The latest from TechCrunch
- Apple Reportedly Blocks Sony Reader App, May Foreshadow War With Amazon Kindle
- 33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups
- Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital
- Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work
- Yammer Swings Back at Jive with a Survey and Salesforce with a Video (TCTV)
- Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities
- Former eHarmony Head Greg Waldorf Joins Accel As CEO-In-Residence
- Bump Now Lets You Swap App Recommendations With A Tap
- Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP
- Exposed: Apple's Terrible Sin in China (TCTV)
- 4chan Founder Unleashes Canvas On The World
- 2RedBeans Is A JDate For Chinese-Americans
- Facebook Launches 'Startup Days': Monthly Hacker Events For Platform Developers
- Google Spent $5.2 Million On Lobbying In 2010; Up 29 Percent From 2009
- Startup America: A Campaign To Celebrate, Inspire And Accelerate Entrepreneurship
| Apple Reportedly Blocks Sony Reader App, May Foreshadow War With Amazon Kindle | Top |
| This evening the New York Times published an article titled Apple Moves to Tighten Control of App Store . An alternative title, should the report prove accurate, could be, Apple Underscores The Downsides Of Its Closed Platform . Really, things look like they are going to get nasty. According to the report, Apple blocked Sony’s e-reader application from the iPhone and mandated that it would need to sell content via In-App purchases: The company has told some applications developers, including Sony, that they can no longer sell content, like e-books, within their apps, or let customers have access to purchases they have made outside the App Store. Apple rejected Sony's iPhone application, which would have let people buy and read e-books bought from the Sony Reader Store. Apple told Sony that from now on, all in-app purchases would have to go through Apple, said Steve Haber, president of Sony's digital reading division. The implications here could be huge, particularly for Amazon. Amazon’s Kindle platform has proven to be very popular, and not just because of the millions of Kindle hardware devices that Amazon is selling. In addition to the dedicated e-reader, Amazon has developed applications for a slew of devices, including iPhone, iPad, Android, desktop computers, and more. And while the platform isn’t open in the same way that Google Books is, it’s still very convenient and far more flexible than Apple’s iBooks, which is only available on the iPhone and iPad. In fact, at this point there’s no reason to buy books through iBooks when you can just as easily download Amazon’s Kindle app from the App Store, which has access to a larger catalog of books, and lets you read those books on more devices. But instead of beating Amazon on price or features, it looks like Apple might just cut them off. Or force them to use in-app payments, which give Apple a 30% cut and would kill Amazon’s margins. Amazon has avoided using Apple’s in-app payments system by kicking users to a browser to complete their transaction, but according to the NYT report (see the bolded section above) it sounds like this will be banned. I’m sure Apple apologists will be quick to back their logic here. Of course they don’t want competitors selling premium content through channels that Apple doesn’t control — otherwise Amazon or Google will start selling movies and TV shows and music through their own media stores. Of course Apple wants its cut of all content that is sold on iOS devices. And then there’s the magazine publishers, who will surely cry foul if they have to run their purchases their Apple but the e-book vendors don’t. But the fact that Apple is apparently changing the rules so late in the game is unnerving. Sony, Amazon, and others have already built these applications and have developed their strategies under the impression that they would be able to sell their own content. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have gotten used to jumping between reading on their iPhone and Kindle device depending on if they’re sitting in their living room or on the subway. That’s the beauty of this one-platform-multiple-device approach. Perhaps Apple will grandfather existing applications (namely, Amazon’s Kindle app) in under the existing rules. But I can’t think of a time that’s happened on iOS. And Apple hasn’t been afraid of pulling the rug out from competitors before — Google Voice was rejected for arbitrary reasons in summer 2009 (it was accepted a few months ago), and who can forget Apple’s decision to block all apps developed using Adobe CS5 (which it later reversed course on). We’ve reached out to Apple for comment. CrunchBase Information Apple Sony Amazon Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| 33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups | Top |
| The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of 33needs , a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is Kiva meets Kickstarter . Social startups post their “needs” in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years. The startups seeking funds are for-profit ventures, as is 33needs. Some of the launch startups include Emergent Energy Group , which wants to bring renewable energy projects to different communities in the U.S., and HalfUnited , a new clothing company which feeds hungry children with part of its profits (see video below). 33needs itself takes a 5 percent cut of any money raised, and nothing if the goal is not met. Generally, thee social startups are trying to raise anywhere from $50,000 or more get their businesses off the ground. They all try to mix profits with creating social good, which increasingly also resonates as a marketing strategy to consumers who want to feel like they are making a difference in the world. Whether or not they actually are is a different matter, but the most enduring social startups will end up being those who create a measurable impact. The company was founded by Josh Tetrick, a social entrepreneur and former Fulbright Scholar who worked in Africa and for President Clinton. He doesn’t see 33needs as a replacement for angel or seed capital, but rather as a launching pad for ideas that may otherwise never have made it beyond a dinner conversation. “It’s a launching pad that builds fans, breeds a loyal base of people who’ll buy your stuff and use your product,” he argues. “There is so much pent up demand to invest in this stuff—not donate, but invest.” But using crowdfunding to help start companies, as opposed to microloans for projects (Kickstarter) or people (Kiva), sets a higher bar. These require more money than a simple project. One of the key learnings from Kickstarter, for instance, is that small projects can grow into full-blown startups, but they don’t have to (watch this interview with Kickstarter founder Perry Chen ). With 33needs it will be all or nothing. So the startups better make their pitches really good. CrunchBase Information 33needs Kickstarter Kiva Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital | Top |
| RentJuice , an online community that allows real estate agents and brokers to view rental data in real time is announcing its Series B round of $6.2 million in funding today, led by Highland Capital and esteemed Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder Tim Draper . While not consumer facing, RentJuice is still useful to consumers as it can provide a broker with up to the minute data on whether a given property is available, thus preventing inaccuracies. It gives brokers “one-click syndication” or the ability to automatically post properties to consumer real estate sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow. RentJuice also offers premium accounts where users can upgrade to features that automate administrative work like lead gen, advertising and paperwork. RentJuice attempts to disrupt the days it usually takes for landlords to complete paperwork and manually fax over hotsheets to agents and is focused on speed. Said CEO David Vivero , "With this capital, we can speed up development of our real-time rental platform and make it available to property managers and leasing agents all across the country." RentJuice will also be using the money to expand its staff, and is currently hiring. CrunchBase Information RentJuice Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work | Top |
| By now you’ve probably heard of Google Voice, a service that lets you take one phone number and configure it to ring all of your phones — work, mobile, home, whatever — with plenty of settings to manage your inbound and outbound calls. But what if you wanted the opposite: a service that lets you spawn a multitude of phone numbers to be used and discarded at your leisure? That’s where Vumber comes in. The service has actually been around for four years, but it was originally marketed exclusively toward people on dating sites. The use case is obvious: instead of handing out your real phone number to strangers, Vumber lets you spin up a new phone number, which you then redirect to your real phone. Then, when your date reveals that he hates animals and has lived in his mother’s basement for a decade, you can simply deactivate the number. Around 30-40% of the service still caters to online dating, but Vumber can be used for other things. Cofounder Cliff Wener says that some of Vumber’s biggest customers are advertising agencies that use it to assign different phone numbers to regional ad placements in print media, so that they can track the response rate (this isn’t unique to Vumber — other firms that cater exclusively to advertisers offer similar features). Beyond these two examples, Wener says it’s tough to track down the more niche use cases, because the whole service is anonymous, and you don’t have to tell Vumber what you’re using a phone number for. But it’s not hard to come up with some creative ideas. The service works with just about any phone, and it’s now bolstering its smartphone presence to streamline its interface. An application is already available for iOS, with an Android app coming next month and SMS support on the way as well. Vumber isn’t the only service that lets you set up a secondary phone number — Line2 , which we’ve covered before, does as well. But Line2 is really catering to users who just need one extra number, not a slew of them. Vumber costs $9.95 per month for your first number, with additional numbers available on a sliding scale starting at $3.95 (you can negotiate bulk discounts). Vumber raised $2.5 million in private capital before the company was acquired by video chat community Paltalk in November 2009 for an undisclosed sum. CrunchBase Information Vumber Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Yammer Swings Back at Jive with a Survey and Salesforce with a Video (TCTV) | Top |
| The social enterprise wars are heating up. Last week, Jive’s Tony Zingale came on to talk about a user survey that showed quantifiable value his customers were getting from Jive’s software and answer why Yammer and Salesforce get the bulk of the industry press. I invited Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Yammer’s David Sacks on the show if they wanted to rebut anything said. Sacks took me up on it, bringing his own user survey, a funny video aimed at today’s Chatter launch, and some fighting words. All are below. CrunchBase Information Yammer Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Instructure Launches To Root Blackboard Out Of Universities | Top |
| Mozy Founder Josh Coates launches Instructure today. He’s hoping to disrupt the entrenched player in the University LMS space, Blackboard, and take a big part of its $377 million or so in revenue. In 2007 EMC acquired Mozy , an online backup solution, for $76 million. Coates stayed for another year, then left. Since then he’s been helping Nepalese refugees integrate into American society, and he’s a big WWII buff. He purchased and restored a M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer. You can see the restoration process here (he keeps it in his garage). And here’s a video of his wife blowing the crap out of the side of a gravel pit. I like how Coates rolls. The guy has a fully operational M18 Hellcat Tank Destroyer in his garage. When he’s not blowing things up or helping other people, he teaches a venture startup course at Brigham Young University. And that’s where two of his students came up with the idea of making a better Blackboard. If you’ve been in college in the U.S. since around 2000, you’ll know all about Blackboard. Last year the company raised around $1.5 million, nearly half from Coates himself, and got to work. They now have 20 employees and working with twenty six educational institutions, some of which have left Blackboard entirely. Instructive is offering their Canvas LMS product as a hosted SaaS solution. Universities can also download an unsupported open source version of the product, or install a for-fee version with support. Here’s a commercial the team created for the product, based on the Apple “1984″ commercial. That flamethrower is also his. Watch to the very end to really see it in action. CrunchBase Information Instructure Mozy Blackboard Josh Coates Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Former eHarmony Head Greg Waldorf Joins Accel As CEO-In-Residence | Top |
| Accel Partners is announcing today the addition of former eHarmony head CEO Greg Waldorf as CEO-in-residence. Waldof spent eleven years at eHarmony and five as CEO before leaving the company a couple of weeks ago and landing at Accel as of today. While at eHarmony, Waldorf oversaw an online dating business that raked in more than $1 billion in revenue. Under his helm the company expanded into over 15 countries worldwide. Waldorf has previously worked with Accel on the board of real estate startup Trulia. Waldorf told us over the phone that he’s most excited about the companies with freemium business models given his background in paid services like dating. He’s also interested in spending some time in Accel’s New York and London offices as so many interesting things are happening internationally with regards to entreprenuership. As Accel CEO-in-residence, Waldorf will be succeeding LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and former Googler Singh Cassidy who went on to found Polyvore. When asked what his number one piece of advice for budding entrepreneurs is Waldorf said “pick your partners wisely.” Accel recently launched its New York branch, joining its offices in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Bangalore, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. The VC firm has has also had some recent notable exits, including that of Diapers.com to Amazon for $540 Million , Admob to Google for $750 Million and Playfish to Electronic Arts for $300 million. Image via Wikipedia CrunchBase Information Greg Waldorf Accel Partners Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Bump Now Lets You Swap App Recommendations With A Tap | Top |
| You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee’s background choir? You get the idea. Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it’s the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted. Bump has just launched a new version of its iPhone application that makes it easy to share apps with your friends. Fire up the new feature, and you’ll be shown a list of apps that have been installed on your phone (more on that in a moment). Tap the ones you want to recommend to your friend, Bump your phone with theirs, and they’ll immediately receive a list of your recommendations along with links to the App Store for each. Now, Bump isn’t the first application that lets you get a list of your iPhone applications. We’ve seen others like Chomp and Appolicious , which let you share app recommendations with friends and can also suggest applications based on your previous ratings. Update : Appsfire allows you to detect the applications on your phone and share them over the air. The difference, says Bump co-founder David Lieb, is that the app exchange using Bump is more personal. You aren’t posting your recommendations to followers on Facebook, or through the application’s internal social network — you’re tapping your phone together with a friend and swapping recommendations immediately (assuming they have Bump too). Now, Apple doesn’t actually let developers do this through a native API — every service that generates a list of your installed apps has to find a workaround. Lieb believes that Bump’s is generally better than the competition’s, and while he wouldn’t get into details on how it works, he says it involves looking at the list of applications that are currently running on the phone. The only catch: apps that you don’t run frequently won’t show up. Of course, if you’re recommending an application to your friend, then it probably isn’t sitting dormant on your phone. Bump isn’t just available for the iPhone — it has a strong Android presence as well. Lieb says that the Android version already supports basic app sharing, and it’s currently working on an overhaul due out later this month. This new version is going to allow users on iPhone to recommend apps for Android and vice versa (assuming, of course, that the same application is available for both operating systems). CrunchBase Information Bump Technologies Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP | Top |
| We’re hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group’s DSL service, Egypt’s last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile, is being shut down, meaning the nation will lose nearly all the remaining high-speed links to the outside world. According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, “noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors.” The ISP’s website itself is offline. @ioerror Jacob Appelbaum It looks like our last terrestrial hope has been shut down; my connections to systems on Noor are all down. #egypt #jan25 about 9 hours ago via web Retweet Reply Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian confirms that the traffic from Noor has trickled to a halt and the last two ISPs are offline, “Effective Measure was recording active traffic from Noor coming in the hour of 11pm last night up until midnight Egypt time but from 12am onwards, we have no active sessions from Noor IP addresses and no data has appeared in the logs.” Julian also points out these connectivity blackouts happened around same time as the last batch and posits that this is a well organized effort. Dial-up is presumably still working as Google and Twitter have just launched a speak-to-tweet service at http://twitter.com/speak2tweet . Update: Internet Monitoring service Rensys is confirming the Noor shut down. Applebaum has tweeted out this graph of the current set of IPv6 addresses online in Egypt. Noor is not one of them. | |
| Exposed: Apple's Terrible Sin in China (TCTV) | Top |
| Last I night I had the good fortune to see Mike Daisey’s highly acclaimed show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. It's both an entertaining and acutely moving performance that anyone who owns an Apple product has a moral duty to see. Daisey is not only a brilliant monologist in the tradition of Michael Moore and Spalding Gray, but he's also a crusading journalist who has exposed the inhumane working conditions of the workers at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China. Daisey went to Shenzhen and stood outside the monstrous Foxconn factory and interviewed its workers – some as young as 12 years old – about the inhumane working conditions there. This is what he found… This is the first of a two-part interview in the Keen On… series. Tomorrow, look for Part Two: Why Journalists Aren’t Reporting the Real Story About Apple and Foxconn. Why Mike Daisey is no longer an Apple fanboy Why Apple is committing a great sin against humanity CrunchBase Information Mike Daisey Information provided by CrunchBase Photo courtesy of kevinberne.com | |
| 4chan Founder Unleashes Canvas On The World | Top |
| Canvas launches today for 4,000 or so lucky souls. Seven year old 4chan , created by now-23 year old Christopher Poole , continues to delight and enrage the Internet. Major Internet memes were either created or spread on 4chan, as were more denial of service attacks than we can count. Twelve million or so people a month visit the site, and at any given moment there are 60,000 – 70,000 people on 4chan. 4chan’s success, says Poole, is based on three things. Real time collaboration as visitors riff back and forth about posted items, often pictures. A true shared experience as an item pops up on 4chan and then eventually falls off the board (there are no archives). And fluid identity – to add content on 4Chan all you have to do is write something, upload a file and complete a captcha. There are no user accounts. But 4chan isn’t Poole’s ultimate goal. He’s taken what works there, changed other things, and created something wholly new – Canvas . We’ve known about the startup since early last year when news leaked out about a small funding round with top tier investors. but until now very few people have been able to actually see the site. The team of four – including Poole – have been hard at work and keeping quiet. Today, though, a few thousand people who requested beta invitations over the last several months will get access to the site. More people will be added in batches over time, and everyone who originally requested an account will eventually be given an invite to bring in a friend. So what’s Canvas? Like 4chan it’s a place for people to post content and start a discussion. It has distinct similarities to 4chan – although content is archived, and people create accounts. But users stay totally anonymous. Their profile page is nothing more than a gathering of the various content they’ve added to the site. Canvas is starting just with images. Like Dailybooth users upload a picture and a discussion starts. Dailybooth , though is mostly about people uploading pictures of themselves. Lots and lots and lots of pictures of themselves. On Canvas, there’s a lot of photoshopping going on, and some of it is highly entertaining. Take the most popular discussion right now, showing a picture of a very chubby baby. Lots and lots of photoshopped variations have been added. More casual viewers can add their two cents by dragging and dropping visual icons – smiley faces, LOL, WTF, etc, to the content. This creates an easy way to gather a lot of metadata about an image, and help push it up or down on the popular list. Poole says they’ll soon add other types of content as well – video, audio, rich text. “This is just the kernel of the long term vision, Canvas is all about collaboration” he says. “Canvas is all about discovery, sharing and play.” Canvas is a separate entity from 4chan, with no connection other than Poole. But my guess is more than a few of the 4chan crowd may head over to Canvas to take a gander. CrunchBase Information Canvas Networks 4chan Christopher Poole Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| 2RedBeans Is A JDate For Chinese-Americans | Top |
| The success of JDate, an online dating service aimed towards matching Jewish singles, has proven dating sites for niche religious or cultural groups can actually work. Today, 2RedBeans , a graduate of the Founder Institute , has launched a dating site exclusively focused on matching Chinese-Americans. The site has a slightly different twist from most dating sites—2RedBeans tries to match singles in accordance with Chinese cultural values. For example, the site's matchmaking algorithm places special emphasis on unique characteristics that are possibly relevant to the Chinese; such as date of immigration, and highest level of education. 2RedBeans, which is currently free for users, also includes live chat functionality that will suggest chat topics based on the singles’ common interests. A "Secret Admiring" functionality allows a shy user can to anonymously "secretly admire" another single. That ‘Admired’ user will then be notified that they have a secret admirer, and will be presented with a lineup of different suitors. If they choose the person who secretly admired them, the two will then be connected and informed of the match. And apparently 2RedBeans is already having success matching Chinese-Americans. In the past two months in beta, the site already has close to 1000 users and has successfully matched over 100 Chinese-American couples. Of course, Chinese singles who are interested in meeting other Chinese singles can also limit their matches to certain cultures and religions on sites like Match.com. CrunchBase Information 2RedBeans Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Facebook Launches 'Startup Days': Monthly Hacker Events For Platform Developers | Top |
| As part of the launch of Startup America, a national campaign to “celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship in the U.S.”; Facebook has announced a new initiative called ‘Startup Days.’ Facebook will hold 12 monthly Startup Days in 2011 to “provide early-stage companies with engineering and design support on the Facebook Platform.” These meetings, which will be held around the country, will provide entrepreneurs with resources to build social applications. Facebook has also announced it will continue its efforts to stay active in open source communities. Startup Days builds on Facebook’s previous initiatives to help connect entrepreneurs with the Facebook platform including 170 Developer Garages hosted globally and the social network’s joint seed fund and incubator fbFund. And Facebook has also launched customized programs for Y Combinator companies as well as for Kleiner Perkins’ sFund. For Facebook, the benefit of holding these hacker sessions are two-fold. Initiatives like ‘Startup Days’ help contribute the greater good of the entrepreneur community by giving founders and developers access to inside resources and APIs. And these events also help continue to grow the ecosystem around the Facebook platform (though the social network doesn’t seem to need to much help in that department). CrunchBase Information Facebook Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Google Spent $5.2 Million On Lobbying In 2010; Up 29 Percent From 2009 | Top |
| Google’s Q4 lobbying spend is in; and the search giant continues to spend more money on influencing policy and lawmakers than in previous years. In the fourth quarter of 2010, Google spent $1.24 million on lobbying, which is up from $1.12 million in the same quarter in 2010. In total, Google spent $5.16 million on lobbying efforts in 2010, which is up from $4 million in 2009. You can find the reports from the U.S. Senate's lobbying database here. For Google, this quarter's lobbying efforts were slightly higher than Q3′s spending ( $1.2 million ) but lower than Q2′s lobbying bill ( $1.34 million ), and Q1′s spend ( $1.38 million ). In the fourth quarter of 2010, Google’s lobbying strategy for this quarter focused on online advertising regulation including privacy and competition issues, patent reform, cyber security and online privacy, renewable energy, freedom of expression and censorship, tax reform, free trade, Congressional Internet service usage rules and broadband access. Google continues to put its lobbying resources towards "openness and competition in the online services market," which probably directly relates to the search giant’s $700 million acquisition of travel software company ITA. The deal is apparently being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department, and Google is reportedly trying to negotiate with the DOJ on the terms of the agreement so that the acquisition isn’t completely blocked. The filing also indicated that Alan Davidson , which Google picked to help lead its lobbying efforts in 2005, will no longer be “expected” to act as a lobbyist for the company. But he hasn’t left Google; Davidson was actually promoted to Director of Public Policy for the Americas, overseeing policy teams in the U.S., Canada, and Latin America. Google director of public policy Pablo Chavez has taken on the role of lead U.S. lobbyist. Facebook, which has steadily ramping up its lobbying efforts in 2010, spent the most amount of money out of the eight quarters of filings, in the fourth quarter of 2010. The social network spent $130,000 in the quarter (up from $38,117 in the fourth quarter of 2009). Policy areas of focus for Facebook include global regulation of software companies and restrictions on internet access by foreign governments; internet privacy regulations, cyber security, and FCC regulations on net neutrality. In total, Facebook spent $351,390 on lobbying in 2010. Photo credit/ Flickr/Johanohrling CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Startup America: A Campaign To Celebrate, Inspire And Accelerate Entrepreneurship | Top |
| Note from the editor: This is a guest post from Aneesh Chopra , United States Chief Technology Officer. During last week's State of the Union address, President Obama challenged the Nation to out-educate, out-innovate, and out-build our competition to win the future. A critical ingredient in this endeavor is the creative spirit of the American entrepreneur that featured prominently in the President's Strategy for American Innovation – a framework for long-term economic growth and sustainable job creation. Today, President Obama celebrated the launch of Startup America , a national (public/private) campaign to celebrate, inspire, and accelerate high-growth entrepreneurship across all corners of the country, and the formation of the Startup America Partnership to catalyze private support for entrepreneurial ecosystems. Steve Case , co-founder of AOL and Chairman of the Case Foundation , will chair the Partnership, and Carl Schramm , President and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation will be a founding board member. This endeavor will tap into the expertise of the country's most innovative entrepreneurs, corporations, universities, foundations, and other leaders and institutions, working in concert with a wide range of Federal agencies to dramatically increase the prevalence and success of America's entrepreneurs. To kick-start the campaign, the Obama Administration announced 27 public and private commitments organized across five key goals: 1. Expand access to capital for high-growth startups. The Small Business Administration (SBA) will commit $2 billion as a match to private sector investment over the next five years in promising high-growth companies. Using existing authority, with no new cost to taxpayers, and through the operating infrastructure of the Small Business Investment Company (SBIC) program, SBA-guaranteed bonds will match private capital raised by these privately-owned and managed investment funds and will focus on growth companies in underserved communities and those in the so-called "valley of death" in the innovation lifecycle. In March, Secretary Geithner will convene a summit on access to capital for small and entrepreneurial businesses with participation from entrepreneurs, investors, and policy makers. Stay tuned. 2. Expand entrepreneurship education and mentorship programs. The indefatigable Brad Feld and his TechStars colleagues will scale the mentorship-driven startup accelerator model to 15 independently owned and operated regional organizations. Over the next three years, the TechStars Network will ensure that 5,000 successful and experienced entrepreneurs and investors will mentor and support 6,000 promising young entrepreneurs, increasing their success rate tenfold and creating 25,000 new jobs by 2015. Several organizations, public and private, will focus on boosting the number of entrepreneurs among our nation's veterans, women, and students. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) will establish two integrated business accelerators – one web-based and the other physically located in Waukesha, WI. A coalition of foundation and corporate partners will enable Astia to inspire a new generation of women entrepreneurs. And the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, recent guests at the White House, will scale its highly successful educational programs targeting at-risk high school students both physically (new communities and projects) and virtually (better online resources). 3. Strengthen federally-funded R&D commercialization. The Deshpande Foundation will join with The Idea Village and Tulane University to enhance the innovation ecosystem of New Orleans. Learning from its successful programs at MIT and the recently launched "innovation sandbox" in the Merrimack Valley, where I had the pleasure of visiting , this endeavor will foster large-scale entrepreneurship, building on the skills and talents of the local community, including local business, higher education, and non-profits. Our Nation's research agencies are actively engaged on this topic. Building on the success of last year's inaugural i6 Challenge , the Economic Development Administration will launch the $12M i6 Green Challenge in collaboration with research agencies focused on proof-of-concept centers that accelerate technology commercialization, regional economic development, and environmental sustainability. 4. Identify and remove unnecessary barriers to high-growth startups. My colleague in the Office of Management and Budget, Cass Sunstein, is leading the President's regulatory review initiative . An important component is the ability to take into consideration the impact of rule-making on small businesses and offer flexibility when appropriate . To hear from entrepreneurs directly, the Administration will launch online suggestion tools and visit innovation centers like Silicon Valley and North Carolina's Research Triangle Park to identify suggestions on how to streamline or eliminate the biggest barriers to startup growth. Please drop by our panel at South by Southwest in Austin, TX and stay tuned for a visit to a city near you. The Department of Health and Human Services will scale a more targeted effort, "DC-to-VC," to engage venture capitalists, innovators, and entrepreneurs who are increasingly focused on how to capitalize on reforms that promote health IT adoption, reform payment incentives to reward value, not volume, and liberate an unprecedented amount of health information. Renowned healthcare venture capitalist Bryan Roberts, of Venrock, recently commented on this opportunity as did a number of investors at the recent JP Morgan healthcare conference. 5. Expand collaborations between large companies and startups. Last year, Intel launched the Invest in America Alliance to bring together companies to expand investment in American startups. This year, to advance the goals of Startup America, Intel Capital will commit $200M of new investment in U.S. companies. IBM will invest $150 million in 2011 to fund programs that promote entrepreneurs and new business opportunities in the United States. And fresh from his performance on Saturday Night Live , Mark Zuckerberg and his six-year old startup, Facebook , will launch Startup Days , a new series of 12 to 15 events around the country designed to provide entrepreneurs with access to expertise, resources, and engineers to help accelerate their businesses. This is just the beginning. President Obama has challenged us with a bold vision to grow our economy through innovation and entrepreneurship. Thanks to today's public/private collaboration, we are better organized to give every American a chance to win the future. CrunchBase Information ANEESH P. CHOPRA Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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