The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- TekTrak Offers A Cheap Way To Make Sure You Never Lose Your iPhone
- ICO In The UK: Google Street View’s Personal Data Represents ‘Significant Breach’
- comScore: Android Continues To Close In On Apple, RIM
- AOL’s Armstrong: “Google And Facebook Are Taking Share In Display Advertising”
- Madlibs For Pitches: How To Perfect The One Sentence Pitch
- How To Try 4.2 On Your iPad Right Now
- Federated Media Acquires Online Group Management Tool BigTent
- TechCrunch Meetup In Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia Tomorrow
- T-Mobile Rolls Out “4G” Network To 6 Additional Cities, Sticks It To AT&T
- Conduit Reports Stats And Groupon App – Microsoft Acquisition Rumors Come Extra
- AOL’s Third Quarter: Revenues Drop 26 Percent, Profit Surges (Slides)
- Flash Sales Site For Indian Fashion Exclusively.in Raises $2.8 Million From Accel
- What Can You Do On Blekko That You Can’t Do On Google? (TCTV)
- How Singapore Could Become the Most Important City in the Emerging World
- At My Wit’s End: Jason Calacanis Threatens To Sue Us
- Cloud Sherpas Raises Another $1.6 Million To Migrate Businesses To Google Apps
- Andreessen Horowitz Raises $650M Fund, Just Shy Of $1B Under Management
- Urban Airship Closes $5.4 Million Funding Round To Help Power Mobile Apps
- Facebook Tests Smaller Font In News Feed, Users Retaliate On Twitter
- Just When You Needed To Know Whether Prop. 19 Will Pass, CA.gov Results Page Goes Down
- As Polls Close, Foursquare Reaches 50K Voting Venue Check-Ins
- Voters Weigh Suspension Of Air Pollution Law, As California Reveals Cap-And-Trade Plans
- New iTunes Preview Rules: 90 Seconds For Songs Over 150 Seconds. Don’t Like It? Get Out.
- WITN: It’s Tuesday so it must be Jakarta
- KissInsights: Gather Customer Feedback Exactly When You Want It
| TekTrak Offers A Cheap Way To Make Sure You Never Lose Your iPhone Posted: 03 Nov 2010 09:00 AM PDT
TekTrak offers its location-tracking app for $4.99, in the Apple App Store. The App’s functionality is fairly simple: it allows an iPhone's owner to access their device’s location information in realtime from a browser. You can access all the location history of your phone (i.e. where it was and when); and the app runs in the background. You can also remotely ring or send push notifications to your phone. TekTrak tries to tackle the pain of battery drain by running in the background and allowing users to check location at predetermined time intervals. TekTrak’s main competitor is Apple, which can be a challenge, but its app is fairly affordable compared to a MobileMe subscription which hovers around $99 per year.
       
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| ICO In The UK: Google Street View’s Personal Data Represents ‘Significant Breach’ Posted: 03 Nov 2010 08:47 AM PDT
       
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| comScore: Android Continues To Close In On Apple, RIM Posted: 03 Nov 2010 08:31 AM PDT
RIM was the leading mobile smartphone platform in the U.S. with 37.3 percent share of U.S. smartphone subscribers (down 2.6 percent from the previous period), followed by Apple with 24.3 percent share (which didn’t rise or fall from the previous period). But Google continued to gain ground rising 6.5 percentage points to capture 21.4 percent of smartphone subscribers. Microsoft accounted for 10.0 percent of smartphone subscribers, while Palm rounded out the top five with 4.2 percent. In terms of device manufacturers, Samsung ranked as the top OEM with 23.5 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers, up 0.7 percentage points from the three month period ending in June. LG ranked second with 21.1 percent share, followed by Motorola (18.4 percent share), RIM (9.3 percent share, up 0.5 percentage points) and Nokia (7.4 percent share). Mobile phone owners continue to use their phones for more than just texting or calling contact. Browsers were used by 35.1 percent of U.S. mobile subscribers (up 2.2 percentage points) and users who used downloaded applications comprised 33.1 percent of the mobile audience, representing an increase of 2.5 percent. And 23.2 percent of users visited social networking sites or blogs, an increase of 1.8 percent. The percentage of users playing games and and listening to music also increased slightly. Android’s steady ascent as a go-to smartphone platform seems to be an accepted fact by now and the surprise at data showing this trend is beginning to wear off. Everyday there’s a new study or report showing that Android is eating away at the share that RIM and Apple held in the smartphone market. Yesterday, Nielsen data indicated that for the past six months, in Android devices were the most popular choice for new smartphone purchases. On Monday, Canalys reported that total shipments of Android phones in the U.S. during the third quarter were nearly twice as large as iPhone shipments.        
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| AOL’s Armstrong: “Google And Facebook Are Taking Share In Display Advertising” Posted: 03 Nov 2010 08:01 AM PDT
Everybody knows that Google and Facebook are killing it in online display advertising. Google recently announced that it is on track to generate $2.5 billion a year in display advertising revenues, and Facebook is doing about $2 billion, mostly from display. This new competition worries AOL CEO Tim Armstrong more than competition from Yahoo, which he didn’t even mention by name. At the tail end of today’s third quarter earnings call he noted:
Before AOL (which is our new parent company) can take market share, however, it needs to start growing again. In the third quarter, overall total advertising revenues (search and display) declined 27 percent, with the display portion down 14 percent. Its annualized revenue for display advertising is less than $1 billion (about $775 million if you count display advertising on AOL properties and third-party networks). AOL is still very much in transition, winding down international operations and unprofitable traffic distribution deals. The 24 percent drop-off in access subscribers is also placing downward pressure on advertising revenues since they account for many of those clicks. “AOL is not a great investment for short term quarter over quarter returns,” Armstrong warns. Instead he’s trying to set it up for a long-term turnaround. His strategy is simple: better quality content combined with an aggressive ad sales force. Part of that will require going after core audience segments which are especially appealing to advertisers. Armstrong explained AOL’s content strategy by revealing his 80-80-80 rule. Women account for 80 percent of domestic purchases, 80 percent of purchases are done locally, and 80 percent of purchases are influenced in some way by “influencer crowds.” So expect to see AOL acquire or develop a lot more content targeted at “women, local, and influencers.” Hence, the focus on celebrity news and parenting (PopEater and ParentDish), local news (Patch), and tech blogs (Engadget and TechCrunch). Patch added 133 local sites in the quarter, well on its way to 500. There is definitely pent-up demand for online display advertising. Now, AOL has to go get it before Facebook and Google gobble it all up.        
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| Madlibs For Pitches: How To Perfect The One Sentence Pitch Posted: 03 Nov 2010 07:52 AM PDT
You’re the founder of a fledgling startup locked in a room with angel investor Ron Conway for exactly 30 seconds, what do you say? If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you fumble for the words to succinctly describe your startup in a sentence or two. That seems simple enough, what could go wrong in under a minute? According to the Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi: a lot. When it comes to the one sentence pitch, Ressi says “Most entrepreneurs manage to screw it up… How much better would the world be if every startup could explain their business well in one sentence?” To help entrepreneurs perfect the art of the micro pitch, he’s created a rudimentary template in Madlibs style: My company, __(insert name of company)__, is developing __(a defined offering)__ to help __(a defined audience)__ __(solve a problem)__ with __(secret sauce)__.
Given the high probability of a brief encounter with a major investor in Silicon Valley, Ressi’s madlib tool is helpful for any young entrepreneur. However, beyond the obvious real world application value, it’s also a fun exercise to help you focus your formal pitch and understand how you want to articulate your business. If you would like to learn more about the Founder Institute or would like to join their program, the deadline to apply for the Bay Area and Houston locations is November 7. The Founder Institute is also hosting free pitch workshops, “Ideation Bootcamps” in Seattle on November 10 and in Palo Alto, this Friday, November 5. You can sign up here. Bonus Footage: To further prepare for the real world, watch Adeo rip on four elevator pitches in under two minutes:
       
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| How To Try 4.2 On Your iPad Right Now Posted: 03 Nov 2010 07:18 AM PDT
The iOS 4.2 Gold Master for all iOS devices is floating around along with iTunes 10.1, the only version of iTunes that supports the new version. What does this mean? It means you can try the new iOS 4.2 on your iPad today, as we speak, and, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be extremely happy. 4.2 adds real multi-tasking and folders to the iPad, two features that make the device truly shine. I spent an hour yesterday just dragging little icons into each other to organize my extensive Crush the Castle clone collection (including Angry Birds). The update also adds a better keyboard and a few other tweaks that make the iPad really hum. You can also wait a few days to get the real update, but there’s no sport in it.        
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| Federated Media Acquires Online Group Management Tool BigTent Posted: 03 Nov 2010 07:12 AM PDT
Digital media and advertising company Federated Media Publishing has acquired BigTent, a platform that enables local school, community and other shared-interest groups to connect online. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Federated Media acquired BigTent for its reach within a well-defined target audience: moms. The media company says more than 8 million moms engage with its authors, and Federated Media President and COO Deanna Brown says the combination with BigTent’s platform for trusted parenting groups will give marketers a “powerful new way to reach the most valuable consumers online”. Federated Media says BigTent's thousands of groups will continue to function as before, and that new groups are welcome to sign up. BigTent gives each group its own private social networking environment in addition to a set of related tools. BigTent says it primarily hosts parent groups, PTAs, schools, neighborhood groups, scouting troops, hobby clubs, alumni associations and other community groups nationwide. The purchase of BigTent follows Federated Media's recent expansion of its ability to reach parents online through a partnership with the Clever Girls Collective and the acquisition of semantic-search technology from TextDigger. BigTent has raised $5 million in funding from Menlo Ventures and Mohr Davidow Ventures.        
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| TechCrunch Meetup In Kuala Lumpur/Malaysia Tomorrow Posted: 03 Nov 2010 06:31 AM PDT
If you’re an avid TechCrunch reader in Malaysia, please join me for the TechCrunch Meetup that’s going to happen as early as tomorrow evening at the Plug and Play Technology Garden The event is being organized by Entrepreneurs.my and the Technopreneurs Association Malaysia (it’s independent of the conference mentioned above), with the support of Plug and Play. Special thanks to local mover and shaker Daniel Cerventus for putting the event together so quickly. Looking forward to meeting you there tomorrow!        
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| T-Mobile Rolls Out “4G” Network To 6 Additional Cities, Sticks It To AT&T Posted: 03 Nov 2010 06:18 AM PDT
Residents of Chicago, Ill.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Ft. Wayne, Ind.; Louisville, Ky.; and Raleigh-Durham and Wilmington, N.C were heard to let out audible cries of joy when the download speeds on their HSPA+ handsets reached peak speeds of nearly 12mbps and average speeds of 5mbps. To celebrate this, T-mobile will release their latest HSPA+ handset, the myTouch 4G, tomorrow, alongside a Dell Mini 10 HSPA+ compatible netbook.        
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| Conduit Reports Stats And Groupon App – Microsoft Acquisition Rumors Come Extra Posted: 03 Nov 2010 05:41 AM PDT
Conduit, the VC-backed company that enables publishers to create and distribute apps on the Web via browser toolbars, is sharing some stats with the world today (as they’ve done before). The startup says it currently powers apps for a network of over 260,000 web publishers, including Mochi Media and Justin.tv, enabling it to reach a potential audience of some 200 million users via its Conduit Network. The company adds that Conduit-powered apps have increased in user adoption, on average, by 69% each month during the past 12 months. Social commerce sensation Groupon is taking part in Conduit’s PR blitz with the announcement of a brand new Groupon Browser App, which notifies Groupon users, regardless of where they are on the Web, when new local deals are available (US customers only for now). Meanwhile, and timed perfectly, an Israeli publication claims Microsoft is looking to acquire Conduit for a reported $300 million, citing sources. We’re digging to find out more about the alleged acquisition talks between Microsoft and the company, but I daresay the timing of the rumormongering is a tad suspicious. A spokesperson for Conduit tells me there’s simply “no truth to the rumor”, and Microsoft informed the Israeli reporter who published the rumor that it wouldn’t comment on speculation. Still, Conduit is reportedly profitable and good for some $100 million in revenues (it has an agreement with Google in place), so combined with the distribution power it is so aptly touting this morning, it might indeed make for an interesting acquisition target. We’ll update if and when we learn more.        
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| AOL’s Third Quarter: Revenues Drop 26 Percent, Profit Surges (Slides) Posted: 03 Nov 2010 04:49 AM PDT
Our new corporate overlords (that would be AOL) have just released their Q3 earnings report, and it’s a mixed bag. Total revenues for the quarter were down 26 percent, from $763.9 million to $563.5 million, in the previous year. This slightly tops Wall Street expectations of $557 million. Profit, meanwhile, surged thanks to cost-cutting and the gains on the sales of ICQ and its Kayak investment. Net income increased to $171.6 million, or $1.60 per share, from $74.0 million or $0.70 per share last year. (We reported on AOL’s Q2 2010 earnings here if you would like to compare). Advertising revenue fell 27 percent to $292.8 million on declines in search, display and third-party ads, AOL reported. Subscription revenue dropped 26 percent to $244.8 million. AOL says it spent $97 million on, well, us, 5Min Media and Thing Labs, and that it could spend up to $23 million more on earnouts/retention bonuses over the next three years. A couple of days ago, the company announced that it sold buildings and land on its Dulles campus, netting it $144.5 million in cash. Below are the earnings slides for the quarter.        
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| Flash Sales Site For Indian Fashion Exclusively.in Raises $2.8 Million From Accel Posted: 03 Nov 2010 04:25 AM PDT
The site features high-end traditional Indian apparel as well as more modern, Indian-inspired clothing. And the startup includes scarves, jewelry, handbags, crafts, paintings, photography and other home goods made by Indian designers. Since Exclusively.In’s launch June, the company’s co-founder and CEO Sunjay Guleria says the site has experienced strong demand from a broad base of consumers, not just the Indian diaspora, as “Indian-infused” fashion and decorations go mainstream. While Guleria declined to name how many members the site has, he did say that over 65 percent of its members make repeat purchases with the average purchase hovering around $250 ion the site. Currently Exclusively.In ships orders directly from India to the U.S., but will eventually expand to Canada, the U.K. and India in early 2011. The site is also looking to expand to other verticals, such as travel. Over the past few months, Exclusively.in has featured deals from the Taj Hotel Group for the company’s hotels all over the world. It’s certainly interesting to see that niche flash sales sites like Exclusively.In are growing and finding a loyal userbase, and a vote of confidence from well-known investors. Gilt’s revenue was expected to reach close to $500 million this year, so even as a niche site, Exclusively.In could pull in decent sales. Or it could be a possible acquisition target. One thing is for sure. My wallet is a little lighter after my visit to the site.        
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| What Can You Do On Blekko That You Can’t Do On Google? (TCTV) Posted: 03 Nov 2010 01:27 AM PDT We recently brought Blekko CEO Rich Skrenta into our office to talk about why his company’s recent attempt to enter a market where two search engines hold 90% of the market share is not completely insane. The prevailing “Blekko is doomed” argument holds that because Google already does search so well, it’s fruitless to for anyone else to bother trying. Granted, it’s hard to imagine a future where people Blekko themselves. But, once you get past the goofy name and syntax, the idea of a category search deserves some exploration. Blekko’s killer feature of being able to search crowdsourced “Slashtags” shouldn’t be too off putting for any sort of Google power user, but certainly isn’t a Google Killer. Skrenta answers this point by stating that Blekko isn’t trying to kill Google, and that if anything it is trying to kill Ask.com which currently has 4% of the search market share.“We’re cool with being number three,” he told said. Operating under the motto “there is no one-size-fits-all” for search, Skrenta is targeting both early adopters and power users with Blekko, holding that everyone has their own Blekko usecase. After our interview, I asked Skrenta for his top three searches that you could execute on Blekko and not on Google, and they were, in this order:
In accord with his logic, Skrenta’s top three Slashtags are drastically different from my top three. Blekko’s SEO tools are amazing with regards to transparency and the http://www.techcrunch.com/ /seo search is a gold mine of inbound link data (Any writer or web editor that’s ever had to track links will really appreciate this). I’m also fond of its direct API search features like Deer licking a cat /youtube. And I’m a huge fan of the simplicity of Blekko’s “most recent” category search /date. In fact, I just used the information found in Foursquare valuation /date to tweet out this pithy attempt at cleverness, “Meg Whitman could have bought Foursquare, and kept the change.” Heh. I know. But it’s the little things that keep you using a search engine. Says Skrenta on Blekko’s longevity, “The more people see the Slashtags the more they will use them, We got a lot of money in the bank [$24 million to be exact] so we’re not going anywhere.” You can read more about Blekko in “TechCrunch Review: The Blekko Search Engine Prepares To Launch” and learn more about how to personalize its features in the demo video below.
       
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| How Singapore Could Become the Most Important City in the Emerging World Posted: 03 Nov 2010 12:36 AM PDT
Meanwhile, on the patio-of-the-future, just off the living-room-of-the-future, a hologram of a lady tells me that the glass-sided windows of this loft are coated with a self-cleaning glass. Dirt beads up and, when it rains, it’s washed away. “Oh those rainstorms in the tropics!” she says with a slightly stilted laugh. This isn’t Tomorrowland. It actually has a more Disneyland-sounding name if you can believe it– FUTUROPOLIS. People live and work here, crafting futuristic crazy research like this. Welcome to Singapore’s rare impractical side: Government-subsidized research conducted mostly by welcomed immigrants who can’t find this kind of science-fair-project cash elsewhere. Elsewhere on the FUTUROPOLIS (sorry, it’s almost impossible to type that word To be fair to Futuropolis there are some potentially commercial– and life altering– applications like the hospital linens that detect when someone has been lying in the same spot too long and send a flashing BED SORE ALERT! (also impossible to type in lower case) notice to nurses. Another application allows people to drive a video There is one area where Futuropolis and other research labs in Singapore are putting a lot of money that’s as important as DARPA’s early investments in the Internet for the future of society: Sustainable, healthy cities. I argued in my last post that comfortable Singapore wasn’t a short cut to understanding a mass-Asian customers. But Singapore is a great guinea pig for two things: Drug companies doing clinical trials and trying to understand the Asian genome and urban planners trying to figure out how to build a sustainable Asian megacity. Futuropolis is investing billions of research dollars in both. Half of the budget goes to biomedical research and Walter Lee, head of the government’s Technology Transfer Network, told me that one company in the complex is doing ninety concurrent clinical trials for drug companies– taking advantage of Singapore’s Indian, Malaysian and Chinese melting-pot population. Web companies, luxury brands and KFC aren’t the only ones who benefit from the rising Asian middle class. As more people climb out of poverty, they demand basic healthcare products we take for granted in the West. The continent is also a huge growth area for pharmaceutical multinationals and for them, Singapore is a great hub of talent and government support for clinical trials. Emerging versus emerged doesn’t matter for their customers– they just need their genes. Much of the other half goes to urban living research, whether it’s somewhat frivolous applications in the living-room-of-the-future or ways to repurpose human waste into fuel. Developing some real solutions for megacities could be even more important to people’s lives than medical research. India is the extreme case of the need, with a legendarily outdated, poorly-planned urban infrastructure. There are regular power outages, sewage backups and the traffic is the worst I’ve seen in any city in the world. And, shockingly, less than 5% of Indians have cars and two-thirds of them still live in villages. If someone doesn’t come up with innovative solutions the cities will become unlivable as urban flight continues. While Jakarta impressed me with a better urban infrastructure the last time I was here, in just four months it has become noticeably worse as the city keeps growing. The traffic is badly clogged at most times of day, and the power was out in the heart of the city for more than an hour last night. Both the Internet and mobile connections are far less reliable– a sign that more people are jumping on the networks without the construction of new towers. I have two local SIM cards in two phones; one can only receive calls, one can only make calls. Pre-paid mobile SIM cards are the lifeblood of an emerging market. It’s what ties the dual economies together. That’s the one part of the infrastructure a megacity has to get right. China has done the best job of urban planning in Asia, although sometimes through draconian measures, like forcibly removing slum dwellers and requiring people have permission to move to a big city. But the country has also been forward thinking in the way it develops satellite cities, buildings housing and schools and gives companies incentives to move there to provide jobs. An impressive example I saw on my last trip to China was Suzhou, just outside of Shanghai. It used to be a comparatively sleepy Chinese city, known for its little rivers throughout the city and quaint architecture. (I know, “quaint” just isn’t a word you hear much in China, but downtown Suzhou is indeed quaint.) But China constructed the Suzhou Industrial Park or (SIP) next to the city, constructing a river walk, luring companies, building luxurious mega-plexes, and an explosion of shopping and restaurants. Millions of people who can’t live in Shanghai live there instead and a have a comparable quality of life. Building a highspeed train connecting the two helps. You can live in Suzhou and still party in Shanghai. Some people are always going to want to live in the big cities, but as we’ve seen in America, if you give people other options where you can still have a modern lifestyle and a fulfilling job, not everyone does. SIP was one of the first tech park experiments China did, supported by Deng Xioaping himself. Want to know who his partner in crafting it was? The City State of Singapore. Why did mighty China need tiny Singapore? For its glorious practicality in solving problems, unmuddied by religious, political or classist dogma and hangups. Futuropolis wants to come up with even more ways Singapore can export this practical problem solving to its overcrowded neighbors whether it’s advances in technologies like solar and wind, investments in clean water systems or even ways to repurpose human waste into a fuel to keep the lights on. Singapore’s own traffic management systems aren’t perfect, but they do a lot to alleviate jams. The city has OK public transportation, but is building more. It does have an amazingly wired cab system: You call any of the three major cab company phone numbers, the system the broadcasts the job to all cabs in your vicinity and the first driver to bid for it gets the job. An SMS tells you the number of the cab assigned to you and how long it’ll be. When the cab shows up, the driver’s LCD display screen bears all your information to make sure the right person gets it. And unlike, say, a dispatch system, this one is highly user-friendly, works from any phone and in my experience actually delivered a cab. (Sorry, UberCab, Singapore is way ahead of you, and the government supports it.) There are also overpasses throughout the city that deduct money from automated sensors everyone is required to have on their windshields (ala FastPass) if you want to drive on more central roads, and deducts more money during peak times. The city is working on a new GPS version of this that would be able to charge more by larger, gas-guzzling cars. The hope isn’t just to make money off of a traffic point like a toll booth– the hope is people find other ways to get from point A to point B. A smaller-country’s path to economically outperforming its natural disadvantages depends on it seizing on what it can do that no one else can, like the village in Three Amigos that could sew. Singapore doesn’t have a mega-population. It never will. But it has the perfect ingredients for creating the model megacity: One of the highest population densities in Asia, a controllable geographic size to implement change and experiments, and billions in research dollars to make the seemingly impractical implementable one day. If it follows through on the promise I saw at places like Futuropolis, Singapore could be the single most important city to the future of emerging markets. [UPDATE: Someone told me on Twitter it's actually called "Fusionopolis," which is weird because when I was in the building they said "Futuropolis." Always possible I misunderstood...several times. It has been a long trip. I didn't see anything on the building and the guy's business card reads Technology Transfer Network. At any rate, Futuropolis is a much better name for what they do. Fusionopolis makes little sense. If I'm indeed wrong, or there are three names, consider that free consulting advice. You should change it to "Futuropolis."]
       
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| At My Wit’s End: Jason Calacanis Threatens To Sue Us Posted: 03 Nov 2010 12:32 AM PDT Jason Calacanis, our former partner on our TechCrunch50 events, is threatening to sue us. His demand letter and draft complaint are embedded below. In a nutshell, he wants part of the proceeds from our sale to AOL. Calacanis has spent most of the last year saying some of the most ridiculous things about me and about TechCrunch, and I’ve stayed completely silent. Mostly because I knew he just wanted attention, but also because I assumed he’d eventually calm down and move on to doing more productive things. Also, somehow, I still consider him a friend. Now, though, the whole story has to get out. Here it is. A few years ago Jason suggested we put on a conference to give startups a place to launch. None of us liked Demo much, the long standing startup launch conference, because they charged as much as $20,000 to get in. It didn’t seem like they were picking the best startups, it seemed like they were picking startups that could pay up. So we put on an event with Jason in 2007. It went well and was profitable. 2008 was also very successful, but stresses started to show in our business relationship. Our relationship required unanimous decisions. For the most part that worked well, but occasionally Jason would simply veto things we wanted to do. We also noticed that while profits were split 50/50, Jason wasn’t putting much into the event compared to us. Everyone at TechCrunch wanted out of the event, except me. I thought we could work things out. At one point though Jason became so abusive on a phone call that he actually made one of our employees cry. Yes, cry. Among other things, he wouldn’t “approve” some expenses, meaning we could either sue him or just take the loss ourselves. We chose to take the loss. And his most shining moment – he got so drunk the night before the last day of the 2008 conference that he couldn’t show up to be on stage until hours after the event started. I tried to negotiate with Jason after that 2008 event to at least get the economics of the conference in line. We offered him 10% of TechCrunch, a board seat and ongoing profit sharing from our events (even the events that didn’t involve him) to take on ad advisory position going forward. He said he wasn’t interested. By the time our last event in 2009 rolled around things had gotten much worse. Jason became what can only be described as unbalanced and dictatorial, ordering me and everyone else at TechCrunch around, demanding ridiculous things and vetoing decisions on a whim. When Jason really wanted something we found a way to make it work. Most of the time our ideas were simply dismissed out of hand. At the end of the conference I remember Heather Harde, our CEO, saying to me “I’m getting sick of putting on a big conference for Jason Calacanis every year.” We told Jason firmly that it would be our last event. He seemed to accept it, and even announced it. He later said he was joking, but at no time did we ever waver from our position that the event was over. That’s when things turned really bad. When Jason realized we were very serious about ending our relationship with him he began to spread rumors that I was abusing prescription medications. From an email he sent to a number of people, where he suggested an intervention: “His behavior is leading to multiple people to report to me that he is abusing drugs (prescription), that his personal life is getting very dark and that he is in the middle of another nervous breakdown (the second one in a year)…When–not if–he crashes we don’t want to be among the folks who say “we all knew that was going to happen.” We want to be the friends who said “We saw it coming and we did everything we could to help Mike.” Hopefully our intervention results in a soft landing instead of complete self-immolation.” Heather’s comment in an email to me: “I have heard a lot of crazy Mike Arrington concerns in the past, but never has anyone ever suggested drug or alcohol abuse. It’s insanity.” I rarely drink at all any more and until the last couple of months I never took any prescription drugs except antibiotics a few times. Funnily enough the only time I’ve ever “abused” prescription drugs was one time in France a year before that when Jason himself gave me a provigil, telling me it was good for jetlag. It was. I’ve certainly never had a nervous breakdown. This was just Jason’s sick way of threatening us by spreading these rumors. I wrote to him “As far as I can tell, your current position is that we are either going to do the conference together or you are going to start spreading rumors about me having an alcohol and drug problem. You can probably guess what my answer is going to be.” Things were up and down after that. We tried one last time to work with him, offering him 10% of profits of future events for an advisory position. A soft landing, if you will. On March 1 we announced TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, including the format (less launches, more conversations). He got angry over that, and demanded we finally dissolve the TechCrunch50 entity. His attorney drafted an agreement, we negotiated parts of it and signed it.
We signed a dissolution agreement and a mutual release of claims, and everything was fine for a while. Jason asked to speak at Disrupt, we accepted. And later when there were (false) rumors of an acquisition, he said he was cheering us on.
In June:
And September:
Confused? Me too. Which is why we ended all communication with him months ago. He’s just bad energy, then good energy, then bad energy, depending on his mood. Now, though, he’s threatening to sue us. Despite the fact that we mutually agreed to dissolve TechCrunch50, release each other of any claims and move on. A few last thoughts. 1. We didn’t kill TechCrunch50, Jason did. He was a terror to work with. He couldn’t keep his own staff around from year to year, and he wouldn’t put enough resources into the event to justify the economics he was getting. Working with him overall was a nightmare, and by the third year we just gave up. Until then, and even after, I tried desperately to make it work somehow. 2. I don’t know where Jason got it into his head that we couldn’t do events unless we partnered with him, or that the format of a conference is somehow proprietary. He certainly did events without us, and we didn’t complain. Way back when we first talked about doing the event, I don’t remember Jason saying anything like “Hey Mike, let’s do an event together. Only, if you do you can never stop or do any other events that involve companies launching, even though I can. And if you do stop, or do a different event, or ever sell TechCrunch, I’m going to call you a sociopath, spread rumors that you do drugs and then sue you.” 3. The spreading of rumors around drug abuse were reprehensible and absurd. 4. His “I love you, I hate you” routine doesn’t show a balanced mind. I don’t even know what to do with “I’ve got nothing bad to say about @arrington. He’s my friend, he treated me like garbage–but that’s business. He will regret it long-term.” 5. We formally and mutually dissolved TechCrunch50 a month and a half after we announced TechCrunch Disrupt. He certainly knew exactly what the format of the new event was. 6. We didn’t start any acquisition discussions with AOL until May 2010, and we didn’t even get to signing an NDA with them (when the real discussions start) until August 2010. We certainly had no immediate plans to sell TechCrunch when we were dissolving TechCrunch50. And when false rumors surfaced later that we were selling, he cheered us on publicly. 7. If Jason wanted stock in TechCrunch he should have asked for it at some point, or taken our offer in 2008. 8. If he sues us, we’ll fight, and he’ll lose. And we are certainly going to explore a countersuit for defamation. 9. TechCrunch Disrupt without Jason has been a smashing success with higher revenue, higher attendance and much better speakers than TechCrunch50. The show is about the audience and the startups. It used to be mostly about Jason. 10. And now, of course, the circus begins. PS – for our newer readers, I know this is way inside baseball. But we have a longstanding policy of posting every legal threat (and there have been some doozies).        
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| Cloud Sherpas Raises Another $1.6 Million To Migrate Businesses To Google Apps Posted: 02 Nov 2010 11:56 PM PDT
Cloud Sherpas not only helps companies migrate and transition over to Google Apps but also provides additional tools, called Sherpa Tools, to make the productivity suite more useful. For example, the Directory Manager provides administrators with an interface for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting in-depth profile information for end users, shared contacts and groups. With Cloud Sherpa, users can also import and export contact information in bulk and add instant messaging features. The startup says implementation sizes range from 75 users to 75,000, with average deployments of around 2,000 seats. Since launch, Cloud Sherpas has migrated over 600,000 enterprise users to Google Apps. Additionally, Cloud Sherpas software is in use at over 7,000 companies, which represents more than 1.5 million Google Apps users. To put that in perspective, over 30 million people use Google Apps. Cloud Sherpas plans to use the new capital to accelerate adoption of Google Apps across the retail, manufacturing, high-tech, real estate, healthcare and government industries.        
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| Andreessen Horowitz Raises $650M Fund, Just Shy Of $1B Under Management Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:58 PM PDT
What’s more? This fund closed in three weeks time. “It was a busy three weeks,” Andreessen offers to those VCs struggling to raise money. (I have a feeling some haters are gonna hate for that quip, Marc…) Is it Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s membership in the elite club of entrepreneurs who have built and sold two companies for more than $1 billion each? Is it Andreessen’s seats on the boards of Facebook and Hewlett-Packard, two of the most talked about and powerful boards in the Valley? Was it the stellar angel investment portfolio that included a raft of open source, enterprise and Web 2.0 stars and has essentially acted like a deal generation pipeline for the fund? Or was it that the first fund succeeded in grabbing the most competitive deals like Foursquare, but also made some gutsy and, at the time, controversial mega deals like Skype? A mix likely. The biggest feedback from LPs: When they called around to other investors and entrepreneurs doing reference checks remarkably few of them said Andreessen Horowitz acted like assholes. As discussed a few times on my AskAVC show, that’s a rarity in this industry and high praise. Horowitz says half the people he’s told the news to have asked why the fund was so big and half have asked why the fund was so small. The former because it’s a lot of money to raise so quickly in an industry that most people feel already has too much cash; the latter because Andreessen and Horowitz aren’t afraid to do a big, late stage deal if they can get a chunk of a company they love, like Skype. I mean, raising another $100 million might have taken, what? Four weeks? Horowitz says they didn’t go larger because they didn’t want the fund size to dictate their investment pace. They’d rather have to go raise money again if things go better than expected than to have to press to find suboptimal deals. It’s striking how fast the deal closed, because most limited partners are saying they want specialized funds, or firms that invest in just seed, just growth or specific sectors– so they can control their own allocations. Andreessen Horowitz is most definitely not that. “We think that’s wrong, quite frankly,” Horowitz says. “We think the stages vary in quality and pricing a lot over time.” For instance, when the two were doing angel investing in the early 2000s the Web was a space no one would go near except the most determined (read: crazy) people, who typically make the best entrepreneurs. The two got in a ton of great deals for cheap. But today with the glut of seed stage deals and lower overall quality of the entrepreneurs, Horowitz says the venture stage is a better vantage point to be competitive on price and pluck up companies that are already demonstrating traction. The two are also really excited about growth-stage opportunities, especially in the consumer Web space– a game so far dominated by Elevation, DST and a few others. “We we sold Netscape there were 50 million people on the Internet and half of them were on dial-up connections,” Horowitz says. “Now it’s two billion. There have been multiple companies that got to $1 billion in revenues in less than five years. That’s not only never happened in technology before, but that’s never happened in the history of business, period. There are very interesting companies– early companies still– with giant revenues that aren’t ready to be public yet, especially given how much more difficult being a public company has gotten in the past ten to 15 years.” Ultimately, Andreesseen Horowitz still want to build big, publicly traded companies and they say they’ve walked from talented entrepreneurs with great products who were looking for a flip. There are plenty of investors who want that business in the Valley, and they can have it. “You can invest $2 million and sell a company for $20 million and make money,” Horowitz says. “But that’s just not what we’re about.” Horowitz also argues the blended fund strategy is a better deal for limited partners. Several leading Valley firms have branched out into late stage or emerging market funds in recent years, and LPs who couldn’t get their money into the early stage fund before rushed at the chance to get closer to the firm. But if the early stage fund gets a home run, but the late stage or emerging market funds do horribly, only the LPs in the early stage fund make money– well, along with all the venture firm’s partners. If an LP is in both, he has to pay the carry on the fund that did well, while losing money on the other one. In many ways this approach of sticking with a company all the way, harkens back to the early Don Valentine, Arthur Rock, Tom Perkins days of venture capital. Andreessen Horowitz doesn’t believe in just one partner being assigned to a startup, they hire a lot of experts and they’re all up for grabs. Some make sense when you need help recruiting engineering talent and some make sense when you are looking to go public. Continuity is an underrated asset, Horowitz says. When you rotate board members in-and-out, weird, reactionary decisions can result. People brought in to help later don’t know the entrepreneur and the company’s history as intimately. A missed quarter’s numbers may call a new board member to call for a founder’s head, but a board member who’s been with the company longer may know more context or what a better role for him might be. I did this interview over a midnight Skype connection from Jakarta, Indonesia– a country that is home to a good deal of the Internet traffic from Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare– all either angel or venture fund investments of Andreessen and Horowitz. Indeed, Asia generally is a big reason there are 2 billion people on the Web. So I had to ask whether the two kingpins of Silicon Valley would finally take a closer look at the global venture capital market with this fund. Nope. “It doesn’t mean you can’t start a big business anywhere else, it’s just harder to do them in a highly repeatable way,” Horowitz said. “You can make a blockbuster movie in Idaho, but a lot more of them come out of Hollywood.” It’s no wonder the guys are said to have such an affinity for the show “MadMen.” Their firm is a throwback to venture capital’s classic, glory days.        
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| Urban Airship Closes $5.4 Million Funding Round To Help Power Mobile Apps Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:49 PM PDT
At a high level, Urban Airship lets mobile developers take advantage of popular (and powerful) features seen on modern mobile platforms like iOS and Android, without having to reinvent the wheel for each app. These services include managing push notification campaigns across apps running on multiple platforms (there’s support for Android, BlackBerry, and iOS). So far, the company says it has distributed over 1 billion messages. Urban Airship also offers functionality related to monetization, including ever-popular in-app purchases. The most recent addition to Urban Airship’s feature-set is support for subscriptions, which are sure to play an important role for publishers in the coming years. The startup powers the subscriptions seen on the recently-released Newsweek iPad application, which is the the first iPad periodical to feature them (don’t be surprised if more publishers turn to the startup to power their subscriptions). Other clients include Tapulous, LivingSocial, and Gowalla. Urban Airship previously closed a $1.1 million funding round in February, so this brings their total funding to $6.5 million.        
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| Facebook Tests Smaller Font In News Feed, Users Retaliate On Twitter Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:30 PM PDT
Unsurprisingly, many members took to Twitter to vent about the smaller font, complaining that the new size is difficult to read. It’s a small adjustment but the majority of Tweets about the change seem to be negative so Facebook may not be keeping the new, smaller font for long. What do you think about the new font size? Love it or hate it?        
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| Just When You Needed To Know Whether Prop. 19 Will Pass, CA.gov Results Page Goes Down Posted: 02 Nov 2010 09:22 PM PDT
Apparently the entire Internet is really invested in today’s California midterm elections, because the official California Secretary of State site has been either down or more spotty than Twitter for the last 20 minutes. While it may appear functional, any attempt to view specific results is met with the following error message: “Due to an extremely high volume of traffic, the page you have requested is temporarily unavailable. We apologize for the inconvenience, please try your request again shortly.” Internet users dying to watch the votes as they e-trickle in can catch them on CNN’s CA State Results page, where it looks like the Fiorina vs. Barbara Boxer race is the only one of the big three that is even remotely close. Image: Kevin Rose via Instagram        
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| As Polls Close, Foursquare Reaches 50K Voting Venue Check-Ins Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:48 PM PDT
California and New York led the pack with check-ins with 7,274 and 5,988 checkins respectively. In total, 58 percent of check-ins came from women and 42 percent came from men. Foursquare users checked into a total of 23,382 polling venues. While this is Foursquare’s first big election since launch, the startup is using the election platform has a guinea pig of sorts to develop a scalable system for the 2012 Presidential Election in a few years.
       
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| Voters Weigh Suspension Of Air Pollution Law, As California Reveals Cap-And-Trade Plans Posted: 02 Nov 2010 08:27 PM PDT
Currently, California requires reporting by (and third-party verification of) facilities and companies that emit 25,000 tons of greenhouse gases or more each year. Originally, AB32 laid out plans to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from industrial sectors and electricity by 25% by the year 2020 restoring them to 1990 levels. Fuel suppliers would come under the air emissions “cap” in 2015. The program would begin to take effect in 2012, with the California Air Resources Board (ARB) monitoring and enforcing the law. The midterm election results in California will determine if AB32 remains on course. Proposition 23on the state’s ballot would suspend the air pollution control law until unemployment in the state drops to 5.5% or less for a full year. Many cleantech entrepreneurs and institutional investors want AB32 to proceed, as its enforcement could accelerate the uptake of their companies’ services and products, and help the country maintain a leadership role in the global, cleantech market. Environmentalists believe that AB32 could help the state and its residents potentially save as much as they spend to achieve better air quality and energy efficiency; and that it would create green jobs for the region. California is working with other Western states and Canada to devise a wider, regional cap-and-trade system. Meanwhile, Proposition 23 supporters— who seek to suspend AB32— believe that enforcing the strict air pollution controls now will reduce California's gross state product enough to choke billions of dollars out of the state each year, perpetuating high unemployment; that the air pollution law would cause an increase in the cost of public services, especially transportation; and that there are better ways for California to combat environmental problems. The cap-and-trade system’s preliminary design allows companies that operate well within the state’s emissions limits to opt-in, initiate reporting and begin selling their offsets to polluters. A full banking and trading system, it would also allow companies to make up for some of their carbon emissions through programs like planting trees, or destroying ozone depleting substances. A sample scenario: a company that emits 100 tons of greenhouse gases in a year, once the controls are in place, would be allowed to emit 90 a year by the state, but would make up for the rest by reducing two to ten tons through improved operations, and up to eight tons through other programs outside of the cap. The following gases are covered by California’s law and system: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), and other fluorinated greenhouse gases. Some industries will have to adapt more quickly and others will be given a bit more leeway should AB32 escape suspension. A Scientific American feature story on the trading system yesterday explained:
Image: L.A. and smog from the air by Scazon        
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| New iTunes Preview Rules: 90 Seconds For Songs Over 150 Seconds. Don’t Like It? Get Out. Posted: 02 Nov 2010 07:33 PM PDT
MacRumors, meanwhile, snagged a copy of the iTunes Connect letter apparently being sent to label representatives that has all the details. They can be summarized as such:
It’s sort of humorous to think that this is the letter Apple is sending around to label which begins with “we are pleased to let you know”. Most of the labels probably aren’t too pleased about that. But you have to assume that Apple was negotiating this change with the big boys, and that’s why it took so long. But since this change is opt-out rather than opt-in, any label who really doesn’t like this change will be forced to pull their music from iTunes if they don’t wish to participate. Considering that iTunes is largest music retailer in the world, will any dare do that? Probably not. Apple says that this change will lead to more purchases since customers will have longer to listen and decide that they like a song. It’s a nice bump. Still, it’s even more of a tease for what we should have: streaming music from the cloud. You know, what Spotify does and Lala did before Apple bought them and shut them down. If Apple can stream 90 seconds of just about every song out there, you know they can stream the entire thing. It’s just a matter of when they’ll start doing that. This change appears to be happening in the U.S. iTunes store only for now. And it should be happening shortly.
       
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| WITN: It’s Tuesday so it must be Jakarta Posted: 02 Nov 2010 06:35 PM PDT Sarah's latest whistle-stop tour of emerging markets has reached Indonesia, where she'll be covering – and helping with – a start-up competition. But before all the excitement kicks off, she called in from Skype to explain the differences between Singapore (her previous stop) and Jakarta. Video below.        
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| KissInsights: Gather Customer Feedback Exactly When You Want It Posted: 02 Nov 2010 06:18 PM PDT
The service has some similarities to GetSatisfaction and UserVoice in that it asks users to express their opinions about the site. But there are a few key differences: first, everything on KissInsights is private — Patel thinks it’s a bad idea to expose your customer feedback to competitors (GetSatisfaction doesn’t have a private setting; UserVoice will allow you to restrict the visibility of your feedback forums to customers, but it’s possible that your competitors will simply sign up for your service to get access).
Installing the service is simple, requiring one snippet of Javascript on your site — from after adding it you can tweak your surveys from the KissInsights dashboard, without having to adjust your website’s source. Patel says that during the KissInsights beta period it’s seen strong engagement with users, with an overage of over 40 customer responses. This is a standalone product from KissMetrics (in other words, if you want both the company’s products and you’ll need to pay for them separately). KissInsights offers a free package with basic functionality; the full service runs $30/month, with a discount if you sign up for a year at a time.
       
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Man, another day, another "
comScore has 
According to Ressi, “most entrepreneurs add useless adjectives, define their audience too vaguely and have a weak value proposition with no secret sauce.” He says articulate entrepreneurs are specific, avoid buzzwords, can adroitly describe the market and target consumer and, in the space of one sentence, even hint at a revenue model. (See video above, where Ressi breaks down each component in under five minutes.)
There was much celebration this morning when T-mobile fired up their 
I’m a 
We noticed a small change tonight on Facebook’s news feed: the font seems to have become smaller. It’s unclear how much the size was adjusted but it looks like the change is significant enough that it drew user attention as soon as the font was tweaked.
To put this in perspective, Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg just 
Just ahead of today’s midterm election, California regulators established a preliminary model for a greenhouse gas 
Well it didn’t happen on September 1 as some had been 
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