Tuesday, April 12, 2011

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Senator To Propose New Internet Sales Tax

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 08:09 AM PDT

The second most senior Democrat in the U.S. Senate, Dick Durbin, will propose a new scheme that would force online retailers like Amazon and iTunes to collect local taxes for each and every transaction. He’s expected to make the proposal the day after Tax Day, and it’s expected to be controversial within two seconds of having been announced.

You already know the story. Durbin, from Illinois, complained in February that out-of-state businesses (again, like Amazon and iTunes) were essentially freeloading off the taxes that local brick-and-mortar stores pay. Why should Amazon be able to sell you a Blu-ray disc without having to collect tax, but if you were to buy that same disc from the local Walmart? Exactly.

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Inadco Emerges From Stealth As The ‘AdSense For Leads’

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 08:03 AM PDT

Inadco is launching today as a cost-per-lead ad network for display advertising. The startup is similar to an “AdSense for Leads.” The company is also announcing that Dave Zinman, previously the general manager of display advertising at Yahoo, is joining Inadco as the Chief Operating Officer.

Cost-per-lead advertising creates leads from ads, where a users fill out targeted forms. Inadco believes that this is a multi-billion dollar market because a lead can be universally defined by all advertisers and it can occur online (vs. offline) for all advertisers. Essentially cots-per-lead ads result in a tangible way to get customers.

Inadco’s technology platform allows advertisers to purchase media on a Cost-Per-Lead basis, and enables publishers to sell ad inventory to earn more revenue than they can with impression or click-based advertising. Inadco then distributes the display ads across the web for advertisers. Founder James Walker says that Inadco sole focus on “solving the cost-per-lead problem,” telling us that “bringing cost-per-lead to dispay advertising is all we think about.”

And the startup has the backing of a number of well known angel investors. Inadco $1.5 million in angel funding from Ron Conway, LowerMyBills founder Matt Coffin, and RightMedia founder Michael Walrath. Last year, Inadco raised an additional $5 million in series A funding from Redpoint Ventures.

Google also dabbles in cost-per-lead advertising, and it seems like a safe assumption that the search giant will bring this format to display ads. But Walker isn’t worried-he feels that the enormity of the market makes there room for a number of networks.

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BookingBug Secures $350,000 Angel Round To Scale Up

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 08:01 AM PDT

Online booking and reservation system BookingBug has been bootstrapped for some time now, but today it announces the inking of a solid Angel round to the tune of $350,000 from a small group of Angels. Among them, Philip Crawford (ex-Oracle, current chairman of Lombard Risk plc and Avanti Capital) is joining the board.

BookingBug enables businesses to share their availability – by hour, day, week or as classes, courses or events – and take bookings and enquiries online. The system is both realtime and distributed in that it’s booking and enquiry widgets can be embedded onto other sites, or affiliate partners and through social media.

(Founder Stories) How Mike Walrath Built Right Media And Sold It For $850 Million

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT

One of the largest exits of a venture-backed company based on the East Coast was when Right Media sold to Yahoo for $850 million in 2007. In this episode of Founder Stories, Mike Walrath tells host Chris Dixon how Right Media got started in the middle of the online ad bust, lost its biggest customer and almost went out of business, just before it launched its eventual business idea of an online ad exchange.

The ad exchange turned out to be quite lucrative. Right Media signed MySpace as a customer, and then attracted an investment from Yahoo, which bought the entire company. In the video below, Walrath continues to explain how he went about to build a liquid exchange for ads. The way he did it was by getting the ad network intermediaries first. He also recalls the buying frenzy that began when DoubelClick was put on the market, drawing a $3.1 billion bid from Google, followed by Microsoft’s $6 billion deal to gobble up aQuantive. “It was a wild time.” Walrath remembers, “I was getting calls from bankers every day.”

When DoubleClick was put on the market by its private equity investors that forced a decision point on the other players. “As long as DoubelClick stayed independent,” explains Walrath, “nobody else had to do anything.” But “once one went, then they are all going to go.” He had to figure out where he wanted Right Media to be in the sequence of M&A events which unfolded. At the end of the interview, Dixon asks him if the fact that Yahoo was already an investor predetermined the outcome, and teh two get into a nuanced discussion about the difference between rights of “first refusal” and of “first offer.”

Be sure to also watch Part I of Walrath’s interview that was posted over the weekend. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes.

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TubeMogul Relaunches As A Video Advertising Platform

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:30 AM PDT

For the past four years, TubeMogul has built itself up as one of the premier tools for online video producers to syndicate and analyze their online videos across the Web. Last year, it launched a video ad network called PlayTime that took advantage of all the video viewership data it was collecting, and on the strength of that product it raised $10 million last October. The company has been busy putting that money to work building on top of PlayTime to create a soup-to-nuts video ad platform around which it is relaunching the entire company today.

TubeMogul is now completely focussed on brand advertisers and their digital ad agencies. CEO Brett Wilson says it is “one place they can buy, place, track and optimize their video ads.” He calls it a demand-side platform (DSP) for video ads, much like Google-owned Invite Media is a DSP for ad agencies. It’s not just an ad network, it’s a whole lot more, folding in analytics and the ability to selectively place video ads on specific sites, or even to tie into existing advertising relationships.

You can think of it as a dashboard for video advertisers that lets them upload ads, select sites where they want them to run, bid on inventory, and get consistent analytics on how those ads perform. Plenty of DSPs exist for online display ads, but none yet for only video ads. “If you are an advertiser you will be able to log in, self serve and launch a pretty sophisticated video campaign in a matter of minutes,” promises Wilson.

TubeMogul is tapping into 60,000 auctions per second for video ad spots across 90 percent of the top 1,000 comScore sites. It has direct access to their ad servers either directly or through partnerships with video ad server companies (LiveRail, Adap.tv, and SpotXchange), ad exchanges (Right Media, adBrite), and other ad optimizers (Admeld, Rubicon).

This opens up a lot of remnant video ad inventory. Video ads placed through TubeMogul’s DSP during the beta period were running on average between $8 and $15 CPMs for preroll video ads, and between $2 and $7 CPMs for video ads running in regular display ad spots on regular web pages. If advertisers already have relationships with publishers, they also can plug in their existing economics.

The ads can be geotargeted, retargeted, or targeted by data imported from other ad-tech companies. And TubeMogul will support mobile and social video ads, such as ones people watch in exchange for virtual currency in games. For self-serve advertisers running video ad campaigns through TubeMogul, it will take 10 percent to 15 percent of the advertising budget. For larger ad agencies and trading desks, better deals are negotiable.

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HTC Unveils HTC Watch Video Streaming Service

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:21 AM PDT

After buying Saffron Digital two months ago, we didn’t hear much about HTC’s streaming video plans until today. The new Sensation on T-Mobile will be the first phone with HTC’s Watch application, a video streaming service that will send new movies down the line over 3G and Wi-Fi.

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eBay Acquires Turkish Marketplace GittiGidiyor

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:17 AM PDT

eBay is announcing the acquisition of Turkish auction marketplace GittiGidiyor. The deal follows eBay's acquisition of a minority stake in the company in 2007. With the new investment, eBay now owns approximately 93% of the outstanding shares of GittiGidiyor. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Launched in, 2001, GittiGidiyor has more than 6.4 million registered users. GittoGidyor is essentially an eBay clone, but localized for the Turkish market. The business also includes a mandatory escrow service for payments between buyer and seller. GittiGidyor’s largest categories are Fashion and Consumer Electronics. In addition to eBay, the company previously raised capital from iLab Ventures, founded and led by Mustafa E. Say.

eBay also believes that traffic and usage of the marketplace will increase, as Turkey is the world's 12th largest market for Internet usage, and has a penetration rate of 45%.

Serkan Borançılı, co-founder and chairman of GittiGidiyor's board of directors, issued this statement: Becoming an eBay company is a source of great pride for GittiGidiyor…By being fully part of eBay, we can accelerate our development, benefit from world class best practices and consolidate our leadership position in one of Europe's fastest growing ecommerce markets.

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TxtEagle Raises $8.5 Million To Give 2.1 Billion A Voice

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:08 AM PDT

Never mind tablets, smartphones, and mobile-social-location-photo-sharing apps. Heck, never mind computers. The single most important technology of the last half-century, the one that has most drastically changed the day-to-day existence of very nearly everyone on Earth, remains the plain old GSM phone: unloved and half-forgotten in NYC and Silicon Valley — but still used by the billion in the rest of the world.

That’s why Boston-based TxtEagle last week raised $8.5 million from a consortium including Spark Capital and RBC Venture Partners. Well, that plus a clever business model, a nifty technology platform, and partnerships with 220 mobile operators in almost 100 countries who between them cover 2.1 billion subscribers.

TxtEagle offers crowdsourcing and market research in developing markets. Clients such as UN researchers or advertisers hire them to survey masses of people; TxtEagle then forwards the survey (or other task) to thousands of individual members via their GSM phones, and pays them upon completion. You might guess that they communicate via SMS, and pay with cash — but no.

“People think we’re an SMS-focused company, and we’re really not,” says Nathan Eagle, their CEO and co-founder. Instead they have built their own platform atop the USSD protocol that GSM phones use to communicate with their service providers. (For the techies among you, USSD is to SMS as telnet is to email.) USSD communications are free, which gives TxtEagle a huge advantage in emerging markets where a) virtually all mobile service is prepaid, and b) the 10 cents it costs to send an SMS is a hefty chunk of the mere $2-3/day that many people make.

You would think the carriers would object to all this free communication over their airwaves — but they don’t, because of TxtEagle’s elegant business model: they pay their members in airtime, which they buy from the carriers in bulk. They’re also hooked into mobile cash services such as Kenya’s M-PESA, but their members generally prefer being paid in airtime, because it’s fee-free. Yes, that’s right; in the prepaid world, ie most of the planet, mobile airtime is becoming a currency as desirable as, and nearly as convertible as, old-fashioned cash.

Long-term, Eagle (who’s also an MIT professor) wants to turn their platform into a mechanism that subscribers can use to start generating their own content, a la Craigslist or Wikipedia. “You don’t see community-generated content there,” he says of the developing world, “because the mobile phone is how you access this content, and for every access you have to pay. At an income level of two dollars a day, that’s prohibitive.”

Interestingly, he’s skeptical about the forthcoming Android revolution that many believe will soon hit the developing world: “I’m not particularly bullish on how smartphones are going to radically empower emerging markets, when people still have to pay for every bit. The mobile phone has played a massive role in a large fraction of people’s lives, but whether smartphones are going to change things any further, I don’t know if I see it.” I think I ultimately disagree, but it’s a welcome note of caution amid the tidal wave of hype.

Cha-Ching: MediaStay’s Game Monetization Solutions Snag $21.5 Million

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:54 AM PDT

Mediastay is a French company that kind of stands out from the rest - and not just because it was founded by a group of teenagers back in 2000 (co-founder Eric Bennepthali started back when he was 16). The 60-person company specializing in online gaming payment solutions has just announced that it has closed a €15 million ($21.5 million) round of funding for further international development.  The money comes from Iris Capital and IdInvest Partners (formerly AGF Private Equity).


Digital Lumens Closes $10 Million To Bring Smart, LED-Lighting To The Industrial Market

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:45 AM PDT

A Boston-based, cleantech startup Digital Lumens closed a $10 million series B investment, the company announced today, that will allow it to bring its LED-based, intelligent lighting systems to warehouses and industrial facilities in the U.S., Canada and Mexico near term. The company's earlier backers all participated in the series B, including: Black Coral Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Stata Venture Partners.

Previously, the company focused on making warehouses greener in terms of lighting-related energy consumption. Digital Lumens’ chief executive, Tom Pincince, said of the company’s progress and near term strategy:

We’ve built a complete [lighting] solution from the fixture through the networking and the software. Our customers use, but don’t “do” lighting, unlike other the owners and operators of some commercial office buildings. It is valuable for them to have a single point of contact, and technology that guarantees interoperability within their facilities as they upgrade and retrofit their lighting systems to become more energy efficient.

Part of our appetite for growth is not just from warehouses to the broader manufacturing and industrial base here, but outside of the U.S. We can address Canada and Mexico. We're also looking into expanding overseas to address European and Asian markets that have similar requirements for energy efficiency, and in many cases, a culture of efficiency that's far more mature than the U.S. along with energy prices that are multiples of what we pay here.

Digital Lumens will also use some of its series B funding to develop new features for its LightRules software. LightRules helps facility owners and operators set up parameters by which they want their lights to respond to a number of factors, like brightening when the number of people in a facility increases, for example, or dousing at times of low occupancy. LightRules, down the line, will offer more granular controls, automating the lights’ response to energy pricing, and more.

One of Digital Lumens’ recent customers, Americold, replaced its older lighting systems— which used more energy, generate more heat, and aren’t as durable in the freezing temperatures of cold storage warehouses— with LED-based systems. The companies, and LEDs Magazine reported, that the installation was responsible for energy savings of 90 percent.

Mike Rubino, Digital Lumens chief financial officer remarked that working with the company’s earlier backers allowed everyone at the startup to get back to growing the business. Rubino is well-known for helping to take another cleantech firm, A123 systems public. While he could not comment on timing, he and the executive team at Digital Lumens do have hopes of an eventual public offering in the U.S.

As Digital Lumens focuses on greening factories and warehouses, and international expansion, a peer and competitor in the industry Redwood Systems, yesterday revealed that it is moving into smart building controls beyond lighting as part of its strategy.

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Cisco To Shut Down Flip Video Camera Business; Will Give Pink Slips To 550 Employees

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:44 AM PDT

Wow. Cisco has just issued a release stating that in a strategic plan to “align its operations,” the company will exit parts of its consumer businesses and realign the remaining consumer business to support four of its five key company priorities: core routing, switching and services; collaboration; architectures; and video. One of the casualties of this realignment: Cisco’s video camera Flip business, which was part of its $590 million acquisition of Pure Digital.

As part of the plan, Cisco will close down its Flip business and “support current FlipShare customers and partners with a transition plan.” Cisco will also refocus its Home Networking business and will integrate Cisco umi into the company’s Business TelePresence product line. As part of the transition, Cisco plans to eliminate 550 jobs.

Cisco CEO John Chambers issued this statement: “We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy…As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network’s ability to deliver on those offerings.”

So Cisco is focusing on its enterprise customers, and is basically shutting down its consumer facing products. The writing was on the wall for the Flip video business. In a world where consumers can now record and stream video directly from their iPhone, Android or BlackBerry phone, Flip’s video camera business is no longer novel or useful.

Cisco also pulled the plug on its web email product earlier this year. Chambers recently wrote a regretful, ‘mea culpa’ note highlighting that the company had disappointed investors and lost credibility. In an effort to refocus the company, Chambers said that “we will take bold steps and we will make tough decisions.” Clearly one of these decisions involves killing the Flip video camera business.

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LivingSocial Taps Into Rewards Programs With Next Jump Deal

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:15 AM PDT

Daily deals site LivingSocial is trying its darnedest to catch up to Groupon. It just raised another $400 million and is spreading its deals as fast as it can. Today, it is announcing a partnership with Next Jump, a company that runs rewards networks for corporations, MasterCard MarketPlace, and Hilton HHonors program. All together, 100 million consumers belong to rewards and perks programs run by Next Jump.

Next Jump will gain full access to LivingSocial’s inventory of deals, and the two companies will work together to integrate their respective technologies. It is a new distribution channel for LivingSocial which should help it keep scaling up the volume of deals and demand that it can handle.

For Next Jump, it is a natural fit since its business is also based on the concept of getting businesses to spend marketing dollars in the form of consumer discounts. It also runs OverWhelming Offers, its own daily deals site. But LivingSocial has much more traction and better deals, so it made more sense for Next Jump to partner.

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Paul Ceglia Returns To Haunt Zuckerberg, This Time With More Alleged Email Evidence

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:09 AM PDT

There used to be an interesting argument for Christianity. Either Jesus was ‘right’ or he was mad. But he couldn’t be just misguided. A similar argument occurs to me regarding the case of Paul Ceglia who has returned to the fray after claiming back in August that he owned 50% of Facebook. Well, it appears he may, potentially, have some interesting evidence to back up this claim.

He started from a tough place. A convicted felon, about to be charged with fraud on an unrelated company, Ceglia had waited seven years to file his first lawsuit. Facebook dismissed the claims. But now he’s back with DLA Piper, a bigger law firm used to tech cases, which has gone through his email archive with a fine toothed comb and come up with a devastating initial salvo.

The UK Startup Visa: Only Halfway There

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 04:19 AM PDT

This is a guest post by Danvers Baillieu and Emma Peacock who are both senior associates at international law firm Pinsent Masons LLP. Danvers is the co-founder of Bootlaw.com, the legal meetup for tech start-ups and entrepreneurs and he specialises in technology law; Emma specialises in immigration and employment law and contributes to HRnetwork.tv and out-law.com.

The news that the British government has introduced the new “entrepreneur visa” has been widely welcomed by the start up community, not least here on TechCrunch Europe, and cited as evidence that the UK has in one respect stolen a march on Silicon Valley as the US government seems unwilling or unable to make progress with its much vaunted Startup Visa Act.

In the short time that the new rules have been in force, we have already been asked by London based start up clients to advise them on obtaining visas for overseas based founders under this new route and wanted to share our views – and specific concerns with the community, in the hope that this new regime can be further improved. The headline takeaway is that, to quote Jon Bon Jovi, “we’re halfway there”, but to quote John Reid, the regime is not yet “fit for purpose”.

SoundCloud Launches Audio Q&A Platform – Quora For Audio? [200 Invites To Go]

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 03:17 AM PDT


SoundCloud, the audio platform not unlike Cinch or Audioboo, has launched Takes Questions, a new product in beta that lets anyone pose questions and others leave answers in audio, from a customisable webpage. Is this trying to be Quora for audio?

Maybe not. There are far more ‘media’ reasons to create this feature. Takes Questions is going to allow celebrities and musicians who use SoundCloud – and there are a few, as the service has grown up as a predominantly music platform – to “engage more deeply engage with their fans, followers and friends in a simple-to-use and personal way” says the startup. This feels more like a public voicemail box to me.

China’s Online Game Market Surges; Set To Top $8 Billion By 2014

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 02:41 AM PDT

China’s got game. A lot of game. In fact, the Eastern power is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in the online games market. According to a study released by business and consulting firm Pearl Research, the online games market in China will exceed $8 billion by 2014.

Though the Chinese gaming market experienced somewhat sluggish growth in the first part of 2010, by year’s end it had rebounded to 25 percent overall growth, reaching $5 billion in sales. Thus, it seems that it is no longer even remotely outlandish to predict that China will make up a quarter of the industry’s total global sales by 2014, with the U.S. falling to 22 percent, as forecasted by The Financial Times, via investment bank Digi-Capital in February.

The bright outlook for Chinese gaming is bolstered by the fact that country’s top online game companies experienced another banner year of growth in 2010, led by gaming colossus Tencent, which saw revenue push $1.4 billion. Tencent was followed by Netease at $749 million, Shanda Games at $680 million, Perfect World at $374 million, and Changyou with $327 million.

What’s more, in 2010, Shenzhen ZQ Game became the first massively multiplayer online game company to be listed publicly on the Shenzen Stock Exchange — its IPO was for a reported $110 million. Not to mention, Sina Weibo, China’s microblogging platform (in which users can write posts of 140 Chinese characters, a la Twitter), surpassed 100 million users in February 2011, according to Pearl Research.

With the surge in online activity, both in online gaming and China’s social web, it should come as no surprise that Pearl Research predicts that Asian, specifically Chinese, companies to drive international consolidation of gaming enterprises. Flush with cash, Chinese online gaming companies are expected to reach out beyond domestic markets to strike deals with foreign competitors, driving overseas expansion, and a flurry of M&A activity in 2011.

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StylistPick Secures $8M In Series A To Expand Its Monthly Fashion Offers

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 02:28 AM PDT

Proof that online fashion remains a hot space, StylistPick, the fashion buying site that offers members a personalised offer each month, has raised $8 million in a Series A round co-led by Accel Partners and Index Ventures. Founded in 2010, Stylistpick offers a neat take on the fashion club model: Customers signup to StylistPick and are asked to take a short quiz to "identify their fashion profile". Then each month via email they receive tailored recommendations for fashion items such as shoes and bags, which claim to be matched to their taste as well as being picked by "leading fashion personalities" or professional stylists as used by celebrities such as Alexa Chung, Dannii Minogue, Paloma Faith and Pixie Lott. Interestingly, each offer is pegged at a set price of £39.95p including postage and members can also choose to decline said offer and therefore skip the month.


The Price Is Right, Now It’s Time To See How The iPad Newsstand Really Does

Posted: 12 Apr 2011 12:49 AM PDT

Lost amid the uproar over Apple’s in-app model change was that fact that their new in-app subscription service creates the first real opportunity for news publications to thrive in the Internet-connected world. Why? It’s connected to iTunes (and as such, millions of credit cards) and it’s extremely simple. But due to some of Apple’s demands — namely, that customers be in control of offering up their own information — publications have been slow to adopt the new service. So it hasn’t really been put the the test. But it’s about to be.

Earlier today, Bloomberg Businessweek released their iPad app. Along with it comes a subscription option administered by Apple. You have one choice: after your one free trial issue, you must subscribe for a monthly fee. The cost? $2.99. Yes, for the entire month. It’s almost shocking because it seems downright fair.

For the past several weeks, everyone has been up in arms about The New York Times’ humorously convoluted paywall. The price to access their content from the iPad? $20 a month — and that doesn’t include other access points. It’s both confusing and seemingly overpriced — it’s actually a much better deal to subscribe to the paper itself and then get the digital access (including tablet access) for free.

But Bloomberg Businessweek takes a product that is $4.99 an issue on the newsstands — or roughly $50 a year if you sign up for a subscription — and gives it to you for much cheaper. Again, shocking in that it makes sense (distribution costs are removed, etc) and that a company is actually doing it.

Erick was underwhelmed by the app because it does little more than take the content that’s in the magazine each week and digitizes it. And most of the content you can find for free on Bloomberg Businessweek’s website. But there are still plenty of people that pay for the print version each week — all they did here was make it a better deal for iPad users.

And I actually like the app. It’s simple — which I mean as a compliment. It isn’t cluttered with gimmicks and hard-to-understand controls. It flows nicely. And each issue weighs in well under 100 MB, which is something none of the other newsstand transplants can say.

So far, those who have downloaded it and reviewed it in the App Store seem to agree. Many talk about just how fair the pricing is, and just how well the app works as intended. After over 50 reviews, it has a 5-star average. In the magazine-to-app world, this is completely unheard of. Normally, it’s the exact opposite: users bitching about unfair pricing and a confusing app experience as one-star ratings abound.

Again, it looks like Bloomberg Businessweek may be the first to get the transition right. And so the new subscription model can really be put to the test. (Yes, The Daily puts it to the test as well, but it exists only on the iPad — it didn’t have to transition from the print world.)

Currently, the Bloomberg Businessweek app is number 113 on the list of Top Grossing iPad apps. Not great, but it is only day one. The Daily, which costs $0.99 a week (or $39.99 a year), is currently number 8 on the list, so Bloomberg Businessweek should rise.

Other publishers are likely to be torn as to whether they hope it does rise or not. On one hand, a successful magazine on the iPad means everyone has a shot in this new frontier. On the other, many are likely unhappy with the $2.99 a month price. If a weekly gets that rate, what’s a monthly worth? $1.99? $0.99? Many of them are still humorously trying to sell issues for $5 a pop on the iPad.

It was a decade ago that Apple proved was seemed unbelievable at the time: that people would pay for music online. It simply had to be accessible and the price had to be right. They created that environment with the iTunes Store for music. And now they’re trying to do it for media with in-app subscriptions through the App Store. If publications stop resisting the changes, it may still work.

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Indian Stealth Startup Mojostreet Secures $350K From Former Microsoft VP, Others

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 10:47 PM PDT

Hyderabad-based Mojostreet, a location-based mobile gaming startup, announced today that it has received $350K in seed funding, led by Srini Koppolu, former Managing Director of Microsoft India and J.A. Chowdary former Managing Director of Nvidia India. Mojostreet will use its infusion of capital to ramp up hiring efforts and to assist in the startup’s beta launch in early May.

Like a mix of its American counterparts Foursquare, SCVNGR, and Booyah’s My Town, Mojostreet’s first product is a location-based app, which will allow users to check in at various point of interests in a game format. At launch, Mojostreet will be restricted to 5.5 million locations in India, but Founder and CEO Kalyan Manyam said that he hopes to launch Mojostreet in the U.S. and Singapore shortly thereafter.

The startup has partnered with several major national retail outlets in India to provide real world offers to complement the virtual gaming experience. So, as users check in at various locations, they will be awarded virtual currency, or “Mojo bucks”. Gamers are pitted against their friends in a mobile scavenger hunt, unlocking special offers at check-in, and stockpiling virtual cash along the way.

Manyam, who also founded Indyarocks.com — an Indian social network with more than 6 million users — said that mobile gaming is currently exploding among the more than 600 million mobile phone users in India. As a result, Mojostreet will be available on Blackberry, Nokia, IPhone and Android phones.

“As data plans become more affordable in India, location-based services are going to play a crucial role in community-based entertainment and eCommerce”, Manyam said. “And we are very excited to see the ways Mojostreet can influence real world experiences and commerce”.

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VHX Wants To Be Your Video Dashboard For The Entire Internet

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 09:26 PM PDT

Launching in private beta today and founded by Casey Pugh, part of the original Vimeo team and Know Your Meme co-founder Jamie Wilkinson is VHX.tv, a site that aims to “combine the best parts of the TV experience with the best of the web.” But wait, haven’t we heard this like a bajillion times?

Right away there’s something different about VHX as a video-sharing experience, namely that when you hit the service after initially registering and following other users, the videos in your VHX dashboard start playing right away, almost like you’ve turned on the social video TV.

The site, which runs in Flash, is admittedly quite slow to load, but once it does the experience of watching videos in your dashboard stream (what your friends have decided to share), in your queue (what you have flagged to watch later) or in your history is pretty much the closest I’ve come to a non-fragmented experience on the web. This is great if you want to watch online video while folding clothes or cooking or doing exercise, and don’t want to click around aimlessly for the next distraction.

VHX also lets you download a bookmarklet that lets you share or queue up videos from around the web, and the VHX browser extension tracks what videos you’ve watched on other sites, adding them to your history. You can share directly to Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Tumblr from within the app, linking to the original video. And while VHX currently only supports Vimeo and YouTube, Wilkinson tells me he wants to add other formats soon, essentially becoming a video dashboard for the entire web.

Working in the online video space is a hard row to hoe, especially when you stand in the shadows of YouTube, Vimeo and Boxee, and audience success is not necessarily matched by a viable business model. “Online video consumption is not a simple problem to solve. Everyone distributes video differently and we’re here to smooth out these inconsistencies for the end-user.  We’ve been working in online video for years, have great relationships with all the players,” Wilkinson acknowleged.

VHX is working on more-in depth features that would turn the service into “your own personal Internet TV Station” where users would be able to create video playlists to share on VHX or embed on their own blogs. Wilkinson eventually wants to give the user the ability to edit the videos themselves. The team also has native iPhone and iPad apps in development, as well as a Boxee app for those not content with watching videos on a computer screen.

The first hundred TechCrunch readers can get early access to the VHX beta here.

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Ask a VC: Bijan Sabet Returns to the Hot Seat. Send Your Questions Now!

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 09:16 PM PDT

This week, I invited Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital back to Ask a VC, because it’s been a while and there were a ton of questions we didn’t get to last time.

Sabet is in the middle of some of the most interesting companies on the Web today including Tumblr, Twitter and Boxee. And as you can see from his last time on the show, he’s a great guest. Last time we talked about everything from investing in Africa to why Boston is struggling to get its startup mojo back.

What do you want to know? Send your questions to askavc(at)techcrunch(dot)com. Feel free to check out his blog to come up with some good ones.

Run iPhone Apps Directly From Your Browser With Pieceable Viewer

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 07:12 PM PDT

Part of i/o Ventures first cohort, Pieceable is launching its first product today, the Pieceable Viewer. As you can see above with the Yelp app or here with apps like Hipmunk or Foodspotting, the viewer allows you to run and test out embeddable iPhone apps from your web browser.

Developers can publish their apps directly to the service and the Pieceable team will create a web page that displays a fully functional copy of the app. Developers or anyone who needs to share an app can then send a link to whomever they’d like to give the demo to.

“It ends up being the easiest way ever to share an iPhone app on the web,” CEO Fred Potter tells me. “There’s no UDID exchange, there’s no worry about the 100-device limit Apple places on dev accounts – it’s zero friction and hassle.”

Using Flash to simulate the app’s functionality, Pieceable Viewer works without any code modifications on the developer’s side, “It’s literally a one line command to publish an existing app to the viewer service,” says Potter.

But Pieceable Viewer isn’t Pieceable’s core product. The company itself, in the same space as Mobile Roadie and AppMakr, aims to be a WordPress for mobile platforms, helping people write apps even if they don’t know how to code.

Potter explains, “We’re focusing a lot on making sure people can build rich apps that have a very custom look and feel. But at the same time, we’re trying to make app creation as easy as it can be (on the same level as setting up something like a blog).” The company should be fully launching in the next couple of months.

Helping non-techies make apps is cool and all but I’m pretty satisfied with just the Pieceable Viewer, which should also support Android in the coming weeks. My grand vision for this is that tech reporters can use the service to include working app demos along with app reviews. Imagine how cool it would be if readers could actually try out the app while reading about it?

Currently the Viewer has a tiered-pricing plan, with Free getting you 1 simultaneous viewer, 1 app and a link that expires, $30 getting you 3 simultaneous viewers and 5 iPhone apps, and $60 getting you 10 viewers, unlimited apps in addition to app links that never expire.

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Location Discovery Service Scoville Lets You Find Hot New Local Spots

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 05:26 PM PDT

If you are a lover of spicy foods or hot sauces, you may be familiar with the “Scoville Scale”, which measures the degree of spiciness of chili peppers and their many conveyances.

Launching today in public beta is Scoville, a startup aimed at taking the temperature of local destinations. Taking a page from the Scoville Scale, the startup wants to help you record, discover, and share hot or trending destinations. Just as Twitter has its #followfriday hashtag, in which users suggest their favorite people to follow every Friday, Scoville is employing #toptuesday to give locations their due.

For the past month, Scoville has been in private beta, gathering data on Fourquare check-in habits. At the outset, only Foursquare users with 1,000+ checkins were accepted. The beta testers (which include uber evangelist Robert Scoble, Foursquare Founder Dennis Crowley, and open web standards promoter Chris Messina) were encouraged to log in at Scoville.com using their Foursquare account, pick the places they’d loved visiting over the past week, and to share them with their friends and followers. More than 5,000 people signed up for the private beta.

Founded by entrepreneur and engineer Gerald Goldstein and former product manager at Amazon and Visa Itamar Lesuisse, Scoville recently raised $400K in funding from Seedcamp, Kima Ventures, and Jaina Capital. The founders have been using the seed funding to grow Scoville’s engineering team, and Lesuisse tells me that the startup intends to launch “many new ways to share and discover places we love” — #toptuesday is just the beginning.

Scoville is currently using the data it has collected from its private beta to feed its recommendation engine, bringing together the destinations you’ve “liked”, your social graph, similarities with other users, and reputation (Lesuisse says they are using Klout’s API for the moment) to serve its users with a fully-personalized list of places each week.

The co-founder says that his vision is to leverage the "small signals infrastructure" — or the many signals we send on a daily basis, like check-ins, messages, and images — to reinvent the way people explore cities. And to attack that much-coveted domain: The interest graph. "These geo-located signals carry a great value when it comes to building users' interest graph", Lesuisse said.

He also said that he sees Scoville becoming a crowdsourced version of Time Out magazine — a fullservice discovery engine for local fare. Sounds good to me.

What’s more, Techcrunch readers can get an exclusive peak at the startup’s service by logging in here using your Foursquare account. Unfortunately, non-Foursquare-ers will have to get on the waiting list, but Lesuisse said that Scoville will soon be extending its service to include the uninitiated as well.

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Amazon, Love The Kindle Ads Idea — But The Right Price Is $99

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 04:21 PM PDT

When I first read the new that Amazon would begin selling an ad-supported Kindle, my heart sank. This is the beginning of the end, I thought. But that was only because the Businessweek article about the change left out one key detail: the ads will not be shown during the reading experience. Jason dug up those details.

Amazon will only be showing the ads on the Kindle home screen and on the screensavers, which is great. In exchange, people will be able to buy a Kindle for $25 cheaper — $114. An attractive price, no doubt. But it’s also ones that begs the question: why on Earth not go to the killer $99 price point?!

Imagine a Kindle for $99. There would be a frenzy. Amazon would sell so many of them.

Even though the $15 price difference may not seem like much on paper, the psychological importance of losing that third digit cannot be downplayed. It’s the very reason why many items are often sold for $9.99 instead of $10.00. And $0.99 instead of $1.00. And so on…

Now you absolutely have to believe that Amazon knows this. They’ve been the leaders in selling just about everything for a long time now. So you have to think they simply could not make a further $15 price cut work.

Amazon has always been cagey on Kindle sales, so there’s no way we can expect them to state their margins on the device. Others have estimated that the Kindle margins are likely “razor-thin” based on component tear-downs and other Amazon stated financial numbers. And when you take into account patents, development costs, marketing, etc, there’s a belief that Amazon may actually be eating money on each one sold.

So they must have looked over the potential numbers from advertising and determined that $114 was as low as they could go. But again, we’re just $15 away from the magical number!

I would bet that many people would gladly accept a Kindle with get this — two ads — running simultaneously on the homescreen if it meant a $99 Kindle.

Still, this is likely phase one of an experiment for Amazon. They’re probably eating money here to see how much a $25 price cut will jack up unit sales — and more importantly, Kindle book sales — and how much advertiser interest there will be. If either of those numbers are significant, maybe we will see the magical $99 Kindle just in time for the holiday season.

Remember when the Kindle was $399? You should, it was only three and a half years ago.

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BrightSource Nabs $168 Million From Google To Develop Ivanpah Solar Power Plant In The Mojave

Posted: 11 Apr 2011 04:04 PM PDT

Developers of large-scale, solar power plants BrightSource Energy Inc. closed another $168 million investment, the company announced today — this time from Google corporate. The funds will go towards the completion of the humongous, Ivanpah solar power tower plant in the Mojave Desert now under construction (image, right).

Three years ago, Google.org invested $10 million, and took an equity stake in BrightSource. This deal hailed from Google’s Green Business Operations team, however, and the funds are to be applied towards the completion of the Ivanpah project not Brightsource’s overall business, a Google spokesman confirmed.

Google’s director of Green Business Operations, Rick Needham, wrote more about the company’s reasons for investing in this project in an official company blog post today. He expressed hope that moving a solar project of this magnitude forward in Nevada, that could supply power to California, would reduce the cost of clean energy from renewable sources for Google, and the market overall. Google still buys most of its power from the grid.

According to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) is expected to be operational for 25 years after completion around 2013, and is expected to generate 392 gross megawatts of solar energy.

BrightSource attained power purchase agreements with major utilities, including Southern California Edison which helped it secure financing for Ivanpah.

Conservation and Native American groups have recently filed lawsuits against BrightSource, expressing concern over the company’s environmental impact to the Mojave, especially endangered tortoises and delicate habitat there.

At least Google’s not — or are they — investing in nuclear. BrightSource’s website notes that Ivanpah, when completed, is expected to almost double the amount of solar thermal electricity produced in the U.S. today.

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