Thursday, March 8, 2012

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HP To Launch New Online Retail Experience At The End Of March, Code-Named "Atlas" Top
under-construction-sign-digital-600x500HP.com is a mess. It has been for years. But I just received word via an internal HP memo that the company plans on launching new U.S. Home & Home Office consumer store at the end of March. As the memo stats, this project, code-named "Atlas", will be "the foundation of a new HP.com experience with more visual content, more product information and better navigation." Anything would be better than Hewlett-Packard's current website. We're still trying to dig up screenshots. The leaked memo -- reprinted after the jump -- links employees to a special purchasing program site for a special price on a Folio 13. However, the link is to just a landing page and not a preview of its swanky new website that the company so desperately needs.
 
P2P Dropbox Competitor Space Monkey Wins Launch, Has Already Raised $750K Top
spacemonkeyStorage startup Space Monkey just took the prize for best new startup at this week's Launch conference in San Francisco. It's no surprise, since this is one of the companies that everyone I've spoken to here has raved about. The company is challenging cloud storage services like Dropbox — which seems to be doing pretty damn well, having raised money at a reported $4 billion valuation and also winning the best overall startup award at the most recent Crunchies. However, Space Monkey's Clint Gordon-Carrol and Alan Peacock (their business cards say "Product Guy" and "Captain Science", respectively) argue that the cloud approach has its flaws.
 
Politix Wants To Be The Center of Your Political Identity Top
photo (1)Online forum Topix has become increasingly focused on politics for the last couple of years, and today at the Launch conference, the site took the next step in that direction. Accompanied by a patriotic marching band, CEO Chris Tolles announced a new service called Politix. There's no shortage of political websites, but CEO Chris Tolles says there's "no place for your political profile online." Sure, you might read a political article on The Huffington Post and even leave a comment, but there's no centralized location for all that activity. And you might occasionally share those articles on your social network of choice, but "you don't want to be that guy on Facebook" who's constantly annoying his friends with political commentary.
 
Virtual Currency Is The Next Big Platform Top
coinsMy youth was spent jumping turtles, killing 16-bit Nazis, connecting kickflips with manuals and nube tubing. Haaaaadouken! Like most boys and young men during the '80s and early '90s, I loved video games. Our passion for games and our willingness to pay $49.99 to purchase the latest Zelda or Mortal Kombat fueled the industry's growth. For two decades, selling hard and soft copies of games proved to be a very lucrative business. However, this model is ultimately flawed because the revenue potential per player is capped. In 1998, a game studio by the name of Iron Realms Entertainment became the first to sell virtual goods in their games. A decade later everyone is building virtual economies into their games. Zynga, which recently went public and has a market value of around $10 billion, makes the majority of their revenue by selling items like virtual strawberries.
 
One Public Undercuts Facebook Marketing Industry With Free All-In-One Platform PageCentrex Top
One Public LogoIt used to cost a lot of money to license a solid Facebook marketing platform, but One Public thinks even small businesses should be able to afford these tools. So today with TechCrunch it launches PageCentrex, a free platform for self-serve management of Pages, ads, Insights, ecommerce, and social CRM from a single interface. For businesses with more money to spend, it offers an enterprise managed service with custom app development. This disruptive shift to free has been a long time coming.  It's not just deep pocketed brands getting doing Facebook marketing anymore. The long-tail of local business, SMBs, and fledgling brands have arrived.
 
Tribesports, The Social Network For Sports Nuts, Grabs $2.8M To Span The Globe Top
Screen shot 2012-03-08 at 4.42.04 PMTribesports, a young, London-based startup, is attacking perhaps the most rabid of all those interest-based subgroups: Sports enthusiasts. The startup launched last year with the goal of motivating sports buffs to connect online to improve in their sport of choice offline. To back up its beta launch, Tribesports raised $400K in June of last year. Today, the company is following up on its seed round with a $2.8 million series A round, led by a strategic investor as well as a group of international angels. The new financing brings the startup's total to just over $3 million.
 
The One Company Marc Andreessen Wishes He Invested In: Square Top
marc-andreessenBloomberg Television's Emily Chang sat down with investor Marc Andreessen today on Bloomberg West. When Chang asked Andreessen on whether he has any regrets about any of Andreessen Horowitz's investments or what companies he wished he invested in, his one answer was mobile payments company Square. He tells Chang in the video clip (towards the end): "The biggest one that we're still kicking ourselves over is probably Square. I think Jack Dorsey is one of the most phenomenal founder-CEO's in the industry and we probably made a huge mistake on that one when he first came in. We overthought the deal and we probably just should have said Jack Dorsey, check. And write the check. That's probably the big one."
 
PayPal Set To Unveil Payments Platform For Small Businesses Top
paypalIn addition to partnering with large retailers, it looks like PayPal is going to be launching a set of payments offering for small businesses as well. We just received an invitation for an event PayPal is hosting next week, which will unveil what the payments company has in store for a solution for small businesses. We've heard that similar to PayPal's recently introduced in-store payments technology for big box retailers, the company is going to be launching a in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. It's unclear what this technology will look like, but we'll find out more next Thursday.
 
No Filter Required: Instagram Reportedly Raising $40M At $500M Valuation Top
instagramInstagram, the photo touch-up and sharing app, doesn't make a penny in revenue from consumers, but it's picking up users faster than you can click on a point-and-shoot camera, and the app is, well, just kind of great. Now, Instagram is poised to pick up another round of funding worth about $40 million, which will value the startup at $500 million, according to reports. According to the WSJ, which was the first to report that the company was raising a new round of financing, the new valuation is about 20 times what the company was worth a year ago when it raised $7 million from Benchmark Capital, Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Instagram itself has not confirmed the new financing.
 
Meet Reddit's New CEO: Facebook Alum / Quora Star Yishan 'Sparklepants' Wong Top
Screen shot 2012-03-08 at 2.52.08 PMThe front page of the Internet, also known as the social news community Reddit had seen its fair share of ups and downs over the years, but in September of last year, many in its community saw a silver lining when its owner, Conde Nast, spun it out as a standalone site, and recruited co-founder Alexis Ohanian to sit on its new board of directors. As it so happens, when Reddit became a (somewhat more) independent entity in September, it also launched a search for a CEO to lead the site to infinity and beyond. Today, Reddit is finally announcing the hiring of (what I believe) is its first CEO, Yishan Wong.
 
Yesterday's iPad Event Was Only Half The Story Top
header1Because of the way Apple structures their major announcements — iPad in the first quarter, WWDC and iPhone in the summer though perhaps with the iPhone, now it's fall — the iPad event is a little weird, because it's really only half an event. The first half is what happened yesterday — the unveiling of the new iPad. And the new stuff is mostly about hardware features. The Retina Display. The A5X. The new iSight. LTE. The Retina Display makes it purchase worthy alone, but the other specs Apple bragged about? Just specs. Moore's Law at play. Talking about them always seem somewhat embarrassing for Apple, a holdover from the days when they used to talk about megahertz and were trying to convince consumers that Pentium chips sucked. Even the software they showed is a little weird, conceptually. iPhoto certainly demoed impressively — but it's also available on the iPad 2 and certainly doesn't require you spending $500 on the new iPad. And if their release cycle is any indication, next year's new new iPad will be a spit and polish update, like the iPad 2 was with the iPad 1. But there's a second half to the event, and it's way more exciting than the first. It happens in June at San Francisco's Moscone Center.
 
The Heat Is On: Eye-Tracking Startup GazeHawk Founders Join Facebook; Product/Tech Looks For A Home Top
Screen shot 2012-03-08 at 22.39.46Yet another talent acquisition by Facebook: the social network is taking on the team behind GazeHawk, a two-year-old Y Combinator startup that uses a computer's webcam to track eye movements and then plot them on a heatmap. But unlike past occasions when Facebook has bought companies for the people and shut down the services they built up (one notable recent case being Gowalla), in this case the product and technology built up by the team is being left behind.
 
Tracky Raises $1M For Its "Open" Cloud Productivity & Collaboration Platform Top
Screen shot 2012-03-08 at 2.22.04 AMLas Vegas-based startup Tracky has spent the last year, heads-down, building a social collaboration platform that aims to bridge the gap between your personal and professional networks. Today, the startup is announcing that it has raised $1 million in seed funding from a few Canadian super angels, Vortaloptics, and family and friends. The startup will be debuting in private beta at SXSW, where it will be showing off a product that is part Dropbox, part BaseCamp, Wonderlist and Chater. In other words, Tracky is offering a platform that offers collaboration between groups, people and project discovery, secure online chat, group task management, and quick access to cloud-based documents.
 
With Over 1.5M Users, SavingStar Grabs $9M To Become The Groupon Of Groceries Top
screen-shot-2011-12-15-at-9-54-51-amDigital couponing startup SavingStar has been on a roll. The company launched officially in April of last year, backed by a $7 million Series B round from its existing investors, before adding Buddy Media Founder and CEO Michael Lazerow to its Board of Directors in June. In December, the startup crossed another milestone, announcing that it had surpassed 1 million active users in exactly 230 days. Today, the funding continues for SavingStar, as it announced that it has raised $9 million in Series C financing. The round was led by venture capital firm, DCM, with contributions from previous investors Flybridge Capital Partners, First Round Capital, IA Ventures, Michael Lazerow, and founder of Loyalty Management Group Sir Keith Mills. The funding brings the startup's total investment to just under $19 million.
 
Community Organizing Platform NationBuilder Raises $6.3M From Andreessen Horowitz; Causes Founder Joins As President Top
nbNationBuilder, a SaaS platform that allows political candidates and organizations to build a sleek website in minutes that supports fundraising efforts, a blog, volunteer outreach, payment processing, calendars and more; has raised $6.25 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Sean Parker, Chris Hughes, Dave Morin, Dustin Moskovitz, Scott Marlette, Pejman Nozad, Mike Volpi, SV Angel, Sam Lessin, Justin Shaffer, Kevin Colleran, Greg Waldorf, and Nihal Mehta participating in the round. NationBuilder also announced that Co-founder Joe Green has taken on the role of President and that Andreessen Horowitz's Ben Horowitz and Parker have joined its Board of Directors. NationBuilder allows non-techies to create a branded website, blog as well as import contact lists and send email blasts directly from the site. In terms of social media, NationBuilder allows you to integrate multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts and Tweet and Facebook Message from these accounts. Even the ability to send mass text messages is fully baked into the platform.
 
Keen On… Vidquik: Why Real-Time Online Video Is Now Ready For Prime-Time [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-08 at 11.41.52 AMTen years ago, I worked with TechCrunch co-founder Keith Teare on a real-time video conferencing startup called Santa Cruz Networks. Like all the other real-time video startups back then, Santa Cruz Networks failed because the market wasn't ready for live online video communications. But ten years is equivalent to several centuries in web history, and today, real-time video communications is not only becoming increasingly ubiquitous, but might also be offering startup entrepreneurs tremendous new business opportunities.
 
ThredUP Shuts Down Kids Clothes Swapping Service In Favor Of Online Consignment Top
thredup logoThe online kids clothing exchange thredUP is shutting down its clothes swapping service. But wait! Don't panic, moms! (And dads, too, if you're all 50/50 about the child-rearing duties. Haven't met one of those yet, but I hear they exist). The good news is that thredUP itself is not shutting down, it's just focusing on the more successful area of its business: its newly launched kids consignment platform.
 
StartupBus to SXSW Day Two: Indio to Las Cruces [TCTV] Top
StartupBus2The journey to SXSW continues. Yesterday, we watched as a busload of entrepreneurs began a multi-city roadtrip to the South by Southwest Interactive conference where they will debut the startups they form on this four-day excursion. The Startup Bus left its San Francisco/Silicon Valley base at 6 am on Tuesday, heading south as the entrepreneurs got to know each other. On Day 2 of the trip, the teams are hard at work on their products. Ideas brewing as the bus rolls along include: Cerealize, a service that lets you create and customize your own healthy cereals and boxes, Expensiev, a receipt-management system that brings paper receipts into the cloud, and Jeli.co, a location-based plotting tool for storytelling within communities.
 
Sonalight Lets Android Users Text While Driving Without Touching A Phone Top
sonalightAndroid users finally have a way to show up their iPhone-toting, Siri-using counterparts. With Sonalight Text by Voice, a new Y Combinator-backed startup, you can perform entirely hands-free texting. And by hands-free, I mean you don't have to push a button, tap the screen, or perform any other actions that would require you to take your hands off the wheel. Yes, that's right - Sonalight is perfect for texting while driving.
 
Pinterest Now Generates More Referral Traffic Than Twitter: Study Top
pinterest-logo6This is big. A new study by online sharing tool Shareaholic has found that Pinterest now drives more referral traffic than Twitter. Again, when it comes to referral traffic, Pinterest > Twitter. The data is based on analytics from 200,000 publishers which reach approximately 270 million unique visitors a month.
 

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