The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Social Gaming To Be A $1B Market In 2011; Virtual Goods To Bring In $653M
- Google Serves Places On The iPhone With A Side Of Hotpot
- OwnEdition: Customizable Watches For You And Yours
- BuyWithMe, The Other Groupon Rival, Appoints New CEO
- Greylock Expands Enterprise Team With Former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman
- Covertix Raises $1 Million, Helps Companies Secure Sensitive Data
- FeeFighters Raises $1.6 Million To Be The BillShrink For Business Services
- Venture Funds Raised 14 Percent Less In 2010
- Instagram Blocks Followgram, But API Should Be Released ‘In Next Week Or So’
- CrunchGear Reviews The HP eStation All-In-One Printer With An Android Tablet
- Personal Hotspots Coming To All iPhones In March
- Online Fashion Community Fashiolista Raises $500,000 From Atomico
- Microsoft Claiming Term “App Store” As Generic
- NetApp Acquires Virtualization Software Company Akorri Networks
- The Daily Show Takes On The Verizon iPhone Announcement (With A Special Dose Of MG!)
- Hold The Phone – Adknowledge Raises $200 Million, Plans Acquisitions
- Microsoft Evangelist Brilliantly Slams Google’s Decision To Drop H.264 Support
- More on that Void Between Super Angels and VCs (TCTV)
- Why Bullpen Capital Thinks We Need Another Venture Fund (TCTV)
- Formspring Closes $11.5 Million Round, Launches ‘Respond’ Button
- Silicon Valley Migrates! Accel Partners Opens Up A New York Office
- Is Naming Your Startup “Hipster” Genius Or Terrible?
- OMG/JK: The Verizon iPhone And The End Of An Era
- GameCrush’s Crush-O-Matic Blends Chatroulette With Online Gaming
- M9 Defense Raises $1.4 Million For Advanced Hydroforming Technology
| Social Gaming To Be A $1B Market In 2011; Virtual Goods To Bring In $653M Posted: 12 Jan 2011 09:01 AM PST
eMarketer says that nearly 62 million US internet users, or 27% of the online audience, will play at least one game on a social network monthly this year, up from 53 million in 2010. In the U.S., consumers will spend $653 million on virtual goods in social games in 2011, compared to $510 million spent in 2010. These revenues from virtual goods will continue to make up the majority of social gaming revenues in the past but other areas in the business are anticipated to grow. Ad spending is expected to grow to $192 million in 2011 to advertise on social games, which is a 60% increase over 2010. And Lead-gen offers will increase to $248 million in 2011 from $225 in 2010. Ad revenue is actually expected to surpass lead-generation offers as a source of developer revenues in 2012, says eMarketer. eMarketer’s Paul Verna, author of the reports, says that the future will bring “more branded virtual goods as social gaming matures over the next two years,” with virtual good becoming more of an advertising vehicle for companies.
       
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| Google Serves Places On The iPhone With A Side Of Hotpot Posted: 12 Jan 2011 08:38 AM PST
Google Places is now on your iPhone. If you download the app (iTunes link) you get a mobile version of Google Places, Google’s local directory. It shows you nearby restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATMs, gas stations, hotels, and other attractions. You can also search for any category you like, just like on Google Places proper or on Google Maps for Android. Google is also serving up the app with Hotpot, its new local recommendation service. When you sign in with a Google identity (like a Gmail username and password), you can rate and review places. The Google Places app only lets you add your reviews and ratings to Hotpot. It doesn’t give you a Hotpot view of places, or allow you to sort places by your friends ratings as you can on the Hotpot Website. Instead, it uses Hotpot in the background to serve up listings and shows you when a place was rated by a friend. Until more people use Hotpot, this is probably a better way to ease people into Hotpot. When you click on a place in the app, it shows you the address, cumulative rating, with buttons to see it on a map, get directions, or make a call. A “more info” button launches your browser and takes you to the mobile Places page for the place you are looking at. Once you do that, however, there is no way to get back to the app without launching it from scratch. Perhaps the most important feature for Google is getting people to write more native reviews using the app. The app shows excerpts of reviews from around the web like on Yelp or Insiderpages, and below that are the native Google reviews. Currently, Google Places does not have a lot of great quality reviews written by Google users themselves. Therefore, Google built the product on the backs of reviews from other sites on the Web. But Google wants to build up its own corpus of reviews, and with apps like this it is going straight to consumers to get them to rate and review places around where they live, work, and travel. Google is pushing Google Places on its main search page, and now it is attacking from the mobile flank. The more native ratings and reviews Google Places can gather, the more it becomes a direct competitor to the Yelps and Citysearches of the world it currently indexes to fill in the details on its Place pages. Note that Yelp and Citysearch have competing iPhone apps as well. Which one are you going to use?        
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| OwnEdition: Customizable Watches For You And Yours Posted: 12 Jan 2011 08:32 AM PST
In the land of customizable merchandise, the bar is set pretty low. You can get a hankie customized or one of those squeeze balls but what about a $3,000 watch? OwnEdition, as ham-handed as their website is, offers customized watches in multiple styles and all of them include automatic Valjoux chronograph movements. Customization has its limits, however. Using the fairly robust Flash front-end, you select your watch, add a custom engraving (I selected “CORN NINJA” for obvious reasons) and place your order. The watches come in steel and gold finishes and the chronographs, at least are quite handsome. What the site could have done without are the handsome gentlemen offering each other a handsome watch while standing around awkwardly in suits. A worse example of clip-art selection I have not seen.        
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| BuyWithMe, The Other Groupon Rival, Appoints New CEO Posted: 12 Jan 2011 08:21 AM PST
BuyWithMe, the group buying site that competes with Groupon and LivingSocial in the United States, has appointed a new CEO after the former (Cheryl Rosner) abruptly left the company last December after only 8 months on the job. The new chief exec of the social commerce startup is Jim Crowley, the former President and CEO of Turbine, the developer of massively multiplayer online games that was acquired by Warner Bros. Entertainment back in April 2010. Prior to Turbine, Crowley also served as the Chief Operating Officer of m-Qube and Network Plus. BuyWithMe has raised $21.5 million in venture capital to date. Recent scuttlebutt said that Google was eying the company after its attempt to acquire rival Groupon fell through, although we haven’t been able to confirm those rumors. More likely, BuyWithMe will be raising more funding this year to scale operations.        
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| Greylock Expands Enterprise Team With Former Data Domain CEO Frank Slootman Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:59 AM PST
At EMC, Slootman served as president of EMC's Backup Recovery Systems Division, and prior to his role at Data Domain, Slootman served as a products executive at Borland Software and Compuware Corporation. Based on his experience in the enterprise market, Slootman invest in data center infrastructure start-ups, particularly in the virtualization, networking, storage, cloud and enterprise application sectors. He joins existing Greylock partners in the enterprise group, Aneel Bhusri, co-CEO and co-founder of Workday and former SVP at Peoplesoft; and Asheem Chandna, former VP of product and business development at Checkpoint. Slootman says that he’s particularly bullish on investments that relate to “everything that populates a data center,” including storage, networking and virtualization startups. Recent enterprise investments for Greylock include Cloudera, Zend Technologies, and Actifio.        
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| Covertix Raises $1 Million, Helps Companies Secure Sensitive Data Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:55 AM PST  Covertix, an Israeli startup that provides enterprise-grade solutions for protecting and monitoring sensitive corporate data, has raised $1 million in early-stage funding. The round was led by Kima Ventures, the investment firm founded by well-known European entrepreneurs Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel. Covertix says the capital will be used to try and gain market share across the European market, expand sales and marketing activities and product development.
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| FeeFighters Raises $1.6 Million To Be The BillShrink For Business Services Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:54 AM PST
FeeFighters is a comparison shopping site for credit card processors. The startup aims to help merchants save money on credit card fees and also conducts reverse auctions to solicit competing bids from credit card processing companies. Since the company’s launch in 2009, FeeFighters has saved customers $30,000,000 in processing fees, with a typical user saving 40% in fees. The company also plans to expand its current payments business product to other business financial services (including payroll procssing, and employee health insurance plans), with the aim of being the BillShrink for Business services.        
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| Venture Funds Raised 14 Percent Less In 2010 Posted: 12 Jan 2011 07:41 AM PST
As we all know, the U.S. venture capital industry is contracting. New data out this morning from Dow Jones LP Source confirms the trend. In 2010, U.S. venture capital funds raised $11.6 billion, down 14 percent from 2009 (and down 70 percent from the $40 billion raised in 2007). The amount marks a seven-year low for the venture capital industry, as limited partners look elsewhere for outsized returns. Things weren’t looking any better in the fourth quarter, when fundraising was down 48 percent to $2.4 billion among 15 venture funds. Early-stage and seed funds are the new hotness, however, as venture firms try to identify winning startups at inception. Of the 15 funds, ten were early-stage, raising $1.5 billion in the fourth quarter. Among venture funds, the strongest were still able to raise more capita last year. Institutional Venture Partners raised an oversubscribed $700 million fund, August Capital raised $650 million, Union Square Ventures is in the midst of raising a new $200 million fund. Overall, fundraising for private equity funds (of which venture capital is a subset) was down 16 percent for the year to $86.3 billion, but saw a 19 percent jump in the fourth quarter due to strength among buyout, distressed debt, and mezzanine funds. You can see the breakdown in the chart below.
       
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| Instagram Blocks Followgram, But API Should Be Released ‘In Next Week Or So’ Posted: 12 Jan 2011 06:41 AM PST
So why did Instagram shut down Followgram? Instagram doesn’t have an API (yet, that is—the startup is supposed to release an API soon), so Followgram was scrubbing Instagram for user data and content without permission. Followgram’s site now reads, “Sorry folks, looks like we have to say goodbye for now. We’ll be back as soon as Instagram releases a public API. In the meantime keep snapping those Instagram photos.” We wrote about Instagram.tk last weekend, which displays photos uploaded to Twitter using Instagram in real time. Every time you refresh the page (or click on Shuffle) a new image published by an Instagram user appears. Instagram.tk is pulling these pictures from Twitter search (when users Tweet out their Instagram pictures) as opposed to Instagram. While it doesn’t appear that Instagram has shut down this startup yet, a disclaimer was added recently on the top of the site, This site is not owned, affiliated, or officially supported by Instagram (Burbn, Inc.). But it could only be a matter of time before Instagram.tk is shut down as well. Of course, no controversy in the tech world is complete without a requisite Quora thread, and the Followgram site points to this one if visitors want to comment on the shut-down of the startup by Instagram. Followgram developer Herman Schutte writes, Yes, the website was in violation of their terms of service and I probably shouldn't have used their API. But I also think that with the current start up boom, companies like Instagram should not wait this long before releasing a public API. As to whether Instagram is right or wrong for blocking Followgram, commenters seem to be mixed. The gist of the commentary seems to sum up to this: While Followgram’s scraping was illegal, Instagram needs to release an API soon to keep up with consumer demand for related services. Especially since there are some elements lacking from Instagram’s platform (i.e. a web interface), there is an ecosystem that could be built off the enormously popular photo sharing app. On thing is for sure—when Instagram does eventually release an API, Followgram will be first in line. UPDATE: Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom has responded on Quora, writing “We’d like to 100% support developers building on top of Instagram. We’re working our hardest at coming out with a simple API that people can start using freely to create cool projects just like Followgram. I’m excited for the release of our API, and even more excited to see the cool stuff folks will build on top of it.” He adds that Instagram’s API will be released imminently, most “likely in the next week or so.” Thanks Chris Voss.        
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| CrunchGear Reviews The HP eStation All-In-One Printer With An Android Tablet Posted: 12 Jan 2011 06:15 AM PST
       
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| Personal Hotspots Coming To All iPhones In March Posted: 12 Jan 2011 06:06 AM PST
       
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| Online Fashion Community Fashiolista Raises $500,000 From Atomico Posted: 12 Jan 2011 06:05 AM PST  Online fashion site Fashiolista.com, which was launched in The Netherlands last year at The Next Web conference, has secured over $500,000 in seed funding from Atomico Ventures. Basically, Fashiolista relies on its members to create a catalog of fashion items online. Via a bookmarklet or browser extension, users can 'like' fashion items wherever they find them on the web, thus building a personal profile they can share with others.
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| Microsoft Claiming Term “App Store” As Generic Posted: 12 Jan 2011 05:59 AM PST
From the filing:
       
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| NetApp Acquires Virtualization Software Company Akorri Networks Posted: 12 Jan 2011 05:27 AM PST  NetApp this morning announced that it is to acquire Akorri Networks, which enables IT organizations to manage their infrastructure as a service. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed, apart from the fact that it concerns an all-cash transaction. 
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| The Daily Show Takes On The Verizon iPhone Announcement (With A Special Dose Of MG!) Posted: 12 Jan 2011 05:27 AM PST
“Those us in the iPhone community have sacrificed one thing for the ability to carry around every photo we’ve ever taken — or video we’ve taken — or song listened to — or have a compass. We have sacrificed the ability to make phone calls.” It’s good, and a 1000 bonus points for spotting MG Siegler in the segment. Really, he’s in there for a fleeting second.        
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| Hold The Phone – Adknowledge Raises $200 Million, Plans Acquisitions Posted: 12 Jan 2011 05:14 AM PST
I’m still waiting for someone at Adknowledge to get back to my requests for information, but this morning they publicly announced that they’ve scored $200 million in funding to pursue acquisitions in the online advertising space. As I suspected, growth equity firm JMI Equity led the equity investment round, while Bank of America took care of the debt financing part of the equation. We’ve also learned Nokia's Growth Fund participated in the investment round. In a statement, Adknowledge says it plans to use the funding to further expand its network so advertisers can access inventory from valuable segments of the long tail marketplace online, such as mobile, video, content sites, and display. The company also boasts that it closed 2010 as the largest privately-owned internet advertising network in the U.S. with over 330 employees, and $300 million in revenue. JMI Equity General Partner Brad Woloson has joined Adknowledge’s board of directors.        
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| Microsoft Evangelist Brilliantly Slams Google’s Decision To Drop H.264 Support Posted: 12 Jan 2011 05:08 AM PST
A lot has been written about Google’s decision to no longer support H.264 HTML5 video playback in Chrome, and we haven’t seen the end of opinions about it (here’s MG’s take). Make sure you read this one from Tim Sneath, director of the Windows and Silverlight technical evangelism team, though. In a blog post entitled ‘An Open Letter from the President of the United States of Google’, the Microsoft evangelist humorously paraphrases Google’s blog post on the decision to discard H.264 support, replacing references to video codecs with languages. Guess which one is Esperanto?
What one calls a hilarious must-read, no matter which side of the fence you’re on. (Via @ScepticGeek)        
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| More on that Void Between Super Angels and VCs (TCTV) Posted: 11 Jan 2011 10:53 PM PST
In this segment of our interview with the Bullpen Capital partners, Paul Martino, Duncan Davidson, and Richard Melmon, talk about the sectors in which they’re the most interested. Video below.        
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| Why Bullpen Capital Thinks We Need Another Venture Fund (TCTV) Posted: 11 Jan 2011 09:13 PM PST
Enter Bullpen Capital: A new firm that the super angel elite are welcoming with open arms. Why? It aims fill the hole in the market between angels and VCs. Of course, some people believe there is no hole. Indeed some VCs are creating seed-programs to compete with angels even more directly. But Bullpen’s founders Paul Martino, Duncan Davidson and Richard Melmon argue too many startups are having to do what we wrote about Klout doing yesterday. If they want to raise more capital they have to pick between aiming for a quick flip or aiming for a homerun, with few options in between. Bullpen’s founders argue a lot of startups just aren’t ready after one $1 million-or-so round. Maybe they’ve run through their $1 million seed round only to find they need to pivot (swear jar) or maybe it’ll just take another $1 million to know what they’ve really got. Right now, few firms want to fill that follow-on seed round role. That’s why Martino, Davidson and Melmon call themselves “Bullpen” Capital– in a Valley where everyone is trying to be a starter or a closer, these guys see a big opportunity in pitching relief. The initial fund will be $50 million, to be closed in two stages. The first stage is closed now, and each of the three partners put in their own money. We trucked down to Bullpen’s offices on Sand Hill Road to hear more about the new firm. In future segments, we talk to partners about sectors they’ll invest in, and how the Valley’s culture hasn’t changed as much as you’d think over the last thirty or so years. Video below.        
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| Formspring Closes $11.5 Million Round, Launches ‘Respond’ Button Posted: 11 Jan 2011 09:01 PM PST
Today, the company is announcing a $11.5 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures (Geoff Yang) with participation from Baseline Ventures (Steve Anderson). This confirms a report from November when GigaOm reported that the site had raised $10 million (obviously they added a bit more to the round since then). In addition to today’s funding, Formspring is also announcing a new feature: the ‘Respond Button’.
One thing I don’t really like: there’s apparently no way to see all of the responses that other users have submitted using the Respond button (i.e. you can’t see everyone’s reaction to a given article). I’m also not sure why users wouldn’t rather leave their comment on the article and also syndicate that to their Formspring profile, as opposed to putting it on their Formspring profile alone. Formspring’s traffic has dipped since last spring, but it seems to have stabilized at around 22 million uniques per month, which still puts it as the 157th biggest site in the US according to Quantcast. The site is also about to hit a big milestone: users have submitted 2 billion responses (and the site sees 10 million per day).
       
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| Silicon Valley Migrates! Accel Partners Opens Up A New York Office Posted: 11 Jan 2011 08:59 PM PST
East Coast vs. West Coast has been a universal theme ever since Biggie and Tupac and now it’s extending itself to the world of startups and venture capital. Accel Partners is justifying the move by saying that it’s made over 15 investments in the New York Area in the past three years and that it does not plan on stopping its aggressive NYC investment pace. Indeed, its (offical) New York investment roster includes: · Quidsi – Diapers.com – parent company for www.diapers.com and www.soap.com · Etsy – DIY craft marketplace · Squarespace – Website and blog publishing platform · Learnvest – The leading independent personal finance website for women · Glam – Online interactive consumer magazine · Global Grind – Hip-hop social media site · Bauble Bar – Curated jewelry site · Birchbox - Beauty product samples · Loosecubes – Rent a desk service · Salescrunch – Sales platform · Bonobos – Men’s clothing company · Collective – Ad platform · VenMo – Mobile payments startup · Exclusively.In – Gilt for Indian decorations New York does seem to be part of some zeitgeist and the latest expansion also comes at an amazing time for Accel, as portfolio company Diapers.com has just exited for about $540 Million. Partner Theresia Ranzetta explains the motivations behing the move, “We had a critical mass of companies exhibiting early stage growth and saw an increasing number of interesting opportunities, we thought now would be a good time for Accel to have an outpost in New York.” While none are permanent, Accel plans on rotating the partners heading up the New York office on a per initiative basis, this week it will be partner Jim Breyer (who owns an apartment in downtown NY) and Ranzetta, the next week it will be Sameer Gandhi, with the basic idea that sector experts will fly in from Palo Alto as needed. Perhaps the most exciting part of the move for aspiring entreprenuers? Accel plans on holding startup networking events as well as bringing in EIRs from Silicon Valley and beyond. Interested parties can email nyc@accel.com to get on the mailing list. Partner Richard Wong attributes the move instigating critical mass to the ease of setting up a startup, “Prior to Amazon Web Services it was difficult to get distribution. Now you’ve got companies popping up in places you’ve never had before.” And Wong is acutely aware of the first mover principle, “Being the first Silicon Valley VC to establish an office in New York is going to be a key part of being successful in the next 3-5 years.” Exactly. Image: Mark Heard        
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| Is Naming Your Startup “Hipster” Genius Or Terrible? Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:54 PM PST
The company is in “stealth” mode and asking people not to say what they do publicly. But they’re pimping themselves hard on Hacker News, offering “earlier access” if you invite 3 friends. Of course. Already the YCombinator thread has some hard-hitting questions, “Isn’t the key to being a hipster never using anything marketed at hipsters?” Well not exactly. Just look at hipster emporium Urban Outfitters, you can never mock their weird products because you can’t tell if it’s all a big ironic joke or not. To wit. THEY HAVE TO KNOW, RIGHT? So is naming your startup “Hipster” genius or terrible? Well, it’s a precarious dance, if there’s a dash of irony then genius, but if it’s in the long run viewed as an attempt to be cool (a.l.a late 2000s MySpace) than you have failed. Says founder Doug Ludlow on the choice of name:
So an extremely unfortunate name may be an ultimate win. Aol’s Ben Roodman owns the domain Unicornfarts.com if anyone out there is looking for worse. Thanks: Broodman        
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| OMG/JK: The Verizon iPhone And The End Of An Era Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:32 PM PST We’re approaching an end of an era. A time when MG Siegler, my cohost on OMG/JK, will no longer be forced to struggle with AT&T on a daily basis. Soon, he will be equipped with a phone that will actually be able to make phone calls. And Seth the Blogger Guy will be able to breathe a little easier. Because soon, MG — and millions of other people — will have the Verizon iPhone. In case you missed this morning’s press blitz, today Verizon and Apple teamed to announce the impending launch of the iPhone on the US’s largest wireless network. Finally, after years of waiting (and countless press reports), it’s official. It’s big, so we did a special edition of OMG/JK to mark the occasion. Here are a few posts related to today’s announcement:        
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| GameCrush’s Crush-O-Matic Blends Chatroulette With Online Gaming Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:00 PM PST
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist GameCrush is launching its own take on the Chatroulette-like experience today with Crush-O-Matic. The new service is a random game generator where users simply click “Go!” and automatically get matched up with another user in a two-way cam-enabled game session. As we we wrote in our initial review of GameCrush, the startup aims to help the millions of male gamers out on the web hook up online with a gaming buddy of the opposite sex for a fee. On GameCrush, gamers can browse the profiles of "PlayDates", which is the term used to refer to the women on the site. Each profile includes the woman's interests and commonly played games, and of course a gallery of photos are featured front-and-center. Users can message the PlayDate and see if she's interested in playing a game with him. Crush-O-Matic allows users select which games they want to play and the gender of their opponent (though users can opt to make these selections random as well). Then members can click to be matched with a random gamer who they can see and talk to while playing online games. Once the game is ended, users can rate their opponent, and users with higher ratings get rewarded with priority matching. Of course, one challenge for GameCrush, which has raised funding from a number of notable investors, is attracting the smut that appeared on Chatroulette. But co-founder Eric Strasser says that the site’s registration requirement, user profiles and a user rating system help prevent this type of clientele from interacting with the site. He says that users block or rate other users based on their experience, and low ratings/blocks (i.e. people who are acting inappropriately) are weeded out. He adds that the startup already has an active user base familiar with webcam-enabled gaming which helps in the dynamics of the site.        
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| M9 Defense Raises $1.4 Million For Advanced Hydroforming Technology Posted: 11 Jan 2011 05:00 PM PST
According to the company’s website: its core product, Boroclave presses, use hydroforming technology to mass-produce ballistic and non-ballistic composites. The company claims the composites it uses have the highest strength to weight ratios available in today’s market, and can be formed into products at speeds comparable to that of sheet metal processing. Hydroforming typically involves filling tubes (made of composites like aluminum) with fluid, and increasing fluid pressure to expand the tube-material to match a mold, even a complicated one, in one or two manufacturing steps. Automotovie companies from BMW to Hyunda-Kia motor group have used hydroforming to make more fuel efficient vehicle parts. M9 Defense sells to defense, transportation, and energy industry players that are seeking to use lighter, stronger materials — and less of them — to build cars, aircraft, vehicles, body armor, blades for wind turbines, telephone poles and satellites.        
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Social gaming is expected to be a billion-dollar business this year, according to an 
Silicon Valley venture firm 
Chicago-based startup 
The 
Did I say online advertising company 
One of the biggest phenomena of last year was 
In what is the first but certainly not the last time we’ll hear of Silicon Valley venture capitalists opening up an office in New York, storied venture firm and Facebook/Groupon backer 
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