The Latest from TechCrunch

Jack Dorsey & The Golden Gate Bridge (Exclusive Video)
Color.com Was Acquired For $350,000 (The Domain Name, That Is)
How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria
InsideView Raises $12M To Give Businesses Social Sales Intelligence
Boom! Walgreens Buys Online Retailer Drugstore.com For $409 Million
Steve Jobs To Tawkon: “No Interest” In Your Phone Radiation Measurement App
Total Immersion Raises $5.5M From Intel, Others For Augmented Reality Platform
Venture Capitalists May Hate AngelList, But They’re Still Using It
That Was Fast: The Speak-To-Search Extension For Chrome
Google TV PM Brittany Bohnet Leaves Google To Found A Startup
Views.fm Makes Dropbox Look Sexy
Dorsey Is Back In Action At Twitter, And That May Be Formalized Soon
Color Looks To Reinvent Social Interaction With Its Mobile Photo App (And $41 Million In Funding)
YouTube Now Helps You Make Movies…Without A Camera
Serlet Transition Out Appears As Natural As OS X Transition Towards iOS
Google’s Algorithmic Cat And Mouse Game [Infographic]
Exclusive Data On Groupon’s U.S. Revenues And February Falloff
AOL HuffPost To Freelancers: We Want You On Staff, But Real Journalists Only Need Apply
Keen On… Why Google Is Making Us Fat and Lazy [TCTV]
Offline Labs Goes Online With $1 Million Seed Round. Enter The Project Dragōn: Sōsh
I, For One, Welcome Our New Dancing Android Overlords
Amazingly, MySpace’s Decline Is Accelerating
CMP.LY Raises $750,000 To Keep Companies Honest Online
Yahoo Launches Its Answer To Google Instant: ‘Search Direct’

Jack Dorsey & The Golden Gate Bridge (Exclusive Video)

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 09:29 AM PDT

A recent Vanity Fair profile of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey ends with an anecdote about an inspiring speech he gave to the assembled staff at his new mobile payments startup, Square. The internal “TownSquare” meeting took place on his 34th birthday last November, and it is a remarkable statement by a young CEO who is finding his voice and trying to impart it onto his company. Fortunately, somebody captured the speech on video, which I’ve obtained and present to you above.

From author David Kirkpatrick’s Vanity Fair article:

Jack Dorsey has spent a lot of time thinking about what went wrong at Twitter. And as Square's C.E.O., he bends over backward to be explicit, to communicate, to guide. He hosts a "town square" company meeting every Friday, where he talks about aspirations and values. . . .

One recent town-square meeting, in fact, was devoted to the aesthetic virtues of the Golden Gate Bridge. "We're the only payments company in the world that's concerned with design," the Prada-clad Dorsey begins. He shows a dramatic photo of the bridge taken from atop one of its towers. "This is what I want to build. This is classy. This is inspiring. This is limitless. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous. . . . So your homework this weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we do, which is carry every single transaction in the world."

The 15-minute speech is succinct and to the point. Every startup founder should watch it. It is about design and building excellent products. “Everything we do here is design,” he says. It is about the importance of telling good stories through your products and editing them down to their core narrative. “We need to present one cohesive story to the world,” he notes.

Dorsey gets his point across, appropriately enough, by telling the story of the Golden Gate Bridge. Towards the end, he brings up a slide of another, extraordinarily ugly bridge, and asks, “What the hell were they thinking? . . . A lot of people in our industry, this is what they’re building. It’s terrible.” Then he goes back to a sweeping picture of the Golden Gate. “This is the bridge I want to cross.”

“And that’s really what it comes down to,” Dorsey says, “we want to design the beautiful and build the impossible.

He also points out, “One of the features of this bridge is it doesn’t fall down. Reliability is a feature.” Another lesson learned from Twitter. And, yes, Twitter wants Dorsey back and he may expand his role there, but after watching this video it is hard to imagine him ever leaving Square.

That said, it is also clear that he doesn’t think Square should be about him. It should be about the product. “Square is not going to be known by me, . . . It’s going to be known as Square. That’s what we want people to care about. We’re trying to push the products and the brand and our story above everything else.” He wants Square to be like Apple in terms of product focus, but without the CEO cult of personality. The full transcript is below.

Transcript

I want to talk about how we build things here, a little bit about the product, the work we do and the work we need to do. So, this is something I put on our Wiki a long time ago [shows slide], as one of our principles is to delight our users. But then I realized it’s more important to delight their users, which are their customers and payers. And the more we focus on that payer experience, the more we focus on really making that magical — and designing it. We win, our users win, and we get more users.

So, going back to a lot of Brian’s points, this is a big focus for us, we’re the only payments company in the world that’s concerned with design. We are all designers in this room, and that’s how we’re leading this company, through design.

So, how many of you have walked or driven across the Golden Gate Bridge? Almost everyone in the room. This is one of my favorite parts of living in San Francisco. This is astoundingly beautiful, and it’s not just beautiful because it looks pretty, it’s beautiful because of the challenge that everyone who built this bridge overcame.

So, if you go back and you look at how this bridge was built, this is what San Francisco looked like before the bridge. This was the Golden Gate. We called it the Golden Gate because San Francisco was known for gold rushes. People would come here, explore and risk everything they had to live in an environment where they might find gold, or might find work, or might open a store of some kind.

So, this is the Golden Gate, this is the fort, right on the point in the Presidio, and there’s this big divide between this fort and Marin, and a lot of people living in Tiburon and Sausalito would have to go all the way around the Bay, all the way up here to get around across the river, up by Richmond.

So, they needed something that was a little bit faster. The war was over, they weren’t using this fort much anymore, so, they decided to build a bridge. So, very simply they said we need to build a bridge here, and they got an architect. The architect had a vision, actually there are a few architects, but one person has incredibly taken credit for most of the work, which was recently rectified — it’s a fascinating Wikipedia article if you have the chance to read it.

So the architects designed this gorgeous bridge, but the problem with the Golden Gate is that this is an extremely tumultuous area, if you’ve ever sailed through this or taken a boat through this, the waves are immense. Or surfed through it, which is more dangerous. It’s a disaster, I mean all the weather of the Bay is being forced through this one single point. So, all these elements create this perfect storm of turbulence. It’s extremely deep in the middle and it’s an epic span, so this was not an easy challenge.

They got a bunch of amazing engineers, and they took it step by step and iterated and iterated and iterated. There was a lot of back and forth between the architects to make this beautiful opening into this gorgeous city that we live in. And what is possible? What is beautiful? What is possible? And that’s really what it comes down to … we want to design the beautiful and build the impossible.

And a lot of people think of design, when they hear the word design as visual, something that looks pretty. Design is not just visual, design is efficiency. Design is making something simple. Design is epic. Design is making it easy for a user to get from point A to point B.

Engineering is design. Every engineer in this room, every operator in this room, every customer service agent in this room, is a designer. Because you’re designing constantly the interaction that you have with your tools or with your users or with your customers, and you’re trying to bring efficiency and take all the thinking out of that process.

So, everything we do here is design. We always want to make the beautiful — to this point — Keith, two minutes before I was supposed to start this Town Square, told me, stop. I’ve got a mistake in my slides, I forgot to capitalize an “S”. I swear. That level of perfection is what we wanna achieve, because if we achieve that level of perfection — it’s gonna take a long time to do that, a lot of hours — but then our users see it immediately, without thinking. And that’s the important part. That’s what design is.

And look at this, this is gorgeous. I mean, just look at this bridge, it’s amazing what was achieved with resources they had in the time these folks had. Millions and millions of people go over this bridge, and one of the features of this bridge is it doesn’t fall down. Reliability is a feature. This is what Brian said earlier, availability, reliability, and staying up, that’s a feature and that’s a product, and it has to be well-designed and thought after and considered, and that’s what we’re doing.

I’ve often spoken to the editorial nature of what I think my job is, I think I’m just an editor, and I think every CEO is an editor. I think every leader in any company is an editor. Taking all of these ideas and you’re editing them down to one cohesive story, and in my case, my job is to edit the team, so we have a great team that can produce the great work and that means bringing people on and in some cases having to let people go. That means editing the support for the company, which means having money in the bank, or making money, and that means editing what the vision and the communication of the company is, so that’s internal and external, what we’re saying internally and what we’re saying to the world — that’s my job. And that’s what every person in this company is also doing. We have all these inputs, we have all these places that we could go — all these things that we could do — but we need to present one cohesive story to the world.

Brian said something very interesting to me a few weeks ago, he said, support and feedback is what our customers are telling us, and product is what we’re telling our customers. I think that’s an amazing, amazing statement. We have feedback loops, and then we speak something back, the product, this company, is what we’re telling the world.

So, on this point, ideas can come from anyone, and they can come anytime. So, we all have various directions that we want to take the company and sometimes those ideas come during a shower, sometimes they come when we’re walking, sometimes they come when we’re talking with other employees at the coffee store, and sometimes you just wanna build it — you just wanna get it done — and we want to support that.

If I want to go and create a screen saver that shows all the signatures that are coming into Square in realtime, and I’m gonna go spend the weekend doing that, and I’m gonna finish it to my satisfaction so that when I go back to the company and say look at what I did, this is amazing, this is beautiful and I’ve had a lot of fun building this. And instead of saying, you know, that’s cool but we didn’t do it as a team so let’s not use it right now. Instead, let’s figure out how to say, that’s awesome, now let’s figure out how to put it into production.

So, allowing folks to work on what they want and the strong ideas that they have at any point, and then figuring out how to build it into production, and speaking to that point of reliability as a feature. Ideas happen to individuals, they happen to groups, we should allow for all of it. We should take them all in and consider them. If we don’t act on an idea, then let’s put in on the shelf, don’t throw it away, just put it in the shelf, because we may use it later in a different way then what was originally intended. This gets us to become good storytellers, and that’s what we want to do. This is about the editorial.

As a lot of you know, this is one of my favorite magazines. [Shows The Economist] This magazine is very interesting. It’s actually a newspaper — out of London. If you look through this magazine, you’ll notice a few things. First, it has a beautiful unfolding. You open the first few pages, you get all the news around the world in brief, little, 140-character news bytes of what’s happening. You want to commit some more time, then you page through and you’ll see the briefings in half pages or pages, a little bit more on what’s going on in the world, about what you just read. If you want to commit even more to any direction or any topic that you find interesting, you can read the full articles, which are multiple pages. And then at the very back are the indicators, the economic indicators, of what various aspects of the economy are doing.

The other thing you notice about this is that there are no bylines at all, there are no names in here, not even the editor has a name, it’s The Economist, they’re building The Economist, they’re writing articles for The Economist.

The editor says, I want to write about Obama, and how he needs to step it up, it’s time. He gets 5 or 6 articles, edits them into one thing that he thinks, or she thinks, will sell the magazine and tell the best story, and that becomes the magazine. This is done with every single article that’s in the magazine. And effectively every single product and feature and aspect that we’re building to our company.

So, my point here is, this company is not going to be known by one person or by five people or by multiple people. It’s going to be known by the product that we put out. We, in the Valley, think that Steve Jobs is Apple. We see Apple and we think Steve Jobs. But the mainstream audience doesn’t know who the hell Steve Jobs is. They don’t really care. They know that the Nano works, they love it, and they want to buy the next one. They could care less what this old guy in the black turtle neck does. Square is not going to be known by me, it’s not going to be known as Keith’s company, it’s not gonna be known as any other individual’s company in here, it’s going to be known as Square.

That’s what we want people to care about, and that’s what we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push, we’re trying to push the products and the brand and our story above everything else. And if you ever see that not happening, then let’s fix it. Tell me about it, we’ll fix it. Kay will fix it.

So, building beautiful things, it’s not easy. You can give up easily. It’s not 9 to 5 job. This is a 9 to 5 bridge [shows new slide]. Everything about this bridge says do not cross me. First of all, I don’t trust that it’s going to stay up. It’s forcing me into these narrow lanes. It’s got this mile-per-hour limit. This does not inspire. This is not aspirational to anyone. This is not something I want to cross. This is not something I want to use. It’s not something that I look at and say, wow, that’s amazing, I mean wow, What the hell were they thinking?

And a lot of people in our industry, this is what they’re building. It’s terrible. This is the bridge I want to cross. [Shows Golden Gate] This is how I want to arrive at a destination. This is classy. This is limitless. This is inspiring. This is gorgeous. Every single aspect of this is gorgeous.

Think about all of the engineers and all of the architects and all of the people that drove rock to this bridge and their families and how happy and proud they are when they walk over this bridge and when they see this bridge in newspapers and they see it in movies and they are part of this bridge. That’s what we all want to feel. That’s what I want to feel, and I know everyone in this room wants to feel.

So, this is why design is important and this is why this coordination is important, and this is how we’re leading and building this company. So, your homework for the weekend is to cross this bridge, think about that, and then also think about how we take those lessons into doing what we want do, which is carry every single transaction in the world.

CrunchBase Information

Jack Dorsey

Square

Information provided by CrunchBase

Color.com Was Acquired For $350,000 (The Domain Name, That Is)

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 08:11 AM PDT

By now, everyone and their dog have been able to form and voice their opinions about the $41 million in early-stage funding raised by mobile photo sharing app developer Color.

Of course, it is a heck of a lot of money, put in ahead of the actual launch and early user reception of the product to top things off, so evidently most people will deem it a frivolous investment.

Only time will tell if it is, or if it’s instead a genius move.

In the interest of feeding those that see the financing round as one of the most apparent signs of a major bubble in technology, consider this: the company spent more money acquiring the domain name color.com than most startups will raise in their lifetime.

As pointed out by industry blog Domain Name Wire, the fledgling company bought the domain name for $350,000 from its previous owner. The sale of the domain name, which was brokered by Go Daddy, was initially reported in December 2010.

For your comparison: Y Combinator provides seed funding for roughly 20 startups with the capital required to make such a purchase. Heck, 100x that money got Yahoo Flickr.

Update: and as Rafat Ali points out in the comments, they also bought Colour.com, which means they probably spent close to $500,000 for the pair.

Of course, one needs to recognize that the domain names are now company assets and that the money wasn’t ‘burnt’ – the startup can always sell them for a good price even if they fail.

How The Mainstream Media Is Failing Us With Its Nuclear Hysteria

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 07:17 AM PDT

The news from Japan is both awful and appalling. Awful: 23,000 confirmed dead or missing, and counting. Appalling: pretty much anything to do with the damaged Fukushima nuclear plant. Nuclear meltdown like Chernobyl! Deadly contaminated milk and radioactive tap water! Tokyo a postapocalyptic ghost town! A plume of radiation that threatens America’s West Coast!

Where do they get these morons? Again, twenty thousand people are dead, and the drooling dimwits of the media can’t stop babbling about Fukushima, where exactly one person died – a crane operator who had the misfortune to be up in the cab of his vehicle when the fifth largest earthquake in recorded history hit – and fewer than 30 were injured, only a handful of whom required treatment for radiation exposure.

But all the nattering nabobs can talk about is the hysteria cited above. I used to have time for CNN, but next time I visit America, it’ll be Fox News all the way. At least their idiocy is entertaining. I dare you to try to watch this CNN clip without cringing. It seems Bob Dylan was wrong: you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—

It’s been interesting seeing which Fukushima stories went viral. First, Josef Oehmen’s post, the day after the disaster. (Why? My theory: because on the day it was the only available information written by someone who sounded like he actually knew what he was talking about.) Then Randall Munroe’s brilliant radiation explainer, which would have made Edward Tufte himself weep with delight. Finally, yesterday, this undeniably awesome Badass of the Week.

In short, the truth, context, and most compelling stories of the disaster have been promulgated by a) a weatherman, b) an amateur, c) a cartoonist, and d) Badass of the Week. Meanwhile, what were the so-called “real media” up to?

@GreatDismal
William Gibson

Western media in race against time; hysterical nuclear bullshit nearing critical meltdown, yet millions are still uncontaminated.

March 18, 2011 11:26 am via TwitterrificRetweetReply

Of course I’m far from the first to be furious about this. Talking Points Memo, James Altucher, and Tim Bray, among many others, led the way. Noted environmental activist George Monbiot argues that Fukushima should turn people pro-nuclear power. But the voices of reason are mostly lost in the hurricane of panicked nonsense.

What went wrong? Well, never ascribe to malice what can be ascribed to ignorance, so I’m going to optimistically argue that the basic problem is that most journalists simply don’t have a clue when it comes to science and engineering. They don’t understand what they’re writing about; they don’t know which questions to ask; they don’t understand that science, unlike the arts, is ultimately about provability and falsifiability, not interpretation and opinion; they don’t know when government advice is reasonable and when it’s terrified CYA boilerplate; and they don’t know when to call bullshit on whatever source they have dredged up to provide “balance,” which they worship beyond all explanation.

Worse yet, instead of linking to their sources, they expect us to take what they say on faith. Consider Ben Goldacre’s recent excoriation of the (usually respectable) UK newspaper The Telegraph for a ridiculous piece headlined “Wind farms blamed for stranding of whales”, which was about a scientific paper which said nothing of the sort, and which wasn’t linked to in the article. Every serious story about Fukushima should link to that XKCD diagram. I can’t believe I just typed that sentence, but it’s true.

@eqe

New rule: I don't read "news" stories that don't link to primary sources. http://bit.ly/gQNxu4

March 20, 2011 11:13 pm via webRetweetReply

Every story should link to all of its sources. Today the online story is the story of record; paper is disposable, irrelevant, and obsolete before it’s printed. But too many mainstream journalists still think print-first, which is one reason you get this kind of context-free nuclear hysteria, or “wind farms kill whales”, or the risible “cell phones kill bees” story from The Independent—again, a “serious” newspaper—four years ago.

To be fair, part of the problem is that no mainstream journalist could countenance writing about Hideaki Akaiwa in a manner as irreverent and entertaining as that of Badass of the Week; and they do still sometimes hit ‘em out of the park. Take this stunning New York Times piece about the so-called Fukushima 50. That is, if you can penetrate the paywall (at least in Canada, where I live). I know they have their reasons, but it’s sad to see the NYT (which has some excellent journalists who do understand technology) about to take two steps back from the online world just when we need them most.

This is all just going to get worse, because, increasingly, all stories are tech stories. Politics? Obama’s staggering online fundraising. Sports? BALCO and high-tech new equipment. Culture? These days, even fine art is all about the Arduino. Technology has insinuated itself into our lives to such an extent that every story now has a technical aspect — but yesterday’s dinosaur journalists will continue to write about them in the same clumsy-to-moronic way that they wrote about Fukushima.

Disaster there was averted by genuine heroism and desperately hard work. Nuclear power is potentially extremely dangerous and raises many serious issues, and it’s important to debate them in a well-educated way. Instead we got a crowd of fearmongering idiots, each trying to shriek louder than the last. As a result, Fukushima was the first major world story for which the best way to stay well-informed was to tune in to the knowledgeable blogosphere—and tune out the so-called “mainstream media.” We all know they’re dying. Now I’m starting to wonder why we should care.

Image credit: John Morrison, Flickr

InsideView Raises $12M To Give Businesses Social Sales Intelligence

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT

InsideView, a service that mashes up social data for enterprises to increase sales productivity, has raised $12 million in Series C funding led by Foundation Capital with Emergence Capital Partners, Rembrandt Venture Partners and Greenhouse Capital Partners participating in the investment round. This brings InsideView’s total funding up to $37 million.

The company's flagship product, SalesView, crawls through more than 20,000 web sites, social networks and databases including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers, Reuters, and SEC filings, to give businesses sales intelligence and information that will aid sales operations with helping develop and maintain leads and clients.

SalesView is available as a stand-alone Web application as well as integrated with CRM vendors like SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SalesForce.com. The service currently has over 75,000 users with more than 1,000 companies that access SalesView's feed, including Ariba, Centive, Cisco/WebEx, JobScience, and SuccessFactors.

In 2010, revenue grew 130 percent and CEO Umberto Milletti says that sales are expected to increase by 100 percent in 2011. Milletti says that interest in using InsideView’s product has increased as social media becomes a crucial part of the sales process in the enterprise.

“Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter in the enterprise is no longer an ‘if,’” he says, “It is a reality.” Of course, it would make sense for an enterprise company playing in the CRM space (i.e. Salesforce, Microsoft) to buy InsideView. But Milletti believes InsideView is best as across-platform company that will remain independent.

InsideView will use the new funds to expand distribution partnerships and to invest in market education to train sales people to use its applications. Competitors include Hoovers and Genius.

CrunchBase Information

InsideView

Information provided by CrunchBase

Boom! Walgreens Buys Online Retailer Drugstore.com For $409 Million

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 05:05 AM PDT

Drugstore juggernaut Walgreens this morning announced that it will acquire online retailer Drugstore.com in a transaction with a total enterprise value of approximately $409 million.

As a result of the merger, Walgreens will acquire the Drugstore.com website in addition to other websites operated by the company, including Beauty.com and SkinStore.com.

Walgreens, which operates 7,689 drugstores across the United States, had fiscal 2010 sales of $67 billion. Walgreens will fund the acquisition with existing cash and anticipates the transaction to close by the end of June 2011.

Founded in 1998, Drugstore.com registered more than $456 million in sales in 2010. Walgreens says it will maintain drugstore.com's corporate office in Bellevue, Washington, after the merger is completed. Drugstore.com employs approximately 1,000 people.

Under the terms of the agreement, Drugstore.com stockholders will receive $3.8 in cash for each share of stock, which represents an equity value of approximately $429 million. The purchase price per share is a premium of roughly 102 percent over drugstore.com's 30-day average closing stock price, and a premium of approximately 113 percent over yesterday’s closing price of Drugstore.com's common stock.

Walgreens President and CEO Greg Wasson, commented:

"This acquisition offers a unique opportunity that will provide us immediate access to more than 3 million savvy, online loyal customers, and will allow us to move even closer to our existing customers through relationships with new vendors and partners, adding approximately 60,000 products to our already strong online offering.

Importantly, drugstore.com's well-recognized presence in the health, personal care, beauty and vision categories, including such strong websites as drugstore.com, Beauty.com, SkinStore.com and VisionDirect.com, will complement and extend many of our own multi-channel initiatives that have been driving growth in our business."

Drugstore.com will maintain separate branding of its websites after the merger closes.

Walgreens says it expects the merger to be dilutive to earnings per share in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2011 by approximately 3 cents, and further anticipates the transaction to be dilutive to earnings per share by 3 to 4 cents in fiscal 2012, and 1 to 2 cents in fiscal 2013 because of its intention to reinvest in the business.

CrunchBase Information

Drugstore.com

Walgreens

Information provided by CrunchBase

Steve Jobs To Tawkon: “No Interest” In Your Phone Radiation Measurement App

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 04:48 AM PDT

I see you driving ’round town with an app that measures cellular radiation, and I’m like, “no interest”.

Apple head honcho Steve Jobs has made it abundantly clear that Tawkon‘s phone radiation measurement application is not welcome on its official App Store, pushing the startup to make it available for free (for jailbroken iPhones) through Cydia instead.

Tawkon sent a courteous email to Jobs in the hopes of gaining approval for distribution of the application through Apple’s App Store, only to receive a characteristically curt response back:

No interest.

Sent from my iPhone

The full email thread is below, followed immediately by Cee-Lo Green’s ‘Fuck You’ music video.

CrunchBase Information

tawkon

Steve Jobs

Information provided by CrunchBase

Total Immersion Raises $5.5M From Intel, Others For Augmented Reality Platform

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 04:20 AM PDT

Augmented reality software company Total Immersion this morning announced that it has secured $5.5 million in a funding round led by Intel Capital, with existing backers Partech, iSource and Elaia Partners participating. The company has now raised more than $11 million in funding.

The additional capital will be used to step up development of its D'Fusion software platform and to expand operations in Asia and the United States, grow its community of developers and explore new consumer markets.

Founded in 1999, Total Immersion provides a commercial augmented reality platform that enables developers to blurs the line between the virtual and the real world by integrating realtime interactive 3D graphics into live video streams. See demo video below.

Intel says it will work together with Total Immersion to develop new usage experiences for its own platforms. It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time the chip maker’s venture capital arm invests in an augmented reality software company – it also took the lead in a $14 million financing round for Layar announced back in November 2010.

CrunchBase Information

Total Immersion

Information provided by CrunchBase

Venture Capitalists May Hate AngelList, But They’re Still Using It

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 10:37 PM PDT

AngelList, a sort of social network that brings entrepreneurs and investors together to talk about and fund deals, is more controversial than the average Joe might think. But one thing’s clear, top tier venture capitalists are using the site to find companies.

OATV Partner Bryce Roberts recently unsubscribed, citing too much noise in the email flow from the site, as well as a personal issue with the herd mentality of investors around certain deals. That created more yelling and personal attacks by bloggers than I’ve seen in a while (much of it rounded up here).

Most of the small angel investors I talk to love AngelList because it gets them information on some deals, and information is hard to come by when you aren’t a celebrity investor. But when I ask more well established investors about AngelList, they usually reply with something like “meh.”

What those investors are saying and what they’re doing appear to be two different things. According to date supplied to us by AngelList founder Babak Nivi, well known venture firms are requesting lots of introductions to companies (a first step towards investing). Here are the venture firms, ranked by number of introductions requested:

1. General Catalyst – 64 intros
2. Atlas Venture – 61 intros
3. Bessemer – 60 intros
4. First Round – 53 intros
5. Charles River – 44 intros
6. IDG Ventures – 41 intros
7. Partech – 40 intros
8. Accel – 40 intros
9. Andreessen Horowitz – 39 intros
10. Polaris – 39 intros
11. Index – 34 intros
12. Spark – 27 intros
13. Redpoint – 26 intros
14. High Line – 23 intros
15. GRP – 23 intros
16. Highland – 22 intros
17. Balderton – 21 intros
18. Metamorphic – 20 intros
19. DFJ – 20 intros
20. Floodgate – 19 intros
21. Mayfield – 17 intros
22. Sequoia – 16 intros
23. Matrix – 16 intros
24. Shasta – 14 intros
25. Google Ventures – 14 intros

This certainly suggests that someone at those firms are paying attention, and actively involving themselves in the AngelList process. Here’s what Josh Stein, a Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, has to say about the value of AngelList in response to a question on Quora:

AngelList is an incredibly powerful platform for connecting entrepreneurs with capital and has rapidly become one of my best sources of early-stage dealflow. I read every summary the system sends me.

Here’s one reason AngelList is a big improvement for me: most entrepreneurs are all too familiar with how inefficient and time intensive a process raising capital can be but may not realize that this is also true for the investors. To make the best investment decisions I want to see as many deals as I can but the traditional method of companies contacting me by email, usually referred through someone we both know, imposes a non-trivial amount of overhead in that each intro then requires a followup – which is most often to politely decline – and which requires care to avoid offending any of the parties involved. This may only take 15-30 minutes but when you’re seeing 3-5 new deals/day, it adds up.

On AngelList, in contrast, I’m presented with a clear, crisp “elevator pitch” in the introductory email and further have access to a detailed summary with a single click. Because there is no human introduction involved at this stage, if the deal isn’t a fit I can just hit “delete” and move on. This is the best of both worlds – I can see as many deals as I want with none of the wasted time on the no-fits.

Very excited to see where Naval and Nivi take the system over time. I think they are really on to something here.

Why are these venture firms so active on the site? Nivi says two reasons – 1. There are startups doing Series As and beyond on AngelList.
2. Lots of VCs are co-investing with angels in Seed rounds.

Whatever their reasons, they’re using it. Even if they hate the fact that it exists.

CrunchBase Information

AngelList

Information provided by CrunchBase

That Was Fast: The Speak-To-Search Extension For Chrome

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 07:21 PM PDT

It seems like just yesterday that I was writing about Chrome 11′s awesome new ability to let you speak to the browser by way of HTML5. In fact, it was just yesterday. But that hasn’t stopped a team from coming up with a Chrome extension to get it to work in search boxes across the web.

Speechify is an extension that Dugley Labs churned out in record speed yesterday. With it, many of the search boxes you visit on the web gain the little microphone icon that when clicked, allows you to speak your search. It works on Google, Bing, YouTube, Hulu — a ton of sites. And it works well.

Saying “TechCrunch” on Google returns results for TechCrunch. Saying “MG Siegler” on Bing returns results for me. Saying “Friday video” on YouTube returns that damn song.

It’s great — but also a little buggy. For example, the microphone shows up on Quora, but it doesn’t actually work (I think their auto drop-down may be to blame). And the microphone sometimes appears in odd places, like the title box in WordPress — but it still works!

The best implementation has to be Google with Instant turned on, because it allows you to search without hitting the keyboard at all.

Of course, this type of technology is old hat in the mobile space — meaning it’s a couple years old. But it’s still nifty to see on the web without any plug-in needed. I suspect we’ll see a lot more web apps and extensions that take advantage of this. In fact, AreYouWatchingThis has already implemented it on their site, icantfindthegame.com.

Currently, the plugin requires Chrome 11 beta (or dev), but the feature should be moving to the stable builds soon as well.

CrunchBase Information

Google Chrome

Information provided by CrunchBase

Google TV PM Brittany Bohnet Leaves Google To Found A Startup

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 05:56 PM PDT

Google TV Product Lead Brittany Bohnet has just announced that she’s leaving Google after four years to try her luck as an entrepreneur, presumably as a co-founder of an as of yet un-named startup.

At Google Bohnet was a Product Marketing Manager who worked on products like Maps, Earth and iGoogle, but most recently Google TV. Before Google Bohnet worked in PR at Apple as well as Marketing at Tiny Pictures. Bohnet has also been a founder before, being the CEO of Median Media which was a PR consulting company for Silicon Valley startups.

We’ve contacted Bohnet for more details and await her blog post about the matter. Bohnet most recently made TechCrunch in a post about her engagement to PATH co-founder Dave Morin.

Update: Bohnet tells me her company is still in “stealthish-mode,” which means that you’ll probably be hearing about it first here.

Says Bohnet on taking the risk and becoming an entrepreneur, “I've long been inspired by female entrepreneurs and it's a great feeling to now be one of them. The possibilities are endless and I'm excited to create a company of my own.”

CrunchBase Information

Brittany Bohnet

Information provided by CrunchBase

Views.fm Makes Dropbox Look Sexy

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 05:38 PM PDT

The Web is a medium for sharing. Whether it be photos, videos, music, links, code, we share the content we produce and consume all the time. The rise of the social graph has only brought more attention to the ways we share and with whom we share. After all, sharing is caring, amirite friends?

In a recent post, I talked about some of the problems that remain in a specific (and familiar) part of the content-sharing sphere: file-sharing. At the end of the post, I mentioned the popular cloud storage, sync, and file-sharing startup, Dropbox, as a service I use frequently. Part of what makes Dropbox so great is its simplicity — you download the utility, create an account, and you can easily share all of your electronic files in a virtual cloud folder, collaborate with friends and colleagues, and sync between devices and hard drives. Boom.

Though Dropbox is fast becoming a Silicon Valley darling and passed the 4-million-user mark at the end of January 2010, parts of the Dropbox sharing experience are lacking. (Admittedly, like every other site out there.) Sharing an entire Dropbox folder, for example, remains difficult unless it’s your Public folder. The sharing options are limited, and the utility’s photo display doesn’t really have a great interface, either.

Enter: Views.fm, a viewer that enables quick and elegant presentation of your Dropbox content. Views.fm allows you to create either public or secure, privately-shared folders that are automatically organized in an easily scan-able thumbnail view.

The creators of Views.fm, Gordon Cieplak and Tyler Love, are both designers and engineers (Cieplak is currently the Creative Director at 8tracks and Love is the Senior Developer at Tumblr) and have worked as freelancers and employees at media organizations. In doing so, they’ve become all-too-familiar with the tools available to share media, Cieplak said, especially in a professional setting: “Views.fm is our effort to make that file sharing process suck less”.

Both admit to being regular Dropbox users and big fans, but said that they think the utility is optimized for “dork on dork collaboration” and doesn’t allow for advanced presentation to clients or friends and family. So, they built Views.fm on the Dropbox API to take advantage of the fact that, if you’re a Dropbox user, your files are already organized in its cloud. This makes the file-sharing fast and easy.

Views.fm offers you the capability to share your files publicly by giving anyone with the link to the folder the ability to browse and download the shared folder — or privately, in which your folders are only available to those you invite via email.

Enhancing the Dropbox experience, private sharing also enables you to view and edit who has access from your shares list and provides the ability to comment on the folder itself as well as individual files. So, that means you can share a folder with 80 people without having to let each person know that he or she isn’t the only one with whom you’re sharing the file.

Most cloud services cater to one type of media, (like Vimeo for video, Soundcloud for music, Flickr for photos, for example), which is great for final presentation and user consumption, Cieplak said, but not so much for iteration. Therefore, Views.fm offers unique layouts for each variety of media, be they audio files, audio folders, images, or regular files. You can see the Muxtape-inspired audio file interface on the right.

Views.fm makes it really easy to use its site as a portfolio, as all you have to do is share a folder full of images, and it takes care of the rest. Views is really designed to allow creative people (Cieplak cited the many underpaid contractors, specifically) some elegance and edge for a final presentation to clients, as well as collaborative tools to rapidly iterate.

Currently, Views.fm is only available for Dropbox, but the creators said that they are hoping to add as many services as possible, as soon as they can. But, at this point, they are both still working full-time for their respective employers.

In the end, it seems that the optimizations that Views.fm adds to the Dropbox viewing experience will likely only be truly useful to sharing addicts or habitual users of the cloud sharing service. To the rest this may just be a sexy Dropbox skin. There’s nothing that says Dropbox couldn’t simply add some of these features themselves, or acquire the startup to integrate for them.

At this point, Views.fm is totally free and the founders said they plan to keep it that way for the foreseeable future. But, without a revenue model on the horizon, they probably shouldn’t quit their day jobs just yet.

CrunchBase Information

Views.fm

Dropbox

Information provided by CrunchBase

Dorsey Is Back In Action At Twitter, And That May Be Formalized Soon

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 05:29 PM PDT

While everyone is going gaga over Lady Gaga at Twitter, it’s the gradual return of another creative genius to 795 Folsom Street that’s got die hard Twitter fans all hot and bothered. Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey, as first reported by Business Insider’s Nicholas Carlson, is currently in talks with Twitter management to expand his role. We’ve confirmed independently that this is indeed the case.

We’re hearing, and its been reported elsewhere, that Dorsey is even more involved in meetings at Twitter following Evan Williams departure as CEO, going beyond his capacity as Chairman and getting more hands-on with product strategy. And Dorsey has been showing up for “Tea Times,” Twitter’s Friday meetings.

But sources say that nothing has been formalized yet, and it is unlikely he would step down as CEO of Square for something at Twitter.

Dorsey invented the micro-blogging service in 2006, while he was at Evan William’s podcasting startup Odeo. Dorsey became CEO of Twitter in 2007 and then was kicked out in favor of Evan Williams in 2008. Williams relinquished the CEO role in fall of 2010 to Dick Costolo, who is primarily responsible for steering the company in the direction of a viable business model namely Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends.

Perhaps one poignant sign that the Dorsey/Twitter relationship has thawed? Dorsey’s nostalgic tweeting about Twitter’s beginning, on its five year anniversary.

Twitter PR gave us the following official statement regarding Dorsey’s position with the company, “Twitter is lucky to have the involvement of its founders. As we said last fall, we’re fortunate that our chairman, Jack Dorsey, has been able to get even more engaged in the company. His assistance has and will continue to be invaluable.”

If one thing’s known for sure, it’s that Twitter is a ten minute walk from Square, and Dorsey’s been going back and forth a lot.

Image via/ a pretty impressive Vanity Fair article of Dorsey (which you should totally read here).

CrunchBase Information

Twitter

SquareTrade

Information provided by CrunchBase

Color Looks To Reinvent Social Interaction With Its Mobile Photo App (And $41 Million In Funding)

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 05:02 PM PDT

$41 million. From Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank. Pre-launch.

That's how much a brand new startup called Color has to work with. Your eyebrows should already be raised, and here's something to keep them fixed there: this is the most money Sequoia has ever invested in a pre-launch startup. Or, as the Color team put it, "That's more than they gave Google."

But the founding team goes a long way toward explaining it. Headed by Bill Nguyen — who sold Lala to Apple in late 2009 — the company has attracted a wealth of talent. It has seven founders including Nguyen and company president Peter Pham, who previously founded BillShrink. And its chief of product is DJ Patil, who was previously LinkedIn’s chief scientist.

So what exactly is Color?

Update: The application is now available for the iPhone at Color.com. Android is coming tonight.

At first glance, it looks like another mobile photo app, like Path, Instagram, or PicPlz. You take snapshots with your mobile phone (the app supports both Android and iOS at launch) and they appear in a stream of photos. And there aren't even any of those trendy lenses to spruce up your images. Sounds pretty basic, right?

But the beauty of Color stems from what it's doing differently. Unlike Instagram and Path, there isn't an explicit friend or following system — you don't browse through lists of contacts and start following their photo stream. Instead, all social connections in the application are dynamic and established on-the-fly depending on whom you're hanging out with. And your photos are shared with everyone in the vicinity. In some senses this is the Twitter of photo apps — it's all public, all the time (I'm ignoring Twitter's protected tweets, since most people don't use them). Another way to look at it: it’s almost the complete opposite of Path, which is built around sharing photos with an intimate group of friends.

It's difficult to explain what Color does with a bullet list of features, so I'll try painting an example that hopefully demonstrates how it works.

Say you walk into a restaurant with twenty people in it. You sit down at a table with four friends, and start chatting. Then one of your friends pulls out their phone, fires up Color, and takes a snapshot of you and your buddies.

That photo is now public to anyone within around 100 feet of the place it was taken. So if anyone else in the restaurant fires up Color, they'll see the photograph listed in a stream alongside other photos that have recently been taken in the vicinity.

In a crowded area these streams of photos will get noisy, so Color also has some grouping features. Tell it which four people you're eating with, and Color will create a temporal group with a stream of just the photos you and your buddies have taken. But here's the twist: because everything on the service is public, you can also swipe to view other groups, to see what the tables next to you are snapping photos of. And you can always jump to the main stream, which shows a mishmash of photos taken by everyone.

It takes some time to wrap your head around, and my time with the app was limited, so I can't really vouch for how well it works. But there's some very interesting technology that's working behind the scenes to make Color more than just a simple group photo app.

First are the social connections, called your Elastic Network. All of your contacts are presented in a list of thumbnails ordered by how strong your connection is to that user. Whenever Color detects that you're physically near another user (in other words, that you're hanging out), your bond on the app gets a little stronger. So when you fire up the app and jump to your list of contacts, you'll probably see your close friends and family members listed first. But if you don’t see a friend for a long time, they'll gradually flow down the list, and eventually their photos will fade from color to black-and-white.

These social connections are important because they're the only way to view a stream of photos beyond those have been taken near you. If you fired up Color in that restaurant example from earlier, you'd only be able to see photos that had been taken by friends and strangers within 100 feet of that restaurant. That is, unless you jump to your social connections. Tap on your best friend's profile photo, and you'll then be able to see all of the photos that have recently been taken within 100 feet of them. In other words, Color is trying to give you a way to see everything that's going on around you, and everything that's going on around the people you care about.

The Groups feature also makes use of this elastic network. In the restaurant example above, the application would likely already know who your friends were based on your previous interactions and would automatically place them in the same group — you wouldn’t have to manually do it yourself.

Color is also making use of every phone sensor it can access. The application was demoed to me in the basement of Color's office — where there was no cell signal or GPS reception. But the app still managed to work normally, automatically placing the people who were sitting around me in the same group. It does this using a variety of tricks: it uses the camera to check for lighting conditions, and even uses the phone's microphone to 'listen' to the ambient surroundings. If two phones are capturing similar audio, then they're probably close to each other.

So far I've described a compelling and unique photo app with some neat tricks. But how exactly is Color going to make "wheelbarrows of cash", as Nguyen says?

At this point the company is still very early on, but it eventually plans to offer businesses a self-serve platform for running deals and ads as part of the Color experience (you fire up the app to see the photos being taken around you, and you also see the special of the day, for example).

But that's just the start. Nguyen has visions of fundamentally changing some aspects of social interaction and local discovery with the app, which he considers part of the so-called Post-PC movement. Using all of the data being collected (remember, the app is taking advantage of all of your phone's sensors), Color hopes to eventually start recommending nearby points of interest, and maybe even interesting people.

There are still plenty of questions, even about the existing service. This kind of voyeurism — you’re sharing photos with the world and looking at photos from strangers — could take a while to get used to. People may reject it entirely. Or it may be completely addictive. There’s really no way to tell until people start using the app in the wild.

The future is unclear, but promising. And with this much money in the bank and a staff of 27, Color has plenty of time to hone in on what works.

CrunchBase Information

Bill Nguyen

Information provided by CrunchBase

YouTube Now Helps You Make Movies…Without A Camera

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 04:35 PM PDT

By now you’re undoubtedly familiar with the incredible amount of footage that’s uploaded to YouTube — the current count is 35 hours of video uploaded every minute. And with video cameras integrated into smartphones, tablets, and computers these days (not to mention dedicated video cameras) it’s easier than ever to record that content. Unfortunately, there are still plenty of people who simply don’t have access to recording equipment. Today, YouTube is looking to do something about that.

The site has just launched a new portal at YouTube.com/create where you can design your own video clips using GoAnimate, Stupeflix, or Xtranormal, each of which lets you ‘build’ custom videos featuring virtual avatars, custom speech, and more.

Each of these third party apps has now been integrated into YouTube. Choose one, and you’ll jump into their editing interface where you can put together a video for free. Each of them also offers freemium options (more sound options, animations, etc.) which you can pay to access.

YouTube says there’s no financial relationship between these partners — it just wanted to give everyone a chance to participate on the site (the third parties will obviously benefit from the exposure, though). And while it was already possible to crosspost a video from GoAnimate, Stupedflix, or Xtranormal to YouTube, this makes the process more seamless and will help introduce the apps to new users.

There’s just one problem, at least for now: the third parties are responsible for hosting their editors, and they’re currently under heavy load so they aren’t working very well at the moment. YouTube says that the partners will be working to compensate for this increased load and that they should perform better soon.

I tried to make a video on Xtranormal but couldn’t get it to work. But here’s a classic video built using the tool:

CrunchBase Information

YouTube

Information provided by CrunchBase

Serlet Transition Out Appears As Natural As OS X Transition Towards iOS

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 04:19 PM PDT

Back in October of last year, the day before it was formally unveiled, I wondered if OS X Lion would be the last of its kind. There were two main arguments: the big cat name choice and the colossal rise of iOS. With today’s news that OS X father Bertrand Serlet is leaving Apple after 14 years (and 22 years working with CEO Steve Jobs), the question has come roaring back to life.

Apple has been giving OS X big cat nicknames since 10.0 (though they started off as informal codenames at first). The forthcoming latest iteration, OS X 10.7, has been given the name “Lion”, the king of the jungle. But more important than the name is what’s inside Lion: iOS-like features. A transition is happening. Apple made this very clear during the initial preview of Lion. It’s OS X meets the iPad.

Some have been interpreting this transition as a reason for Serlet’s departure. After all, why would he leave now in the “middle” of OS X Lion’s development, as Gizmodo puts it, unless he was unhappy? But the truth is that OS X Lion is pretty much locked and loaded at this point. There’s undoubtedly polish being added, but it’s being released to the public in a few months after a few years of work. Apple does not allow outsiders to see products in the “middle” of their development, and yet a developer beta of Lion has been out for weeks now.

This is not the same as key Chrome OS architect Matthew Papakipos jumping to Facebook last year. As it turns out, Papakipos actually did leave in the middle of development, as Chrome OS still has yet to be released to the public. The fact that Chrome OS is already about six months late from Google’s initial timetable (and is still a few months away) suggests Papakipos may have seen the writing on the wall. Again, that doesn’t appear to be the case with Serlet here.

Nor is this like the situation in which SVP of Devices Hardware Engineering, Mark Papermaster, left Apple last year amid the iPhone 4 antenna controversy.

Instead, Serlet appears to be transitioning out at a very natural time, as Digital Daily’s John Paczkowski details today. “He's leaving because he feels it's time and likely because Lion seems a perfect monument to his legacy at Apple,” Paczkowski writes.

At the same time, we are well into a massive software shift at Apple. Last quarter, Apple sold roughly 34 million devices that run iOS. During the same time, they sold about 4 million Macs running OS X (which was also a new record, by the way).

34 million to 4 million.

That’s not to say OS X is no longer important to Apple. Quite the contrary — you can’t make apps for iOS without OS X. And, of course, iOS is directly derived from OS X. We’re simply seeing the two begin to merge into a more unified experience. And new vice president of Mac Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, is leading that charge. That’s exactly why he took the stage last October to show off the new iOS-like features of Lion (whereas it was Serlet who took the stage two years ago to show off OS X Snow Leopard). It’s no longer point & click, it’s flick & swipe.

The main question still remains: is OS X Lion the last of its kind? Will Federighi’s first duty as head of Mac software be to more fully merge iOS and OS X? Will that be a “Mac OS XI” (or perhaps more appropriately, “OS Xi”) or something else?

Serlet may not be leaving as a result of OS X becoming more like iOS, but it’s happening nonetheless. Both appear to be natural transitions.

[image: Engadget]

CrunchBase Information

OS X

Information provided by CrunchBase

Google’s Algorithmic Cat And Mouse Game [Infographic]

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 03:05 PM PDT

Click for a larger version.

The search wars have officially arrived! That’s right folks, Google’s ongoing quest to make its search results more impervious to spammers has become an infographic, which basically is a badge of honor for any tech bitchmeme.

Closet and not so closet SEO nerds can follow the above flowchart tracing Google’s storied path, from getting rejected by Excite@Home in favor of current Demand Media honcho’s iMail through the chutes and ladders of its algorithmic spam chase to the company’s most recent attempts to quell the rising influence of content farms like um, Demand Media.

“People trade links off topic in large reciprocal link farms.” –> “Google filters out sites that have a high ratio of reciprocal links.” And so on and so forth …

Most ominous part?

“Every change is a new opportunity! Some webmasters are already building business models around the exploiting of opportunities created by the latest algorithm change.”

Shudder.

Via SEOBOOK/ ByJess.net

CrunchBase Information

Google

Information provided by CrunchBase

Exclusive Data On Groupon’s U.S. Revenues And February Falloff

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:31 AM PDT

By most accounts, Groupon is growing like gangbusters. It’s taking market share around the world, hiring left and right, and priming for a $25 billion IPO. But how much of the group-buying site’s revenues are U.S. versus international and how is it doing in its home market, especially after its disastrous Super Bowl ads?

The chart above shows a pretty good estimate of Groupon’s monthly U.S. revenues based on an analysis of every Groupon deal on its site over the last year (each deal page shows how many Groupons were sold and the price). Some key takeaways: From January, 2010 to January 2011, Groupon’s U.S. monthly revenues grew eightfold from $11 million to $89 million. But February saw a huge 30 percent drop-off to $62 million. Was that a backlash because of the Super Bowl ads or simply a breather after three months of crazy holiday deals?

When you add up all of the monthly figures for 2010, it comes to an estimate of $460 million for Groupon’s annual U.S. revenue. That is 60 percent of Groupon’s rumored worldwide 2010 revenue of $760 million reported by the WSJ. And it also gels with this report on the U.S. group buying industry, which estimated total 2010 U.S. group buying revenues at $1.1 billion, with Groupon accounting for less than half. But the numbers being thrown out for Groupon’s 2011 revenues are in the $3 billion to $4 billion range. That means that either these estimates are low (a possibility), or that the bulk of Groupon’s growth is overseas.

This data came from a source I trust who monitors Groupon’s offers and has written custom software to gather the data. My source is not the only one doing this kind of digital sleuthing. Late last year, I received a similar data dump from another source that I never published because I wasn’t sure I could trust that source. Looking back now and comparing the two data sets, they are almost identical month by month. Again, these are just estimates based on the equivalent of scraping Groupon’s site, and thus could be missing something. Or something could have changed in February to make the data collection methods used less reliable.

But let’s look at one more set of data, this time from comScore. Its estimate of Groupon’s U.S. traffic shows it peaking in December. 2010 at 10.7 million unique visitors, and then drooping to 9.7 million in February, 2011. It stands to reason that traffic to a deals site is strongly correlated to revenues.

I reached out to Groupon CEO Andrew Mason about this data. He doesn’t talk about revenues, per his policy, but on the traffic numbers from comScore he says emphatically, “my man, don’t you know that shit is bullshit?” He sent me the Google Analytics chart at the bottom of this post, which he says shows Groupon’s true U.S. traffic trend. I guess we’ll find out how accurate this data is when Groupon files for its IPO, assuming it breaks out U.S. revenues in that filing.

CrunchBase Information

Groupon

Information provided by CrunchBase

AOL HuffPost To Freelancers: We Want You On Staff, But Real Journalists Only Need Apply

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:25 AM PDT

In the reorganization of AOL and the Huffington Post into the Huffington Post Media Group, the company succumbed to layoffs and consolidated AOL news sites into the Huffington Post, folding or shutting down thirty properties. While a number of staffers were let go in this round of layoffs, what about the freelancers? It has been speculated that their time at AOL may be over, though it has remained largely unclear as to how freelancers for the properties in question will officially be treated going forward under the new media group.

Today, Peter Goodman, editor for business and technology news for the Huffington Post, held a conference call for freelance business writers for AOL properties, and we were fortunate enough to get the inside scoop on what was discussed from a freelancer (who shall remain anonymous) on the call.

One of the major points Goodman tried to make, says our source, is that AOL HuffPost wants freelancers who are professional journalists (not bloggers) to become staffers. Goodman encouraged all of the call attendees to apply for full-time jobs with the Huffington Post Media Group and reiterated that the new group is “ultimately about greater journalism.” Of course, we know that AOL HuffPost has been on a journalistic hiring spree of late.

One interesting quote from Goodman, “We can’t replace professional journalism with an ad hoc blogging arrangement….we don’t want to confuse professional journalists with bloggers.” Non-professional journalists (perhaps bloggers churning out content for the AOL Way?) from what we heard, are being encouraged to freelance.

AOL also wants to staff up its main offices in New York, LA and Dulles, and create large newsrooms of these professional journalists. If you don’t want to move to these locales, AOL is bullish on these freelancers joining hyperlocal news platform Patch.

The HuffPost business desk will move into the AOL 770 Broadway offices on Monday, and staffers have already been notified that they should be packing up their belongings for the move to the new office. Goodman says AOL HuffPost wants to create a large newsroom where all staffers are sitting in one area.

Goodman also made sure to caution freelancers that the integration is not happening immediately and that the media group is still evaluating each property to determine the best way to proceed in terms of hiring. He said that over the next three weeks, editors of every site will be meeting with the HuffPost to determine what the ratio of staffers and freelancers should be for each property.

While this all seems great for some freelancers, the picture Goodman painted isn’t so rosy. Many freelancers who had already applied for HuffPost jobs weeks ago have not received a response fron editors, says our source.

Photo Credit/Flickr/VictoriaPeckham

CrunchBase Information

AOL

Information provided by CrunchBase

Keen On… Why Google Is Making Us Fat and Lazy [TCTV]

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:25 AM PDT

Nicholas Carr once argued that Google is making us stupid. Googlization of Everything author Siva Vaidhyanathan goes one step further than Carr. Google, Vaidhyanathan says, is like junk food. It indulges our need for speed and convenience and thus makes us fat and lazy. As ice cream rather than spinach, therefore, Google is bad for us.

The good Dr. Vaidhyanathan doesn't tell us to quit our Google habits. But he does advise our to "be careful.” Google isn't a force for the good, he tells us and thus we need to be wary about how we use the service and how much we trust it – especially given recent accusations of its biased results. Indeed, Vaidyanathan is himself so worried about Google that he calls for what he calls some "public infrastructure" to control its power.

This is the second part of a two part interview with Vaidhyanathan. Yesterday, the University of Virginia professor talked about his controversial new book The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry).

Why Google is making us lazy

Last word on Google: “Be careful”

CrunchBase Information

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Information provided by CrunchBase

Offline Labs Goes Online With $1 Million Seed Round. Enter The Project Dragōn: Sōsh

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:10 AM PDT

A year ago, Rod Begbie, Rishi Mandal, and Vivek Patel were all working at Slide. Then the Google deal happened. Shortly thereafter, each of them left — but they weren’t ready to stop working with one another yet. The result is Offline Labs and they had no problem attracting a large group of investors to their seed round.

Specifically, Offline Labs has raised $1 million from Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, Benjamin Ling, Karl Jacob, Jack Herrick, Kevin Freedman, Richard Chen and firms: Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Polaris Ventures. “We’re thrilled to be associated with such a solid group,” Mandal says.

So what does Offline Labs do exactly? Well, that’s still classified. On their site, all you’ll see is vague statements that they “believe that ‘online’ can and should improve ‘offline’” and that they’re “bridging the gap.” But we do know a little bit more.

For the past few months, the guys have been heads down working on their first product which had been codenamed Project Dragōn. The product is now finally coming together under its official name: Sōsh. It should be ready in a few weeks, Begbie says. “Simply put, Sōsh is a completely new way for people to discover and share things to do with their friends in the real world,” Mandal notes.

Their website gives a few more hints. The tagline is “be more social” and the site includes talk of “curated activities, exclusive events, and deals — for members”. So is this this the Members Only jacket meets Foursquare meets Path meets Groupon hybrid? Hard to say. But I’m intrigued. We should know more soon.

I, For One, Welcome Our New Dancing Android Overlords

Posted: 23 Mar 2011 11:01 AM PDT

Little known (and completely false) fact: once upon a time, the Android Robot (the platform’s lovable lil’ green logo) entered a dance contest. First place was a lucrative dance contract with one of the world’s finest agencies, with dancing gigs from Paris to Rome. Second place meant you got to dance next to a Sony Ericsson stand in Taiwan. Needless to say, Android didn’t get first.