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TechCrunch -
3 hours and 5 minutes ago
It seems that Y Combinator and TechStars-like incubators are popping up everywhere. BoomStartup just
launched an incubator in Utah and TechStars is expanding
to other cities in the U.S., as is The Founder Institute.
Chicago has a new incubator that recently launched, called Excelerate Labs.
Excelerate is the brainchild of OKCupid
entrepreneur Sam Yagan, Kapil Chaudhary,
Kelli Rhee, and Troy Henikoff. Yagan
says the Chicago-based incubator has a similar model to TechStars and Y Combinator. Six to ten
startups will be chosen for a three month long program, where founders will be given resources to
build their products, access to mentors and funding. Each startup will receive anywhere from
$15,000 to $20,000 (depending on the number of founders) for five percent of equity.
The program is currently accepting
applications until April 2. Yagan says that one of the reasons that we wanted to start the
program was to help make Chicago become “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” Sandbox Industries and i2a Fund have invested in the incubator, but
Yagan says that other venture funds have taken an active interest in Excelerate, including DFJ
Mercury. Mentors include TechStars founder
David Cohen, OpenTable’s Chuck
Templeton, Apex
Ventures Partners’ Lon Chow and a host of other notable entrepreneurs and investors.
Groupon directors Eric Lefkofsky
and Brad Keywell, also recently
launched Lightbank and will invest as much as $10
million annually in early-stage technology companies through a new fund dubbed. Similar to
Excelerate, the fund aims to help establish Chicago as a technology hub.
It’s always great to see investors and former tech executives investing time (and money) in
promising startups and ideas. And we are seeing a plethora of innovative startups emerging from a
variety of incubators around the country and world, including Y
Combinator, TechStars, The Founder Institute, Launchbox Digital and more.
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TechCrunch -
8 hours and 38 minutes ago
When I
came to the U.S. in 1980, I was young and naïve. I used to think that corruption and ethical
lapses were just a third-world ill. Eventually, I became a tech CEO and learned the harsh
realities of American business. Yes, standards are much higher, and breaches are punished, but
the temptations are just the same here as they are in any other country. Ethical lapses (which
are a form of corruption) are quite common. You watch stories about these on TV
every other day and read about them on TechCrunch. It was the ethical lapses of our
financial institutions that threw our economy into a tailspin, and for which we are paying the
price, after all.
It is best to be aware of the temptations and to prevent the lapses from occurring. As Enron,
Bernie Madoff, and Lehman
Brothers have shown, it’s a slippery slope. Once you start compromising your values for
short-term gains, there is no turning back. Business ethics are not something you need to start
worrying about when your company reaches a certain size; they need to be sewn into the fabric of
your startup from the get-go. The lessons are the same for tech businesses as they are for
investment banks and for third-world economies.
Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer
researched the difference between companies that perform at high levels for extended periods and
those that implode when they reach a certain size. When analyzing the spectacular failures in the
recent financial meltdown, he found that:
· Of the original Forbes 100 (named in 1917), 61 had ceased to exist by 1987.
 Of the remaining 39, only 18 stayed in the top 100, and their return during the
period 1917 to 1987 was 20% less than that of the overall market.
· Of companies in the original Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index of 1957, only
74 remained in 1997; of these, only 12 outperformed the S&P 500 in the period 1957 to 1998.
· The average CEO tenure in the U.S. is 4.2 years, less than half the 10.5-year average in
1990.
Beer posited three core reasons for the failure of so many Wall Street firms in the fall of 2008:
the firms lacked a higher purpose (in other words, they were focused on short-term gains,
profits, and bonuses); they lacked a clear strategy; and they mismanaged their risk. Companies
like Charles Schwab and US Bancorp were able to avoid the fallout by having a laser-like focus on
customer service and on honesty and transparency. Neither company touched the subprime mortgage
securitization market, because they saw it as risky and simply not the kind of business that
served the company’s long-term interests.
Even outside Wall Street, companies like Cisco Systems, Southwest Airlines, and Costco Wholesale,
with the strongest sense of higher purpose, achieved the greatest success. Take Costco. Wall
Street analysts have long chastised Costco’s management for paying high wages and keeping
employees around for a long time, because this results in higher benefits costs. But the
company’s CEO, Jim Sinegal, lives by his belief that keeping good employees is strategic
for Costco’s long-term success and growth. The company’s per-employee sales are
considerably higher than those of key rivals such as Target and Wal-Mart; customer service at the
stores is phenomenal and fast; and Costco continues to expand, both in number of warehouses and
in products and services for business and consumer customers. The culture of the company flows
downward from Sinegal and his focus on employees and, by extension, to customers.
One of the problems that Beer found with the failed banks was that their employees lacked the
ability to “speak truth to power”. Employees felt intimidated by superiors; the
institutions’ internal voice of conscience and purpose was silenced by a maniacal focus on
short-term profits and whatever scheme would bring them in. The silencing of employees who sought
to challenge strategy and risk-management practices likely also undermined the banks’ moral
authority and emboldened those who already felt inclined to do the wrong thing. With a muted
internal voice, these organizations lacked a moral compass. As a result, they drove off a cliff
with astonishing speed.
The same things happen in Silicon Valley companies. Â I asked
management guru — and head of the CEO
Institute of Yale School of Management — Jeff Sonnenfeld for his advice on how
startups can sow the seeds for building a Cisco or Costco. Here is Jeff’s advice:
1)Â Create a culture of openness and welcome dissent
– Internal constructive critics are your best friends — too
often, founders are blinded by their own enthusiasm for their creative vision and then are
surrounded by sycophants, kissing up. Founders who fall out of touch rapidly lose their ethical
bearings. At Intel, founder Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore did not look for sycophantic followers
in selecting the brilliant, contentious, but relentlessly honest Andy Grove as their colleague
and successor. Similarly, Craig Barrett and Paul Otellini have consistently fought for different
points of view internally — without undermining the enterprise, and always
reinforcing Intel’s self-critical core ethic.
2)Â Lead by example. Â The authenticity of the
leader’s character is essential — if colleagues don’t believe you,
they will not take needed risks on your behalf — such as training subordinates
to be able to do their own jobs. Â Startups are often defined by the hip
clichés of VC firms, adoring press, and HR consultants — but the
startups don’t really practice what they preach.
3)Â Learn from immediate peers or distant models. Too often,
founders atrophy because they believe that the unique quality of their business or technological
mission means that they too are truly unique in leadership values. Steve Jobs has
patterned himself after Polaroid founder Ed Land — and tried to learn from
Land’s strengths and weaknesses. Henry Ford regretfully once claimed
“History is bunk” but in reality revered Thomas Edison. Michael Dell put
legendary tech entrepreneur (Teledyne) and educator Dr. George Kozmetsky on his board right from
the start to learn from this brilliant then septuagenarian.
4)Â Recognize your own fallibility as a leader, know your limits, and beware
of the myth of immortality. Entrepreneurs often are horrified at the
thought of leadership succession. The founders of great firms such as Google, Cisco, Amgen, and
Microsoft have known that they would need to prepare for a day when they no longer could be the
lone day-to-day internal boss, primary external ambassador, and symbolic cultural icon. The
founder of the original (pre-Starbucks) coffee house chain Chock-Full-o-Nuts started his first
café on Broadway 43rd Street in 1923 and was a great national
success. Sadly, sixty years later, as a dying man who had been flat on his back for
two years at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, he still clung to the job of leader of the
enterprise, his full-time physician serving as acting president.
5) Remember that institutional character — like a liquid
cupped in your hand — is fragile; easily lost; and hard, if not impossible, to
regain. Egomaniacal moves, personal grandiosity, greed, and deception create impressions
that are hard to erase. Whole Foods founder, John Mackey, sabotaged the integrity of
his own exalted brand, damaging the company’s internal pride and customer admiration far
more badly than any competitor could have, due to his self-inflating and his misleading
“anonymous” blogging, hiding his identity through an anagram of his wife’s
name, “rehodab.”
I’ll add another very important point: Establish an independent board.
Venture firms often demand a majority of board seats as a condition for their investments.
Conflicts invariably arise. The board begins to serve the needs of VCs and management, rather
than of the company itself, which loses the independent voice to warn it not to do the wrong
things. The inconvenient truth is that all board members have a fiduciary duty to act in the
interests of the company, and not in their own interests. Board members must not engage in
transactions in which they or their partners stand to gain. They are legally required to avoid
these conflicts of interest.
Finally, remember that in business, you have to make tough choices at every juncture. Though
business decisions usually have clear consequences and outcomes, ethical decisions are always
hard. Making the right choice doesn’t always bring success, but ethical lapses almost
always lead to failure. No matter what the consequence, doing what’s ethical and right is
always the better long-term strategy.
Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned
academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law
School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization
at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.


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TechCrunch -
20 hours and 35 minutes ago
I didn’t have the same problems at SXSW this year
that some people did. Was it too crowded at some events? Sure.
But there were plenty of alternative things to do. Did some of the keynotes bomb? Yes.
But there were plenty of other things to listen to. Did AT&T fail? No. Actually, they
did an awesome job keeping the
network up. Instead, I had a problem of a different kind: check-in fatigue.
Seeing as location was this
year’s Twitter at SXSW, and seeing as I write a lot about location, I wanted to try to
use as many of the services as I could during the actual conference. I drastically underestimated
how much work that would actually be.
At first, I was using all of the services I had on my phone to check-in when I arrived at a place
in Austin. This included: Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, Burbn, MyTown, CauseWorld, Hot
Potato, Plancast, and (at certain places) Foodspotting. Even with great AT&T service, this would take a
solid 10 minutes or more to check-in to all of them. And it took even longer when I’d have
to pause to explain to my friends what the hell I was doing on my phone all that time.
This was at every venue we stopped at. The situation simply wasn’t tenable.
By the second day, I had cut the services I would check-in to in half. It still wasn’t
close to being something I would consider doing on a regular basis. By the end of my
time in Austin, I was down to using only two services — yes, the two in the
midst of the
“war” — Foursquare and Gowalla.
Pretty much everyone I knew in Austin were also using both Foursquare and Gowalla to send out all
their check-ins. And all seemed to agree: it was still too tedious to use even just two services
to do the same thing. In the end, there should be only one.
And so it should be no surprise that a few companies are already working on a solution for this
problem. One is by the creators of Brightkite, who managed to obtain the killer check.in domain name. The team showed me a preview of the app at a party
one night, and I immediately knew it was exactly what I needed (see a
preview of it here).
But there’s a problem with this solution too. Currently, Gowalla’s API is read-only,
which means you actually can’t use another app to check-in to the service. I spoke with CEO
Josh Williams a bit about this just prior to SXSW, and he noted that the main thinking behind
this is to maintain the user experience Gowalla is looking for (a very Apple-like argument). But,
he did say that eventually he thinks they will open up a two-way API — maybe
once they have time to create some best practices documentation, he noted.
Another problem is that currently each of these check-in services has their own places database.
That means that a place on Foursquare may be slightly different than a place on Gowalla, even
though they’re technically the same place. Worse, there are plenty of duplicates for some
venues since people are allowed to create their own. Check.in works around this place problem by
doing a look-up on each service and letting you pick the correct check-in spot. But it’s a
bit slow, and still seems rather tedious.
A better solution would be for the various services to adopt a standard for places. The Activity Streams group is working
on such a concept. Yahoo may also be able to implement such a system on top of its WOEID system. Of course, any
service that adopts such a standard would be risking at least part of their business since these
place databases are one of the keys to each service.
Meanwhile, Facebook is thinking about aggregating data from
both Foursquare and Gowalla for its own upcoming location implementation. Might that be the
one location stop to rule them all (of course, the writing back to Gowalla would still likely be
an issue)? Not if Twitter has anything to say about it.
I love that all these startups are
emerging around location right now (at least a dozen more have emailed me just since
I’ve been back from SXSW). But I’m starting to worry that this is going to turn into
a repeat of the social wars, where we all have 15 different profiles we constantly have to
update across a range of networks.
During our Realtime Crunchup last year, I brought up this issue during our panel on
location. All the players on stage (including Twitter, Foursquare, Hot Potato, Google
Latitude, GeoAPI, and SimpleGeo) seemed to want to say that they could all get along and play
nicely together for the betterment of location as a whole. I didn’t buy it then, and
I’m definitely not buying it now.
From a business perspective, it doesn’t make sense for these guys to all play nicely with
one another and make it so you don’t have to use their services. The need to take steps to
ensure that you will use their
service, and will do so instead of a rival service. That’s the way it works, and
that’s the way it has always worked. And that’s why it’s a war. Right now,
it’s just the early stages where all sides are arming themselves. Soon, they’ll try
to kill one another. And that may not be such a bad thing.
[photo: flickr/intagiblearts]
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TechCrunch -
22 hours and 50 minutes ago
During my recent trip to India, I flew down to Bangalore for one
reason: To meet N.R. Narayana Murthy. Murthy is the co-founder, executive chairman and former CEO
for 21 years of Infosys, the first Indian company to go public on Nasdaq and effectively the
company that began the $30 billion Indian IT outsourcing market.
Murthy’s idea was so successful that it quickly became controversial—not
only within the United States where some Americans feel Indians are “stealing jobs,”
but also in India where many are concerned about a tech economy that doesn’t make
anything. I wanted to meet with Murthy, because in many ways he’s the best person to
address what Indians at home and abroad are facing and where Indian entrepreneurship goes from
here.
Here are a few highlights from our meeting:
His Day Job. Murthy thought he was stepping down from Infosys back in 2002, but
he couldn’t fully let go. As such, he still works pretty much full time for the company,
traveling to meet with customers and running a lot of the company’s mentoring and training
programs. The more surprising aspect of his job: He personally signs off on the architecture of
every building on each one of Infosys’ campuses that employ some 17,000 people around the
world. The one we were sitting in was spread of eight acres and had some remarkable buildings,
including one that looked like the Luxor casino in Las Vegas.
I asked why this was a top priority—after all, many Valley campuses are plush
but from an architecture standpoint look about the same. He said when GE and other American
multinationals were starting to come into his business everyone thought Infosys would lose the
local talent war. So Murthy studied why people want to work at a particular place. One of the
results was the comfort and design of the facilities. That was in 1994 when Infosys was designing
the very building we were sitting in as we had this conversation. “I’ve been in
charge of every building since– all over the world,” he says.
Hurting or Helping Local Entrepreneurship? Given exactly how plush Murthy and
his colleagues have worked to make Infosys, has he indirectly hurt Bangalore’s
entrepreneurship scene by making the risk of leaving so daunting? He smiled when I asked this and
said, “We may have unwittingly. But I do feel like the spirit of entrepreneurship is alive
and kicking in Bangalore.”
Further, I asked about Bangalore’s Zippo-flipping, free-spending generation of young
techies who’ve graduated to a huge wave of multinational jobs that pay them far more than
their parents ever made, in many cases more than the rest of their families combined. Murthy
didn’t deny that that instant-gratification, “gimmie” contingent was strong in
the city he helped build, economically speaking. But he blames the Internet and the
mass-cross-pollination of Western pop culture, not the bigger paycheck from companies like his.
“We are moving towards a uniform, global culture with an intense competitive spirit and an
intense desire for instant gratification,” he says. “But I have a firm belief that
each generation is better than the previous one. The Indian entrepreneurs today are more daring
than we were.” (This from a man who became a capitalist after after hitchhiking across
communist Eastern Europe and getting thrown in jail for chatting up someone’s girlfriend on
a train. “More daring” is a tall order, young Indian techies.)
Is India’s Tech Community Too Addicted to Services? Clearly, services has
been a great business for Infosys and the hundreds of dollar-millionaires and even more
rupee-millionaires that the company’s generous stock program has created. But a lot of
Indian CEOs and investors complain that in most cases services-based tech businesses are a great
way to get revenues quick, but not a way to build a huge, high-growth business. There’s a
big question of whether India’s tech sector has a worrying lack of product-building
know-how.
Murthy says it’s a progression. “India missed the industrial revolution, but Indians
had intelligence,” he says. “We had to make do with pen and paper. We were always
forced to look at the abstract. What is happening in India today is the creation of jobs.
Let’s create jobs as long as they are legal and ethical, it doesn’t matter, as long
as we make money. The time will come for creating products. I wouldn’t lose sleep over
this. If we create enough jobs we’ll raise the confidence of the youngsters and
they’ll create products.”
India’s Infrastructure. Here’s something it’s hard for even
Murthy to be upbeat about: India’s shoddy physical infrastructure. Murthy has traveled the
world and it’s frustrating that so much money has poured into the country he loves, and
yet, the infrastructure is still so shockingly bad.
There is progress—Infosys for instance has benefited from a new overpass that
cuts down on the drive to the campus by more than thirty minutes. (See!) But it’s
not moving nearly fast enough, he says. “I don’t know if we will reach the level of
the United States or China,” he adds.
Murthy gave a more nuanced explanation than the usual “it’s corruption” answer
you get in India. He explained that 65% of India’s population lives in rural areas and 35%
live in cities. And there’s such polarity between the quality of life that politicians have
to appear to be doing more for the villages than the cities if they want to get re-elected. That
leaves prosperous economic cities blighted by poor sewage systems, pollution spewing generators
and beggars weaving through traffic tapping on car windows. “Different emerging nations
take different paths,” he says. “In China, they chose to emphasize giving people
economic freedom first and political freedom second. In India we chose the opposite path.”
Hurting or Helping US-based Indians? All you have to do is read the comments on
one of Vivek Wadhwa’s posts to see the ugly, anti-immigrant, anti-Indian fervor
that’s been whipped up in America, post-recession. A lot of it has to do with outsourcing.
I asked Murthy if he felt his company and industry’s huge success has indirectly made life
harder for Indian-Americans. He turned the blame on xenophobes like Lou Dobbs and grandstanding
politicians who use the wedge issue to get viewers and votes.
But it’s an issue he has to address a lot. He answers it by saying every morning he gets up
and gets a Pepsi out of his GE Fridge and drives his American car to work where he sits down at
his Dell computer. India used to have companies that made soft drinks, refrigerators, cars and
computers. But the American ones were better. Allowing them in hurt Indian workers in the short
term, but provided a far better quality of life for a much bigger swath of Indians long term. He
argues outsourcing has done the same thing for US companies. Greater efficiencies and
cost-savings enables these companies to stay competitive and there’s no reason they
can’t—in theory—plow those savings into better local
jobs or job training.
This argument isn’t going to pacify hate-mongers, because nothing will. Murthy knows that
too and while he regrets it, he seems to accept it as reality.
Advice for Entrepreneurs. Murthy has started a $170 million venture fund, so
although he spends most of his time still at Infosys, he clearly cares about encouraging the next
generation of entrepreneurs. He had two big pieces of advice for them. One, be able to articulate
what you do in one sentence. If you can’t, you don’t have a good idea. And two, make
sure the market is ready. Businesses are killed, not congratulated, for being ahead of their
time.


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TechCrunch -
23 hours ago
Back in June, Google launched Sputnik, a
suite of tools that runs over 5,000 tests to check a web browser’s JavaScript conformance.
Last week, they made the tool a lot easier for anyone to use, with a version that works in the web browser.
The results are interesting.
Notably, both the Opera and Safari web browsers beat Google’s own Chrome browser in the
test. As you can see in the picture above, Opera is the clear leader, with only 78 failures (the
closer to the center, the less errors). Safari came in second with 159 errors, with Chrome in
third with 218 errors. Firefox is close behind with 259 errors, while Internet Explorer is the
outlier with 463 errors.
These tests were run on Windows machines, with the latest released version of each browser. Using
the web tool on my Mac, though, shows similar results (at least for Opera, Chrome, Safari, and
Firefox — there is no IE for Mac anymore).
While much of the focus on JavaScript is about speed (that’s what the SunSpider test measures, for
example), Sputnik is interesting because it focuses on conformity, making it more like the
Acid3 test, which tests web standards
compliance. Chrome, Safari, and Opera have all passed Acid3, with Firefox getting very close
(94/100 for Firefox 3.6). IE, meanwhile, again lags behind with just 20/100 for IE8. And even the
new IE9 preview only scores 55/100.
Speaking of IE9, I tried to run the Sputnik tool in the preview build of the new browser on
Windows 7. Unfortunately, it completely shut down several times after getting up to about 50
failures after only a few hundred of the 5,000+ tests — not a good sign. But
again, it’s just a very early preview release of the browser, and early SunSpider results for the browser
have been good.
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TechCrunch -
1 days ago
Last month we
wrote about Crocodoc, a new Y Combinator-funded company that makes it very easy to upload a
text document or PowerPoint deck and mark it up online to share with your colleagues.
Unfortunately, it was also pretty bare boned — you couldn’t
even save your edited document to your hard drive. Today, that’s changing: Crocodoc has
rolled out some key new features (including the ability to save) that make the service
significantly more flexible, and also pits it more directly against Adobe’s Acrobat Pro.
Aside from the ability to save to PDF, the new version includes a freehand pen tool, a tool to
convert any website to PDF (which you can then add notes to), and a new API. In a few days, the
company will be releasing its application on Google’s recently-launched App Marketplace. The service will
also be rolling out a Flash-based embeddable document viewer (similar to what you’ll find
on DocStoc and Scribd) that lets you both view and mark up embedded documents.
CEO Ryan Damico says that these features make Crocodoc more competitive with Adobe’s $400
Acrobat Pro software because the free Acrobat Reader most people have doesn’t allow them to
mark up and save their documents (personally, I’ve been avoiding any software with the word
‘Acrobat’ in its title for years). Damico does acknowledge that there are still
plenty of premium features that Crocodoc doesn’t have that Adobe’s paid
software does, but says that this basic editing/saving functionality is what most people are
after, anyway. Damico says that in the long term, Crocodoc is hoping to “do to
Acrobat what Gmail did to Outlook” by taking a widely used desktop application and bringing
it online.

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TechCrunch -
1 days and 1 hours ago
Back in January, Google announced that it
would follow Mozilla’s lead
and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser
behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the
bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337) for
“particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the
first of those.
As noted on the
Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes
(both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337
prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that
Google is calling, “High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects.”
This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through
development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already
they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser
are likely to launch at some point over the next few months.
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TechCrunch -
1 days and 2 hours ago
Banks, cable companies, and utilities all want to get rid of their paper bills and get customers
on their electronic billing systems. Just as there were back-office billing providers for the
paper era, there are now back-office electronic billers. A company in Charlotte, North Carolina
called Transactis is one of them, and it just raised a $2.5
million round led by New York City-based Metamorphic
Ventures. CEO Joe Proto and other existing shareholders also participated in the round.
Transactis works primarily with banks and payment processors to take over the whole e-billing
process for them, from presenting the bills via email to collecting the cash. More and more
consumers are opting to go paperless (it’s the green thing to do), and companies save on
the paper, printing, and postage costs.
Email billing is a growth business, and Transactis is carving out a nice little niche for itself.
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TechCrunch -
1 days and 2 hours ago
Editor’s note: This post was written by Joe Stump, the co-founder of SimpleGeo, a geolocation
infrastructure company. While much of the focus in location these days is on the
front-end side of things, SimpleGeo focuses on the backend, allowing startups to very easily get
started with geolocation.
There’s been a lot of coverage lately about the location “war” between Gowalla and Foursquare.
Nobody is arguing that Gowalla and Foursquare aren’t, on some levels, competing, but I do think a
lot of people are missing the big picture here. Which is the impending location gold rush.
My cofounder, Matt Galligan, and I
firmly believe that location is in a similar position as social was in 2001 or so. By that I mean
that, at the time, social was very nascent, but exciting as it gave us a whole new view of the
data we consume every day. Over the course of almost 10 years we’ve seen social get baked
into everything from photo sharing to financial tools. I think that location, similarly, gives us
an interesting new view of our data.
This momentum has been slowly gaining steam since, essentially, the iPhone was released. We, the
developers and general nerd populous, finally had an open platform that had location (in the form
of latitude and longitude of our users) baked into it. The first wave of location services made
location the core feature. Much like social, this isn’t sustainable long-term. You
can’t be “Some Company plus location” and expect to sustain users. Especially
after Some Company enables location themselves.
Which bring us to the second wave of location, which I think was started by our friends at
Foursquare. They were, in my opinion, the first product to gain traction by moving past simple
location and building an experience on top of it. It’s as if
co-founders Dennis
Crowley and Naveen
Selvadurai said, “Okay, we have location, but that’s boring. Let’s make a
game out of going out with our friends!” In other words, they worked under the assumption
of having location and built a compelling experience from there.
I think people who are building location-based applications need to keep two things in mind:
1. If there’s any war brewing, it’s over presence. That is the very basic question of
where you and your friends are and who may know those details. Gowalla, Foursquare, Loopt, et al,
if they wish to own presence, will be duking it out with Twitter and Facebook. For anyone
who’s not already in this game it’s going to be very hard to break into it at this
point.
2. You need to move past the mindset that location is the feature. Build products under the
assumption that you have a user’s location and that you can use the social plumbing
we’ve been building for the last nine years. What kind of interesting experiences can you
build on top of the potent mixture of friends, location, and the real world?
So who’s going to win? More than just one company. The users are going to get more
interesting and compelling experiences, some familiar names will revolutionize their products
with location, and some kid in a garage we haven’t heard of is about to make us all look
like fools.
I can’t wait.
[photo: flickr/bogenfreund]
CrunchBase InformationFoursquareGowallaSimpleGeoInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 3 hours ago
There are only two weeks left until the iPad’s April
3 launch date, and Apple has just started reaching out to developers to say that
they’re accepting applications that were developed specifically for the device. We’ve
included the Email below. The key takeaway: If you’re looking to have your app available at
launch, you need to submit it by March 27, at which point Apple’s team will let you know if
your application is ready for the grand opening.
The first few weeks after the iPad is released will be a huge gold rush opportunity, as users
look to try out the device’s large screen for the first time. In short, if you can make it
to one of the App Store’s ‘top apps’ lists, you’ll likely do very well
for yourself. The only problem is that the vast majority of developers have never had access to
an actual iPad — they’re all working off of emulators, save
for a handful of extremely lucky developers who literally have their iPads chained to a
desk. Developers can tweak their applications all they want on their computer monitors, but until
they’ve actually gotten to try it out for themselves, they’ll have a hard time
figuring out if their apps feel right.
I expect most developers will scramble to submit what they have by March 27, and that we’ll
then see numerous updates immediately afterward as developers tweak button placement and other
interface elements. Some developers may choose to simply wait until they have a device in their
hands so that they can try out their apps before submitting, but the App Store’s
discoverability issues make this a risky move (of course, given the hundreds or thousands of
applications that will launch alongside the iPad, there’s no guarantee that you’ll
get noticed on launch day, either).
Keep in mind that users will also be able to use scaled-up versions of iPhone applications on
their iPads. Given the choice, though, there’s little doubt they’ll choose a native
iPad app over an iPhone app every time.

CrunchBase InformationApp StoreInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 4 hours ago
One of Yahoo’s key chief technologists, Sam Pullara, is leaving the company to become
an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Benchmark Capital. Pullara was the technologist how headed
up the development of the the Yahoo! Open Application Platform,
the Yahoo! Query Language and Yahoo! Pipes. His departure follows
that of veteran Yahoo senior executive
Ash Patel earlier this week.
Back in 2008, Yahoo was making a big push to open
itself up to developers, and Pullara was one of the champions of that strategy. He was also
Yahoo’s representative on the OpenSocial Foundation, which sought to create a counterweight
to Facebook.
Pullara has been an EIR before. In 2004, he held that position at Accel Venture Partners and
created a startup called Gauntlet Systems, which he sold to Borland in 2006. At Benchmark, he
will be looking for new startup opportunities. He will also be working again with Benchmark
partner Peter Fenton, who was at Accel when Pullara was there. Pullara’s last day at Yahoo
will be on April 1. Yahoo has no plans to hire a replacement.
CrunchBase InformationSam PullaraYahoo!Information provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 4 hours ago
Who says you
can’t attract a substantial number of users on a shoestring budget?
Spain-based social networking platform provider Genoom,
which lets family members communicate amongst each other on private online community sites, is
about to sign up its millionth user.
This isn’t exactly a huge milestone, but I think it is noteworthy since the startup is
operating on a mere $80,000 in seed
funding, which it raised from Midatel roughly 3 years ago.
Genoom was launched in July 2007 and will cross the 1 million registered users mark by this
weekend. According to company spokesperson Bob Samii, the site is now available in 17
languages and counts more than over 10 million profiles from families all over the world.
On the Genoom website, users can add family trees, personal information, photos, videos, and
related documents about ancestors and living relatives alike, limiting access to uploaded
information through invitations and custom group privacy settings. This makes the service
effectively a marriage between genealogy and social networking.
Genoom offers a handy Facebook application,
allowing users to access their family tree and communicate with family, all while logged into
their Facebook account.
CrunchBase InformationGenoomInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 5 hours ago
 While every man and his dog is waiting for their
preordered iPad to arrive, some
Germans went their own way and yesterday presented a Slate
that appears to have, well, better features. The Neofonie WePad has similar
form and function as the
wet dreams of our Crunchgear editors, but facts are that the German Android device has a bigger
multitouch screen and a faster CPU than the iPad. Also it runs Flash, has USB ports, an inbuilt
card reader and expandable memory. Additionally it allows complete multitasking and has a webcam.
Beat that baby.

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TechCrunch -
1 days and 6 hours ago
Last year, OneRiot
ventured into the advertising world with RiotWise, an ad format which places content in
an emphasized position in their
realtime feed. The search engine also
launched a pilot program of RiotWise Trending Ads,
a stream of ads that correspond to trending topics as they emerge across the social web, that has
since been
integrated into the search engine’s API. Today, the realtime search startup is
improving upon its advertising product by offering Trending Ad unit that automatically updates in
realtime corresponding to the the most popular trending topics at the time.
The ability to update in realtime allows OneRiot to show advertiser content that is relevant to
trending topics as they emerge on networks like Twitter, Facebook and the web. The ads are
available via standard-size IAB Ad Units and is enabled by OneRiot’s realtime search
technology and PulseRank relevancy algorithm. And previously, OneRiot’s “Trending
Ads” were available only via OneRiot’s API. This meant that developers had to
integrate the raw feed into their applications, and create their own UI. The new ad unit allows
any website currently monetizing with standard static ad units to display RiotWise Trending Ads.
In order to implement he new ad unit, publishers need to integrate Trending Ad Units in the same
way they would call standard ad units. The ads will then link to realtime and relevant content
from OneRiot’s network of media partners. One Riot claims that the realtime relevance of
the ads leads to click through rates at four times the average rates.
Currently OneRiot’s trending ads have been used on Twitter apps (ÜberTwitter) and
desktop clients (Digsby). OneRiot shares
revenue with the application developer. As we’ve written in the past, OneRiot runs the risk
of surfacing irrelevant or spammy content with realtime ads, especially is the ads are refreshing
constantly to match trending topics. But as a realtime search engine, OneRiot has invested
heavily in spam prevention and is constantly sorting through millions of pieces of content to
determine what is relevant and what isn’t. Regardless, it seems like a viable monetization
tool for developers.
The startup, which just raised $7
million in funding, has been steadily innovating its product and is gathering up partners
quickly. The realtime stream ramped up this year with all the big players adding functionality to
their search offerings and OneRiot was smart to get in the game early.


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 6 hours ago
Google’s obsession with speed is well-documented. One of
the primary design principles behind its search engine is to return results as fast as possible
and strip away anything extra. But its need for speed goes well beyond search. All of
Google’s apps are optimized for speed (well, except Gmail lately, but they promise to fix that). The Chrome browser is
extremely fast,
and the
upcoming Chrome OS is also expected to make Web browsing and other computing tasks zippier.
It almost doesn’t matter if Google’s Chrome browser and OS gain significant market
share or not, as long as they push other browsers and operating systems to keep up in the speed
race. Google’s need for speed boils down to one very simple thing: money. It realized long
ago that every millisecond improvement in pageload times on its search engine resulted in more
searches, and thus more search ads served and clicked on. The opposite is also true. Google once
did a study showing
that delays of 100 to 400 millisecond in showing search results translated into up to 0.6 percent
searches. Multiply that across the billions of searches done on Google and it starts to add up to
real money, perhaps tens of millions of dollars per quarter.
Google can keep trying to make search faster because that is under its control. But what about
the rest of the Web? The faster pages load, the more Web pages people will visit overall (this is
why broadband adoption is the single biggest driver of Internet traffic and e-commerce). And it
stands to reason that the more Web pages you visit, the more searches you will perform in any
given day. Because searches are driven by the other things you do on the Web. You go look for
information, surf around, and then go back to search when you want to find something new (at
least Google hopes you do). By helping to speed up the Web, Google can speed up that information
loop so that instead of waiting for Web pages to load you can get what you need and start another
search instead.
No wonder Google tries to do everything it can to make the Web faster. For instance, it is
supporting emerging standards such as HTML5 and
SPDY, and sharing
its best practices and speed-monitoring
tools with developers. It is also baking the PuSH
protocol into Google Reader and
other apps. In doing so, Google is helping to deliver news feeds faster (PuSH, aka
Pubsubhubbub, was created by two Google engineers, of course, and released as an open-source
project). The list goes on and on.
It is all about trying to get people to achieve a “flow state” where they are just
clicking from one link to the next and it all happens instantaneously. In order for humans not to
notice electronic delays, new information needs to appear in a matter of milliseconds. Get the
whole Web humming like that and we may never leave our monitors.
Photo credit: Flickr/ Ana Patricia
Almelda
CrunchBase InformationGoogleInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 7 hours ago
Ankeena Networks, a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of new media
infrastructure solutions, has raised approximately $16 million in new VC funding, according to a
regulatory
filing (via peHUB).
No word about who backed the company with this third round of financing, but Ankeena Networks was
listed by one of its main business
partners, Juniper Networks
as one of their investments when they announced their $50 million fund recently, so
that’s one name at least. Ankeena had previously raised $15.2 million from Clearstone Venture Partners,
Mayfield Fund and Trinity Ventures, so this brings its total to a healthy $31.2 million.
Ankeena Networks’ flagship product is a content delivery platform dubbed Media Flow Director, which enables
mobile operators and other service providers to take advantage of rising consumer demand for
mobile content and other rich media content across mobile devices, PCs and televisions.
MFD aims to ensure users receive a smooth viewing experience without buffering or stuttering
despite of varying network conditions, regardless of the viewing device, over mobile as well as
wire-line broadband networks. Ankeena does this by dynamically detecting the available bandwidth
and varying the delivery bit-rate.
Ankeena Networks was born under another name, Nokeena, back
in 2008. The company was co-founded by CEO Rajan Raghavan, chief strategy and
technology officer Prabakar Sundarrajan, chief strategy and technology officer, VP of Engineering
Kumar Narayanan and Jaspal Kohli, chief architect, along with Deepak Srinivasan, VP of Business
Development.
Collectively, this team brings leadership expertise from companies like Akamai/Speedera, Cisco,
Citrix/NetScaler, Exodus Communications, HP, IBM, InSilicon/Virtual Chips, Intel, Level 3
Communications, Mirapoint and Yahoo.
One to watch closely.
CrunchBase InformationAnkeena NetworksInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 8 hours ago
Andover,
MA-based website conversion company SeeWhy today launched
Conversion Manager, an
automated web analytics service that allows publishers and e-commerce companies to optimize
website conversion rates through real-time ‘remarketing’ campaigns.
The company claims that their solution can recover up to 50 percent of website abandoners (i.e.
people who start but never complete a sign-up or payment process) by triggering automated
campaigns using email and social media.
The company fences with study results that highlight the importance of real-time follow up with
website abandoners, citing research from MIT that says 90 percent of e-commerce leads go cold
within the first hour. SeeWhy CEO Scott G. Silk compares such leads with fine wine, stating that
unlike the latter e-commerce leads don’t get better with age. Cute.
SeeWhy’s new product builds upon the functionalities of its predecessor, Abandonment
Tracker Pro, which we
wrote about earlier. With added support for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace, Conversion Manager
is able to track individual visitors’ behavior on e-commerce and other websites and trigger
automated, real-time messages to shopping cart, online form, and other abandoners by email and
social media the moment abandoners leave the site.
Conversion Manager is available now at an annual fee of $15,000.
SeeWhy has so far raised $6.5 million in
venture capital:
$4.5 million in May 2009 and another $2 million from the same investors
in December 2009. SeeWhy’s CrunchBase profile doesn’t list any competitors and a Web
search doesn’t immediately turn up potential rivals – if you know alternative
services feel free to share their names in comments.
CrunchBase InformationSeeWhyInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 10 hours ago
TechCrunch50
startup CrowdFlower has been attracting a lot of attention,
even raising $5
million in funding recently. CrowdFlower is a labor as a service startup that helps
businesses outsource mundane or repetitive tasks to the cloud. Now the startup has attracted a
competitor, recently launched CloudCrowd, which also
promises increase efficiency and lower costs to companies by breaking large projects into smaller
tasks, and distributing them to its virtual workforce.
Once a client assigns a task to CloudCrowd, the company will distribute tasks its work force of
more than 100,000 workers. With each task completed, a worker earn a credibility rating that
determines the types of tasks they are offered. Workers who don’t have a rating yet are
assigned basic tasks until they develop a reputation. Workers are able to see how much each
separate task pays, and earnings are distributed through PayPal.
Tasks range from content moderation, internet research, audio and video transcription to data
entry. Since the company’s launch a few months ago, CloudCrowd has completed over 500,000
tasks for a variety of clients, including USC and RentCycle.
As I wrote above CloudCrowd will face competition from CrowdFlower, but it seems that the model
is attracting the attention of businesses to perform mundane tasks, so there should be room fr
several players in the space.
CrunchBase InformationCloudCrowdInformation provided by CrunchBase


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TechCrunch -
1 days and 10 hours ago
GROU.PS, a do-it-yourself social network focused on
moderated online
collaboration has unveiled a synchronization
tool that allows the group administrators on Yahoo
Groups to sync with GROU.PS. So Yahoo Groups admins can incorporate functionality such as,
location-based services and chat, into their platforms from GROU.PS.
The new tool doesn’t require the Yahoo Group owners to shut down their existing group. They
can still continue using their email list. Instead, a GROU.PS group surrounds their old Yahoo
Group list and will add additional functionality such as collaboration, deep customization tools
and integration with Facebook. GROU.PS will essentially create a whole new social network
tailored particularly to that specific list, and augments its functionality with typical social
networking features that can be found on any GROU.PS group.
And GROU.PS has amped up its offering for publishers by launching Elastic Modules, which gives
publishers the ability to change the way the data is displayed to their visitors. To date, the
highest reach of look and feel customization was at the template level; the
publisher could only change the skin of their site. Now publishers can actually modify the
backend of the social network they’ve created.
The startup’s networks are attractive to users because it lets you run all of your
group’s collaboration tools from one GROU.PS domain using a single login. The system
supports wikis, photos, links, blogs, calendars, chat, forums, maps, profiles, and subgroups
– each of which is available as a plug-and-play module for your community. These modules
also allow users to pull in their data from other third party services (flickr, Facebook, Digg,
blogs, etc).
The startup, which has over 40,000 networks on its platform and
2.5 million users, also added
ActivityRank Pipelines, a point and reward system that lets moderators of a social network
measure and rank members’ content contributions and then extend moderation privileges to
members based on these rankings. And the social network is launching a subscription model that
will allow moderators to charge subscription fees to members (GROU.PS gets a 50% cut on any fees
charges).
GROU.PS raised $1
million in funding, bringing the startup’s total funding up to over $2 million. But
while the social network is growing, it is still faces major competition form the leader in the
space, Ning, which hit
37 million users with 1.6 million social networks in November.
CrunchBase InformationGROU.PSInformation provided by CrunchBase


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