The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Social Photo Aggregator Pixable Raises $3.6 Million
- (Founder Stories) How GroupMe Won SXSW: Grilled Cheese
- Sequoia Invests In Chinese Online Retailer Milanoo.com
- How A Tweetdeck, UberMedia Deal Could Cut Down Twitter’s Bird
- 83% Of Startups Plan To Hire This Year (Up From 73% Last Year): Survey
- OpenFlow Startup Big Switch Raises $13.75M From Index, Khosla Ventures
- MapQuest Nabs Former Google Docs Product Manager As Its New VP Of Product
- A Disaster In The Making? Sony’s PlayStation Network Suffers Prolonged Global Outage
- With Bridg.me The Conference Calls You
- Kiva Expands Micro-Loans To Green Businesses
- YC_Y_U_NO Give Twitter Link Readers Auto-Entry Into YC?
- Apple Is Tracking You To Build Something Very Valuable: Its Location Database
- Japanese Company GREE Buys Mobile Social Gaming Platform OpenFeint For $104 Million In Cash
- It’s Not Just Apple That Is Tracking Our Every Movement (TCTV)
- Formspring Names Ro Choy COO; Has Answered Three Billion Questions To Date
- Google Hires A Tech Blogger? Caroline McCarthy Leaves CNET For The Search Giant
- Xtify Retain Helps You Keep Your App Users Active
- Move Over iFund: DCM, Tencent, GREE, KDDI Launch $100M A-Fund
- Groupon Hires Google VP Margo Georgiadis As COO
- Google Allows You To Subscribe To Offers In Portland, New York City, San Francisco
- London’s Dream Of A Tech City Is A Nightmare With BT
- Playmatics Raises $1 Million To Make Reality-Based, Social Games
- No Coupons Here, Just Cash: Groupon Files For Another $6 Million
| Social Photo Aggregator Pixable Raises $3.6 Million Posted: 22 Apr 2011 08:55 AM PDT
Founded by 3 MIT graduate students, Pixable's service allows people to use of all their Facebook and image sharing site photo content like captions, tagging information, comments, and birthdays to make albums, slideshows, calendars and nor artwork. Pixable's browser-based simplifies the creation of albums, making it easy to use for anyone. One of Pixable’s early applications was a nifty tool that allows you to make mosaics of your Facebook photos. Since then, the startup launched Photofeed, a Facebook app and companion iPad app which will intelligently sort and categorize your friends’ Facebook, Instagram and Flickr photos. And most recently, Pixable extended Photofeed’s functionality to the iPhone with a newly launched app. Since its launch in January, Pixable’s Photofeed has sorted and ranked over 10 billion photos for its 500,000 users. The new funds will be used to further scale the company's engineering team and infrastructure to manage        
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| (Founder Stories) How GroupMe Won SXSW: Grilled Cheese Posted: 22 Apr 2011 07:26 AM PDT At this year’s overcrowded and overhyped SXSW conference in Austin, one of the few startups to break through the noise was group text messaging app GroupMe. How did GroupMe win SXSW? Grilled cheese. The company rented an outdoor food shack for something like $10,000 and turned it into the GroupMe Grill with free grilled cheese sandwiches and beer. The grilled cheese, says co-founder Steve Martocci in this episode of Founder Stories, was “an homage” to Phish concerts, where grilled cheese sandwiches are consumed in large quantities (watch the video above). The GroupMe Grill became a meeting point for attendees of SXSW, and it was one of the places everyone was taking photos of on Instagram (one of the other “winners” of SXSW). Jason Kincaid stopped by and did this video. All in all, two million text messages were sent through SXSW groups during the week of the event. GroupMe wasn’t the only text messaging startup at SXSW. Beluga, Fast Society, Kik, Textplus, Yobongo, and many others were also there in full force. Does all this competition worry the GroupMe founders? In the video below, CEO Jared Hecht says, “It lights a fire under our ass.” But the proliferation of all of these semi-private group texting apps says something about the “broadcast overload” problem on more open social networks where “conversations are sterile.” Be sure to watch Part I (on how GroupMe got started) and Part II (on where group texting is going) of this GroupMe interview. You can also check out other previous episodes of Founder Stories or subscribe in iTunes. (Disclosure: host Chris Dixon is an investor in GroupMe through Founder Collective).        
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| Sequoia Invests In Chinese Online Retailer Milanoo.com Posted: 22 Apr 2011 06:16 AM PDT
Sequoia Capital has invested ‘multiple millions of dollars’ in Milanoo.com, a China-based online retailer and wholesaler with a “passion for fashion”. The proceeds of the financing rounds will be used to strengthen Milanoo’s product supply system, optimize its online shopping platform, allow it to lower its prices and to hire more people. Launched in July of 2008, Milanoo.com says it has managed to consecutively increase its revenue by 600 percent each year that the company has been in business. Currently, the ecommerce company serves customers with fashion apparel and related products in over 180 countries around the world, in seven languages (including English, Spanish and French).
       
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| How A Tweetdeck, UberMedia Deal Could Cut Down Twitter’s Bird Posted: 22 Apr 2011 06:10 AM PDT  In the world of Internet startups people can become obsessed with the function of a product or app, often ignoring how a company can change the dynamics of a market just through its sheer existence. More often than not, it is not just a case of just having a better technology than the other guy. Equally it can be about a creating an incursion into a competitors' space which forces them to manoeuvre, destroying value for them, and creating value for yourself. No greater example exists of this today as the dramatic moves being made around the rumoured sale of Tweetdeck. I have been talking to sources well acquainted with the issue and what they have to say suggests a fascinating drama - which we are about to see played out.
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| 83% Of Startups Plan To Hire This Year (Up From 73% Last Year): Survey Posted: 22 Apr 2011 05:45 AM PDT
Silicon Valley Bank this morning released Startup Outlook 2011 (PDF), a survey of startup perceptions. The financial institution surveyed 375 U.S.-based, private, VC-backed software, hardware and cleantech companies, and found that startups are generally optimistic about current business opportunities and that they will continue to hire throughout 20111 to support the expected growth. In fact, 83 percent of surveyed startups said they planned to hire this year, up significantly from the 73 percent of startups that reported plans to hire in last year’s report. Other key findings: nearly one in four companies (23 percent) exceeded their 2010 revenue targets, again up significantly from 2009 (15 percent). Two in three surveyed executives posited that business conditions in 2010 are better than they were in 2009, and three in four expect they will get even better in the coming 12 months. Yay optimism! Twenty-five percent of respondents are pre-revenue, 74 percent had 2010 annual gross revenues of less than $10 million, and 95 percent had 2010 annual gross revenues of less than $50 million. The average 2010 revenues among revenue-generating companies was $13.9 million, and the average size of the responding companies is 55 employees. The number one challenge cited across all respondents is access to capital. Independent market research firm Koski Research conducted the online Startup Outlook survey for SVB Financial Group in February 2011. The full report can be found below.
startup_outlook_2011        
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| OpenFlow Startup Big Switch Raises $13.75M From Index, Khosla Ventures Posted: 22 Apr 2011 05:16 AM PDT  Exclusive - Big Switch Networks, a fledgling company building a platform for virtualizing enterprise networks based on the OpenFlow standard, has raised $13.75 million in Series A financing in a round led by Index Ventures and Khosla Ventures. The startup also announced that it has joined the newly formed Open Networking Foundation (ONF), a non-profit group on promoting OpenFlow and other Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies as a way to speed innovation in the networking industry. 
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| MapQuest Nabs Former Google Docs Product Manager As Its New VP Of Product Posted: 22 Apr 2011 04:49 AM PDT
Online mapping company MapQuest has named Vijay Bangaru VP of Product Management. Bangaru joins the AOL subsidiary from Google, where he was most recently responsible for all aspects of product development of Google Docs and Google Apps. Previously, Bangaru worked as a program manager at Microsoft, where he worked on the WinFS project and strategy for SQL Server. Bangaru will be located at MapQuest's Denver headquarters and will work on the company’s mapping and location-based services, which it indicates as an area of growth. In addition, Bangaru will be responsible for the overall user experience on MapQuest consumer products, including its mobile apps, developer tools and services. Bangaru joins recent hires Patrick McDevitt, VP of Engineering, and Anke Corbin, VP of Marketing. That makes three executive appointments in as many months. (Note: MapQuest is owned by AOL, which also owns TechCrunch)        
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| A Disaster In The Making? Sony’s PlayStation Network Suffers Prolonged Global Outage Posted: 22 Apr 2011 03:33 AM PDT
Not to mention, the outage comes on the same day that Amazon's cloud-based web services crashed, taking Reddit, Foursquare, and Quora (among others) with them. Unfortunately, it seems that today has become a fairly drastic example of the vulnerability of the cloud and the extent to which these outages can effect business-as-usual on the Web. But, as per Sony’s downtime: At this point, the network has been out of commission for over 20 hours, and it has been 16 hours since Sony last posted updates to its blog or Twitter account. So, the root cause of the problem remains unclear. So far, the only update Sony has blasted out to its users is this message: “While we are investigating the cause of the Network outage, we wanted to alert you that it may be a full day or two before we’re able to get the service completely back up and running. Thank you very much for your patience while we work to resolve this matter. Please stay tuned to this space for more details, and we’ll update you again as soon as we can”. The acknowledgement that there is indeed a widespread problem is admirable, but the company’s vague handling of public relations leaves something to be desired. Especially considering the fact that, several hours before, Sony released a statement through its EU blog, saying that the network outage may be a result of “targeted behaviour by an outside party”, bringing the possibility of cyberattacks into play. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the message has since been removed. This message, along with the lack of updates or details regarding the outage has led to speculation across the Web that this was potentially the result of attacks by the infamous hacker consortium, Anonymous. Earlier this month, the “hactivist” group launched what it called “Operation: Sony”, in which it employed Denial of Service attacks to take down the parts of the PlayStation Network. The move was hotly debated within Anonymous and was met with criticism from gamers, because it marked the first time the group didn’t simply attack an organization’s main site — and because the coup had a very real effect on consumers — the very people Anonymous claims to support. Since then, Anonymous has called for a near-term “cease fire” in relation to the PlayStation Network, and it has largely kept its word. In response to today’s outage, the group maintained its innocence on its Facebook page. The Examiner.com reported that Anonymous’ original beef with the company began “with Sony’s court case against George Hotz, which has since been settled out of court”. Sony sued Hotz for jailbreaking the PS3 and posting the videos of his hack and links to the third party software on YouTube. This led to the creation of “Operation: Sony”. However, in relation to today’s network outage, Anonymous has not yet officially denied responsibility for the attack, nor has it taken credit for it. Thus, it could be the case that members within Anonymous acted without consent from the majority, and therefore the band of hackers does not wish to take responsibility. Or, on the other hand, a more likely explanation is that Sony is taking advantage of Anonymous’ previous ill-will towards the company to distract users from the fact that the outage is actually an internal problem with the company’s servers.
Sony may not be aware of the exact problem (maybe it’s a glitch in an update or Steam integration issues), but as we near 24 hours of a global outage that affects millions of people, you’d think the company would at least be able to determine if the problem were due to internal or external factors. Being more open about these things, even though it might involve enduring a black eye, would be smart for public relations — and good for business. We will update as we learn more. Stay tuned.        
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| With Bridg.me The Conference Calls You Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:58 PM PDT
Yes the headline here is actually this startup’s trademarked tagline, but I couldn’t resist the opportunity to feature a Yakov Smirnoff reference on TechCrunch (yes, I know, I’m old). In the same conference calling space as Zipdx and Lippt, the idea for Bridg.me was pitched at last week’s NYC Startup Weekend by Justin Isaf and created by Justin Heilman and Jagdish Repaswal that day. Basically the gist is that current conference call platforms, with their dial in systems and unwieldy PIN access codes, are way too complicated to be productive. Being able to arrange such a call should be as simple as posting an event in your Google calendar. Users who want to initiate a call with Bridg can visit Bridg.me to schedule a call, enter phone numbers and book a time. Aside from its web booking capabilities, Bridg does indeed sync up with Google Calendar if you enter the hashtag #bridg in your Event description, along with the participants’ phone numbers in the 1+ # format. Bridg will then call all people involved during the time you’ve indicated on the event, using your Google calendar’s time zone. Woot. Right now Bridgs are 5 cents a minute per person after the trial period, but eventually the Twilio-powered company plans to offer its basic services for free and then unlimited plans with unlimited numbers of participants at a premium. “We want to make it an even more seemless experience,” Isaf tells me, “We hate conference calling as it stands. We want to make it as easy to conference call as it is to tweet.” Are you listening        
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| Kiva Expands Micro-Loans To Green Businesses Posted: 21 Apr 2011 09:29 PM PDT
Green Loans, which can be accessed from a new module on the lend tab, is a new vertical that allows the Kiva community to make loans towards green businesses and individuals who are helping make the transition to cleaner and more efficient sources of energy. Kiva Green Loans include both business and personal loans that contribute towards reducing energy expenditures, minimizing waste and pollution, recycling, or re-purposing used materials. For example, Blanca Rosa of Santa Cruz, Bolivia has applied for a $500 loan from Kiva to help her expand her business of converting taxi engines to run on natural gas, which ends up being a more affordable business model. With the loan she received from Kiva, she was able to purchase an emulator, timing devices, iron, bolts, and other supplies for her gas conversion workshop. Other examples of Green Loans include loans to create or purchase organic fertilizer; loans to purchase renewable energy-generating devices, such as solar panels, wind power and biofuels; loans for transportation, including hybrid cars, converting cars to natural gas or purchasing a bicycle; loans for "green" home improvements, including more efficient heating methods or high-efficiency cookers/low propane gas stoves; and recycling-related loans, such as re- purposing or transforming used or recycled materials. This is actually the second vertical that Kiva has expanded to. The non-profit just added student loans to the mix last Fall. Kiva has been growing like a weed since its launch in 2008. Currently, over 570,000 people have loaned more than $200 million to entrepreneurs in 59 countries via Kiva. Kiva’s repayment rate thus far (for entrepreneurs) is 98 percent and the startup is raising $1 million every 5 days for small businesses. And Kiva CEO Premal Shah predicts that the organization will raise $1 billion in microloans by 2015. Expanding the power of this service to green businesses is no doubt a worthy cause.        
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| YC_Y_U_NO Give Twitter Link Readers Auto-Entry Into YC? Posted: 21 Apr 2011 09:15 PM PDT
Right. Anyway. As it turns out, YC_Y_U_NO was created by a trio of YC hopefuls — Wesley Zhao, Dan Shipper, and Ajay Mehta — who will be interviewing this weekend for a spot with the selective startup incubator. The startup recently launched a project called Readstream, and, while it’s still very early, it’s not bad for a few day’s work. The app in its current form is very simple: authenticate with your Twitter account, and Readstream will present an excerpt of the most recent link to appear in your Twitter stream (e.g. if someone tweeted a link to a TechCrunch article, you’ll see an excerpt). Click the arrow button, and you’ll see the excerpt of the next most recent link (you can also jump between other recently-tweeted links using the right sidebar). As you read each excerpt, the site fetches and caches more stories, so you can jump smoothly between the links. It’s nice, but it isn’t especially novel: there are some much more polished services, like Flipboard, Trove, and the recently-launched News.me that also present stories based on your social network feeds. The twist, says Wesley Zhao, is that Readstream will eventually allow you to manually tweak the algorithm. For example, in the future he says you’ll be able to flip switches that let you toggle stories that are popular within a) just your social stream or b) the entire Twitter ecosystem. Zhao says that none of the other services give users granular control over their recommendation algorithms, and he thinks they’ll want it (he compares the controls they plan to those featured on Hipmunk). Of course, this is all still a long ways off. They’re still prepping for their YC interview. As for the YC Y U NO account, here’s the background story:
Also amusing: Zhao and Mehta met the team’s technical lead, Dan Shipper, after Shipper hacked their site PennMatch. The team has since launched Wheremyfriends.be (an animated map of your Facebook friends) and Grim Tweeper, a simple game inviting you to unfollow people on Twitter.
       
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| Apple Is Tracking You To Build Something Very Valuable: Its Location Database Posted: 21 Apr 2011 06:14 PM PDT
Your iPhone tracks you everywhere you go, and so do most phones these days. You knew that already. The reason this is a big story now is because it turns out that for the past 10 months Apple has been keeping your location data on a file in your iPhone itself where someone who knows how to get it, and has possession of your phone, could find it and figure out where you’ve been. For most people this is never going to be an issue, but for anyone involved in a lawsuit or nasty divorce, it is one more thing lawyers will be getting a subpoena for. It’s bad data retention policy and Apple could and should change it with the next update to iOS. But what is Apple doing with your location data anyway? It needs your data to build its own location database for use with geo-location apps and for diagnostics (it helps analyze where dropped calls happen the most, for instance). Apple already explained all of this back in July, 2010 when general counsel Bruce Sewell responded to questions from Congress about its location-tracking policies (letter embedded below). In that letter, Apple revealed that it had replaced the location databases it was using previously from Google and SkyHook Wireless with its own. Apple noted in the letter:
And in fact, Apple doesn’t track a person’s location if they turn Location Services off in settings, and it takes care to remove personally identifying information and encrypts the data before transmitting it from your phone to its servers. All that is fine. But the letter doesn’t say anything about the data staying on your phone. Certainly, you should have access to that data if you want it. A growing number of people actually consider having an archive of all their movements to be a feature not a flaw (see Foursquare, Google Latitude, etc.). They should be able to choose to keep the location data on their phone (after all, it is their data), but it should not be stored there by default. Once it becomes opt-in, consumers can choose to track themselves as long as they accept the risks of doing so. Have no doubt that Apple will keep tracking your movements as well. You do get some benefit from this in the form of wondrous geo-aware apps that open up the world around you. But you are also helping Apple build up its location database, which is an increasingly valuable asset. You are contributing to that database every time you walk out of your house with your iPhone.        
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| Japanese Company GREE Buys Mobile Social Gaming Platform OpenFeint For $104 Million In Cash Posted: 21 Apr 2011 06:04 PM PDT
OpenFeint provides a comprehensive mobile social gaming platform for the iPhone and Android platforms. OpenFeint's plug and play mobile social platform and application for smartphones includes a set of online game services such as leaderboards, virtual currencies and achievements running in a cloud-based Web environment. The platform first launched on the iPhone and iPad and more recently adding Android game developers to its rapidly growing community. In fact, the company has been growing like gangbusters on the Android platform, adding 215 Android games in the past six months. OpenFeint raised $12 million in funding from Intel Capital, Chinese gaming company The9, and Gree rival DeNa. GREE, which has a market cap of $3 billion, as an acquirer makes sense as the company is Japan's largest mobile gaming social network. The company’s games have over 25 million users. In fact, GREE just partnered with DCM, Tencent and KDDI to launch the A-Fund, to support early-stage Android entrepreneurs. GREE also recently announced a partnership with mobile community MIG33 and Tencent. And GREE has launched an American entity, GREE International, as an effort to enter the American gaming market. In fact, GREE International was the acquirer of OpenFeint in this transaction. Combined, the GREE and OpenFeint gaming ecosystem will reach 100 million users worldwide and Gree will uses its own resources to accelerate OpenFeint's growth. The joint company will soon opening offices in Beijing, Singapore and London and plans to double OpenFeint in size in 2011. This isn’t the first gaming company to be acquired by a Japanese gaming giant. DeNa bought social gaming startup Ngmoco for $400 million last year.        
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| It’s Not Just Apple That Is Tracking Our Every Movement (TCTV) Posted: 21 Apr 2011 02:58 PM PDT This story of how the iPhone and iPad are tracking the every movement of their users keeps growing. Now DC Policymakers Ed Markey and Al Franken have gotten into the act, calling on Steve Jobs for an answer to this potentially massively embarrassing story. While I haven’t had the opportunity to chat today with Steve about the situation, I did talk earlier to Robert Vamosi, a cybersleuth at Mocana and the author of the excellent new book When Gadgets Betray Us. And what Vamosi told me was pretty scary. According to him, it’s not just Apple gadgets that are betraying us. So guess who else is watching you as you watch this TechcrunchTV clip? We’ll have more from Vamosi’s interview next week.        
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| Formspring Names Ro Choy COO; Has Answered Three Billion Questions To Date Posted: 21 Apr 2011 01:02 PM PDT
Choy’s roots go back to RockYou as well where he was chief revenue officer, before leaving in 2010 to become CEO of Peerpong. Peerpong didn’t last, primarily because its question and answer product failed to delight users, Choy says. His new employer doesn’t have that problem. For all the hype and attention Quora gets thanks to its Valley-centric audience, high-quality responses, sky-high valuation and Facebook mafia pedigree, Formspring is way bigger. The site has more than 20 million monthly uniques and 3.5 million unique visitors per day. About three billion questions have been answered on Formspring to date, and about one million people respond to a question every day. That’s a lot of engagement. The only thing that puts Formspring and Quora in the same category is the fact that people ask and answer questions on their sites. While Quora is a quintessential example of a site championed by Valley insiders, Formspring has a very mainstream, college kid audience, reflective of its Indiana-founding roots. (The company has since moved to the Valley and is flush with $14 million in Valley cash.) And the questions and answers are totally different: Quora doesn’t allow users to poll each others’ opinions, it is seeking actual demonstrable answers to questions. And it prizes that ultimate answer more than the rights of the person asking. Formspring on the other hand is like those emails that used to go around where your friends filled out personal questionnaires and them routed them to more friends. They were annoying, but there was also an element of discovering more about a person you thought you knew that made them infectious. Formspring takes away the spammy chain letter element, and just leaves the infectious part. After stints at two companies that didn’t live up to their promise, Choy says he’s excited to join such a strong product team. His goals will be on the business and operations side, starting to experiment with revenue models this year. Sponsored questions that allow brands to interact with users is an obvious direction. But the big thrust is keeping users growing. 20 million users may be bigger than the competition, but to really prove Q&A is a mainstream social media product, someone needs to hit the 100 million user milestone.        
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| Google Hires A Tech Blogger? Caroline McCarthy Leaves CNET For The Search Giant Posted: 21 Apr 2011 12:43 PM PDT
Score one for Google. “In my time covering Facebook, Google, Twitter, and countless start-ups, I've learned so much from so many people and am incredibly grateful to you all. Though I'm a bit wistful about checking out of the fourth estate (at least for now), I hope that we can stay in touch as I move into a whole new side of the business”, McCarthy wrote on her blog this morning. McCarthy has been a writer at CNET for 5 years, since she started at the media outlet as a 21-year-old. Fresh out of college, she began working at CNET as an entry-level general assignment reporter. She was then formally assigned to cover social media and Web 2.0 about a year later, and began her column “The Social” at the same time. May 6 will be McCarthy’s last day at CNET, and she’s slated to start at Google on the 16th. As to what she’ll do before heading to the Googleplex? A trip into the California wilderness. (Presumably to prepare herself for the data-mining ahead.) You can read the rest of McCarthy’s announcement on her blog here.        
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| Xtify Retain Helps You Keep Your App Users Active Posted: 21 Apr 2011 12:12 PM PDT
If you’re like me you probably have about 20 to 30 apps on your phone you never use. According to Localytics, 55% of new users use an application less than four times, 26% using that application just once. The Xtify Retain platform attempt to solve this problem by giving app developers the ability to create their own retention messaging plan for free, pushing notifications like “We miss you!” based on certain user behaviors like when the app was last installed and opened. Now while the original purpose of Retain was to send a push notification to customers who haven’t used an app in a while in order to keep them sucked in, I’m thinking this could be used benevolently, like “Hey, we notice you never use ‘Pimple Popper for the iPhone’ (yes it exists), would you like us to delete it?” It also would be extremely useful in the case of app updates. For example, I initially missed the existence of Tilt Shift on Instagram because I had no idea the app had new features. I should probably just read TechCrunch more. Xtify, which has other products that allow customers to drill down into their notifications (for example, pushing a message to people with 1.5 miles of the TechCrunch office or who have achieved a certain level in a game), also provides users with deep app analytics. In the case of Retain it will provide data as to how well the retention notifications work. The company plans on monetizing by offering premium analytics features to power users. Helmed by Josh Rochlin, the New York-based Xtify has more than $3.6 million in funding from Acadia Woods, SeventySixCapital and others. The platform supports iPhone, Android and Blackberry.        
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| Move Over iFund: DCM, Tencent, GREE, KDDI Launch $100M A-Fund Posted: 21 Apr 2011 12:10 PM PDT
But in Asia– and much of the rest of the developing world– the anticipated mobile giant is Android. Android phones are just starting to hit Japan and China, and a flood of cheap new models are expected to come on the market within the next year. Expect a flood of new apps to follow that, particularly in China where venture capital is flowing like water. The rise of Android is as close to a no-brainer prediction as you can make with always volatile and uncertain emerging markets. Combine the market size of countries like Japan, China, Indonesia and India with cheap, increasingly-sophisticated devices and a massive base of gamemakers and hackers and someone’s going to make a lot of money. Silicon Valley companies have a long track record of screwing up in Asia, especially China. But Google would have to screw up so monumentally badly to blow Android’s Asian future. It would have to screw up worse than eBay, MySpace, Amazon, AOL, and, ahem, Google already screwed up in China, combined. So it’s not a surprise that DCM has launched a $100 million Asian A-Fund to support early-stage Android entrepreneurs. The surprise is that more firms haven’t been creating funds like these. Android development has already been a huge thrust of Innovation Works, the incubator started by former head of Google China, Kaifu Lee, for about six months. (Innovation Works is also our partner in producing TechCrunch Disrupt in Beijing, so expect to see a lot of Android innovation at the conference this October. More news on Beijing Disrupt is coming soon.) DCM general partner David Chao says the idea developed over dinner in Beijing with DCM, GREE and KDDI about three months ago where the group couldn’t stop talking about Android’s opportunity in their requisite countries. “There’s this explosion of freedom coming,” Chao says. “It’s probably the first time people all around the world feel like they can do something simple on mobile and unleash their talent. If we just did this in the US, it’d be incredibly restricting.” DCM’s fund will focus on startups in Silicon Valley, Beijing and Tokyo and investment decisions will be jointly made by partners in all three locations. Mostly, that will be DCM’s existing staff, with a few extra hires. That may sound inefficient, but DCM has long been an outlier with its China strategy, making all its investment decisions as a single firm, not a Valley firm with international franchise offices. And, so far, it’s worked well for the firm. DCM has partnered with some big Asian heavyweights including gaming giant Tencent, Japan’s largest mobile gaming social network GREE and Japan’s second largest mobile operator KDDI. DCM has additional partners in the United States that it will be announcing in coming weeks. Chao described the role of the strategic partners as an advantage startups could chose to take advantage of if they wanted distribution help in China and Japan, or refuse if they were worried about those bigger competitors squashing them in the market. Worries about competition are just one of the headaches with an undertaking like this. While Android is undoubtably a huge opportunity, there are a lot of cooks in this $100 million kitchen– not only across different time zones and cultures, but across different industries. Already, there was a dispute on the part of the various partners on when the news would be released. I woke up to DCM moving the news release up by about five hours, thanks to a promise a Japanese partner made to the Japanese media. Let’s hope the coordination gets better once investments start, because it’s a huge opportunity for startups to leverage these massive markets at once.        
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| Groupon Hires Google VP Margo Georgiadis As COO Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:55 AM PDT
At Google Georgiadis led a sales group comprised of over 1600 employees. Prior to Google, Georgiadis was a partner at McKinsey and Company, a CMO at Discover Card and Principal at Synetro Capital. While Groupon declined to comment to Chicago Business, Senior Google VP Nikesh Arora expressed his congrats, “I’m grateful for all that Margo has done for our team over the past two years. We will miss her, but we’re also very excited that she’s joining a terrific company and a great partner for Google.” Georgiadis’ position is a crucial one as the company prepares to IPO at a reported $15 billion dollar valuation in the spring and Groupon CEO Andrew Mason needs a Sheryl Sandberg to his Mark Zuckerberg. The company made $760 million in revenue last year, a number that Mason wants to increase to “billions” in 2011. As it’s already technically spring I’m guessing Georgiadis’ schedule will be pretty tight in the coming weeks. Image: LinkedIn        
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| Google Allows You To Subscribe To Offers In Portland, New York City, San Francisco Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:44 AM PDT
On the landing page of the Offers site, you are greeted with this “Google Offers BETA is starting in Portland, Oregon. Get 50% off or more at places you'll love.” You can then subscribe to the offers with your email. Update: Google issued this statement about Offers: Today we launched a marketing campaign inviting Portlanders to sign up for a test of Google Offers — to get great deals delivered right to their inboxes. Offers is part of an ongoing effort at Google to make new services that give consumers great deals while helping connect businesses with customers in new ways. Google tells us that this part of a marketing campaign to publicize offers andusers can sign up for future launch of Offers beta, with Portland as first city you’ll be able to access Google Offers. Google is also starting to push radio advertisements on Pandora to users in Portland. Here’s a newly uploaded video advertisement for Offers.  As we reported in late January, Googlewas preparing to launch a pre-paid offers product called Google Offers which is supposed to more Groupon-like in that the deal must be paid for in advance in order to redeem it. From the sounds of it, it looks like this could be Google’s Groupon competitor. Considering that you have to subscribe to the emails, get 50 percent-plus discounts, it sounds like the two could be the same.        
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| London’s Dream Of A Tech City Is A Nightmare With BT Posted: 21 Apr 2011 10:02 AM PDT
However, one thing I have been banging the table about – increasingly angrily as the weeks and months have past – is the provision for broadband to startups in London.        
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| Playmatics Raises $1 Million To Make Reality-Based, Social Games Posted: 21 Apr 2011 09:24 AM PDT
The Millennium Institute is best known as the creator of Threshold 21 (T21) and other government modeling software, research and algorithms. Its tools are used by policy-makers and development organizations to test and plan responses for a range of real-world events. The Millennium Institute’s overall mission is to “empower people and governments to build societies that are peaceful, equitable and sustainable,” according to their website. Dr. Hans Herren, president of The Millennium Institute — also a fan of SimCity, SimAnt and A-Train — wrote about his organizations’ goals through the media of games, via an email interview with TechCrunch:
Millennium Institute wants the Shadow Government games to be incorporated into curriculum from primary schools through universities. Chief executive of Playmatics, Margaret Wallace noted that the game should be entertaining above all, though it is also educational. She explained:
Playmatics was co-founded by game industry veterans Margaret Wallace, Nick Fortugno and Phillipe Trawinka. The company, which currently has 15 full time employees, has designed social and mobile games for the AMC television show Breaking Bad, and more recently for the New York Public Library (with Jane McGonigal).        
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| No Coupons Here, Just Cash: Groupon Files For Another $6 Million Posted: 21 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT
Groupon has been a very busy company of late. Several days ago, the daily deals site acquired Whrrl creator Pelago, and today it announced the hiring of Google VP Margo Georgiadis and Amazon's Jason Child as CFO in December. The funding, it seems, is directly related to its recent acquisition of Pelago. According to the filing, “This offering is being made in connection with the purchase by a subsidiary of the Issuer of certain assets of Pelago, Inc.” Put together, these moves create a clear picture of a company Groupon taking steps to build an experienced management, an impressive bullpen of subsidiaries, and plenty of funding in an effort to look as attractive as possible to investors in preparation for an IPO. Listed on the form are Groupon's board members Eric Lefosky, Brad Keywell and Kevin Efrusy, as well as new board member and Starbucks founder Howard Schultz — among others. The daily deals site turned down a reported $6 billion offer from Google in December, and has raised $1.146 billion to date. We will update as we learn more.        
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Mobile gaming startup 
Googler and fellow Greek 
Sometimes being a TechCrunch editor can actually be vaguely useful. Honest. Because we cover European startups from London, I’ve ended up being invited to join the London Mayor’s Digital Advisory Board as well as attending roundtable sessions at Number 10 Downing Street. But it’s not just to chat over coffee and biscuits. Both the local London government and the national one is serious about trying to enliven and nurture the growing tech scene here. I wouldn’t say they ‘get it’ all of the time – but they are trying, and I’ve seen the enthusiasm. While there are sceptics about the whole ‘
Social and mobile gaming startup Playmatics attained a $1 million investment from several Swiss-based angel investors to develop a “real world game” franchise called
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