Thursday, April 26, 2012

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"In the Studio," MinoMonsters' Josh Buckley Chronicles His Quest to Constantly Create Top
Screen shot 2012-04-25 at 10.52.39 PM 1"In the Studio" marches on this week with yet another entrepreneur who on the surface seems too young to be a founder/CEO, until you peel back the layers and realize that he actually has a decade's worth of experience building web products, has built his own consulting services, has built sites that have been acquired for real sums of money, spent his nights in high school in a big city tech scene, invested his own earnings into startups (which mostly failed), and after immigrating to the U.S. to attend Y Combinator, is now leading a small team into the iPhone gaming market. I'll keep this post brief, mainly because I'd encourage everyone to really watch this video -- perhaps twice -- to really get a view into how an entrepreneur like Josh Buckley thinks. Buckley, who is currently 20 years old, began hacking on computers a decade ago, teaching himself basic programming languages, securing consulting gigs, and eventually going on to build products that were sold. At age 15, he made a larger sale, started traveling, and started investing in some of his friends ventures. Though he lost most of his invested money, he made one investment which gave him a view into Y Combinator.
 
The Profit Is In Another Castle: Nintendo Records First-Ever Annual Loss Top
nintendo-reports-loss-announces-wii-u-2012Citing poor sales of the Nintendo 3DS and "the stronger yen against the euro was also another reason," Nintendo posted its first-ever loss - $534.6 million on revenue of $8 billion. This is down from $12.6 billion in revenue last year with $960 million in profit. But, as they say, it's dangerous to invest alone. Here, take this: the company is predicting a profit of $429 million next year.
 
Twitter Updates iPhone and Android Apps: Improves Discover Tab, Search & Push Notifications Top
twitter_newbird_boxed_whiteonblueTwitter just announced the latest updates to its mobile apps for Android and iOS. With these updates, these apps get a number of much-needed new features, including an improved Discover tab, better support for search and support for push notifications for interactions. These new push notifications now let you know whenever somebody retweets you, favorites one of your tweets or when somebody new follows you. With this update, Twitter is apparently trying to address some of the criticism it faced when it launched its radically redesigned mobile apps last December.
 
OnSports Raises $2M Led By Floodgate To Be The Mobile Watercooler For Sports Fanatics Top
onsports-appleIn both sports and the tech industry, you win some and you lose some. Even though OnSports chief executive Aaron Krane got a nasty black eye this week in a pick-up basketball game, his company just closed a $2 million round led by Mike Maples' Floodgate fund. The company, also known as Hitpost, makes this mobile app OnSports which has live discussions, polls and news about sports. It's aiming to be the destination where sports fans can chatter or rage about their most-loved or hated teams and players. The app has more than 1 million downloads on Google Play and something less than that on iOS. While Krane didn't share stats on active usage, he did say that there are "tens of thousands" of discussions and votes per day. Krane, who used to work at the social gaming company that Google acquired called Slide, says there is an unexploited sweet spot in between freemium games like Zynga Poker and sports media. OnSports recently launched a better way for fans to create polls and stories about sports.
 
Look, See: Warby Parker Launches $150 Prescription Shades Top
Screen shot 2012-04-26 at 10.30.05 AMThere are plenty of places to turn if one is looking to buy prescription glasses, but the problem is that most of those options are expensive. So David Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal started Warby Parker last year to breathe some new life into the eyewear industry by selling designer, prescription glasses online -- for $95. The New York-based startup has since gone on to raise $13.5 million from a bunch of notable investors, and has been growing fast. While the startup has been offering both prescription glasses and sunglasses for sale online, they haven't offered eyewear for the visually-impaired who want to look hipster-cool while braving the sun. Today, Warby Parker has come to their aid, launching a line of prescription sunglasses with a reasonable price tag of $150.
 
Hub Ventures, Excelerate Labs & MuckerLab Announce New Startups Top
startupsignThe startup accelerator scene is booming, and that means there will be days like today, when a bunch of news from the various incubators around the country hits all at the same time. Today, we've got the details from several of the newer programs, some of which are announcing their new spring classes, others which are wrapping up with demo days. The result, in either case, is that there are now dozens upon dozens of new companies making their grand debut today, across a number of verticals that include everything social networking to health care. Below, we've rounded up the new launches and announcements from Hub Ventures, Excelerate Labs, and MuckerLab. In addition, DreamIt Ventures is preparing to start its summer program in NYC next month, and is hosting a kick off party tomorrow night.
 
Jack Dorsey Talks Square, Twitter, And Instagram-Facebook With Charlie Rose Top
Charlie Rose - Jack DorseyTwitter co-founder, and Square CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey sat down with Charlie Rose yesterday (you can watch the full video clip here) to talk about the two companies he's developed as well as Facebook's $1 billion acquisition of Instagram and the "digital revolution." The entire interview is just under 18 minutes, and is worth a watch, but here are some of the highlights: As Square revealed yesterday, the payments company is now processing $5 billion in annual payments (or around $416 million in payments per month), which is up from $4 billion in annual payments in March. Dorsey says that Square is moving fast, and this year will be expanding internationally, both to local shops and larger merchants. "We want to be the point of sale for every merchant," he tells Rose.
 
Sincerely Ink Launches In-App "Giving" Program, Lets You Send Cards With Charitable Donations Top
Giving Stylized_3 Cards_v2_clearSincerely is on a roll. The startup behind a ton of photo-printing and greeting card mobile apps, including Postagram, PopBooth, Sincerely Ink and Dotti, just launched the underpinnings its photo sharing network earlier this month with the debut of "Sincerely Magic," and today, the company is launching its first-ever partnership with non-profits in a program called "Sincerely Giving." If you're debating about which app you're going to use to send out your Mother's Day cards with this year (and c'mon, this is TechCrunch - I bet most of you out there have forgotten how to write legibly using a pen and paper), Sincerely is making the choice easier. With the new program, the majority of the profits from select cards in its Sincerely Ink app will be donated to various non-profits, including the National Breast Cancer Foundation, buildOn, and Thirst Relief International.
 
Track Your Facebook Abuse, Bullying, Spam Reports With Transparent New Support Dashboard Top
Facebook Community SupportFacebook wants you to know it's listening when you report bullying, hate speech, identity theft, and spam, so today it launched a new Support Dashboard for tracking these reports until they're resolved. Users can check to see if their report has been reviewed, be notified of whether the offensive content was removed or left up, and learn why the decision was made. The Support Dashboard is gradually rolling out to the Account Settings menu starting today with Facebook tracking Timeline and photo flags there, and monitoring for more content types will be added soon. Cyberbullying has emerged as huge problem across the Internet and especially on Facebook, where Consumer Reports says one million children were bullied from June 2010-2011. The Support Dashboard should make users feel more confident about spending time on Facebook because they know if they're abused and report it, their problems will actually be heard and responded to.
 
Mail.Ru Q1 Earnings: Revenues Up 45% To $160M Top
mai.ru plus mail sign-inMail.ru, the Internet giant -- and 2 percent owner of Facebook -- today reported Q1 revenues of $160 million, up 45 percent over last year and posted annual earnings with a full-year net profit $208.6 million -- a impressive rise of 158.2 percent as it launched a range of new products and continued its push into international territories using games as its main assault weapon. The company runs one of the country's biggest social networks and its biggest web mail service, both of which saw significant growth over last year. With Mail now numbering 32.7m Russian subscribers and Odnoklassniki ("OK") with 25.3m monthly active users as of March 2012.
 
Customer Service Support SaaS Freshdesk Raises $5M From Tiger Global And Accel Top
freshFreshdesk, an Indian startup that offers a cloud-based customer support platform, has raised $5 million in financing led by Tiger Global Management with previous investor Accel Partners participating. Freshdesk, which competes with Zendesk, offers a simple, online help desk and support ticketing application that supports customers through email, phone, Facebook and Twitter. Customer service agents can support, update and assign projects directly from an email client, without needing to log in or use a mobile app. Agents simply email or forward a request to a Freshdesk unique email address and the request will be added to Freshdesk's interface.
 
StumbleUpon Reaches 25M Registered Users, Plans For Global Expansion And API Top
stumbleupon logoCEO Garrett Camp tells me that content discovery service StumbleUpon hit 25 million registered users earlier this week, and that those users are pretty damn active — the service is now seeing 1.2 billion Stumbles a month. For someone like me, who sees the impressive traffic that StumbleUpon can drive to an article, the growth isn't a big surprise, but it's worth remembering that StumbleUpon had some, uh, stumbles of its own, having been acquired by eBay and then spun out again as a separate company in April 2009. At the time, Camp says the site had about 5.5 million registered users, so that's almost 5x growth in three years.
 
Things You Never Thought Would Happen: Wu-Tang's Raekwon Makes "Google That" Rap Video Top
Google Thugged Out entertainment"She told me that she Googled my name up / Shootings, robberies and big coke came up". These are lyrics from "Google That", a vulgar, violent new rap song from NORE Styles P, and Wu-Tang Clan member Raekwon immortalizing the search engine. In it, the rappers brag about how their crimes and jail time are so famous you can find them on the Internet. Most tech companies probably wouldn't mind being mentioned in pop culture, but probably not like this. Rap enthusiast Ben Horowitz might love it, though. Here's the video and full lyrics.
 
What Gaming Can Teach Us About Social Apps Top
fun-games-36Every time I see a photo sharing app come across the transom, the same question crosses my mind: what about trolls and porn? A game we saw yesterday, Pictorious, asks you to take pictures of items in order to get likes from friends and strangers. Additionally, sites like Pinterest have to act like Soviet censors in order to prevent dirty hot porn from taking over. The threat of someone ruining a good thing is everywhere, and in a world of socially connected apps, trolling is the norm. If you haven't played online video games recently, you'll notice that trolling is arguably more virulent and nasty than even a Goatse pic popping up on Instagram. The folks at Penny Arcade along with some major players in the gaming industry have released a video detailing various ways to stop trolling and if you're a community manager or programmer, it deserves a look.op trolling and if you're a community manager or programmer, it deserves a look.
 
With $3M In Hand, Gopogo Launches To Let You Create, Share & Discover Location-Based Stories Top
Screen shot 2012-04-26 at 8.19.18 AMWith the rise of social networks, people are now sharing more information about themselves online than ever before. Sharing is happening at an unprecedented volume, with some calling it ... "The Sharepocalypse". Social feeds now disseminate content in realtime, but the problem of course is that a lot of this sharing gets lost in the noise -- and with content piling up so quickly, stuff quickly gets lost. Want to find a tweet you wrote a year ago? Good luck. A New York-based startup called Gopogo is launching in beta today to address this problem, with a geo-location platform for recording, sharing and discovering connected experiences.
 
Last-Minute Booking App HotelTonight Goes International With Toronto And Vancouver Top
hoteltonightHotelTonight, the smartphone app that lets you book same-day hotel rooms, is moving into international markets for the first time. It now supports bookings in Toronto and Vancouver, and it plans to add other Canadian and international cities this year. The app is built for this moments when you suddenly realize that it would be nice to have a hotel — say if you're visiting San Francisco from somewhere else in the Bay Area, and you decide to stay in the city for the night rather than head home. Instead of popping into a random hotel and possibly getting ripped off or finding it full, you can open the HotelTonight app, which will offer three curated hotel deals in the neighborhood — one that's "Hip", one that's "Luxe", and one that's "Solid". (The deals first become available at noon local time, and can be purchased until 2am.)
 
Mon.ki Is Building A Rapportive For The Web Top
logo-monkiPrepare for the concept of the address book to be flipped. Today, a startup called mon.ki is launching a new way for you to discover "who you know" by providing that information to you in the context of what you're viewing. The product, which they're calling a "social compass" of sorts, automatically extracts information from the web page you're viewing, and then displays relevant information from Twitter about the people and tweets related to the page . To be clear, it's not just about finding out who tweeted about that page, but about the people related to that page. For example, a TechCrunch article would point you to the author's profile, as well as Twitter profiles related to that writer. And Twitter integration is just the beginning. The company is adding support for Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, too. In addition to today's launch, mon.ki has also closed a round of $400,000 in seed funding.
 
Apple ≠ Sony: Why Apple Can Succeed Post-Jobs Top
steve-jobs-steve-wozniakWhile I often prefer to watch analysts hoist themselves with their own petard, it's not often that one dumps out a bit of drivel so short-sighted as George Colony at Forrester. In short, Colony believes that Apple is the next Sony - a desiccated organization that has nothing new to offer the world. While he's right about Sony, he's wrong about Apple. Analysts, to be fair, do know a thing or two about a thing or two. I'm sure he's great at plumbing financial data and picking expensive steaks. But in this Forbes piece he cites Max Weber's Theory of Social And Economic Organization, a book that I read in college but haven't had the time to peruse of late. Weber, writing in 1947, breaks organizations down into legal/bureaucratic, traditional, and charismatic. Weber probably knew from charismatic, considering his demi monde, but I doubt his version of a charismatic leader - "he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities" - is applicable in any case in our modern business climate.
 
Ditto Picks Up $3 Million From August Capital, Others For Its Virtual, 3D Eyeglasses Sales Site Top
Screen shot 2012-04-26 at 15.23.51The next big thing in fashion e-commerce is a moving target -- literally. Ditto, a site that lets users upload videos of themselves to use in trying on eyeglasses, has today announced that it has picked up a $3 million in funding from a group of investors led by August Capital. Ditto's co-founder and CEO Kate Endress says the funding will be used to further enhance the technology behind the service, and to grow the company's own eyewear business, which resells frames from Persol, Chloe, Ray-Ban, Tag Heuer, Vera Wang and others.
 
Walmart Adds "Pay With Cash" For Online Shoppers At Walmart.com Top
Pay with CashWalmart.com is launching a new way to checkout, targeting customers who don't have credit or debit cards...or money in the bank for that matter. The company is now allowing customers to buy online and pay with cash. The change reflects the current economic conditions in the U.S., as Walmart states (citing FDIC figures) that one in four U.S. households is "unbanked" or "underbanked" - meaning they rely on cash for their purchases. In addition, Walmart says the majority of its own in-store transactions are cash or debit, and only 15% are paid for using credit cards.
 

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