The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- After Near-Death Experience, Grockit And Its CEO Come Back Strong (Screenshots)
- Dailymotion Lands On The iPhone
- KPN Acquires Rest Of iBasis For $93.3 Million In Cash
- TC50 Star Tonchidot Releases Its Augmented Reality Sekai Camera Worldwide
- Limelight Networks Shells Out $110 Million For Ad Platform EyeWonder
- The Anti-Ad Network Contenture Shuts Its Doors
- Mobile Roadie And Random House Partner To Launch iPhone Apps For Authors
- World Map Of Social Networks Shows Rise Of Facebook
- Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars
- After A Few Fits And Starts, Hunch Begins To Sprint In The Right Direction
- Report: Bidding War Over, O2 Rings Up Jajah For $200 Million
- The Difference between $1 Billion-Plus in Exits and “Success”
- YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict
- Are Hot U.S. Startups The New Bling For Rich Russians?
- Ribbit Mobile Gets An iPhone App By Sticking To Voicemail
- Behold Kincaid’s Law. My Law.
| After Near-Death Experience, Grockit And Its CEO Come Back Strong (Screenshots) Posted: 21 Dec 2009 08:52 AM PST Sitting across from Grockit CEO Farb Nivi, you’d never know that a few months ago he was spending weeks in the hospital and with tubes down his throat after getting hit by a minivan on his Vespa. One of his kidney’s burst and half of it had to be removed. His recuperation was slow and painful, and it took a toll on his social learning startup as well. He lost some employees and investors, who put in $8 million last year, began to worry about Grockit’s health as well. Nivi came back strong, though, and he’s about to push out a significant redesign for Grockit. The social learning site, which launched at TC50 in 2008, helps high school and college students study together for standardized tests such as the SAT, GMAT, and GRE, and connects them with tutors. It competes with Knewton and Brightstorm. The redesign (see screenshots below) does a better job highlighting the three main things students can do on Grockit: take virtual lessons from tutors, do a group study session, or practice solo. “The big feature change is that each of these modes is adaptive,” says Nivi. “So solo games adapt to you as a player, group games use an algorithm to figure out what group to put you in, and lessons will float up which teachers and lessons we recommend.” Grockit uses game mechanics to encourage participation, and is designed so that students can really help each other. It learns a student’s strengths and weaknesses over time, and serves up appropriate questions (much like Knewton does) or matches them to other students with complementary skills. The new homepage also includes a dashboard which will show students their relative performance for different skills, such as verbal or quantitative. Leaderboards for both students and tutors will be on the right. The group study sessions are live and all the students text chat with each other to figure out the answers to each question together. Or they can find a tutor by looking at their ratings and student testimonials, and pay for lessons and live classes right on the site (Grockit takes a 20 percent cut). Grockit already has a small, but active community of about 10,000 students a month. Nivi plans on expanding the platform beyond standardized test prep to K-12 curriculums next spring. He will open up the platform to schools across the country and allow teachers to use it as either a primary or supplementary teaching tool to get students to practice questions across every main subject area, from math and science to social studies and history. It is a Ning model for education. He plans to create a private site for each public school in the country which can then be claimed by a teacher or administrator and used only by students of that school (at least at first). Teacher’s can create their own curriculums, choosing from a menu of thousands of questions for each subject, or adding their own. To me, this is where Grockit will become interesting. It could become a generalized computer learning tool across every imaginable subject. Teachers and tutors can create their own set of “test” questions, and students can play the tests out either alone or in groups. They can rate the best courses and even have online competitions to see who is the smartest. Homework may never be the same again. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Dailymotion Lands On The iPhone Posted: 21 Dec 2009 08:17 AM PST
Like the plethora of competing iPhone video offerings, Dailymotion, which as been called the French YouTube but has much wider reach across continental Europe and elsewhere, is at a significant disadvantage compared to the Google-owned video sharing site, which comes pre-installed on the iPhone. That said, the functionality provided by Dailymotion’s iPhone app at least matches YouTube’s offering. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| KPN Acquires Rest Of iBasis For $93.3 Million In Cash Posted: 21 Dec 2009 08:05 AM PST
KPN says it intends to complete the acquisition of iBasis through a merger no later than today. The deal price is more than double the $1.30 closing price of iBasis shares on July 10, the last trading day before KPN announced an offer for the company, and about a third more than the closing price on Friday of $2.26. KPN adds that all iBasis shares not validly tendered into the tender offer will be converted into the right to receive $3.00 per share, net to the holder in cash without interest. KPN had to raise its offer to gobble up iBasis quite a few times, and the two companies were mixed up in litigation over the unsolicited buy-out offer. iBasis had filed a complaint last August, seeking declaratory and injunctive relief to stop KPNs “grossly inadequate tender offer”. As part of their agreement, KPN and iBasis have now agreed to drop the litigation. iBasis, founded in 1996, is one of the three largest carriers of international voice traffic in the world, having carried approximately 24 billion minutes of voice traffic in 2008 according to its website. Besides carrying international calls, the company also provides retail prepaid calling services, VoIP and other services for mobile operators. The company has its headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| TC50 Star Tonchidot Releases Its Augmented Reality Sekai Camera Worldwide Posted: 21 Dec 2009 06:08 AM PST
The premise behind the app is quite simple: as you go about your day, Sekai Camera invites you to leave text messages, photos, and audio recordings that will appear as floating bubbles wherever you created them. You can also fire up Sekai Camera to look at the world around you to see what kind of content has been left by other users. As you spin the camera around, you’ll see new messages pop up as floaty icons. Click one, and you’ll see the content that was shared previously. It’s a bit like Twitter in that everything is publicly available, but everything is built around location — if you aren’t near a message, you can’t see it. The application itself is quite well done. As with a number of other AR apps, Sekai Camera takes advantage of the iPhone’s GPS and compass (if you have a 3GS), allowing you to shift the position of your iPhone viewfinder as new tags pop up in real-time. I found the performance to be good, though there aren’t many tags floating around in my area yet so I couldn’t test to see if performance is affected by a high density of tags. Because high traffic locations will likely spawn dozens of bubbles (or more), the app offers a number of filters. The interface is simple and polished, though it may take users a minute to figure out what some of the features (like the Pocket) are for.  Tonchidot has already established Sekai Camera as a huge hit in Japan. It launched there in late September, and was installed on over 10% of Japan’s iPhone userbase within four days (though the company acknowledges that the Japan has a relatively small iPhone install base). Tonchidot has already partnered with some major Japanese retailers, and the company says it was recently named “Best App in 2009″ by Apple Japan. The worldwide release actually features version 2.0 of Sekai Camera, which introduces a few features that improve on the original Japanese release. In the original version of the app, you had to be physically present to see tags, making it difficult (if not impossible) to keep tabs on items your friends had created. The new version also your to ‘follow’ friends (you’ll see a Twitter-like stream of their activity). You can also put your favorite tags into a ‘Pocket’, which essentially lets you bookmark tags for future reference so that you don’t have to track them down again. The application itself free, but there are a few avenues that Tonchidot can use to monetize. For one, they can allow businesses to insert their own tags in the Sekai virtual world. Tonchidot can also provide these companies with PC-based tools to manage their tags remotely (something that normal users can’t do). Sekai Camera isn’t launching with any of these relationships in place in the US, but in Japan Tonchidot has partnerships with a number of major retail stores. To help further enhance the app, Tonchidot is allowing third parties to integrate their content into the Sekai Camera virtual world via an API. For example, if I used a virtual whittling app to cut out a 3D version of the TechCrunch logo, I could post it right in front of TechCrunch headquarters, so anyone who used the Sekai Camera app nearby could see it. This API has quite a bit of potential, and Tonchidot says that a number of game developers are currently finding ways to fuse their games with the service. These third party integrations will likely prove very important to Tonchidot’s success. Checking in on random messages left by people nearby is fun at first, but it will need variety and some addictive features to keep people coming back for more. Tonchidot has come a long way from its classic TechCrunch50 presentation, which left some of the judges scratching their heads as Tonchidot execs answered their questions with non-sequiturs and over-the-top gestures. Their success in Japan proves that they’re on to something — the question now is whether or not that will translate to success abroad. Tonchidot recently announced a $4 million funding round.  Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Limelight Networks Shells Out $110 Million For Ad Platform EyeWonder Posted: 21 Dec 2009 06:03 AM PST Content delivery platform Limelight Networks has acquired ad platform EyeWonder for $110 million. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2010. Seattle-based EyeWonder, which as seen success with its ad formats, helps interactive agencies and content publishers create, build, track and optimize rich media and interactive video advertising campaigns. Limelight recently acquired video ad insertion firm Kiptronic in May for an estimated $12 million. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| The Anti-Ad Network Contenture Shuts Its Doors Posted: 21 Dec 2009 05:39 AM PST Contenture, a startup that aimed to be the "anti-ad network," is shutting its doors after only a few months of business. Conenture wanted to shake up the online ad market with its monthly-fee based network, which was paid in micropayments, to offer visitors the option to do things like turn off ads, turning a site to a subscription-based model. It basically offered a full-on "freemium" model, giving users the option to toggle certain features on and off depending on if a user has paid. Contenture has been added to the deadpool. Contenture let a bunch of sites sign up to this model and have users pay one flat monthly fee to have access to all of these sites. That money would then be distributed to all of these sites. These sites could determine what Contenture subscribers get as a part of their subscription. Some may lose the ads, some may have special commenting ability, etc. The startup said on its website that it was not able to get any large publishers to sign up for its service, and couldn’t survive without these clients. A similar model has been tried by the likes of TipJoy and others, but Contenture took it a bit further with the freemium business model. As we wrote a few months ago, the idea behind service seemed like a gamble Because it is based around a monthly-fee, users may not want to sign up for the service because of the limited number of sites available — while sites not want to sign up because of the limited number of users. All in all it’s a tough sell, which is why Contenture didn’t catch the eyes of publishers so quickly. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Mobile Roadie And Random House Partner To Launch iPhone Apps For Authors Posted: 21 Dec 2009 04:54 AM PST As the way consumers read books evolves, there is an opportunity for mobile technologies to connect consumers with their favorite reads. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, is collaborating with one of the most foremost publishers, Random House, to launch iPhone apps for authors. The Random House group will launch free individual iPhone applications, powered by Mobile Roadie, for three of its bestselling authors—Steve Berry, Sophie Kinsella, and Karen Marie Monin. With this new application, fans will be able to preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more. Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference. Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple's App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| World Map Of Social Networks Shows Rise Of Facebook Posted: 21 Dec 2009 03:53 AM PST
Italian writer, blogger and photographer Vincenzo Cosenza has for the second time put together a visualization that shows the most popular social networks around the world on a map, based on the most recent traffic data (December 2009) as measured by Alexa & Google Trends for Websites. The first one, which we featured in June 2009, already painted a picture of Facebook taking over the world from the West, but the second one shows its relentless colonization even more clearly. Facebook, with over 350 million users, is the undisputed leader of social networking in the English speaking parts of the world, and has been making strides in Latin-America, Europe and Africa as well. Based on Alexa data only, Facebook has even taken over Orkut in India, historically a high-flyer in those parts. Google’s social network remains the most trafficked in Brazil, however. Facebook clone Vkontakte.ru has been able to resist and stop Facebook from becoming the leader in Russia. It’s worth noting that Vkontakte is largely owned by Digital Sky Technologies, which also owns a significant stake in Facebook, so you can see how they could potentially melt together in the future. Hi5 has also seen Facebook take over most of the territories where it was leading, and has only been able to stop the social network from dominance in Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand and Mongolia. Meanwhile, QQ is still ahead of everyone else in China, where the number of Internet users is expected to double and reach a staggering 840 million by 2013. Nowhere to be seen on the map: MySpace (which only leads on the Island of Guam). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars Posted: 20 Dec 2009 11:27 PM PST
The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition. Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources. So what made the deal go sideways? We’re working on that. From the information we’ve gathered, there is currently no other suitor seriously looking at the company. For now Yelp intends to stay independent. We’re betting that someone – Apple, Microsoft, etc. – came to Yelp with an offer for a strategic deal gave Stoppleman the confidence to say no to Google. But who that partner is and what they offered isn’t something we’ve been able to track down. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| After A Few Fits And Starts, Hunch Begins To Sprint In The Right Direction Posted: 20 Dec 2009 09:27 PM PST Sometimes it takes a while for a site to find its legs. Hunch, which launched last March to much fanfare, is only now in the past few months capturing the attention of consumers. As the comScore chart above shows, Hunch recently hit a growth spurt, jumping from an estimated 130,000 unique U.S. visitors in August, 2009 to 371,000 in November, 2009. While the overall size of the audience is still small, nearly tripling it in three months certainly makes for an eye-catching chart. Hunch takes a little getting used to. It is not a straightforward Q&A site. Co-founder Caterina Fake compares Hunch to a “Wikipedia for decisions.” Contributors create a series of questions aimed to help visitors make decisions. The more questions you answer about any given topic, the better guidance Hunch is supposed to be able to give you. Like any crowdsourced service, it is designed to get better the more people use it. So far, people have answered more than 28 million questions to train the Hunch system about themselves. Although it is not necessary to do so to get suggested answers. But the more you put in, the more tailored the answers are to your specific needs. It took time to build a corpus of useful answers and decision trees which help people figure out everything from “What’s my favorite color?” to “What should I eat for lunch?” or “What places should I visit before I die?” Early on, Hunch asked too much of its users before providing an answer, but now it seems to have enough topics and data to take users straight to its top recommendations. Shortening the cycle between landing on the site with a question and finding an answer may account for part of the jump in Hunch’s popularity. But Hunch is up against a lot of competition, including from social Q&A service Aardvark, which only recently expanded to the Web from an IM platform. My hunch is we’ll see both grow fast next year. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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| Report: Bidding War Over, O2 Rings Up Jajah For $200 Million Posted: 20 Dec 2009 05:13 PM PST
It was believed that Microsoft and Cisco were two other companies that were vying to get the company. Back in June, the company served up its 1 billionth VoIP call. While the company has some 15 million subscribers of its own, many of the calls originate from Yahoo Messenger, which has used Jajah since 2008 for its VoIP calls. They also have a deal in place with Microsoft. The company has raised over $30 million in funding over four rounds. They are backed by the likes of Sequoia and Intel Capital. O2 is the mobile arm of Telefónica Europe, and had been considered the company with only an outside shot at theacquisition, especially considering Microsoft’s partnership with Jajah. Earlier reports indicated the price could be driven as high as $400 million in a bidding war, instead it appears to have stayed on the low side. We’ve reached out to Jajah for comment on the matter, and will update when we hear back. Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| The Difference between $1 Billion-Plus in Exits and “Success” Posted: 20 Dec 2009 04:29 PM PST
How could that be? We're geographically closer, have a shorter difference in time-zones and while few countries in Latin America are growing as fast as China or even Rwanda, Brazil's economy just graced the cover of the Economist and anchored a special report in the Financial Times. Hell, the biggest IPO of the year was a Brazilian company. So what gives? It can't just be the fact that it’s harder to get into Brazil than Harvard. Silicon Valley is noted as a meritocracy, and one-quarter of successful tech entrepreneurs are immigrants. But for all the Indians, Chinese, Israelis, Iranians and even Africans I've interviewed over the years at various seats of Valley power—one group has been notably absent: Latin Americans. Even Pishevar isn't from Argentina, he's an Iranian who just fell in love with it in recent years. Given that many of India's advocates early on were Indian immigrants who'd made it big in the Valley, I wondered if part of the lack of attention on Latin America was the lack of high profile, super-successful Latin role models in the Valley. Not long after I started work on the book, I dumbly stumbled upon one such role model living in Woodside, practically in my own backyard. (Some reporter I am.) His name is Wences Casares, and he's almost Marc Andreessen-level of fame South of the border. But for all his accomplishments—ahem, selling three companies for more than a combined $1 billion—he's gotten little ink in the Valley. His first company, Patagon, was an online bank for Latin America. It sold to Santander Bank in March 2000—one month before the market crashed– for $750 million. The company wound up writing off most of that value after the fact, but Casares' reputation in Latin America and among the well-heeled investors who invested in him was cemented. Those investors included George Soros, Microsoft, Intel and Fred Wilson who recently told me Casares one of the best entrepreneurs he'd ever backed. Casares has since sold two other companies: Wanako Games to Vivendi and Lemon Bank to Banco do Brasil. He can't comment on price, and they were much smaller than Patagon, but the returns were much better. He's now building his latest company, Bling Nation, which has raised $33 million dollars. He raised $20 million of that in October as many startups were struggling to raise funds. Bling Nation is building out a mobile payment system for physical goods that can bypass expensive credit card systems. Casares is rolling the system out through small community banks. Casares doesn't get attention in part because he doesn't crave it. The year after he sold This year's asado was a few weeks ago, and since I was in Chile and I'm decidedly not a The more time you spend with Casares, the more interesting things like this you discover. But here's possibly the most interesting thing about him: He considers the fact that he's sold three companies—and made himself and his investors hundreds of millions of dollars in the process—an embarrassment. That's right. In a Valley where everyone obsesses over investing in the "serial entrepreneur," Casares thinks it's a sign of failure that he couldn't take his companies the distance. He compares those assembly-line-esque entrepreneurs who say they are just "the startup guy" to a 40-year-old man who still hangs out at a disco trying to pick up young girls. It's fine at a point, he argues, but at some level a really good entrepreneur grows up. Indeed, the most successful tech companies are those where the founder stays well into the company's life, ie Oracle, Apple, Amazon, Google or Hewlett-Packard. Casares isn't totally alone here. That's a core investing thesis of a lot of newer venture firms started by dot-com era veterans who saw the downside of replacing founders with so-called "grown up CEOs." Prominent examples include Peter Thiel's Founders Fund or Marc Andreesseen's Andreessen Horowitz Ventures. Casares was an expert at Endeavor's recent selection panel in Patagonia, where I eavesdropped on several of his sessions and heard him give some blunt advice along these lines that’s worth sharing for anyone thinking about selling his or her company, whether in Latin America, the US or anywhere else in the world. "I don't think there are people who are just better at startups,” he said. “I think that's a character flaw, and I have it. I have sold all my companies, and I wish I hadn't sold a single one. No matter how much money you make you'll be surprised at how bad you feel later. I sold them because it got really hard. But a lot of times there are easy things you can do to fix that without selling the company." That comment is going to make Bling Nation all the more interesting to watch in coming years. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| YC-Funded Lingt Uses Games To Turn You Into A Language Learning Addict Posted: 20 Dec 2009 03:15 PM PST
The Y Combinator funded company is launching today in public beta, offering a suite of matching games to help English speakers learn Chinese. Using the app is quite straightforward. First, you choose a set of words that you need to learn. You can use a one of Lingt’s suggested lists, a list of vocabulary words drawn from one of thirty US/Chinese textbooks, or you can manually enter your own words. From there, the site will quiz you on the meaning of the words. You can either input your answers via text, by saying them aloud, or as a matching game (click on one of five choices). The site uses well established learning principles to make sure that the words stick. The name of the game here is repetition: every time you take a quiz, Lingt will keep track of which words give you the most difficulty, and will present them to more frequently than the words you know well. The site works best when you check in on a near-daily basis, but if you have to you can switch to ‘Cram’ mode, which lets you tailor quizzes to suit your needs. As you progress through your vocab sets, you earn badges and achievements similar to those seen on Xbox Live and Foursquare. At this point Lingt is still pretty early in development. It only has support for Chinese, but founder Justin Cannon says that it will soon support other languages including Spanish and French. The service was built to make adding a new language very easy — the site just needs to add a new dictionary. But there are a few other things that will take longer to add. At this point, everything in Lingt is based on vocabulary, so this won’t be very helpful for learning grammar rules. This is something that the company also plans to implement (along with cultural information as well). Perhaps most important though, I think Lingt needs to do more to expand its reward system. The site doesn’t currently have a way to actually share any rewards with friends, so there isn’t as much of an incentive to earn badges. Basic sharing to services like Facebook is coming soon, Cannon says. In the longer term, the site plans to offer features like class leaderboards, so a teacher could invite students to face off against each other. Other services in the flashcard/memorization space include Smart.fm, Quizlet, and TC50 alum Grockit.
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
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| Are Hot U.S. Startups The New Bling For Rich Russians? Posted: 20 Dec 2009 01:56 PM PST
We weren’t the only ones surprised earlier this year when Facebook raised a new round of financing at a $10 billion valuation. Facebook itself apparently held its nose as it closed the round, but Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies was offering a far richer valuation than anyone else (and, importantly, they didn’t require a board of directors seat). Now the investment group keeps popping back into the news. First as a possible buyer of AOL’s ICQ property, and more recently they led Zynga’s robust $180 million financing, and last week when word got out that it had increased its Facebook stake to more than 5%. DST is a legitimate investment firm, according to the companies and co-investors who’ve looked into them. They do have a colorful past – one of DST's major shareholders, Alisher Usmanov, spent six years in an Uzbek jail for fraud and embezzlement in the 1980s, says the NYTimes. What’s interesting about DST isn’t their past. It’s that they seem quite willing to dump very large amounts of money into hot U.S. startups at sky high valuations. No one else wanted in at Facebook at that $10 billion valuation (at least without a board seat). And while Zynga had quality co-investors, DST led and presumably priced the round. Why is a Russian investment firm willing to pay these prices when other’s won’t? Here’s the comment from Hacker News, which appeared on this thread about the Zynga investment:
I interviewed DST founder and CEO Yuri Milner, who graduated from Wharton Business School in 1992, just after the Facebook investment. And to be fair, he doesn’t appear to be anything other than a mild mannered and successful business guy. But the man is willing to pour money into companies at valuations that make U.S. investors blanch. Maybe the bling value of Facebook and Zynga help sweeten the deal. Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors
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| Ribbit Mobile Gets An iPhone App By Sticking To Voicemail Posted: 20 Dec 2009 12:50 PM PST Ever since Ribbit Mobile launched, I’ve been using it to forward my calls to Skype when I am at my computer and transcribe all of my voicemails, the text of which are then sent to me via email. It’s similar to Google Voice (which Mike uses), except you can use your existing mobile number. So I was pretty excited to hear that Ribbit Mobile now has an iPhone app which was just approved today (iTunes link). I was also pretty surprised. Because Apple wouldn’t approve the iPhone app for Google Voice, which led to an FCC investigation last summer. The main reason Apple gave was because Google Voice substituted its own dialer for the iPhone’s native dialer, and this changed one of the iPhone’s core user interfaces. Well, suffice it to say that Ribbit Mobile does not attempt to take over any of the iPhone’s telephone functions. Calls are placed through the iPhone’s regular dialer. And you don’t even receive calls through the app. Just like with Ribbit Mobile, the calls are placed through the mobile phone you link up to your Ribbit account. Instead, the app is more of a voicemail manager. You can see all of your transcribed voicemails, and click them to read each one, or press the play button to hear them. For each voicemail, you have the option to call back (through the iPhone dialer and AT&T), respond via SMS or email, or even record a voicemail response, which you send as an MP3 attached to an email. The app also lets you create a To-Call list to remind yourself which voicemails to respond to directly later on. Ribbit Mobile’s iPhone app is fine as far as it goes, but I kind of just want it to take over the entire phone function of the iPhone, which is the part of my iPhone I use the least anyway. But if it did that, it probably would never have seen the light of day. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
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| Posted: 20 Dec 2009 09:49 AM PST
 Yes, I know he was joking. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to print that tweet out and frame it. And who knows, maybe real-life interaction will eventually prove to be more important than social media when it comes to human happiness. For those who aren’t familiar with it, Metcalfe’s Law states that “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system”. It’s up there with Moore’s Law in terms of well known tech “laws”. I’m in very good company. Now excuse me while I go stand in front of a mirror and tell myself how awesome I am.  Image by Craige. Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
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Paris-based video sharing site 
Dutch telecom group 
Last month, we wrote about the VoIP startup 
I had a lot of theories back in 2008 when I started researching entrepreneurship in emerging markets, and I had one big, glaring question: For all the noted VCs urging me to go check out their companies in Israel, Eastern Europe, China, India, parts of Africa and even Iceland—almost no one mentioned one of the hottest emerging countries: Brazil. In fact, only one person in the Valley urged me to visit any country in Latin America, and that wasn't a VC. It was Shervin Pishevar, CEO of 
Patagon he disappeared on a boat with his family for three years. But he quietly does a lot to encourage Latin American entrepreneurs. He invests. He mentors. He's on 
vegetarian (sorry for the delicious picture above if you are) I jumped at the chance to go. I soon realized by "typical asado" Casares meant a lavish affair for hundreds of people and by "house" he meant castle. I'm not kidding—Casares actually owns a castle in Chile. (Pictured to your left.) Ever the savvy businessman, he is actually making thousands a day renting it out to a production crew that's filming a show about vampires there.
A 
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