Sunday, April 22, 2012

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Microsoft Israel's Best & Brightest on Parade at ThinkNext Tel-Aviv Top
ThinkNextSlowly but surely, Microsoft Israel is making itself more and more relevant for the local startup community. In fact, we recently covered its latest major push, the Windows Azure Accelerator. Then there's the annual ThinkNext conference which has become one of the local tech community's staple events. The more interesting portion of the event (in my opinion at least) is the demo area, where startups chosen by the the local Microsofties showcase their goods. So unless you happen to be at the event in the port of Tel-Aviv this afternoon, here's what you're missing out:
 
Dollars, Sense, And 40 Billion Facebook Credits Top
facebook creditsRoughly 16 billion Facebook Credits were distributed and consumed in 2011. In 2012, I predict that the use of Facebook Credits will soar by three times to over 40 billion Credits spent on virtual goods, digital goods and more. The growth will be fueled by new digital content available on Facebook, use of Facebook Credits to reward brand loyalty and better marketing of a social currency that is still in its infancy. The following chart shows the growth of Facebook Credits revenue reported by Facebook from 2009 to 2011.
 
How Niche Content Sites Can Build And Keep Audiences Top
audiencen Sept. 2007, I was on a well-deserved holiday, having spent an excruciating 11 months with a startup where 80-hour weeks were normal. I was the Chief Technology Officer and in my short tenure, I had gained new clients, setup the company infrastructure and trained a few interns. On the morning I came back from holiday, my office was packed up, and the bosses were in it to hand my stuff to me. They kicked me out of the door without so much as a thank you. I went through the various stages of depression, and then realized that I had to come up with an action plan quickly to pay for the massive mortgage and the new baby. With nothing more than an idea in mind, my wife and I started CraftGossip.com, a niche blog network covering everything that your grandma would be proud of, sewing, knitting, crochet. We also covered some new age favorites like indie crafts, edible crafts and home and garden. We decided to cover news related to the craft world (I explain later why we decided to start this site and not something else).
 
Take Credit For The Jobs You Create With SmartRecruiters' "Got Jobs?" Campaign Top
smartrecruitersThanks to an election year and a high employment rate, jobs seem to be dominating the headlines even more than usual. Now SmartRecruiters, a hiring startup recently backed by the Mayfield Fund, is trying to tap into that interest — and maybe do some good in the process — with a campaign it's calling "Got Jobs?" The company says that its technology is can help small- and medium-sized businesses, in particular, cast a wider net as they try to fill open positions. Rather than just posting their job listings to a few sites like Craigslist and Monster, SmartRecruiters customers can post to to more than 100 job boards, including LinkedIn and Careerbuilder, then track applications and feedback. And SmartRecruiters is free to use. (It takes a percentage of the fee when you post to a paid job board or buy background checks from third-party vendor.)
 
Quora Is Raising At A $400M Valuation, With D'Angelo Putting In His Own Money Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-21 at 7.24.05 PMIt's really beautiful outside. Like so beautiful if San Francisco is like this more often it will become really expensive to live here. Also, Quora is raising money according to the multiple people in the past week who have told me that Quora is raising money. From what I've heard, the startup wants to raise between $30 to $50 million in its Series B, at a $400 million valuation -- an amount which strangely enough seems modest in light of the billion dollar rounds being thrown about willy nilly.
 
Seven Gmail Add-ons That Make Email Suck Less Top
gmail logoI think it says a lot about the current state of email that we have so many startups trying to change the way we do it. Gmail has been a key player for many years now. With features like threaded messages and filters, they've kept ahead of the game; but the feeling still seems pretty unanimous. Email sucks! Someone has got to burst this bubble and, when they do, they are going to make a mint. I don't know, this legendary "empty inbox", if it does exist, still evades me, have you ever seen one? What happens when when there are zero emails? A win screen? Now there's an idea... But while we're waiting for the next big disruption, there are services that can make the experience a little better. This is a list of Gmail add-on services that are at the top of the game right now.
 
Online Video vs. Music – Different Game, Same Rules Top
netflixNetflix — the poster child for premium Internet video services — was birthed by iTunes and other online music services before it. Yes, movies and music are fundamentally different forms of media. Apart from the obvious, in the online world, music tracks can be unbundled from albums (movies can't), and the number of movies produced in any given year represents a small fraction of the total volume of recorded music (and these differences directly impact business models). Nevertheless, despite these differences, three ingredients that have proven to be essential for the success of any online music service apply equally to the premium online video world. This trilogy represents the "Sacred Tenets of Online Media" that apply to any service provider. Apple was the first to get it right in the online music world with iTunes. Who will first get it right at massive scale for online video? Netflix may have the lead, but the game is still early. So, game on.
 
Convertible Note Seed Financings: Econ 101 for Founders Top
economics for dummiesThis is the second part of a three-part primer on convertible note seed financings. Part 1, entitled "Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Convertible Note Seed Financings (But Were Afraid To Ask)," addressed certain basic questions, such as (i) what is a convertible note? (ii) why are convertible notes issued instead of shares of common or preferred stock? and (iii) what are the advantages of issuing convertible notes? This part will address the economics of a convertible note seed financing and the three key economic terms: (i) the conversion discount, (ii) the conversion valuation cap and (iii) the interest rate. Part 3 will cover certain special issues, such as (i) what happens if the startup is acquired prior to the note's conversion to equity? and (ii) what happens if the maturity date is reached prior to the note's conversion to equity?
 
The Rise of Smart Mobile Services (Not Apps!) Top
iphone-appsA new generation of Smart Mobile Services is coming. We don't need to wait for Google Glasses to build the next generation of world-changing consumer services. Many of the enabling features for these services exist in our smartphones today. What do I mean by a Service versus an App? Well, most mobile app developers have built their user experiences to look a lot like a desktop application jammed on a phone. I open up the app when I need something. I open up Outlook on my desktop to check email (I am on Gmail, but work with me here), and I open up my Yelp app on my iPhone when I need a restaurant recommendation. Same, same.
 
Twitter and LinkedIn Manage Tasks With Asana, New API Means Robots Can Too Top
Asana LogoWhat could be a better endorsement of your product's quality than having some of the hottest companies in tech relying on it? Launched in November, task management software Asana is already being used by Twitter, Uber, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Rdio, NationBuilder, and Airbnb. This week, Asana released a REST API to let customers build custom interfaces and in-roads to its productivity tool. A few examples of what you could build include a desktop app for viewing assigned tasks, or a dashboard for monitoring your team's current projects. At an event to celebrate the startup's progress on Thursday night, co-founder (and Facebook co-founder) Dustin Moskovitz and advisors like Ron Conway watched proudly as Asana's other co-founder Justin Rosenstein delivered a rousing speech. "In just five months, customers have created 10 million tasks. Even more impressively, they've completed 4 million of them."
 
Startups: Time For Another One-Sentence Pitch Competition With The Founder Institute Top
adeo ressiLast December, TechCrunch worked with Adeo Ressi from The Founder Institute to host a competition for one-sentence pitches. It's been a few months — so we're doing it again. Distilling your startup idea into a single sentence can be a big challenge, but it's crucial for communicating what you're doing to the outside world. (While there are certainly exceptions, I've found that it's a big warning sign when founders can't succinctly communicate what they do.) Here's the basic formula: ""My company, _(insert name of company)_, is developing _(a defined offering)_ to help _(a defined audience)_ _(solve a problem)_ with _(secret sauce)_".
 
Gillmor Gang: Scoble's Magic Penny Top
Gillmor Gang test patternThe Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, Keith Teare, and Steve Gillmor — drunk on power and app-pacified to the max, a pathetic unanimity in search of an argument, a raised eyebrow less than a real opinion... You get the idea; Keith Teare's stellar Techcrunch post of last Sunday on Google's earning call click problem seemed like a great place to continue a comment argument with @kevinmarks. But lo and behold, it's not Web or Apps but both. HTML5 may turn out to be the least relevant part of this refactoring of the world around mobile. Hindsight or HipSwitch or Turncoat, the names don't matter but the services do. Some people (like me) will do anything to avoid searching for an answer, and apps are just what I am looking for: touch and tap services orchestrated via push notification and intelligent predictive caching. Or not.
 
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 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.
 

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