The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children
- Going The Distance: Nike+ GPS Vs. RunKeeper
- Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic]
- Show Soulja Boy His @Replies, Twitter! (And The Rest Of Us Too)
- Kosmix Kills Off MeeHive’s Custom News Service As It Focuses On TweetBeat
- Hey New MySpace Logo, New Gap Logo Has Some Words For You
- Uh Oh AT&T, Verizon Getting The Talk+Surf Feature Too — Not That It Really Matters
- Hollywood’s Adam Rifkin: “You Don’t Need Permission From The Gatekeepers”
- MySpace Unveils New, Artsy Logo
- Facebook Complies Imperfectly With DMCA, Suffocates Fan Group
- Netflix’s Reed Hastings on the New War for the Digital Livingroom [TCTV]
- Angry about Education? Go Here.
- 60mo Gives QuickBooks A Minty Dashboard
- Android Chief Likely Out Of Breath After Non-Stop Excuses For Carriers In Interview
- Three Things You Can Count on: Death, Taxes, Spotify’s Arrogance
- Google Confirms Acquisition Of ‘Everything Is The Best’ Assets, Including Plannr
- Ask A VC: Chris Dixon Solves Your Problems [TCTV]
- Android Chief On Windows Phone 7: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Platform”
- Google Cuts The Cord On Its Free 411 Service
- Video Ad And Analytics Startup TubeMogul Takes $10 Million In VC Funding
- Pearltrees Visualizes TechCrunch Disrupt
- Twitter Users On AT&T Foaming At The Mouth In The Hopes Of A Verizon iPhone
- Libyan Domain Registry Shares Its Views On The .ly Hoopla, But Questions Remain
- How To Replace Styrofoam With Mushrooms
- Netflix Proved Me Hugely Wrong [TCTV]
| Women Don’t Want To Run Startups Because They’d Rather Have Children Posted: 09 Oct 2010 08:50 AM PDT
Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Penelope Trunk. My company, Brazen Careerist, is moving from Madison, WI, to Washington, DC, where our new CEO lives. Running the company has been absolute hell. Not that I didn't know it would be hell. It's my third startup. Each has had its own hell before we were solidly funded, but this one was so bad that my electricity was turned off, and I really thought I was going to die from stress. So while my company moves its center to DC, I'm staying in Wisconsin. I just married a farmer and my two young sons and I are learning to live among the wonders of pigs and cattle and corn. I thought I would be sad that the company is moving. It's weird to be the founder of a company and not be where all the action of the company is. But honestly, I'm relieved. There is good evidence that you have to be crazy to do a startup. Jeff Stibel, writing in the Harvard Business Review, calls entrepreneurship a disease. Because you are not likely to make money – you are likely to die broke. And you work insane hours – longer than any other job – and you do it over and over and over again. This is not sane. In fact, David Segal reports in the New York Times that there is a mania that entrepreneurs exhibit that is very attractive to investors. The trick is to make sure you're investing in someone who is on the border of insane, but not insane. So I had a going away party. To say goodbye, but also to acknowledge that I am officially not crazy enough to spend another year missing out on being with my kids. There is still an office in Madison, but the company is running well enough that I don't have to be the center of it. It's hard to not be the center, but I want to be the center of my family. There are enough articles in the last year alone to fill a book (not to mention conference panels) about why women don't get funding for startups. But really, you could tell that story on one page: Startups move at break-neck pace, under a lot of pressure to succeed bigger and faster than any normal company. And women don't want to give up their personal life in exchange for the chance to be the next Google. Or even the next Feedburner. Which is why the number of women who pitch is so small, and, therefore, the number of women who get funding is small. Did you know that in Farmville, women make colorful, fun farms, and men make big, sprawling farms? And I don't think it's a social pressure sort of thing. My sons are under no pressure from me to beat each other up with anything that they can turn into a sword, which is everything. And the girls who visit are under no social pressure to sit quietly, and watch. Boys and girls are fundamentally different even before they get to Farmville. Women are under real pressure to have kids, though. They have a biological clock. So women who are the typical age of entrepreneurs—25—need to be looking for someone to mate with. Think about it. If you want to have kids before you're 35—when your biological clock explodes—then you need to start when you're 30, allowing for one miscarriage, which is more probable than most young people think. If you need to start having kids when you're 30, you probably need to meet the guy you're going to marry by the time you're 27, so you can date for a year, get married, and live together for a year before kids. If you need to meet that guy by 27, you are very distracted during your prime startup time. (I have done years of research to come to this conclusion. Here's the post.) And I'm not even going to go into the idea of women having a startup with young kids. It is absolutely untenable. The women I know who do this have lost their companies or their marriages or both. And there is no woman running a startup with young kids, who, behind closed doors, would recommend this life to anyone. For men it's different. We all know that men do not search all over town finding the perfect ballet teacher. Men are more likely to settle when it comes to raising kids. The kids are fine. Men are more likely than women to think they themselves are doing a good job parenting. This makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. Men have to trust that the kids will be okay so that they can leave and go get food or make more kids. Before you tell me there are exceptions, I'm going to let you in on a secret: I'm a magnet for high-powered women with stay-at-home husbands. And when the men aren't listening, the women always tell me that their men don't pay enough attention and they (the women) are really running the household. They would never say this to the men. It would de-motivate them. So even the most child-oriented men are not as child-oriented as their wives. And this is why women don't have startups: children. It's not a complicated answer. It's a sort of throw-back-to-the-50's answer. You could argue the merits of this, but you could not argue the merits of this with any woman who has kids and has a startup. There's a reason that women start more businesses than men, but women only get 3% of the funding that men do. The reason is that women want a lifestyle business. Women want to control their time, control their work, to be flexible for their kids. This seems reasonable: Women start more lifestyle businesses and men start more venture-funded businesses. This does not, on face value, seem inherently problematic. But wait, let's ask why so many men with kids are doing startups? Why aren't they with their kids? A startup is like six full-time jobs. Where does that leave the kids? We use social service funding to tell impoverished families that it's important for dads to spend time with their kids. But what about startup founders? Is it okay for them to leave their kids in favor of 100-hour weeks? For many founders, their startup is their child. My startup is me and a bunch of twenty-something guys. And if you're a woman launching a startup, my advice is to stick with this crowd. They never stop working because it's so exciting to them: the learning curve is high, they can move anywhere, they can live on nothing, and they can keep wacky hours. The problem with that mix is that someone who is not a guy in his 20's has different priorities. And that's something we saw really clearly at Brazen Careerist. The more I became focused on my personal life, the more annoyed everyone got with me. Sure, they understood, but they were pissed also. I think our new setup will alleviate much of that stress. I'm on the farm, Ryan Paugh is in Madison, and Ryan Healy is in DC. It's not how I imagined the company evolving when we started it, but that's part of the fun of entrepreneurship: you never get what you imagined, ever.        
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| Going The Distance: Nike+ GPS Vs. RunKeeper Posted: 09 Oct 2010 05:31 AM PDT
To that end I decided to test out the new Nike+ GPS app alongside an old favorite, RunKeeper. Both apps have their pluses and minuses. Clearly RunKeeper is aimed squarely at the professional or at least obsessive runner, while the Nike+ software is aimed at a more casual user. Both have their value in the training arsenals of the average runner, and many of the hardware-specific features of Nike+ have been stripped out of the new GPS version, thereby putting both apps on equal footing.        
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| Startups Started By Former Yahoo Employees [Graphic] Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:22 PM PDT Oh Quora! You’ve done it again. This time with the utterly fascinating “What startups have been started by former Yahoo employees?” thread which provides a pretty comprehensive list from AClevertwist.com to Ycombinator.com (Quick, some ex-Yahooer start a Z-word startup!) of startups founded by former Yahoo employees, which, as we’ve already pointed out, are a force to be reckoned with. Inspired by the sheer scope of Yahoo defector startups (Hunch! Ycombinator! Tunerfish! Tinyspeck! Onetruefan!) we and the folks at Pearltrees are working on the above visualization, which currently runs through “M.” So go ahead, click on one of the nodes and explore the ever expanding house that Y! built.
       
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| Show Soulja Boy His @Replies, Twitter! (And The Rest Of Us Too) Posted: 08 Oct 2010 08:15 PM PDT
I thought Twitter had been awfully quiet for a Friday night. It turns out that @replies appear to be very broken at the moment — and have been for a couple of hours now. Hip hop artist Soulja Boy has just confirmed the problem to his 2.5 million followers. “Show me my @replies @twitter !!!,” Boy tweets. Neither the Twitter Status blog nor the official Twitter account seem to acknowledge this problem which makes Twitter almost useless. If you can’t communicate with people, you’re just communicating at them. The work-around hack, of course, is to do a manual search for your Twitter username, and you’ll see what you’re missing. Hundreds of tweets each minute show that the crowd has sourced the problem. And it appears to affect twitter.com as well as all the clients. Help us Twitter, we need to know what people are saying about us! And so does Soulja Boy! Update: Twitter is aware of the problem and is working on it. They have a status update on their Status Blog — but now Tumblr (which hosts it) is down.        
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| Kosmix Kills Off MeeHive’s Custom News Service As It Focuses On TweetBeat Posted: 08 Oct 2010 05:34 PM PDT
Here’s a portion of the email:
Kosmix offers a search engine that will dynamically build ‘topic pages’ for your query, pulling from sources like Wikipedia, blogs, and content written by the Kosmix community. MeeHive essentially took that technology and applied it to news, but it obviously it didn’t catch on. In the email announcing the closing of Meehive, Kosmix writes that it’s directing its attention to Tweetbeat, a real-time Twitter search engine that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. The company also recently launched Tweetbeat Firsthand, a browser plugin that will let you mouse-over proper names to see that person’s recent tweets (for example, you can mouse-over President Obama’s name in a news story to see his tweets). Update: If you’re wondering why this sort of personalized news startup so often fails, there’s an excellent thread on Quora that discusses this. We’ve reached out to Kosmix for more details on the shutdown of Meehive.
       
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| Hey New MySpace Logo, New Gap Logo Has Some Words For You Posted: 08 Oct 2010 05:14 PM PDT
The new MySpace logo or the new Gap logo, which do people hate more? It seems to close to call at this point. But after days of sitting back and taking a beating, Gap logo is on the offensive now — on Twitter. “That new MySpace logo? I mean I know I have very little room to talk but holy shit,” Gap logo writes in a tweet today that is currently setting Twitter ablaze with retweets. Them fightin’ words. Myself, I like the comment Joey Daoud left on our MySpace post — er, My ____ post:
Oh _____! Update: Or:
(via @issaco) Oh and:
(via Chris Dalonz) Also, this happened:
       
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| Uh Oh AT&T, Verizon Getting The Talk+Surf Feature Too — Not That It Really Matters Posted: 08 Oct 2010 04:53 PM PDT
Over the last year, we’ve had to listen to Luke Wilson tell us that “the nation’s fastest 3G network” is also the one that lets you “talk and surf at the same time.” Currently, Verizon cannot do that due to a decision the people behind CDMA (the technology that Verizon uses in its phones) made to split data and voice into separate signals. But as WSJ reports:
Verizon won’t commit to a date for such a feature, but they are working on it. From the story:
But the last part is important. I’ve had an iPhone for over three years now and I can only recall a handful of times when I needed/wanted to use data while on a call. And almost all of those times have been when I was on hold. And probably half of those were when I was on hold with AT&T. AT&T touts the feature, but it’s simply not that important. Certainly, it’s not important enough to stop me from switching from a service that has poor coverage in some big cities, to one that has great coverage in those same cities. Coverage is a much more important feature. But I’ll admit that the global roaming ability is nice. I was in Japan earlier this year and was able to buy a (ridiculously expensive) plan from AT&T so my phone would work there. With a CDMA phone, I would have likely be out of luck. But again, a small price to pay for my phone to work 99 percent of the rest of the time. So, for an encore, let’s enjoy one of Luke Wilson’s lovely AT&T commercials below. You’ll note that instead of being 4 to 1 in favor of AT&T, come next year, it looks like it will be more like 1 to 1 (and I’m sure Verizon would argue that they have the fastest 3G network — there are only about a billion studies that say different things).
       
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| Hollywood’s Adam Rifkin: “You Don’t Need Permission From The Gatekeepers” Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:46 PM PDT
Hollywood Adam Rifkin is this week's guest on Why Is This News, where we discuss the democratisation of filmmaking and the growing supremacy of raw talent over financial resources. Also Sarah calls Paul a snob and Paul accuses Sarah of being the new Christine O’Donnell. Video below.        
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| MySpace Unveils New, Artsy Logo Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:36 PM PDT
MySpace VP of User Experience Mike Macadaan explains the philosophy behind it, “MySpace is a platform for people to be whatever they want, so we’ve decided to give them the space to do it.” Apparently the blank space to the left will be filled with user generated artwork when users hover over it on the redesigned site, like this:
If the iTunes 10 logo and Gap logo fiascos have taught us anything, it’s that people hate logo change, so people are inevitably going to hate this (I can’t wait for the comments section of this post).
But, in all fairness, the new logo’s art school abstractness and UGC element is better than the human centipede + Arial “myspace” blandness of the old logo (see above), and from Macadaan’s presentation it looks like it will have some Google Doodle-like interactive features once the MySpace redesign launches as the end of this year.
In any case, please put your inevitable redesign suggestions the comments, or on Dribbble if you prefer.
       
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| Facebook Complies Imperfectly With DMCA, Suffocates Fan Group Posted: 08 Oct 2010 03:01 PM PDT
But like YouTube, they must also work within the law, and while the right to make a fan page for someone else’s work isn’t the most critical example of free speech, it serves for a quick lesson in DMCA compliance.        
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| Netflix’s Reed Hastings on the New War for the Digital Livingroom [TCTV] Posted: 08 Oct 2010 02:30 PM PDT
In this clip, we talk about Hasting’s vision for the future, including what life will be like when TV-as-we-know-it is gone, Netflix’s plans for international expansion and life amid two new formidable online video entrants, Apple and Google. For the whole video go here, or go here for a podcast of the entire talk.        
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| Angry about Education? Go Here. Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:27 PM PDT
There’s clearly a groundswell happening in our industry around this issue, which is surprising because education is typically a vertical startups and investors avoid, and let’s face it– most of the people funding these efforts have the resources to send their kids to private schools. It seems less about personal needs and more about a cause, the way the Valley swelled around global warming a few years ago. A fad? Maybe. But like the whole green-fad, if it’s a fad that helps the world, there’s nothing wrong with trendiness. If you’ve seen the film and want to get more involved, you may want to join an online town hall happening tonight with Ariana Huffington, director of “Superman” Davis Guggenheim, producer Lesley Chilcott and New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein. There will be a group specifically set up for TechCrunch readers here.        
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| 60mo Gives QuickBooks A Minty Dashboard Posted: 08 Oct 2010 01:03 PM PDT
The tool, which launched at TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Alley, allows you to import your financials from a number of accounting software programs including QuickBooks and FreshBooks, as well as directly from financial institutions, including Bank of America, Chase and American Express. The startup will also ask new users a set of questions regarding their industry, business model, office location(s), staff, shareholders, and accounting system. 60mo will then create an optimal account structure with built in projection trends, reports, and more for each company. Of course, the ability to share this information within a company (i.e. with accountants, shareholders, lawyers, payroll companies etc.) is also integral to any application that automates financial forecasting. 60mo will allow users to give service providers controlled access to financial projections, profit and loss rollups, HR data, cap tables, and more. In terms of pricing, 60mo seems fairly affordable at $19 per month for an unlimited amount of users. 60m is sort of like a Mint.com for small businesses. It’s similar in some ways to recently launched Indinero.
       
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| Android Chief Likely Out Of Breath After Non-Stop Excuses For Carriers In Interview Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:24 PM PDT
When asked why some OEMs are still releasing phones with Android 1.6 on them, Rubin says:
Okay, Android has been out for two years now. When exactly are the OEMs going to get that message? Is that really them learning “pretty quickly”? Hasn’t the same things been said about all the previous versions of Android? I mean, people tend to want whatever is the latest and greatest — why is that difficult to understand? And why do consumers have to demand it for the OEMs to do it? When asked about Android’s openness actually meaning it’s open for the carriers to screw customers (an idea near and dear to my heart), Rubin responds with:
So, Google is a vehicle for the carriers? Great. And, um, what exactly is the value that the carriers bring? Their bloatware? Their rip-off self-serving apps? This sounds like it was written by the carriers for Rubin to read. I don’t think that anyone can argue that if Google had absolute power and held the carriers in check, the world would be a better place. For a while, it seemed like they were going to try to do that — then they folded (which was a smart business decision, but a bad decision for consumers). When PC Magazine points out that it’s not like Google is taking a fully open approach with Android — they still have minimum standards for phones that will have their branding — and asks why they don’t simply say that the only app store should be the official Android one, Rubin says:
Okay, but when Verizon and Sprint load up Android devices with pre-installed apps that can’t be deleted, how exactly is that in the hand of the community? Unless, of course, he means the carrier community. In which case, ugh. And that’s actually exactly how PC Magazine read that response too. “But when you say ‘you’ve put it in the hands of the community,” what people in the U.S. frequently hear is ‘you’ve put it in the hands of the wireless carriers.’” is their response. Rubin’s response to that:
Sure they will Andy, sure they will. What are we at now, twenty years of this carrier bullshit and counting? PC Magazine then goes into the fact that when the Nexus One was announced, it was being billed as the device that could change the way carriers have a stranglehold on consumers in the U.S. market. Then Google backed away from that plan. Rubin is vaguely optimistic here about how Google can get back to selling an unlocked phone:
Translation: we have to figure out how to do this without pissing off our carrier partners. PC Magazine then goes into the possibility that Android could get native VoIP capabilities by way of Google Voice and the Gizmo5 acquisition. That would be awesome. But what does Rubin say to that?
Because, you know, that might actually be the best thing ever for consumers and would royally screw the carriers. Nope, don’t want to do that, they’re our buddies. At that point, PC Magazine switched gears and went into Windows Phone 7. I think they were just as tired as we are of hearing how great the carriers are.        
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| Three Things You Can Count on: Death, Taxes, Spotify’s Arrogance Posted: 08 Oct 2010 12:20 PM PDT
So what if the company lied to us several times and exaggerated their success? Ambitious startups always stretch the truth right? And so what of all those reports of talks with potential partners– from MySpace to Facebook to Google– who were interested in helping bring Spotify to the US, but were also put off by the company’s arrogance? A lot of our startup heros have an arrogant swagger: Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs. (Some would even venture to say Michael Arrington…) Arrogance may even be a good thing. A grounded, humble company would never think it could beat huge, well-funded competitors. But here’s the thing: When you’re going to be this arrogant for this long, you have to, at some point, show something to back it up. Just read the comments on every Spotify post we’ve done over time to see how weary even the fans are getting of the endless promises of a US launch and the blase downplaying that the labels may have an issue with, oh, say, giving away music for free. And, yet, we get this Tweet today announcing the company’s impending world domination.
       
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| Google Confirms Acquisition Of ‘Everything Is The Best’ Assets, Including Plannr Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:32 AM PDT After hounding them left and right, the folks at Google did us a solid and sent us an email confirming their acquisition of “Outlook for hipsters” startup Plannr. The story is bigger than what we orginally wrote apparently, as the search company today has acquired all assets of the Ben Eidelson and Jason Prado run “Everything Is the Best LLC,” a Seattle based holding company which builds mobile clients, including Plannr and a couple of other mobile applications including ridepenguin, LoveTap and SheetIt. From a Google spokesperson this morning: “We're excited to welcome Ben and Jason to Google. They have built several innovative mobile applications, and we believe they can help us make a better and more useful mobile experience for our users." So as of today, Google is a (slightly) hipper and more mobile place. Having met at Stanford, Eidelson will be Product Manager and Prado will be Software Engineer of a new project they declined to mention at Google. And while the two wouldn’t disclose an acquisition price, I’m guessing it was around $6 million.
       
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| Ask A VC: Chris Dixon Solves Your Problems [TCTV] Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:30 AM PDT
And, as promised, I asked about why Dixon got a Harvard MBA and if it was a waste of money. He tries to justify it, but admits that, like me, his parents “were horrified.” Dixon isn’t one of those guys who gives a pat answer to an entrepreneur’s problem. So we didn’t get to very many questions before we had to go, but I’ll roll some of them over to next week’s guest, tentatively Reid Hoffman. (Note: I haven’t really confirmed that with him, but since asking for more questions in a post got me a flood of questions this week, testing whether just writing that Hoffman is the guest in a post will make it happen. If the guest isn’t Hoffman we’ll have our answer. If the guest is Hoffman expect a forthcoming post about a pony.) As always send questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com.        
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| Android Chief On Windows Phone 7: “The World Doesn’t Need Another Platform” Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:19 AM PDT
Rubin says that based on the screen shots he’s seen (which is funny — I’d say there’s no way he hasn’t actually seen a device itself, just about everyone in Silicon Valley has at this point), he thinks Windows Phone 7 looks “interesting” but he doesn’t see the value of it when Android is already out there. “Android is free and open; I think the only reason you create another platform is for political reasons,” Rubin says. Of course, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has already given his stance on Android being free — that stance being: it’s not free, you have to pay patent fees for it, notably, to Microsoft. Rubin expands his thoughts on Android versus Windows Phone 7:
He notes that the key strength of Android lies in Google’s ability to create mashups of a bunch of service — meaning, thanks to their cloud computing expertise. Rubin notes that Google has been in this business “since day zero” — a clear shot at Microsoft lack of success transitioning to the web so far. “The cloud is humming away with unlimited bandwidth, acting on your behalf,” Rubin concludes. More: Android Chief Likely Out Of Breath After Non-Stop Excuses For Carriers In Interview        
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| Google Cuts The Cord On Its Free 411 Service Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:18 AM PDT
As Google alludes to in its blog post, the 411 service didn’t exist solely because Google wanted to help people out — it also gave Google a vast amount of voice data, allowing it to improve its speech recognition technology for the voice services that are now present throughout Android and on many other phones, including the iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia S60, and Windows. In the blog post, Google also hints that we’ll be seeing much more voice functionality on the way:
Here’s how we described the service back when it first launched.
       
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| Video Ad And Analytics Startup TubeMogul Takes $10 Million In VC Funding Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:17 AM PDT
Video advertising and analytics startup TubeMogul closed a $10 million Series B financing. The round was led by Foundation Capital, with existing investors Trinity Ventures and Knight’s Bridge Capital Partners (where WallStrip and StockTwits founder Howard Lindzon is a partner) also putting in more money. Previously, the company raised $5.4 million. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is a board member and one of its angel investors. TubeMogul is best known as an online video analytics service, but it makes its money as a data-driven video ad platform. CEO Brett Wilson projects revenues this year will hit $10 million, up from $2.6 million in 2009. “We just did a $1.1 million month in September,” he says. Most of those revenues are coming from TubeMogul’s PlayTime video ad platform, which only launched last March, but is already one of the broadest reaching video ad networks. It is really less of a cookie-cutter ad networks than it is an ad optimization and management system. Because its video analytics are so widespread across video publishers (TubeMogul made them free in July), whenever you watch a video somewhere on the Web, chances are pretty good that TubeMogul is dropping a cookie on your browser. So it knows what kinds of videos you watched and shared elsewhere. It uses this data to determine whether and how much to bid for video ad inventory on other sites through PlayTime. Wilson claims to posses the “world's largest proprietary database of video viewership.” TubeMogul combines that database with collaborative filtering to figure out which viewers watch videos the longest and what kinds of ads they might want to see. “In the time it takes an ad to load,” he explains, “we are looking at the site and who the person is. Do we know them? Do we want to serve them an ad? We are picking off impressions in realtime.” TubeMogul doesn’t just buy bulk video ad inventory. It decides on an viewer-by-viewer basis whether to buy that inventory and show them an ad. And brand advertisers seem to like it. Some of them just use TubeMogul for the data and buy their own ads directly. TubeMogul shows them the same granular analytics it offers video publishers. It can show them video ads by number of views, number of viewers, geography, time of day, time watched, clickthroughs, and sharing on social sites like Twitter and Facebook. In an era when brand advertisers especially are more interested in measuring engagement than anything else, whoever can give them the best data will win.        
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| Pearltrees Visualizes TechCrunch Disrupt Posted: 08 Oct 2010 11:10 AM PDT Did TechCrunch Disrupt blow right past you? I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to watch that video of Eric Schmidt’s keynote about five times before I actually understand what was going on, and don’t even get me started on “Dancing Erick.” For those that are likewise, um disrupted, data curation tool Pearltrees has created the above tree visualization, which allows you to relive the three day info hurricane on your own terms by clicking through any of the available “pearls” or data nodes. For the uninitiated, Pearltrees is a free visual curation tool that allows you to organize the web into subscribable clusters, either by pulling in data from your browser or by crawling what you follow on Twitter. You can embed a Pearltree (like we have) on any website and it will update automatically as you add more content (like “Dancing Erick.” Hint. Hint).        
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| Twitter Users On AT&T Foaming At The Mouth In The Hopes Of A Verizon iPhone Posted: 08 Oct 2010 10:18 AM PDT
A new study by online conversation analysis startup Crimson Hexagon looks at just that. According to their data pulled from 27,634 Twitter conversations between just October 5 and October 7, a full 21 percent stated that they planned to switch to Verizon for the iPhone. Further, another 38 percent indicated that they were considering such a move. That’s nearly 60 percent of people tweeting about the iPhone who want it on Verizon rather than AT&T. The other important stat: 29 percent thought the news of a Verizon-based iPhone was just a “crazy rumor” once again. Only 12 percent stated that they would probably stay with AT&T in the event of the Verizon device showing up. It’s also important to remember that while a lot of people are likely to make the jump from AT&T to Verizon in the event of an iPhone landing, millions more will likely buy their first iPhone on the network.
[image: flickr/youngthousands]        
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| Libyan Domain Registry Shares Its Views On The .ly Hoopla, But Questions Remain Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:42 AM PDT
As you may have read here earlier this week, the Libyan domain registry NIC.ly raised quite a ruckus by suddenly assuming control over the domain name vb.ly, abruptly taking down a URL shortening service cooked up by Ben Metcalfe and Violet Blue. NIC.ly now states that they tried to contact the previous owners of vb.ly repeatedly, to no avail, and that the domain was singled out because of its purpose (“to serve as a 'sex friendly URL shortener', mainly for adult uses”). The registry adds that the local online community plays a part in the decision-making, and that vb.ly was deemed to operate under the “porn/adult” flag and thus in violation of its rules and regulations. That means other URL shorteners and other companies with a .ly domain name such as bit.ly, ad.ly and others can breathe easy, right? Except the statement leaves questions to be answered still. While NIC.ly says other URL shorteners have policies in place that make them adhere to NIC.ly rules and regulations, the registry adds the following, fairly ambiguous part:
What the registry fails to clarify here, is whether it intends to deprive owners of short .ly domain names of control over their website addresses, or if this only goes for new registrations. In other words, NIC.ly says it “would prefer” seeing art.ly used by a local Libyan business or person, but doesn’t say if that means it will effectively transfer ownership of the domain name at some point in the foreseeable future. I’ve contacted the registry with a request for clarification and will update according.ly (haha).        
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| How To Replace Styrofoam With Mushrooms Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:27 AM PDT
Lately at my house we’ve been getting a lot of packages. And with packages, comes styrofoam. My three-year-old loves styrofoam. Me, not so much. He breaks it up and it makes a huge mess. The little bits get everywhere and they are impossible to clean up. I can only imagine that multiplied by 100 million homes in the U.S. alone. Styrofoam is everywhere, but nobody really thinks about it. It is a $20 billion dollar business in the U.S. and occupies an estimated 25% of the country’s landfill by volume. But Eben Bayer is thinking about it. He is a greentech entrepreneur who recently gave a TED talk (embedded below) where he describes the problem and what he is trying to do about it. Instead of using styrofoam packaging, which is a petroleum-based plastic that pretty much never goes away, he and his team have come up with a way to use mushrooms and agricultural waste such as seed husks to grow bio-degradable packaging material. If you think about it, styrofoam really should be replaced with something that is compostable. It generally only has to last during shipping to protect items. But once it arrives at your home, it is the first thing you throw away (if your kids don’t destroy it first). Bayer is the CEO of Ecovative Design, which literally grows packaging materials from mycelium, a substance found in fungi, and various seed husks. It can be molded into any shape and takes about 5 days to grow. The big question that remains is how much does this cost, and can it compete with styrofoam at scale? (Hat tip to Green Thing)
       
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| Netflix Proved Me Hugely Wrong [TCTV] Posted: 08 Oct 2010 09:25 AM PDT
The town would certainly love more high-tech jobs so people who want to live and work in Santa Cruz have more options. But Hastings and his family live in Santa Cruz, precisely because it’s not Menlo Park. In an hour interview, Hastings and I traded plenty of barbs (he never calls me back yet seems to lavish attention on Om Malik), discussed the future of digital entertainment, Netflix’s unique corporate culture, when video services like Netflix will go global, and as a large supporter of charter schools, his thoughts on the documentary “Waiting for Superman.” The local NPR station has the podcast of the talk here. In case you don’t want to sit through an hour of banter, I’m posting a few shorter clips. In this one we talk about how Hastings utterly proved me wrong. He’s done it a few times, but mostly back in 2002 when the company went public. I was one of the only reporters bearish on the company insisting that sending DVDs by mail was a clever trick but in a land of Blockbuster and Wal-Marts not enough of a sustainable edge. Netflix wasn’t well known in a lot of the country back then, and nearly everyone I knew had a Blockbuster account. If they just offered to mail them to you and eliminate late fees, how could Netflix compete? A few years later, Wal-Mart jumped into the market aggressively, Netflix’s stock fell to about $2 and I looked brilliant. Then, Hastings beat both giants and I looked like an idiot. He credits Blockbuster not taking the threat seriously enough and he credits “the power of focus and desperation.” In this clip, we also talk about Netflix’s focus on constantly tweaking the product, why he believes the Valley adage “Only the paranoid survive” is flawed, and why the big surprise for him has been how long it’s taken streaming video to erode the DVD-by-mail business. Later today, I’ll post a clip about where Hastings sees the future of the digital livingroom going and life amid giants like Google and Apple, now that he’s beat the brick-and-mortar titans. Quick shout-out to The City of Santa Cruz and coworking hub NextSpace who organized the event.        
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