The latest from TechCrunch
- Sean Parker Joins Yammer's Board Of Directors
- MySpace Co-Founder And CTO Aber Whitcomb Leaves, To Be Replaced By Alex Maghen
- Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go
- The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death
- DoubleTwist Remakes Apple's Classic 1984 Ad With A New Dictator: Steve Jobs
- It's Money In The Bank: BillShrink Now Helps Choose Your Ideal Savings Account
| Sean Parker Joins Yammer's Board Of Directors | Top |
| Sean Parker is no stranger to Internet success. He’s 28 years old and has already helped start four very well-known services on the web: Napster, Plaxo, Causes, and of course, Facebook. And now he’s taking his impressive resume to Yammer , where he is joining the enterprise microblogging service’s Board of Directors, we’ve learned. Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50 , recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client . We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications . As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward. Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes , one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund . He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network , based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook. Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago. Mr. Parker joins George Zachary , Keith Rabois , Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni , and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The later two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| MySpace Co-Founder And CTO Aber Whitcomb Leaves, To Be Replaced By Alex Maghen | Top |
| MySpace has just announced that CTO and co-founder Aber Whitcomb will be leaving the company, to be replaced by MySpace Music’s current CTO Alex Maghen . The news doesn’t come as much of a surprise — we speculated that Whitcomb would be leaving as part of the core executive shakeup that swept through MySpace last April (if anything it’s surprising that Whitcomb stayed on this long). At this point the last remaining member of MySpace’s old guard is Tom Anderson, who remains onboard in a limited capacity. Maghen will take on the core responsibilities for running MySpace’s platform and will report to COO Mike Jones. Before joining MySpace, Maghen has previously served as CTO of MTV Networks and CTO of Yahoo Entertainment. Other recent MySpace hires include former AOL and Tsavo exec Mike Macadaan as VP Product and former Facebook Director Katie Geminder as SVP of User Experience and Design. But it’s still seeing a trickle of current executives leaving — earlier this month SVP of Business Development Jason Oberfest left to join social and mobile gaming company ngmoco. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| Dropbox Meets The iPhone; Access Files On The Go | Top |
| Dropbox , the easy to use file access manager which syncs your files across all your computers and the web, has introduced an iPhone application to make it even easier to access your files anywhere in the world. After almost 7 weeks of waiting, Apple has finally approved the application. With this new iPhone app, users will get access to all their Dropbox documents, PDF’s, pictures, videos and much more. Dropbox also introduced offline viewing in the iPhone app, with “Favorites.” If you add a file to your 'Favorites', they'll be accessible at any time. To do so, just hit the star at the bottom of any file, and it’ll be added. Otherwise, your files stay in the cloud. One of Dropbox’s core features is sharing your files and folders stored in the cloud with anyone else who has a Dropbox account, and the iPhone is no exception. Users can easily share their Dropbox files and folders from their iPhone to any other Dropbox user by putting in their email address, just like on the web. The app allows users to upload photos for 3G users, and videos if you have an iPhone 3GS. What’s really cool about Dropbox’s iPhone app is that you can even stream music and movies from your Dropbox straight to your iPhone, without any noticeable delay. Dropbox’s app is also heavily integrated into Apple’s camera API with straight photo and video uploading available too. Just a few days ago, Dropbox reached 2 million users. Dropbox was a finalist at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| The VC, The Professor, And The Valley Of Death | Top |
| Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @ vwadhwa . Everyone seems to be waiting for the next great discovery which will change the world. But, believe it or not, the next Internet, semiconductor, or breakthrough in MRI technology may already have been discovered. It's just languishing on the shelves of the university research labs you drive by on your way to work every day. University researchers don't know how to commercialize their discoveries and smart, hungry entrepreneurs looking to meet the next Larry or Sergey don't know how to find them. These parallel universes rarely meet (well, except sometimes at Stanford). In 2007, U.S. universities performed $48.8 billion of research and filed 17,589 U.S. patent applications. In that same year universities received back revenues for licensing and royalties on patents of less than $2 billion. Those revenues include ongoing royalties from all of the research licensed over the past 40 years. The implication is clear. An astonishing amount of promising research is left in the lab. When I say this to university administrators, they get incredibly defensive (almost like the VC's I pissed off with my last post .) They rightfully argue that the role of the university is to teach and to add to the world's knowledge base. The real benefit comes from the students who universities educate, who go and start the Apples and Microsoft's. No argument there. But we have a goldmine of knowledge and potential innovation locked in our research universities. This goldmine could fuel the next two decades of economic growth. It is time to mine this goldmine. I'll sketch out a little treasure map for you in part two on this topic, posting later this week, but first, you need to know more about the inhabitants of the other dimension. Some of the brightest people in the universe work in our universities. After getting a science or engineering Masters degree (which could earn them six-figure salaries in Silicon Valley) they slog it out for 4-6 years at close to minimum wage to get their PhD's. Then they wait another decade to *maybe* become a full professor, usually by working at a series of lesser university jobs in less than optimal cities or towns. Even those PhDs who get tenure usually don’t make anything near what senior tech guys make in industry. Clearly they are not in it for the money. Rather their twin desires are often to acquire knowledge for knowledge’s sake and to do good for the world. I know these are foreign concepts to some of you, but this is the academic world. And by the way, they often see the business world as the "evil empire" that robs their discoveries of purity and puts a dollar sign on anything it can. For those reasons, they are usually more concerned about disseminating knowledge and publishing academic papers than creating patents that limit how this knowledge can be used. (I have known many academics who refuse to file patents because they don’t believe in them). These purists worry about the conflicts of interest that can arise when taking money from industry might be perceived to color their research. And they want to ensure that their teaching activities are not adversely impacted by the time spent on commercialization efforts. To make things worse, the funding which universities received from the government usually only covers the cost of writing some papers. They don't get enough to build a prototype or prove their technology. This is what most VC's want to see at a minimum before investing in technology, to make sure they are not investing in a “science project,” the industry term for leap-of-faith investments in lab science discoveries. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of university technology withers on the vine. This chasm between promising benchwork and investable prototype, between what professors and VCs can and are willing to do, is also known as the "Valley of Death". The challenge is to create a bridge between these researchers and the VCs or idea-seeking entrepreneurs who know to turn an idea into an invention. Many of the ideas and breakthroughs are easy to exploit and just require enterprising minds to come together with inquiring minds. But others require the investment and support which only VC's can provide. (Hey, I never said that venture capital didn't serve an important purpose – just that VC's don't innovate.) Taking these types of hard science discoveries from bench to fab or factory is sometimes very, very hard work that often does require VC capital, fat Rolodexes, and regulatory and industry specific operational expertise. But someone has to take these discoveries into a stage beyond "science project" – and this is where the entrepreneurs need to step in again—to hand VC's the "technology on a platter" that they expect. I asked a colleague at Duke University, Barry Myers – who is considered to be one of the leading biomedical researchers in the world and also happens to work part-time at a VC firm (weird, isn't it?), to help me create a guide for the adventurous entrepreneur. I must warn you that this isn't going to be easy. In my next post, I’ll walk you through what Barry said. Yes, we've got a cliffhanger. (Photo credit: Jon Sullivan ) Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| DoubleTwist Remakes Apple's Classic 1984 Ad With A New Dictator: Steve Jobs | Top |
| On January 22, 1984 during the third quarter of the SuperBowl, Apple broadcast one of the most famous television commercials of all time. Based on a dystopian future George Orwell described in his novel 1984 , the ad features a procession of soulless drones trudging into a large room to listen to the unquestioned words of their dictator whose face is being projected on a large screen. Moments later, a beautiful woman bounds into the room, evading capture by armed guards by only a few meters, and hurls a large hammer into the screen that explodes in a dazzling display of light. And so we were introduced to the Macintosh, Apple’s new weapon to take on the monolithic IBM. What a difference 25 years can make. Now Apple has grown from underdog to a tyrant in its own right, preventing other devices from tapping into its iTunes software and restricting what users can install on the iPhones that they’ve purchased. And doubleTwist , which makes software that lets you use iTunes seamlessly with other devices, is calling it out in spectacular fashion. They’ve just unveiled their new commercial (embedded below) that’s nearly a shot-for-shot remake, featuring an army of iPod-wearing clones sitting in silence as their master — sporting Steve Jobs’ familiar round glasses — commands that “no other choices shall distract from our glory”. The ad closes with the statement that “ on October 6th, doubleTwist brings you Choice”. The company says that a major new release will be coming out that day for Mac users (followed a week later for Windows), but said that the new feature they’re unveiling is a surprise. doubleTwist is also exploring showing the ad in movie theaters before previews begin. This isn’t DoubleTwist’s first direct attack on Apple. In June, the company pulled an incredibly gutsy move and legally purchased ad space for one side of San Francisco’s flagship Apple Store that invited passersby to “try The Cure for iPhone Envy”, that could put your iTunes library on any device. Apple pulled strings and had the ad quickly taken down. Soon after doubleTwist managed to have it put up once again, only to have Apple pressure the advertising company to have it removed for a second time. Talk about Big Brother. You can find the original Apple ad here Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
| It's Money In The Bank: BillShrink Now Helps Choose Your Ideal Savings Account | Top |
| We all like the idea of setting aside a nice chunk of money in a savings account and putting it to work for us, but it’s a bit easier said than done — if you want the best rates, you have to choose from one of hundreds of CDs and savings account products offered by various banks, each of which has its own rates and restrictions. BillShrink , the startup that targets a variety of verticals to help users save money, is launching a new service today that looks to help make this decision much easier. If you’ve used any of BillShrink’s other services before — which include cost cutters for cell phone plans, gas stations , and credit cards — you’ll be right at home here. To get started, BillShrink asks you where you’re currently keeping your money, as well as the amount that’s in your account. It doesn’t ask for your bank credentials (people tend to be far more hestitant to give these up than they are for their phone bills), but it does automatically look up details like your current APY which isn’t unique to the user. Hit submit, and BillShrink will present a list of its top matches, taking into account each product’s interest rates and any restrictions that might be involved. And BillShrink goes far beyond just a basic listing. You can futher refine your results by specifying which features you want (for example, you might want to be able to withdraw money at ATMs, or get paper statements without an extra fee). You can also specify how long you’re willing to keep your money in an illiquid state, and if you enter your employer and region you can turn up special offers from smaller banks and credit unions. As with BillShrink’s other services, the new savings feature has a clean, intuitive interface. That said there is still some room for improvement — I think the site could do a better job at holding the user’s hand through the process. While BillShrink does a good job offering contextual explanations (say, how it calculated the fees associated with a given product), it doesn’t attempt to educate the user, so there’s a chance some users won’t know what some of the terms mean. BillShrink isn’t the first player here — BankRate.com has been a leader for quite a while, and Mint also offers a savings component that looks at savings accounts and CDs. But co-founder Samir Kothari says that BillShrink differs in a few key respects. For one, the site doesn’t offer any sponsored listings (both Mint and BankRate always show their sponsored products at the very top of the list, so you may not immediately notice the products that would give you the best returns). He also says that BillShrink’s customization options are more precise than what you’ll find on the other sites. BillShrink has been having a very strong year, with 1000% growth since the beginning of the year (they’re now up to over 650,000 monthly visitors) and some major marketing love from T-Mobile ). Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco | |
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