Tuesday, September 29, 2009

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Microsoft Courier Gets Demonstrated More Fully, Limitations Suggested Top
The trickle of news about Microsoft's Courier device continues, and this time there's a bit more of a realistic walkthrough. The device is being shown to be much more of a next-generation notepad than all-purpose tablet, and that's probably for the best; Microsoft overreaching with a device like this could result in a real crash and burn. I suppose the best way to picture the Courier is just as a web-connected organizer — you know, one of those leather-bound ones that business people used to have, and which the Courier seems clearly designed after. Of course, with an internet connection and full-color touchscreen, much more is enabled and the device becomes much more complicated. Microsoft's (and Pioneer's) task has been to pare that down to a product, and it really looks like they've done it right. Still all renders, though. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Financial Startups Demo Their Dashboards At Finovate Top
The following guest post is written by Larry Chiang , a co-founder of Duck9 who also regularly blogs for BusinessWeek . Today he is reporting from the Finovate startup conference. At the FinovateStartup conference in New York City today, it is clear that financial startups are pushing forward regardless of funding woes or a lackluster economy Companies here at Finovate center around financial innovations. They track personal finance and are aggressively plodding forward because consumer adoption of the internet is rising. These companies did not just present ideas, they brought along established industry stalwarts to their demos. What’s more, many of these start-ups are already white labeling their product and integrating into established company sites (T-Mobile ads, Yahoo, Bank of America). The user interfaces are better than average, which is perhaps influenced by Finovate’s previous winner Mint . Best in Show went to Kasasa , an Austin, Texas-based financial website that uses real-world rewards and charity donations to get people to open free deposit accounts. They dragged a community banker up to the stage who gave a testimonial about Kasasa’a ability to generate new saving accounts. bank account selector . Canopy has tools to better understand and manage healthcare cost, including Health Savings Accounts. Their oh-so-chic iPhone App matches up medical services to your personal HSA. A typical company presenting was SmartyPig , which adds a social component to saving. It crowd-shares personal saving goals for a vacation or a set of golf clubs. FinanceWorks demonstrated online banking data aggregated into TurboTax. Outright takes and scrapes sales data for one-person businesses (such as eBay sellers) and helps the entrepreneur alleviate the burden of quarterly tax pre-payments. Home-Account seeks to be a Kayak for loan mortgage shopping. It plugs into Homes.com, Movoto.com and Bills.com and ‘B’- and “C”-grade paper companies like Freedom Financial Network. Most of the sites demoed today offer features such as interest payment tracking, loan shopping, expense account summaries and more everyday, core consumer finance applications. Many of the demos featured summaries of expenses, and visually extrapolated spending behaviors to identify trends. For example, Credit.com boils down 20+ pages of credit reports into one graph (with a trend line). At the heart of the functionality for consumer finance are apps that summarize “money in” / ‘money out’. In the same way that dashboards revolutionized the ability of C-suite officers to forecast a company’s revenues and expenses, the average consumer now is able to get dozens of data points that paint a picture of their personal budgets. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos Joins Benchmark As Entrepreneur In Residence Top
Mårten Gustaf Mickos , former CEO of MySQL , is Benchmark Capital ’s newest Entrepreneur In Residence ( EIR ). Mickos served as chief executive officer for the open source database company from January 2001 to February 2008, when Sun Microsystems acquired MySQL for $1 billion. Benchmark was a relatively early investor in the company; they participated in the $20 million Series B round together with Index Ventures back in 2003. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology and is also a board member of Mozilla Messaging and RightScale . In the tweets announcing the move, Mickos says he likes Benchmark because they care about the needs of entrepreneurs and because they can ‘think big’. He will be joining Keith Krach, Mike Cassidy, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Dan Finnegan, Sarah Leary and Nirav Tolia as EIR at the Silicon Valley VC firm, which is behind a number of high-profile investments in web startups like Twitter, Gigya, Prosper, OpenTable, Mint.com and FriendFeed. Anyone care to venture a guess as to when Mickos’ next Benchmark-backed startup will see the light of day? Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
Ruby-On-Rails Startup FiveRuns Acquired By WorkThink Top
Ruby-on-Rails startup FiveRuns has been acquired by WorkThink, according to FiveRuns’ site. FiveRuns provides a variety of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails and related open source and commercial systems. Built on Rails and delivered as a hosted service, FiveRuns' products manage the complete Rails application lifecycle — from installation to production. Products include Install, a free Ruby on Rails stack powered by BitRock; Manage, which was an application that monitors your Rails applications in production (Manage was discontinued this summer); TuneUp (a debugging tool which we wrote about here ); and Dash, which was a metrics, storage, reporting, and communication hub for applications connected to the web. According to FiveRuns, Dash’s services will be discontinued by the middle of October. It’s unclear if the other products will survive the transition. FiveRuns has raised $9 million total from Austin Ventures and is in the same genre of startups such as New Relic, Heroku, and Engine Yard. It appears that Workthink hasn’t launched yet, but we’ll keep you posted. 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 : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors 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 : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 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 : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 
gpsAssassin Could Be The iPhone's Next Highly Addictive Hit Game Top
The iPhone has all the ingredients necessary to build the first popular location-based game that combines the real world with fantasy — a scenario long dreamt of by gamers. A handful of games like Parallel Kingdom have gotten some traction, but they have yet to really catch on on a large scale. And while Foursquare has gotten quite a bit of attention, particularly in tech circles, its gameplay elements are very rudimentary. Now a new game called gpsAssassin may have struck gold by fusing location and the popular campus game Assassins with the text-based games that have become immensely popular on social networks, Twitter , and the iPhone. Founder Nicholas Holland says that he’s had some difficulty describing the game, largely because it looks very much iMob, Mafia Wars, and similar games that don’t rely on your location when you play them. And while gpsAssassin may share some of the same mechanics with these — it’s primarily text based with leveling, attack/armor ratings, and other key RPG elements — its location features turn it into a different beast entirely. After picking a nickname, the game presents you list of possible actions, the most important of which is “Scan for targets”. This will bring up a list of any players within a five mile radius (anyone within a two mile radius is shown under a list of ’short range’ targets). After tapping on someone’s nickname, you enter Attack mode, where you choose from a list of actions. This is where the game’s real fun kicks in: you can choose from a list of available attacks created by other users, which range from silly (’Throw Nail Polish” or “Robotic Kitty”) to more conventional forms of violence. Better yet, you can get creative and think up your own attack, which is especially fun when you personally know the person you’re attacking. Your target will then be informed that you’ve attacked them with whatever weapon you choose, and depending on your strength they’ll find out who emerged as the victor. This is all, of course, dependent on where you are physically located. If your favorite victim picks up shop and drives across town then you won’t be able to attack them with your ‘Gospel of Chuck Norris’ or ‘Mullet of Fury’. Holland says that gamers have been known to actually change their driving routes so that they can get in their attack on an unsuspecting victim and get out of dodge before they have a chance at retaliation. He also says that he’s seen neighboring offices band together to wage war against a cross-town competitor. Clearly, there’s plenty of room for friendly (or not so friendly) rivalries to emerge. While most people will probably spend most of their time thinking of especially infuriating (and hilarious) attacks, gamers can further boost their stats by fighting against non-player characters. And the game offers virtual goods that you can use to boost your stats and win/loss percentage without the time investment, which is where the game will make most of its money. The application has been available in beta since February but Holland staggered its release by initially pricing it at $5.00, then $.99. Now that it’s ready for mass consumption, gpsAssassin is available for free, though there are a handful of premium versions that come with more of the game’s virtual currency. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. TechCrunch50 Conference 2009 : September 14-15, 2009, San Francisco
 

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