Tuesday, April 3, 2012

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Aframe Goes After Avid With A Fresh $7 Million And A Very Big Cloud Top
wpe7_concordPop quiz! How much is spent on making Television shows in the US annually? It's $300 billion or there-abouts. That's a lot of video. Petabytes of data and more. Next question! How are all those shows edited and produced? Well, it's almost all put though big-ass editing suites and in-office servers from the likes of Avid. Lastly, how many tech startups have gone after this TV market? No, I'm not taking about Brightcove and your little video podcast. I mean one that goes after Avid and that TV industry. Answer: None. Why? It's just very, very tough. But now one has. Aframe, the SaaS/cloud video production platform which has been bubbling under in Europe since 2010, has today raised a new $7 million Series A round of funding led by Octopus Investments and Eden Ventures, with participation by existing investor, Northstar Ventures. This is a large Series A in European terms, but one which also sees Aframe launching into North America with operations in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. Yes, folks, these guys are taking on the television production world with all guns blazing, already working with companies such as the BBC and MTV.
 
Can Two Young Entrepreneurs Disrupt A Market And Solve The High Cost Of Hearing? Top
Screen shot 2012-04-02 at 6.12.01 AMIt's not an unfamiliar story: There's a niche market, which despite its relatively large size, goes unnoticed by most entrepreneurs and investors, because, simply put, it's not sexy. For this and countless other reasons, as time goes by, legacy models and hardware, fragmentation, and high prices prevail. In short, it begs for new blood, new ideas, and a fresh perspective. The same can be said for countless industries, but it's especially true for many of the markets within the bloated, backwards beast we know as the health industry. Case in point: Hearing aids. Of the 27 million Americans who qualify for a hearing device, 75 percent choose not to purchase one -- only one in seven Americans over 50 years old who need a hearing aid actually wear one. The problem is a sizable one, so former Stanford University classmates Sam Tanzer and Ross Porter decided to do something about it. In early 2011, they founded a startup called Embrace Hearing to apply some entrepreneurial pressure to the situation.
 
Mobile Social Gaming Company Dragonplay Raises $14M From Accel To Expand To iOS Top
DragonplayDragonplay, a free-to-play social games developer for Android and Facebook, has raised $14 million Series A funding from Accel Partners, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital. The Israeli company was founded in 2010 by Sharon Tal. Dragonplay specializes in multi-platform social game experiences in the cards, casino and board game category and is best known for its Android app Live Holdem Poker Pro. The studio's games are mainly free-to-play and use in-app purchases of virtual good for monetization. Live Holdem Poker Pro is frequently the top ranked application on Android's Google Play, and has over 12 million installs with more than 2 million monthly active players.
 
Online Community For Small Businesses Manta Raises $44M From Norwest Venture Partners Top
mantaManta, an online community dedicated entirely to small business, has raised $44 million in funding from Norwest Venture Partners. This brings the company's total funding to $61 million. With this investment NVP's Jon Kossow and David Su have joined Manta's board of directors, which includes previous investors Athenian Venture Partners and Reservoir Venture Partners. Manta is an online community meets social network for small business owners. The network aims to help these businesses easily gain an online presence, increased visibility with customers and prospects and ultimately increase sales. Owners can create, manage and share an online profile for their business; promote their companies, products and services; as well as build and engage with other businesses on the platform. The company aims to provide these services for businesses who have less than $5,000 in marketing spend.
 
How Does Y Combinator Scale Y Combinator? Top
Y_Combinator-logo-USETHISThe startups that presented at Y Combinator's Demo Day last week were remarkable in their own right, but perhaps the most striking thing was the sheer number of them. With 66 companies and 180 founders in this season's batch, the auditorium at Mountain View's Computer History Museum was practically bursting with angel investors and reps from every notable venture firm last week. And that was just the latest class. Since 2005, Y Combinator has since spawned more than a dozen batches of startups including Dropbox and Airbnb. The last two classes alone have created more than 120 companies. So it raises the question of how Y Combinator has been able to grow in size while sustaining both the quality of startups it churns out and the value it provides for founders. Essentially, how do you scale a company that creates companies?
 
BrightEdge: Here's How To Make Paid And Organic Search Work Together Top
brightedge case studyIf your company shows up in both the organic and paid search results of a given search term, is that a good thing? Or a waste of money? That's something that Google itself has been researching, and today, SEO service BrightEdge took a closer look at one advertiser's approach for balancing search strategies. Specifically, it released a case study about how hotel marketing agency HeBS Digital used integrated tools from both BrightEdge and Adobe to manage organic and paid search results for Loews Hotels. The strategy supposedly paid off in a 63 percent increase in revenue from online room bookings and 44 percent ROI increase on targeted keywords.
 
Roomorama And Lofty Merge Online Rental Sites, Take $2.1M Seed Round From ProFounders, Lerer Media Top
RoomoramaAs a wave of new hopefuls enter the online travel market using social media elements to stand out from the pack, two sites that focus on vacation rental accommodation, Roomorama and Lofty, are merging to scale up, and they're picking up a $2.1 million seed round to help them along the way. The list of new investors in Roomorama, as the merged company will be called, include names that are already connected to the online travel market, including Jose Marin (investor in Russian travel site HipWay and hotel booking site GuestMob); PROfounders Capital, Lerer Media Ventures, and Thrive Capital Partners.
 
First Round Capital Brings On Scribd's Jack Leidlein As Head Of Talent Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 4.54.26 PMIncreasingly VC firms are functioning as one-stop-shops for all your starting up needs; Some have dubbed this the Andreessen-ification of venture, where the definition of investment becomes more about resources beyond just cash, as money is easier to come by for startups than connections and experience. Like A16Z, Greylock and Kleiner Perkins, First Round Capital is hitching its horse to this trend, bringing on Scribd's Head of Business Operations and Recruiting Jack Leidlein as its new Head of Talent.
 
Keen On… Clay Christensen: How To Escape The Innovator's Dilemma [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 12.22.51 PMWhy do so many great companies fail? Professor Clay Christensen of the Harvard Business School argued they fail because of something he called The Innovator's Dilemma - a term he popularized to describe the way in which smart companies become prisoners of their own innovation. So is it possible to escape the innovator's dilemma? I had the honor of interviewing Clay at The Economist's Innovation event in Berkeley last week where the great man talked to me about how Google might escape the innovator's dilemma, why he worries about Apple's future, how to effectively innovate in education and healthcare and why most business school professors get the economy so wrong.
 
Two Months Removed From AddressGate, Path Starts Hashing, Anonymizing Data Top
Screen shot 2012-04-02 at 4.31.24 PMBack in early February, Path met with some serious backlash when Arun Thampi revealed that the social app was uploading address book data without explicit permission from its users. Path responded by taking Mike Arrington's advice, deleting the entire collection of user-uploaded contact information from its servers, along with an app update which added an opt-in feature to prompt users for permission before using its data. Today, Path is re-upping its commitment to showing users that it takes privacy seriously, announcing via blog post the release of Path 2.1.1 that the latest version enhances security by "hashing user data so that it is anonymized." According to the post, this includes last names, phone numbers, email address, Twitter handles, and Facebook IDs -- all of which will be anonymized.
 
1DollarScan Improves Its Book Digitization Service With Fine Tune and Dropbox Top
Fine Tune - iphone1DollarScan — the service that offers to digitize books and documents for as little as, yes, $1 — is now promising an improved experience through a service called Fine Tune. The company is a subsidiary of Bookscan Japan, and it launched last August with the goal of bringing the Bookscan service to the U.S. market. Users send their books, documents, photos, and other printed material to the 1DollarScan office, which then handles the scan process. For a price of $1 per "set" (for books, one set means 100 pages; for documents, it's 10), you get a PDF that you can read on your smartphone or tablet. Don't send any physical copies that you're particularly attached to, however, because books will have their spines removed for scanning, and all of the printed materials will be recycled two weeks after the scan.
 
Google Buys TxVia, Banks On Better Payment Technology (And 100M Customers) For Google Wallet Top
Google WalletGoogle has had a few teething problems with its ambitious mobile payments service Google Wallet, but it is also putting some money down to get it on the right track. Today the company announced that it would buy TxVia, a mobile payments technology company, for an undisclosed amount. Osama Bedier, VP of Wallet and Payments at Google, says in a blog post that the acquisition will be used to "complement" the work already done on Google Wallet, Google's service that enables payments, discounts and loyalty points -- and the ability to make those transactions mobile using selected NFC handsets. The news comes at the same time that Google Wallet is losing some of its key people, including Rob von Behren, one of the founding engineers, who has now joined mobile payments startup Square.
 
Too Much Tape? Highlight Hunter Finds Your Best Clips, Cuts Video Editing By 80% Top
hh-50px-lockupThe increasing ubiquity of compact, portable video recording devices has given rise to a burgeoning set of amateur videographers. Whether filming a friend's aerial tricks in the half pipe, recording action-packed family road trips, or filming on-the-spot interviews, capturing hours of quality digital video has become a breeze thanks to Flip cams, GoPro and Countour sports cameras, digital camcorders, and more. The problem is that sifting through those hours of footage to find the gems is time-consuming and a pain in the ass. That's why Noah Spitzer-Williams and team founded Highlight Hunter, a free app for Mac and PC that aims to cut the hours you spend scanning footage down to minutes.
 
YouSendIt CEO Ivan Koon To Step Down As The Company Looks For New Funding Top
YouSendItWe've learned that Ivan Koon, the CEO of cloud collaboration company YouSendIt, will be stepping down from the company. We've confirmed this with YouSendIt. A replacement has not been named, and Koon, who has been at YouSendIt for six years, will be leaving the company. For background, YouSendIt was one of the pioneers of file sharing, offering a service that mainly appealed to behind-the-firewall customers who were unable to send large files via email due to Microsoft Exchange limitations. The company has since expanded to file-sharing across a number of platforms, including mobile and desktop. YouSendIt has 28 million registered users worldwide.
 
Arizona Law Amendment Would Criminalize "Lewd Or Profane" Language On The Internet Top
lawArizona's legislature has passed some proposed amendments on Section 13-3916 of the State Statutes. The law has to do with stalking and harassment, and originally defined telephone harassment — generally a one-to-one communication that was deemed threatening or obscene. The law has been revised with, essentially, a find-and-replace of "telephone" with "electronic or digital device," without any thought given to how fundamentally different these forms of communication are. If signed by the governor, the revised law would potentially outlaw any speech on the internet determined by the government as being lewd, profane, threatening, or disturbing of the "peace, quiet, or right of privacy of any person."
 
"Published" Tumblr Posts Can Now Be Auto-Featured On Facebook Timeline, But "Read" Stays Private Top
Facebook Tumblr PostingWhen you publish on Tumblr, you can now auto-share your post to the Facebook News Feed and feature it prominently on your Timeline. More Facebook referral traffic will be the result of these improvements as well as Ticker and Timeline sharing of your Likes and replies that were announced today. Importantly, though, the posts you read won't be auto-shared. By giving Tumblr posts their own structured, Open Graph data type rather than classifying them as standard links, your Tumbl'd cat memes, hipster photos, and random thoughts will stay visible even after you post Facebook status updates and other content.
 
Keen On… Stewart Brand: How Real Innovation Is Now Coming From The South [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 11.08.48 AMThere are few more iconic figures in the digital community than Stewart Brand, the effervescent founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, The Well, The Long Now Foundation and the guy who almost single-handedly connected the counterculture with cyberspace. So it was a real thrill to sit down last week with Stewart at The Economist's excellent Innovation event in Berkeley to talk about the origins of the gift economy, what the hippies got wrong (sex, the family & optimism), why the US and Europe have become so timid and how all the innovation is now coming from the south.
 
DataSift Teams Up With NewsCred For Deep Data Analysis Of Social Media And News Content Top
NewsCredDataSift, a data analysis company that provides developers and third parties with access to Twitter, Facebook and other social data sources, is teaming up with NewsCred to allow clients to perform deep data analysis and monitoring of social media and news sources. For background, developers, businesses, media companies and organizations can essentially use DataSift to mine the Twitter firehose of social data, as well as Facebook and other sources. But what makes DataSift special is that it can then filter this social media data for demographic information, online influence and sentiment, either positive or negative. As we've reported in the past, DataSift does not limit searches based on keywords and allows companies of any size to define extremely complex filters, including location, gender, sentiment, language, and even influence based on Klout score, to provide quick and very specific insight and analysis.
 
Is The Nokia Lumia 900 The Right Phone For You? Top
lumia-900The Lumia 900 is a special device in that it's the beginning of a shift. At least, that's what Microsoft and Nokia are hoping for. Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam said in September that a third mobile platform would emerge to compete with Apple and Google, and to be honest the only OS that even stands a chance is Windows Phone. That said, Nokia is putting more eggs in the Microsoft basket than any other WP7 partner, and will thus bring some of the best Windows-flavored offerings to the table. The Lumia 900 is just the beginning, so whether you consider yourself an early adopter or a late technological bloomer, it's worth figuring out whether a reinvented Nokia and a much improved mobile Microsoft are worthy of your time and consideration. So after some long, hard thought, I've come away with a sort of pros vs. cons list that may help you.
 
Pinterest Co-Founder Paul Sciarra Leaves, Ben Silbermann Officially Takes On CEO Role Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 1.26.39 PMWell, big changes on the horizon for Pinterest! We've confirmed with our own independent sources Startup Grind's report that Pinterest co-founder Paul Sciarra is leaving the company. And it's complicated: While Sciarra, who took a six week hiatus from pinning and company matters a few weeks back, is listed on the company's SEC documents as CEO, it was co-founder Ben Silbermann who through his actions unofficially took on that role.
 

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