Friday, December 17, 2010

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Don't: Parade In Front Of TechCrunch HQ Wearing A Chicken Costume Top
Late last week, a handful of TechCrunch staff noticed something strange going on in front of our headquarters in San Francisco: there was giant, creepy-looking chicken pacing back and forth in the street, holding a sign over its head that said “TechCrunch Dont Be Chicken, Check Out DoDont “. Laura bravely went outside to scope out the situation — she returned to say that the guy had already been out there for hours, and that this was actually the second day he’d been walking around TCHQ (nobody noticed him the first day). So, I did what any other fearless reporter would do: I grabbed my Flip camera and started talking to the giant chicken. As you’ll learn in the video above, the chicken in question happens to be one of the founders of DoDont , a site that invites users to voice their recommendations on a binary scale: “Do” something, or “Don’t”. Like the pizza at Primo’s? Tell people to ‘do’ dinner there. Hated the service at your local movie theatre? Tell your friends that they ‘don’t’ want to go there. You can vote on the ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ you agree with, and you can also see the top Dos and Don’ts for each tag category. The chicken — whose actual name is J. Brent Large — says that the site is a decision engine (he’s also described it as a “Digg for opinions”). It uses Facebook Connect for signins, and in the near future, he says that it will add support for Twitter integration and asymmetrical relationships, as well as native mobile apps and an API. Obviously it’s very simple, probably to a fault. Then again, we’ve seen sites with similarly simple propositions take off — Formspring’s ‘Ask me anything’ comes to mind — so who knows. Now, let me be clear. As a general policy, TechCrunch writers have every intention of ignoring any similar shenanigans for the foreseeable future. People try similar stunts all the time and we generally ignore them, but this one took guts and is pretty funny. But everyone else, please use our company submission form and/or tips address. Here’s a video overview of DoDont:
 
Ask a VC: Kairouz on Canada, Splurging on Wine and the Surging NYC Scene (TCTV) Top
Habib Kairouz of Rho Ventures was my guest on Ask a VC this week, and as I mentioned earlier this week, he’s had a range of Web exits in the last ten years. He’s also seen tremendous changes in his home tech market of New York. It’s gone from silly Silicon Alley days to tumbleweeds and now to a thriving hub that’s stolen Boston’s East Coast venture thunder, at least when it comes to consumer Internet companies. In this episode we talk about what New York finally got right, why Rho has offices in Canada, the value of an incubator versus bootstrapping and why Kairouz doesn’t think there’s as much opportunity in online beer as there is in wine. (Note: Apologies on my audio. We had some issues, but Kairouz is the one answering the questions and his is just fine.)
 
Yahoo Just Killed… Consumer Confidence In Them Top
It has been fairly amazing to watch this Yahoo “sunsetting” news over the past 48 hours. It seemed to go from a bad leak, to huge backlash, to PR disaster, to confusion, to worse PR disaster. Now Yahoo, by way of Delicious (the most prominent service being “sunset”), has responded by lashing out at all the press for the coverage of the fiasco. Danny Sullivan just did a great job of ripping them a new one for this nonsense misdirection. But the issue actually goes much deeper. Yahoo may not be killing Delicious, but they have killed something else: consumer confidence in them. The entire time I was reading the back and forth of this fiasco, I had one thought on my mind: I need to get my pictures out of Flickr, pronto. No, Flickr wasn’t on the list of companies being “sunset”, but how do I know that in a year it won’t be? Hell, maybe even 6 months from now? I don’t. In fact, I’d say it’s 50/50 that something similar happens with that service. Sure, Delicious has been largely stagnant over the past few years (which, of course, is Yahoo’s fault), but it has long been one of the mainstays of the so-called “Web 2.0″ movement. In fact, the sale of Delicious to Yahoo was one of the first stories that TechCrunch broke back in 2005. There are a ton of people that have a ton of data in it. It’s still a valuable tool to those people. It has millions of users. Yahoo just gave them all the middle finger. Mathew Ingram argues that the moves makes sense from a business perspective. Maybe. But the key ingredient of Yahoo’s business is people using their services. If they’ve showing that they can just kill off such a big one on a whim, I’m just not sure how they can convince us that all of them aren’t at risk. Yahoo says that Delicious isn’t “a strategic fit” for the company anymore. How is Flickr? I know the CEO Carol Bartz has a hard time explaining what Yahoo is, but of the dozen answers she has given, one hasn’t been “photo-sharing service”. It’s true that plenty of other large companies kill off products all the time. Google, for example, “sunset” a number of services like Dodgeball and Jaiku in early 2009. But that was a different time. The entire U.S. economy was collapsing. Everyone was making cuts everywhere. And none of those services were the size of Delicious. Yahoo’s plan now is to try to find a buyer for Delicious. That’s great, but it might not be so easy. Even though they just likely drove down the price with this fiasco, they’re still going to want a pretty penny for the company. It has been a part of Yahoo for so long that there’s likely a lot of proprietary code behind it, and they’re not going to part with that for nothing. Even before all of his info go leaked, we had heard there was interest from other Bay Area companies taking Delicious off of Yahoo’s hands. The hold-up was and likely still will be the price. I’m sure they will be able to find a buyer, but it’s not going to be as easy as they’re making it seem. And again, that’s very troubling. What if it’s a death-by-default situation? And Flickr is a thousand times more troubling. That service is so large that the only ones who could likely buy them off of Yahoo are one of the big boys. That means Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, etc. And again, there’s likely a lot of code in there that Yahoo may not want companies that they still see as competitors in some ways buying. The whole situation is just sad. Yahoo has become a shadow of what it once was. Even with massive layoff after massive layoff, they still have tons of talented people working there. But those people can’t do anything about big picture product direction decisions coming from the top as Yahoo tries to morph into some kind of something that will make shareholders happy. And that’s the thing. Yahoo is all about the shareholders now. It’s all about the bottom-line. That’s all that matters. It’s not about the users. It’s not about building or maintaining great products. It’s about finding the ones that make the money and slicing the rest. People often express their growing concerns about putting data into Google for privacy reasons. But I now have a problem putting data into Yahoo out of the concern that it could just disappear one day. That’s really terrifying. [photo: flickr/ dev null ] CrunchBase Information Yahoo! Flickr delicious Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Confirmed: Tumblr Raises $30 Million Top
For the past several weeks there’s been reports of blogging platform Tumblr raising a boatload of money. That was confirmed today in  a SEC filing with numbers on the Series D round. $25 million to be exact.  According to the filing it looks like Spark Capital, Sequoia and Union Square Ventures participated in the round. We’ve heard that the post-money valuation is in the ballpark of $155 million. We had also heard that the total amount of funding was $30 million, no word on whether the round was reduced in size or there is just a second tranche coming later. Tumblr founder David Karp will have plenty of things to spend the money on, Tumblr just opened a new office in New York Cityand hired another four people to bring the total up to 16 people now. David Karp recently told TechCrunch that he plans on expanding the company to 20 employees before the end of the year. Update : Tumblr President John Maloney tells us that the full round is actually $30 million, as we previously thought and there will be a second SEC filing on Monday for $5 million. Maloney also gave us the breakdown: Sequoia went in at $20 million, Spark Capital at $5 million and Union Square Ventures at $5 million. You can read more about the company’s plans for the cash in its blog post “ Getting ready for 2011 .” CrunchBase Information Tumblr Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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