The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- GetGlue Passes 1M Users; 100M Data Points
- IAB: Internet Advertising Reached $26 Billion In 2010, Display Grew Twice As Fast As Search
- AOL Jumps To No. 2 Spot In comScore Online Video Rankings
- RankAbove Offers Start-up and Non-Profit SEO Packages To Companies Who Aren’t Thinking About SEO
- Japan’s GREE And Mobile Community mig33 Sign Deal To Bring Social Games To Asia
- VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Social Video App For iOS
- Jive Bets On Big Data With Acquisition Of Software Startup Proximal Labs
- Motorola And Huawei Settle Patent Lawsuit
- Former OfferPal CEO George Garrick Joins SocialShield
- Dailyplaces Turns Ups The Social, Adds Realtime Chat To Locations
- For The Electric Vehicles Market, Small Batteries Mean Big Sales
- OpenBuildings Unveils Its New Architecture Database And Raises $2 Million In Funding
- TekTrak: Mobile Location App Helps Reunite A Family After The Japanese Earthquake
- Sugar Inc Raises Another $15 Million To Grow Its Women-Focused Media Empire
- Meet Duolingo, Google’s Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web
- Apple Announces Final Cut Pro X At NAB
- Kiip’s Brian Wong On Taking Risks As Young Entrepreneur
- Could Flip Have Survived On Its Own? (TCTV)
- The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000
- Exclusive: The Bleak Financial Numbers From The MySpace Sale Pitch Book
- Jajah Brings Its Facebook Calling To Android, iPhone Coming Soon
- Power Assure’s Software To Make Cisco Blade Servers More Energy Efficient
- Facebook Comments, Now On Over 50K Sites, Get More Social With Latest Upgrade
- NASA Names The Space Shuttles’ Final Resting Places
- Social Commerce Network Lockerz Raises $30 Million
| GetGlue Passes 1M Users; 100M Data Points Posted: 13 Apr 2011 09:00 AM PDT
GetGlue allows users to check-in to their favorite shows, music, movies and books, and see what their friends are enjoying in real-time. With each check-in, users earn points and stickers from GetGlue and other major brands. The app also allows users to rate their favorite shows, movies, music and books and receive personalized suggestions. You can also share check-ins with your Twitter and Facebook friends, rate lists of popular shows, movies, music and books, receive weekly new releases and customized recommendations, and access existing reviews, clips and ratings for 20 million movies, books and albums. The startup has reached 1 million users less than a year after hitting 500,000 users (GetGlue declined to reveal how many of its one million users are considered active). As for the 100 million data points, these represent likes, comments, check-ins and other connections between people and the entertainment they’ve consumed. The GetGlue network is now averaging over 1 check-in every second with as many as 10 check-ins per second during primetime. On an average day 500,000 new unique data points enter the GetGlue database. During primetime, GetGlue is averaging 1 share per second to both Facebook and Twitter. The company says that 3 percent to 20 percent of Tweets about shows are coming from GetGlue. During the Oscars, GetGlue was the third most mentioned account on Twitter and 1/12 of the tweets that mentioned the word “Oscars” in the first 30 minutes of the telecast originated from GetGlue. Other shows have experienced similar stats, says GetGlue. For example, 10 percent of tweets during Californication’s season finale came from GetGlue. GetGlue has formed a number of branded partnerships with well-known media companies, including HBO, Fox, Showtime, PBS, TwiT, and Universal Pictures. And the startup received a $6 million investment from Time Warner, Union Square Ventures and others last December.
       
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| IAB: Internet Advertising Reached $26 Billion In 2010, Display Grew Twice As Fast As Search Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:13 AM PDT
The Internet Advertising Bureau released its numbers for 2010. Last year, online advertising in the U.S. grew 15 percent to $26 billion. After a 3 percent dip in 2009, growth resumed in 2010, hitting a record high. Industry revenue in the fourth quarter alone hit $7.45 billion. Search still made up 46 percent of that total, followed by display ads at 38 percent.But display advertising grew twice as fast as search (24 percent growth versus 12 percent). Search advertising in the U.S. totalled $12 billion, with display closing the gap at $9.9 billion. Video advertising (which is counted as part of display) now makes up 5 percent of the total. It jumped 40 percent to $1.4 billion. This was also the first year that the IAB is estimating mobile display advertising revenue between $550 million and $650 million. Compared to other forms of advertising, Internet advertising surpassed newspaper ads in the U.S. last year ($22.8 billion) and is now second only to TV ($28.6 billion) Here is the breakdown below
       
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| AOL Jumps To No. 2 Spot In comScore Online Video Rankings Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:06 AM PDT
Google Sites (a.k.a. YouTube) was the top online video content property in March with 143.2 million unique viewers. AOL jumped from the seventh spot in February to the second spot in March with 57 million viewers. Yahoo Sites followed with 56.4 million viewers. Microsoft Sites came in fourth with 53.1 million viewers, while VEVO ranked fifth with 52.6 million viewers. Facebook came in sixth with 48.8 million viewers. Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions as it neared the 2 billion mark, and highest time spent per viewer at 276 minutes, or 4.6 hours. So why did AOL jump five spots in the past month? There are a few possible reasons for this. But the main one is because comScore is counting video viewership differently than before. ComScore says that as the data analysis company switches over to UD, (unified digital measurement); AOL’s online video views have been boosted. Besides that, however, AOL has also recently become more bullish on video content and is ramping up video production on its properties. AOL bought video syndication network 5min last Fall for this reason. And in January 2010, AOL acquired StudioNow for $36.5 million to integrate a solid video creation platform into its content business. And AOL acquired the Huffington Post in February and closed the deal in early March. The rise in views could also be from the integration of the HuffPo’s video content with AOL (and, of course, we are doing our small part with TCTV). In terms of video ad views, Americans viewed 4.3 billion video ads in March, with Hulu generating the highest number of video ad impressions at more than 1.2 billion. Tremor Media Video Network followed (and highest among video ad networks) with 804.3 million ad views, followed by Adap.tv (553 million) and BrightRoll Video Network (398 million). Time spent watching videos ads neared 1.9 billion minutes during the month, with Hulu delivering the highest duration of video ads at 520 million minutes. Video ads reached 43 percent of the total U.S. population an average of 33 times during the month. Hulu also delivered the highest frequency of video ads to its viewers with an average of 47 over the course of the month.
Disclosure: We are owned by AOL.        
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| RankAbove Offers Start-up and Non-Profit SEO Packages To Companies Who Aren’t Thinking About SEO Posted: 13 Apr 2011 08:00 AM PDT
While I consider most SEO to be snake oil, RankAbove has been fairly consistent and intelligent in their dealings and, as such, deserve a bit of a mention. Their Start-up package starts at $199 and is designed to drive traffic to your start-up page and manage metrics so you know just what’s going on when people search in your space. This is more about measuring than making fake linkbait farms, so it’s OK. The kit includes:
If you’re a non-profit, on the other hand, RankAbove is offering a Giveback package that will pair you with a corporate sponsor and help send traffic to your page. They’ve already begun work with DonorsChoose and the the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International and are looking for partners going forward. Either way, clearly SEO can help make or break a service and RankAbove is interested in helping you and yours. May be worth a look.        
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| Japan’s GREE And Mobile Community mig33 Sign Deal To Bring Social Games To Asia Posted: 13 Apr 2011 07:11 AM PDT
Under the agreement, mig33 adopts the “GREE platform for smartphone”, which means that smartphone games that have been created using the technical specifications of GREE’s Japanese platform can now be easily ported to mig33, and vice versa. The cooperation isn’t only a win for the two companies but should also be a big deal for mobile social game makers, as GREE and mig33 combined have over 70 million users – mostly in markets where the mobile web is bigger than the fixed web. As background, GREE is a social gaming network that can so far only be accessed through Japanese feature and smart phones (roughly speaking, it’s like Facebook and Zynga rolled into one). The company is listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange since December 2008 and currently boasts a market cap of $3.6 billion. In January, GREE inked a deal similar to the one announced today with China’s Tencent. An American entity, GREE International, was launched earlier this year, which means we will probably hear more from the company about its plans in the US soon. mig33, on the other hand, is focused on the Middle East, the Asian and African markets where it currently counts 47 million members. Last November, Project Goth, the California-based company behind mig33, sold a stake to GREE in its series C venture round.        
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| VodPod Founders Launch Showyou, A Social Video App For iOS Posted: 13 Apr 2011 07:00 AM PDT
Once you sign into the app with your Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts, Showyou will displau videos from your friends on Facebook, people you follow on Twitter and Tumblr, and from channels you subscribe to on YouTube and Vodpod on one screen, called the Showyou Grid. Videos are presented in a grid-like format, allowing you to easily view all of the content that is shared by your friends. You can also follow people on Showyou, comment on videos, and share videos to your social networks and within the app. The feed itself will only contain Tweets, Facebook updates and other messages that include videos. To start, Showyou will include and allow viewing of videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and TED (you also won’t be able to access licensed content like TV shows from the app). In the coming weeks and months, the startup says that users will be able to share and view videos from many publishers so long as they're HTML5 and iOS compatible. Mark Hall, CEO of Remixnation (the company behind Vodpod and Showyou), tells us that the app is trying to add a social layer to video viewing. YouTube and other video sites lack this element and it can be difficult to filter your Facebook and Twitter streams to focus purely on viewing video. Hall also believes that users want to access this content on a mobile device, like an iPad, and does not plan on extending the application to the web. As for making money, Showyou plans to display cost-per-view, click-to-play ads within the app and may experiment with a subscription service. Hall adds that the company used much of Vodpod’s core, underlying technology to build Showyou. Launched in late 2006, Vodpod has over 1 million registered users who have collected videos from over 20,000 different video sites. ShowYou’s interface is sleek, especially on an iPad, but I’m curious if consumers will want a dedicated app for social video. I like apps like Flipboard because it aggregates content from all of my news feeds and social networks in one place.        
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| Jive Bets On Big Data With Acquisition Of Software Startup Proximal Labs Posted: 13 Apr 2011 06:58 AM PDT
Proximal Labs is a software company that analyzes and mines data within a community to power applications that plug into social media networks. These "smart apps" learn about users based on what they do in the community, who they interact with, and how they behave. Based on data mined, Proximal Labs’ technology delivers contextualized recommendations that put timely, relevant conversations, people and content together; guided, personalized search that sort results based on users interests and recent activity in the community; smart streams that filters and personalizes content, and an adaptive Q & A that automatically routes questions to key community members and creates teaming around issues. For Jive, the acquisition of Proximal is an investment in beginning to analyze and mine big data within Jive’s professional social networks to better serve its users. As Jive says, the company is using 'big data to unlock Of course, Facebook has masterfully analyzed interactions and data on the social network to give users a better personalized experience (i.e. friend recommendations). Jive’s SVP of Engineering Brian Roddy, says that Jive wants to start delivering a similar experience to their enterprise users. Roddy says that Proximal’s technology will help Jive provide better personalized and intelligent recommendations to Jive users, will enhance search results, and improve the application’s analytics capabilities. And a more personalized Experience, says Roddy, improves collaboration within an enterprise. With the acquisition, Proximal Labs’ team will lead the “big data” team at Jive. David Gutellius, Proximal Labs’ co-founder and CEO will become Jive’s Chief Social Scientist. As Jive ramps up for an IPO this year, the company just added four new board members, including execs from Google and Facebook. And the company raised $30 million in new funding last year. As for acquisitions, Roddy says than we can expect more on the horizon.
       
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| Motorola And Huawei Settle Patent Lawsuit Posted: 13 Apr 2011 05:17 AM PDT
Huawei has actually entered an agreement with Motorola Solutions and Nokia Siemens that allows Motorola Solutions to transfer its commercial agreements with Huawei for a fee, and allows Nokia to receive and use Huawei confidential information revealed to Motorola. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. And Motorola is also dismissing a prior complaint filed against Huawei, which alleged that the Chinese company was conspiring to steal trade secrets from former Motorola employees. The backstory is that Huawei was claiming that because Motorola and the company has a previous licensing relationship (worth $880 million), Motorola’s wireless networking unit was provided with details on Huawei’s confidential intellectual property. Huawei was trying to ensure that Motorola does not transfer this confidential information to Nokia. Motorola, Huawei contended, did not provided any assurances that it will prevent disclosure of that IP information to Nokia and if this transfer of information did happen, Huawei would suffer from this. It appears that Motorola ponied up the funds to pay off Huawei in this suit. In February, Huawei won a court order preventing Motorola from transferring the Chinese telecom-gear maker’s intellectual property to Nokia Siemens. Greg Brown, President & CEO of Motorola said in a statement: "We regret that these disputes have occurred between our two companies. Motorola Solutions values the long-standing relationship we have had with Huawei. After reviewing the facts, we decided to resolve these matters and return to our traditional relationship of confidence and trust.”        
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| Former OfferPal CEO George Garrick Joins SocialShield Posted: 13 Apr 2011 05:00 AM PDT
Garrick, who was an investor in SocialShield, is a seasoned technology exec that was most recently the CEO of Offerpal (which is now TapJoy) as well as Mochi Media. Garrick was also previously the CEO of Jingle Networks, Wine.com, PlaceWare (which was acquired by Microsoft), FlyCast Communications, Information Resources and A.C. Nielsen. Founded by Noah Kindler and Arad Rostampour, SocialShield gives parents high level visibility into what kids are doing online and on social networks, and who they're interacting with online and via mobile phones. SocialShield, which requires that both parents and children opt-in to the service, monitors kids' picture sharing, social gaming and other social activity on networks that kids use the most (currently Facebook, Myspace and Twitter). Rather than giving parents access to kids' accounts or copies of their online communications, Social Shield sends parents alerts when activity indicates potential danger. The startup, which raised $10 million in funding and inked a licensing deal with AOL, was also recently invited to The White House to participate in a Presidential Summit on CyberBullying.        
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| Dailyplaces Turns Ups The Social, Adds Realtime Chat To Locations Posted: 13 Apr 2011 03:40 AM PDT  Dailyplaces, the social recommendation service for places, has upped the social today by adding realtime chat to its iPhone and Android apps. Dubbed 'Places Chat', users can communicate directly and in realtime with other users that are checked-in at the same location. Additionally, it's possible to chat with other users that aren't nearby via a user's friend-list. The thinking behind the feature is to enable users to converse with each other around locations so that they can ask about the place, give recommendations or even book appointments, says the Frankfurt, Germany-based startup.
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| For The Electric Vehicles Market, Small Batteries Mean Big Sales Posted: 13 Apr 2011 12:28 AM PDT
And what will cause this prodigious (and steady) growth spurt? Well, in spite of the current popularity of plug-ins like the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf, Lux sees big returns in small vehicles. The bulk of growth, the study says, will be driven by “more humble” vehicles, like e-bikes and micro-hybrids. It also seems that, while many expected battery prices across all-electric and hybrid cars to drop, the decline has been more measured than anticipated. Prices have not yet reached that magic number that would begin to encourage true widespread adoption. As a result, small vehicles will step in to fill the gap, as will the batteries that power them. For example: Replacement batteries for the currently deployed eBike base, especially in China where eBikes are thriving, plus growth in new sales, will drive the eBike market from $12 billion in 2011 to $24.3 billion in 2016, Lux says. And, as the eBike market transitions from lead acid batteries to lithium-ion technology, demand for lead acid-based storage technology will diminish, as will its lead in the market. The other significant factor in market growth will be micro-hybrids, which offer an attractive, low-risk way for automakers to improve fuel efficiencies. Because micro-hybrids use regenerative braking applications to improve fuel efficiency, they do not require as much energy storage as their all-electric or hybrid counterparts. Micros are also much less expensive for automakers to retrofit and don’t have nearly the same amount of battery costs as their bigger cousins. As this is such, Lux sees micro-hybrids eclipsing other passenger vehicles in terms of both storage and dollars, growing from 5.1 GWh and $495 million in 2011 to 41 GWh and $3.1 billion by 2016. So, there you have it. The future is mini. Small electric vehicles will drive battery sales, and eBikes and micro-hybrids will be the ones to capitalize.        
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| OpenBuildings Unveils Its New Architecture Database And Raises $2 Million In Funding Posted: 12 Apr 2011 11:48 PM PDT
OpenBuildings is an online database of buildings around the world. Right now, they have over 40,000 buildings in their archives with more being added each day. Started in 2010 by a group of architects studying in London, construction professionals and architecture lovers have quickly latched on to the site. And the new site should attract even more users. As you might expect, the initial impression of buildings on OpenBuildings is a visual one. But once you find a building that you’re interested in, you can drill down into that building’s profile and see a ton of information about it — things like construction status, architect, location, materials, etc. And if there’s not a lot of information, you’re free to add more (provided you create an OpenBuildings profile). And, of course, many buildings have a lot of crowdsourced pictures to showcase the architecture. There’s also a powerful search tool that allows you to filter the types of buildings you’re looking for. The coolest of these filters is a timeline which allows you to focus on just a particular period of time. And soon there will be a way for construction companies working on projects to attach themselves to building profiles — and advertise services. There will be a fee for those (but the first three months will be free). The goal of OpenBuildings is to share architectural knowledge and create a hub for like-minded individuals to interact with one another about their passion. The 40,000+ buildings currently in the system have come from a mixture of the community and a spider tool that crawls other websites looking for building information, co-founder Adel Zakout says. “We’re building natural language processing tools and semantic technologies to help us properly record, tag buildings and infer facts from free text descriptions,” he adds. The iPhone app, Buildings, allows users to access all of this information while on the go. And in a few weeks, there will be an Android app to accompany it, Zakout says. All of this is being made possible thanks to a $2 million Series A funding led by BlueRun Ventures and Index Ventures. With the funding, John Malloy of BlueRun is joining the OpenBuildings Board. The money, which the company notes they weren’t actively seeking out, will help them expand their teams in London and Sofia, Bulgaria as well as work on new tools to further surface great architecture around the world.
       
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| TekTrak: Mobile Location App Helps Reunite A Family After The Japanese Earthquake Posted: 12 Apr 2011 09:59 PM PDT
Of course, natural disasters often wreak havoc on our lines of communication and, with many people simultaneously attempting to reach loved ones, cellular networks quickly become overloaded. I, personally, will never forget the anxiety of struggling to find and reach relatives in Lower Manhattan immediately following the September 11th attacks. Unfortunately, the disaster in Japan was no different. Phone lines were either down or those that were available quickly became overloaded with calls, and many people had to spend anxious hours waiting to find out if loved ones were alive and safe. Yet, while technology sometimes has the tendency to abandon us in moments of need, it is also a tool that reunites us. We learned today that, TekTrak, a mobile tracking and security app, provided one Japanese family with this very ability following the March 11 quake. The family (who asked to remain anonymous) was unable to locate their daughter in the disorder, who was at school over an hour from where they lived — or to reach her on the phone. But, because the app works in the background of a phone’s OS, using the 3 hardware components already built into most smartphones (cellular, GPS, and WiFi) to pinpoint its location, the girl’s parents were able to go onto TekTrak's website to find their daughter's location. And, once they saw the timestamps in the app’s location history feature, they knew she was okay, because they could see that she had been moving since the earthquake had struck. The father said that it usually took his daughter an hour to return home by bus from school, but on March 11th, it took more than seven hours. Luckily, the worried parents were able to follow her progress home using the app’s web maps. Originally he uploaded the app on his daughter’s phone, he said, to prevent against theft, as the $5 app both enables users to monitor the location of their device at all times and to secure sensitive or private information stored on the phone. Sometimes it takes a disaster to show us the areas of true weakness within our infrastructures, be they communication, transportation, or electrical — and, on the flip side — they sometimes reveal applications or strengths we didn’t necessarily know we had. Obviously, apps that help us stay connected (and aid in search and location) in the event one method of communication disappears can be extremely valuable in emergency situations. So, if your phone should turn off and you are unable to locate it directly, TekTrak allows you to see where the phone was last located (and check location history). The app also comes with a remote ringer feature that allows users to locate their device once they are within close proximity of the phone. Or, if you don't think you can retrieve the device from that location, users will soon be able to send remote messages to the phone in the hope the person who may have the phone will respond, founders Arik Waldman and Luka Sklizovic said. Albeit a single case, it is great to see an example of technology not only allowing people to reunite with their phones — but, more importantly — their loved ones. For more info on the story, or the app itself, you can check out TekTrak’s blog here.        
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| Sugar Inc Raises Another $15 Million To Grow Its Women-Focused Media Empire Posted: 12 Apr 2011 09:00 PM PDT
Sugar’s flagship site is PopSugar, and it also home to social shopping site ShopStyle, a free blogging platform for users called OnSugar, and a variety of topical blogs including FitSugar (fitness), PetSugar, and BuzzSugar (gossip). It draws 20 million visitors per month between its sites. Sugar says that the company, which has been profitable for the last year, plans to use the new funding for further acquisitions (it bought virtual fashion assistant MyPerfectSale last October), international growth, and to extend its brand. The company’s last round of funding was a $16 million raise in June 2009 — a report that it raised $30 million in June 2010 was bogus.        
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| Meet Duolingo, Google’s Next Acquisition Target; Learn A Language, Help The Web Posted: 12 Apr 2011 08:13 PM PDT
In 2007, now-Professor von Ahn had another idea. He realized that all the time people wasted typing in CAPTCHAs could be used for some good: helping to digitize books. Out of Carnegie Mellon he launched the project as reCAPTCHA, a startup. And guess what? In 2009, Google bought it as well. Now von Ahn is back again. Duolingo is his latest project. It has been blowing up on Hacker News for the past day, though not too much is known about it. But we got a chance to get a bit more out of von Ahn, and not surprisingly, the idea is very cool. Von Ahn notes that over the past year and a half, his Carnegie Mellon team has been quietly working on this new idea. It originally arose from a single question: how can you get 100 million people on the web translating everything into different languages for free? One problem is that there aren’t that many people that are truly bilingual. Another problem is the whole “free” thing. So along with his PhD student Severin Hacker (yep, that’s his name), von Ahn twisted the idea on its side. Instead of getting people to do something that felt like unpaid work, why not spin it as a learning experience? That’s exactly what Duolingo does. “The solution was to transform language translation into something that millions of people WANT to do, and that helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals: language education,” von Ahn writes. It is estimated that there are over 1 billion people learning a foreign language. So, the site that we’ve been working on, Duolingo, will be a 100% free language learning site in which people learn by helping to translate the Web. That is, they learn by doing,” he continues. Smart. Von Ahn didn’t want to give too much else away as their still finalizing the service. He notes that it should be ready for a private beta in a few weeks. “We’re now mostly testing the site, and it really works — it teaches users a foreign language very well, and the combined translations that we get in return are as accurate as those from professional language translators,” he says. He also says that while it’s currently just a project under Carnegie Mellon, he and Hacker may turn it into a company. And if they do, the countdown to Google buying them will officially be on. I give it 6 months until that happens. Tops.        
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| Apple Announces Final Cut Pro X At NAB Posted: 12 Apr 2011 07:25 PM PDT
After a preamble where they described FCP has having over 2 million users and teasing the competition, they launched into the new features. They’re still in the middle of the presentation, but so far it appears we have 64-bit, a revamped UI, and a ton of automatic clip-optimization going on in the background by utilizing Grand Central Station.        
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| Kiip’s Brian Wong On Taking Risks As Young Entrepreneur Posted: 12 Apr 2011 06:16 PM PDT After taking his mobile ads startup out of stealth on Monday, Kiip founder Brian Wong has a lot on his plate, mainly putting a recent $4.3 million in funding and a novel product and business model to good use. And Wong can’t even drink legally yet! We brought him into the TCTV studio this morning to talk about about the inspiration behind Kiip among other things. Wong says the idea came to him after he did an “iPad creep,” or sneak-peeked at everyone’s iPads while walking down an aisle on a plane. He realized that everyone was playing games, that games were “a holy grail of engagement,: but that game ads basically took up a piece of the screen without adding any value. Wong then came up with the idea of providing real life rewards, “There has to be a reset button here, we have to try something new … We have to build a company with the DNA of being in mobile.” After graduating from the University of British Columbia in 2009 (after skipping four grades), the 19 year old got a job in business development at Digg, until a layoff left him looking for the next opportunity. Despite being so young, Wong is an advocate of staying in school, “The notion of finishing something is something that entrepreneurs get a bad rap for, we’re so schizophrenic. [It's like] hey let’s go to this project, let’s go to that project. Well let’s just finish school, let’s just finish that project.” Wong also talked about the risks involved with raising funding, and how people might underestimate him and other entrepreneurs because of age, “Obviously I’m a human being, it’s intimidating. You walk into this partners meeting (I didn’t know what a partners meeting was when I was first going to raise money) and there are people there that are going to be your future if they accept you. And you have to be able to talk to them and be able to relate.” Well Wong obviously convinced somebody he was on to something, as True Ventures, Hummer Winblad and blue chip brands like Carl’s Jr, Sephora and PopChips have now given him the vote of confidence. So what’s his secret to success? “I like to call it ‘Inception,’ like the movie. You have to seed the idea first, you have to let them think of it as well, at the same time you’re revealing it. If you have that parallel, then you have them, the vision is now in their head.”        
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| Could Flip Have Survived On Its Own? (TCTV) Posted: 12 Apr 2011 05:32 PM PDT When people build startups, we measure their measure success not only by how big is their exit, but also by how many lives their products touch and how long their brands lasts in the minds of consumers. Cisco’s decision today to shutter its Flip Video business two years after paying $590 million for it raises a series of questions which startup founder/investor Chris Dixon and I address in the video above. Why didn’t Cisco sell the business? Was the tax write-off bigger than anything Flip could have fetched? But namely, was it inevitable that Flip would have failed on its own because it got in the way of the iPhone, or could it have adapted if it stayed independent? There is no right answer here. Imagine if Netflix had been acquired early on by Blockbuster or some other lumbering giant—it would never be where it is today. On the other hand, Android is great example of a company that flourished because it was acquired by Google and given the resources to become the powerhouse that it is today. It’s not so much about the product. Android originally was working on a Sidekick-like device. “Great founders don’t move linearly,” says Dixon. The best acquisitions seem to be those where the acquired company is left alone. But it is easier to adapt to a changing market if you are a standalone startup than if you are part of a larger company. Could Flip have survived on its own? And what would it be worth today if it hadn’t sold?        
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| The Moral Of The Story Is Never Sell Half Your Company For $1,000 Posted: 12 Apr 2011 02:30 PM PDT
Paul Ceglia may just be a con man, or he may turn out to be the greatest tech investor who ever lived. After all, anyone who invested early in Facebook looks like a genius today. Peter Thiel turned his initial $500,000 investment in Facebook into a 10 percent stake that would be worth at least $5 billion today at the latest $50 billion private valuation. Facebook investor Jim Breyer of Accel Partners tops Forbes’ Midas List. And now we have Paul Ceglia, a convicted felon who claims that Mark Zuckerberg sold him half of Facebook in 2003 for $1,000, and he has the contract and emails to prove it. He later put in another $1,000 for a total investment of $2,000, but if he gets anywhere close to what he’s asking for (half of Zuckerberg’s share, which could be worth as much as $10 billion), he could go down as the best tech investor in history. The purported emails, which Facebook says are fake, look pretty damning. They paint a picture of a young Zuckerberg playing Ceglia for some extra cash to help develop Facebook when it was only a dorm room project (Zuckerberg was doing work for hire for another Ceglia project, and got him to fund development of Facebook as well, at least according to Ceglia’s latest complaint). Facebook will either end up fighting this in court or settling with Ceglia for a princely sum just to take the risk of the lawsuit off the table. Whatever happens, this incident holds several lessons for any would-be entrepreneur or engineer. In the video below, angel investor and Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon and I discuss what every founder needs to know before they give away any part of their company. The decisions made in the first 6 month usually end up being the most important. The biggest takeaway from this incident: Don’t ever sell half your company for $1,000.        
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| Exclusive: The Bleak Financial Numbers From The MySpace Sale Pitch Book Posted: 12 Apr 2011 02:06 PM PDT
We’ve gotten a copy of the confidential MySpace pitch book that parent company News Corp. has distributed to potential buyers. Notably, that pitch book doesn’t include any historical financial or user data about MySpace at all. Everything is projected out and forward looking, and even then it’s bleak. Revenue for fiscal 2011, ending June 30, 2011, is expected to be just $109 million. Expenses for the year are projected to be $274 million, and the company will lose a whopping $165 million for the 12 month period. That’s after massive waves of layoffs, although I expect much of the costs of the layoffs are included up front in 2011 expenses. After 2011 the pitch book turns to pure fiction. After losing $165 million this year, they expect to actually have $15 million in ebitda in fiscal 2012. How? Revenue will decrease to $84 million, but expenses will fall from $274 million this year to just $69 million. The company will then be profitable, says the pitch book. That means about $205 million would need to be found in operating cost savings in the next 14 months. That means even more massive layoffs. And yet somehow News Corp. argues that revenue will only fall 23% in the next year. Costs will decrease 75%, and revenue will fall just 23%. Believable? Nope. But at least on paper it makes MySpace profitable. The pitch book predicts 2013, 2014 and 2015 revenues to be $101 million, $119 million and $139 million, respectively. With the company losing 14% of its audience every month, it’s hard to see revenue stabilizing and then actually rising. It’s extremely unlikely that anyone believes the projections in the pitch book are possible. Which is why News Corp. is in the unfortunate situation of trying to offload a money vacuum, and will be lucky to be able to even give it away. The real question is how much News Corp. should be paying someone to take this off their books, not the other way around. MySpace, in other words, needs a dowry. A sad fate for what was once the largest site on the Internet.        
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| Jajah Brings Its Facebook Calling To Android, iPhone Coming Soon Posted: 12 Apr 2011 01:43 PM PDT
That sounds a bit confusing, but the feature is straightforward in practice. After installing the app on your phone, you’ll be asked to authenticate using Facebook Connect. You’ll then be able to see a list of all of your Facebook friends who are currently logged into Facebook Chat. Tap the one you wish to call, and they’ll receive an instant message with a link inviting them to join a free voice call with you. If they click it, a website will pop up and they’ll be able to talk using their computer’s speakers and microphone (they don’t need a Jajah account). The whole process, which you can see in the video below, takes about 10 seconds. And in case you’re worried about privacy, the service masks your outgoing phone number. The company originally launched this feature last fall in the UK with support for its Blackberry app, but for some reason it’s remained in private beta. The Android app is now live for everyone, and the iPhone app will be released pending Apple’s approval (the Blackberry app is still on the roadmap, though the release date sounds less soon). Jajah isn’t the only service that adds voice calling functionality to Facebook — last October Skype released Skype 5, which lets users call their Facebook friends’ phones (instead of sending them a link and initiating a call in the browser). Rumors continue to swirl that Facebook is working with Skype to bring deeper integration of video calling to the social network.         
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| Power Assure’s Software To Make Cisco Blade Servers More Energy Efficient Posted: 12 Apr 2011 01:35 PM PDT
According to Jed Scaramella, a research manager for servers at IDC, here’s how fast blade servers, in general, are gaining traction in the market:
By design, blade servers (including Cisco’s) are supposed to use less energy, and take up less space than their predecessors. Still, Power Assure — and competitors like SynapSense — have designed software to make them even less power-consuming, and hopefully more affordable and longer-lasting, for data center owners and operators. According to a post on Cisco’s corporate website, in September 2010 the company’s chief financial officer Frank Calderoni said that the company was seeing 82 percent growth for its UCS product line on a quarter over quarter basis. (Neither IDC nor Cisco offered specific market share data on these servers in time for publication.) In general, Power Assure — whose investors include Good Energies, Point Judith Capital and Draper Fisher Jurvetson — claims its solutions cut ongoing power consumption for IT organizations by an average of 50 percent. Computers and data centers in the U.S., in recent years, have only used a few percentage points of all electricity consumed in the country, but that number is on the rise along with the cost of electricity generation from traditional power sources. For more information, check out the reports over at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories Data Center Energy Management website which covers the economic and environmental benefits of efficient IT organizations.        
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| Facebook Comments, Now On Over 50K Sites, Get More Social With Latest Upgrade Posted: 12 Apr 2011 01:23 PM PDT
According to Facebook, Facebook Comments are now on over 50,000 websites including us, NBC and Hotels.com. Sure Hotels.com is a start, Facebook’s got a long way to go if it wants to dominate the commenting space. While it made some needed adjustments today, there’s still more work that needs to be done. Here are the new features added in today’s upgrade: Permalinking Users can now access each comment by its permalink, allowing users to share and a respond to specific comments more easily. Comment notifications in the Facebook newsfeed also direct back to specific comments, which is awesome because the alternative is pretty disorienting.
Comments API Facebook is also providing an API so site owners can search and rank their comments, like highlight interesting and popular comments, reward top commenters or segment comments around a specific topic, like Apple or startups. More social context in the newsfeed Developers now also have the option of adding meta-tags to include more information about a story in commenters Facebook newsfeeds, including any images involved, title and description. Facebook holds that this optimization will increase click through because users will feel more drawn to specific stories.
Darker color scheme Facebook is also offering a darker color scheme for darker websites, so developers with darker sites don’t have to have mismatched commenting systems. I’m actually pretty surprised no one thought of this sooner.
For Great. So those without a Facebook account are good to login if they’re planning on doing so from 1998. See what I mean about “more work that still needs to be done”?        
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| NASA Names The Space Shuttles’ Final Resting Places Posted: 12 Apr 2011 12:18 PM PDT
Of course every museum around the US wants one, but there are only four shuttles to go around with one already reserved for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. The shuttles new homes are to cover the $28.8 million cost of prepping and transporting the massive shuttles, but those costs should be easily recovered with ticket sales. NASA has been talking with suitors for the last few months and today used the historic anniversary to announce the winners.        
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| Social Commerce Network Lockerz Raises $30 Million Posted: 12 Apr 2011 11:38 AM PDT
As we’ve written in the past, Lockerz revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. The network, which has 18 million members worldwide, is primarily targeted towards men and women ages 13 to 30, attempting to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web. Users can earn points and discounts on brands by sharing content on the site. Founded by Kathy Savitt, a former Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters exec; Lockerz eventually wants to be the go-to commerce homepage for teens and young adults. Lockerz spokesperson tells us that the raise is part of a larger round. The filing indicates that the company raised $30 million out of an offering of up to $45 million. We’re told the larger round will be closed in the coming weeks. The company is holding off on announcing specific investors until the entire investment is closed. In January, social commerce network Lockerz acquired photo sharing app Plixi as a way to boost photo sharing on its platform. The deal was reportedly between $10 million and $15 million. The company also recently hired former Amazon exec Mark Stabingas as the company’s chief operating officer. Updating        
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Has this happened to you? You’re busy building and launching your social video and image sharing check-in network with location-aware beta APIs with complete Blackberry, Windows Phone 7, iOS, Symbian, Java stack, and iPaq support designed for single Spanish grandmothers and you have no time to drive traffic to your app page. What to do? Luckily, RankAbove has your back.
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30 years ago today the Space Shuttle Columbia blasted off on its first mission. Two missions ended in disaster, but a total of five different shuttles spent a collective 1289 days in space over 132 missions. The program is set for retirement after Atlantis’ final voyage later this month. The three remaining shuttles, along with the Enterprise prototype, are going to need cozy homes.
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