Saturday, April 21, 2012

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NY Tech Day: "Justify Your Startup's Existence In 20 Seconds" Top
Screen shot 2012-04-21 at 11.39.56 AMThe tech scene in NY is growing at such a rapid pace it kind of blows my mind. New York Tech Day was a glowing example of that growth, with 160 startups pitching and over 3,500 attendees. We couldn't help but attend ourselves, and what we saw was more than exciting.
 
Real-Time Research: iOS Dominates Over Android When It Comes To Usage, Says Chitika Top
chitika pie chartAndroid, by most accounts, is proving to be the most popular smartphone platform when it comes to devices getting sold today -- partly due to the sheer variety of devices and price points that are out there. But a new research tool that tracks usage in real-time shows that when it comes to usage, consumers, in the U.S. at least, are far more active on Apple's devices than on any other. The numbers come from the ad network Chitika, which notes that in the last 24 hours, iOS devices, covering the iPhone, iPad and iPod models, accounted for just under 68 percent of all usage on its network. Android, meanwhile, accounted for just under 28 percent. And other platforms were less than five percent of all activity. But there have been periods in the last few days when Android accounted for as little as 19 percent of traffic (on April 19, as it happens).
 
Ticl Her Fancy With Romantic Gift Service Ticlr Top
TiclrWhen you ask someone on a date, maybe you are a gentleman that likes to offer some flowers to make it official. This is where Ticlr, a startup showcased at DEMO Spring 2012, comes into play. You can send a date idea for a nice dinner at a French restaurant with yes/no answer options. If the recipient agrees, some flowers will be sent to his or her home. This is called "tickling" and can be used in many different scenarios. Ticlr is creating another way to send gifts that claims to be easier, less stressful and more creative. Gifts can be both personal gestures (I'll cook a nice romantic dinner) and paid gifts such as gift cards, a donation to a charity or an object from one of its partners. It fosters spontaneous gift-giving because of the inexpensive personal gesture option — a new take on gift coupons — and the motivational aspect of conditional gifts.
 
Voldemort's Got Nothing On Jeff Bezos Top
voldemortE-books. Again. Amazon and the DOJ vs. Apple and "The Big Six." The future of reading. A breathtakingly stupid David Carr piece in the New York Times, which thankfully someone else took down paragraph-by-paragraph, so I don't have to. Elsewhere, an awesome quote which I want to cheer with the force of a million choirs of angels:
I am completely unmoved by the argument that if Amazon forces traditional publishers to sell books at lower costs, then the publishers will go away and we won't have books anymore. Hogwash. The publishers built for a printed books world may go away, but their digital native versions will replace them.
Yes, it's time to trot out that obligatory William Gibson quote again:
"A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil." -- Neuromancer
There's certainly more than enough evil to go around here: Evil But Smart, represented by Amazon and its oppressive Kindle monoculture, vs. Evil And Flailingly Inept, aka Publishing's Big Six.
 
Why Search? Let LaunchGram Bring New Product Info To You Top
lg1Last week at the 10x Xelerator, Andy Sparks impelled LaunchGram.com into motion and lazy people all over the world rejoiced (or they will...eventually). This new service, in the words of Sparks, "aggregates pre-release demand signals for products coming soon." The way it works is that consumers can create an account at LaunchGram's website and subscribe to news about imminently launching products of interest 
(the iPhone 5 for example). Once users subscribe, they can receive "LaunchGrams" via email with curated updates about product release date, pre-order availability, photos and video. (LaunchGram does the dirty work here by scouring the web for the most up to date information about listed products). The same information that shows up in emails can also be viewed on product-specific pages at the main website.
 
From Russia With Money: How KupiVIP Is Riding The Middle Class Wave In Europe's Most Connected Market Top
photo-2From a slow start in the aftermath of the Soviet Union, Russia is now Europe's biggest internet market with 53 million users (compared to number-two Germany at 51 million), and figures from GP Bullhound and comScore indicate that it is also growing the fastest, at 14 percent (other European countries are at less than six percent it says). On top of that, a growing base of middle class consumers -- 15 million today, expected to double to 30 million in the next five years in an e-commerce market that is projected to be worth $40 billion -- has translated into a veritable boom in the rise of tech companies. But not all of that growth means big money just yet. KupiVIP, the Russian flash-sales site, is on track to make $200 million in net sales this year, on revenues of $300 million. Oskar Hartmann (pictured), KupiVIP's young and bullish CEO and co-founder, who I met while on a tour of Moscow's tech scene this week, believes the company will be making $1 billion in sales annually within the next five years -- pretty modest by the standards of Amazon, a company to which KupiVIP is compared, which had revenues of over $48 billion in 2011, but still making KupiVIP one to watch in the years ahead as it gears up for an IPO, possibly in the next two years. A story that Hartmann tells gives an insight into some of the trials and tribulations of building a startup in a country like Russia:
 
Facebook Shareholders: What Do You Do After You Make a Zillion Dollars Top
02-Ferrari-250-Testa-RossaIn the dot-com boom I lost $15 million cash. Yes, I am an idiot. You know what happens when you lose that kind of cash? When you go to zero? You lose your libido. You don't want to have sex ever again. And even Viagra won't help. I lost my house. I lost my family. I lost all my fake friends. I was sick all the time. When I passed people on the street who were laughing I was definitely sure they were laughing at me. $15 million cash. One million a week in the summer of 2000. I could've saved lives with that money.Instead every night I would lie on the floor and try to mentally force my body to die. [See, "What It Feels Like to Be Rich"] So now I will save some lives. You Facebook shareholders are about to make a lot of money. One friend of mine made one of the most common features on Facebook we use every day. He's going to make $15 million. So my message is to him but the rest of you can listen in on the conversation.
 
If Financing is Marriage, is M&A Death? Top
cypress hillNot a week goes by where I don't get an email that goes like this: "I wanted to reconnect, as I've recently left [the company that bought my startup].  Long story, but suffice it to say their executives and I did not share the same vision for the future." Let's face it, although there have been some smashing successes, more often than not, Mergers & Acquisitions fail.  If you didn't know any better, you'd think that selling your company amounted to a kiss of death, when it ought to be closer to a rebirth and the start of something… better.  Indeed, while raising money from investors feels like marriage, M&A sure feels like death.
 
The Power Of AngelList Revealed In Its New Look: 978 Deals, 48 Acquisitions Top
Screen shot 2012-04-20 at 9.32.41 PMHaving found traction (in 2011, 500 startups and 2,500 investors joined the community, with a total of 12,500 introductions resulting), AngelList is now on a mission to capitalize on its position and become a more advanced resource for early-stage companies. (See its experimentation with a new pitch deck format.) Today, AngelList added some cool new features to its homepage (sign out if you're logged in), which offers the startup a more effective way to show off what it's been able to accomplish and gives all visitors a better way to break down the information they want to see.
 
Flush With Funding, Video Chat Service Tango Has Social Network Ambitions Top
Tango logoVideo chat service Tango is moving in a new direction, and this week, the company closed a round of $40 million in Series C funding which will help it get there. Today, many think of Tango's service as an up-and-coming Skype competitor, as it, too, is about real-time communication, specifically video calling, between users. But the comparison to Skype may no longer be apt. Tango is working towards becoming a more social service - something more akin to the micro social network Path, in fact. On the roadmap are several new social features, some of which make sense for a phone replacement utility (like text messaging), others which seem more like a shift to a social network (like exchanging photos).
 
A Mid-Career Switch: From Massachusetts State Trooper to iOS Developer-To-The-Rescue Top
before-after-2After writing about Lovestagram, the app that Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger's girlfriend made for him as a Valentine's Day present, we didn't think we could find a cuter story. But we totally did. Smoopa, a mobile commerce app I wrote about yesterday, is also the by-product of a little love story. Derek Langton, who served as a Massachusetts state trooper for 18 years, picked up programming over the last year and a half to change his career and prove his ex-Googler husband and Smoopa's co-founder, Mendel Chuang wrong. "When you have an economy like the one we have now and when you're trying to change career paths, it's not easy," Langton said. "But it comes down to motivation. It's like losing weight. People try and fail. But when you see that it's a lifestyle change and you make it part of who you are, you can be successful."
 
Got Pot? Leafly Can Help Top
Screen shot 2012-04-20 at 1.39.52 PMDuring my daily combing of tech news feeds/breaks to learn more about the wide world of drugs, I stumbled upon this interesting little service called Leafly. Essentially, you hop on over to Leafly.com to do one of two things: find local dispensaries or explore various strains of the Mary Jane. But the set-up is quite nice, and with Marijuana legalization becoming a matter of when and not if, it could become a pretty huge part of the medicinal marijuana industry. The industry rivaled that of Viagra revenue in 2011 at around $1.7 billion, and is expected to reach $8.9 billion in 2016, according to a March 2011 See Change Strategy Report. So, what could essentially become the Yelp of gooey greenery is exciting to come across.
 
PicPlz Founder Dalton Caldwell: All This Gossip About The Instagram Sale Is 'A Waste Of Time' Top
11403v4-max-250x250Apparently lots of people are still talking about Instagram's sale to Facebook (last week seems like ages ago to those of us in the attention-deficit-disordered world of blogging, but I guess a $1 billion pricetag will tend to keep tongues wagging for a while.) The latest Instagram/Facebook detail the chattering classes are seizing on? Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz's position in the deal, which is smaller than it would have been had the firm not decided to ultimately place ultimately opted to place more of its money and support behind PicPlz, a competing mobile photo sharing app. Well at least one person has had enough of the snark: PicPlz co-founder Dalton Caldwell.
 
Facebook Updates Android App: 1.9 Adds Photos, Message Sharing From Home Screen Top
Android 1.9 Facebook messengerFacebook has released an update to its Android app today that should give users of the social network on Android devices a more integrated and instant experience -- and takes Facebook another step closer to making its mobile app experience more like the one people have when using the social network on the web. Specifically, the new version lets users share photos and messages direct from the home screen of their devices, and it includes several features that had been in the standalone Messenger app.
 
Live From The First Ever MamaBear Family Conference Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-20 at 4.03.17 PMBecause I'm so clearly ready to settle down and have a family, I am at the first ever 500Startups Mamabear Family conference in Mountain View today, watching a group of talks from family-oriented startups and people who have experience with family oriented startups -- like Wittlebee's Sean Percival and mama-entrepreneur Randi Zuckerberg. Yesterday I was totally ready to remove my uterus, but today my biological clock is all "Ring the alarm!" now that I know that the mom space = major moola (that sounds really gross actually, sorry). If you too are itching to go beyond the social photo sharing black hole and build something useful for families and chillens, watch the Livestream above for tips and tricks.
 
What Would You Do For A TCTV Interview? Digital Ocean Employee Does 100 Pushups [TCTV] Top
Yesterday at New York Tech Day we met with quite a few great companies including Digital Ocean. These guys are pretty established in the cloud space. They offer OS agnostic cloud servers and are giving away some service space for free to NYTD participants and their minimum package is $5 a month. Pretty basic stuff.
 
Tiggzi's Drag-And-Drop Mobile App Builder Goes Beyond Templates Top
Tiggzi - FeaturesThere are plenty of services out there that will let you build simple mobile apps without the need to know how to program. The problem with most of these is that you quickly reach their limits once you want to build more complex apps. Tiggzi, a new cloud-based service by software engineering company Exadel, wants to provide a bridge between the world of drag-and-drop app builders and more complex tools. With Tiggzi, you could build a basic app without any programming knowledge, but the service is really meant for more advanced users who can use it to design complex apps that can hook into virtually any REST API on the net.
 
Khan Academy Partners Up With 23andMe To Make Learning About Genetics Fun Top
23andmekhanIt's 4/20, and you know exactly what that means: It's National DNA Day! (What, were you expecting something else?) Yep -- this is the official day to commemorate the 1953 publishing of the first scientific paper on the double-helix structure of DNA, which was famously co-authored by James Watson and Francis Crick (with the sometimes overlooked contributions of others.) Anyway, to celebrate, educational non-profit powerhouse Khan Academy has announced a partnership with personal genetics testing company 23andMe to "promote the importance of genetics education." Specifically, this means that Khan Academy's website now has educational videos produced by 23AndMe on topics such as Genetics 101.
 
Facebook's $1 Billion Instagram Deal Didn't Affect Path's Valuation In Recent Raise Top
pathWhy? Because the term sheets were signed weeks ago. The deal was only announced this week. (Yes, sorry, there isn't a more interesting reason.) However, Scott Raney, a partner at Redpoint Ventures, the firm that led the deal, suspects the valuation would have almost certainly gone up in this TCTV interview. (He didn't comment on the previously reported $250 million valuation number.)
 
Equally Creepy And Creative, Cheek'd Is Online Dating In Reverse Top
Cheek'd, Cards-1I've covered a few online dating services in my day, but this one has got to be the most creative. It's called Cheek'd, and I'd categorize it as a place where business cards meets picking up prospective boyfriends/girlfriends/one-night stands. Here's how it works: you go over to the Cheek'd website, at which point you take a couple minutes to fill out a profile. The fields of personal representation are actually a bit more novel than most dating sites, asking things like where you're most likely to be found, the most played song on your iPod, and your favorite board game. Upload a pic, and the fun really begins.
 

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