After having a banner #WWDC start yesterday, Apple founder Steve Jobs humbly presented his idea for a new Apple campus at the Cupertino City Council today. I’m still watching this, but what I’ve seen so far is amazing. “It’s a little like a spaceship,” Jobs says. No kidding.
Seventeen years ago Wired published Neal Stephenson’s magisterial epic "Mother Earth Mother Board", about the web of undersea fibre-optic cables being built to connect all of humanity. Well – almost all. Africa, again, was left behind. Until 2009, all of East Africa could only connect to the Internet over slow and hugely expensive satellite links.
Finally, two years ago, SEACOM laid a cable along the East African coast to Mumbai; then tributaries were run thousands of kilometers inland, as far as Uganda and even Rwanda; and later this year, a direct connection to Europe will be lit up. This has chopped the cost of bandwidth from US $5,000 per megabyte per month to approximately $100, hugely increased capacity to 1.28 terabits/second, and given more than hundred million people access to broadband Internet for the very first time. Today I visited their cable landing site in Mombasa, Kenya.
It doesn’t look like a high-tech hub. The site stands in the shadow of Fort Jesus, an ancient castle constructed by the Portuguese in 1593, and to better blend in with its UNESCO World Heritage surroundings, its outer walls are built to look like a Swahili keep:
But within are prefab buildings constructed in New Jersey (of all places) and shipped halfway around the world. The open trapdoor leads to the cable…
…which runs seven kilometres out to the branching station, and then 3,000 kilometers northeast to Mumbia, 2,000 km northwest to Egypt, and another 3,000 south to South Africa:
An observant eye can see the path the cable takes, beneath the shore below Fort Jesus:
Landing the cables is the hard part. It took three months to dig, lay, and cover those seven kilometres, using local barges and professional divers. By contrast, the cable that runs to Djibouti along the 1500 kilometres of Somalia’s wild coast was laid in less than a month … not counting the 55 days that the ship had to rest in port because of the danger of pirates.
That Djibouti branch isn’t even lit up yet. The cable is laid, and ready – but three kilometers of it that pass through Egyptian soil remain a sticking point. "Each country moves at its own pace," sighs Mahmoud Noor, manager of the Kenyan landing station (which also double’s as the system’s backup Network Operations Center.) He won’t go into details, but I get the impression that the problem is more political than technical. When Egypt comes online, hopefully later this year, SEACOM capacity will leap upwards again, and lag times will halve. Until then, all their external traffic has to go to Mumbai, then be routed elsewhere by leased lines.
The undersea cable consists of the fibres themselves, as thin as human hairs, wrapped in a copper sheath that carries up to 12,500 DC volts to power the repeaters every 100km that keep the signals comprehensible. In depths less than kilometre, this is all sheathed in thick additional armour. Here Peter Ouko, a SEACOM engineer, displays a cutaway example of the cable:
…and here’s where it enters the New-Jersey-built prefabs after its monumental journey along the continent.
The interior is cavernous, antiseptic, and honeycombed with cables:
An outgoing sheaf of fibre connects to the next building, where customer equipment goes, and where SEACOM is installing added-value options: an exchange to route connections within Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda (and Ethiopia, when they finally connect) directly without having to wastefully forward that data to Mumbai or London first, and an IP service so that customers can connect directly to routers without having to step down from SDH themselves.
It’s a triumph of engineering, and a profoundly important one. In Kenya today, a SIM card costs less than a beer, and a minute of 2G Internet access costs only 2.5 cents. That’s still too much, but far less than in the bad old days. Once South Africa was the continent’s tech powerhouse, but now they grumble about how good the Kenyans have it -
- and this building is why. It and the others like it are the bedrock on which Africa’s nascent Internet revolution is built; they are, quite literally, where the future is being forged.
This past January, we first wrote about Founders Den, a new shared office space based in the SoMa district of San Francisco. The idea was to create a private clubhouse where invited entrepreneurs (including California’s Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom) could come to hang out and small, referred startups could rent space. Today, the don’t-call-it-an-incubator incubator had its first demo day.
Overall, the quality of the 12 startups that gave presentations seem very solid. A number of them already have funding in place. And some even come by way of other incubators, like Y Combinator. We’ve covered a few of them already, but here’s a rundown of all 12 startups that gave presentations today. Well, actually 11 of them. 1 is still in stealth mode and made me double pinky swear that I wouldn’t reveal what I saw.
Cake Health — The idea behind this startup is more or less to be the Mint for health insurance, as we wrote when we first covered them last month. They aim to be the best free way to manage your health care expenses — something which I think everyone will agree is a huge pain right now. Cake Health provides a simple way for you to input your current healthcare information and gives you easy-to-understand data to show you where your money is going and more importantly, where you can save money. One of the co-founders is an ex-TechCrunch developer.
Chart.io — This is one of the Y Combinator alums focusing on the business intelligence space — which they call “massively broken”. Essentially, they’re Google Analytics for databases. And they already have some big time clients such as Airbnb and Aviary. From the get go, they give you fully customized database information access that can be mixed and matched in a ton of different ways. We’ve also covered them previous here.
DotCloud — This another Y Combinator alum that a couple months ago raised a large $10 million round from Benchmark and others. They aim to solve the choice and management problem that developers have today given how many tools are now at their disposal. Developers go to DotCloud, pick the tools they wish to use to build their applications, and in 30 seconds they can be up and running thanks to the DotCloud infrastructure which sets up and manages everything on their end. This is for consumer apps, web apps, enterprise apps, etc.
EpicRebates — Each year, 1.5 billion mail-in rebates don’t get redeemed. That’s $20 billion consumers are missing out on. That’s the market for EpicRebates. Just as Netflix arose out of late fees, these guys are springing up to cap this waste of money. The aim is to dramatically improve the mail-in rebate experience by making it a fully digital one. Consumers will be able to track rebates with their apps, as well as see which ones are actually worth it.
Formative Labs — Another company we previously covered, Formative Labs is using social experiences to get consumers to lower their energy consumption habits. In the next few weeks, they will launch a new platform called Double Impact (like the Van Damme movie) which aims match brands (who are already spending billions of dollars each year on charity) with consumers who want to help the environment but need motivation. The platform will use Facebook to motivate through social means and to promote brands that want to be associated with good causes.
Groupiter — These guys aim to be a sort of Yammer for creative product teams. In other words, they’re a communication tool to help creative people and teams more easily get stuff done. So why not just use Yammer? Because often creative professionals need outside collaboration. And they need ways to talk to clients from the organizational tools they use. The main thought is to be able to bounce ideas off of your own braintrust at will, rather than just in creative meetings once a week.
OpenAppsMkt — This team has built an HTML5 app store. Essentially, they want to be what Apple’s App Store is, but for the open web. Why? Because a major pain point for developers right now is having to code apps for multiple platforms. And that problem will not go away unless someone creates a centralized store for HTML5 mobile applications that works. OpenAppsMkt believe their solution does because they practice what they preach: their own app is an HTML5 one. It looks similar to Apple’s App Store, but it’s much easier to get into and just as easy to use.
ProximityWare — They put WiFi “to work” by transforming WiFi hotspots into marketing hubs. If you’ve ever been to Union Square in San Francisco and hoped on the WiFi, these guys handle the marketing served up to you there. They offer customers the benefit of having zero installation because they work with existing networks. And they work with networks of any size. Maybe you want to serve an ad over the WiFi in a stadium, or maybe you just want to push a survey over the WiFi in an office. They can do both. And they get a lot of data from these partnerships. And as WiFi continues to expand everywhere, they’ll get even more.
RethinkBooks — They are a white label social reading platform focusing right now on the Christian market. Very targeted, but also very big — with no competition. While it’s considered to be the “wild west” right now in digital publishing, it’s even crazier in the Christian market because it’s behind in the digital revolution. RethinkBooks gives the Christian publisher the tools they need to make their books social and put them out there on today’s latest devices. It’s a $2.3 billion market. We previously covered them last November.
Revel Systems — The aim here is to completely disrupt the point of sale idea for restaurants and retail. Originally, they set out to create an iPhone app to help with the out-of-date POS services being used by most retailers today, but when they saw the iPad, they knew that was the future. Now they provide everything a retailer needs — the software, the iPad, even the cash drawer — to run their own POS system. They key selling point is price — Revel Systems model is much cheaper than traditional ones. But also data and ease of use. Of course, there is now competition here, but it’s a massive potential market.
TheIceBreak — We now have social apps and games for just about everything. But one thing that has remained relatively untouched are relationships. Not new ones, but existing relationships — romantic ones. 60 percent of Facebook users in the U.S. are supposedly in a realtionship currently, and while there are services that help you find love, what about ones that help you keep it? That’s what TheIceBreak does via three key things: communication, affection, excitement. The private network allows you to do questions and answers with your significant other to get your true feelings out there. And this data is shared with other couples (after it is anonymized completely). They also track key moments in your relationship and give you statistics to see things like: if we argue, do we have better sex after? Yep, that’s something they track.
appMobi likes HTML5-based mobile games, and it wants you to like them, too, which is why appMobi is focused on giving developers the tools required to make HTML5 and JavaScript mobile applications that run smoothly across platforms and browsers.
Of course, many loudly pronounced HTML5 the new heir to the throne, as it would finally bring the native app experience to every mobile device, and take some of the iterative work in app creation out of the hands of developers. The problem is that this pronouncement jumped the gun by more than a few paces: HTML5, while an important step forward, is still a work in progress.
But, today, appMobi announced a new technology, called DirectCanvas, that it claims speeds up the often slow graphic rendering of HTML5 in mobile games by 500 percent. DirectCanvas was designed to accelerate the HTML5 canvas element, allowing graphics and animation in mobile games to be more fluid, in other words, to appear with greater speed and fewer glitches. appMobi hopes that its technology will allow game studios to build a more diverse range of mobile games, which many have resisted because of the questions over whether or not devices can support complex HTML5-based games.
appMobi also announced today at E3 that it acquired TapJS, a game hosting platform with community features that enables users to integrate games with player accounts, server-side data storage, leader boards, badges, Facebook, and more through a simple JavaScript API. appMobi said that acquiring TapJS will beef up its mobile development feature set by adding the startup’s engagement features, like player challenges and leader boards and allow developers to integrate social elements to their games using the platform.
For more on the comparison between appMobi’s new speedy updates to HTML5 in gaming, check out the video below. The technology looks impressive, but it will take DirectCanvas getting out into the wild in the hands of developers before we’ll know whether or not this can have a significant effect on HTML5 game development across the board.
Matt may think that the Wii U is the E3 champion, but I’m not convinced. It looks like a fun and versatile device, but I’m not sure it’s as accessible as the Wii, which focused on motion and a few primary buttons to make gaming as simple as possible. The Wii U, on the other hand, seems powerful in some ways but not nearly the breakthrough device the Wii was.
The Playstation Vita, on the other hand, isn’t even trying to be a breakthrough device. It’s simply an extremely powerful and versatile portable gaming system. While I have my reservations about the system, Sony convinced me today that it’s going to at least fulfill its own mission. And the price? Perfection.
I like Jawbone. They’re one of the few companies out there that consistently surprises me which each step they take.
Finding a sustainable business model in selling a series of expensive Bluetooth headsets with marginal, almost-entirely-intangible improvements between iterations? Surprise! Launching a somewhat niche product like the Jambox, then finding success in it by marketing to hipsters and urban kids (markets which largely ignored their previous products)? Surprise!
Making a music video promoting their products that not only isn’t horribly embarrassing or lame, but is actually pretty cool? Surprise! Oh, and the unannounced product they tucked into the video? It’s probably the most surprising bit yet.
Between Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Google and countless startups, there’s no shortage of services looking to offer you restaurant and activity recommendations while you’re on the go. But there’s a reason there’s so much competition: as smartphones become increasingly common, this market is going to be absolutely massive. Which means there’s plenty of room for more than one winner.
Which brings us to a new company called CleverSense that is about to join the fray. Led by CEO Babak Pahlavan, the company has spent the last two years working on an algorithm that Pahlavan says is better at making recommendations than many of the existing services. And he has a strong pedigree to back that claim up — his advisors include Prof. Jeff Ullman of Stanford, who was Ph.D. advisor for Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
CleverSense is currently putting the finishing touches on an iPhone application called Seymour, which it says will serve as a “Pandora for the real world”. The app isn’t out just yet, but I got a walkthrough of an early version, and it has potential.
Seymour’s main mission (he’s a robot) is to give you suggestions for places to eat and things to do, without requiring the user to enter a query. Fire up the app, tap a button to point Seymour in the right direction (be it a restaurant, activity, cafe, bar, etc.) and the app will immediately give you a list of suggestions tailored to your tastes.
The app does this by attempting to learn what you like. The first time you boot Seymour up you’ll be asked to complete a brief learning process (you enter a restaurant you like, the app will present some suggestions, and you tell it which ones it got correct). And then as you use the app it will use your interactions to further improve the algorithm.
My time with the application was limited to only a few minutes, but its initial recommendations were good (then again, my tastes aren’t exactly eclectic). One other nifty thing: CleverSense has crawled the web to build a list of attributes associated with each venue; it will tell you which of these attributes it thinks are relevant to you (see the screenshot below).
So how exactly is this different from the recommendations given by other applications? Pahlavan says it’s a matter of algorithms — many services use something called collaborative filtering, which uses data from other users similar to you to make recommendations. Seymor is combing that with a different technique called model-based learning, which tries to build a set of recommendations for each individual user. This is how Pahlavan describes the distinction.
Model-based learning facilitates deep personalization around the individual user and really focuses on entities that match YOUR specific tastes, not just the aggregated recommendations of others. Model-based learning can act like the friend that knows you well and knows what you like when and where.”
For model-based learning to work properly you’d need a rich interest graph that describes each entity thoroughly. We mine the Web to build our interest graph and to jump start our learning engine. With our rich interest graph, we can provide high quality recommendations on day one, with zero users!
We’ll have more on the app when it launches. CleverSense has raised $1.6 million so far, and has a team of eleven (eight in the US, three abroad).
In another step towards filling all its holes, Twitter has just announced its own link shortening service which starts rolling out today. The Twitter link shortening service will pass through t.co and shorten links to 19 characters, still allowing users to see what site the links are pointing towards (see above).
From Twitter support, on how to use the new shortener.
Start typing or paste a long URL into the Tweet box.
After you've entered the first 13 characters of a URL, a message will appear at the bottom of the Tweet box, letting you know that the link will appear shortened. (Fig. 1)
Notice that even if you've reached the character limit, you can continue to add text to the URL with no consequence.
Once the Tweet is posted, it will be assigned a t.co link ID, but the link will appear as a shortened version of the original URL, so people who see your Tweet will know the site they are going to (Fig. 2, above).
Yep! It's now that easy.
In an afterthought, Twitter users are still referred to third party apps like Bit.ly if they want analytics surrounding their links. [Insert well-worn statement about Twitter breaking the heart of its developer ecosystem here.]
There are a bevy of startups in the process of raising big rounds of capital at billion dollar or higher valuations – something that was a rare occurrence even a few months ago. We’re tracking most of these deals (and have written about the ones we’ve confirmed). Now, we’ve confirmed via multiple sources, is payment startup Square’s turn.
The company is raising $50 million or more, says sources, at a valuation that will likely be north of $1 billion. It’s still fairly early in the process, though, and the company is rumored to be meeting with additional venture and private equity firms to either fill out the round or encourage a higher valuation. But at least one term sheet has been received by the company, says one source.
COO Keith Rabois was in a particularly chipper mood when he sat down with me two weeks ago at TechCrunch Disrupt to talk about how Square is doing.
Which isn’t surprising. The company is on a roll. They’re processing more than $3 million per day in mobile payments, and that was announced prior to their new iPad payments service which can replace the entire cash register system at retail merchants.
To date Square has raised more than $37.5 million (the size of a recent investment by Visa hasn’t been disclosed). The last round, closed in January, valued the company at a rumored $240 million valuation.
Alright, everyone. You can go home. E3 2011 is a mainly bust besides Nintendo’s amazing Wii U. Microsoft added Bing to the 360 and Sony announced the name of the NGP, the Vita. Sure, there are several clever games like Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, and several new Zelda games. But there really isn’t anything new per se here. It’s a bunch of rehashing of the same, I’m sorry, tired story lines.
Of course E3 is still fun. Hell, it’s probably one of the most fun trade shows of the year. It’s wall-to-wall video games. Stick around if you must, but once you see the Wii U, you may as well head home because that’s the best as it gets here this year.
There’s been a lot of talk about the fierce competition for talent among the top players in the tech industry. As the story goes, Facebook has been the primary source of anguish for its competitors, seemingly bearing the gravitational pull of a giant sun. Even the ubiquitous Google was forced to take some extraordinary measures to stem the flow of top talent to Facebook last year by offering exorbitant counteroffers as well as a 10 percent, company-wide salary increase. Then-CEO Eric Schmidt called it a “war for talent”.
Bringing in top talent can change (and cement) a company’s future, and Google is not the only company willing to go to great lengths to keep (and nurture) talent within its ranks. But, up to this point, there’s been little understanding of who is actually winning (and losing) the war for recruiting top talent in the tech industry, especially in Silicon Valley. Today, thanks to Top Prospect, the social recruiting site that rewards users for helping their friends find jobs, we now have a snapshot of where we stand in the great talent wars of the 21st century. (Not to over-dramatize or anything.)
To find out, Top Prospect dug into its data and culled together information from over 2.5 million profiles in their database. Their findings (based on the number of users that have changed jobs in the last 2 years), perhaps unsurprisingly, show that Google, Facebook, Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Apple have been the companies to gain the most new talent.
Likely the only slight surprise among that group is Microsoft. After all, Google and Apple are enjoying billions in revenues, LinkedIn just loudly went public, and Facebook has gone Hollywood.
Yet, when we look at the companies who were on the flip side — those that saw the most employees leave for greener pastures — the losing leaders include Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, eBay, and Amazon.
But, wait a minute, how can Google and Microsoft be both winning and losing? To solve this statistical enigma, Top Prospect broke it down into a ratio to compare how many new people were hired for each employee the company lost. The winner? Twitter with nearly 11 new hires for every employee lost. Facebook is not far behind at 8.1, rounded out by Zynga (8.0), LinkedIn (7.5), and Groupon (3.9).
This looks like an IPO All Star Team.
And the losers?
Intuit (1.2), Google (1.2), eBay (0.8), Microsoft (0.4), and Yahoo! (0.3). Looks like Google isn’t faring so well after all.
For those companies at the bottom of the chain, that are losing 2 to 4 people for every hire, you might want to call Top Prospect …
And for good measure, because you’ve been good readers, here’s a graph that highlights movement of talent among the big players:
Our favorite singer, Jonanthan Mann, is back. While the guy literally performs a new song every day, unsurprisingly, I have a preference for the songs about Apple (and me). And he’s back today with a new one: WWDC 2011: The Musical.
Using the live notes MacRumors took during the event, Mann and company perform a brilliant song. If you don’t want to watch the entire 2-hour keynote on video, this is the perfect substitute (along with our follow-up notes).
Mann recently used Kickstarter to secure funds for an album — which we eagerly await. For now enjoy the latest song below.
Thanks to a plethora of startups and services (and SXSW), text messaging and group messaging is becoming faster, cheaper, and more and more like instant messaging every day. But what about MMS, and more specifically video messaging — the oft-forgotten cousin of SMS? Many services today offer robust, free SMS functionality, which generally includes the ability to send images, but these apps tend to draw the line at video messaging.
Of course, if you’re anything like SayClip Founder and CEO Romil Patel, you may have family or friends overseas, who you don’t get to see everyday. You’d like to stay in touch and share videos to keep them up to date on what you’re doing. Patel was musing on the limitations of video messaging, when a simple question popped into his head: Wouldn’t it be great if he could send family members video messages, and they could respond in a simple way that would encourage the interaction to happen more often — for free? Yes, yes it would.
And thus SayClip was born. Over the last few months, Patel has created an app that will likely appeal to fans of Path — the app that allows private photo-sharing among family and close friends, though Patel says he sees his app more as a “Google Voice for video messaging”. As with with Path, SayClip is geared towards private sharing — functionality that sets it apart from other video messaging tools for mobile.
In creating SayClip, Patel addressed several of the major problems with current video messaging tools: Primarily, the ability to send video messages even if friends and family didn’t have an iPhone or even have the SayClip app. Adding a contact list can be a pain, too, as is the sign up process inherent in many video messaging tools — it’s just one more password to remember.
Thus, SayClip is a private platform for the web, iOS, and Android, where users can privately send video messages to their friends and family — all facilitated by Facebook Connect. If a friend doesn’t have the SayClip app, they are notified on Facebook that they have a new video message (which they can then view) brought to them by SayClip. (Facebook push notifications are coming shortly, according to Patel.) Or if a user doesn’t have an iPhone, they can use the Web platform — or the Android app. This, in particular, addresses the “Why not just use FaceTime?” question). And, since you likely connect with your closest friends and family on Facebook, your Facebook contact list is imported automatically when you download SayClip.
When any new sharing or messaging platform arises, the first people who sign up often encounter often find themselves just talking to (and amongst) themselves. Facebook integration and web plus mobile offerings avoid this early usage phenomenon, which I know to be a big deterrent among people who are on the fence over whether or not they should sign up for yet another new platform.
Oh, and of course, SayClip users can also message more than one person at the same time to engage the now famous so-called “group messaging”. All in all, SayClip offers some cool features, and I think it goes a long way towards solving cross-platform and cross-device barriers to entry.
SayClip is now only a few weeks old (having launched last week), so there is still some room for improvements in design and functionality, but my main concern is that video messaging is simply not as popular as text and image messaging. Part of the problem is that many of the great SMS apps out there don’t integrate video functionality — likely for good reasons. There doesn’t seem to be as much of a demand there, and what’s more video messaging (and files) are bulkier and tend to be more expensive to send. People also tend to stick to email or Facebook when sharing videos, or go to Skype or FaceTime for realtime video conversation.
Of course, with an easy, free, and cross-platform solution, we may see video messaging become more of a fixture and, seeing as Patel says that SayClip has already expanded into 43 countries in a relatively short period of time, there seems to be cause for optimism.
Following in the footsteps of commenting systens Echo, Disqus and Intense Debate, WordPress.com has launched WordPress, Twitter and Facebook authorization and identity systems for its own commenting platform, in that order. The blog host didn’t even have the WordPress.com option before.
Coming before Facebook on this is another albiet small win for Twitter, who yesterday became the first social platform to be fully integrated into an iOS.
Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg tells me that the Twitter and Facebook comments are a lot more “flexible” than just Twitter and Facebook, and that we also should probably consider them here at TC. (Check in on this post in an hour or two for statistics what is being most used.)
While the new WordPress.com commenting box allows you to post as your WordPress.com account, a guest or as your Twitter and Facebook profile, the platform conveniently allows you to stay logged in to multiple identity systems at once.
WordPress.com currently serves 18 million sites, including VIPs GigaOm, CNN and Time and of course TechCrunch.
Yes, it’s been a long time since we braved the curious smells of LikeALittle’s hacker hose. And while TechCrunch Disrupt may have kept you occupied for a week, that emptiness you’re feeling inside can only really be cured by one thing: a new episode of TC Cribs. Happy to oblige.
This episode features GroupMe, the hot startup that has its roots in a TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon and has since landed over $10 million in funding. The NYC-based startup is full of bright hackers eager to show off their custom rugs and bingo games — and they have a decent sense of humor, too. This is one of our best episodes, so tune in.
I might even dance a little. Thanks for the memories, Petey.
Credit once again goes to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing.
Also make sure to check out our previous episodes of TC Cribs:
Mobile payments startup Square is announcing that Vinod Khosla is joining its Board of Directors. Khosla’s Khosla Ventures is an early investor in Square. He will be replacing Gideon Yu, who left Khosla Ventures to join the professional football team San Francisco 49ers as Chief Strategy Officer
Square’s founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said in a release: Square is thrilled to welcome Vinod to our board. We have worked closely with Khosla Ventures since our inception and Vinod's expertise, history and input will be a tremendous asset to our company as we continue to grow.
Having someone with Khosla’s entrepreneurial experience on a board is a big win for Square. Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems. He went on to become a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and then founded his own venture fund Khosla Ventures in 2004.
If you happen to be on a Google site and see a giant Chrome logo, click on it. Well, if you want one of the first Chromebooks, that is.
Google is in the midst of a two-day scavenger hunt being played around the web. The first clue went live this morning here — a copy of Tim Berners-Lee's original WorldWideWeb memo. The second has just gone live on this YouTube page. Those who act fast and click on the Chrome logo that appears on these sites will be granted access to a special Amazon page allowing them to buy the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook early. Everyone else will have to wait until June 15 to get their hands on a Chromebook.
So is the Samsung Series 5 worth it? We did a preview here. But that was just an early version, running beta software. The version being given away here will be the final one.
And to be clear: this scavenger hunt only gives you access to buy a Chromebook early. Google isn’t giving them away. It will cost you $499 on Amazon to get one.
Humorously, the Chromebook preview page keeps killing my browser tab in… wait for it… Chrome.
Twitter seems simple enough to use; how difficult can 140 characters be, right? But now imagine trying to monetize Twitter to its full potential. Not quite as easy. And it’s no secret that a big part of Twitter’s strategy is developing its platform to enable brand support — in other words, making it easier for brands to expose their message to the right users. But this, too, has been a slow process. So, in stepps SocialFlow, a young startup that is teaching brands to more effectively use Twitter to target their customers. SocialFlow uses data analysis to enable brands to do this and allows companies to send SocialFlow their Tweets so that they can determine when is the best time for them to blast out their message, for example.
So far, it’s worked out well. This year SocialFlow signed a long-term deal with Twitter and raised $7 million in funding in April. Today, the startup looks to continue its upswing by hiring Peter Hershberg to become the new acting president. Hershberg has been a figure in the New York startup scene for over fifteen years, and, most recently, co-founded Reprise Media, serving as co-CEO from 2003 until December 2009. Reprise was acquired by Interpublic Group in April 2007. Prior to Reprise, Hershberg served as VP of Strategic Development at Ask.com and co-founded Rotomedia, a consulting firm for web marketers and publishers.
Among other things, Hershberg has also been an active early-stage investor with investments in companies including Betaworks, Bitly, Chartbeat, GroupMe, Kickstarter, Yipit, and of course, SocialFlow. And seeing as Hershberg is an investor and has been acting as an advisor to SocialFlow, he is already well-familiar with the business. The startup will look to Hershberg to help build a reputation among top brands, publishers, and retailers looking to make the most out of their social media (well, really Twitter) engagement.
It’s no secret that the local buying and selling market is an active one these days. Blink once and you will likely have missed the launch of five local-focused startups. PayPal, eBay, and craigslist all offer models that have become the roadmap for a number of startups trying to intermix their features for a more targeted local market of buyers and sellers.
In September 2010, Paygr co-founders Brad Damphousse and Andrew Ballester began work on Paygr, working closely with the PayPal team on their API in order to gain insight into the backend and the best methods to offer a secure way to send and receive payments online. Building on this payment mechanism, Paygr took the basic idea behind craigslist's "Services" and "For Sale" features and is attempting to make local transactions less anonymous and more secure.
Today, Paygr launches into the wild with a lofty mission in mind: “Improve people's lives by putting money in their pockets”. This sounds nice, but why will the Paygr method work better than other similar services out there? As I wrote in a sneak peek at Paygr, it’s all about building trust.
So, if you're a buyer on Paygr, you'll enter your query and the platform will serve up a list of matching sellers, each of which will have reviews left by other members (Paygr's system will pull in your social graph, allowing you to see reviews that have been left on your friends). Sellers gradually build reputations on the site, helping create a trust model.
From math tutors and personal trainers to car washers and dog walkers, Paygr aims to enable sellers across the board package their services into affordable “deals”, allowing them to complete as many deals as they can handle each day so there's no limit on earning potential.
And unlike traditional online classifieds, Paygr users display their real names (as verified by Facebook) to manage their communication and billing through the tools provided on the website. Anonymity and privacy are no longer the same thing, so they key here for Paygr is to build trust between buyers and sellers. Certainly, there’s a level of sharing users will have to become comfortable with, but attaching users names deals being offered adds a level of transparency and accountability to the process.
In regards to Facebook integration, Paygr’s optional ‘Deal Request’ feature is a great way to hook-up your friends and known contacts with work that would otherwise have left your social circle to be used elsewhere — not to mention that trust is built-in when dealing with people you already know or referred by friends. And, in a chicken-and-egg scenario that is the marketplace, Deal Requests are a fun way for users to help contribute towards building Paygr’s community of buyers and sellers. The feature is optional and may be deemphasized as the community grows.
Build credibility and trust by displaying info from their Facebook accounts (Paygr doesn’t actually link to a user’s profile, that stays private), Damphousse tells me, has proved viable thus far. The startup has seen sellers accepting more deals from buyers who display personal information as well as a greater number of orders going out to sellers who display the name on their Facebook account, as well as a photo, number of friends, and so on. The more people know about each other, it seems, the more business gets done.
Of course, as mentioned previously, there are a number of marketplaces in which users can offer services or jobs for small prices. So, how is Paygr different? RedBeacon, for example, is focused on professional service providers and licensed businesses offering larger jobs, whereas Paygr instead targets the average Joe offering a service for a reasonable price.
Elance and oDesk focus on hourly work for longer-term projects and seem to have a lot of deals being offered in tech, while Fiverr and jobsfor10 are both awesome sites for $5 and $10 jobs, but Paygr sellers are local people charging up to $100 per “deal” and tend not to be hourly-type gigs.
Not to mention, gotskillz, skillinity, gigbux, peoplestox, 20under, and neighborex are all vying for market share in this space, but haven’t yet gained large-scale adoption. Paygr hopes that by building its business to scale and that through establishing trust among local buyers and sellers, it can soon put the competition in the rearview mirror.
The Foundry Group’s Ryan McIntyre (who was a board member of Postini) just announced the venture firm’s investment in browser security startup Authentic8, which is the brainchild of Postini founder Scott Petry and Ramesh Rajagopal (Postini's VP Corporate Development). Postini offered businesses message security, archiving, encryption, and policy enforcement tools which can be used to protect a company's email, instant messaging, and other web-based communications platforms. The company was eventually acquired by Google in 2007 for $625 million.
As McIntyre writes, Authentic8 is “a direct descendant of the Postini DNA.” While Positini tackled email security, Authentic8 addresses security in the browser. The startup has created a secure browser called the Disposable Browser (currently based on the Firefox codebase), which runs remotely on a virtual server in the cloud.
From McIntyre’s post: Each time a user accesses Authentic8, a "fresh" browser is built from scratch in private server environment. As a result, any malicious code encountered hits Authentic8's servers, not the end-user's. When a browsing session is over, the server instance is trashed, leaving no trace of of a user's personal data or browsing history behind. Finally, Authentic8 can manage a user's login and password information, encrypting and submitting login credentials on the user's behalf. Of course, all communication between the user and the Authentic8 service is encrypted, over their secure protocol.
The goal of Authentic8 is to appeal to businesses who are conscious of employees’ security through browsers. The service is currently in closed-beta and will be opening up to additional beta users in the next few weeks.
“Foursquare for beer” Untappd is announcing its one millionth checkin today, in addition to the acqi-hire of other niche beer checkin app RedPint, an iPhone app co-created by founders John Vajda and Alica Benjamin.
Said Untappd co-founders Tim Mather and Greg Avola in a blog post,”As with many craft breweries, collaboration is one of the best ways to benefit the community and it is with this merger that we will be able to dedicate more time and resources to continue to build and cultivate Untappd.”
Through the web app Untappd, which has been around since 2010, users have the ability to check in to niche beers with their friends and share their checkins to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. The RedPint acquisition means that the creation of native iPhone and Android apps is shortly on the horizon, and should be completed by the end of this year.
We saw brilliant hackers, met determined entrepreneurs, revealed new companies and products, witnessed a surprise proposal, threw incredible after parties, chatted with inspirational guest speakers, witnessed our first ever “Office Hours” onstage, and gave away spontaneous prizes, all while hosting an amazing event in New York City. Disrupt NYC was a huge hit and we are still recapping everything that happened. We had around 2,100 attendees and had the time of our lives in the Big Apple. However, the fun doesn’t stop there. This September, we will be hosting our next Disrupt in San Francisco!
Disrupt SF will take place September 12th – 14th, preceded by our ever popular Hackathon on September 10th – 11th. Even though Disrupt NYC was a huge hit, we hope and expect Disrupt SF to be even bigger. We will have more hackers, more startups, more special guests, speakers, and judges, more disruptive companies and products, more giveaways, more after parties, and more fun. What we have in store for this year’s Disrupt in San Francisco will be revealed in the following months as we come closer to September. We will also be doing free ticket giveaways, so be on the lookout for those.
Extra early bird tickets for Disrupt SF, September 12th – 14th, are on sale now until June 30th! For the best prices, please purchase your tickets HERE. Startup Battlefield applications, speaker inquiries, and details on how to join the Hackathon will be announced soon.
We can’t wait to reveal what we have coming up for Disrupt in San Francisco. All we can tell you now is you do not want to miss it.
If you’d like to become a foundational part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo.
YapStone, a company that develops an electronic payments as a service technology for property management and other vertical markets, has raised $50 million in new funding led by Accel Partners with Meritech Capital Partners participating.
YapStone develops RentPayment, end-to-end, payment services platform for property managers to easily accept credit cards and e-Checks for rent and other recurring payments. It essentially aims to disrupt the act of mailing in a check monthly for renters and landlords. The technology is currently serving thousands of property management companies representing over 3 million apartment units.
The beauty of YapStone is that it provides tailored e-payment features for the rental vertical. For example, YapStone allows landlords to separate payments received into categories like security deposits, late fees, and monthly rent. For renters, YapStone gives consumers the ability to put rent on a credit card. The payments system will even send a text to a renter’s mobile phone reminding them to pay.
Additionally, YapStone is using its technology to expand to other verticals including storage, dues payments and vacation rentals. In fact, the company was recently selected as the payments solution for vacation rental giant HomeAway.
Accel partner Todd Maclean tells us that the vacation rentals and home rentals are huge markets in terms of customer reach, and that the firm’s view is that not only is Yapstone the market leader, but the company is well positioned to be in the middle of the convergence of e-payments.
The new funding will be used for YapStone to expand to new verticals, and to support international expansion and acquisitions.
As the Chief Strategy Officer at Time Warner Cable, Peter Stern is responsible for planning the long term future of America's second largest cable company. Much of his job involves rebuilding both the appearance and reality of the cable industry in a 21st century world of ubiquitous online video and revolutionary consumption devices like the iPad.
Stern is at his most provocative in his acknowledgement that cable needs to rebuild trust with its customers. In our interview last week, he spoke about Time Warner Cable's commitment to providing their customers with what he calls the "4 anys": being able to watch any video content, anytime, on any device, anywhere. Most importantly, he stressed that a traditional cable provider like Time Warner Cable needed to change from selling products to providing their customers with great experiences such as his company's new personal solutions agents.
This is the second part of a two part interview with Peter Stern. Check out yesterday's interview, in which Stern explains why cable has a future and why it is the least expensive form of legal entertainment.
On the cost, value, and pricing of broadband
On the iPad, smart TVs, and video devices of the future
Online ticketing service Eventbrite is on track to sell $400 million worth of tickets this year, which is double the $207 million it did last year. But in order to do that, and push towards $1 billion in gros ticket sales in 2012, it must capture more ticket sales.
One project it is revealing today is the beginnings of what will become an Eventbrite Box Office. All Eventbrite tickets today are sold online, which means that people who decide to spontaneously show up at the door are not necessarily buying through Eventbrite. So Eventbrite is bundling together an iPad with an Eventbrite app, a card swipe, and a ticket printer so that event organizers can take payments an issue tickets at the event itself.
Eventbrite is bundling the hardware and testing it in beta with about five or six event organizers, but it plans to release it as an iPad app this summer. The first iteration will be called Eventbrite at the Door, but as more features are added, such as seating, it will evolve into a full mobile box office. CEO Kevin Hartz sees it as akin to Opentable terminals at restaurants. Eventually he’d like to partner with Square for the card swipe readers, but is waiting for Square to open up its API.
Hartz will have to do a lot more to get to $1 billion in gross ticket sales, but this is the right thinking. International expansion is another obvious area of growth. He just raised $50 million, so he can try a lot of things. Who knows, if he gets to $1 billion in gross ticket sales, of which Eventbrite takes a tiny percentage cut along with other fees, he could be looking at an IPO in late 2012 or early 2013.
Thanks to the wonders of Ustream, we will be broadcasting live video from the floor of E3. Jon Orlin and John Murillo from TCTV are here with the same magical backpack we used at CES to bring that show to the interwebs. We’ll be taking questions, comments, and suggestions live using the #e3crunchgear hashtag. While I’ll make no promises, we’ll do our best to vist the booths and events of the show you wanna see.
Last night during an Internet Week event at General Assembly, investors Fred Wilson, David Lee, and Chris Dixon took the stage to talk about a range of topics related to startups, including one that’s been a source of angst for many a startup: patents.
It’s a topic that Wilson has discussed before on his blog (most recently in this post titled Enough is Enough, and he didn’t mince his words:
“The basic problem with patents is that you’re trying to assign property rights to something that doesn’t deserve property rights. The fact that these property rights end up in the hands of financial owners as opposed to the original inventors just exacerbates the problem. The basic problem is that Chris [Dixon] and a bunch of engineers can be sitting at Hunch designing some amazing new feature and somebody unbeknownst to them has a patent on this feature and never actually implemented it and can now screw them over… It’s just not right, it shouldn’t exist.”
Lee then followed up by briefly discussing the distinction between a patent and a copyright. Dixonexpanded on more issues with the patent system, including the fact that many of the assigned patents are blatantly obvious. Check out the video for the full discussion (it’s around four minutes long).
Despite the conventional wisdom these days that the broader sharing options you have, the better, Path set out to take the opposite road. 50 friend limits. No outside sharing features. No Facebook. No Twitter. That changed a few months later when selective Facebook sharing was added to the mix. But still, the massive public sharing tool was nowhere to be found: Twitter. And it’s still not — in Path itself. Instead, the team has built an entirely new app for that: With.
With is Path’s acknowledgement that people love sharing photos and who they’re with on Twitter. But again, they just don’t see that sharing mechanism as a part of Path itself. When the team held a hackathon several weeks ago to come up with other interesting ideas, With was an obvious first child. And that’s interesting since Twitter itself was born in a similar manner, as a hacked-up side-project at Odeo.
The core concept behind With is similar to Path: sharing moments. But unlike the limited sharing of Path, the only way to use With is to connect it to your Twitter account — in fact, they use Twitter login. Once you do that, you do one of two things: share who you are with by tagging their @names, or share a picture of who you’re with using the same tagging mechanism. The photos can use the same filters (both free and paid) currently found on Path itself.
Path co-founder Dave Morin talks about the importance of maintaining quality networks, and believe that while different, Twitter offers a powerful “interaction network”. Or, in Path parlance, a “With Graph”.
Using With, the friends who you tag most often quickly populate your With Graph by rising to the top of your profile. The idea is eventually to give these friends “special benefits” as well — think: friendship levels and badges with more to come, Morin says.
To be clear, Path remains the main focus of the team. With will remain a side project (unless, of course, it explodes in popularity like, say, Twitter). And Morin won’t rule out other side projects (or Path “Shorts” as he calls them). It all depends on the hackathons — which Path is now doing about once a month. The only rule of these is that you can’t work on what you’re been working on (an idea borrowed from Facebook).
And With will be integrated with Path in the coming weeks, we’re told.
One more thing: because With is already using Twitter’s new single sign-on capabilities, when iOS 5 hits, you’ll be able to launch With right after you download it and be ready to go. No login required. No wonder Morin was happy yesterday.
You can find With in the App Store here. It’s a free download.
Nintendo just announced the Wii U, a new console/controller combo that includes a large, touchscreen controller with control buttons similar to those found on current Wii controllers. The system is considerably upgraded over the Wii and you can use the Wii U controller in many “unique” (hence the U) ways.
The graphics are truly next-gen and this firmly places Nintendo in with the big boys in terms of graphics and gameplay.
The Gillmor Gang — John Borthwick, Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — were rendered iCloudy in the aftermath of Steve Jobs’ WWDC announcements. Even stalwart Google fanboys Taschek and Marks found it difficult to withstand the halo surrounding Apple’s aggressive move to the Cloud and iOS as the dominant platform moving forward. Betaworks’ John Borthwick applauded the Twitter integration and just about everything about iCloud’s new grip on the music business.
You’d expect Robert Scoble’s enthusiasm for iOS/X in comparison to Microsoft’s Windows 8 adoption of ZunePhone UI, but the highlight of a day of highlights was the just one more teeny little thing coup de grace of iTunes Match. In a single flick of the lighter, Apple gave us the tiny nudge we needed to erase music’s years of isolation from the digital age. At 256K and cord-less synching, Mobile Me went from $99 to $25 and all the records you can eat.
Ning and live stream video company Ustream are announcing an integrated partnership today that allows Ning network creators to broadcast live video and audio on their website at anytime, complete with live chat capabilities and more.
With the integration, live video content can easily be embedded networks hosted by Ning, allowing users to broadcast via Ustream. Not only can users embed Ustream channels into Ning websites, but creators can also add an indicator to the site to alert visitors of a live broadcast. In addition, the integration allows for live chats during streaming.
Ustream is available to all Ning Plus and Pro subscribers, and also includes automatic access to previously uploaded Ustream files, directly from the site management screens.It’s important to note that Ustream creators could previously add Ustream live video streams through an OpenSocial plugin, but this integration is a deeply integrated, native experience for creators that adds new functionality such as live chat and more.
A number of Ning Creators will begin live-streaming video to their members today including band Weezer, which will be streaming a Q&A and Pre-Show Warm-up from a concert in Austin.
I don’t know if combining one relatively new trend (location-based services) with one that has been around for long but still leaves much to be desired (Q&A) makes perfect business sense, but a growing number of startups sure seems to think it does.
The concept behind LOCQL’s take on local Q&A is fairly straightforward. Users sign up through Facebook Connect and are then encouraged to share as much information about a given place that could be useful to other people, whether they are visitors or residents.
LOCQL users can vote on answers based on their quality and interact with other community members. Eventually, LOCQL should become collaborative community building an extensive database of answers about places, local businesses and whatnot, on a global scale.
The startup’s co-founder, Haitao Li, tells me they consider the key problem in local search today to not be the data set but the missing link between user queries and location information. LOCQL aims to leverage users’ existing social graphs as well as game mechanics to try and change that.
Li was previously a Senior Software Development Engineer at Microsoft. LOCQL’s other co-founder is Robert Mao, SDE at Microsoft Research and the company’s FUSE labs.
An early prototype of LOCQL was actually created during a Startup weekend event in Seattle.
The company is at present self-funded but Li says they’ve already been approached by quite some VCs despite keeping a relatively low profile.
Worth noting: Li and Mao still work at Microsoft – they’re moonlighting.
As a matter of fact, LOCQL actually runs on Google App Engine.
As books goes digital, Amazon is managing the transition nicely with the Kindle. Amazon now sells more Kindle books than print books, and offers nearly a million ebook titles. In a research note that just went out this morning, citi analyst Mark Mahaney estimates that sales of Kindle devices and digital books will account for 10 percent of Amazon’s revenues in 2012.
Thanks to the Kindle, Amazon’s U.S. book business is growing faster than at any point in the last ten years. So far in 2011, Amazon has sold three times as many Kindle books as during the same period last year.
Mahaney estimates that total Kindle revenues last year were $2.5 billion, or 7.2 percent of Amazon’s total. He thinks that total Kindle revenues will hit $3.8 billion this year (8.0 percent of revenues), and $6.1 billion in 2012 (9.9 percent). He breaks that down between device sales and ebook sales (see his model below). For instance, he just increased his estimate of how many Kindle devices Amazon will sell this year from 16.5 million to 17.5 million units, and he expects another 26 million Kindles to be sold in 2012.
The number of Kindle books sold this year will increase to an estimated 314 million, from 124 million in 2010. And Mahaney expects that number to grow another 140 percent in 2012 to 752 million.
Digital book revenues should surpass device revenues in 2012, when Mahaney estimates that Amazon will make $2.4 billion from device sales and another $3.7 billion from Kindle book sales.
Now Amazon just has to figure out how to transition its sales of physical CDs and DVDs in music and movies as effectively as it is doing for books. HD Kindle Movie Player anyone?
We’re here at Nokia Theater right by the LA Convention Center for Nintendo’s E3 Day One keynote. We expect a number of reveals, including updates on Zelda: Skyward Sword, a brand new Mario for the 3DS, and most importantly, the successor to the Wii, code-named “Project Cafe.” While we don’t expect a playable console (it may arrive by the holidays, but even that may be optimistic), we’ll get to see the mythical mega-controller with the 6-inch screen, dual cameras, and who knows, maybe a vitality sensor. We’re entering now and should be getting the news flowing in just a few minutes here.
Rally Software, a specialist in Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) solutions, this morning announced that it has raised $20 million in funding led by Meritech Capital Partners (an investor in companies like Facebook, NetSuite and Salesforce.com). The funding will be used for growth and to accelerate adoption of Rally's platform for Agile development.
The technology IPOs continue this week as Fusion-IO, the developer of flash- memory technology for companies, increased the price of its IPO to $16 to $18 per share. The company had previously priced its shares at $13 to $15 per share, which valued the company at as much as $1.17 billion. The increase announced today puts Fusion-io’s total value at $1.4 billion.
Fusion-io's enterprise flash-based drives help store data in smaller devices and is known for being an incredibly fast data storage solution. Facebook is a client of Fusion-io, which has raised $110 million from Meritech Capital Partners, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz and Triangle Peak Partners, New Enterprise Associates and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Fusion-io is planning to sell 10,755,607 shares in the offering; and current stockholders will be offering 1,544,393 shares as well. The company plans to raise as much as $254.6 million (up from $212 million a few weeks ago), and will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "FIO."
Investors are keeping a close watch on Fusion-io, which is expected to begin trading this Thursday. In the nine months that ended March 31 (its fiscal year ends June 30), revenue quintupled to $125.5 million and gross profit quadrupled to $65.7 million. But as Dow Jones notes, 10 clients account for 91% of the company’s revenue and Facebook alone generated 47% of Fusion-io’s revenue in the past nine months.
We’ve written quite a bit about PCH International, a China-based supply chain solutions company and a leader in the accessories market for e-readers, tablets and smartphones. Most recently, we covered the launch of their business accelerator program, which was presented on stage at Disrupt NYC.
The company just announced that it has raised a new round of funding, to the tune of $30 million. Two new investors (Northbrooks Investments and J. Christopher Burch) participated in the round alongside existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, Cross Creek Capital and Fung Capital.
The company basically designs, produces and packages electronics and accessories in partnership with major gadget brands.
See Michael Arrington’s coverage of PCH’s past funding rounds:
All together, Fotopedia’s photo apps have been downloaded 3.2 million times. And today it is going to launch its fifth app called “Dreams of Burma” in partnership with National Geographic.
Dreams Of Burma brings together more than 1,000 images of the people and landscapes of Burma from Fotopedia photographers. The collection was both created and curated by the Fotopedia community, and then vetted by Fotopedia’s own photo editors and the editor of National Geographic Traveler. Like Fotopedia’s other iPad “photo books,” you can explore the images tags, swiping through, or shuffling for a random selection.
Every photo is geo-tagged and linked to a Wikipedia entry which you can call up in the app. And just like the Paris app, if you see a picture of a place you want to visit, you can see where it is on a map and add it to your itinerary. Other photos taken nearby will also appear as pins on the map.
There are no photos from National Geographic itself, although you wouldn’t know it by looking at the images, which are all stunning. Although, it seems like a missed opportunity for National Geographic to showcase some of their photographers as well. But there are licensing issues, since all the Fotopedia photos are Creative Commons by default. “We want to drive this industry to get to a new model better for the mobile space,” says CEO Jean-Marie Huillot. “We have to start with something simple.”
After experimenting with both paid and free apps, Huillot is leaning towards making future apps free with sponsorships. “People who take this space today will be the kings tomorrow,” he says hopefully. “You have to find a way to get the biggest audience you can.”
Huillot shared some more stats with me on how his apps are doing. Of the 3.2 million people who have downloaded a Fotopedia app, half are active on a monthly basis. The average time per session is 18 minutes. And the audience is truly international, with only 30 percent of downloads coming from the U.S., 40 percent from Europe, and 25 percent from Asia.
The two most popular apps are Fotopedia Paris and Fotopedia Heritage. Huillot wants to put out a new app every 5 or 6 weeks, which keeps driving adoption. One of his next apps will be a Fotopedia Cities app modeled on the Paris app, but with many more cities.
Foursquare breaks out venues into a dedicatedAPI to help developers with their own location-based apps. As part of the agreement, Yellow Pages will be rendering 1.5 million Canadian business listings and information accessible to the social networking site through YellowAPI.com, the company's own open platform application programming interface.
The deal will also allow the hundreds of developers using YellowAPI.com today to integrate Foursquare functionality into their apps.
YPG is the first Canadian business to participate in Foursquare’s project.
Other partners include The New York Times, New York Magazine, Thrillist, and MenuPages.
We know Google has made a big bet on near field communications (NFC) as a payments system with the launch of Google Wallet, but does the technology have the potential to be the future of how money is transacted? Juniper Research seems to think so. The company is releasing a new report that forecasts that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions will reach nearly $50 billion worldwide by 2014.
Juniper says that NFC is steadily gaining traction, and because of the latest rollout of the technology both in the U.S. and outside the U.S., 2011 and 2012 are expected to be “banner years for NFC service rollouts.”
For background, NFC enables people to make transactions, exchange digital content and connect electronic devices with a simple touch. As we’ve seen with Google, Android phones such as the Nexus S are being built with NFC chips, making your cell phone a mobile wallet. It’s unclear if Apple will add NFC technology to the iPhone 5.
Of course, NFC has gained traction in international markets before the U.S. Orange Mobile is using the technology, and Starbucks is set to sign on to use the technology to enable payments in the U.K.
Juniper says that in the next 18 months, we will see implementations of the technology in up to 20 countries. In fact, Juniper is forecasting that North America and Western Europe together will exceed the Far East region in under three years based on transaction value. North America and Western Europe will account for 50% of NFC payments market by value in 2014.
As we’ve written in the past, there are a number of barriers that could prevent NFC technology from becoming a mainstream technology, so it’s not a sure thing that NFC will reach the sort of scale that Juniper is forecasting.
Liquid Robotics has raised a $22 million series d investment, led by VantagePoint Capital Partners. Based in Hawaii and California, the company makes wave-powered, marine drones that are remote controlled by satellite, and capable of roaming the seas unmanned to gather environmental and defense-related data.
Liquid Robotics also announced the appointment of a new chief executive officer today, Bill Vass, previously the president and chief of operations at Sun Microsystems Federal.
VPCP’s cleantech portfolio includes: the now-public Solazyme, makers of algae-based chemicals and fuels; Tesla Motors the electric vehicle pioneers; a designer and builder of large-scale solar power plants, BrightSource Energy; and Ostara, a company with technology that removes phosphorous and other nutrients out of the ocean (where in too high concentration, they can harm marine life) and recycles these into sustainable fertilizers.
Oilfield services provider Schlumberger also contributed to the series d round in Liquid Robotics. The company’s vehicles are used today in oil field exploration and monitoring.
VSee, a video collaboration service provider, has received a capital injection from Salesforce, TechCrunch has learned. The amount was not disclosed, but we’ve been informed that the investment amounted to ‘multiple millions of dollars’.
Coinciding with the investment announcement, the company today announced the upcoming release of ‘One-Click Collaboration’, which it calls a ‘no install experience’ that instantly starts a rich video collaboration session between distributed users.
VSee offers a service that supports multiparty video calling, application/desktop sharing and file transfers over the Web. See video below for a demo.
The startup’s CEO, Milton Chen, says this concept of ‘One-click Collaboration’ combines the scalability and performance of p2p approaches such as Skype with the no-install simplicity of web technologies like Flash, overcoming the limitations of both.
The service will be released for general availability in July 2011.
The company says it already provides services to more than 6,000 enterprises worldwide, including Shell, Intel, Primerica, U.S. Navy SEALs and the U.S. National Science Foundation.
It currently only runs on Windows XP, Vista, and 7.
VSee was founded in 2008 following Chen’s human-computer interaction PhD research at Stanford University. Aside from Salesforce, In-Q-Tel has invested in the business.
Also worth noting: Chen is one of the authors of the XMPP video standard.
Earlier this year, Salesforce announced that it had acquired DimDim, a web conferencing service, for $31 million in cash.
Prosper.com, a social lending marketplace that connects borrowers with individual and institutional investors, this morning announced that it has raised $17.2 million in funding from new investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Crosslink Capital.
Existing investors Accel Partners, CompuCredit, Omidyar Network, Eric Schmidt’s TomorrowVentures and Volition Capital also participated in the round.
Prosper also announced that Tim Draper, founder and managing director of DFJ, and Jerome Contro, general partner and COO of Crosslink Capital, will join the company’s board of directors.
According to its website, Prosper’s peer-to-peer lending marketplace currently boasts more than 1,080,000 members and over $236,000,000 in funded loans.
Prosper has raised close to $75 million to date. Its closest competitor, Lending Club, has secured $52.7 million in venture capital.
As we wrote a few months ago, SEO firm BrightEdge released a study showing that the majority of brands are doing little to optimize their Twitter or Facebook pages to make them more discoverable in search results. And because of this many high-profile brands’ Facebook pages are buried in search results. Well, Facebook took note and decided to team up with the firm to co-author a white paper educating brands on social SEO.
Titled ‘Facebook for Social SEO,‘ the document gives brands and companies tips on the best practices to drive organic search performance for Facebook pages. We’ve embedded the white paper below. And the two companies will also conduct a webinar this month designed to get top brands better educated on improving rank of their pages.
Tips for brands to improve SEO for Pages include SEO friendly subtitles and descriptions on the social media pages, adding links to a brand’s website from the Facebook or Twitter page, using Brand names in posts on the Page and more. BrightEdge is also extending its enterprise SEO platform to include a more comprehensive offering for Brands who need help with optimizing their Facebook Pages.
Social SEO is a real problem for brands. Over 70 percent of major brands that BrightEdge studied had Facebook Pages that did not appear in the top 20 results of a search for the specific brand name.
It makes sense for Facebook to help Brands mitigate this issue, and it’s definitely a big vote of confidence for BrightEdge that the social network has tapped the startup to help educate brands on the platform.
Scott McNealy, who famously co-founded Sun Microsystems, has raised close to $6.4 million in financing for one of his new ventures, stealth startup WayIn, an SEC filing reveals.
Visitors to the WayIn website are informed that they are keeping quiet for now, but are advised to follow McNealy on Twitter for updates. Judging by its logo, it’ll most probably have something to do with the cloud.
I know, I’m awesome at analyzing logos of stealth startups.
The SEC filing reveals some other interesting names involved in WayIn. For example, the filing was signed by Damien Eastwood, former VP of Legal at Sun Microsystems.
Also mentioned are Sun’s former Chief Human Resources Officer, Bill MacGowan; investor Scott Johnston; former Sharks president and CEO Greg Jamison and Silicon Valley lawyer Larry Sonsini, among others.
McNealy co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy, and Andy Bechtolsheim. He led the company for roughly 22 years after stepping down as CEO back in April 2006. He remained as chairman of the board after that but resigned in January 2010.
His Twitter bio currently reads:
“Founder, Curriki.org, Chairman + Commissioner of AGA (www.flogton.com), Chairman of WayIn, JrSharks Hockey Advisory Board, free coach, husband, dad of 4 boys.”
Online payments company eWise has raised $14 million in new funding led by Wellington Partners with Balderton Capital,TTV Capital,, and Patagorang participating in the round. This brings eWise’s total funding to over $26 million.
eWise develops a payments technology, called Secure Vault Payment, that allows users to automatically deduct a payment from their bank account without disclosing their personal information to online businesses. Payments are processed via a login and password to the bank’s site.
eWise expects that this payments technology could reach 400 million uses within 5 years. Clients include Citibank and First Direct (part of HSBC) in the UK, Ping An in China, Westpac in Australia and USBank in the U.S. The company plans to use the funding to expand further to the U.S. as well as for the development of a new mobile payments technology.
Skype appears to be down, or at the very least it is for a whole lot of users throughout Europe who are tweeting in a ton of different languages about their inability to connect. Many blameMicrosoft, and even founder Bill Gates for the downtime, which is sort of strange because the multi-billion dollar acquisition of Skype hasn’t even closed yet.
Anyway, let’s pray that this isn’t a repeat of the Great Skype Outage of December 2010, when the apocalypse appeared nigher than ever.
Funnily enough, a bug in the Microsoft Windows client was to blame for that one.
If you’re affected by the downtime, you’d be well advised to monitor Skype Heartbeat (although it claims things are all working normal at the time of publication) and @Skype.
I’ll be one of those watching closely, because it’s down for me too. Damn you, Microsoft!
Update: around 7 AM Eastern time, the Skype team tweeted that “a small number” of users may be having trouble connecting indeed, and that it’s investigating the cause.
Companies always say only a small subset of users experience problems when they occur.
I have no clue why they insist on pointing that out like it makes a difference.
Update 2: and a Heartbeat blog post for good measure, saying the same.
Update 3: Skype slowly crawling back up for me (7:40 AM Eastern time)
Update 4: Skype now says a configuration problem caused the glitch (8:15 AM Eastern time). The company adds that now that is has identified the cause of the problem, they have begun to address it. The client should reconnect automatically as soon as it’s able to do so.
MyHeritage.com, a relatively heavily-funded Israeli startup operating a huge family-based social network, has moved to acquire Bliscy.pl from Poland's Internet publishing company Wirtualna Polska to solidify its position in the Polish family history market. The acquisition translates to growth of MyHeritage's family network to 56 million registered users and roughly 760 million profiles.
Concur, a provider of integrated travel and expense management solutions and recent purchaser of TripIt, has acquired London-based GlobalExpense, a company that specializes in Web-based expense management solutions. Concur has agreed to cough up £12 million ($19.7 million) for the acquisition of the privately held company, plus a performance-based earn-out of up to £2 million ($3.3 million).
EDITD, the London-based startup that offers a retail monitoring and analytics platform for the fashion industry, has raised a $1.6 million "seed round" led by Index Ventures. Alex Zubillaga, Atlas Venture, High Line Venture Partners, Sylvie Gabriel and Joanne Wilson have also participated. The new funding will be used to further develop EDITD's product offering, including increasing the amount of data being analysed, along with entering new markets and expanding the team "globally". Robin Klein of Index will also join the company's board as chairman.
This past January, 
Cake Health
Chart.io
DotCloud
EpicRebates
Formative Labs
Groupiter
OpenAppsMkt
ProximityWare
RethinkBooks
Revel Systems
TheIceBreak
Between Yelp, Foursquare, Facebook, Google and countless startups, there’s no shortage of services looking to offer you restaurant and activity recommendations while you’re on the go. But there’s a reason there’s so much competition: as smartphones become increasingly common, this market is going to be absolutely massive. Which means there’s plenty of room for more than one winner.
In another step towards filling all its holes, Twitter has just announced 
There are a bevy of startups in the process of raising big rounds of capital at billion dollar or higher valuations – something that was a rare occurrence even a few months ago. We’re tracking most of these deals (and have written about 
Alright, everyone. You can go home. E3 2011 is a mainly bust besides Nintendo’s amazing Wii U. Microsoft added Bing to the 360 and Sony announced the name of the NGP, the Vita. Sure, there are several clever games like Battlefield 3, Modern Warfare 3, and several new Zelda games. But there really isn’t anything new per se here. It’s a bunch of rehashing of the same, I’m sorry, tired story lines. 
Our 
Mobile payments startup Square is announcing that 
The Foundry Group’s 
“Foursquare for beer” 
As the Chief Strategy Officer at Time Warner Cable, 
Thanks to the wonders of Ustream, we will be broadcasting live video from the floor of E3. Jon Orlin and John Murillo from TCTV are here with the same magical backpack we used at CES to bring that show to the interwebs. We’ll be taking questions, comments, and suggestions live using the #e3crunchgear hashtag. While I’ll make no promises, we’ll do our best to vist the booths and events of the show you wanna see. 
Despite the conventional wisdom these days that the broader sharing options you have, the better, 
Ning and live stream video company 
The technology IPOs continue this week as 
We know Google has made a 
Liquid Robotics has raised a $22 million series d investment, led by VantagePoint Capital Partners. Based in Hawaii and California, the company makes wave-powered, marine drones that are remote controlled by satellite, and capable of roaming the seas unmanned to gather environmental and defense-related data. 
As we 
Online payments company 
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