Wednesday, April 18, 2012

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Open Source Private Cloud Software Startup Eucalyptus Raises $30M From IVP, Benchmark To Take On VMware Top
eucalyptus-systems-incEucalyptus Systems, the developer of an open source, on-premise private cloud computing platform, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). To date, Eucalyptus has raised a total of $55.5 million in capital. Led by former CEO of MySQL, Marten Mickos; Eucalyptus helps companies create private cloud computing infrastructure on their own servers. Eucalyptus' software sits inside businesses' firewalls, using their own hardware. As Mickos tells us, IT administrators install the software on their servers, which sits on top of the severs, and are then are able to create private cloud.
 
Research: Only 6% of UK Consumers Care About TV Apps; 12% Want Mobile TV; 19% Want 3D Top
tvAttention TV world: consumers, it appears, are not as tech-friendly as you might think. According to a new survey out in the UK, the vast majority of the public is not interested in fancy new 3D or mobile TV services, and even less of them care about TV apps. What they would like are better players to watch on-demand content on their main TVs and better TV guides for discovering what is on where. These conclusions come from Freeview, the UK's subscription-free digital TV service, which canvassed opinion from some 2,000 UK consumers. Only 12 percent of consumers said they consider mobile TV an appealing service, and only 19 percent thought the same of 3D TV. And TV apps -- something that has become standard among producers and broadcasters -- fared worst of all, with only six percent saying these apps were appealing, and only eight percent thinking they were in any way "useful."
 
Online Education Startup Coursera Lands $16M From Kleiner & NEA, Adds John Doerr To Its Board Top
Screen shot 2012-04-18 at 1.26.31 AMIt has already been a year since Peter Thiel called public attention to the bubble growing in American higher education. Yet, the cost of receiving a college degree in the U.S. has continued to grow, as student debt in the U.S. today has pushed north of $1 trillion, with the average debt per student standing at more than $25,000. Mountain View-based Coursera is one of the many young edtech startups looking to help solve the rising costs in higher education by offering Ivy League-caliber courses online -- for free. To help steer it down this path, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $16 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). As part of its investment, veteran investor, KPCB partner, and education reform advocate John Doerr and NEA General Partner Scott Sandell, have joined the startup's board of directors.
 
The Game Is Not Over For Facebook, Google In Russia (But There Is Work To Do) Top
Image (1) russia.jpg for post 364461Russia, like China, is a market full of tech promise, but in the face of strong local competiton, it is one that has also proven to be tough nut to crack for big U.S. companies looking for international growth. But according to one IT leader in the country -- Alexander Turkot, executive director of the IT Cluster at Skolkovo, Russia's multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley-like work in progess, the game is not yet over for the likes of Facebook and Google. In a briefing this morning, he also had some good insights into what is happening in early-stage investing in the country, and what Russian startups need to be doing to get ahead.
 
A Sign Of The Hiring-pocalypse Top
finggOh San Francisco, has it really come to this? Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so. I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie pen. "Find me a programmer and we'll buy an island together," he said.
 
DealAngel Helps You Find The Best Hotel Deals — Not Just The Cheapest Top
DA_Shot1Not all hotels are created equal. That's why paying $150 for a room at one hotel may be a rip-off at one hotel while it may be a great deal somewhere else — and that, in turn, is why DealAngel is launching a new way to search for hotels. When you go into DealAngel and select your dates, the site provides a list of hotels and prices for your trip. Each of those rooms is assigned "value" score — basically, how the offered price compares to what the expected market rate for the room, based on pricing data from both that hotel and surrounding locations. So if a room at a hotel on a given night would normally cost $300 is priced at $150, that's a great value — but you might not see it if you're searching purely based on price.
 
How RocketSpace Is Building A 'Hit Factory' For Tech Startups Top
Screen shot 2012-04-17 at 6.48.43 PMRocketSpace, the San Francisco co-working space for tech and new media startups, has attracted a strong set of tenants in the 14 months since it first opened its doors. Uber, Zaarly, Giftiki, Spotify, and GeekList are just a few of the more than 100 companies who have called RocketSpace home for a stretch of time in either in the past or present. So TechCrunch TV stopped by RocketSpace's four-story offices in San Francisco's SOMA district to get a first-hand look at how exactly its ship is run. In the video embedded above, you can see footage of RocketSpace denizens at work and watch our interview with its founder and CEO Duncan Logan.
 
CloudFlare Is In Talks to Raise Funding At Near A $1 Billion Valuation Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-17 at 2.44.52 PMCloudFlare, a San Francisco-based startup that protects web sites from security threats and speeds up their load times, has been in talks to raise funding at a valuation that's around $1 billion, according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions. Apparently on the back of the company's growth, there was inbound interest during the last three to four months with at least one firm agreeing to north of a $1 billion valuation. A few other venture firms have given pushback, saying that a $1 billion post-money valuation is too high. The company itself says it has no need to raise funding, with the majority of its last $20 million round still in the bank. (And no, they didn't plant this story because I heard about it through other backchannel chatter about Sand Hill deal flow.) "Cloudflare's team is working to address some of the Internet's hardest challenges. We're literally building a faster, safer, smarter web," the company's chief executive Matthew Prince told me. "We're in a fortunate position where we don't need to raise capital and have no immediate plans to do so."
 
TransferWise Raises $1.3M From Index, Others For The Next Disruption In Money Transfer: Crowdsourcing Top
moneyIf you've ever had to transfer money from one currency to another, you know that it can be a frustratingly pricey business. Now a new company, TransferWise, has raised seed funding totaling $1.3 million to tackle that problem. TransferWise describes itself as the "Skype of money transfer" because it allows consumers to send money between UK and European accounts for a fraction of the price that banks charge, using a peer-to-peer, "crowdsourced" model to get the best rate on the exchange. (And, also like Skype, it is banking on scaling up the business quickly in order to make some money back on the margin that it loses in individual transactions. So far the service is only available in two currences, euros and dollars, but there may be more added soon.)
 
iKamasutra: A Tale Of Sex, Love, And Apple App Store Rejection Top
apple_afterI've seen plenty of apps get yanked from Apple's App Store in my day, but the news of an app called iKamasutra getting that same treatment really has me scratching my head. I won't rehash the entire story, but here's the gist of what happened: Apple pulled the iKamasutra from the App Store in February, and after a bit of sleuthing, creator Naim Cesur of NBITE managed to contact someone in Apple's verification department. According to that Apple employee, the app was removed because of a suggestive app icon and a preponderance of detail in the images used (including the use of brown hair). Cesur and his team dutifully updated the apps with a revamped icon and less detailed imagery, and resubmitted it. And then they waited.
 
CEO Scott Thompson To Cut 50 Properties: "Yahoo Has Been Doing Way Too Much" Top
scott-thompsonCEO Scott Thompson outlined a vision today of how Yahoo can start growing as a company again. His big theme: Focus, focus, focus. "Yahoo has been doing way too much for too long and was only doing a few things really well," Thompson said. He was speaking on the conference call covering the earnings report covering his first full quarter as CEO, where revenue was flat while earnings went up. Thompson has already been making some big changes, with big layoffs and a major reorganization, but he said he isn't satisfied with the results so far.
 
Liberate Your Pics: OpenPhoto Brings Its Killer Photo Sharing Platform To Your iPhone Top
Screen shot 2012-04-17 at 10.41.10 AMIf you've ever scoffed at Flickr, felt that photo sharing and storage websites hold your photos hostage, associated photos on the Web with platform lock-in, then you've already started to get a sense of why Jaisen Mathai left Yahoo last year to build OpenPhoto. Appalled by having to watch Yahoo let an awesome startup/service like Flickr go to seed, ("I was extremely frustrated by the lack of product vision," Mathai said at the time), he took to Kickstarter and raised the $25K he needed to get it off the ground. The OpenPhoto project has gained the attention of ex-Yahoo and Apple engineers, current Twilio and Mozilla engineers, and more, who are all donating their time to help get Mathai's open source photo hosting and sharing platform off the ground. Today, Mathai is officially unveiling the new OpenPhoto iPhone app, a new website, and sharing more about a project that I'm fully convinced will eventually replace all of your other photo sharing and storage tools. Plenty for geeks to get excited about, and plenty for the non-geeky as well.
 
Coffee Meets Bagel Turns Online Dating Into A Daily "Deal" Top
Screen shot 2012-04-17 at 5.34.46 PMTechnology is all about convenience. At least, that's where it's headed. I can now ask someone to run across the city and pick up a package for me on Zaarly (which I did), Songza chooses my music playlists for me, and I can literally push a button and ask my phone where the nearest burger joint is (even if she never quite understands me). It's incredible. And now that same convenience is entering into our love lives in the form of a site called Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB), which just launched today in NYC.
 
Turntable Rival Soundrop Says 35M Tracks Went Through Its Spotify App In March; Funding Coming In Weeks Top
Screen shot 2012-04-18 at 01.05.34As Spotify continues its march to becoming a $1 billion-revenue company, the music streaming service is launching a battery of new products to increase the amount of time that people spend on the site: There is an iPad app that could launch as soon as tomorrow; and there is the ability to play Spotify tracks on third-party websites, launched last week. Another development in Spotify's stickiness has been the rise of third-party, web and mobile apps, which have been planting themselves on its platform and growing in use. One of the more popular has been Soundrop: a jukebox-style app that lets users create playlists or listen to "rooms" of music created by others, adding their selections to the mix -- similar to Turntable.fm, except that it works in more countries (everywhere that Spotify does; currently 13 markets compared to Turntable's U.S.-only limit). It's not only users who are finding Soundrop popular: Inge Andre Sandvik, the co-founder and CEO, says the company is weeks away now from closing its first round of funding from "leading VCs."
 
VenueSeen: Social Media Monitoring Via Photography Top
wllMkLI3DLarHNniNFPcb19pLEXXjFDPDKklcJSkxHAVenueSeen launched their new platform today that lets businesses aggregate location specific sentiment, via social photography. What does that mean in layman's terms? It means this startup company will monitor and identify any shared photos that a consumer takes inside a place of business. If the photos are shared via Instagram, Foursquare, Foodspotting or Facebook then VenueSeen can tabulate and send reports about those photos to a subscribing business, complete with comments.
 
Building Smarter Apps Top
iPhone App Store Icon WallA new breed of mobile applications is coming. These new apps will not only "sense" the world around you, using the smartphone's sensors like the compass, GPS, and accelerometer - they'll also be able to combine that data with a history of your actions to intelligently determine your likes, interests and favorites. This understanding of the world, or "ambient discovery" if you will, could then be piped into any app to make it smarter, whether it's a social app for finding friends, a Siri-like personal assistant, a fitness app, a mobile game, or anything else. This, at least, is the promise from the Palo Alto-based startup, Alohar Mobile, which recently introduced new SDKs for mobile app developers interested in experimenting with the possibilities of smarter apps.
 
Cartoonist Bill Amend Releases FoxTrot Packs For iPad Top
id517538298In what I suspect will be an increasing trend, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three "packs" of his popular FoxTrot comics for the iPad. He built the books by himself using iBooks Author and proceeds go to the Help Bill Amend Eat Food Fund (I suspect). He's selling three titles including a special issue -- number 3.14 -- featuring geek strips. Each book contains 100 strips and is optimized for the new iPad.
 
IBM's Mixed Q1 2012: Revenue Flat At $24.7B; Net Income Up 7 Percent To $3.1B Top
ibmIBM just reported mixed first quarter earnings for 2012. GAAP earnings came in at $2.61, up 13 percent with non-GAAP earnings at $2.78, up 15 percent. Revenue was flat for the quarter coming in at $24.7 billion, up 1 percent adjusting for currency. Analysts expected $2.66 a share and $24.82 billion in revenue. Net income for the quarter came in at $3.1 billion, up 7 percent from last year. "In the first quarter, we drove strong profit and earnings per share growth. We delivered another excellent software performance, expanded services margins, and continued the momentum in our growth initiatives," said IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. "Our investments in growth market countries continued to generate strong revenue growth across software, hardware and services while contributing to the company's ongoing margin expansion.
 
Yahoo Q1 Results: Revenue Flat Year-Over-Year, Net Earnings Up 28% Top
yahooYahoo today reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012, and after three years of declining annual revenues, the company looks like it may just be on track to stop the streak -- or at least slow it down. Yahoo posted first quarter revenue on a GAAP basis of $1.22 billion, up one percent from the $1.2 billion in GAAP revenue Yahoo reported in the first quarter of 2011 (which itself was down 25 percent year-over-year from its Q1 2010 revenue.) This is the first time Yahoo revenues have grown on a year-over-year basis since the third quarter of 2008. At the bottom line, Yahoo's performance was solid, with net income of $286 million, up 28 percent year-over-year from the $223 million the company reported in Q1 2011. Net earnings were 17 cents per diluted share. Overall, these results are largely in line with what Wall Street analysts expected from the company.
 
Chrome For Android Gets Desktop View, Home Screen Bookmarks, File Downloads Top
Chrome Beta - Android Apps on Google PlayChrome for Android is becoming somewhat of a flagship product for Google, but given that it's only available on phones and tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich, its reach is pretty limited. It's still one of the best mobile browsers on the market, though, and Google is adding a number of cool features to it today. Chrome for Android is now also available in 31 additional languages and in all countries where Google Play is available.
 

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