Monday, January 23, 2012

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Baseline, Accel Put $15M In Online Privacy Certification Company TRUSTe Top
trustOnline privacy certification company TRUSTe has raised $15 million in Series C funding led by Baseline Ventures with existing investors Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Jafco Ventures participating. This brings TRUSTe's total funding to $37 million. TRUSTe certifies that companies are meeting online privacy standards for consumers. Websites which are certified by the company bear a "trustmark," indicating that the site is secure. TRUSTe says more than 82 percent of consumers who recognize TRUSTe's privacy seal use it to decide how and when to disclose personal information. TRUSTe was actually a not-for-profit venture until 2008 when the company changed its business model.
 
Fantasy Shopper Confirms Its Hottness With $3.3m First Money From Accel And NEA Top
logo (1)Fantasy Shopper is a social shopping game where players discover and share the latest fashion from real-world online and offline retailers. It's gained a lot of traction since it's launch last October, especially amongst women and we've heard on the grapevine that it was piquing the interest of investors for some months since emerging from the European Seed accelerator HackFWD. Today that intense interest has been confirmed with a first round of funding led by top tier venture firms Accel Partners and NEA (one of the key investors in Groupon) to enable it to build out engineering and expand into new cities other than London. With NEA co-leading the investment, clearly there is a big opportunity to scale in US cities and elsewhere. The investment is based on a convertible note not equity, which is standard practise when investors want in fast and the round is hotly contested.
 
Mykonos Helps Companies Battle Hackers, Raises $4 Million Top
mykonosMykonos (the security software company, not the lovely Greek island) has secured $4 million in a Series A funding round led by previous backer Tom Golisano, founder and chairman of Paychex.
 
Clearstream Promises to Bring Transparency to Video Ads Top
clearstreamA new startup called Clearstream says it's time to tame the "Wild West" of online video advertising. According to co-founder Brian Mandelbaum, the idea for the company came from his time at ad agencies including Razorfish and Saatchi & Saatchi. The problem, he says, is that there's no good way to distinguish between the high- and low-quality ad placements. When you buy placement on a video ad network, that ad could be running before a video on a premium site, but it could also be running in a banner on a random website.
 
Report: Olympus In Final Stages Of Negotiations To Partner With Sony Top
olympus logoIt would be a tie-up between two giants: Diamond Weekly, a major Japanese business journal, is reporting [JP] on its website today that scandal-hit Olympus is about to ink a capital and business alliance deal with Sony. Olympus has been under fire for months, after it was revealed the company has covered up large losses for the past 20 years. At some point, Olympus was in danger of getting de-listed at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, but it's now on a 3-year "probation" that requires the company to improve governance. According to Diamond, Olympus' top management has been consulting with various electronics companies but chose Sony as the best partner to help get it out of one the biggest corporate scandals in Japanese history.
 
DLD 2012 – Andrew Mason: Groupon Now Boasts 10,000 Employees, 70% Outside Of The US Top
groupGroupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason was interviewed by Techonomy's David Kirkpatrick on stage at the annual DLD confab in Munich, Germany. Below are my notes - Mason's responses are slightly paraphrased.
 
Cyfe Lets SMBs Monitor Their Business Metrics From One "Command Center" (In Realtime) Top
Screen shot 2012-01-23 at 12.55.43 AMSmall businesses spend up to 80 percent of their time manually collecting data and creating reports on the performance of their services, their customers' activity, or that of their competition. It's a pain in the ass, time consuming, and Deven Patel thinks he's found a simple solution to the problem. This week, Patel launched the open beta of Cyfe, what I like to think of as a "TweetDeck for business analytics", which offers business owners an affordable, web service through which they can easily monitor and share their vital business data and analytics from a single location, in realtime.
 
Hitachi And Mitsubishi Stop Domestic Production Of TVs, Optical Discs Top
Image (1) hitachi_wooo_plasma-620x465.jpg for post 108683Two big Japanese electronics companies, namely Hitachi and Mitsubishi, are to stop producing parts of their product portfolio domestically: Hitachi announced [JP] it will end production of plasma and LCD TVs in Japan, marketed under the Wooo brand, by September this year. The company owns a plant in Gifu prefecture in central Japan that churns out about 100,000 TVs per month (pictured: a Hitachi Wooo plasma from 2009). Citing price competition in the TV business as the main reason for the move, Hitachi said the plant will be used to produce projectors and chips instead.
 
Cash-Starved Ambient Industries Folds Location Browser App Flook Top
flookNearly two years ago, Ambient Industries raised capital to boost development and marketing of its iPhone app Flook, a location-based social discovery application. Alas, they never got the kind of traction needed to develop a business model solid enough to make money from the app. Yesterday, the people behind Flook sent an email to users announcing that the app will be retired "some time in the next 30 days" (after February 25th).
 
Maker Of Taxi-Ordering App myTaxi Raises €10 Million From Daimler, Lars Hinrichs Top
mytaxiIntelligent Apps, the Hamburg, Germany-based startup behind popular taxi ordering smartphone application myTaxi, has raised 10 million euros in growth funding from car2go, a subsidiary of Daimler, Germany's third largest carmaker. XING and Hackfwd founder Lars Hinrichs also participated in the financing round, as did previous backers T-Venture (Deutsche Telekom) and KfW Bankengruppe. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Daimler took a 15 percent stake in the mobile apps developer. Intelligent Apps claims myTaxi has a market share of no less than 80 percent in Europe, and is still growing fast. The app has been downloaded 800,000 times to date, and 7,000 taxi drivers have registered for the service so far. Read more at TechCrunch Europe.
 
Gadgets Week in Review: Picture Book Top
1528Here are some stories from the past week on TechCrunch Gadgets: What Happened To Kodak's Moment? Improvement On Age-Old Mathematical Principle Could Yield Improved Images, Video Sea Change: Apple Guts Textbook Publishing Marketing Genius: Two Twins Giggling As They Sell You Designer 3D Glasses What Is A 3D Printer Good For? Stop-Motion Cartoons Featuring Princesses, Of Course!
 
I'd Rather Watch Instagram Than A Movie Top
photoLast week a friend of mine asked me at brunch, innocently enough, "What's Instagram, and why do you use it?" I meekly offered the answer, "It's a way to share photos via the iPhone," and then, feeling like I hadn't done it enough justice, went on the defensive and was like, "Oh but it's really simple and that's what makes it emotional. Like in one click, I can view all these interwoven stories." It turns out he used Instagram himself, and just wanted to hear someone describe its appeal. The appeal of Instagram is, for lack of a better word. simple; the world is moving too damn fast and we don't want the cognitive load of figuring out what we're looking at -- we just want to see simple pretty things. This simplicity is what makes services like Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest a joy versus other entertainment offerings.
 
SOPA Spring Top
sopaspringIt's not so much that the world has changed as that the speed with which events evolve has telescoped. The rise of social analytics and realtime feedback loops means that business processes are now transformed on the fly by the velocity with which the impact of a product or idea or strategy is folded back into the process flow. Products become services, interactive streams of data and influence metadata where who thinks what about it when changes the service elastically. That explains why our leaders are having so much trouble with realtime. Their expertise is in the politics of yesterday, where all the PI used to live. What's happening? Look at the last election's data. Meanwhile this year's voters are getting Twitter push notifications with links to the most up-to-date attitude from a cloud-curated stream of instant influentials. Translated: the news is delivered on a whispernet by those we trust with follows and engage with @mentions.
 
RIM's New Playbook: The CEO Sneak Top
96027_Eagles_Giants_FootballIt was a big day for football fans, with both the AFC and NFC Championships taking place this afternoon and this evening. The games grab more than a few eyeballs every year -- last year's championships grabbed 54.8 million and 51.9 million viewers, respectively. While the numbers aren't out yet for today's games, the viewership is expected to be equally as enormous. That's why so many in the Twittersphere have been so quick to point out that, nestled quietly behind a hotly contested NFC Championship between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers, and an equally great game over in the AFC, was a fairly huge announcement for the maker of BlackBerry, Research In Motion. During Championship Sunday, RIM quietly released a statement saying that its co-CEOs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, are stepping down and will be replaced by current COO for products and sales, Thorsten Hein.
 
RIM Co-CEOs To Step Down; COO To Take The Reins Top
sadberryI suppose some might have seen this coming. In December, Research In Motion (RIM) released their third quarter earnings, which were yet another disappointment for the struggling maker of BlackBerry. RIM Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis announced subsequently that they would only draw yearly salaries of $1 to help combat the company's financial woes. Today, it seems the pressure has become too great, and a management shuffle is under way. The Globe has reported that the co-CEOs, after a year of pressure from investors and stockholders, have stepped down from the position. Company insider and current COO Thorsten Heins will be replacing them as the new chief executive.
 
Weight Watchers For Small Business: Silver Lining Helps You Set Financial Goals (And Actually Meet Them) Top
Screen shot 2012-01-22 at 5.08.20 PMOwning a small business is tough. Carissa Reiniger has been working in small business development for over seven years and says she's seen countless entrepreneurs and small business owners run into what she calls the "cash flow catch 22": If I had more money, I could make more time -- and vice versa. What's more, the large majority of startups and small businesses that fail, she believes, don't hit the deadpool because their ideas were terrible, but instead because their owners' health declined, or their spouses were fed up with them working 80 hours a week, or they didn't have the stamina or resources to push on. That's why Carissa founded Silver Lining -- to help small business owners make enough money so that they can keep doing what they love. To help jack up the success rates of SMBs, she and her team created "The Slap", or the Silver Lining Action PLan.
 
TCTV Debate: What SOPA & PIPA 2.0 Should Look Like Top
SOPA Debate Video 3-tc_upload.mp4On Friday The House withdrew the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) from being put to a vote and the Senate postponed voting on its version of the bill, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). As the debate continues over the best way to shield copyrighted material from being pirated, we invited David Sohn, General Counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology and Viacom's General Counsel, Michael Fricklas to discuss language that should be included in any future SOPA/PIPA legislation.
 
Six Lessons in Entrepreneurship Top
EntrepreneurBlogs1As much as we all strive to build sustainable and stand-alone companies, we're living in a period of massive transformation and thus, consolidation and acquisition. As a result, many entrepreneurs build their businesses with potential acquirers in mind, choosing to grow at any cost instead of actually building a sustainable business that is solvent and profitable. GRP VC Mark Suster (and occasional Techcrunch contributor) published an article on this theme recently. The very short version of the post is: "Most companies (98+%) in the world (even tech startups) should be very profit focused. Being profitable allows you degrees of freedom you don't have when you rely upon other people's money."
 
The Uphill Battle Of Social Event Sharing: A Post-Mortem for Plancast Top
plancast_penguin_running_200x225Nearly three years ago, I left my position at TechCrunch to start my own Internet business, with the idea of creating a web application that'd help people get together in real-life rather than simply helping them connect online as most social networking applications had done. Alas, our efforts began to stall after several months post-launch, and we were never able to scale beyond a small early adopter community and into critical, mainstream usage. While the initial launch and traction proved extremely exciting, it misled us into believing there was a larger market ready to adopt our product. This post-mortem is an attempt to describe the fundamental flaws in our product model and, in particular, the difficulties presented by events as a content type.
 
Weekend Watch Update Top
JLC-Spherotourbillon-watch-7For the third time in a row Tag Heuer has once again released the worlds most precise mechanical chronograph watch. The oddly named Mikrogirder 2000 watch measures time with 5/10,000th of a second precision (and flair). The best German luxury brand A. Lange & Sohne releases a watch that sincere watch connoisseurs will go ga-ga over. It is the new Lange 1 Tourbillon Perpetual Calendar timepiece.
 

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