Sunday, November 27, 2011

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Akamai Reportedly Buying Rival Cotendo For Up To $350 Million Top
cotendoClassify this as a rumor for now, but Israeli business press is reporting that Akamai is poised to take over one of its competitors, website and mobile acceleration technology vendor Cotendo, for $300 million to $350 million. Founded in 2008, Cotendo has raised over $36 million in funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Tenaya Capital. A few months ago, Cotendo raised $17 million in new funding from its previous backers, with Citrix Systems and Juniper Networks stepping in as strategic investors as well.
 
Josh Kopelman: "I Think 2012 Will Look More Like 2008 Than 2011″ Top
KopelmanRemember, R.I.P Good Times, the Sequoia slide deck  in 2008 warning its portfolio companies to batten down the hatches and "spend every dollar as if it were your last"? Things aren't yet quite as dire as the last time the economy tailspinned into recession, but a number of factors are making some startup investors wary. "I think 2012 will look more like 2008 than 2011," warns First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman. His pace of investing has not slowed down.  He's just being realistic. Speaking to other early-stage investors recently, I get the same sense that the froth (dare I say "bubble"?) of the past 18 months is coming to an end. Many VCs (and founders) have been feasting, and now it might be time to take  a breather. The number of seed-stage fundings is outpacing series A fundings. And whether you consider this a Series A Crunch or not, many more seed stage companies got funded over the past 18 months than previously and many more will subsequently not continue to get funded when it comes time for a series A.
 
Review: Super Mario 3D Land For The 3DS Top
01It's not hard to love Mario. He's had his ups and downs - what, for example, was the deal with Paper Mario? And Super Mario Strikers was pretty hard to love - but darn it if the little guy doesn't keep coming back for more and keeps you, at the very least, entertained. Super Mario 3D Land is the latest in the Mario saga. The story is fairly typical - something was stolen (a lot of leaves) and Bowser took Princess Peach. Your mission is to find the leaves (which are special and give you the Tanooki suit) and then find Peach. What you go through to find her, however, is where all of the fun comes in.
 
How to Make Your Startup Go Viral The Pinterest Way Top
pinterest.com_uv_1yOn Thanksgiving, Pinterest's co-founder Ben Silbermann sent an email to his entire user base saying thanks. It was fitting, as Pinterest was born two years ago on Thanksgiving day 2009.  Ben had been working on a website with a few friends, and his girlfriend came up with the name while they were watching TV. Pinterest officially launched to the world 4 months later. Some startups go crazy with hype and users right after launch. And some don't. I don't know the founders, but I thought I'd take apart Pinterest's story to discuss growth and virality in consumer web startups. Pinterest was not an overnight success. On the contrary, its growth was surprisingly modest after Turkey Day 2009. Take a look at Pinterest's one-year traffic on Compete from Oct 2010 to Oct 2011, which is the picture in this post, and shows Pinterest rising from 40,000 to 3.2 million monthly unique visitors. I took both ends of this chart and estimated monthly compounded growth over Pinterest's lifetime, then interpolated the curve using constant growth and put the results in this Google Spreadsheet.
 
(Founder Stories) Bump's David Lieb: "We Want To Build That New UI Layer For The Real World" Top
Bump IISeeking a way to reduce friction while exchanging contact information, David Lieb and his two co-founders launched Bump - a service that allows users to trade personal data (and an array of items spanning calendar events to music samples) by simply tapping their smartphones together. In part II of his Founder Stories interview, Lieb notes there is bigger picture at play than just swapping content. He tells host, Chris Dixon, "there is a lot of time spent figuring out how I interface with this [smartphone] to go access the virtual world, but nobody has really spent a lot of time thinking, well I am using this phone in the real world, what do I want to do in the real world, and how do I want to interact with other people and things in the real world, and that is the problem that we want to solve, we want to build that new UI layer for the real world."
 
Cyber Monday Piggybacks On Social Media To Become Top Online Shopping Day Top
Cyber Monday Facebook Users Graph Done 2When the term Cyber Monday was coined in 2005, the Monday after Thanksgiving was the 12th biggest online shopping day of the year. That year, Facebook had 5.5 million users and Twitter didn't exist. In 2010, Cyber Monday was the #1 biggest online shopping day of the year, with sales topping $1 billion. I believe the growth of social media and the importance of Cyber Monday are correlated because peer -to-peer sharing of deals and owned marketing channels like Facebook Pages and Twitter accounts are bringing promotions directly to where users spend their time online.
 
Thanksgiving + Black Friday Mobile Traffic Up 60% From 2010 Top
Mobile Ecommerce Traffic UpMobile is growing as a medium for ecommerce, with users sourcing deals from their phones and tablets before visiting physical stores according to a new study by Usablenet, The company which powers mobile sites for 100 top U.S. retailers including JCPenney, Aeropostale, and REI tracked 180 million page views and 1 million mobile users over Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It saw mobile traffic to its clients was up 60% from the same period last year, with Thanksgiving sending more traffic than the following day. Usablenet also found that iOS devices accounted for 42% of the traffic, trumping Android, and trouncing the tiny traffic from Windows and Nokia devices.
 
Sing Now The Praises Of Klout's Klumsy Kludges Top
OLP_ClumsyOver the last month, Charles Stross memorably called the online influence measurer Klout "the internet equivalent of herpes," Rohn Miller of Social Media Today exhorted people to "Delete your Klout profile now," John Scalzi lambasted it as "sad, and possibly evil," the New York Times wrote about parents' outrage when they discovered Klout was autogenerating accounts for minors, Flout caustically mocked them with the insincerest form of flattery, and perhaps most damning of all--it's one thing to be controversial, another and far worse to be irrelevant--our own Alexia Tsotsis convincingly argued that "Nobody Gives A Damn About Your Klout Score." Why all the hate? Stross cites privacy violations, but it can't be that alone which inspires such vitriol. As Mathew Ingram points out, "it's hard to see why Klout should be criticized for collecting information about people based on their public web activity." Scalzi gets more to the heart of things: "Klout exists to turn the entire Internet into a high school cafeteria, in which everyone is defined by the table at which they sit." Oh noes! It's an online popularity contest! Stone them! Let me offer a different take: Klout, as flawed and clumsy as it is--and I'll admit that in many ways it's a terrible service--is an admirable pioneer, a first innovative step in an important direction.
 
Social Travel: Rediscovering the Friendly Skies Top
Photo Credit / Creative Commons Flickr, Phineas BWe've heard endlessly how "social" will eventually disrupt and transform old, stodgy industries, perhaps even reinvent them for the better. The promise of this change, of course, is often tempered by the reality that, if indeed this stuff actually happens, it will take time and we're currently in the early stages of the game. And when it comes to travel, one of the most heavily regulated industries, while disruption and transformation would be music to travelers' ears, change won't come fast. There are a number of reasons travel has become more of an onerous task (thank you, TSA), yet consumers continue to brave the elements to happily trot around the globe.
 
IBM: Black Friday Online Retail Spending Up 24.3 Percent Top
shoppingThanksgiving brought record online retail sales for the holiday, with spending up 39.3 percent over Thanksgiving 2010. And today, IBM Coremetrics data shows a 24.3 percent growth in online sales on Black Friday compared to the same period last year. Mobile traffic on Black Friday was 14.3 percent of all retail traffic compared to 5.6 percent in 2010. Sales on mobile devices surged to 9.8 percent from 3.2 percent year over year. As we saw with PayPal stats from Thanksgiving and Black Friday, mobile shopping volume is increasing by over 500 percent this year.
 
Startups: Silicon Valley Vs. The Emerging World Top
big-vs-little-sumoBeing from Jordan and having visited Silicon Valley on a number of occasions, this visit (along with others) continue to show how the realities of the Valley stand in stark contrast with what an emerging world founder, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, face to start and scale a Web business. I believe the lack of a well-developed ecosystem (funding, mentoring, risk culture, lawyers, human resources) puts the burden tenfold on the entrepreneur in the emerging world. In many cases, foreign entrepreneurs have to do ten times the lifting of an American startup -- for a much longer period of time to boot -- in order to succeed.
 
Daily Crunch: Hot Stuff Top
1482Here are some recent posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: ScottEVest Introduces The Puffer Jacket 2011 Holiday Gift Guide: Laptops Are A Geek's Best Friend LuvBook S: Japan Gets Super-Cute "Hello Kitty" Laptop The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For? They're Rioting Over BlackBerrys In Indonesia (And Other Black Friday Insanity That'll Make You Fear For The Future)
 
'Twine' Foreshadows A Future Where All Objects Talk To The Internet Top
Screen Shot 2011-11-25 at 4.58.05 PMWant to be notified to turn on the AC when a room reaches a certain temperature? Or when your laundry's done? Well MIT Media Lab alumni Supermechanical have built Twine, a sleek 2.5" rubber square which connects to Wifi and allows objects to "communicate" under certain conditions. The Twine, which reminds me of a Square from a design simplicity perspective, comes with a web app, 'Spool' which allows you to program its sensors with natural language rules like "When: accelerometer is at rest, Then: Tweet" in the case of the laundry done thing, for example.
 
Microsoft: "Microsoft Has Had [Voice Control] In Windows Phones For A Year" Top
In a charming interview with Forbes Magazine, Microsoft's Craig Mundie discussed future products at Microsot, including the success and plans for the Kinect as well as their mesa para computación, the Surface.
 
ScottEVest Introduces The Puffer Jacket Top
ScottEVest makes clothes for use geeks. They have lots of pocketses, plenty of acceptable style, and you can amaze people by stuffing a water bottle and laptop out of one of their coats with room to spare.
 
The Kindle Fire, What Is It Good For? Top
Kindle fireWhen the Kindle Fire first shipped a couple weeks ago, the reviews were mixed. Uncle Walt calls it good, but not great. David Pogue at the NYT thinks it is "sluggish," lacking "polish or speed." But the Kindle Fire is still selling like hotcakes. Some reviewers are disappointed that it is not an iPad, but that is the wrong way to look at it. The Fire is a standout media tablet that does a few things very well and I am going to tell you what they are. I've been using a Kindle Fire for the past two weeks (that is, when my kids or wife haven't absconded to another room with it). The device passes my first test: my family fights over it. The Fire is kid-tested, and mother-approved. Fruit Ninja is the new obsession with my young children. Even my two-year-old, who loves the iPad, is increasingly eyeing the Kindle Fire and scheming ways to get her Mom out of the room so she can play with it. My wife will have none of that, she's reading Joan Didion's latest book on the Fire. I sneak it away from the bedside table when everyone is asleep at night to watch old episodes of Arrested Development.
 
eBay: PayPal Mobile Payment Volume Up Over 500 Percent On Thanksgiving Day And Black Friday Top
ebayAs we heard earlier today, Thanksgiving proved to be a lucrative day for online retailers. IBM reported online Thanksgiving 2011 sales were up 39 percent over Thanksgiving 2010, with mobile shopping on the rise. eBay and PayPal are seeing similar trends. PayPal Mobile just announced a 511 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Thanksgiving 2010. On Thanksgiving in the U.S., consumers shopped on mobile via PayPal most frequently between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 p.m. PST. Around the world, consumers shopped on mobile most frequently between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PST.
 
Walmart's Black Friday Disaster: Website Crippled, Violence In Stores Top
Walmart Black Friday WebsiteFire sales turned into a firestorm for Walmart this morning as the company's web servers buckled under Black Friday traffic. Shoppers from around the country waited until the middle of the night for sales only to experience broken checkout pages, emptied shopping carts, and login errors. This caused their desired items to go out of stock before they could buy them, leading to mass frustration and ill will towards the discount store chain. Meanwhile at its physical stores, 20 people were pepper sprayed by a fellow customer, and 2 people were shot outside separate locations. Walmart will need to sort out its servers in preparation for the upcoming Cybermonday blitz or it risks losing customers to Amazon.
 
(Founder Stories) Bump's David Lieb On Getting To 60 Million Downloads Top
Founder Stories LiebIn his first Founder Stories interview with host Chris Dixon, Bump co-founder and CEO, David Lieb relates how he conceived the idea for Bump one week into business school at the University of Chicago. He met co-founder, Jake Mintz at the same time and along with their third co-founder, Andy Huibers began building on "nights and weekends" during "the fall of 2008." By spring of 2009 Bump launched, and has since been downloaded more than 60-million times, he says.
 
They're Rioting Over BlackBerrys In Indonesia (And Other Black Friday Insanity That'll Make You Fear For The Future) Top
rimBlack Friday often makes people act absolutely crazy. This is well-documented. Still, you don't expect to see consumer-driven insanity go down in countries that don't celebrate Turkey day and its accompanying shopfest. And that's not where the surprises ended this morning in Indonesia. A crowd of 3,000 people waited in line today in Jakarta, Indonesia for a new smartphone. In fact, the group got so out of control that riot police had to be brought in to calm the masses.
 

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