Monday, December 12, 2011

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Social Censorship in India: Much Ado About Nothing Top
Photo Credit: Flickr / Dipankar DuttaAnother year, another attack on the Internet. Lately, though, it's not a loose collective of individual hackers sitting in dark rooms trying to wreak havoc. This time, stronger forces and vested interests are stepping into the game. In a matter of a few weeks, the world's most powerful democracy and the world's largest democracy engaged in their own specific battles over the future of how information can be monitored and circulated online. Whereas in the U.S. the fight centers around freedom of expression (through sharing) and copyright, the suggestion made by India's Minister of Communications and Information Technology, Kapil Sabil tugged at the core of self-expression itself, monitoring potentially disruptive comments generated by social media in the name of preserving the peace within an extremely diverse democratic society.
 
The $99 TouchPad Sale Overwhelms Ebay As Consumers Snatch Up The Discontinued Tablet Top
newpalm-2118And like that they're gone. $99 TouchPads hit ebay right on schedule and were gone within minutes. But that's to be expected, really. It's not often that a solid piece of hardware like the TouchPad is available for so cheap. And thanks to HP's recent moves, the tablet's operating system, webOS, will be around at least in some capacity for as long as there's a demand (and developers). The sale started at 7pm EST on HP's ebay store like the memo we leaked indicated. Both the 16GB and 32GB models were available for $99 and $149, respectively. I watched the 16GB model disappear from ebay within 10 minutes. As of this post's writing, 2 hours after the sale began, only one SKU of the $150 32GB TouchPads are still available although those will likely be gone soon as well. But good luck as ebay is still flaky hours after the sale started. Twitter and forums sites quickly relayed the troubles of many buyers shortly after 7. Ebay was crashing. PayPal was lagging. The whole thing was a mess. For a short moment in time, HP's tablet was anything but an unwanted iPad clone.
 
Sean Parker And Shervin Pishevar At Le Web: "If You Don't Fail, You Haven't Tried Hard Enough" (Video) Top
Last week at Le Web, Alexia interviewed Sean Parker and Shervin Pishevar onstage in what turned out to be one of the most-buzzed about sessions. Here is the full video for your weekend watching pleasure. It's a great discussion that ranges across the state of startups, venture capital, music, and politics . Parker bemoans the surplus of venture capital  for its effect of diluting the talent in the tech industry, a point he's made before. "It prevents the aggregation of talent around great ideas," he says. He emphasizes the need for a great team from the get-go. "People are the greatest asset class," Pishevar agrees. The conversation quickly turns to Gowalla, which recently was acquired by Facebook, and why it failed to take on Foursquare. "If you don't fail, you haven't tried hard enough," says Pishevar.
 
Navarrow Wright: There Is A Diversity Problem In Silicon Valley Top
Navarrow Wright, the co-founder of Global Grind and current CTO of InteractIve One, which operates BlackPlanet.com and other sites, came into the TCTV studio to have "the race conversation" with me. "It is a meritocracy at some level," Wright acknowledges. "I think the challenge is how do you get involved in that ecosystem." One of the biggest barriers for black tech entrepreneurs is a "perception problem in the minority community," says Wright, that "it is easier to become a celebrity or athlete than an entrepreneur." Watch the video.
 
comScore: U.S. Online Holiday Spending Surges 15 Percent To A Record $25 Billion Top
com2comScore just released its U.S. online holiday spending numbers for the season to-date, and as predicted, consumers continued to spend online in record amounts. For the first 39 days of the November to December 2011 holiday season, $24.6 billion has been spent online, which is a 15 percent increase compared to the same days last year. The most recent week ending Dec. 9 reached $5.9 billion in spending, up 15 percent with 3 days surpassing $1 billion in spending. For the holiday season-to-date, six individual days have surpassed the billion dollar threshold, led by Cyber Monday at $1.25 billion.
 
Y Combinator Vs TechStars: Whose Companies Are Bringing In More Funding? Top
all graphs[Here's a look at how startups backed by Y Combinator or TechStars compare in terms of funding, based on the data available in CrunchBase. It's written by Edmar Ferreira, a data scientist and founder of a data analysis startup called EverWrite. He writes about making data work on makeandthink.com.] Y Combinator and TechStars are two of the first seed-stage venture funds, and they've each had some successful companies. But how can we analyze how they're doing so far? One way is acquisitions, but there's not always complete information about who sold or for how much (and anyway, most of them haven't sold yet). Another metric would be valuations -- are companies becoming more valuable over time? -- but we also don't have good access to that. What we can do is look at the amount of money raised by the companies that participated in these programs. This is not a perfect metric of success, but it's an interesting enough signal because most of these companies need funding during their early stages as they build their products and find markets. If they are making enough progress, investors will put in more money.
 
(Founder Stories) Turntable.fm's Billy Chasen On Closing Stickybits: "None Of Us Used The App" Top
Founder Stories TurntableWhen we first invited Billy Chasen to join us on Founder Stories he was working hard to make his startup, Stickybits a success. Turns out it never took off. But like many founders, Chasen bounced back and found better luck elsewhere. In this case it's with Turntable.fm - a platform where people play DJ online and share music with others in virtual rooms. Having recently raised $7-million from investors that include Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital, we thought it would be interesting to catch-up with Chasen and hear how it all went down.
 
Google's 3 Top Executives Have 8 Private Jets Top
air googleA surprising piece of news was buried in an article this week. Friday, The Mercury News reported the three top executives at Google, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt, are offering to pay $33 million to finish the restoration of the historic airship hangar at Moffett Field. The giant structure, built in the 1930s and called Hangar One, sits a few miles from the Googleplex and it's well known the Google executives have special permission from NASA to park their jets at Moffett.
 
Stop Telling Women To Do Startups Top
penelope-trunkWe need to get more guys who are running tech startups instead decide to be stay-at-home dads. What do you think of that? Stupid, right? That's what it sounds like when anyone suggests that we need to get more women doing startups. If you are worried that women don't feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it's easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.
 
How Can Local Businesses Avoid The Horror And Structure More Effective Daily Deals? Top
hotdeals2Couponing has been around forever, but the popularity of digital offers, daily deals, and group buying is fairly new. We've gone through the honeymoon period, watched the meteoric rise of Groupon, its overvaluation, IPO -- and thankfully, through it all, we've seen increasing scrutiny on the space, especially over just how profitable daily deals actually are for local businesses. The debate has raged over the daily deal model's clever repackaging of old ideas and just how valuable the Groupon model is as an advertising mechanism for local merchants. Rocky was probably a little overzealous in saying that Groupon is poised for collapse, but there is no doubt that there are holes in its business model, just as there is no doubt that there are upsides to the model as a whole, both as an advertising channel and a tool for customer acquisition and retention.
 
Backed By Tandem, UpOut Launches A 'Realtime Yelp' For Spontaneous Local Event Discovery Top
logo_lighttagThis summer, Tandem Entrepreneurs raised a $40 million fund to continue investing in its incubator and capital fund, both focused exclusively on startups building solutions for the mobile space. One of the four companies (which includes JungleApps, GimmieWorld, and Flit) funded in Tandem's most recent batch is coming out of private beta today to get young people off the couch and into the fray. UpOut, as its name implies, is an online event discovery service that wants to get you involved in fun activities that are happening right now, in realtime. Founded by two young Babson College entrepreneurs, Martin Shen and William King, UpOut is intending to do for local events what Yelp has done for the local restaurant market, showing what's nearby, what's inexpensive, and what people like you are recommending.
 
Louis CK Sells Latest Film, DRM-Free, For $5 Per Download Top
Screen Shot 2011-12-10 at 9.10.19 PMFollowing Radiohead into the wild world of micropayments, comedian Louis CK is offering his latest concert film, Live At The Beacon Theatre, as a DRM-free download or stream for $5. Once payment is tendered, downloaders can both stream and download the movie twice. Once those four chances are used up you have to pay again, although because the MP4 file is DRM-free there is nothing stopping you from watching again and again, projecting it on a building across the street, or making a tiny flip book of Louis CK excerpts. However, Louis does ask that you not "torrent" his film:
 
A Modest Proposal For Immigration: The $100,000 Green Card Top
green card lotteryPermanent residence in the USA is a valuable asset that is enjoyed by most of you reading this article. Many potential immigrants from around the world want to acquire that asset and become valuable members of American society alongside us. Why don't we let more of them join us? There are two common objections: they will drive down wages, or they will be a drain on tax-funded programs. Some existing immigration paths, like the H1B visa-to-green card route, are based on the idea that for some immigrants, the benefits will outweigh these potential costs. But the H1B path is a bureaucratic nightmare. Small startups don't even bother with it. And for the immigrant, the H1B path puts them in the awkward position of having their visa status tied to their job until their green card is approved. You think having to leave your health insurance plan when you lose your job is bad? Try having to leave the country.
 
Microsoft Ends Another Vertical Market Dalliance—This Time In Healthcare Top
7635.HealthTech_Logo_MAIN_WMS-Logo_v2_7653C9B6While Microsoft has been the most successful platform company in history, it periodically has flirted with vertical market-specific businesses with only mixed success. In virtually all cases, it ends up exiting the vertical business. At times, this has been with great financial success, like Expedia, for example. In other cases, not so much. The latest exit is in healthcare. Microsoft is folding its Health Solutions Group into a JV with GE (see release here). The overriding decision in each case was to ensure the core platform business wasn't threatened. Given the dynamics in healthcare, the threat to Microsoft's platform business in healthcare is greater than ever. The last major platform shift in healthcare was from host-based computing to client-server. When Microsoft entered healthcare, the market was clearly shifting to Unix-based client-server systems but it was able to redirect the shift towards Windows back-end systems. That platform dominance persists 15 years later.
 
Catching Up With IntoNow Before The Republican Debate (Video) Top
Social TV these days usually means a companion app on your iPad that lets you Tweet along with your friends and fellow fans while you are watching TV. These apps work best for live events (the one remaining time in the age of the DVR when a large mass of people actually watch an event at the same time). IntoNow, which was bought by Yahoo and launched its iPad app last month, is partnering with ABC News to provide live audience polling during the Republican debate tonight for people who "tag" the debate inside the app. If you are not familiar with IntoNow, Adam Cahan, the founder of IntoNow who still leads the product at Yahoo, came by our office in New York to give us a demo of the new iPad app. The video is above.
 
Double Hubble Bubble Trouble Top
hubble_bubbleOK, now I'm worried. Here's why: Lo these many years ago, in the long-gone spring of 1996, I set out to San Francisco to make my software fortune, armed with a freshly minted degree from Canada's finest technical university. The second of the interviews I'd arranged via email--itself a radical notion, then--consisted mostly of playing Doom with my potential employers, but during the little time devoted to talk, I asked them: "Do you think this whole Internet boom is getting a little overhyped?" The company's CEO looked shocked, and said: "No way. First, my grandparents in Florida have still never heard of the Internet. Second, when they do, that's when things are really going to boom." He leaned closer, with the wide, wild eyes of a true believer. "Because the Internet changes everything, for everyone." They didn't hire me. (I've never been good at first-person shooters.) Instead I wound up doing consulting work at the investment bank that led Netscape's IPO, and rode the subsequent boom several times around the world. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was a giddy crazy time a lot like now. Because, you see --
 
Get Your Nominations In Now For The 2011 Crunchies Awards Top
DaviesSymphonyHallThere are only a couple days left to nominate your favorites for this year's 2011 Crunchies Awards. Already, we've received over 150,000 nominations from the tech community, with hundreds more trickling in every couple hours. Coming this January 31st at 7:30pm PT, we will be hosting the 5th Annual Crunchies Awards with GigaOM and VentureBeat. The ceremony is taking place at the gorgeous and huge Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, with an incredible after party following the ceremony. We have some really big surprise announcements coming soon, all of which we will share with you in the coming weeks. Now is the time to nominate. Nominations close to the public this December 13th, at 11:59pm PT. That gives all of you only three more days to nominate who you believe is the most deserving. We have 20 categories this year, with topics ranging from: Best Social Application, VC of the Year, Best Time Sink, Best Mobile Application, CEO of the Year, Best New Startup of 2011, all the way to Best Overall Startup of 2011. Some winners from last year include: DailyBooth, Yuri Milner, Cityville, Google Mobile Maps for Android, Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, Quora, and Twitter who took Best Overall Startup for 2010. You can view the full list of winners from last year here.
 
Today Amazon Will Give You $15 To Use PriceCheck and Screw Local Retailers Top
Amazon PriceCheck AppToday, December 10th, Amazon is offering a very special deal you're going to love and your local brick-and-mortar retailer is going to hate. Use its PriceCheck mobile app and get 5% off your purchase, up to $5 at a time, as many as 3 times. Why the discounts to use PriceCheck? The app is designed to get you to visit local shops, try out a product, submit valuable pricing data to Amazon, leave without buying anything, and make your purchase on Amazon instead.
 
UFC's Dana White: "Twitter Is The Greatest Marketing Tool In The History Of The World" Top
I got to sit down and interview Dana White ahead of UFC 140. The event takes place on December 10th in Toronto, Canada and like every UFC event, heavily hyped via social media. Over the past 3 years, Dana White and the UFC have built a very strong social media presence. I wanted to speak to the president of the UFC himself and get some more detail on what he thinks of Twitter and other social media tools. Dana talks about how he got into Twitter, how he uses it to help his business, what are the pitfalls and benefits. He's a huge fan. "Twitter is the greatest invention in the history of marketing," he tells me. Watch the video.
 
TC Gadgets Webcast: Jakarta Blues Top
This week HP webOS open-sourcing, RIM's problems in Jakarta, and giving away a few Speck iPhone cases. Join us, won't you, in the TC Gadgets Webcast?
 

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