The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Harris Poll: Majority of Americans Oppose Cuts To Pollution Control Spending
- Resource Nation Acquires Business.com Brand, Assets (With A Little Help From JMI Equity)
- WowWee Releases New Paper Jamz Pro-Series Guitars, Now With Downloadable Music
- Crocodoc Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Annotations, Embeds, And Its Own API
- SlideShare Moves Into Virtual Meetings With Zipcast
- Powered By Google Checkout, One Pass Is A Payment System For Content Publishers
- ThingWorx Scores $5 Million To “Connect The Web To The Real World”
- Kinoma And Marvell Attempt To Augment Android
- Lookout: Android Market Growing Faster, But App Store Attracting More Developers
- Mozilla: Internet Explorer 9 Isn’t A ‘Modern’ Browser
- Did Intel Just Leak The New MacBook Pros?
- Constant Contact Buys Social CRM Startup Bantam Live For $15 Million In Cash
- ZocDoc Opens in LA; How Your City Can Be Next (TCTV)
- Intuit Extends Free Version Offer For Square-Competitor GoPayment Indefinitely
- Greylock Invests $2.5 Million in 1000Memories (TCTV)
- RealNetworks CEO Bob Kimball: “The Real Player Is Only 10 Percent Of Our Business” (TCTV)
- Apple Keelhauls Music Streaming Services
- Paperless Billing Service Doxo Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding
- Roqbot Is A Jukebox On Your iPhone
- Want To Buy Into A Hollywood Movie? Now You Can
- TechStars Network Wants One Startup Application To Rule Them All
- The Simple (And Perhaps Harsh) Reality Of Apple’s Ecosystem
- Javelin Venture Partners Closes New $105 Million Fund
- Apple’s Digital Newsstand Just Disrupted The Publishing Industry
- New Micro-VC Lool Launches in Israel. Can Better Mentoring Boost the Country’s Returns?
| Harris Poll: Majority of Americans Oppose Cuts To Pollution Control Spending Posted: 16 Feb 2011 08:53 AM PST
This week, the EPA announced its 2012 budget would reign in the agency’s spending by about 13 percent from $10.3 billion in 2011 to $8.973 billion. The EPA’s fiscal year 2012 begins October 1, 2011 and ends September 30, 2012. Feeling the pinch would be programs that: protect the Great Lakes; clean up hazardous waste sites; and help states provide clean and safe drinking water to their residents.
Specifically, the Superfund program to support cleanup at hazardous waste sites, would be slashed by $70 million to $1.2 billion for 2012; spending on projects “strategically chosen to target the most significant threats to people's health in the Great Lakes ecosystem,” would lose $125 million year over year; and the hardest hit (by dollar amount) would be the Clean Water and Drinking Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs) program, which could lose $947 million from 2010 to 2012. The president’s budget still faces Congressional approval — House Republicans have suggested a plan with twice the cuts for the EPA, especially related to air pollution programs. SustainableBusiness.com reported:
The president’s proposed budget actually increases spending on air pollution controls, though it takes away from water and hazardous waste sites. As Greenwire noted Monday “state and local air quality agencies would receive $79.5 million more than they are getting at the fiscal 2010 funding level.” Some other programs that would survive and thrive, despite the suggested purse-tightening of the Obama administration, would benefit businesses and institutions with a heavy research and development focus, and enforcement officials. According to the EPA website, the Science to Achieve Results (STAR) grants program, for example, would see a $24.7 million increase in spending to ensure that the EPA procures and/or uses “best-in-class science [and technology] to protect air, water and land.” There would also be an increase of $584 million in spending to support research and innovation into new and emerging environmental science. Additional spending would go to enforcement, namely increased inspections and oversight of chemical and oil facilities to the tune of a $27.5 million increase for enforcement and compliance, using what the EPA called “e-reporting and monitoring tools.” Majorities of Americans, according to the same Harris Poll referenced above, may not be happy about that, either. They favor cutting “spending by regulatory agencies (by 56 to 28 percent)… and subsidies to business (by 51 to 37 percent).” Image: The Great Lakes on a clear day, via Nasa Goddard Photo & Video        
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| Resource Nation Acquires Business.com Brand, Assets (With A Little Help From JMI Equity) Posted: 16 Feb 2011 08:12 AM PST
Resource Nation today announced that it has acquired the brand and associated assets of Business.com, an online marketplace for business-to-business solutions. Growth equity firm JMI Equity provided an undisclosed amount of funding in support of the transaction – terms of the deal were not disclosed. Resource Nation CEO Ryan Peddycord will continue to lead the company with a combination of Business.com and Resource Nation management teams. The company says it will retain a number of current and former Business.com sales and account managers, as well as some other ‘key employees’. For your background: Business.com has quite a history. Most notably, it was acquired by R.H. Donnelley Corporation for $350 million almost four years ago. R.H. Donnelley filed for bankruptcy two years later. This acquisition, meanwhile, makes perfect sense. Resource Nation is essentially a lead generation company for all things B2B, and boasts about 10,000 advertising partners already. Business purchasers will now have the ability to obtain price quotes using Resource Nation’s core services, and DIY purchasers will be able to access Business.com’s directory to find vendors that make sense for their business. Another footnote in the fascinating (IMHO) history of one of the most valuable domain names on the Internet.        
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| WowWee Releases New Paper Jamz Pro-Series Guitars, Now With Downloadable Music Posted: 16 Feb 2011 08:03 AM PST
The new guitars have downloadable songs as well as downloadable guitar sounds including heavy metal and twanging country. They are still quite thin and this time they look nothing like anything Gibson has to offer, so they won’t get sued.        
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| Crocodoc Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Annotations, Embeds, And Its Own API Posted: 16 Feb 2011 08:01 AM PST
Crocodoc launched last year setting out to kill off Acrobat, and it’s come a long way toward making that dream come true. The site’s workflow is simple: you upload a PDF, and a few seconds later you’ve got a version of the same document in your browser, which you can then share with coworkers and annotate with notes, highlighting, text, and a pen tool, with changes that show up to other users in real-time. Up until now this has all been done using a Flash viewer, but with this new version it will be done via HTML5, which means that they can be viewer in modern browsers and on mobile devices. And Crocodoc isn’t stopping there. In addition to launching this HTML5 viewer on Crocodoc.com, the site is also enabling the first embedded HTML5 version of documents (for some reason Scribd still hasn’t brought its HTML5 engine to embeds). They’ve also opened up an API/Partner Program that allows developers to integrate this HTML5 engine into their applications — one early customer is Yammer, which will now let you view and edit documents directly from the Yammer interface. The API is free for non-commercial use, and premium apps will pay Crocodoc based on usage. This is good stuff. As I’ve said before, I am not a fan of Acrobat and being able to complete these tasks in the browser will be fantastic. That said, the service still has plenty of features to add before it will be able to replace Acrobat for a lot of people (fortunately, form filling is on the way) but this is a very solid start. It’s worth noting that while this new feature shares a lot in common with Scribd’s HTML5 viewer, Crocodoc cofounder Ryan Damico claims that they aren’t directly competing — “Scribd is for the publishing world, this is for professionals and app developers,” he explains. Though something tells me we won’t be waiting long for Scribd to launch its own HTML5-based embeds.
       
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| SlideShare Moves Into Virtual Meetings With Zipcast Posted: 16 Feb 2011 07:35 AM PST
Why go through online slides alone when you can do it with other people? If you are one of the 45 million people who go to SlideShare every month to check out slide presentations like this one from Mary Meeker on mobile Internet trends, you are probably going to like Zipcast. Slideshare is launching the new service today with Zipcast buttons on every public slideshow that turns the slides into a Webcast with video, audio and chat. There are plenty of virtual meeting services on the Web—everything from Cisco’s WebEx and Citrix’s GoToMeeting to Adobe’s Acrobat.com, which have been out for years. But Zipcast is, well, zippier. It doesn’t require a software download or plug-in, and it doesn’t take over your entire screen. Instead, it is just a tab in your browser (thank you, HTML5 Websockets). Zipcast is also stripped down compared to other existing virtual meeting products. There are the slides, a one-way video stream of the person hosting the meeting, a conference call line for audio, and a text chat window. And if you are board during the presentation, you can skip ahead through the slides on your own. That’s it, and that’s all most people probably need for giving a pitch, presentation, or remote talk. And to share the slideshow meeting, all you have to do is pass out a regular link—every SlideShare user will get a customized link that looks something like www.slideshare.net/erick/meeting and that can be used over and over again for every meeting that person hosts. Participants can sign in with Facebook and can choose to send their chat comments out to their Facebook streams, along with a link back to the meeting, which is a good way to gather an audience for live events. Zipcast will have its <a href="“>own page with an activity stream showing what meetings are going on right now , along with comments, which could also drive more people into public meetings. There is no limit to how many people can join a meeting, Meetings can be public or private, but anyone with the link can view the presentation. If you are a SlideShare Pro member, which starts at $19/month, you can get password protected meetings, along with other bells and whistles. Zipcast will be bundled in with the other SlideShare Pro features such as analytics and removing ads. SlideShare just launched subscriptions a few months ago, and paid subscribers are “doubling every month,” says CEO Rahsmi Sinha. She plans on rolling out more premium features for Zipcast such as two-way video and the ability to embed Zipcasts. With Zipcasts, you can see how SlideShare will start to fold in new products to tackle the enterprise market from the ground-up, using its installed base of loyal SlideShare users to spread the word about new products. Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield recently joined the company as VP of business development to help pursue this strategy.        
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| Powered By Google Checkout, One Pass Is A Payment System For Content Publishers Posted: 16 Feb 2011 07:18 AM PST
Google One Pass allows publishers to embed a simple e-commerce functionality to content that will require readers to purchase the content for viewing. Google says that publishers have the flexibility to charge for a variety of models including, subscriptions, day passes, metered access, pay-per-article, multi-issue packages and more. Users can purchase the content once and view it anywhere using the technology. Readers who purchase from a One Pass publisher can access their content on tablets, smartphones and websites using a single sign-on with an email and password, says Google. Google One Pass also enables metered models, where a publisher can provide some content or a certain number of visits for free, but can charge frequent visitors for additional views. Publishers can also use a coupon-base system to grant access to existing subscribers. And One Pass offers payments in mobile apps (i.e. in Android apps), in instances where the mobile OS terms permit transactions to take place outside of the app market (which seems to be a direct hit at Apple’s subscription announcement yesterday). Google says that One Pass is a fairly lightweight technology to implement on publisher sites. Here’s how it works: publishers host their own content and can upload the list of the content they want to monetize into the Google interface. Publishers then need to add a small amount of code to their website, and One Pass will be implemented. The technology is currently available to publishers in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. Already a number of customers are using One Pass, including Axel Springer AG, Focus Online (Tomorrow Focus), Media General, NouvelObs, Popular Science, Prisa and Rust Communications. Clearly, this format will compete with Apple’s subscription model, as well as PayPal, which launched its own micropayments product recently. Details are still vague, but One Pass does seem to be more publisher friendly that Apple’s subscription product. And this could be a big boost for Google’s own payments product—Checkout.
       
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| ThingWorx Scores $5 Million To “Connect The Web To The Real World” Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:52 AM PST
Oddly named ThingWorx, which markets an application platform designed for apps connecting people, systems and devices, has raised $5 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Safeguard Scientifics. Founded in 2009, ThingWorx has developed technology that lets companies create and deploy secure connected applications, whether they’re in the cloud, on an intranet or on an embedded platform. The company emphasizes the platform’s value in industrial markets like manufacturing, utilities and energy, as well as in emerging “Internet of Things” markets, which includes smart homes, cities and transportation.        
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| Kinoma And Marvell Attempt To Augment Android Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:15 AM PST
Marvell is a player on the pre-OEM level, providing tech and chipsets to companies putting together devices like handsets, tablets, and e-readers. Kinoma, which I hadn’t heard of until today, is working on a sort of thin OS layer that goes on top of Android and a few other OSes, adding functionality and connectivity while keeping the footprint small and the compatibility level high. But could they be mistaken on where the platform is going?        
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| Lookout: Android Market Growing Faster, But App Store Attracting More Developers Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:02 AM PST
According to Lookout, the number of apps available for Android increased approximately 127% since August 2010, while iPhone saw a growth rate of 44%. Of course, the fact that the Android Market is growing faster isn’t new. And if apps continue to be developed for each platform at the same rate, Android apps will overtake iPhone apps in mid-2012. While the Android Market may be growing at a faster rate than the Apple App Store, the Apple App Store continues to attract a significant portion of developers. The App Store attracted nearly 24,000 developers between August 2010 and February 2011, whereas the Android Market attracted just over 4,000 developers in the same time period.
The number of unique developers in the Apple App Store grew by approximately 48% over the past 6 months, while the number of unique developers in the Android Market grew by just over 40%. The Android Market generally has more apps per developer than the App Store. The average number of apps submitted per developer is 6.6 in the Android Market and 4.8 in the App Store. In terms of free versus paid apps, previously, apps in the Android Market have been primarily free; however, over the past 6 months, the Android Market has seen an influx of paid apps. In contrast, the Apple App Store has seen an increase in the proportion of free apps, with prices of paid apps remaining steady, says Lookout. The Android Market saw its prevalence of paid apps grow from 22% to 34% during the past 6 months. The number of paid apps in the Apple App Store decreased from 70% to 66% in the past 6 months.
In terms of mobile ad networks, the AdMob SDK is integrated into more free apps in both the Android Market and the Apple App Store than any other ad platform. However, Lookout says that iAd is quickly gaining traction on the App Store and expects to see iAd surpass AdMob in prevalence amongst free Apple App Store apps during the first half of 2011. iAd has grown in prevalence from just 5.6% of free Apple App Store apps to 15% during the past 6 months
Lookout also examined the number of apps that access users location, claiming that the App Store has a higher percentage of apps that access contacts and location. According to the report, 28% of all apps in the Android Market and 35% of all apps in the Apple App Store access location. Plus, 7% of Android Market apps and 13% of Apple App Store apps have the capability to access contacts. Lookout's web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry phones help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer's phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer. The startup also sponsors the App Genome Project, which is a mobile app dataset created to map the anatomy of mobile applications across multiple mobile platforms and app markets, to provide insight into mobile market dynamics and identify security threats in apps.        
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| Mozilla: Internet Explorer 9 Isn’t A ‘Modern’ Browser Posted: 16 Feb 2011 06:00 AM PST
       
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| Did Intel Just Leak The New MacBook Pros? Posted: 16 Feb 2011 05:40 AM PST
Probably not, but a girl can dream. Why does it look fairly convincing? Well, as 9to5mac points out, Intel has leaked future MacBooks before and there is some evidence of new MacBooks in the pipe for Best Buy and others.        
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| Constant Contact Buys Social CRM Startup Bantam Live For $15 Million In Cash Posted: 16 Feb 2011 05:14 AM PST
Bantam Live, which has raised $1.7 million in funding, provides an online workspace for business teams that has "social CRM" features, which include a real-time dashboard stream of messaging and workflow activity along with a native CRM application. Members can share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships both inside and outside the organization via a real-time activity stream. Bantam extends a company's sales outreach and customer relationships out to the social Web. For instance, with Bantam, a user can search Twitter, import a new contact with one click, initiate task workflows with team members to engage this new contact, and then converse with the new contact for lead generation. Bantam also integrates with Facebook as well. The company debuted its product at TechCrunch’s RealTime Stream CrunchUp two years ago and exited beta early last year. Bantam’s CEO and founder John Rourke told us that he was pursued by a couple of public companies to be acquired but chose Constant Contact because it was the best fit. Bantam Live's technology will help offer a communciations and social CRM product to Constant Contact's more than 400,000 small business customers, helping them better track, measure and increase customer engagement. Social CRM functionality will eventually be built into all of the Last year Constant Contact acquired social email and messaging manager Nutshell Mail.        
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| ZocDoc Opens in LA; How Your City Can Be Next (TCTV) Posted: 16 Feb 2011 04:59 AM PST
This is ZocDoc’s sixth location, and while the roll out is methodical, the service has grown bookings by more than 42% in the last month alone. As a consumer, I’m a huge fan of ZocDoc– it’s stunningly efficient and the customer service is stellar. But is the site too good to be true? We interviewed CEO and co-founder Cyrus Massoumi via Skype to talk about the new location, and how even with $20 million in venture capital the site can roll out to every metro market and continue to provide expensive customer service from SoHo– the antithesis of outsourcing. (We also discover a surprising secret about Massoumi’s past around the 11 minute mark…) To lobby for ZocDoc opening in your city, go here. <div><div><script src=”http://www.crunchbase.com/javascripts/widget.js” type=”text/javascript”></script><div><a href=”http://www.crunchbase.com/”>CrunchBase Information</a></div></div><div><div><a href=”http://www.crunchbase.com/company/zocdoc”>Zoc Doc</a></div><div><script src=”http://www.crunchbase.com/cbw/company/zocdoc.js” type=”text/javascript”></script></div><div>Information provided by <a href=”http://www.crunchbase.com/”>CrunchBase</a></div></div></div>        
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| Intuit Extends Free Version Offer For Square-Competitor GoPayment Indefinitely Posted: 16 Feb 2011 04:45 AM PST
Launched two years ago, GoPayment offers a complimentary app and credit card reader to allow small businesses to conduct charges via their smartphones. GoPayment is available for iOS, Android and Blackberry phones. GoPayment now offers two payment plans to choose from: For lower or intermittent credit card processing volume, Intuit offers a free credit card reader, no monthly fee; and discounted rates (2.7 percent for card swiped; 3.7 percent for both key entered and non-qualified transactions; $0.15 per transaction.) For higher credit card processing volume (recommended for more than a $1,000 per month), Intuit offers a free credit card reader; $12.95 monthly fee; and further discounted rates (1.7 percent for card swiped; 2.7 percent for key entered; 3.7 percent for non-qualified transactions, such as corporate cards; $0.30 per transaction). That compares to Square, which has always offered a free reader with no monthly fee and currently charges 2.75 percent and $0.15 for swiped transactions and 3.5 percent and $0.15 for keyed-in transactions. While Intuit is clearly growing in terms of usage and sign-ups, so is Square, which is unarguably a smaller operation with a lot of buzz. Fresh off a $27.5 million funding round, Jack Dorsey’s startup is expected to process $40 million in transactions in Q1 of 2011. Clearly, this is a competitive space. What Intuit has in its favor is that it already has a built in small business network with users of its popular business applications, including Quickbooks, Quicken and TurboTax. And another player has joined—VeriFone entered the mobile payments arena with a deal with PayPal. Intuit is no doubt extending its free version because it is getting more traction from small businesses with a less-costly GoPayment product. Perhaps Intuit should spring for a Times Square billboard.        
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| Greylock Invests $2.5 Million in 1000Memories (TCTV) Posted: 16 Feb 2011 03:59 AM PST
1000Memories aims to be a site where loved ones can commemorate the lives of those that have passed away. Several sites have tried to do this, and previous attempts have come off as cheesy or morbid. 1000Memories has struck a chord with its stylish design, and its commitment to always offer the product for free without garish ads. Obituaries are one of the only bastions of newspaper classifieds that haven’t been disrupted, Thacker says. In San Francisco, a basic obit can cost up of $1,500, and it’s a static, non-collaborative mention that only runs one day. 1000Memories’ timing couldn’t be better. Facebook and other social networks have brought people closer to people they’d fallen out of touch with, providing an efficient medium for communicating a death and for sending condolences and remembrances. And increasingly, those memories are already captured digitally, via photos, videos and emails. And as newspapers become increasingly irrelevant, it’s natural that there’s some solution for celebrating someone’s life online. So while it’s easy to see that something like 1000Memories should exist in the world, the question is how long it will take to build a laudable service like this into a real business. Co-founder Jonathan Good stopped by our studios to talk about the news– unfortunately he didn’t come prepared with many details on what the funding means for the company or what the money would be used for. He also refused to give us any sense of how big the user base was or even any basic idea of how much the service has grown or how many tribute pages have been built. It’s a shame, because those are key questions. Customer acquisition will be a challenge for the site, since most people don’t have a death in their families or communities several times a year. Given the emotional investment people make in 1000Memories, I hope the company will be a bit more forthcoming in the future.        
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| RealNetworks CEO Bob Kimball: “The Real Player Is Only 10 Percent Of Our Business” (TCTV) Posted: 16 Feb 2011 02:57 AM PST
I caught up with Bob Kimball and Peter Kellogg-Smith, respectively the chief executive and VP of emerging products at RealNetworks, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Like most people, I knew Real mostly from their media player and their former subsidiary Rhapsody (they still own 47 percent of that business), but I must admit I was only vaguely familiar with their other activities. Kimball pointed out to me that the media player currently represents merely 10 percent of Real’s business, with the majority of revenues actually coming from products and services it provides to mobile operators worldwide and its booming casual gaming operations (already a $111 million business and growing). At the Congress, the company, which significantly downscaled operations last year, previewed its new digital media management service Unifi. It hasn’t publicly launched yet, so I won’t elaborate too much about it, but suffice to say I think it could easily become a great, popular product, if they can get the pricing right. Expect a full review of Unifi as soon as it launches.        
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| Apple Keelhauls Music Streaming Services Posted: 15 Feb 2011 11:42 PM PST
That’s all well and good for apps that have zero marginal costs. But for some content providers, specifically the music streaming services like MOG, Rhapsody, Rdio, etc., this is crushing. It effectively pushes them off the iPhone, iPad and other iOS devices. They’ve been keelhauled. That’s because they don’t have 30% margins to begin with, the labels and publishers take somewhere around $8 of the $10 subscription fee. We saw Rhapsody balk at Apple earlier today. On Wednesday morning, we hear, most of the online music streaming services will be issuing a joint statement condemning the policy. Does Apple’s move violate antitrust laws? The Wall Street Journal seems to think probably not. Of course, if Apple now launches their own music streaming service, that may change. Apple will be the only company that doesn’t have to pay Apple’s 30% subscription fee, so they’ll be the only company that can offer a $10/month music streaming service without losing money on every user. How does this all play out? We hear the music labels are torn between waging an all out legal war against Apple and just capitulating and lowering their fees enough to keep the streaming services in business. The problem isn’t that Apple is asking for 30%. It’s that the apps can’t charge more to cover those costs. In the end Apple may get what they’re asking for, but if they do it will only be because the labels cave and because Android has gained so much market share that Apple may be able to effectively beat an antitrust action.        
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| Paperless Billing Service Doxo Raises $10 Million In Series B Funding Posted: 15 Feb 2011 09:00 PM PST
Paperless billing is one of those things that is slower to take hold than it should, but it just seems inevitable that is how we all will be receiving our bills sooner or later. One startup trying to speed along the paperless era is Doxo, which just raised a $10 million. The Series B financing was led by Sigma Partners, with previous investors Mohr Davidow and Bezos Expeditions participating. Thomas Layton, the former CEO of OpenTable from 2001 to 2007, also invested and is joining Doxo’s board of directors. Greg Gretsch from Sigma is also taking a board seat. This round brings the total raised by Doxo to $15 million since it was founded in 2008. As I described the service last year:
Businesses pay about $10 a year per customer to send paper bills. Doxo aims to greatly reduce that cost, and gives consumers one place to manage all their paperless bills. Companies offering Doxo as a billing option include Sprint, Kansas City Power & Light, and Puget Sound Energy. The service is still invite-only, but if you want to try it out enter the code “techcrunch” here.        
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| Roqbot Is A Jukebox On Your iPhone Posted: 15 Feb 2011 08:26 PM PST
Something unusual happened last Friday night at Bar Basic here in San Francisco. When I walked in, the entire room was fixated on on a screen above the bar, which displayed what looked like a musical game but wasn’t karaoke. The game? Roqbot, a unique iPhone app that allows you to yes, pick the music playing at a bar. Like a combination Pandora and traditional jukebox, Roqbot allows you to control the tunes without getting up from where you’re sitting. The inspiration for Roqbot came when one of the co-founders got frustrated using the jukebox at a bowling alley — Every time he had to walk across the bowling alley he would miss his turn. Roqbot, which shares the space with jukebox networks TouchTunes and eCast, is the first startup that I’ve seen experimenting with bringing social music to real life businesses like bars and cafes. Up until now plenty of people have deployed this concept for private settings, but no one has touched public because of the many challenges involved.
Co-founder Garrett Dodge says Roqbot isn’t actually competing with jukeboxes, but with iPods. Playing an iPod at a cafe or a bar has its disadvantages, namely that the staff gets tired of listening to the same music day in and day out (anyone who has ever worked in a store knows how hellish this can be around Christmas-time) and that customer requests are never heard. There is also the legal issue of music licensing fees when playing personal music in a public setting. With Roqbot you can check in at a participating venue as well as publish your checkins and music picks to Twitter, Foursquare, Last.fm and Facebook. You can select a song to play using Roqbot credits that you can buy with Amazon, Paypal or your Credit Card through your phone. The app offers you a comprehensive list of popular music to choose from, including some that will please the cranky indie music snob you’ve dragged along. If you’re having trouble deciding what to play you can pick from curated lists like “Highest Rated of all time,” “Most Played of All Time” and yes “Top 80s.”
Participating venues have their own dashboards within the app and aspiring DJs can navigate through “Now Playing” “Next Up” “DJs” and “Specials” homescreens. On the “Next Up” screen, a Digg-like interface allows you to thumb up and thumb down songs, increasing or decreasing people’s DJ ratings with each vote (and it gets heated). Likewise people can vote your picks up or down, which affects your own DJ rating as well as your position in line. For extra Roqbot credits you can set your musical picks to “Priority Pick” which moves them up in the queue. “We’re going beyond checking into a venue,” says founder Garrett Dodge, “Now you can actually checkin and do something useful.” True. Roqbot also gives away all the equipment for free to venues, including the entire catalogue of five million fully-licensed songs (one of the co-founders has a background in IP law and one of their advisors used to be the CEO of Sony Music). The Roqbot beta can be downloaded from the iPhone, but can only be used at Bar Basic in San Francisco which I highly suggest if you’re in the area. Dodge plans on launching the alpha for both the Android and iPhone platform in March, offering it for free to people planning parties at SXSW. Roqbot is currently bootstrapped. Image: voteprime        
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| Want To Buy Into A Hollywood Movie? Now You Can Posted: 15 Feb 2011 07:29 PM PST
The movie is called “Lydia Slotnick Unplugged“:
Sound good to you? Then you’ll definitely want to invest. Because the movie will only be made if they raise the full $8 million. Your minimum purchase is 2 shares, for $20. Here’s what you get – your money back + 7% if the movie makes a profit. Any profit over 7% is shared 50/50 between the investors and the people behind the company. If the movie makes less than $8 million, all of it goes back to the investors. Don’t expect a free ticket to see the movie, though. From the FAQs: “Do I get to see the completed movie for free? No. A distribution arrangement will preclude such a large number of complimentary tickets or DVDs.” You also won’t be allowed on set, but you will get to download clips of the movie. Also note that the stock won’t be listed on Nasdaq or any other exchange, so you won’t be able to sell these shares very easily once you’ve invested.        
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| TechStars Network Wants One Startup Application To Rule Them All Posted: 15 Feb 2011 06:57 PM PST
Applying to startup programs these days is a little like applying to colleges. There are so many of them, it is hard to decide which ones to try to get into. TechStars wants to streamline that process, at least for founders applying to any of the 20 or so accelerators in the TechStars Network. The TechStars Network was recently launched as part of the White House’s Startup America initiative to spur entrepreneurship. TechStars wants to create a unified startup application for all the seed accelerators in the TechStars Network. This would be an online application which would allow entrepreneurs to apply to multiple startup programs within the network. Presumably the different accelerators would compete for the best candidates just as colleges compete for the best students. And startups that don’t fit into one program may find a home in another with less friction. The development of the universal application is being by a Kauffman Foundation grant of $200,000, and it will be made available to other startup programs not part of the TechStars Network. That means other startup programs such as Y Combinator or the Founder Institute could end up using it if they want.        
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| The Simple (And Perhaps Harsh) Reality Of Apple’s Ecosystem Posted: 15 Feb 2011 05:07 PM PST
To those who have followed tech news for any extended length of time, this is a familiar refrain. Company X changes something, therefore Company X is “evil”. Over the years, this has been true of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. But no company has seen this vitriol to the extent of Apple over the past few years. And curiously, it seems correlated to their meteoric rise in power and profitability. But if Apple is really evil — or at the very least, if several major moves they’ve made over the past few years have been evil — shouldn’t the opposite be true? Shouldn’t Apple be losing a ton of customers who are fed up with their cruelty and inhumane torture of developers, users, and the world in general? Makes sense, right? Welcome to reality, conspiracy theorists, loons, and occasional TechCrunch commenters. This latest maneuver by Apple, and several other of their recent “evil” moves, can actually be explained quite easily. Apple isn’t out to trick everyone and eventually screw them over. Instead, Apple has perfected the art of making money. To some, that will still seem evil. Hell, to a few that will likely seem synonymous with evil. But that’s an extremely myopic view of things. The absolute key to Apple’s ability to make money is the ability to make products that customers want. This includes both their tangible hardware products, the software that runs on them, and the underlying infrastructure that fuses it all together. And that includes things like the App Store, which today’s latest change affects. Apple makes good products that people want, so they make a lot of money. The two are absolutely tied together. If they didn’t do the former, they wouldn’t get the latter. To be clear, I’m not convinced that the subscription changes announced today won’t backfire against Apple — that was the point of the previous article. But given Apple’s recent track record, there’s every reason to believe that they won’t. Further, there are plenty of reasons to believe that Apple is making a smart bet here. Apple is betting that the allure of being tied into their incredibly efficient iTunes payment ecosystem (along with its 100 million + accounts tied to credit cards) will outweigh the downside of having to pay them a 30 percent fee. The same 30 percent fee they currently take from the thousands of app developers collectively making billions of dollars off of the App Store. And the same 30 percent fee they currently take for all other types of in-app purchases. You don’t hear those developers complaining about Apple’s cut. But this situation is different because it’s a de-facto change in policy. Actually, wording in their app guidelines has suggested for some time that Apple would move to filter all purchases made on their iOS devices through their in-app payment system. They just hadn’t enforced it until now.
But now that they have a system in place to do that, they’re going to do it. For many developers, this is a harsh reality. But is it evil? Regardless of what I write or what anyone else says about this issue, here’s the actual situation: if this is a mistake, people will reject it. Both users and developers will have the chance to vote. But they won’t vote with their mouths. They’ll vote with their wallets. If Apple is in the wrong here, developers will stop developing for iOS (a privilege which they pay Apple $99 a year for on top of the 30 percent app sales cut). And customers will stop buying iOS products. Those two factors will amplify one another. And the Apple ecosystem will wither. There’s simply no reason for developers to develop for a company that is evil to them. And there’s no reason for customers to buy products from a company that is evil to them. There are other options out there. And those options will only continue to sprout. And people will walk away from Apple. But allow me to state the obvious: with all the other “evil” changes Apple has made, this hasn’t happened. In fact, the opposite has happened. Apple has continued to sell more and more of their products and their ecosystem has exploded into a juggernaut. Apple is so “evil” that they have more users than ever giving them more money than ever. Either the entire world is brainwashed or most users interpret these maneuvers as a part of Apple’s overall goal to make products that are consumer-friendly. Which, again, in turn, makes them money. A lot of it. You could certainly make the case that the subscription changes could harm consumers if Amazon or Netflix or other developers decide to pull their apps from the App Store. That’s exactly why I’m not sure this won’t backfire (would Amazon really be okay giving Apple a 30 percent cut?!). But on paper, the main change to push for streamlined in-app payments is a big time benefit for consumers. And if the others play ball, that’s all the consumers will see: yet another system developed by Apple that is better than every other system out there. And that’s exactly why the inevitable antitust talk (that has actually already begun!) is for the most part ridiculous. This is a free market that both developers and consumers are free to walk away from — and towards a competitor. A number of people today seem to believe that Apple’s move will force companies to raise their prices by 30 percent across the board. That would be totally ridiculous, completely unacceptable, and worthy of an antitrust inquiry. But why on Earth would they do that when they can just put their products on Android or BlackBerry or webOS?
But again, that would not be a case of Apple being evil. It would be a case of them building a natural monopoly similar to the way Google has done that in search. Still, natural or not, just like Google, Apple would then have to be careful about what policies they implemented. With great power, comes great responsibility, and all that. But we’re not there yet. It does look like competition is coming — and fast. And so Apple should be allowed to implement the changes to their ecosystem as they see fit. The market will decide if they’re the right ones or not. And that really is the key to all of this. It’s so obvious, but so many seem to be looking past it. Apple is not the great dictator of the world. We’re all free to not buy their products and to use other ones. But despite all the bluster about Apple being “evil” over the past several years, this has not happened. And it’s because they’re not evil. They’re simply a free market machine churning out great product after great product thanks to (and not in spite of) many of the policies they put in place. But that could all change tomorrow. We’re in control, not them. Welcome to reality. [images: New Line Cinemas]        
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| Javelin Venture Partners Closes New $105 Million Fund Posted: 15 Feb 2011 04:54 PM PST
Javelin was founded by Noah Doyle and Jed Katz, both of whom have experience as entrepreneurs. Doyle founded online loyalty program MyPoints.com and was an executive at Keyhole (which was acquired by Google and became Google Earth). Katz founded Rent.net and Move.com. The firm initially got its start in May 2008, and then relaunched in April 2009 with a fund size of $75 million (it’s now raised a total of $180 million). Katz and Doyle say that they’re often asked how they differ from so-called “super angels” and explain that they can participate in later-stage rounds that angels typically can’t. But they say they’re different from typical VC firms because they’ve been entrepreneurs much of their careers and that they tend to “run at an entrepreneur’s pace” in terms of reaching decisions quickly. (Of course, many other VCs have entrepreneurial experience and will make similar claims). Katz and Doyle also say that they tend to be very involved with their companies, as opposed to just swinging by for board meetings. The first Javelin fund has had one exit so far: Scout Labs, which was acquired by Lithium Technologies for $20-25 million last May.        
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| Apple’s Digital Newsstand Just Disrupted The Publishing Industry Posted: 15 Feb 2011 04:04 PM PST
How much pricing power exactly does Apple have over publishers desperate to figure out a digital strategy that results in paying subscribers? A hell of a lot—at least that is what Apple is betting with its new subscription billing service. Apple is taking a 30 percent cut of all digital subscription revenues. Just take a moment to think about that for a second. Up until now, Apple took a 30 percent cut of one-time purchases in iTunes. So the 30 percent number doesn’t seem strange, at least not to consumers. What do we care how the money is split up as long as we all of these digital goodies are affordable? But publishers and other media companies with subscription businesses (cough, Netflix, cough) care very much. Apple is saying if we deliver a paying customer, we will take 30 percent of their subscription dollars in perpetuity as long as they consume your media on our devices. You could argue that iTunes is the new digital newsstand, and so it deserves a cut. True, it does deserve something, but let’s compare what Apple wants to take with what a real newsstand collects. Typically, magazine companies take as much as 75 percent of the cover price of a magazine sold at a newsstand, which shows who has the pricing power in that relationship. But that is on a per-issue basis. The newsstands are merely lead generators which get people to sample magazines and newspapers before a portion of those people convert to paying subscribers. The newsstands don’t get anything extra for helping to bring in a new subscriber, forget about an ongoing cut of the subscription fee. Of course there are services that deliver subscribers to publishers, but even they don’t get an ongoing cut of the subscription. It’s more of a lead-gen type deal. Apple is now telling media companies to forget about the way they’ve been doing business for decades. There are new rules in its digital newsstand. And, while some big publishers like might try to hold the line or go over to Android, in the end if consumers decide they want to read digital magazines on their iPads, they may have no choice but to do what Steve tells them to do. And that could kill their business. Not only would they be handing over a substantial portion of their revenues to Apple, but they get virtually no data in return—data about customers. It’s that credit card data they use to do their consumer marketing and sell those readers to advertisers. So yeah, there’s going to be lots of resistance to Apple’s subscription scheme. No wonder the antitrust knives are already out. In the end, the old guard will fight it as long s they can, while new entrants with nothing to lose will build readerships on the iPad. It’s probably never been a better time to start a digital magazine. Correction: An earlier version of this post reported that magazine publishers collect 95 percent of newsstand sales, which came from a source at a magazine publisher. After this figure was questioned in comments, I went back to my source who admitted he was wrong and suggested that for a large publisher with clout 70 to 75 percent was a better figure. Some commenters say it is closer to 50 percent, which may be true for smaller publishers. Nevertheless, these only apply to single issue sales—the equivalent of a paid download in the App Store—not ongoing subscription fees. Photo credit: Susan NYC        
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| New Micro-VC Lool Launches in Israel. Can Better Mentoring Boost the Country’s Returns? Posted: 15 Feb 2011 04:00 PM PST
I’ve traveled to Israel several times and met dozens of entrepreneurs, investors and startup boosters. In my experience, there are generally two kinds of Israelis: Those who blindly talk up everything Israel, going rabid if you dare point out the obvious decline in returns, and those who have a clear grasp of the country’s strengths and weaknesses and actively play to the strengths to combat the weaknesses. Yaniv Golan and Avichay Nissenbaum are the latter. They have no illusions about the challenges to starting a big tech company in Israel, as industries have changed and globalization has shifted many VCs’ focus to bigger, sexier markets like India and China. But they still believe in their country’s entrepreneurs. TechCrunch last heard about Golan and Nissenbaum in 2007, when they sold their Q&A site Yedda to AOL. Now, the two are launching a new micro-VC firm called Lool in hopes of filling a gap in the Israeli funding market, and help entrepreneurs with a good idea get a little further. Lool is Hebrew for “crib” or “hatchery” and the idea is that this will be more like an incubator, heavy on the mentoring. And Nissenbaum an Golan have the cred to mentor. Nissenbaum was the former country manager for AOL Israel, and before Yedda he co-founded and sold a company called SmarTeam. Golan has been a Web developer since the mid-1990s and is well liked in the Israeli scene. Both have been active angel investors, funding or advising 15 companies. Index’s Saul Klein is an adviser to the firm and calls it “Israel’s first credible micro VC.” “Increasingly this talent is looking to work with experienced entrepreneurs who have been there and done that,” Klein said. “Yaniv and Avichay have real entrepreneurial, product and general management credentials, they are very embedded in the community and they have great access to the US.” Like a lot of micro VCs in the US, the firm is focused on Internet and media and expects most of its companies will have rapid exits of less than $50 million. The firm will provide seed and series A funding and a lot of added services like discounted legal and accounting services and in-house product and user experience experts. “We’re trying to create unfair advantages for the companies in our portfolio,” Golan says. Lool will focus on helping a handful of the best companies it can find. It’s a dramatically different approach from Israel’s most famous angel investor Yossi Vardi who’s more of a Ron Conway-style investor, coming in very early and spreading his investments widely and providing less one-on-one time with each entrepreneur. As the Valley has shown, a rich startup ecosystem can support both. Anyone who reads my posts regularly knows I’m not a big fan of funds set up just to help companies flip. I don’t buy that they’re sustainable long-term in what has always been a hit driven business. But like it or not, these quick flips have become the bread and butter of Israel’s Web scene, and Internet companies are what aspiring entrepreneurs want to build, whether the country has a good track record at it or not. I applaud these guys for taking a new approach and working to make entrepreneurs more successful at the game they want to play.        
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A new poll from 
Not content to totally rock your face off with their current 
Last spring document sharing portal 
We’ve been 
Why is Mozilla harshing on Internet Explorer 9 ? The company’s tech evangelist, Paul Rouget, said in a recent blog post that Internet Explorer 9 isn’t a "truly modern" browser, specifically calling out its implementation of HTML5. I don’t understand why the average person couldn’t use both (along with Chrome and Opera) to browse the Web as they see fit, but let’s hear Rouget out for a bit.
Online marketing company 
Intuit 
Lots of hullabaloo about Apple’s 
A company called 
In my previous post about Apple’s new subscription plans for the App Store, I offered up three possibilities. With the move, Apple is either: 
Looking ahead, the more I think about it, the more I think that may be the one (potentially) big vulnerability in Apple’s plan. The requirement that prices must the the same or less than they are elsewhere on the web might have to be altered eventually. But that will only be the case if rival products by competitors fail to produce an paid app ecosystem to compete with Apple’s.
Early-stage VC Javelin Venture Partners has closed a second, $105 million fund. The firm expects to use the money to fund around 20 companies over three years in seed and Series A rounds ranging from $500K to $3 million, and will reserve some of the funds for subsequent rounds raised by these portfolio companies.
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