Wednesday, April 4, 2012

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Mogreet Nabs $4.1M For An Easy Way To Share Rich Media To Any Mobile Device Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 5.16.04 AMMogreet, a Los Angeles-based mobile video marketing startup, is today announcing that it has raised $4.1 million in strategic capital. The round was led by Black Diamond Ventures, with participation from existing investors, including DFJ Frontier, Ascend Ventures, Bryant Park Ventures, and Draper Associates. The new infusion of capital brings the startup's total funding to $14.1 million.
 
Founder Of Dubai's First Startup Accelerator Looks To Educate, Inspire Global Entrepreneurs Top
Screen Shot 2012-03-13 at 6.18.52 PMWith how much TechCrunch and other tech publications cover incubators and accelerators in Silicon Valley and in the U.S., it's refreshing to occasionally get a glimpse of what's happening outside North America, especially those places where startup incubation and entrepreneurial activity is on the rise. One such example is a relatively new startup accelerator and seed fund called SeedStartup, which makes its home in Dubai, UAE. SeedStartup was founded by Rony El Nashar (who is also a managing partner), an entrepreneur an investor who is dedicated to finding and cultivating tech talent in the Middle East, which he says has seen an explosion of entrepreneurial enthusiasm over the last year. While SeedStartup was designed to begin to address the lack of funding and mentoring, the process starts with education. Especially education from the brightest minds and leaders in the tech sphere -- as they are the people that can help get would-be founders excited about taking the entrepreneurial leap of faith. To aid in that endeavor, Rony recently launched a side project called Cofounder TV, which is meant to be an educational resource for international entrepreneurs -- specifically in video form.
 
NEA Leads $33M Round In CRM Developer And Salesforce Competitor SugarCRM Top
sugarcrmSugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source CRM software, has completed a $33 million equity and debt financing round. We're told around $14 million of the round was equity financing. The investment round was led by New Enterprise Associates and includes participation from new investors Silicon Valley Bank and Gold Hill Capital as well as the company's current investors Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International. To date, SugarCRM has raised over $60 million in equity funding. While Salesforce tends to grab the most attention as the cloud-based CRM company, SugarCRM has quietly built a loyal, and growing userbase around its customer relationship management platform for sales teams. SugarCRM applications have been downloaded more than ten million times and currently serve over 1 million users from over 6,000 companies in 192 countries.
 
Wikia Rolls Out Big Redesign To Bring Accessibility, Discovery To 20M Pages Of UGC Top
Screen shot 2012-04-04 at 12.51.54 AMYou may not be familiar with Wikia, but the collaborative media company has been quietly growing into a giant, recently passing IGN, for example, as the largest network of gaming sites on the planet. Led by both its gaming and entertainment verticals, Wikia's content-driven social network is home to one of the largest and most active communities on the Web. For those unfamiliar, building on the popularity of its non-profit predecessor (Wikipedia), the site allows anyone (even you) to create new communities around any subject they're passionate about -- or participate in one of its 200K existing communities -- for free. However, as publishing models change, Wikia is looking to more strategically marry the world of professional content creation with the openness of UGC, without fundamentally changing or restricting the formula. As its communities have largely remained disaggregated and separate from one another, Wikia is today officially unveiling its biggest redesign in years, which aims to collect its communities under one, sleek-looking roof while improving both engagement and discovery for a more mainstream audience.
 
What Took So Long? Germany's Samwer Brothers Rumored to Launch a Square Clone Soon Top
square_rocket_logoSquare, the mobile payment startup founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, is one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies right now. It's no surprise then, that German clone factory Rocket Internet, which is run by brothers Mac, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, is now rumored to be developing its own blatant Square clone. According to German startup blog Deutsche Startups, the clone, which will supposedly be called Zenpay, is currently one of Rocket Internet's top priorities, though it is not clear when and where it will launch. The source that talked to Deutsche Startups, however, did indicate that Rocket Internet is planning to launch Zenpay "globally." Given the nature of these payment systems, however, this seems rather unlikely.
 
The Interesting Part About Amazon's In-App Payments Beta Is That Developers Have Pricing Control Top
images-screenshots-captures-amazon-appstore-logo-21032011_00B4000000001978The most interesting part of Amazon's move to provide an in-app payments flow is that they're ceding pricing control to mobile developers. Amazon has been testing a new in-app payments system with several top-tier mobile developers for several months. It's a big deal because there has been a huge shift over the last 18 months toward giving away apps for free instead of selling them for a dollar or more. This move would bring Amazon's Android appstore closer to parity with Google and Apple's stores for developers. But the part worth noting isn't that Amazon will offer an in-app purchases flow. It's obvious that they would do that, given their experience in online payments and commerce and need to compete with Google's app store. The part worth pointing out is that Amazon is letting developers set their own prices for virtual currency and digital content. That's a departure from the strategy the e-commerce giant tried to pursue last year with mobile developers.
 
Google Highlights Search Changes From March Top
IMPROVEMENTSGoogle has rolled out a great number of small changes to the search engine and UI over the last month, and now they have rolled them all into a big blog post for your consecutive enjoyment. We've highlighted a few that seemed more relevant, but there isn't much here that's life-changing. All the same, it's good to stay up on changes like this, just in case you happen to do SEO for a living (scoundrel).
 
Nokia Lumia 900 Review: Initial Impressions (Video) Top
Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 1.15.53 PMNow that 9pm has rolled around and the awkwardly timed embargo has lifted, I can finally talk to you guys about the phone I've been playing with for the past week: the Nokia Lumia 900. I'm not going to get too detailed, as a full review and a head-to-head battle will go live in the coming days, but I wanted to hit you guys with initial impressions as early as possible. To put it plainly, I think this is a swell phone.
 
Tell The Truth But Tell It Slant: There Are Still Major Worker Issues In China, Just Not Where Daisey Looked Top
img_0066-620x465In the hullabaloo over Mike Daisey lying about meeting injured workers, the spotlight turned from actual employment problems in Asia onto the face of the orotund and penitent former colonialist. Now that the news cycle has passed, we're no longer interested in the topic of Chinese manufacturing and, judging by the positive response to my April Fools' post on Sunday, the world now understands assembly work to be a good if tedious form of employment. But the problems Daisey seemed to fabricate do exist. He just didn't do the legwork to see them. I've personally been to factories where OSHA is just a four-letter word and ISO standards are paid little more than lip service. And the factories I saw were relatively good and considered reputable suppliers by Westerners in town. After seeing these I wondered "If these are the good ones, what are the bad ones like?"
 
With $25M From Benchmark And Larry Summers Advising, Can Minerva Build An Online Ivy? Top
Screen shot 2012-04-03 at 4.57.07 PMWell, we've said it before: Technology is changing education. It's flipping the classroom, bringing instructional videos to the masses, and dragging online higher education into legitimacy. Investors have begun to hear the call, as was evidenced today when Benchmark Capital made its largest seed investment to date -- $25 million -- in a startup/university called The Minerva Project. Sure, it's not quite the $41 million Color raised pre-launch, but it's certainly head-turning for an education startup. Hopefully it can avoid the rough early start and crushing expectations that come along with big seed rounds. To help it take flight, the startup is announcing that Larry Summers, former Harvard President and U.S. Secretary of Treasury will chair its advisory board.
 
Backed By Time, Next Issue Launches A Tablet Newsstand With Netflix-Style Pricing Top
next issueMany magazine publishers see the iPad as their salvation. Five of the big ones (Conde Nast, Hearst, Meredith, News Corp., and Time Inc.) banded together to create a joint venture called Next Issue Media, and today the company is launching its Android app. CEO Morgan Guenther (formerly president of Tivo) says that despite all the excitement about bringing magazines to tablets, the current system is lacking — specifically, the need to download a new app for every magazine. Gone is the "newsstand" feeling of walking into a store and browsing a rack of titles. Instead, it's like you're ushered into a windowless room where you can read a copy of Wired. Want to read The New Yorker? You'll have to leave for another room.
 
Facebook Sues Yahoo With Patent By A Former Yahoo Employee Top
Revenge Of The Facebook PatentsIn 2006, former Yahoo employee Thyagarajapuram S. Ramakrishnan was working for Facebook when he filed a patent for the news feed. Today in a sweet piece of irony, Facebook is using that same patent to sue Yahoo. Facebook claims that Yahoo's Flickr Photostream and Activity Feeds infringe on "Generating a Feed of Stories Personalized for Members of a Social Network". This U.S. Patent 7,827,208 for "generating dynamic relationship-based content personalized for members of a web-based social network [with] weighting by affinity" and nine others could help Facebook escape a costly settlement over the original patent lawsuit Yahoo's filed against it last month. See kids, trolling doesn't always pay.
 
Keen On… Beth Comstock: Why GE Might Be The World's Oldest Start-Up [TCTV] Top
Screen Shot 2012-04-02 at 11.14.55 PMI have to confess that when I think about GE, the first thing that comes to mind isn't radical innovation. But, as usual, I might be wrong. As GE's Chief Marketing Officer, Beth Comstock, told me when we met at The Economist's stimulating Innovation event last week, GE is actually totally committed to creating radically new structures of organization. As what Comstock calls the "world's oldest start-up," the 130 year-old company has the scale, she says, to be both nimble and agile. Indeed, she even boasts of GE doing away with traditional organizational hierarchy in some of its many manufacturing businesses so that it can generate more innovation.
 
NSF-Funded Project Aims To Enable Print-On-Demand, Customizable Robots Top
mainIn some of the old science fiction stories I remember from Weird Tales and Ray Bradbury and the like, robots always figured. But they always came the way you might expect a new dryer or hot water heater to arrive. In a big box, packed in straw or foam, heavy and metal of course as they always were back in the day. But the world of robots is different from the way they imagined it then: the metallic golems of yore have given way to a sort of Cambrian explosion of potential robot types, imitating everything from worm to dog to bird. A team of researchers hopes to both expand that robodiversity and change the way our future companions are delivered. Funded by the NSF, they've begun a 5-year-long project exploring the idea of on-demand robots. MIT is leading the effort, specifically Professor Daniela Rus from CSAIL. They have researchers from University of Pennsylvania and Harvard on the team, and the object is to "make it possible for the average person to design, customize and print a specialized robot in a matter of hours."
 
Facebook Threatens To Sue TechCrunch Commenter Top
rick-mugshotLast year, Alexia covered a funny Chrome web browser extension called "Defaceable" that allowed you to comment anonymously on Facebook and on other websites using Facebook Comments. Instead of having to associate your comment with your real name and identity, the Defaceable extension let you once again post your troll-isms to friends' walls and blogs like TechCrunch (which uses Facebook Comments) using the names of fruits. For example, instead of "John Smith," your comments would identify you as "Peach" or "Watermelon." Oh ha ha. As it turns out, Facebook didn't think it was so funny, and has since taken legal action against the company for violating its Terms of Service. But it hasn't stopped there. Facebook also went after one of the commenters on that blog post, too - a guy named Rick Stratton, who gleefully discovered he made it into the screenshot used to accompany the post. Stratton doesn't work at Defaceable, to be clear, he was just commenting on the post. Apparently, posting "Hey! I made TechCrunch!" is now worthy of legal action.
 
Want To Rent A Founder? Justin Kan's Exec Is Making That Happen (For Charity) Top
exec-requestJustin Kan is a busy guy. The serial entrepreneur is best known as the founder of Justin.tv, the online community that lets users broadcast, watch, and interact around video. Last year, he and team spun-off Twitch.tv, a gaming-focused version of the video streaming site, and the fast-growing Socialcam, which is on a mission to bring mobile video creation to the mainstream. Not one to sit still, Kan jumped into yet another venture in January, launching Exec, a task-management service in the vein of TaskRabbit and Zaarly that lets people post errands on-demand for $25/hour. Today, Kan and Exec announced via blog post that they are now getting into the founder-renting business. That is to say: Exec is offering a one-day-only special which allows anyone and everyone to book time with the founders of companies like Parse, Reddit, Hipmunk, Sincerely, and even Exec itself.
 
No LTE, No Problem: Sprint's $100 LG Viper Goes Up For Pre-Order On April 12 Top
viperSprint still hasn't launched their new LTE network yet, but if a new announcement about a LTE-capable handsey is any indication, they're getting pretty close. Though the existence of a Sprint-bound Galaxy Nexus probably overshadowed it a bit, Sprint has announced that LG's eco-friendly Viper handset will be available for pre-order beginning on April 12 with a release soon to follow.
 
A Brave New Push: Urban Airship Brings Location, Context Targeting To Mobile Notifications Top
go_segments_example_smallAt the end of October, Urban Airship, the startup that gives developers a simple way to build in-app purchases and push notifications into their mobile apps, acquired SimpleGeo for a reported $3.5 million. At the time, it was unclear what Urban Airship would be doing with the terabyte-plus of SimpleGeo location data, but in January, Urban Airship announced that it would be shutting down the startup's Places, Context, and Storage services by April 1st. Though both SimpleGeo co-founders have left the company, the rest of the team stayed on board and has been heads down, plugging away on a big new product. Today, at O'Reilly's Where Conference, in its biggest announcement since its acquisition of SimpleGeo, Urban Airship is unveiling that product -- which combines its push notification platform with the ability to segment audiences by location, time, context, and preferences in an effort to improve relevancy and targeting of both messages and offers.
 
Facebook Fights Back, Countersues Yahoo For Patent Infringement Top
Facebook vs Yahoo DoneIn response to being sued by Yahoo for patent infringement last month, Facebook today filed counter-claims against Yahoo for infringing 10 of its own patents. Facebook says the following Yahoo features and properties violate its intellectual property: Yahoo Home Page, Yahoo's Content Optimization and Relevance Engine ("C.O.R.E."), the Yahoo Flickr photo sharing service, and advertisements displayed throughout Yahoo. Facebook also denied the original claims against it from Yahoo, seeks damages for Yahoo's infringement, and requests a trial by jury. The two lawsuits could effectively end up causing a stalemate between the companies that could prevent Facebook from having to pay exorbitant patent licensing fees to Yahoo or having to shut down some of its services. Facebook's legal response and full counter-claim can be seen here and below.
 
TRUSTe Announces An Opt-Out System for Mobile Ads Top
TRUSTe Mobile AdsIt looks like there are some big challenges ahead for mobile advertising, as the industry faces increasing scrutiny from the federal regulators, and as Apple phases out the UDIDs used by advertisers and publishers to identify users. Now privacy company TRUSTe is offering a new way for advertisers to address some of these concerns. The program is called TRUSTe Mobile Ads, and it allows consumers to opt-out of both targeted advertising and data collection. When an ad is shown by one of TRUSTe's partners, it includes a small AdChoices icon. When someone taps on the icon, they're taken to a page where they can opt-out of collection and targeting from an individual network, or from all of TRUSTe's partners. Those preferences are then remembered through a system called the Trusted Preference Identifier.
 

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