Something is definitely up at uber nerd site BoingBoing.net. A trip to the front page brings up the charming image above, which seems to be some sort of vulgar message to site founder Cory Doctorow.
Die hard fans have found a workaround URL for now. And the official BoingBoing Twitter account seems to have a sense of humor about it, tweeting stuff like “So much for the 100,000 Hours Without a Hack T-shirts.”
Along with the financing, Wong is announcing that Kiip is bringing on former Digger Courtney Guertin as co-founder and CTO and Amadeus Dermazi as co-founder and design director. Wong plans on using the newfound cash for further hiring and distribution partnerships and Kiip will be rolling out in alpha in the coming months, with a public launch date in January.
Wong says that Kiip (prounounced “Keep” as in “Keep me”) will attempt to move “beyond the banner ad” and leverage in game elements without compromising game play; “We’re doing the first catered ad product for the mobile games space, beyond the virtual goods and virtual currency folks [who are] potentially our main competitors.”
It looks like Kiip might be stiff competition. The startup, still in stealth, has already wrangled five game publisher partnerships (Wong would not disclose which ones) and currently boasts an audience of over 2 million active users monthly.
When can you really declare your game a smash hit? When it cracks through 10 million downloads? Eh. When you’ve got a full line of plush toys coming based on its characters? Sure, I guess that’s alright. But here’s the real challenge: dig your game deep enough into the hearts and minds of your fans that you’ve got people dressing up like the characters for Halloween.
With that in mind: Congratulations, Angry Birds. You’ve (sling)shot your way into a VIP area generally reserved for the likes of Master Chief, Mario, Samus, and other gaming legends. That’s right: you’ve got cosplayers.
Yesterday, both the New York Times and Robert Scoble unveiled publicly for the first time what a company called Kiha Software has been working on for about three years in stealth now: a piece of software called Aro Mobile. With $20 million in backing from the likes of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, they’re obviously getting a lot of buzz. And that should continue when they fully show the system off in a few weeks at Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. But for now we have a video sneak peak of it in action, and 1,000 exclusive beta invites for TechCrunch readers to try out the software themselves.
So what is Aro? Currently, it’s a piece of software that runs on top of Google’s mobile Android OS. But it’s not just another layer like some of those awful skins that OEMs design for Android. Instead, it weaves itself into the OS and uses AI and machine intelligence to make sense of what you’re doing with your phone. It natively ties into your email, phone, calendar, address book, and browser to make them potentially much more useful to you when you’re on the go.
Maybe someone sent you an email mentioning an address, the Aro system can recognize that and with the click of a button give you all kinds of actions you can do with it. The same is true with names — of both people and companies. And dozens of other things.
But it really is one of those things that’s better when you see it in action. So watch the videos below. And if you’re interested in signing up to test it out, use this link. The first 1,000 people who do will get priority access to the beta program (though it is still rolling out in waves as they ramp up).
Like other hot startups there is a healthy secondary market ecosystem for Twitter stock. The current street value of a share of any series of Twitter stock? At least $7 per share, say multiple sources with knowledge of transactions. With 225 million shares outstanding after a three for one stock split earlier this year, that’s a $1.575 billion valuation.
There aren’t nearly as many early Twitter employees with sizable amounts of stock to sell compared to Facebook, but the demand is there for those that are in the market. There are even a few funds that have been created with the sole purpose of buying stock from Twitter employees and investors, and the Twitter board of directors generally doesn’t interfere by exercising its right of first refusal.
The $7/share valuation is generally considered the “fair” price for larger transactions of at least $1 million. Smaller transactions, which can attract a more robust number of potential buyers, are sometimes closing at higher valuations, we’ve heard.
Twitter was last officially valued at $1.1 billion post money when it raised $100 million late last year. The company is still effectively revenue-free.
Sencha is making a big bet on HTML5. The company, which was formerly known as Ext JS, raised a hefty $14 million round led by Sequoia Capital in June. Since then it has been perfecting its HTML5 framework Sencha Touch — a framework that lets you build mobile web apps for iOS and Android that feel almost native and are also cross-platform. And today, the company is adding another big addition to its product suite: Sencha Animator.
If you’ve used Flash before, Animator should be fairly easy to pick up. It’s a tool for creating CSS3-based animations that will work on WebKit browsers — drag a few objects and images onto the screen, set up some keyframes, and you should be off and running. And, unlike Flash, these animations will work on iOS devices (and Android, BlackBerry, and anything else that supports WebKit). Here’s how the company is describing the product:
Sencha Animator allows you simply place objects (text, shapes, and images) onto a re-sizable stage area, configure their properties and then animate to bring them to life. You can move, scale, skew and rotate objects singly or at various levels of nesting, in 2D or 3D space. With Sencha Animator, you can also take advantage of CSS3 capabilities like gradients, blurs, reflections and shadows. You can create basic animations quickly and easily. But Animator is also designed to be a CSS3 power-tool. So when you need to add HTML or custom CSS, it's easy to do that too. Best of all, Sencha Animator outputs pure CSS3 animation code, so it's hardware accelerated on Apple iOS, which creates incredibly smooth animations. This also means it's ready to work with any JavaScript library, not just Sencha.
The application is available for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s still rough around the edges — this is a beta release, and additional features, like a gradient maker, are still in the works. It also doesn’t support some major browsers like Firefox yet (Sencha says that Firefox hasn’t implemented support for CSS3 keyframes). You can see some demos of HTML/CSS-based animations at the bottom of this page.
Sencha will be selling a standard version of Animator for a price in the “low hundreds of dollars” for each user. This also obviously has a big appeal to advertisers — Sencha will be offering a version with additional functionality specifically for them.
Sencha isn’t the only company building HTML5/CSS3 based tools. Adobe is also hard at work on its own products, including a HTML5-editing tool called Edge (which hasn’t been released yet). In the advertising space, Sprout offers Advine, a tool for authoring ad creative that supports both HTML5 and Flash.
This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]“ Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.
The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design. But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.
Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”
However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.
Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience it’s one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”
Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.
Earlier today, Apple’s 10-K form was released for their 2010 fiscal year. The long document is full of tidbits about the state of Apple’s business. One thing of note is just how much Apple ramped up their advertising spending in 2010.
For 2010, the company’s advertising costs were $691 million. That’s up from $501 million last year. And it’s the first huge jump for Apple in recent years. In 2008, for example, they spent $486 million. And in 2007, they spent $467 million. In other words, in previous years, the ramp up in ad spending has been about $15 to $20 million. This past year? A $190 million jump.
But what’s pretty incredible is that even despite this huge ramp up, Apple continues their trend of lowering the percentage of revenues they spend on advertising. While the spend was $691 million this year, total revenues were over $65 billion, so Apple only spent about 1 percent of their revenue on this. Last year, that percentage was 1.37. In 2001, it was 5 percent.
So even though Apple is ramping up ad spending, they’re bringing in money much quicker so the overall percentage of money they’re spending keeps getting less and less.
And while $691 million may seem like a massive amount of money, it’s still less than half of what Microsoft spent on advertising last year. And it’s less than what Dell spent last year.
So what did Apple spend that extra $200 million on? They don’t break it down, but you can bet a bunch was their new category: iPad. And those great Don Draper-like iPhone 4 ads.
It’s very apparent within seconds of sitting in the 2011 Ford Edge Sport that it’s different. It feels like the future. There are two LCD screens flanking a lovely analog speedometer, flush mounted inductive-type controls on the center stack and of course, a large infotainment screen. It’s like a car from the future! (It’s not)
Inside is the latest generation of Ford’s in-vehicle system. Dubbed MyFord Touch, it’s reach and capabilities are unlike nearly anything else in the same price range. But this system isn’t just stuck in the center stack, tasked with the job of controlling the climate and radio. The MyFord Touch is also in the dash cluster in the form of two LCD screens. This is where it gets interesting and validates its place in Ford’s future.
Yahoo has hired Ross Levinsohn, the former President of Fox Interactive Media, as EVP America’s Region, we’ve confirmed. AllThingsD first broke the news that he was close to taking the job.
Levinsohn will take control of Yahoo’s Americas business, including content, advertising and partnerships. Some 2,000 employees will report into his organization.
This is also the first high profile executive hire at Yahoo since bringing in Chief Product Officer Blake Irving earlier this year.
Levinsohn is currently a partner at Fuse Capital, a venture firm with ties to Best Buy. Levinsohn’s former partner at Fuse Capital, Jonathan Miller, now runs News Corp.’s digital business, effectively the same position Levinsohn held.
While at Fox Interactive Media Levinsohn oversaw the $580 million acquisition of MySpace as well as the nearly $1 billion advertising deal with Google.
Many of his previous employees have gone on to do interesting things. Adam Bain is now President, Revenue at Twitter. And Heather Harde, our CEO, ran M&A for Levinsohn.
And for once, we have nothing negative to report about Yahoo.
You can watch an interview with Levinsohn by Sarah Lacy at TechCrunch50 last year here, and we’ve embedded it below.
At the beginning of this year, I was very excited. You see, at Google’s launch event for the Nexus One, they made one thing clear: they were going directly after the dominating carrier lock-in model that had held everyone in the U.S. captive for years. Then Google chickened out. And things are now getting just as bad as they have ever been. Unless Apple has the cojones to do what Google wouldn’t, that is.
To be clear, the report today from GigaOM’s Stacey Higginbotham isn’t about the U.S. She notes that Apple is working alongside SIM-card manufacturer Gemalto to make a built-in hardware SIM card that could work with many carriers across Europe. Essentially, this would allow customers to jump from carrier to carrier as a better deal came along or as they were traveling without having to swap SIM cards.
The thing is, in many European countries, this already isn’t nearly the problem that it is in the U.S. because the market is much more competitive. But here’s the key to all of this from Higginbotham:
Then customers will then be able to choose their carrier at purchase at the Apple web site or retail store, or buy the phone and get their handset up and running through a download at the App Store as opposed to visiting a carrier store or calling the carrier.
Sound familiar?
That’s almost exactly what Google’s plan was to sell the Nexus One originally. They created a web store where customers could pick their phone, their carrier, and a plan. Of course, at launch, Google only had the Nexus One with T-Mobile on board. But they noted that soon other carriers like Sprint and Verizon would be on board as well. That never happened.
It’s true that the Nexus One wasn’t selling well that way. But the reality is because it was the carriers’ fault. Google’s original plan was to sell the Nexus One for $99, unlocked, on their website, we’ve heard. Let me repeat that: $99. Unlocked. But when they ran this idea by the carriers (which they had to work with because they control the networks they need, remember) they were told to go to hell.
And so what we got was a Nexus One that you could either buy unlocked for several hundreds of dollars — which basically no one did. Or a carrier-subsidized one. Just like the good-old days.
When the Nexus One didn’t sell well on their site, the other carrier partners bailed on the Nexus One altogether (undoubtedly patting themselves on the back as they did). And Google stopped selling it to consumers. In other words, the entire idea blew up in Google’s face.
They should have stuck to their guns, sold the Nexus One as they wanted to. And told the carriers to screw themselves. Of course, had they done that, Google wouldn’t have had the buddy-buddy relationship with carriers that they now enjoy. That gamble could have risked the success of Android. And Google wasn’t willing to go there. It was a smart business maneuver, but it sucks for us, the consumers.
Enter Apple.
The company has proven time and time again that they don’t care who they piss off in order to push their own agenda forward. That agenda includes creating the best consumer experience possible. A big part of that in the cellphone business would be allowing customers to buy a phone and pick carriers based on who has the best deals/options.
Obviously, that hasn’t been the case with Apple in the U.S. as they’ve been tied exclusively to one carrier, AT&T. But that’s about to change. And that time spent with AT&T wasn’t a total waste. They’ve been able to build themselves from literally nothing into a force to be reckoned with in the mobile space. The iPhone is now by far Apple’s largest source of revenue. And customers from all of the other carriers are demanding the phone come to their network.
Now Apple is in position to make a move. But the main problem in the U.S. is that the carriers run on networks powered by different technologies. That’s not the case in Europe, so it makes sense to start there with this carrier-killing SIM, while the U.S. transitions to the much more universal LTE technologies that are forthcoming.
And let’s not forget a huge part of this equation. Apple, unlike Google, runs their own retail stores. Hundreds of them. Around the world. Does anyone doubt that the iPhone would still be a massive success if it was only sold through their stores and website? If they do, they’re foolish.
So Apple can absolutely do what Google couldn’t/wouldn’t. The question is, would they really be willing to possibly alienate their carrier partners by screwing them over? Again, the iPhone is Apple’s biggest business, but that’s largely thanks to the subsidies the carriers pay them. Could Apple risk that?
CRM and cloud giant Salesforce.com is shelling out $170 million to fully acquire its Japanese subsidiary, Salesforce Japan, from VC firm SunBridge and other stockholders. The subsidiary was formed in 2000 as a joint venture between Salesforce and SunBridge. Until now, Salesforce has the majority control (with 73 percent) but is purchasing all outstanding shares from the VC firm and other stockholders. Salesforce says the joint venture agreement has subsequently been terminated with the acquisition.
It appears that the reasoning behind the move is financial. Salesforce says that Jaapan is the largest revenue contributor in Asia Pacific for Salesforce, and “acquiring full ownership in Salesforce Japan allows Salesforce.com to further benefit from the growth in the Japanese cloud computing market and integrate and align its financial and operational functions.” In the first half of 2010, Asia Pacific sales accounted for 14 percent of Salesforce.com's revenue, which is an 11 percent increase from the same period in 2009.
A few weeks ago, Salesforce announced that it would be adding a new data center in Tokyo to support a growing customer base in Japan. Clearly the company sees the country as a valuable revenue stream and counts Japan-based Canon and Fujitsu as customers.
Since the Yankees are not in the World Series this year, my allegiance shifts to the San Francisco Giants. And, yes, while I may be a fair-weather baseball friend, I am willing to go to bat for my new favorite team, at least through this series. What better way to show my support than to “beardify” my Facebook photo with the Brian Wilson Beardifier app? (You can become a fan of his beard on Facebook too).
Brian Wilson is the Giants relief pitcher with the 95 mph fastball and pitch-black beard. He intimidates his opponents, who have learned to “fear the beard.”
And now you can intimidate all your friends by spreading the fear and Brian Wilson’s beard on Facebook. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take over your profile pic for every status update, unless you upload it as your new pic. It’s not quite the same as turning your Twitter avatar green last year to support democracy in Iran, but it is probably just as effective.
Americans exporting renewable energy resources to the Middle East? It’s not opposite day.
A Mountainview, Calif. company, SolFocus, announced a deal with a major construction company in Saudi Arabia— Advanced Vision Electro Mechanical Company (a.k.a. Vision) — that is building a new, commercial solar power plant in Bahra.
The plant will be the first in Saudi Arabia to use concentrator photovoltaic solar power systems, or CPVs according to a joint press release from SolFocus and Vision. In general, CPV systems consist of solar cells and optics that concentrate sunlight onto the cells increasing their power output and, in the end, decreasing the cost of solar-generated electricity in sunny, dry environments.
SolFocus sells warranty-backed, concentrator photovoltaic solar systems that it manufactures primarily in Mesa, Arizona. To date, SolFocus has raised $143 million in venture funding.
The new solar power plant in Bahra employing SolFocus technology will deliver around 300 megawatt hours of solar energy per year, representing a 132 kilowatt nameplate capacity.
At the 2009 United Nations’ Summit on Climate Change, Saudi Arabia’s negotiator Mohammed Al-Sabban expressed disbelief that global warming is caused or accelerated by humans, and was concerned about the likely economic impact to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) if others reduce their use of oil.
Still viewed as an obstructionist by global sustainability advocates, Saudi Arabia began investing in renewable energy recently. Why would the OPEC leader warm up to solar? First, the region gets a lot of sun.
Co-founder and chief of technology at SolFocus, Steve Horne, also explained on Wednesday:
“The Saudi king has recognized climate change, and wants to reduce the carbon footprint of the country. A significant percentage of the oil that's extracted from Saudi Arabia is used internally. That's what they'll be able to offset by using renewable energy. The king is interested in exporting renewable energy as well. There is a process of putting together a transmission line that runs up the east coast towards Kuwait, now. The king has a long-term vision for the country as a generator of renewable energy.”
Mark Crowley, chief executive officer of SolFocus said in a press statement:
"The high sun conditions of the Middle East provide an ideal environment for reaping large-scale, low-cost solar energy from CPV systems. Together [we] will bring the world's most efficient and resource-friendly solar technology to Saudi Arabia, providing energy diversification for the country."
The project developers, Vision, will also build and install additional solar power plants within the research centers at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and throughout Saudi Arabia.
Hassan Chahine, general manager at Vision said in a press statement: "This is a breakthrough in Saudi Arabia's thrust for energy diversification. We believe the Bahra plant will serve as a model for the further research and study of clean water and power solutions that diversify the region's energy mix."
Many sellers on sites like eBay, Etsy, and Amazon have created profitable small businesses out of opening up online storefronts on these e-commerce platforms. But these storefronts aren’t conventionally considered small businesses by the financial community and it can be difficult for them to raise working capital from banks. Kabbage is entering the space as a way for online merchants and sellers on eBay and Amazon to get capital they otherwise wouldn’t qualify for at a bank.
Kabbage uses technology to analyze online merchants’ sales and credit history; customer traffic and reviews; and prices and inventory compared to competitors. Via PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API, Kabbage will make cash advances available to eBay and other online marketplace sellers fairly quickly (Kabbage says that many transactions take as little has ten minutes).
Kabbage makes money off of fees charged to merchants for the working capital. Fees depend on how long the online merchant keeps the capital (6 month maximum) and the customer’s repayment risk. Rates range from 6 percent to 16 percent of the original advance amount.
While the startup only supports eBay for now, Kabbage, which has raised $2 million in funding, plans to extend its services to Amazon and Etsy sellers in the near future. It actually seems like a pretty good idea, that is, as long as sellers continue to pay Kabbage back.
We’ve gotten word this morning that online streaming video service Ustream has laid off 9 people from its 200 person staff. With social news site Digg having other notable layoffs this week, it’s crucial to remember that startups often shed staff when going through product and business goal realignments. This is also the case here according to Ustream VP of Communications Lynn Fox.
“This is about us looking forward, we are totally pumped about our future and this is a way to get ourselves conditioned to meet our goals.” said Fox
It's hard to have metaphysical conversations in the technology game. Most of chat – even with techno-evangelists and social media utopians – is disappointingly mundane. But once-in-a-while, one comes across an exceptional individual who thinks so deeply about technology that he makes it seem profound, even other-worldly.
Officially, Jeff Jonas is the chief scientist of the IBM Entity Analytics group and an IBM Distinguished Engineer. Less officially, he is a Las Vegas based ironman triathlete who is paid by IBM to think deep thoughts about data. If intelligent machines could talk, perhaps they would speak like Jonas – elliptically, enigmatically, but with a depth and wisdom that is all too rare in our always-on world of continuous updates and partial attention spans.
How ironic, then, that Jonas should be an expert on this always-on world of data overload. He is IBM's resident genius on data – it's his job to bring sense to a seemingly senseless world that is spewing out more and more data. So listen carefully to what Jonas says. Part shaman, part showman, there is something irresistible about the rigor and intensity of his thinking.
In a post this weekend, I wrote about how the cable tv industry was finally stepping towards the cliff. And we’d learn more today when Comcast, the largest U.S. cable operator, reported earnings. Well, the numbers are out, and it’s not a surprise.
275,000 Comcast subscribers cut the cord last quarter. Its subscriber count is down 3.5% from the same quarter last year. To be fair, some of that loss was offset by a gain in 219,000 digital cable subs. Revenue was up as customers bought higher priced bundles of tv, internet and phone service.
During the earnings call, Comcast blamed the drop on the lousy economy. Always a handy excuse. Sure, many people are struggling right now, and it makes sense that the high cost of cable is an expense they can no longer afford. Comcast said, based on exit interviews, only a ‘small number‘ seemed to cut the cord for over-the-air signals, and they are not planning to switch to internet tv alternatives.
Comcast’s exit interviews run counter to other reports. PlayOn, digital media server software that let’s you watch over-the-top video on TV, says 30% of it’s customers have canceled cable after using its box. Perhaps they weren’t Comcast customers? PlayOn estimates its customer base saves $24 million a year in cable fees.
Boxee’s CEO made the point on CNBC yesterday that his box won’t necessarily lead to cord cutting. “Instead, it will usher in a generation of people that never get cable.” He predicts with Boxee, they won’t see the point in cable, just like young people don’t see the point in a landline phone.
The CEO of Verizon, Ivan Seidenberg made the same point last month, saying young people are “not going to pay for something they don’t need to.” He also says “over the top is going to be a pretty big issue for cable.”
Another company to keep an eye on is Clicker. It launched a year ago at TechCrunch50. Clicker bills itself as “the simple way to find, share and watch TV online.” Many viewers agree, based on feedback to my earlier post.
And one more thing. No, not Apple. Actually Yahoo. You don’t hear much about new products at Yahoo. It took the tech community 20 hours to notice Yahoo Mail’s first redesign in five years. But, 600 million user strong Yahoo has a product called Yahoo Connected TV, which gets you access to movies, tv shows, and other web services. It’s already built into TV’s from Samsung, Sony, LG, Vizio, and Toshiba. Crunchgear reviewed it last year.
I haven’t even touched on mobile and DVRs vs Live. Maybe a future post. But, you can’t tell me cable tv is not an industry being disrupted. Not overnight, but now live on tv.
Back in April, we noted that Google was about to escalate the so-called “location wars” by reworking and rebranding their Locale Business Center as Google Places. They’ve since done a lot of work on improving the area (despite an on-again/off-again war with Yelp over results) and they’re clearly feeling good about it. How do I know? Because starting today, they’re going to add Place results to Google Search in a major way.
Place Search will now reside on Google.com when you’re doing a search that Google believes is attempting to discover a location. And it will also have a home in the left toolbar (you know, where “Images”, “Videos”, “Shopping”, etc reside) as “Places”, which a user can click on to just get location results.
One of the great things about our approach is that it makes it easier to find a comprehensive view of each place. In our new layout you'll find many more relevant links on a single results page—often 30 or 40. Instead of doing eight or 10 searches, often you'll get to the sites you're looking for with just one search. In our testing Place Search saves people an average of two seconds on searches for local information.
While it’s in the process of rolling out, you can use this link to see what it will look like. As you can see, a search for “Chicago museums” will bring up seven or so museums place pages it believes you may be looking for. If you want more of these place suggestions, you can click on the “more results” link at the bottom of the seven. Or you can click on the Places left sidebar item.
The big question, of course, is what this means for all of Google’s competitors also in the location space? You’ll note that Google rather prominently links to results from sources of place information like Yelp and CitySearch, so some of them could actually benefit from this new style of result. Still, many of them will no longer be the number one result for specific place searches. That could hurt.
That said, this new layout should be much easier for people doing the actual searches to parse and find what they’re looking for.
For their part, Google should make a killing on the sponsored links related to place searches. As you can see below, they’re already populating a ton of these right below the all-important map on the right side. Many place results have sponsored links along the top as well.
Music streaming service Spotify has retained executive search firm Odgers Berndtson to assist them in finding chief operating officer as the number two executive after founder Daniel Ek. A number of candidates, particularly in Silicon Valley, have been contacted for the job.
Our first source on this story said that Spotify was actually looking for a new CEO to replace Ek. But Ek says this is inaccurate. “We’re looking for a COO to help run the company,” he said by phone this morning.
I also spoke with Ek about the story I wrote yesterday about acquisition attention from Google and Apple. Ek says Spotify has had absolutely no acquisition discussions with Apple at all, ever. “We don’t want to sell, we are here for the long term,” he said.
On the Google story he was less forthcoming, saying only that the story wasn’t correct in its entirety. “Google is a great partner,” he said.
I also asked Ek, since I had him on the phone, about Spotify’s U.S. launch plans. The company has been talking about a U.S. launch for well over a year, but it hasn’t happened yet. The complications appear to be over their very strong desire to offer a free version of the service here, as they do in Europe. Ek says that discussion with labels are ongoing, and that he still “hopes for a U.S. launch this year.”
Today at a press event in San Francisco, Intel and a group of 70 companies announced an alliance to build a system of open standards for cloud computing. Part of the Cloud 2015 initiative, The Open Data Center Alliance makes it easier for customers to deploy cloud computing solutions, as it focuses on interoperability, flexibility and unifying industry standards. The Open Data Center Alliance will represent more than $50 billion in annual IT investment.
Intel, which powers 9 out 10 of the servers for cloud today, will be a technical advisor and non voting member in the alliance. The companies involved are cross-vertical including Lockheed Martin, Marriott International, BMW and JP Morgan Chase, joining together with Intel towards the ultimate endgoal of simplified virtual computing. While Google, Amazon Yahoo are missing from the list, Intel commented that membership is still open, “There’s a lot of people still in the pipeline. We’re adding people by the minute.”
Grappling with the fact that there will be another one billion people and another 15 billion devices on the Internet in 2015, the Cloud 2015 vision to simplify virtual computing is three pronged: Federated (so clients can better and more securely share data), automated (more efficiency in moving data), and “client-aware” (a cloud API that is device aware, taking into account whether a user is on a phone or a laptop). Intel executives emphasized that communication between the players will be key in achieving the initiative’s goals of decreased IT spending and increased effiency.
“The Open Center Alliance is way to create and unify the voice of cloud consumers and cloud users, using usage models as a way to specify requirements. We’ve never seen this approach before.” said Intel representative Billy Cox.
From the hardware side, Intel also announced an expansion of its Cloud Builders program, which allows companies like Citrix, Dell, HP, IBM, Microsoft, NetApp and VMware to provide solutions for many of the issues brought up by the alliance and the usage model roadmap.
Want an alternative to the Amazon Kindle/Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader duopoly? Borders’ Kobo is always a choice, and now there’s word that you can newspapers and magazines on there, "there" being the Kobo Wireless eReader device as well as the iOS Apps.
If you need more proof that seed investing is taking over the world, just look up north to Canada. Three years ago, a group of angels started Montreal Startup, a $5 million seed fund. This week, they are launching their second, $45 million fund under a new name, Real Ventures. It will invest in startups across Canada from Montreal to Vancouver, but mostly within 250 kilometers of Montreal where most of the partners are based.
The partners include serial entrepreneur Austin Hill, John Stokes, and Jean-Sebastien Cournoyer, Daniel Drouet, Alan MacIntosh, and Mark MacLeod. The fund will invest in web, mobile, software, digital media, social and casual gaming startups.
A $45 million fund is small by venture capital standards, but it is actually quite large for a seed fund. New York City’s Founder Collective, for instance, is a $40 million fund. The more seed capital gets spread across different pockets of entrepreneurship, the more chance there will be for new startup hubs to grow or feed into the bigger hubs in California and, increasingly, New York. You can learn more about Real Ventures and its investing philosophy in this blog post.
Given all the apparent excitement surrounding electric vehicles and the billions invested by automakers, financial firms and government incentives, you would assume there was a groundswell of consumer support for hybrid and battery electric cars underlying this momentum.
Unfortunately, according to a J.D. Power and Associatesreport released this morning, we may be on the electric car bandwagon but once you get us to the dealership, we look the other way.
The firm predicts that in 2010, international sales of hybrid and battery electric cars will total 5.2 million, or 7.3%, of the 70-plus million consumer vehicles expected to be sold. This year, the world is on track to sell 954,500 electric units, 2.2% of all car sales. Thus, in a decade, consumers will only move the needle about 5 percentage points, from 2.2 to 7.3. If the future of the car is electric, it’s not happening in the next decade and— given the sluggish growth curve— not the one after that either.
So why the apprehensiveness among consumers?
According to J.D. Power and Associates, a confluence of factors have discouraged would-be-electric owners. Not surprisingly, the number one reason is money. Although there are government subsidies to encourage green car purchases in the US, it’s still difficult for cash-strapped buyers not to compare the new hybrid models against cheaper, less fuel efficient vehicles (remember, the recession is not over for the 9-plus percent who are still unemployed or the many who are underemployed).
“Many consumers say they are concerned about the environment, but when they find out how much a green vehicle is going to cost, their altruistic inclination declines considerably,” John Humphrey, an SVP at J.D. Power, said in a statement. “For example, among consumers in the U.S. who initially say they are interested in buying a hybrid vehicle, the number declines by some 50 percent when they learn of the extra $5,000, on average, it would cost to acquire the vehicle.”
Beyond sticker shock, the report says other popular reasons included: aesthetics, insecurity in the new technology, unhappiness with how the car performed, and the need to recharge batteries/driving range.
Who is actually buying?
J.D. Power says from their research, a very clear, dominant demographic emerged: “buyers of HEVs and BEVs are generally older, more highly educated (possessing a postgraduate degree), high-income individuals who have a deep interest in technology, or who like to be among the early adopters of any new technology product.”
At least there’s hope for those Tesla dealerships in Silicon Valley.
Intel’s investment arm, Intel Capital, announced three new investments at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa today.
The three startups that have received fresh capital from the investment organization are UK/Lebanon based Nymgo (which delivers cheap VoIP telephony services), Jordan-based Jeeran (social networking site) and ShooFeeTV (which operates a Web-based entertainment guide).
The size of the three investments were not disclosed, but I understand the investment comes from Intel’s $50 million Middle East and Turkey Fund.
For Jeeran and ShooFeeTV, this is actually the second financial boost provided by Intel Capital – both were originally funded in May 2009.
The investment in Nymgo, means Intel Capital firm has now expanded its portfolio in the ME region to a total of eight companies.
Nymgo launched in December 2008 and offers low-cost VoIP calling services. With over two million downloads, Nymgo says it serves customers in over 200 countries worldwide. Since its creation, Nymgo claims to have served over 300 million minutes of international calls.
With Intel’s help, Nymgo says it intends to accelerate infrastructure deployment, operations enhancement and global marketing.
Ever wonder what the inspiration was for the Facebook Friends icon, the one with the outline of two people side-by-side? Neither have I. But now that Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley put up this side-by-side comparison of images on his Tumblog, I will never be able to look at the outline of the woman friend’s bob haircut again without thinking of Darth Vader’s helmet.
It’s just a funny photoshopped juxtapostion with the caption, “I'm sure this is where the Facebook 'Friends' icon came from.” I don’t want to psychoanalyze Crowley too much on this. He simply reblogged something he found amusing from someone else’s Tumblog. (That is what you do on Tumblr. It’s like retweeting). But you have to wonder if he doesn’t feel a little bit like the Luke Skywalker friend.
Before closing Foursquare’s last $20 million round, he was talking to Facebook (and others) about a possible acquisition instead. The deal never happened, and Facebook went on to launch its own rival geo-location product, Facebook Places. Interestingly, Foursquare was present at that launch., but Crowley definitely has mixed feelings about Facebook. Sort of like Luke did about Darth Vader.
Resilient storage solutions provider Cleversafe this morning announced that it has secured $31.4 million in an extension of its series C funding from new and existing investors including Motorola Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and OCA Ventures. Earlier this week, the cloud storage company also announced that it had received a strategic investment from and inked a development agreement with In-Q-Tel (IQT), the not-for-profit investment firm that was launched by the CIA back in 1999.
According to an SEC filing, cloud-based phone systems provider RingCentral has raised $10 million in its third institutional financing round (with another $850k remaining to be sold).
RingCentral markets an advanced replacement for legacy phone systems in the form of a hosted business phone system with voice and fax functionality.
RingCentral capabilities are said to include “auto-receptionist, flexible extension structure, multiple voicemail boxes, smart call routing, business answering rules, extension dialing, call transfers, and elegant integration with Smartphones”.
Like Michael Arrington wrote earlier, RingCentral’s phone systems make their clients look bigger.
We pinged RingCentral to ask what the fresh capital will be used for, and if any new investors participated in the round.
The clock is counting down until November 2, when American citizens will flock (hopefully) to their local polling places to cast their votes for the mid-term elections. And you can bet some of them will be checking in on Foursquare. To mark the occasion, Foursquare has teamed up with noted design firm JESS3 to create a dynamic map, which will display Foursquare check-ins in real-time at nearly 107,000 polling locations across the country. You’ll be able to access it at http://elections.foursquare.com/.
The site goes live this morning, but obviously we still have some time to wait before the big day so there’s a placeholder countdown clock for now. Fortunately JESS3 has given us some details on what the site will look like: the map will include the total number of check-ins, the gender ratio of check-ins, and a listing of the top check-in locations across the country. And it’s all done in HTML5 using the Canvas attribute (though there’s a Flash fallback for browsers that don’t support it). And, of course, there will be a special Foursquare badge awarded to anyone who checks in at a polling place come election day.
JESS3 built the site using data from the Voting Info Project (which has data on every polling location in the US) along with map data from Open Streetmap (which gives designers more flexibility than Bing or Google Maps). We’ll check back in with them in a week to see if any interesting trends emerge from the data.
This is Foursquare’s first major election, and it sounds like it has more ambitious plans for the next go-around in 2012. But it isn’t the only service that’s embracing politics: both Twitter and Facebook had extensive coverage of the 2008 elections, and you can be bet they’ll both be back for more this year, and in 2012.
uCIRRUS, which markets real-time enterprise operating software dubbed PUSHvm, this morning announced that it has closed a $4 million funding round led by SK telecom Ventures and joined by Qualcomm Ventures and ATA Ventures. The company says the fresh capital will be used to accelerate the product roadmap for PUSHvm, which powers real-time datastream processing and delivery of large volumes of customized data for its clients, thus reducing their infrastructure costs.
Barry Diller realizes that his Ask search engine isn’t going to gain market share anytime soon, but search can still power growth for IAC if it just keeps up with the growth in the overall search market. IAC released third quarter earnings this morning. Total revenues were up 25 percent to $422 million. Operating income quadrupled to $36 million, and adjusted earnings per share came in at $0.32 versus Wall Street estimates of $0.27. (However, after stripping out the adjustments due to one-time sales of stock and other assets a year ago, net income was actually down 19 percent).
Search represented nearly half of revenues ($205 million). The search business grew 20 percent, goosed primarily by a 55 percent increase in active toolbars to 97 million. IAC’s toolbar business is its secret distribution weapon, but those searches tend to generate lower revenue per query than those on Ask.com, which itself is still growing and is now ranked as the sixth largest website in the U.S. LAst month, Ask CityGrid Media’s new local advertising network also contributed to overall search revenues.
But search wasn’t the fastest growing part of IAC’s business. Revenues for its media and other properties (such as CollegeHumor, The Daily Beast, Electus, Evite, and Vimeo) grew 44 percent to $63 million. Match’s revenues jumped 31 percent to $106 million, with paying subscribers up 30 percent to 1.8 million (“organic” growth in subscribers, though, was 16 percent). The rest of IAC’s revenues came from ServiceMagic, up 10 percent to $48 million.
In terms of operating profits, the two biggest contributors were Match ($38 million) and search ($29 million). The media businesses showed an operating loss of $4.6 million. The company also bought back $125 million worth of shares during the quarter. The stock is up about 5 percent this morning to $27.85 on the earnings news.
Online analytics company Compete has just published its ranking of the top 50 websites for September 2010, giving some insights into current visitor trends (and not absolute numbers, as the company tends to undercount traffic for most websites).
Compete’s data compilation shows increasing traffic to Microsoft’s search engine Bing (up 11.7 percent for the month and 108.5 percent for the year) as well as Ask.com (up 8.7 percent for the month and 75.3 percent for the year). On the other side of the spectrum we – unsurprisingly – find MySpace (unique visitors down 5.53 percent for the month and 19.1 percent for the year) and MapQuest (down 5.8 for the month and 22.1 percent for the year).
Perhaps more surprisingly, Yahoo’s Flickr.com seems to have lost some of its shine lately, showing a 14 percent decline in unique user visits in September 2010.
And what about IAC’s Ask.com, which actually jumped over online juggernauts such as Amazon.com and MSN.com last month, according to Compete’s data. The search engine is now ranked in sixth place, trailing sites like Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and YouTube.
Other winners include Disney’s Go.com and Mozilla.com, which showed the largest monthly unique user visitor gains (15.8 percent and 30.5 percent, respectively).
If there was one problem with the otherwise excellent Eye-Fi card it’s that images stored to the card had the nasty habit of appearing on public Flickr accounts without their owners knowledge – images that usually involved the owner in a compromising position with a close, naked friend or a barnyard mammal. Sure you can control where the Eye-Fi sends stuff but not many people bothered with those settings.
The company has just announced Eye-Fi View, a sharing system that makes sense. View creates a temporary private storage space for all Eye-Fi users where it keeps photos safe and sound for up to a week (you can buy unlimited storage for $4.99 or $49 a year.) You can see the updated View UI at http://center.eye.fi/.
Have you ever walked into your neighborhood Sephora only to feel utterly inundated by a sea of colorful beauty products? There are literally thousands of slots filled with bronzers, eye palettes, brushes, moisturizers, foundations, creams, creating a dizzying kaleidoscope of shades and scents.
As someone who doesn’t pour over fashion magazines for the latest product and make-up tips, it’s simply overwhelming.
I’ve always wondered why we couldn’t take the makeup discovery process out of the box, aka the brick and mortar experience, and bring it into the home in a real, non-Mary Kay tactile way that’s a step beyond mere online shopping.
A new breed of startups are trying to do just that, including New York-based BirchBox, which just raised a $1.4 million seed round led by First Round Capital and Accel Partners. Several individual investors participated in this round, including Sam Lessin (drop.io), Dave Morin (Path), Michael Dearing (Harrison Metal), Kirsten Green (Forerunner Ventures), and Gary Vaynerchuk.
BirchBox, which officially launched in September after a few months in beta mode, is a mash-up of a monthly sample service, an online shop and a beauty editorial content.
The core of the site is the monthly subscription plan. Users can either pay $110 upfront for a full-year package or $10 a month, with the option to quit at any time.
Each month, users receives at least four premium samples (no dinky packets), shipped to their homes from high end beauty retailers like Laura Mercier, Nars and Cargo. The website supplements these monthly packages by providing pertinent tips and tutorials for the featured samples. If a user wants to purchase the full-size version, they can buy it on BirchBox, which will earn them points for future discounts (inviting new members will also help you rack up points). The idea is create a fun discovery process at an affordable price and to help brands reach consumers and drive sales.
The site currently has 2,000 paying subscribers and competes with traditional retailers, like Sephora, and other makeup sample subscription services like Yellow Box Beauty or TestTube.
"Beauty brands have long recognized the power of sampling and Birchbox improves the reach and effectiveness of sampling programs by identifying high potential consumers outside of the brands' traditional reach, tracking their behavior and feedback, and encouraging a deeper relationship with the brand,” Principal of First Round Capital, Phineas Barnes said in a statement.
According to the co-founders Hayley Barna and Katia Beauchamp (who, like the founders of Gilt, are Harvard Business School grads) they wanted to create a service that was simple and exciting, by focusing on prestige brands and their latest products.
“We thought, wouldn’t every woman want a best friend who has access to the beauty editor’s closet,” Beauchamp says.
When I asked her whether she will eventually slap on an (oh-so-trendy) flash sales feature on BirchBox, she flatly said, “No.” Although she acknowledges the popularity of flash sales, and many like Gilt have dabbled in cosmetic offerings, Beauchamp says BirchBox is focusing on new products and catching them early in their life cycle.
For now, the service seems to lack significant customization (most users will get the exact same items), but the startup says it’s working on increasing personalization, particularly for skin types, hair traits and style tastes.
I’m interested to see how this service works out and whether the economics make sense for the participating brands. Beauchamp provided little detail on the pricing structure, but these top tier beauty brands are effectively giving away premium-sized samples of new products for the sake of promotion. That makes sense if users opt to buy the full-size versions when their samples run out, less sense if there’s a thin correlation between samples and sales.
We’re hearing from two separate sources that Nasza Klasa, the largest Polish social networking platform, is on the block for €130 million.
Launched in November 2006, at its height the service had over 27 million registered users. But figures have been nose-diving this year as Facebook eats into its core social networking user base. It may be that heat from Facebook which is prompting the sale. We’ve reached out to Nasza Klasa for comment.
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