doesn’t seem to have dampened Sony CEO Howard Stringer’s mood: he reportedly wants the deal finalized as soon as possible. Sony’s big issue seems to stem from control, and specifically the lack thereof when it came to Sony Ericsson’s phone lineup. By bringing phone design and production in-house, the Wall Street Journal believes that Sony could leverage their “technology strengths to develop new innovative handsets more quickly.” I don’t know how much I agree with that sentiment, but I will say this: it’s worth a shot. It could be that the Sony Ericsson experiment has run its course. Together, the pair managed to snatch up a considerable portion of the market back when it all took to make a popular phone was to jam multimedia functionality into it. Times have changed, to say nothing of people’s expectations, and now Sony Ericsson finds itself as the perennial also-ran of the smartphone industry. Let me ask an honest question: when was the last time you looked at a Sony Ericsson phone and felt something stir inside you? Your answers will almost certainly vary from mine, but I’d wager it’s been a while. Mine was the original Xperia X1 — a phone that pushed enough of my buttons that I could overlook the fact that it ran Windows Mobile. That phone came out three years ago — none of the people I posed the question to named a phone newer than that. The joint venture made all kinds of sense back in 2001, and even for some years after that, but these days it seems like Sony Ericsson has become listless. They slowly churn out smartphone after smartphone to an audience that wants them less and less each year. I’m trying hard not to throw Ericsson under the bus, because they haven’t really done anything wrong. Still, their main business is developing and rolling out telecommunications networks. It’s not that Ericsson is screwing anything up so much as the fact that the two companies may not share the same priorities or vision. Their 2009 agreement to join up with STMicroelectronics doesn’t really help things, as companies like HTC have . In short, Ericsson doesn’t need the mobile phone business as much as Sony does. Sony Ericsson CEO Bert Nordberg seems to get it. In an interview from last week, Nordberg mentioned that the company was closer to Sony than it was to Ericsson. Under his guidance, Sony Ericsson is aiming to be a 100% smartphone-focused company by the middle of next year. If a Sony buyout took place, and Nordberg ran Sony Mobile with the full backing of a parent company that would like to control the consumer electronics market end to end, we could be looking at a brand new beast. |
Cleantech Venture Investment Up 12% From Previous Quarter | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | According to the latest from the , a global research firm tracking innovation in the cleantech sector, venture investment in the industry grew 12% in Q3 2011 ($1.98 billion) compared to the previous quarter, and is up 23% since Q3 2010 ($1.81 billion). Worldwide, there were 189 deals totaling $2.23 billion. In Q2 2011, there were 179 deals, for comparison purposes. Of this quarter’s deals, 59% were Series B or later rounds, accounting for 81% ($1.81 billion) of all investments. IPO and M&A activity were slower in Q3 compared with the first half the year, the group found, but M&A activity was up from last year. Two acquisitions in the water and wastewater sub-sector were the highlights. These included Ecolab, which acquired water treatment service provider Nalco Holdings for $5.4 billion, and Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing’s Cheung Kong Infrastructure Holdings, which acquired British water utility company Northumbrian Water for $3.9 billion. In terms of IPOs, China came out on top, with 11 of the 14 IPOs this quarter. Four of these were for Chinese solar cell or panel manufacturers raising a total of $812 million. For the first time ever, energy storage was the leading sector by amount invested ($514 million), followed by solar ($350M), and energy efficiency ($223M). Energy efficiency saw the highest number of deals (34), followed by solar (33) and energy storage (19). Here’s the further breakdown by sector: – $514 million in 19 deals – $350 million in 33 deals – $223 million in 34 deals – $177 million in 15 deals In addition, North America accounted for 76% of the total amount invested in Q3, followed by Asia Pacific (14%) and Europe & Israel (10%). North American companies raised $1.69 billion, up 17% from Q2 and up 59% from this quarter last year. California led the way with $654 million investment (39%), followed by Massachusetts ($176 million, 10%) and New Mexico (175 million, 10%). Canada saw a drop with $33 million invested across 8 deals. The largest deals were Sundrop Fuels ($175 million), Bloom Energy ($150 million) and Boston-Power ($125 million). European and Israeli companies raised $230 million, down 34% from Q2, and down 32% from this time last year. There were 40 deals, down from 44 last quarter. The largest deals were for Nexeon ($65 million), Elstat ($15 million) and EcoEridania ($14 million). Asian companies raised $303 million in 21 disclosed rounds. India ranked 3rd after the U.S. and the U.K. in amount raised, but China ranked third in number of deals globally. The largest deals were for Soma Enterprise ($110 million), Champions of the Earth ($52 million) and Changxing Wind Power ($47 million). |
Upcoming Film Could Be Litmus Test For Theater And On-Demand Release Strategy | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | As we all know, movies tend to come in two varieties: in-theater and straight to video. There’s a grey area around indie flicks and festivals, but generally it’s one of those two. When you think about it, that’s a rather old-school and unnecessary limitation. It’s in place because for a very long time, home theaters offered poor viewing environments. Nowadays that’s not as true, and people spend thousands to replicate that theater feel. So why keep the old model? There have been a few experiments on this front, but that is perhaps the most serious attempt yet to break the release strategy mold. , an action-comedy starring Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy, will be released to on-demand video just three weeks after its theatrical debut. If it’s a success, they can tweak the formula and break the “blockbuster” rut that Hollywood has been in for decades. There’s a catch, of course. It wouldn’t be the movie industry if there wasn’t a catch. In this case (not surprisingly) it’s the price: $60. Yes, $60 to rent a movie. They are hoping to catch families and groups of friends who don’t want to go downtown to the movie theater and buy popcorn. It’s being offered in Atlanta and Portland to half a million Comcast subscribers (people with other providers are out of luck). My prediction? Total failure. Pricing failure, positioning failure, content failure. It makes going to the theater look like a bargain, and that’s not something you want to do. Hell, I didn’t even think it was possible. Seeing this price will make your target audience get off their couches and eat the parking fee and concession stand pricing. $30 would make sense, since that’s three tickets and people will feel they’re saving money by seeing it at home, people who might have never paid for your movie at all. But $60? People are confused enough about movie rollout dates, first run and second run stuff, staggered releases to DVD, Blu-ray, streaming, download, etc. It’s coming to two limited markets, on Comcast only? I realize the cable companies are risk-averse, but if you’re going to do this, go big. Advertise it from the start with the movie, offer it nation-wide, license it to other cable providers if possible, and eat the loss if it doesn’t work out. Can’t be more than ten million in lost ticket sales and setup costs, right? Universal probably spent that much on catering during production. By dipping their toe instead of just diving in, Comcast is going to get inaccurate results and put off the real thing another few years. People want to go to theaters to see action comedies. You laugh with the other people, you go with friends from school, the sound is super loud. It’s a blockbuster movie, not the kind you want to rent on video at all. Who really doesn’t want to go to the theater? Parents with kids. Driving the kids down, buying them candy, dealing with them crying and monkeying around — it’s a nightmare. The only reason they do it is because there’s no other way to see Kung Fu Panda 2 and all the other kids at school are talking about it. This model should have debuted with a high-profile kids movie. Put the home availability thing right into the preview and ads. Give the theaters the two or three weeks they need to get their initial ticket sales, then drop it into living rooms at $30 for a single viewing. Parents around the country would be ecstatic. I could be wrong, but this just doesn’t look like it’s going to work. Still, they’ve been beating around the bush for so long that even this poor effort counts for something. The hybrid release model is going to happen sooner or later — it’s inevitable — but isn’t going to set the standard. |
Trooval Wants To Help Businesses Better Predict Which Customers Will Be The Big Spenders | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | Consider this scenario: Two grandmothers walk into a Harrah’s hotel/casino in Las Vegas. Both ladies put $5 into a slot machine, and unfortunately, neither hits the jackpot — both lose their $5. One of these kindly old ladies will go on to spend thousands of dollars at Harrah’s, while the other will walk away without spending another dime. How do you know which will continue to spend? Applied to a larger picture, companies spend millions of dollars on technology, like cognitive and behavioral analysis and intelligence mining, to attempt to create a model that will accurately predict which of their new visitors will be the better customer. As you can imagine, if businesses can target their marketing, deals, loyalty programs, etc. at the “better” customer, their dollars are better spent. Of course, the refined analysis, software, databases, and specialists required to run predictive modeling is expensive, time-consuming and is really only affordable for the corporate giants of the world. Enter , a Bay Area start-up that is helping companies distinguish between the customers that will spend money and the customers that won’t, so that they can target them accordingly. Trooval Founder and CEO Jonathan Lowenhar tells me that companies like Capital One and AMEX have found ways to integrate effective realtime predictive modeling into their customer acquisition strategies, but he says that only about 5 percent of businesses are taking advantage of this kind of technology. Lowenhar spent 15 years in Las Vegas in the casino gaming industry, part of the time as VP of Marketing at Harrah’s, where he learned firsthand that customers at casinos (and across industries) are all generally treated the same. There wasn’t a science to how casinos were approaching their customers. At Harrah’s, the team developed a system that would aggregate all the known information about the little old ladies of the world, including the speed at which they play the game, how much they spend, the distance they live from the casino, etc. Of course, Harrah’s had to hire a big team to do this. Lowenhar says that this is the marketer’s dream: Being able to understand, for any given consumer, where they sit in regard to loyalty potential. Thus, the ultimate value proposition for Trooval is the ability give marketers realtime, actionable scores on consumer leads, prospects, and their existing customers. Trooval does this by way of a simple alphanumeric score — that tells marketers just that. Through its predictive analytics software tool, Trooval allows companies to access accurate predictions with one cloud app. Predictions are based on that mash of readily-available public consumer data and companies can take advantage of the startup’s API connection to enrich their businesses’ leads with third party data from both public and boutique sources. While Trooval has begun working with certain retail outlets and companies in the time-share industry, their software is applicable to auto sales, financial services, mortgage, and student loan lending companies — any industry where the cost of sales and marketing (and the potential sales price) is high. Too many people suffer from flawed credit reports today, and they really are no longer an accurate prediction of who can pay and who can’t; what’s more, just because a consumer has made a big purchase in the past, doesn’t mean that they will again. Companies need to know this kind of information, who is most likely to pay for that big high ticket item? The B2B2C company can work with businesses to have them up and running on Trooval in just a few weeks.
Trooval has raised $2.8 million in seed and series A rounds from North Bridge Venture Partners and AngelList. For more on Trooval, . |
Mysugr Wins TechCrunch Vienna, As The City Proves Its Startups Mettle | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | Until recently Vienna hasn’t generally been known in Europe as a startup hub, but this week has blown that perception out of the water. What appears to be going on is the clear emergence of Vienna as kind of bridge between Eastern and Central Europe on the one hand and the gravitational pull of London and Berlin’s startup ecosystems in Western Europe. The evidence was clear this week, as over 500 people and 50 startups packed into an 18th century ballroom for five days in the combined conference and startup competition billed as . There are plenty of pretenders to that nom du clure, but Vienna has proved an awesome hub for the region and the event is sure to take its place in the panoply of European tech conferences now emerging – and appropriately, a minute’s silence was held today in honour of Steve Jobs. The eventual winner of the startups competition was , a startup which appears to have captured the zeitgeist of mobile, health and social gaming. |
Palantir Technologies Raises $70 Million At $2.5 Billion Valuation | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | has raised $70 million in Series F funding, we’ve confirmed with the company. This brings Palantir’s total funding to nearly While the company declined to reveal the valuation in the round, we’ve learned from sources that it is around $2.5 billion. Two unnamed New York-based hedge funds anchored the round, and multiple early investors and university endowments participated in the round. Founded in 2004 by former PayPal employees and Stanford computer scientists, Palantir offers a high-powered data analysis platform. Palantir Government and Palantir Finance both integrate, visualize, and analyze information in these sectors. The company analyzes a variety of data including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial content. The virtue of Palantir is that it accepts huge databases and allows users to slice and dice this information. Palantir says its platform works at any scale while also promising security and civil liberties protections. Clearly this makes it ideal for governments and financial institutions, who need to analyze large amounts of classified, secure data. While the company’s technologies has been popular amongst government agencies (including the FBI), Palantir has revealed that 60 percent of its business actually comes from the commercial sector. In fact, the company closed a number of recent deals in the commercial space, including with financial giant JP Morgan Chase. Palantir told us last year that revenues have at least doubled every year for the last three years. And in the company’s last round last year (in which it raised ), its valuation was pegged at $735 million; so clearly the company has taken a big jump in value in the past year. Early investors include former PayPal CEO (who is the Chairman of Palantir’s board as well), and the CIA’s venture arm In-Q-Tel. We had originally reported on an revealing some of this most recent round in May, and a few weeks ago of another SEC filing that showed additional fundraising. As the company confirmed to us today, this round has closed and Palantir now has another $75 million in its coffers. |
Crowds Gather At Apple Stores To Remember “The Inventor Of Our Time” (TCTV) | Jon Orlin | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | As the news of Steve Job’s death spread last night, fans held spontaneous vigils at Apple stores around the globe. They came to pay tribute to a man they never met but who profoundly touched and changed their lives. We asked people outside the Apple store in downtown San Francisco to talk about the impact Steve Jobs had on their lives. |
Zero-Day Vulnerability On American Express Website Now Closed | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | American Express say it shut down the webpage that left a portion of its website open for anyone to access in what’s being a called a zero-day security vulnerability, the company says in statement. The security issue was first discovered by developer Niklas Femerstrand, who attempted to reach out to American Express via Twitter in the hopes of being pointed to an email address he could use to send the company further details regarding the issue. The seemingly confused Twitter rep asked him whether he was an Amex cardholder and offered him a phone number to call, despite his objections to contacting Amex via phone, fax or physical mail. In frustration, Femerstrand published the details instead. According to the blog post (also featured here on ), Femerstrand discovered that American Express developers had accidentally left an administration panel for website debugging accessible, potentially leaving it open to XSS attacks. “Hackers could inject a cookie stealer combined with jQuery’s .hide() and harvest cookies which can, ironically enough, be exploited by using the admin panel provided by sloppy American Express developers,” wrote Femerstrand on his . He also demonstrated a proof-of-concept attack. What this means is that customer sessions could be hijacked and they could be directed to the American Express website through phishing attacks. The hackers could then harvest their account info, while avoiding having their emails picked up through anti-spam/anti-phishing technologies. American Express has now responded, stating that the webpage in question is now down: “We learned this morning that an internal test page created to update promotional offers was temporarily accessible on our US website. The page did not contain CM information such as card number, name or address. The page in question has been taken down. We are not aware of any information at this time that this vulnerability was used for malicious purposes but we are continuing to investigate.” There are several other concerns that accompany this particular incident, however. For example, if this was a case of pure oversight, ? That seems to indicate that the company knew the page was open. In addition, why are Twitter representatives for a financial services company not aware of the proper email address for security researchers to use? Twitter may be primarily a marketing channel, but sheer ignorance to key terms like “security vulnerability” seems inexcusable when, potentially, private customer information is at stake. And finally, shouldn’t have Femerstrand tried a little harder to find a legitimate way to contact Amex besides using Twitter? That’s the consensus on , , and even, in some cases, on the itself. |
Samsung And Visa Partner To Launch NFC-Equipped “Olympics Phone” | Jordan Crook | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | Rumors have been floating around for a while now that Visa and Samsung had something special planned for the Olympic Games next year. With about ten months left before the games kick off in London, Visa has formally confirmed that they are building a special phone for the Olympics and that it will, in fact, have an NFC chip. confirmed the phone with Sandra Alzetta, Visa Europe’s head of innovation and new product development, at the Visa Europe Security Summit in Frankfurt, Germany. She added that the phone will be “iconic,” and packed full of special Olympics content. As far as availability goes, the phone should be on shelves globally before, during, and after the Olympic games. Visa also confirmed that there will be “almost 160,000 terminals in Europe, including the 70,000 shops, bars, and restaurants in the UK,” all of which will work with this special new “Olympics phone.” And it gets better — there’s also been talk of NFC-equipped microSD cards, which could theoretically turn any phone (save for the iPhone, of course) into an NFC-capable device. However, it hasn’t been specified whether or not those microSDs will be available for the Olympics or are just another cool thing coming down the pipeline. Sounds good, yes? And if the rest of its specs are anything close to what we’re , the “Olympics phone” certainly looks like a winner. |
inDinero Now Lets Small Businesses Track Their Financial Transactions And Receipts On One Platform | Rip Empson | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | How many 21-year-old serial entrepreneurs do you know? Probably not many, but now you’ll know one. Jess Mah launched her first startup at age 13, her second in high school, and is now working on her third, which just may be, as they say, the charm. For those unfamiliar, Mah’s third startup is called , which offers software to help small businesses track and manage their finances in realtime. Unsurprisingly, the startup has been tagged the “Mint for small business”. The Y-Combinator backed startup also has some high-profile backing, as it raised $1.2 million in September of last year from angels like Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, Intuit’s David Wu, Slide’s Keith Rabois, YouTube’s Jawed Karim, and more. Since launching in July 2010, inDinero has seen more than 20,000 businesses register to use its service, and today it’s processing several billions of dollars in revenue from these businesses, and is tracking approximately 5 million transactions every month. InDinero is a pretty nifty tool for local businesses, as it enables startups and small business owners to quickly enter information from their financial accounts into the startup’s dashboard, at which point the service will fetch bank statements, financial docs, and more, automatically organizing transactions into pertinent categories. It will even update your budgets through its simple dashboard, and since it has all or your financial information categorized and sorted, it can provide you with the latest set of reports in a few minutes — without having to call your accountant. Of course, there’s one small problem here. The IRS requires small businesses to track their receipts on their transactions, so inDinero is today launching a full-service feature for owners looking to track both financial transactions and business receipts in one place. Now, instead of wondering what you bought at Walmart or Amazon last month, you can see the full receipt next to every single transaction. Mah tells us that the issue here is that most business owners keep their receipts in a shoebox, and the team has heard countless stories from accountants who’ve watched as their clients bring in a shoebox full of receipts to be processed at tax time. Most businesses aren’t tracking the electronic receipts they get after making online purchases. And as long as entrepreneurs have an accounting system or excel spreadsheet alongside a shoebox of receipts, they don’t have organized business finances, she says. solution to merge the two together under one roof, in an automated way. So, inDinero is merging the two together under one roof, in automated way. Plus, the startup is now offering its users three ways to send their receipts to inDinero: Users can now upload, email, or snail-mail their receipts to inDinero, at which point the team will automatically match those receipts to the corresponding transaction on their financial dashboards. If the receipt doesn’t match with the transaction, inDinero will send the user an email alert. And the best part for users? The receipt tracking is free. (inDinero is still a freemium service, of course.) Accountants are also going to love this, as they hate when clients bring in a mess of paper receipts. So, inDinero is going to help them do their jobs, free of charge. The startup will process all paper receipts, and automatically upload them to the right transaction, making it viewable to the user in his or her dashboard. What’s more, the user who sends in the biggest suitcase full of receipts will receive a free year-long subscription to inDinero and a $300 AMEX gift card. (Though this offer only lasts through October.) With this added functionality, there’s little reason not to use inDinero. In fact, I’m gathering my paper receipts as I write this. That gift card has my name written all over it. For more on inDinero, or visit . |
Tony Fadell on Jobs and Apple’s Legacy (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | These are bittersweet days for . The man who oversaw 18 generations of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone is finally launching his new company, Nest Labs, today. It has been eighteen months in the making and marks a — and quite possibly other neglected categories of home electronics. But he’s also recently lost his former boss and long time friend Steve Jobs. In this final segment of our sit-down interview with Fadell, he talks about the Steve Jobs he knew. He also talks about the future for Apple, and what he hopes Apple’s legacy will be for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. |
Tony Fadell Demos His New Nest Learning Thermostat (TCTV) | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Even if you read our earlier tonight on iPod Godfather Tony Fadell’s new company and its new Learning Thermostat, you may still be wondering how anyone could make a thermostat an object of beauty. So we sat down with Fadell to get a video demo of the device that brought him out of retirement and has been eighteen months in the making. True to the Apple aesthetic it’s one big dial you can spin and push to control a sophisticated array of features. It’ll be the first thermostat marketed directly to consumers. Can they get excited enough to plunk down a couple hundred dollars? My husband and I are finally putting a new heating system in our drafty San Francisco Victorian. After this demo, I was sold. How about you? |
Jobs: “Focus Is About Saying No” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | [youtube=”http://youtu.be/H8eP99neOVs”] Before the accolades; before the iPod, the iPhone, and the iPad; before it became the most valuable company in the world, Steve Jobs returned to Apple when it was at its low point. Back in 1997, the stock price was hovering below $4, and most people saw it as a lost cause. But not Steve Jobs. As we remember the man after his , watch what he did at Apple’s developer conference in 1997 when he sat down and just took questions for an hour from the developers in the audience. It was during that Q&A session when he famously said, “Focus is about saying, No. And the result of that focus is going to be some really great products where the total is much greater than the sum of the parts.” (see video clip above). One of Jobs’ greatest talents was as an editor, selecting what not to include in a product. It was that ability which helped him save Apple from going off in 18 different directions and do a few things better than any other company. Even when it looked like Apple was down for the count, Jobs never gave up. He stood up as Apple’s lone defender and knew exactly what he had to do to get it back on track. “Apple was a loser, and he was honest, laid out a grand vision, and then made it happen,” recalls Adeo Ressi of the Founder Institute. “All the great minds that I know think that this was his defining moment in Apple.” Watch the entire Q&A session below. [youtube=”http://youtu.be/3LEXae1j6EY”] |
Conan Tweaks The Siri Commercial | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | You’ve probably seen the new Apple Siri commercial with people talking to their iPhones like they would to a personal assistant because, well, it is a . It sets up meetings, reminds you to do things, shows you how to tie a bow tie. Well, Team Coco at Conan O’Brien had a little fun re-imagining the commercial with what looks like two guys from Brooklyn. Yeah, you pretty much know what they are going to ask: “How far am I right now from diarrhea town?” |
GroupLogic Launches MobilEcho 3.0 | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Enterprise I.T. company is today unveiling the latest update to its Mobile File Management (MFM) service with the launch of mobilEcho 3.0. Most importantly, the new version now adds support for the iPhone, in addition to the previously supported iPad. And the company says it will have support for Android by next quarter. MobilEcho , allowing companies to provide their employees with secure access to files stored on servers by way of the iPad. Since then, the company has added around 100 businesses who have signed up to use mobilEcho within their organization. GroupLogic, a company which has historically focused on tools that allow enterprise to integrate Apple Macs into their network, says it has added 1,000 customers this year, for a total of 6,000. In addition to the new iPhone support, the new version of mobilEcho 3.0 also provides the following upgrades and features: – Complete PDF preview and annotation providing users a secure method to review, comment, and annotate documents to meet corporate security, compliance and governance standards. – Direct access to the employee’s unique Active Directory assigned home directory. – Support for automatic one-way sync from the server to the employee device, for easy access to the latest document changes when offline. – Centrally managed simplified device enrollment. – Enhanced management features that include per-device status tracking, remote wipe and password reset. The company also recently partnered with mobile device management (MDM) vendors and , allowing those customers to deploy mobilEcho within either the MobileIron or Good environment. According to GroupLogic, the update for will be free for current customers. For new customers, pricing info is . is already a profitable company, so its current development efforts involving mobilEcho are self-funded. The company is not looking for external capital at this time. |
iPod Godfather Tony Fadell Finally Reveals His New Product: A Thermostat. No, Really. | Sarah Lacy | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | For the last eighteen months, the tech world has been anxiously awaiting news of what iPod godfather Tony Fadell is up to. His staff has been sworn to secrecy since word got out he was leaving retirement to do something new. Despite reporters camping out in front of his office with cameras, the news somehow stayed a secret– no small feat in the ever-leaky land of Silicon Valley. No doubt the anticipation raised expectations in fan boys’ minds that the next great entertainment or communication device was going to be unveiled by the former DJ who oversaw 18 versions of the iPod and the first three versions of the iPhone. Fadell is well aware that those fan boys may be in for some confusion or some disappointment today. Because he’s announcing what finally got him to come out of retirement and start a new company: A desire to reinvent thermostats. That’s not a moniker for some cutting edge game device– Fadell’s new company, , is bringing Apple-level design and cool to the those little boxes on the walls of a quarter of a billion US homes and offices that control the internal temperature. Why? Because all the ones on the market are ugly, they are too hard to use and they control a whopping 50% of the average American home’s energy budget. His goal is to take something we never think about and make it more than just sexy– he wants to make it a “beloved” object in the home. Fadell got the idea designing his green home in Tahoe. He was shocked there wasn’t a single attractive thermostat on the market so he decided to build his own. The size of the market and the potential impact on the planet convinced him it was a great business. And if he didn’t do it, who would? The unit uses the guts of a smart phone and required someone who knows how to build drop-dead-easy user experiences. When Fadell left Apple, he promised Steve Jobs he wouldn’t build a device to compete with what he’d done at Apple. Instead, he’s taking the design philosophy to an utterly different industry. Will consumers bite? We sat down with Fadell for his first video interview about Nest last week. In this segment, he talks about why he feels this opportunity was too good to pass up. Stay tuned for part two of the interview, when Fadell will demo the Nest Learning Thermostat.
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CNET In Talks To Acquire gdgt As Early As This Week | Greg Kumparak | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Back in 2009, TechCrunch Founder Michael Arrington wrote that CNET (and parent company CBS) , the then-brand-new community/review site/blog by and . While CNET was considering an investment at the time, an acquisition was said not to be an option. Oh, how time can change things. Two years later, we’re not only hearing that CNET now in talks to acquire gdgt, but also that the deal could be announced as early as this week. Our tipster was unable to provide any details on the financial terms of the deal — these details are, presumably, still being worked out. Even if the deal goes through, we’re told that gdgt’s (who, like TechCrunch, is owned by AOL) will not be impacted. And what about Block and Rojas? The deal would presumably be structured to try and keep them on board for as long as possible. Though not often mentioned as one to snatch up other companies, this wouldn’t be CNET’s first acquisition. They acquired mySimon and ZDNet in 2000, the TechTracker network (VersionTracker, MacFixit, etc) in 2007, China’s 55bbs.com in 2008, and, coincidentally, a technology product database company called GDT way back in 1999. Gdgt co-founder Ryan Block politely declined to comment. : An investor in the company reached out to us and says there is no deal with Cnet or even any talks. We’ll take his denial at face value at this point and admit we may have gotten this one wrong. |
New Factual Resolve API Will Help Clean Up, Complete Location Databases | Sarah Perez | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Open data platform is launching a new API for developers of location-based services called . The API is an entity resolution API that makes partial records complete, matches entities against one other and assists in the process of de-duping and normalizing datasets. What this means is that developers can simply tell Factual what they know about an entity (i.e., a venue in a place database) and it will fill in the missing pieces (e.g., the category, the latitude/longitude info and venue’s address). At launch, will be available only for Factual’s list of U.S. Places, but the company hopes to expand Resolve globally in the future. Resolve is one of those under-the-hood type launches that is going to make many engineers’ lives much easier. To use, a developer sends what they know about a place to Resolve as a GET request with the attributes included as JSON-encoded key/value pairs. The API then, well… the request by looking at all the possible candidates in Factual’s dataset and returns a solid match (if one can be identified) and all of the missing attributes. A couple of companies are already using Resolve, including daily deal API provider and restaurant menu platform . Sqoot uses Resolve to convert the business name and address within a daily deal to a geo-referenced entity, and provides users with the most hyperlocal and geo-relevant deal recommendations possible. Meanwhile, OpenMenu uses resolve to identify restaurants in Factual that match those in Factual and then pushes this info on to Factual’s Crosswalk API. Crosswalk, another Factual Places API, tells you the URL and ID of a place in up to 40 other third-party namespaces including Foursquare, Urbanspoon, Citysearch, Yellowpages, Yahoo, AllMenus, Yelp, Zagat, Chow, Gowalla, InsiderPages, MenuPages, Menupix, SimpleGeo, Superpages, Explore To, Fwix and others. Documentation on how to use the newly launched Factual Resolve API, including examples and requirements is available . |
The Hackathon: Your Ticket To Disrupt Beijing, Great Prizes, And More | Elin Blesener | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Hackers, are you ready? The is almost here. Not only is this our fifth time hosting the Hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt, but it is our very first time hosting it overseas. The Hackathon has become an incredibly popular event, where hackers of every stripe come together to build cool products and businesses — from funny to useful, from bizarre to essential. The goal of the Hackathon is to push innovation forward. We have been lucky enough to receive support from some amazing companies. These companies will be helping hackers by hosting their own API platforms, providing educational workshops, and offering exciting prizes from their own contests. Make sure to check out the contests and prizes below, and make sure to soon! It’s our first Hackathon overseas and one you don’t want to miss. 6waves Lolapps is looking for the next killer game in the social/mobile gaming platforms. Up to 3 winning teams could bring home over US $100,000 worth of prizes and win an opportunity to partner with 6waves Lolapps to get their games published globally. Contestants are welcome to use any open-source or licensed technologies to build a demo social game on any mobile or social network platforms. Example API’s and platforms include Tencent, OpenSocial, Facebook, iOS, and Android platforms. Demos or prototypes with built-in social and cross-platform concepts will gain advantage. Demos will be judged based on the following criteria: – most original creative concept
– highest-level social experience
– best use of cross-platform technologies
– most compelling game design Prizes: 1st Place: Potential funding from 6waves Lolapps’ 6L Fund (worth up to US$100,000) and 1 iPad 2, 1 Samsung Galaxy Tab 2nd Place: Apple iPad 2 (64GB) 3rd Place: Samsung Galaxy Tab 为了能与更多优秀的开发者拉近距离紧密交流，6waves将赞助首次在北京举 办的HACKATHON，欢迎任何手机游戏或社交游戏的开发团队/个人报名参加
；前3名将有机会获得总价值超过100,000美元的奖品，更有机会成为6waves的 亲密合作伙伴从而获得6waves全球游戏发行渠道的支持；我们歡迎开发者采用 开放源码技术或已获得授权的技术去开发社交游戏/手机游戏的演示版，例如 API：腾讯、OpenSocial、Facebook、iOS、Android。若演示版或原型当中包含及 内置社交元素或跨平台的概念将获得更佳评分。 演示将会以下列标准为评分准则： – 最具原创意的概念
– 最能利用社交元素
– 最佳跨平台技术的运用
– 最引人注目的游戏设计 奖品 冠军：
有机会获得由6waves “6L 基金”提供的资金支持（价值高达10万美元）
苹果iPad一台, 三星Galaxy Tab10.1一台 亚军：
苹果iPad2（64GB）一台 季军：
三星Galaxy Tab 10.1一台 Tianji, part of the , is the official host of the Beijing Disrupt professional network. Tianji will sponsor a special Professional Social Network prize for the best hack of . With Tianji’s open API, third party developers can leverage the company’s business social networking platform to create a personalized web experience for their site visitors – ultimately increasing brand awareness, driving revenue and elevating engagement. Their criteria will be best usage of Tianji’s API, disruptive, and out of the box thinking. The prizes will be: – 5000 RMB as first prize
– 3000 RMB for the second prize
– 2000 RMB for the 3rd prize 天际定制大赛 天际作为Viadeo网络的一部分，是Beijing Disrupt专业网络的官方承办人。天际将为使用其API的最佳作品设立特别的专业社交网络奖。利用天际的开源API，第三方开发者可以借助企业的商业社交网络平台来为网站访问者打造个性化的网络体验——最终提升品牌知名度，增加利润并提高市场参与度。 他们的评判标准是看参赛者是否很好地利用了天际的API，以及是否有突破性和创新性的思维。具体奖项将很快公布。 allows developers to plug quality translation into any application, website or platform. myGengo is supporting efforts to “go global” with a prize for the best myGengo API integration encouraging global outreach and communication. Through this API, developers can access over 3,000 translators around the world, enabling users to publish new content dynamically in multiple languages and attracting a global audience. in popular programming languages are available, as well as a for testing and for integration. Demos will be judged based on the following criteria:
– most likely to encourage global growth
– potential for furthering cross-cultural communication
– seamlessness in user-experience and workflow Prize to be announced soon. deCarta will be hosting their location-based services (LBS) APIs for hackers to access during the Hackathon and will be presenting a workshop on how to integrate their mapping tools with new applications. They will have a developer environment (deCarta devzone) open for hackers during the event. If interested, you can register and get information on their 编程马拉松活动赞助商deCarta deCarta将会为开发者们提供其位置服务（LBS）API，还会开设一场讲座，介绍如何将他们的地图工具与新应用整合。比赛期间，他们将会为开发者们提供一个开放的开发环境（deCarta devzone）。如果你有兴趣，可以在这里进行注册，获得其API的更多信息。 Red Pagoda Resources will be helping developers learn about some of the coolest jobs at startups. Founder, Andy Mok, along with being the organizer for our Beijing Disrupt Hackathon, is a talent-hunter for audaciously visionary internet companies in China. When he’s not trolling
Zhongguancun or the Internet for game-changing developers and product managers, he also organizes to help developers meet investors as well as talented and like-minded product managers and UI/UX professionals. Make sure to seek him out if you want to discuss opportunities! 编程马拉松活动赞助商Red Pagoda Resources Red Pagoda Resources将会帮助开发者了解一些创业企业当中最有意思的工作。其创始人，同时也是我们Beijing Disrupt编程马拉松活动的组织者之一的Andy Mok，正在为中国那些富有远见的网络公司招募人才。在忙碌于中关村和开发者、产品经理之余，他还组织了北京创业周末，来帮助开发者与投资人交流，同时也帮他们寻找有天赋并且志同道合的产品经理和UI/UX专业人士。如果你想寻找并把握住机遇，一定要去找他聊聊！ MailChimp is hosting a to help companies create new innovations that integrate with MailChimp email marketing tools. 编程马拉松活动赞助商MailChimp MailChimp旗下有一个总额一百万美元的整合基金，专门用来扶持那些可以与MailChimp邮件营销工具整合的创新。 CloudFlare will be hosting a workshop to discuss its 编程马拉松活动赞助商CloudFlare CloudFlare将开设一场讲座介绍其API。 |
MyPad Shrugs Off Official Facebook Competitor, Now Has 2.5 Million Daily Active Users | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | On October 10th, one of the longest running tech rumors in recent memory finally came to fruition: Facebook released its own, official . The app had been in high demand since the day the iPad first launched (Facebook’s iPhone app is, after all, among the platform’s most popular of all time). But there was no iPad app available on launch day. Nor was there one the day the iPad 2 came out. But that didn’t stop people from heading to the app store and typing ‘Facebook’. In the mean time, some enterprising entrepreneurs took the opportunity to launch their own, unofficial Facebook iPad apps — which millions of people wound up downloading. One of these is (formerly called FacePad), which has seen strong growth since it first launched in January, offering access to Facebook features like Photos, News Feed, and Chat — with an interface that’s slicker than the web version of the site. The app has steadily improved since then, and recently introduced its . Perhaps more important: despite the launch of the official Facebook app earlier this month, MyPad usage is still at an all-time high, and growing. Cole Ratias, one of the founders of Loytr, the company that makes MyPad, says that the app has seen 25% growth since Facebook launched the official iPad application, and that it’s currently the 15th most popular app on Facebook platform. The app now has 2.5 million daily active users (up from around 2.1 million a month ago) — and 65% of them are using the app on a regular basis. Ratias says that is 10-15% higher than the repeat visitors Facebook itself sees in its app, based on AppData. Ratias acknowledges that there was a dip once the official Facebook app launched, and the number of new downloads has taken a hit as well, in large part due to Facebook’s official app ranking higher in search results and Apple’s ‘top apps’ listings. But the engagement numbers show that plenty of people are sticking with what they already have, and Ratias says that a lot of new users actually tried out the official app and wanted something different, then turned to MyPad. That said, for Loytr to retain that audience and to keep growing in the longer term, it’s going to have to find ways to differentiate itself from the official app. But it knows that full well. Last night the company rolled out a new version of the iPad app (the 99 cent version is already live, while the free version is pending Apple’s approval).With the new update, Loytr continues to integrate new features that Facebook doesn’t offer — in addition to Twitter integration, it now features a trending apps section, which showcases other applications users have installed to their devices. And the company just did a deal with Hype Machine to integrate free music as well. |
Keen On… Parag Khanna: How To Run The World (TCTV) | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Yes, we know that technology entrepreneurs are revolutionizing media, healthcare, education, energy, even government. But what about the ancient art of diplomacy? Can entrepreneurs – and, in particular, Internet entrepreneurs – help us run the world more effectively? According to the author of we live in a world of perfect storms and crises which requires management by what he calls “creative capitalism.” I caught up with Khanna last month at the excellent “Whose Crazy Idea Is It Anyway” in Amsterdam about the future of the university, and he explained to me how an entrepreneurial approach to diplomacy can make the world a better place. So is Khanna correct: will the 21st century world best managed by creative entrepreneurs? |
No more missing out – MoviePilot lets fans follow only upcoming films | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | One of the annoying things about the movie industry is that if you blink while the promotion for a new release is on – about 48 hours in marketing terms – you effectively miss the launch. It’s a bizarre scenario that much of this marketing dollars are spent in inly a few days before a new film hits the screens are are aimed at the ‘first weekender’ fans. But many people – myself included – follow actors and their IMDB profiles to see what is ‘to be released’. So there’s a behaviour there industry is just not capitalising one. Stepforward today . This new recommendation and discovery platform brings upcoming films to fans based on their taste. That twists the old marketing model on its head and makes the whole process much more efficient. Already claiming to be the largest movie community in Germany via its existing recommendation portal Moviepilot.de, it’s already garnered more than five million fans on its Facebook app. As a recommendation service, Moviepilot focuses solely on upcoming movie projects and TV shows says Tobias Bauckhage, Moviepilot’s founder and CEO. That’s handy as it means fans are less likely to miss new releases. Fans can sign into Moviepilot.com using their Facebook login and immediately get personalised movie recommendations based on their social networking activity on Facebook, for example what they ‘Like’. Disney, Universal and Paramount have been working with the German version of Moviepilot.de since its launch in 2007. Moviepilot was founded by filmmakers Tobias Bauckhage and Jon Handschin (CPO), as well as former OMDB founder Benjamin Krause (CTO). The company is based in Berlin, Germany and has received funding from Grazia Equity, Passion Capital’s Stefan Glanzer and Deutsche Telekom Ventures, as well as Peter Read, who previously ran Nielsen Entertainment for the movie studios in Los Angeles. |
Reed Hastings: “Qwikster Became The Symbol Of Netflix Not Listening” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Netflix announced today, and its expectations to go next year. The stock is trading at around $87 in after-hours, down from a close of $120. Following the blowback from his price change, CEO Reed Hastings says, “The focus for us is in rebuilding our reputation.” Asked a question about the attempt to separate the DVD business from the streaming business and create a new in a new Qwikster brand (a plan now ), Hastings admits now: “In hindsight, it is hard to justify. Having separate brands can in theory make sense. However after the price increase, Qwikster became the symbol of Netflix not listening.” Below are my notes. You can listen to the entire Q&A in the audio embed below. Q: Why will subscriber additions be positive in November? Reed: We have seen the second wave of cancellations. The first wave was in July, second wave was in September and October as people become more aware of price changes, those cancellation shave been declining. Q: Why do you think December net adds will be strongly positive? Reed: our marketing has been very successful for the past several years, don’t plan on changing it. very effective at attracting streaming subscribers. Q: Why not reintroduce a combined streaming-DVD? Reed: we think future is brightest for streaming. We don’t want to subsidize DVD. We think $7.99 is such a great price that mostly we should focus on filling out content. The focus for us is in rebuilding our reputation David Wells (CFO): We will be up slightly in subscribers in Q4. From a hybrid subscriber basis, we expect streaming only to be up substantially, DVD only up somewhat and hybrid to be down. We anticipate growth of streaming subscribers to outpace growth of content costs. Q: Why did you try to do Qwikster? Reed: In hindsight, it is hard to justify. Having separate brands can in theory make sense. However after the price increase, Qwikster became the symbol of Netflix not listening. DVD business will become like AOL dial-up. a slow decline. We do expect to continue to expand exclusive licensing relationships Q: Are you okay being rerun television? Reed: It is not how we would describe us, but not entirely inaccurate. David Wells: $3.5 billion streaming commitments, up from $2.4 billion. Q: What is the split between movie streaming and TV streaming? Reed: TV as a percentage of hours is ahead of movies, but round numbers each about half. Q: What is your competitive advantage competing against the traditional pay channels? What about new entrants like Hulu and Amazon, Dish, Google, and Apple? Reed: relative to pay television, it is not a zero sum game. Many people, including me, subscribe to HBO. There are multiple channels, people will consume from multiple providers. That said, when budgets are tight there is a hierarchy of which one you use most? We definitely want to use those. We are on-demand, highly personalized, unique for each individual. and enormously great value, and unbundled from traditional cable business. In terms of new competitors, that is exactly what happens when you have an enormous new opportunity. Everybody sees that Internet video will be an enormous market over the next couple years. That is why we are focussed on streaming. Q: What impact have you seen from Dish’s Blockbuster service or Amazon Prime Reed: From neither one have we seen any impact. Q: What advantage to you get from keeping the DVD business? Reed: It is a source of profits funding international expansion and a source of satisfaction to the 10 million subscribers who still have it. |
TomTom Finally Acknowledges It’s Getting Out Of Devices; Shareholders Rejoice | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | Time was when a GPS device was the must-have item in any self-respecting gadget-lover’s gear bag. But as years wore on and smartphones began to usurp the location functions, they’ve grown increasingly irrelevant. Sure, they still serve a purpose, but we’ve been advising companies like and for years to do some serious self-evaluation if they expect to be around much longer. TomTom appears to have truly taken this to heart, and are . As CEO Harold Goddijn diplomatically put it after their earnings report: The PND business is important and will remain an important part of our business and revenue, but the market size in absolute terms is shrinking and we need to adapt our costs, some of which are variable and some aren’t. In other words, the volume is shrinking fast (sales down 23% just this last quarter) and they can’t afford to be running design and manufacturing infrastructures that were configured with a much larger market in mind. The new focus will be on automotive and embedded systems. It’s an area where Google (the biggest danger to their business by far) has almost no foothold at all except in a few . Meanwhile people still associate the TomTom brand with location and GPS, and the expansion of such systems into cheaper cars means the market is blowing up. They can ride the wave yet again, growing a new market while iOS and Android devour the old one. It won’t be a bloodless restructuring, though. Jobs will be lost and shipped overseas, and it’s likely that they’ll have to move to cheaper manufacturing to stay in the black. Meanwhile, shares bounced back a bit on the news, though they’re still an order of magnitude away from where they were a few years. |
Creator Of Lisp, John McCarthy, Dead At 84 | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | The creator of Lisp and arguably the father of modern artificial intelligence, John McCarthy, died last night. He studied mathematics with the famous John Nash at Princeton and, notably, held the first “computer-chess” match between scientists in the US and the USSR. He transmitted the moves by telegraph. McCarthy believed AI should be interactive, allowing for a give and take similar to AI simulators like Eliza and, more recently, Siri. His own labs were run in an open, free-wheeling fashion, encouraging exploration and argument. He won the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1972 and the National Medal of Science in 1991. He was born in 1927 in Boston and taught himself higher math using Caltech textbooks when his family moved to the area, allowing him to take advanced classes when he enrolled as a teenager. He received a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1951. According to he created Lisp in order to create Turing machines in the limited computing environment at his disposal. In this month of fallen giants, it’s nice to think that McCarthy’s work lives on in the many systems – seen and unseen – that control the way we interact with computers and the Internet. The information of his passing came first from his daughter through informal channels, and was confirmed by Stanford this afternoon. [ , ] |
With Wikileaks Embargo, Payment Institutions Choose The Devil They Don’t Know | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | You may agree with Wikileaks’ mission. Or you may think they’re a menace. Or perhaps something in between. But here’s one thing you can’t deny: they’re an organization, with a leader, a name, and (however well hidden) servers, bank accounts, and so on. They also have principles — which, again, may not be to your liking, but they at least exist: removing certain identifying information, distributing to press by certain means only, etc. The world’s dominant payment institutions are . I suppose that’s their prerogative, and of course their senators and MPs would have a fit otherwise. But I’m not sure they realize exactly what they’re getting into. They must not be familiar with the Hydra. This is the second time I’ve had recourse to this metaphor in the last few months, to both my delight and disappointment. , recording labels shut down an innocuous and very much not unique service that let you download videos from video sharing sites. They failed to understand how little this takedown mattered, it seems, and chances are they only made it worse for themselves. But that’s just a matter of money and copyright. The stakes are a little higher with Wikileaks. What do Visa, Mastercard, et al. expect will happen once they’ve ground Wikileaks into the dirt? The reasons they’re doing this are almost certainly political, and those political reasons have roots in fears of the integrity of governments opaque to public oversight. Whether or not you agree with the degree of transparency idealized in Wikileaks (i.e. some things must remain secret), it should be obvious that the cat is already out of the bag. Why does Wikileaks need money, anyway? The volume of information they’re sifting through, redacting, tagging, distributing, and so on, is immense. There is obviously demand for the service they’re offering. Just as there was demand for, say, digital downloads of music in the days of Napster. But Wikileaks isn’t Napster. Napster was a free-for-all, essentially data-agnostic, chaotic neutral if you will. Wikileaks is the of global leak management. It’s a known entity, centralized, connected (though perhaps not liked). If they’re forced to shut down, what happens to that demand? Oh look, another instructive engraving. I’ll stop being circuitous. What will happen is the information being sifted by Wikileaks (and a few other growing and semi-legitimate leaks-type organizations) will be distributed anyway, by whatever means is convenient. It will be chaos, uncontrollable, unredacted, and entirely in the hands of the people least likely to be responsible with it. Is that situation inevitable? Probably. But that doesn’t mean we should be in a hurry to bring it about. It really is a case of the devil you know or the devil you don’t know. Unfortunately, governments and institutions like Visa have their hands tied. They can’t make the right choice because it’s untenable politically. In the end it’s going to turn out worse for everyone involved. |
null | Andrew Keen | 2,011 | 10 | 6 | null |
Engadget Hooks Up With gdgt To Power Its Product Modules | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | According to a tipster, social product review site will be expanding its embeddable widget offerings, which have previously included Time’s Techland blog, to a more massive scale on our sister AOL site, . A screencap of how the integration will work, above. Like TechCrunch’s , gdgt will be syndicating its crowdsourced product data, user review data, Q&A and discussions across related Engadget content. In return gdgt will benefit from the exposure to Engadget’s formidable readership. The two sites apparently have been working on this partnership for a while, made even more notable by the fact that gdgt founder was Editor in Chief of Engadget before he left Aol to do his own thing, as people are wont to do. The product is expected to be unveiled officially sometime in November. GDGT has $3.72 million in funding from , , , , and others. |
Bonfire.im brings IM-style chat to Twitter, know when your friends are online | Mike Butcher | 2,011 | 10 | 24 |
So far Twitter users have gotten by with Direct Messaging when they want to be more intimate with their friends. But what if they could do Facebook-chat style instant messaging? That’s the offering today from , a brand new disruptive startup which promises to change the Twitter experience in quite a fundamental way, by adding IM-syle Presence. Suddenly you could now know if your friends were online or ont. However, they hope Twitter will like this new plugin since it keeps users stuck to the web site. That means ad dollars for Twitter. Launching today, Bonfire.im is part of a trend away from centralised IM services. As we know, there is no incentive to innovate on the part of MSN Messenger or AOL Messenger. It’s all about user lock-in. Facebook IM by contrast has show that people want to IM “in context” with their social graph, and now Bonfire.im hopes to prove the same for Twitter. They are also hoping their plug-in for Chrome and Safari will be interesting enough for Twitter not to shut down their service at first site, so we’ll have to see how that plays out. Bonfire.im works by detecting your browser then letting you install the appropriate plugin. Once you have it running you can invite friends very easily, but a Twitter user has to follow and be followed by the same person in order to IM them over Bonfire. Now, it sounds technically replicable in plug-in terms and it probably is, but I’m told but it’s “not trivial”. Direct Messaging remains unaffected. Uses? Well, that’s to be decided, but of course this could be great for brands which want to do live customer service, for instance Would Twitter do this IM service? Probably not right now, as it’s a distraction and doesn’t monetize content. They might do it, but it would have to be a separate team, like the Search team. The Bonfire team – coming out of Brighton in the UK – are hoping they won’t. Not yet. The co-founding team consist of Josh Russell and Jay Gooby. They have taken a small Angel round, undisclosed. |
Obama 2012 Campaign Turns To Tumblr For “Huge Collaborative Storytelling Effort” | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 24 | President Obama has added a new web service to his repertoire: , the hot blogging service that just raised another in funding. You can find the new blog . The site was set up by the 2012 Obama/Biden campaign, which also runs his and account (The White House also recently an account on ). Tumblr is generally known for having a youngish audience (particularly teens), and its reblog feature will help anything the campaign posts spread like wildfire across the service. The folks at Tumblr are undoubtedly smiling — the President’s presence can be worn as a badge of honor, and also generally leads to plenty of free mainstream press coverage. In the first post on his blog, Obama’s team writes that they want Tumblr to “be a huge collaborative storytelling effort—a place for people across the country to share what’s going on in our respective corners of it and how we’re getting involved in this campaign to keep making it better.” To do this, the site will be accepting submissions via the Tumblr submission feature. Fortunately the campaign isn’t being naive — they’ve preemptively asked submitters to think of their mothers before they send anything nasty. There will be trolls among you: this we know. We ask only that you remember that we’re people—fairly nice ones—and that your mother would want you to be polite. |
Steve Jobs Bio Now Available On The Kindle And In iBooks | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | As if this whole thing couldn’t get more drawn out and dramatic, users — including and — are reporting early deliveries of Walter Isaacson’s book, oddly enough through pre-orders on the Amazon Kindle. This leaves Apple fans with quite a conundrum; Watch the “60 Minutes” Issaacon or read his book first? Before you get too Amazon trigger happy, I just tried to order one via Kindle and it has not yet shown up — so maybe it’s first come first served? My copy on the Kindle just arrived, 15 minutes after I ordered it. And, as is fitting, the book — including a free sample — is now available for the iPhone and iPad in , with zero wait. The analog version of the 656 page book should be officially available in bookstores across the US tomorrow. |
GoPro Releases The HD Hero2 Action Camera, All-New Imaging In The Same Rugged Housing | Matt Burns | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | GoPro is ready to take action cameras to a whole new level. Again. The Half Moon Bay-based company just released the HD Hero2 Professional, a major refresh over the original (and much loved) HD Hero. Chief among the updates is a new video sensor that has twice the performance as the original including better low light capture. This new sensor is paired with a different lens that not only improves the overall clarity, but also features a 170 degree field of view rather than the 127 found in the older HD Hero. Yep, your extreme tomfoolery will look that much more awesome.
The HD Hero2 looks very similar to the original. It’s the same square form factor, which allows it to fit into the existing housings. However, GoPro improved the user experience markedly. A bonifide user interface now occupies the tiny LCD rather than a cryptic single character menu system (the original is horrible). Plus, the camera now has LED status lights on four sides rather than just the front. The big improvement involves the internal systems. The new sensor and processor allows for incredible burst modes: 10 photos per second or one every .5 seconds. The faster sensor allows for 960p at 48 frames per second, 720p at 60 fps or WVGA at 120 fps. Plus, the sensor is capable of still photos at 11 megapixels, a huge upgrade from the 5MP sensor in the HD Hero. The new model also has an mini-HDMI port, and 3.5mm external stereo mic input along with a 3.5mm composite video port. Like the HD Hero, the HD Hero2 is also compatible with the BacPac add-ons including the upcoming WiFi BacPac that will add remote management through a small wireless remote and a smartphone. GoPro dispatched the $299 HD Hero2 to Best Buy last week should the should be hitting your local store within the week. The model is also .
My buddy Dan and braved a cold northern Michigan afternoon at to capture the sample footage above. True to GoPro’s word, the new model’s video quality is definitely an improvement but the updated user interface is even more appreciated. The UI on the orignal is so obscure that I constantly have to refere to the instructional booklet. Plus, the multiple recording status lights allows users to see the recording status without sticking their head in front of the lens ( started with a pic of my face looking oddly into the camera). There simply isn’t a more versatile and capable extreme recording system than the $299 GoPro HD Hero2.
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Steve Jobs: “I Admire Mark Zuckerberg For Not Selling Out” | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | The with Steve Jobs biographer Walter Isaacson is up on the web, but one of the most interesting parts is an outtake that didn’t make it into the televised segment. In it, we hear Steve Jobs directly from some of Isaacson’s taped interviews. While Jobs was withering in his assessment of Google and Microsoft, he expressed respect for Facebook and founder Mark Zuckerberg. “We talk about social networks in the plural,” Jobs told Isaacson, “but I don’t see anybody other than Facebook out there. Just Facebook, They are dominating this. I admire Mark Zuckerberg . . . for not selling out, for wanting to make a company. I admire that a lot.” He doesn’t have such nice things to say about Google or Microsoft. He was angry at Google for what he saw as its attempt to copy the iPhone with Android. But when Larry Page became CEO Jobs agreed to meet with him to give him some advice: Don’t be like Microsoft with products all over the map, focus. And don’t try to be too nice as a CEO. Jobs’ relationship with Bill Gates goes back the furthest and is the most complicated. But the two pioneers of the PC era met one last time near the end of Jobs’ life and talked for several hours. Gates told Jobs that he proved his model—of controlling computer products from end to end—works. And Jobs said that Microsoft’s model of licensing out the OS to other manufacturers worked as well. Only later did Gates relate to Isaacson: “What I didn’t tell Steve is that it only works when you have a Steve Jobs.” When Isaacson asked Jobs if he really thought the Microsoft model works, Jobs replied: “Yeah, it works, but only if you don’t mind making crappy products.” |
Kleiner Perkins Leads $20M Round In Chinese Digital Ad Measurement Company Moment Systems | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | , China-based digital marketing measurement company, has raised in funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers with China Broadband Capital, Redpoint Ventures and WPP Digital participating in the round. Kleiner partner will join Moment Systems’ board. Founded in 2006, Moment Systems specializes in the measurement and optimization of digital advertising through reach/frequency, demographics and more. Advertisers, agencies and online media companies use Moment Systems to track reach, frequency and demographics of a target audience, evaluate return on investment, optimize investment and improve advertisement impact. Moment Systems clients include P&G, Microsoft, KFC, L’Oreal, Volkswagen, IBM and others. As of 2010, Moment Systems of around 250 million Chinese internet users. |
Apple Remembers: Video of ‘Celebrating Steve’ Memorial Now Available To The Public | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | Last week Apple held a special event at its Cupertino campus for employees to come together and remember Steve Jobs, who passed away on October 5. The event was closed to the public, but Apple has just posted an 80 minute recording online. You can It’s sad, but it’s very much worth watching. The event, called was attended by many thousands of Apple employees — both at Apple’s campus, and worldwide. Every retail store around the world closed its doors to the public for the duration of the event as the employees inside watched a live feed. The video includes talks from many of Apple’s most prominent figures (and Jobs’s closest friends), including CEO Tim Cook, board members Al Gore and Bill Campbell, and the company’s SVP of industrial design, Jonathan Ive. The event also includes performances by Norah Jones, Coldplay, and Randy Newman. One thing to note: the video plays in Safari for me, but in Chrome I see a message that it will be available soon (in other words, use Safari). |
Iterations: Swords and Shields in the Merchant Economy | Semil Shah | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | “The American Dream,” loosely defined, is made up of a few building blocks. The right to life, liberty, and to pursue happiness. The opportunity to advance, whether through education, sport, entertainment, or enterprise. Perhaps have a family, live in a house, run your own business. Over the past ten years, for a variety of factors, the pursuit of the American dream got significantly harder. Home values have depreciated. It’s more competitive to get into schools. Pinks slips are flying off the copying machine. For many, the dream currently seems elusive. I’d like to focus on one slice of the dream: The ability to run one’s own business. Let’s leave aside venture-style businesses for a minute to focus on local merchants. Enterprising individuals and families across the country typically raise funds from friends, family members, and local banks to open their own local businesses, in part motivated by the opportunity to hold equity, reap profits, and exert more control over their lives. Perhaps household income takes a little hit, but the family can vacation when they want to and make more of the kids’ soccer games. I don’t mean to suggest this all happened smoothly. The local bookstore got squashed by the mega-bookstores, which in turn got served by the endless reach of web retail, which is now currently under threat by social and interest networks. We all know what happened to the small, medium, and large merchants here. No matter how many gimmicks each type of store could experiment with, the fact is that many of them couldn’t compete against the scale and price sensitivity of the Internet. They didn’t have tools to learn more about their customers. And, as a result of these external forces, the transformation of the economy, and the emergence of the “daily deals economy,” many merchants were put on the defensive, scurrying to survive. Mercifully, within the last few years, networks and tools have emerged that offer great hope to small, medium and large physical businesses alike. This is often referred to the as , broadly speaking, the idea that networks, new media, and targeted offers can motivate customers surfing the web or playing with their phones to visit a store nearby. The race to grab and close valuable parts of this loop has been staggering, with Groupon finally set to go public in November, with LivingSocial gaining more and more steam, and services like Square and Foursquare focusing on very narrow yet valuable, strategic pieces of the loop. It’s infamously debatable whether or not the daily deals craze is worth it for local merchants, but we’ll have to sit tight and just see what happens. What is not in dispute, however, is that the consumer web, social media, and mobile devices evolved at a rate faster than most local merchants could keep up with. The majority of local businesses are not typically very high margin ones and, therefore, have smaller appetites for risk, so the day-to-day focus in large part is on maintaining inventory and increasing foot traffic through advertising. Therefore, today, even though running a daily deal may place acute stress on a business not prepared for it, new media companies can simply drive foot traffic, and that prospect alone will likely make any merchant in a competitive situation seriously consider it. In a local context, we are smack dab in the middle of a “daily deals economy” that’s here to stay, whether we like it or not. And, offers are going to get more and more targeted, based on a variety of customer and merchant inputs, such as time of day, inventory, and repetition. Now that we are beginning to understand this world a bit better, I’ve noticed an interesting class of new products and services from startups nationwide have emerged to help local merchants better manage their businesses. This is what I refer to as the “merchant-side economy,” where new companies are developing suites of offensive and defensive solutions to help merchants capture more information, optimize traffic, and manage inventory. In this “merchant-side economy,” entrepreneurs are building products and services as “shields” and “swords” to help arm merchants to defend against fights from competition and their customers and get stronger by using new tools. New companies such as , , , and provide software solutions to help merchants manage inventory, CRM systems, and targeted offers. Startups like offer a hardware solution, allows merchants to create and manage deals, offers digital ordering, helps businesses build dead simple websites, and helps merchants manage the deals they want, inverting the model entirely. (There are so many companies sprouting up, it’s impossible to list them all, but please add to the list .) Larger companies are, of course, keenly aware of the importance of this trend. Google to buy Groupon last year, Facebook dropped and then of the daily deals space, LivingSocial has been quickly, eBay Milo, Square Card Case, and even one of the biggest retail chains in the world, Walmart, got into the game by Kosmix. As media attention shifts from television tubes to new media and mobile channels, retailers have more options to grab online traffic and convert it into real foot traffic, and once they are in the store, startups like and can help create new in-store experiences. These are the swords and shields in the new merchant-side economy, products and services that help store owners handle the daily deals economy, compete for foot traffic, capture more information about existing and potential customers, and leverage the scale and precision of new media companies to provide better consumer experiences and, hopefully, to keep that one very important slice of the American dream from fading forever into the darkest shadows cast by the growth of new Internet media, advancements in technologies, and the harsh realities of globalization. |
Super-Powered Launch App Quicksilver Adds Support For OS X Lion | Jason Kincaid | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | If you’re on a Mac and haven’t expanded your horizons beyond Spotlight, you owe it to yourself to check out , a free, open sourced launchbar app that can prove very handy once you’ve gotten over the learning curve. The app has just been updated with a slew of new features including automatic Plugin updates (see their for a full rundown), and has also been optimized for Mac OS X Lion. Quicksilver has an interesting history. The app was originally developed by , which ceased active development several years ago — but not before open-sourcing their code. Since then it’s seen periodic updates, but they’ve been few and far between, to the point that some longtime fans and looked elsewhere. But in the last six months the app has seen a resurgence of sorts, as updates and blog updates from the team at have been much more frequent. The site’s tagline? “Quicksilver Lives”. Of course, Quicksilver isn’t the only game in town when it comes to super-powered launch apps — alternatives include (which is free, with an optional feature-pack available for £12) and , which runs $35 for a new single license. Quicksilver offers its full functionality for free, but it can be more complex to use than some of these alternatives. Ultimately it’ll come down to personal preference — in any case, learning how to effectively use one of these apps can be a major time saver in the long run. : Quicksilver lead developer Patrick Robertson reached out to let us know that the site is actually their blog — the app itself is at .
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Microbridges | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | Google + still looks more like a science fair exhibit than anything else. I say that because I continue to feed it by skimming Circle notifications, only rarely finding anybody I recognize or forgot to block already. Facebook taught me the value of making distinctions at the invitation stage, not by separating into family and friends but by accepting anyone who I either recognized or who made an attempt to signal some interest in what I wrote or communicated on the network. Twitter I constrained to a very small set of follows and a counter-intuitive best practice. That consisted of frequently breaking the “rules” by getting really verbose in realtime, imagining that Twitter was in reality a worldwide message bus and not a celebrity honey pot. The early Twitter featured Track, which allowed us to ping someone with their @handle and immediately get a response. That back and forth style was exhilarating, but it also pissed off the larger volume of folks who followed based on a strategy of creating a comprehensive stream of updates from people who wanted to reach as many people as possible. The trouble was, and is, that I was, and am, more interested in establishing a strongly-typed follow cloud where such communications chatter contained value as a measure of not just its content but the context surrounding the messages. That is, the @mentions, the retweets, the timing of the interactions, and the sense of how these individual interactions scaled outward in a cascading series of overlapping circles. By establishing rules for myself based on such context, those who weren’t interested soon fell away. What was left has grown slowly over time, but not based on suggested user lists (I’m not suggested) or popularity. Those interior rules are simple: anything goes, as long as I feel I’m adding something to the conversation, preferably either unique or supportive of something I deem valuable. I’m not opposed to being promotional about what I post; I retweet every column and Gillmor Gang from the TechCrunch feed, adding @mentions of the Gang members and a few others that may be referenced. But the @mentions are designed to establish a taxonomy of interest, a map of the fluctuations and authority that flows around the participants and themes of the material. It’s my sense that these maps exist in the wild, whether or not they are being curated or simply observed and harvested. Similarly, the work we are beginning to do with Siri is creating the outlines of a similar layer of context based on how we alter our behavior in order to optimize the current state of Siri’s capabilities. Over time, Siri will extend itself to built in and third party apps, and over time those services will talk not just to us but on our behalf to each other. While it may not be immediately discoverable, I believe these two layers, the @mention cloud and Siri routing, are already connected and operating in tandem. If that is true, then our immediate opportunity is to establish these communities of interest regardless of the underlying service. In doing so, we imbue these notification layers with IP that neither depends on or is locked into any one service. Instead, the messages may be more easily housed in one or another service, but the overarching context only survives by being consistent and coherent across services. The same dynamics that for me first emerged from Twitter — Track, @mentions, and direct messages — are reliably available on Chatter and other services. I @mention Chatter not because it’s the only one that supports context (it’s not) but because it’s important that it does. Anybody who’s serious about context must follow these rules. Much is made of the distinction between the consumer and commercial, though that is more a matter of products and economic model and strategy. But across these models is the unifying structure of time and opportunity, and the context that bridges them. Take the action of setting an alarm in Siri, or sending a direct message over Twitter. These are the most personal of events, signals to and from ourselves that we think of as private and necessarily secure. But the context in which these messages operate is public, at least to the extent that the actions they trigger impact outside of our own view. An alarm triggers a quick shower and then a walk to a dinner meeting. A DM is received by another person and processed based on the symmetrical mutual follow relationship. In turn they might send a private message to someone else, but in aggregate the @mention cloud derives information based on a collaborative map of consensus. Expand it slightly with a public message with @mentions but without key details, and you bring in serendipitous rendezvouses unanticipated but desired. Each of these broader attributes of the @mention layers survive and prosper regardless of service but in aggregate because of the strengths of each of these individual services. We all can feel the familial pull of Facebook, the sense that the landmarks of our lives — birthdays, reunions, memorials, life events that we formerly only tracked by design — are now part of the fabric of our daily lives. It’s not just family but a sense of family in our friendships, schoolmates, even the famous and semi-famous, all bound together by the basic immutable rhythm of our lives. You can fill in the blanks for the other services, Twitter and the realtime drumbeat of what used to be called the news, Chatter with the heartbeat of the company and increasingly the uber companies that act in concert, and in some as yet unformed way Google +. It doesn’t matter what Google is doing with the service, though it clearly represents an orchestration of services that may or may not survive being absorbed. It does matter that what does work will add to the aggregate strength of the context service bridge. Already we’re seeing microbridges being set up, like the one that puts Twitter into your Contacts list as an SMS address so you can ask Siri to Tweet out a message. As these hacks accelerate, it will be incumbent upon Apple to expand API access to the routing layer so that third parties and especially users themselves can construct these macros. The more they’re used, the more the business process layer can be extrapolated across multiple services. How many days did it take to come up with these early tools? This will happen fast. Can’t wait. Don’t have to. |
10 Years Of The iPod | Devin Coldewey | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | On October 23rd, 2001, Steve Jobs introduced the iPod at a special event, showing off a design destined to become iconic. Ten years later, the brand is as strong as ever, though sadly, we have lost its inventor. Take a few minutes to watch the original product announcement and take a short trip through the evolution of the device that is arguably the most important in Apple’s history. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=kN0SVBCJqLs w=640] I say the most important because while the Mac Classic, iMac, and later, the iPhone, are equally as prestigious to some, I think that the iPod was a watershed moment. If the iPod failed, Apple would have remained a boutique computer maker prized by designers and schools but able to be safely ignored by the tech world at large. Instead, the iPod proved to be a powerful wedge, the de facto standard for listening to music for many years; indeed, it still has years to go until it finally gives way to more integrative devices like smartphones. And even then, the brand will endure. This wedge of Apple’s gave them mass-market credibility, boosted sales enormously, and established iTunes as a market force that would disrupt an entire industry. The iPod itself has changed over the years. But anyone could look at today’s 160GB iPod Classic and recognize the original as its predecessor. Some say that the current model (available in more or less its current form since late 2008) is due for replacement. It has already been replaced, though, by a number of devices. Apple seems to offer the Classic as a sort of public service, declining to have those sales transfer over to the newer devices, perhaps out of respect for its legacy. There were missteps: the line of touch buttons from the third-generation iPod didn’t last long, and the puny color screen of the first color models wasn’t particularly compelling. The “fat nano” was, let’s be honest, an object of ridicule. The whole battery debacle was poorly handled. But these problems were corrected and every time, consumers thought “Ah – it’s complete.” And then, of course, along came the iPhone. Ten years is a hell of a long time for a consumer electronics brand to endure, much less a form factor or look and feel. I’m betting nearly everyone reading this has owned an iPod of one kind or another, and probably has an iPod memory stashed away somewhere. Personally, I remember receiving a 5th-gen iPod at Christmas of 2005, and whining until we could go to the store the next day and exchange my white one for a black one. Not a proud moment for me, but perhaps it is one for Apple. So here’s a salute to one of the most important pieces of consumer electronics of all time. Feel free to share your thoughts and memories below. |
Microsoft Inks Tenth Android Patent Deal, Signs Agreement With Compal Electronics | Leena Rao | 2,011 | 10 | 23 | Microsoft has Android patent deal, this time with China’s . The current list of Microsoft’s patent agreements include , Wistron, , Acer and General Dynamics Itronix. This is the tenth agreement relating to Microsoft’s Android patents, and the ninth agreement in the last four months. According to the release, the patent agreements covers any tablets, mobile phones, e-readers and other consumer-focused devices running the Android or Chrome OS Platform. Similar to the Quanta deal, Compal Electronics will pay out royalties pay out royalties on phones, tablets or e-readers that run on Android or Chrome OS. As with many of these deals, the exact structure of the royalty fees is unknown. In a , Microsoft revealed that Compal, which produces smartphones and tablet computers for third parties, has revenues of roughly $28 billion per year. From the release: Microsoft continues to profit off of Android, and this deal just adds more fuel to the fire when it comes to Google’s view on Microsoft’s practices. Google believes Microsoft’s endeavor to profit off of Android is , and takes away from Google’s belief that Android is a Of course Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer . But Microsoft counters that its agreements reduce the number of patent lawsuits, as depicted in the chart below. From Brad Smith and Gutierrez (Smith is Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and General Counsel) write today, The company added that following the Samsung licensing agreement, Microsoft now has license agreements in place with OEMs that account for 53 percent of all Android smartphones in the United States. And there’s a jab at Google included as well in the announcement: |
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Are Facebook ID Cards In Our Future? | Alexia Tsotsis | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | Facebook has on the usage of “Facebook” on business cards and, more curiously, “non-magnetically encoded” ID cards among other things. If granted the trademark would protect using the word Facebook in the specified formats, not any actual invention. So what if Facebook just wants to stop people from making fake Facebook business cards? Well, it seems like this trademark would cover that and a whole lot more including “business card and identity card design services,” “printing services” and the ominous, “facilitating social and business networking through the provision of data for use on its own business and identity cards.” It also looks like the trademark would cover QR code and NFC/RFID uses — which work through magnetic induction, NOT the aforementioned magnetic encoding — much like the Presence cards and photobooths that allowed you (see left). It’s easy to envision some sort of master Facebook plan where Facebook would give users a cheap physical ID that could be read by smart readers and used for a variety of practical purposes. When asked, people familiar with the Facebook matter had no clue as to whether this was actually in the works. It’s also unclear how often companies like Facebook trademark something and then don’t actually take advantage of the trademark. If Facebook were to develop some sort of physical ID system, it would be great for marketing and extremely practical; Imagine going to concerts or movies, buying tickets through Facebook and swiping through a key fob ID card. So will Facebook play a larger role in how we manage in our offline identity in the future? Well the idea is not so far-fetched — After all, Facebook is already most dominant identity system on the Internet. |
Watch Me Talk To My iPhone 4S (Siri Demo) | Erick Schonfeld | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | If the iPhone 4S has one standout feature, it is the . You ask Siri to do things by speaking to it, and it can call anyone in your contact list, send them a text message or email, set up a meeting, play a song, set up a reminder for yourself, get directions, or just ask a question. It is a conversation starter in more ways than one. Siri is the kind of feature that makes you want to to show a friend or a total stranger. John Biggs and I covered Siri in yesterday’s on the iPhone 4S, but I taped this extra video to go into more depth. It’s just better to see Siri in action that to read about it. Siri isn’t perfect. Sometimes it runs into network issues, picks up background noise, or gets the wrong question because your instinct is to start talking before it is ready. But it is the most impressive voice-computer interface out there right now. In the demo above, I set up a reminder to pick up some flowers for my wife (a notification later popped up on my phone at the appointed time), dictate a note, find a park nearby on a map, and set up a meeting with Biggs. When you set up a meeting, Siri both sends an email to the other person and puts it on your calendar. I find that particularly impressive because this is a case where talking to Siri takes so much less time than doing those actions myself. |
In The Ring: Problems, Problems Everywhere | Seth Sternberg | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | When you decide you’re going to start, or run, a startup, you’re signing up for problems. Lots of problems. They’re everywhere. New competitors. A key employee leaving. You didn’t hit your numbers. A market shift rendering your service useless in a year or two. When you first start, they’re almost fun. “Oh, how am I gonna solve that one?” Or better yet, “All these VCs want to get into my deal!” Of course, they also have the tendency to seem existential. You don’t have much at the beginning, so the good feels like it can make you—“We just landed an awesome partnership. We just became millionaires!”—and the bad feels like it can destroy you—“Holy shit, Facebook’s launching ?? We’re dead.” As you scale, more problems seem to crop up—hourly. A system that was working super well, like how your engineers choose projects, may all of the sudden break once you tip past 12 engineers. Who knew it’d happen then? It did, and it felt like it happened out of the blue. Before you know it, your engineers are feeling unmotivated, the system seems broken, and it’s no longer fun For the CEO, this can get overwhelming fast. If you have a great team, most problems get solved before you ever hear about them. But there are enough big problems that you will hear about, at least one a day. And it’s not the easy problems that make it your way. Those already got solved. Rather, they’re the hardest problems that people bring to your attention. Day after day. That, my friends, can be tiring. Have you caught the setup yet? The huge, massive, you could lose your job kind of risk lurking in this story yet? It’s all too easy to become the CEO who telegraphs “don’t bring me every damn problem—you’re smart—solve your own problems. That’s why I hired you!” This, in fact, can seem particularly effective. Adopt this position and problems will apparently take care of themselves…until all those lurking problems that never made it to you, for fear of you not wanting to hear them, result in a declining company. Buh-bye. So what to do? First, obviously, resist the temptation to become that CEO who no one wants to tell what’s really going on. Just don’t be that guy or gal. That means you need to listen to the problems that come your way and, as much as you can, play traffic director. Help them figure out who to work with to solve their problems. It’s incredibly empowering if you can help others learn how to solve their problems, rather than solving the problems for them. Second, it’s all about education. You need to teach people how to identify and solve problems when they’re nascent, rather than letting them fester and become a big deal. Catching problems early (eg: our system for deciding what engineers work on broke) often keeps larger problems from ever occurring (eg: our star engineer wants to leave). Teaching this, it turns out, is surprisingly complex Once I began to realize that I needed to actively talk to the folks at Meebo about identifying and solving problems, I thought it would clearly be enough to say, “Guys, don’t let problems fester. If you notice a problem, fix it or bring it to someone who can!” It wasn’t—somehow problems still festered without being solved. So I began to telegraph the process of solving a problem. 1. Identify that a problem exists. 2. Identify the cause of the problem. 3. Hypothesize a solution. 4. Implement the solution. Thinking about problems in a structured way, such as this, turned out to help my own thinking on problem solving. In fact, it led to two pretty interesting discoveries: a) people often don’t realize they’re facing a problem. Rather, they just feel frustration. b) problem solving, and particularly the ability to shepherd a problem through the four stages listed above, is highly correlated with seniority. It turns out that many folks, particularly junior folks, don’t realize when they’ve run into a solvable problem. Rather, they’ll tend to just feel frustration. I’ve had this same thing happen to me. You know that feeling you get in your gut when something doesn’t feel right? It bums you out, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. That’s it. There’s a problem, but you haven’t yet consciously realized it. Thus, junior folks are particularly susceptible to becoming frustrated, confiding in their peers about their frustration, and not beginning the process of solving the problem. You tend to see it manifest in the form of complaints, rants, and general lack of motivation. Things then snowball. This is where education comes in. Teaching folks to realize they’re frustrated and that that’s a sign they need to think about they’re frustrated is the first step in ensuring that problems get caught and solved early. As long as the problem gets identified (step 1), if that person can’t get to step 2 on their own, at least they can bring it to someone who can. I’m not certain why seniority and problem solving capability are correlated. It’s tempting to chalk it up to experience, but it’s more likely information or influence asymmetry—more senior folks are more likely to know who can help them solve a problem, where the cause may be coming from within the organization, and certainly are more likely to have the influence to help implement a solution. That is, it’s likely less tied to experience and more tied to information flow, which is often tied to place within a given hierarchy. This is why information transparency within an organization is so crucial (topic for a future post). But knowing this relationship exists can help you both empower your more junior folks, and ensure that your more senior folks understand how important it is to help the folks they manage identify and solve problems with them before they mushroom. The other half of this is, once the problem is identified, being transparent about solving the problem. It’s an equal partnership between you and your employees. It’s too easy to disappear into the management black box, secure in the knowledge that you’re working to solve the problem, but leaving everyone else hanging. To instill a sense of trust and empowerment, establishing a pattern of good, collaborative problem solving can be the difference between a motivated team working with you to solve problems and a dysfunctional organization. Net: don’t run from your problems, but do everything you can to empower your people to solve them early and often. |
Conversocial launches free single user version | vaughn597 | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | Social Media Management system is launching a free edition of its service. That’s good news for stressed Social Media Managers struggling to organise multiple conversation channels with customers. The London startup provides a platform to run effective marketing and customer services through Facebook pages and Twitter, bringing structure to the customer-company interaction on social media platforms. The service was launched in 2010 and counts ITV and Groupon amongst others as customers. Its new Starter Edition is the first software Conversocial is delivering fully free. Co-founder and CEO Joshua March thinks the business decision to go free is a profitable one. “The perfect customer for our paid accounts is a company who has a reasonably big fan page and Twitter account; they need to plug in their customer service teams to really stay on top of all the direct questions and problems being posted. However before companies reach this point, many have a social media manager trying to do everything themselves, often with very limited budget. We’ve crafted our free starter edition to be a really useful tool for these lone social media managers, which allows us to be in front of them when they are ready to plug in a full team; and will hopefully allow them to get to that point faster.” Sounds like a plan. The Starter Edition is an instantly delivered SaaS solution, featuring automated to-do lists ensuring comments and tweets aren’t missed, inappropriate content blockers and priority notifications. Managers can prioritise customer service issues, schedule updates, screen and respond to comments, wall posts and tweets on corporate Facebook pages and Twitter account. The Starter Edition is available to use for one person only. Conversocial’s paid accounts are back in the game when the company’s social media presence outgrows the control of a single manager and a service team is introduced. That’s what instant multi-user upgrades are available for. |
The crowd is still at the core of the new wave of startups | vaughn597 | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | Well-known Israeli power player Yossi Vardi took to the stage this week in front of an audience still thinking about , to talk business. Vardi, Israel’s number one high-tech entrepreneur, has been involved in building over 60 companies in various fields, from mobile to water technology. Here he introduced the “true wisdom of the crowd”, a concept based on the old paradigm that the Encyclopedia Britannica was replaced by Wikipedia. Namely: Online is the new crowd or tribe. The desire to be a part of the crowd, says Vardi, is as old as civilization itself, it’s just that the implementation of this desire has shifted from the real world to a virtual one. “The concept of the wisdom of the crowd came with crowdsourcing. (…) People used to aggregate in crowds in real life, now the internet has enabled us to communicate in great masses online.” Well, that’s not news. But the “wise” online crowd opens business for collaborative consumption. Author and visionary Rachel Botsman introduced the term, used to describe an economic model based on swapping and sharing, less than a year ago. One of the first speakers at Wired 2011, Botsman explained the re-invention of old market behaviour in the global village we are living in today. “Technology can enable relationships,” said Botsman when she spoke about , the online marketplace that enables people to outsource their errands and assets. In this sense we can all become “micro-entrepreneurs” within the crowd. We are headed towards one very big crowd in one very big marketplace, where not just goods, but also assets are available from taxi services to help in assembling IKEA furniture (which is, by the way, the most frequently posted request on Taskrabbit). For startups this means, as usual, either disrupt the crowd or be disrupted. |
Gillmor Gang 10.15.11 (TCTV) | Steve Gillmor | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | By the time the swarm slowed down, it was decorated by numerous blog posts including one from the Dean of the Fully Disclosed, Fred Wilson. We’ll look back on this thread as the moment when 140 characters provided the Vitamin B12 shot that jumpstarted the move toward prioritization of the Push Notification window. @stevegillmor, @gaberivera, @scobleizer, @jtaschek, @kevinmarks |
What Can We Learn From Dennis Ritchie? | John Biggs | 2,011 | 10 | 15 | As we noted earlier this week, one of the founding fathers of UNIX and the creator of C, Dennis Ritchie, passed away last weekend. While I feel that many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing, I think it’s valuable to look back at his accomplishments and place him high in the CS pantheon already populated by Lovelace, Turing, and (although this crowing will be controversial, at least until history has its say) the recently-departed Steve Jobs. UNIX was one of the first multi-user operating systems, allowing scientists and researchers to share computer time on what were traditionally batch-based machines. The concept of multi-user and multitasking were of great interest to researchers simply because of the time required to write, run, and receive the output of batch programs. Computer time, in batch mode, was expensive, as illustrates: While mulling over the problems of operating systems in 1969, [Ken] Thompson [the co-creator of Unix] in his spare time developed a computer game called “Space Travel.” The game simulated the motion of the planets in the solar system. A player could cruise between the planets, enjoy the scenery, and even land the ship on the planets and moons. The game, first written on Multics and then transliterated into Fortran for the GECOS operating system, ran on a GE 635 computer. The game’s display was jerky and hard to control because the player had to type commands to control the ship. Also, it cost about $75 in CPU time on the big GE 635, a cost that hardly endeared it to management. At $75 a game, especially in 1960s dollars, it was hard for a hacker to have any fun. Dennis Ritchie and Thompson worked together to build UNIX as a hacker’s paradise, a place to test small programs and share the results. He was a physicist and mathematician by training but entered the nascent world of mainframe and micro-computing at just the right time. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of great change in the way computing interacted with the world. Whereas the the common view was that “These darn computers are going to mess up my phone bill,” in reality computers were messing up the status quo. In a few short years paper records were slowly eroded by computation, telephone switches were changing from wild, steampunk octopi into a quasi-mechanical system of routers and terminals. Bell Labs was at the forefront of it all, tasked with connecting the world through copper wire. Most important, what he was doing was , something we forget in the days of drag-and-drop, autocompleting IDEs. The key to UNIX was the concept of sharing. The OS was begin in 1969 as a reaction to Bell Labs shutting down Thompson and Ritchie’s favorite operating system, Multics. With the cooperation of multiple organizations including MIT, a group of four New Jersey Bell Labs programmers began working on a neglected PDP-7 machine where they ported the Space Travel game and began to build out a file system in order to save games. Slowly, a command structure that anyone familiar with modern Linux would understand accreted around this file system. Slowly word of UNIX trickled out of the small cabal of original users and in 1971 the Bell Labs patent filing office began using it to format documents for printing using . It is also important to note that Linus Torvalds was born in 1969, making him a prime candidate to reap the benefits of what you could term the UNIX Age. To come of age in the tumult of a new industry is important and Gates, Torvalds, and Ritchie all were excellent examples of this. Ritchie went on to create a number of other improvements and, in the development of the C operating system, gave the world its first multi-machine, cross-compatible coding standard that anyone, from a grizzled machine language veteran to a young student in Helsinki, could use and understand. The UNIX source code was passed from programmer to programmer like holy writ even after refused to make it available to education institutions. It was written in C with some of its core components written in machine language in order to shave off time, cycles, and most important, to retain an elegance that Ritchie and Thompson inculcated through cross-pollination of ideas. No one man, not even Ritchie, understood the complexity of the beast that became UNIX and that was by design. The goal was simplicity up front and complexity in the back, a model that everyone in computing would do well to emulate. Also important was the desire to reach a golden ideal in clarity and elegance. “Peer pressure and simple pride in workmanship caused gobs of code to be rewritten or discarded as better or more basic ideas emerged,” wrote Doug McIlroy, a member of the UNIX team. “Professional rivalry and protection of turf were practically unknown: so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations”. The question is, then what can we learn about building our own products from this giant of computing? There was no initial push to make money and, in fact, their goal was to save money or at least hide their gaming by moving it to a less costly machine. Ritchie was a physicist and a mathematician. However, he became a programmer. While it’s clear that his background helped him immensely in building UNIX and C, as Bjarne Stroustrup , Ritchie was not afraid to attempt to work in new and unfamiliar territory. “If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn,” he writes. Third is the importance of a hands-off approach to innovation. Ritchie was lucky in that Bell Labs had the money and staff to allow him to hide in the shadows with his friends, creating what they wanted on their own timeline. Google seems to have captured that same sense of internal experimentation obviously with their 20% projects as well as their Labs products that slowly metamorphose into mainstream tools. That the Google founders allowed these 20% projects almost immediately after inception of the company is a testament to Thompson and Ritchie’s methodology. People build mean tools when the foreman is watching and masterpieces when left to their own devices. It amuses me to no end to see a small start-up cloak their product behind NDAs and secrecy or to watch entrepreneurs mistake glad-handing with networking. When this happens, it’s clear that their idea is not novel nor will it be particularly successful nor is their attitude particularly conducive to growth. I would argue that many current, successful entrepreneurs aren’t successful because they talk a good game but because they play one. Arguably the most important software project in the world today, Linux, is important because it gloriously available and open. There are those who will crow that open is not synonymous with profitable, but those people are at best pessimists and at worst fools. In the end Dennis Ritchie taught us that computing wasn’t a secret society, one that required long years of service and special incantations to join. His intellectual largesse is writ large over everything we do online and his still as an explainer – although notoriously shy – shone in his voluminous commentary and . Although none of us can attain what he and the Bell/AT&T team attained, especially considering their milieu and the relative nascence of the information age, we’re reminded that this doesn’t matter. After all, as we learned from the UNIX source code all those years ago: * You are not expected to understand this. You simply have to build on it. |
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