The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Union Square Ventures Is Raising A New $200 Million Opportunity Fund
- Ifbyphone Raises $8 Million Cloud-Based Call Management Platform
- Sears And Kmart Team Up With Sonic To Launch A Netflix Competitor
- McAfee’s 2011 Cyber Attack Targets: URL Shorteners, iPhones, Geolocation Services
- Zumigo Raises $420,000 To Help Jumpstart More Location-Based Applications
- Dashwire Raises Another $1 Million For Mobile Services Platform
- Zynga’s CityVille Now More Than 25 Percent Bigger Than FarmVille
- Flicksquare Sends Your Foursquare Check-In Photos To Flickr
- Footage Of Android’s Revamped Music Player Leaks
- Firefox On The iPhone? No (Though It Is Being Worked On). Another Mozilla Browser? Maybe.
- Search Etsy Listings By Color With Glancely
- How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot!,” Says Steve Case
- StyleHop’s Hunt For Hot Fashion Comes To An End As It Heads To The DeadPool
- Moot On 4Chan User Survey: “It’s Total Garbage.”
- Many iPhone App Downloads Jumped 2-3X On Christmas
- EnergySavvy Raises $1.1 Million To Match Up Green Contractors, Rebates And Homeowners
| Union Square Ventures Is Raising A New $200 Million Opportunity Fund Posted: 28 Dec 2010 08:53 AM PST
Union Square Ventures is raising $200 million for a new fund called the Union Square Ventures Opportunity Fund LP. According to an SEC filing, the VC firm already raised $135 million for the fund from 19 investors. The last time Union Square raised money was for its $156 million Union Square Ventures 2008 LP fund. Union Square Ventures is the leading early stage VC firm in New York City led by Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, and Albert Wenger. Its portfolio includes Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga, Tumblr, Boxee, Disqus, Etsy, Clickable, and Indeed. Partner Fred Wilson is well known for betting on startups right out of the gate before most other VCs will touch them, and is also highly-visible because of his popular blog, A VC. He recently raised concerns about too many venture investors chasing returns, wanting to invest in venture startups without really understanding their business. But in that same post he also wrote:
Union Square’s new Opportunity Fund will presumably focus on the same sorts of early stage Internet startups Union Square is so good at sniffing out. Although the name is different its previous funds, which are differentiated by date. So it is possible that the Opportunity fund will focus on a different set of opportunities. I have an email out to Union Square about this and will update when I hear back.        
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| Ifbyphone Raises $8 Million Cloud-Based Call Management Platform Posted: 28 Dec 2010 08:10 AM PST
Ifbyphone’s Web-based management applications allow businesses to track, route, and automate phone calls to. Users can use the company’s software to manage call flow, set up virtual call centers, measure advertising, and to automate manual clerical tasks. Earlier this year, Ifbyphone bought Cloudvox, a hosted service that allows developers to place, receive, and control phone calls from their own software (including Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, C#, and simple HTTP/JSON). As part of the new investment, The National Association of Realtors will be collaborating with        
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| Sears And Kmart Team Up With Sonic To Launch A Netflix Competitor Posted: 28 Dec 2010 05:51 AM PST
Powered by Sonic Solutions’ RoxioNow platform (Rovi just bought Sonic Solutions for $720 million), Alphaline allows Sears and Kmart customers to download movies and and TV shows online. The company says that it plans to make the platform available to users on a variety of devices, including mobile. A number of Sears’ competitors including Walmart have already started to dabble in the online movies space. Walmart recently bought Vudu, a service that streams movies to internet-connected TVs. BestBuy teamed up with Sonic to put its movie library in all of the Web-connected devices the company sells at its stores. But when it comes to actual movie rentals from the web, these companies haven’t been able to compete with giants like Netflix. It should be interesting to see how long Alphaline survives.        
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| McAfee’s 2011 Cyber Attack Targets: URL Shorteners, iPhones, Geolocation Services Posted: 28 Dec 2010 05:25 AM PST
McAfee Labs says that URL-shortening services, which create more than 3,000 URLs per minute, will be a significant target for cyber criminals in 2011. Because social media sites are already riddles with cyber criminals, these links are going to be used for spam, scamming and other malicious purposes, says the company. Interestingly, McAfee recently launched its own URL shortener, McAf.ee Geolocation services, such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook Places, are expected to also be a security target as cybercriminals can see in real time who is Tweeting, where they are located, what they are saying, what their interests are, and what operating systems and applications they are using. McAfee says this personal information that is publicly shared allows cyber criminals to create a targeted attack. Of course unsurprisingly, mobile is expected to a huge target in 2011 as more consumers and businesses use smartphones. McAfee says that this increase in usage, combined with “historically fragile cellular infrastructure and slow strides toward encryption,” will put user data on mobile phones at high risk for an attack. Apple is another target that McAfee named for its list. The Mac OS platform has been known for warding off cyber criminals but the McAfee Labs warns that Mac-targeted malware will continue to increase in sophistication in 2011. And as iPads and iPhones populate businesses, there is the risk for data and identity exposure. Web-connected TV platforms such as Google TV, will also be a target for suspicious and malicious apps says McAfee. The company says that these apps will target or expose privacy and identity data, and will allow cybercriminals to manipulate a variety of physical devices through compromised or controlled apps. With the dawn of controversial site Wikileaks, McAfee says that next year will also bring more politically motivated attacks to the web. McAfee Labs says that “hacktivism” will become the a new form of political demonstration.        
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| Zumigo Raises $420,000 To Help Jumpstart More Location-Based Applications Posted: 28 Dec 2010 04:46 AM PST
There’s no doubt in my mind that 2011 will be a big year for location and context-aware applications, and thus also for the companies that enable developers and publishers to build or enhance software that takes advantages of information on users’ whereabouts, such as SimpleGeo and Twitter (which acquired GeoAPI maker Mixer Labs about a year ago). Enter Zumigo, a company that offers a suite of fully hosted applications and services that feature advanced mobile messaging and location-based services. The startup hasn’t made any noise to date, but an SEC filing reveals that they’ve just raised $420,000 in funding. Furthermore, the company’s chief executive is Chirag Bakshi, former Vice President, Wireless Messaging at VeriSign and a director at Apple in the early nineties. He’s not the only former VeriSigner on board – the company’s former Director of Product Management Bill Loller is also involved with Zumigo as the startup’s VP of Marketing & Product Management. We’ve added Zumigo to CrunchBase and will keep tracking the startup closely.        
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| Dashwire Raises Another $1 Million For Mobile Services Platform Posted: 28 Dec 2010 03:27 AM PST
Dashwire, which offers a mobile services platform for carriers, handset manufacturers and retailers, has raised $1 million in debt financing, according to this SEC filing. Dashwire’s Dashworks platform (PDF) is a “mobile-plus-web app” solution that helps people setup their phones, migrate from one device to another, backup everything on the phone, keep it in sync online and share photos and videos with others through social networking services. The platform is available for Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and BlackBerry. Dashwire is privately held and based in Seattle. According to its about page, the company is backed by investors who “built the wireless and technology industries” at McCaw Cellular, Western Wireless, Voicestream, Nextel, China Unicom, and Microsoft; and by Best Buy Capital. Founder and CEO of Dashwire is Ford Davidson, a former Product Manager in the Mobile Devices group at Microsoft.
       
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| Zynga’s CityVille Now More Than 25 Percent Bigger Than FarmVille Posted: 28 Dec 2010 03:00 AM PST
We knew Zynga’s Facebook game CityVille was a hit if the company ever had one (and it’s had several already) but the growth that it is displaying is simply mind-blowing. We’ll kick off by pointing out that the game was released on December 2, 2010, which is less than a month ago. The company subsequently reported that in the game's first 24 hours on Facebook, over 290,000 people had already played CityVille. A few days later: 3 million daily active users. And while you turned your eyes away from the screen for a few minutes: bang, 6 million active users. Last week, the Sim City-esque game logged about 61.7 million monthly active users, effectively eclipsing its other hit game, FarmVille. Today, CityVille is at close to 72.5 million monthly active users, which means that it has already outgrown FarmVille (which boasts roughly 57,4 million monthly active users) by more than 25 percent. CityVille isn’t just the biggest game on Facebook, it’s now the biggest game on Facebook with one hell of a margin. For the record: we got the number straight from the application pages, as AppData’s stats on monthly active users appear to be a tad outdated at the time of writing. And just for the heck of it, here are the current usage stats for the other “Ville” games: FrontierVille: 30,468,070 monthly active users No wonder Google investor John Doerr famously said Zynga is probably his VC firm’s best investment to date. Its growth is simply astounding.        
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| Flicksquare Sends Your Foursquare Check-In Photos To Flickr Posted: 27 Dec 2010 07:16 PM PST
While Foursquare gave lip service to working on the Flickr and Facebook export capability a couple of weeks ago, Wong has beat it to the punch. Along with being able to automatically publish photos to Flickr, Flicksquare also includes data like the name of venue checked-in to as well as a link to your Foursquare check-in on Flickr’s photo info. Wong even included Foursquare’s machine tags when About Foursquare made the request. You can keep tabs on the photos being sent through the Flicksquare site and turn the service off if you plain old get tired of it. Wong says he’s taken aback by how much positive response the service has engendered since its launch, “Im surprised its being so well received; I spent an afternoon throwing this together since I’m in NY and I was snowed in on Sunday.” Thanks to Wong and Foursquare, you can now check into the Snowocalypse 2010 venue with a photo and simultaneously send that photo to Flickr. Hurrah.        
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| Footage Of Android’s Revamped Music Player Leaks Posted: 27 Dec 2010 06:55 PM PST
Earlier this week, some folks over on the XDA developers forum got their hands on a leaked test build of a revamped Android music player that could possibly be shipping with Android’s next OS upgrade, Honeycomb. This evening the footage was spotted by Engadget, and now the word is spreading like wildfire: Android is going to get a default music player that isn’t totally mediocre. Alright, maybe I’m being a little harsh — the music player that ships with the stock build of Android can play music just fine. But it’s also underwhelming, especially when compared to the iPhone’s much slicker music application. It’s drab and there’s nothing like Apple’s Cover Flow — but all that’s changing. As you can see in the video above, the new music app includes a lot more color, flourishes like volume meters next to the currently playing song, and a more visual album view that looks similar to Android’s image viewer. It looks like a solid improvement, but there’s still one feature that isn’t shown: the music store that Google previewed at its I/O conference in May. Google hasn’t said anything about this since, and there are rumors that its efforts to launch a music service have been delayed. Update: A comment on the XDA forum (and one of our comments below) indicate that the app does in fact reference streaming functionality, but it isn’t functional. On the plus side, if you don’t feel like waiting for this new Android music app to ship, there are plenty of other options including PowerAMP and DoubleTwist, which also offers        
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| Firefox On The iPhone? No (Though It Is Being Worked On). Another Mozilla Browser? Maybe. Posted: 27 Dec 2010 05:41 PM PST
First, he gave the obvious and fairly well-known official answer, “We have no plans to release the full Firefox browser for Apple iOS devices,” Brubeck wrote. Why? Because the current iOS SDK agreement forbids apps like Firefox from including their own compilers and interpreters, Brubeck explains. But he continues on to note that there are a couple of ways to work within Apple’s system, notably what Skyfire is doing (using Apple’s own build-in WebKit libraries) or what Opera Mini is doing (using a proxy server to execute their JavaScript). “Mozilla could create a browser that did one of those things, but it wouldn’t be related to Firefox in any way,” Brubeck explains. Mozilla does currently have a Firefox iPhone app, Home, but it does not include a browser for the reasons listed above. Instead, it lets you sync bookmarks and open tabs between your iPhone and the home computer. But Mozilla is also in charge of other browsers, notably Camino, which has long been a Safari and Firefox alternative on Mac machines. Might Mozilla consider releasing it as an iPhone app? If they did, it would have to be altered from its current state as it’s not WebKit-based (it, like Firefox, is Gecko-based). Or could Mozilla come up with an entirely new WebKit-friendly browser for the iPhone? It’s certainly possible, though it would still have to use the specific WebKit framework that Apple has built-in to iOS. Or, there’s always the jailbreak route. As Brubeck notes, some people have been doing work to port Firefox to iOS. Interestingly enough, his wording seems to imply that it actually might be Mozilla employees working on this. But as he continues, “unless Apple removes these restrictions, Mozilla will not spend time and money on this project.” So if they are working on it, they’re doing so off-reservation. “The development would likely violate the SDK agreement, and it would not be distributable to non-jailbreak iOS users,” Brubeck conclues.        
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| Search Etsy Listings By Color With Glancely Posted: 27 Dec 2010 04:59 PM PST
Let’s say you want to find that perfect quirky little black dress for New Year’s Eve? Like a mashup of Etsy, Flickr color search and Google Instant, Glancely lets you search Etsy visually, sorting instant results by color and by price so you can scan through multiple green knit caps or purple socks or whatever handmade items your heart desires. Hold your mouse over an item to get a closer look and click on an item to go straight to its Etsy profile. The most interesting thing about Glancely is that creator Davin Bentti plans to expand beyond Etsy, his ultimate goal being thousands of retailers and millions of products and searching. He is currently adding more upscale retailers like MacMall, Kidorable, GelaSkins, Scarpasa and Diamond.com and has BestBuy, FinishLine, Linea Pelle and PrincetonWatches in the queue, considering “pretty much anyone who has images big enough to use.” While TheFind and Milo also offer visual shopping search, the results are sometimes underwhelming from a visual standpoint. Says Bentti, “The concept of visual search results isn’t really being exploited the way I think it potentially could be and the technology is either there now, or will be soon.” Glancely is currently looking for seed funding. Aside from further expansion and product scaling, Bentti plans on eventually having a Glancely mobile app, visual input for search and potentially localized results.        
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| How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot!,” Says Steve Case Posted: 27 Dec 2010 03:14 PM PST
If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL? “A lot,” says CEO at the time, Steve Case. Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990′s? Case says that he doesn’t remember the total amount spent on the discs specifically, but says that in the early 1990s, AOL’s goal was to spend 10 percent of lifetime revenue to get a new subscriber. He says that since the average subscriber life was around 25 months, revenue was about $350 off of each of these users. So he guesses they probably spent about $35 per user on things such as these discs. “As we were able to lower the cost of disks/trial/etc we were able to ramp up marketing. (Plus, we knew Microsoft was coming and it was never going to be easier or cheaper to get market share.) When we went public in 1992 we had less than 200,000 subscribers; a decade later the number was in the 25 million range,” Case recalls. In other words, the discs worked. Case also notes that the subscriber growth helped grow AOL from a market cap of $70 million at the time of their IPO to $150 billion when the marger with Time Warner occurred. I repeat, the discs worked. Well, at least until that merger turned into a nightmare and had to be dissolved. A move which paved the way for the new-look AOL to purchase TechCrunch this year. Another user on Quora looked over some numbers from the 90s and gave a more specific number for how much AOL spent on those discs: $300 million. Update: Jan Brandt, AOL’s former Chief Marketing Officer has now weighed in as well:
As a side note, it’s great to see people like Case — who is usually pretty candid — answering questions directly on Quora. Humorously, it was SGN founder Shervin Pishevar who actually asked the AOL question in the first place. How do we know? Because he emailed us about it, overjoyed that Case himself responded. He also sent us the following love note for Quora completely unsolicited:
We love Quora too. It leads to information like this.        
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| StyleHop’s Hunt For Hot Fashion Comes To An End As It Heads To The DeadPool Posted: 27 Dec 2010 01:57 PM PST
Some of the company’s struggles stem from the financial meltdown of 2008 — founder David Reinke explains that after raising some seed money, StyleHop was planning to close a Series A in October 2008, which happened to be right when Sequoia’s RIP: Good Times was making the rounds. The funding round never happened, and the company quickly had to shift gears from its consumer-facing fashion games to something more directly related to generating revenue. This second model was to help retailers with their merchandise selection by assembling a consumer panel of women who had proven that they could pick winning items. To create this panel StyleHop asked prospective panelists to rate items that had already been released, and compared their predictions to historical data to see who had the keenest eye. StyleHop signed up two big-box retailers as pilot customers, who used the service to pick out which fashion items to feature in their stores the following season. And it apparently worked: Reinke says that StyleHop panelist predictions were seven times more accurate that the predictions of in-house ‘product pickers’ when comparing how each item sold versus how much inventory had been ordered. Unfortunately, despite these encouraging results, the service couldn’t land any larger-scale rollouts. Reinke attributes this in part to the company’s lack of funding, and also to the fact that many retailers weren’t ready to experiment with new merchandising techniques during the economic downturn. He also believes that StyleHop may have taken the wrong approach when dealing with these retailers — it was mostly negotiating with middle- to senior-level managers, some of whom could have their jobs potentially threatened if the system worked. Instead, Reinke thinks StyleHop should have tried to work more directly with CEOs and company boards. The failure of StyleHop is interesting in part because there are currently an increasing number of services looking to reinvent the way fashion is selected and presented to consumers. ModCloth has done extremely well turning this model on its head (see my interview with the founders right here), and Moxsie is also looking to help crowdsource merchandise selection. However, both of these are targeting the indie fashion market — StyleHop was hoping to reinvent merchandising for mass-market stores. StyleHop has been added to the TechCrunch Deadpool.        
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| Moot On 4Chan User Survey: “It’s Total Garbage.” Posted: 27 Dec 2010 12:51 PM PST
Over the weekend, a interesting demographic survey of over 6000 4Chan users made the rounds of 4Chan, Reddit and Hacker News. While if anyone is going to skew a survey it’s 4Chan users, the Google document with the responses given a lot of Internet ink, lauded for being “bracingly honest.“ I emailed 4Chan founder moot a.k.a Christopher Poole to get his take on what one commenter called “One of the best representations of the youth in the 21st century.” “It’s total garbage,” Poole responded. When asked if this was yet another example of media trolling (remember TIME’s “Person Of The Year 2009″?), Poole clarified “It’s ‘real’ in the sense that a random user conducted it and I imagine he collected responses on 4chan. But the questions, answers, sample, method used, etc aren’t exactly scientific. It should be taken with a massive grain of salt.” 4Chan user genkouhande, who set up the ongoing poll as a project on December 24th, tells TechCrunch that while all surveys do have error, he’s confident with the results, having included test responses like “Age: Over 59,” “Started masturbating: Over 18,” and “Time spent on 4Chan: 24+” to help trap the trolls. “As more people answered the survey the results seemed to be less chaotic and have now been pretty typical,” he said. Poole tells us that 4Chan itself does not collect any sort of demographic data and that there are no plans to conduct any sort of official OKCupid-type survey, “Kind of defeats the point of an anonymous message board, doesn’t it?” Heh. You can view the full results or take the survey yourself here.        
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| Many iPhone App Downloads Jumped 2-3X On Christmas Posted: 27 Dec 2010 11:03 AM PST
Since yesterday, developers have been tweeting and messaging about huge spikes in downloads of their apps on Christmas. How huge? Just look at the chart in this post. We’re talking two to three times normal numbers. That particular graph came thanks to data from MixPanel, a Y Combinator startup that specializes in iOS analytics. We’ve since confirmed with the company that on the apps they track, they’re seeing the same “2-3x in app download/sales across the board.” This data point coincides with others, such as Tap Tap Revenge 4, a game for the iPhone/iPod touch, which is seeing download traffic 2x what it was last Christmas, according to Business Insider. Meanwhile, the site All Facebook looked at the data for Facebook’s iPhone app and also found a massive surge on Christmas. In fact, the app added some 1.6 million users in just the three days around Christmas. By comparison, Facebook for Android added some 900,000 users in the same span. So what does all of this mean? Clearly that a lot of people got new iOS devices for the holidays and went on massive downloading binges. Apple will officially announce their holiday earnings on January 18. Expect a “boom” or two.        
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| EnergySavvy Raises $1.1 Million To Match Up Green Contractors, Rebates And Homeowners Posted: 27 Dec 2010 11:02 AM PST
NorthWest Energy Angels led the round, joined by several investors in the Pacific Northwest, including Geoff Entress, Andy Liu, and aQuantive alumni Mike Galgon and Karl Siebrecht (the latter two are on EnergySavvy’s board). The company’s consumer-facing website EnergySavvy.com asks users about their homes, and generates suggestions as to which type of improvements will help them save the most energy. It also guides them to rebates and other incentives for green homes, which are typically provided through government programs and power companies. Finally, the site links potential customers with qualified contractors in the area who would be able to implement recommended home improvements. Contractors certified as residential energy efficiency experts pay to be listed, and pay for lead generation through the site. Goldfeder would not comment on the average number of customer leads a contractor can expect for his or her money, but said listings would cost $50 for initiation, then between $10 and $60 per referral, depending on the nature of the project. EnergySavvy is web-only thus far. The company has developed proprietary databases and detailed maps of programs, contractors and utility rates, which it crosses with location data from end users’ IP addresses or routers to generate focused, local results without the aid of GPS technology. EnergySavvy recently struck a marketing agreement with The Building Performance Institute, which bills itself as “a national standards development and credentialing organization for residential energy efficiency retrofit work.” That group’s silver- and gold-level certified contractors can initiate a complimentary listing on EnergySavvy.com. Government and utility programs can also buy and adapt EnergySavvy’s audit tool for their own websites, using it to encourage residents and customers to take advantage of their programs (see: screenshot below). Competition for EnergySavvy could come from a range of other environmental and home improvement sites.
EcoRebates.com and FreeCleanSolar.com both offer audit tools, and serve contractors or retailers who want to sell more “green” products and services. Angie’s List offers listings and reviews of “eco friendly” contractors. The non-commercial site DSIREUSA lists state, local, utility and federal incentives and policies to promote renewable energy and energy efficiency. In March, President Obama endorsed the Home Star Energy Retrofit Act, “a program of incentives for homeowners who make energy efficiency investments in their homes,” referred to casually as Homestar, or “cash for caulkers.” The House passed a version of the bill, which is currently scheduled for Senate review and is part of the Clean Energy Jobs And Oil Accountability Act of 2010. While it is not likely to pass, Goldfeder believes, the two-year program to create energy efficient homes could prove a boon to his company and its ilk. Jeff Genzer of the National Association of State Energy Officials explained in an NPR report earlier this year: the $6 billion of incentives for things like caulking and insulation would create 160,000 new jobs in the building sector, while helping reduce residential energy consumption in the U.S. which represents 40 percent of the nation’s overall energy consumption. Goldfeder said his company plans to use its new found capital to hire up to 10 more employees in 2011, to enter new markets — with or without a lift from Homestar — and to create calendaring tools that make it easier for contractors and homeowners to connect. EnergySavvy, he noted, is “a stone’s throw from profitability.”        
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Phone management system 
It looks like Sears wants to get in the online movie market. The retail company, which also owns Kmart, has just 
Inspired by a tweet from 
Continuing today’s theme of scouring 
Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I’m not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You’ve got mail, indeed.
Over two years ago I wrote about a startup called 
It’s beginning to look like Apple may have had a very, very merry Christmas. Not that it should surprise anyone given how many of their products were on year-end “best-of” lists. But some data that has started to come in over the past few days points to Apple’s Christmas surge once again being led by the mainstays: the iPhone and iPod touch (and probably the iPad as well).
Seattle startup, EnergySavvy, closed a $1.1 million series-a investment according to the company’s founder and chief executive Aaron Goldfeder. EnergySavvy’s site and service motivates homeowners to reduce their power consumption through retrofit-variety improvements. 
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