Tuesday, August 28, 2012

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Wadi Ventures — A New Israeli Micro-Seed Fund With Close Industry Ties And Mysterious Backers Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-28 at 11.21.19Targeting "Silicon Wadi" -- Israel's own version of Silicon Valley -- Wadi Ventures has launched as a new micro-seed VC fund focusing on disruptive Internet and new media startups in the region. So new, in fact, that its website is currently under construction. More interestingly, however, the fund thinks it's seen a gap in the accelerator model, where industry partners, such as telcos, banks and corporates, get in on the action early and actually help shape those early-stage ideas -- and with it, offer a quicker route to market. It's not yet saying who those partners are. Or more importantly, who is backing the fund, aside from that they are European and consist of a mixture of important financial institutions and entrepreneurs, some of them "very well known". It hopes to be able to disclose more information on its mysterious backers sometime in the future. We wait with bated breath.
 
Cloud Accounting Startup FreshBooks Launches An iPhone App, So Users Can Do Invoicing On The Go Top
FreshBooksCloud accounting startup FreshBooks is designed to make billing, invoicing, tracking expenses, and managing customer relationships easier for small and medium-sized businesses. The company now wants to take that a step further by providing its users with an iPhone app that will allow them to do all those things -- and more! from wherever they are. In the past, small business owners would have to wait until they got back to their offices to do certain accounting tasks, like entering time or tracking expenses from on the job. With the new app, FreshBooks users can now instantly create invoices, manage client information, track time that they've spent with clients and expenses, create estimates, and get reports based on the information they enter.
 
Rackspace Acquires Mailgun, A Y Combinator Startup That Gives App Developers An API For Creating And Managing Online Mailboxes Top
mailgunlogoRackspace has acquired Mailgun, a San Francisco-based Y Combinator startup that has developed an API for creating and managing online email inboxes for apps and websites. It's a concept that sounds simple on its face, but Mailgun's ease of use and sophisticated routing can provide a number of new functionalities to web apps and web pages that is all done programatically. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The company was part of the 2011 winter Y Combinator class. In May of that year, it received $1.1 million in funding. Investors include SV Angel, Yuri Milner; Maynard Webb; Y Combinator Partner Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail; and Geoff Ralston, who built and launched Yahoo Mail back in 1997.
 
Science-Backed 'Baby Birchbox' Wittlebee Makes Its First Acquisition: Cottonseed Clothing Top
wittlebee-logo-transWittlebee, a "Birchbox for babies" backed by LA's Science incubator, is diving deeper into the products that form the core of its subscription-based kids' clothes service: today it is announcing its first acquisition, the baby clothesmaker Cottonseed Clothing Company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The acquisition will mean that Wittlebee becomes the exclusive distributor of Cottonseed's clothing: a selection of cotton basics in 24 colors. These will ship alongside clothes from other high-end brands, Wittlebee says. Cottonseed was Wittlebee's earliest partner when the online service launched earlier this year.
 
With More Than 1 Million iOS Users, Magisto Brings Its Mobile Video Editing App To Android Devices Top
magisto logo 2Since everyone's got a smartphone in their pocket nowadays, video has never been easier to shoot. And with video apps like Viddy and Socialcam, it's also easier than ever to share with family and friends. There's just one problem: About 95 percent of videos shot with mobile are things no one would ever want to watch. Video editing startup Magisto is trying to change that, with mobile apps that automagically edit videos and add audio to make them actually watchable. Magisto first introduced its cloud-based editing tool last September, and made the same tool available for iOS devices in early January. In just seven months, it's gotten more than a million iPhone users, who collectively have created more than 7 million edited videos. Now, Magisto is rolling out a new mobile app that will let Android owners make their own beautiful mobile videos.
 
Garmin Announces Thinner, Lighter Garmin 10 GPS Watch Top
forerunner-10-groupThe $129 Garmin 10 is a new GPS watch by Garmin. Designed as a direct competitor to "grab and go" sport watches from Nike and Polar, the new watch offers training features like "Virtual Pacer" and auto pause settings as well as run/walk break setting for beginning runners.
 
Barnes & Noble Moves Away From Bookstores For UK Nook Launch: John Lewis Dept Store Named First Partner Top
nookMore developments on Barnes & Noble's plans to launch its Nook devices in the UK, the first market outside of the U.S. to see the e-readers and tablets: today the company has announced that it will sell the devices via John Lewis, a retail heaven for the UK's middle class, but not a bookstore. The 37-store chain, which markets itself with the tagline "never knowingly undersold," will be selling devices starting with the Nook e-readers, the NOOK Simple Touch and NOOK Simple Touch with GlowLight, beginning in October, as well as online. B&N says that more retail locations will follow in the autumn. B&N first announced its plans to finally launch in the UK earlier this month. It will also sell the devices directly through its own retail site.
 
Enterprise App Testing Platform Sauce Labs Raises $3M From Salesforce And Triage Ventures Top
sauce-labsSauce Labs, a a company that develops a web application testing platform for enterprise developers, has raised $3 million Series B funding round led by Triage Ventures with Salesforce joining as an investor. The company is also releasing a mobile web application testing cloud for Mac OS X, iOS and Android environments. Sauce Labs offers automated and manual testing services for web applications in the enterprise. The Sauce testing cloud uses Selenium, an open source testing project and browser automation framework, to automate web browsers for testing purposes. With Sauce's extended Selenium-based software, agile developers can test web applications across all major browsers, including Internet Explorer (IE), Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera on Windows and Linux, while recording screenshots and videos of bugs.
 
Patent Case Aftermath: Samsung Down By $12B (And Still Slumping) While Apple, Nokia, RIM All Gain Top
Image (1) Samsung-galaxy-s.jpg for post 335827We still have to wait and see how the jury's ruling against Samsung over Apple patents will play out for the company in terms of actual fines, injunctions -- and crucially -- future device design for the handset giant. But for now the markets have spoken. Share prices for Samsung Electronics fell by 7.5% yesterday, equating to a $12 billion loss in market value. However, it looks like this was a single big hit rather than the start of a series of sustained blows for the Android handset maker: today, shares are still trading down, but not by nearly as much: 3.65%, giving it a market cap of $159.38 billion. Samsung's loss was really Apple's gain, although others like Nokia and RIM got a bump, too.
 
Tripbirds Pivots From Social Travel Omnibus To Social Hotel Booking Site Top
tripbirds-03-instagramWhen I interviewed Tripbirds co-founder Ted Valentin before the social travel recommendation site's launch in March, he told me that hotel bookings formed the core of Tripbirds' revenue-generation model. "If we can nail hotel recommendations, you don't have to do more to have a valuable business," he said. Now, Tripbirds is taking this idea to heart: the social travel network is from today paring down and relaunching as a social hotel bookings site, using friend recommendations and Instagram photos, supplemented by traditional hotel listings, to help you figure out the best place to stay wherever you are going. The reason for Tripbirds' pivot? The company -- backed by Index Ventures, Passion Capital and Creandum, angel investors Peter Read, Wrapp's Andreas Ehn, Soundcloud's Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung, and Path's Dave Morin -- decided that its service needed to be pared down and "easier to understand," according to Martina Elm, communications manager for the site. Before the relaunch, the social travel site was more open-ended -- the recommendations could be for places to stay, but they could also be about sites, bars and whatever else people wanted to post.
 
Motorola's Droid RAZR M 4G LTE Gets Detailed Ahead Of Official Unveiling Top
razrmIn case you hadn't heard yet, next week is going to be a busy one for gadget fiends — Amazon's got something brewing on the 6th, while Nokia and Motorola will be duking it for eyeballs since both have launch events scheduled for the 5th. Rumor has it that both of them will also be unveiling a pair of new smartphones — Nokia has the Phi and the Arrow, and Motorola is expected to pull back the curtains on the RAZR HD and the newly-leaked Droid RAZR M 4G LTE.
 
After Removal By Apple, Privacy App Clueful Returns Via The Web Top
clueful home pageBack in May, security company Bitdefender launched Clueful, an iPhone app that looked at the other apps on your phone and identified what they were doing with your data. However, according to Bitdefender, Apple removed the app from the App Store in late June without an explanation. Today, Clueful has relaunched ... but not on iOS. Instead, it's now a website where users can search for different apps and get basic facts like which ones are accessing your location, tracking your in-app usage, and reading your address book. For example, one of the apps that I use the most on my iPhone is Routesy, so I can look it up on the Clueful sit and see that it can display ads and track my location, while also encrypting my data. (Basically, nothing to worry about — which is good to know.)
 
Jack Dorsey To Keynote At TechCrunch Disrupt SF Top
disrupt-sf12-eventPeople don't give technology enough credit as an art form -- the specifics of infrastructure and hard science behind it ultimately overshadow its more inchoate creativity. But the cliched trope of a socially awkward engineer coding in a hole somewhere is on its way out. Instagram is a mass product used to cover news events, Twitter is a celebrity playground and you can use Square to pay at Starbucks: The people who build technology companies now have as much influence as Oprah. In fact, Oprah is hanging out on their platform.
 
MasterCard Inks 5-Year NFC/Mobile Payments Deal With UK's Everything Everywhere, Covers 27M Users Top
ee-mcMasterCard is once more extending its reach into mobile money services in Europe in partnership with a carrier -- this time in the mobile-savvy UK market. The payment processing giant has cut a five-year deal with Everything Everywhere, the JV between France Telecom's Orange and T-Mobile, to develop mobile payment solutions, with a "co-branded, prepaid solution for mobile devices" enabling contactless NFC payments one of the first planned out of the gate. Later, the two want to include money transfers, loyalty rewards and more.  Everything Everywhere is the UK's largest carrier and the deal will cover 27 million subscribers. It comes on the heels of MasterCard inking a mobile payments partnership with Deutsche Telekom covering Germany and other T-Mobile operations in Europe, as well as a deal with Turkcell in Turkey. MasterCard has also worked for the past three years with Orange on QuickTap, the first commercial NFC payment service in the UK, as well as the Orange Cash prepaid card.
 
Twitter API Changes Are Already Posing Challenges To Tweetbot Developers Top
Tweetbot for Mac Alpha warningTapbots has announced on their blog that the alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac will no longer be available. Now that Twitter limits an app's user base to only 100,000 users, Tweetbot is one of the victims of Twitter's new API rules. The third-party app currently offers a better user experience than Twitter's own official app. It is therefore a controversial outcome. Tapbots contacted Twitter to see if they could implement a workaround to prevent wasting user tokens during the free alpha test, but Twitter was intransigent.
 
Marissa Mayer Appoints Former Lockerz CEO & Amazon VP Kathy Savitt As Yahoo's New CMO Top
kathy_headshot-1While the search continues for a new top executive for Flickr, Yahoo and its new CEO have found a new chief marketing officer -- and one with former operations experience. This afternoon Yahoo announced that Kathy Savitt will be joining the company as CMO on September 14th and will report directly to Marissa Mayer. Yahoo gains significant experience at the top of its marketing arm, as Savitt has held a number of consumer, retail and tech executive positions during her career. Most recently, she was the founder and CEO of social commerce company, Lockerz, a site that now counts 45 million users.
 
Samsung V. Apple And The Obviousness Standard Top
apple-samsunggraphicEditor's Note: Leonid ("Lenny") Kravets is a patent attorney at Panitch, Schwarze, Belisario and Nadel, LLP in Philadelphia, PA. Lenny focuses his practice on patent prosecution and intellectual property transactions in computer-related technology areas. He specializes in developing IP strategy for young technology companies and blogs on this topic at StartupsIP. Follow Lenny on Twitter: @lkravets and@startupsIP. In the wake of Apple's billion plus dollar win in their patent suit against Samsung last week, much of the focus appears to be on the flaws in the patent system. Many argue that the suit involved patents that are "obvious," and that Apple is a bully in enforcing them. These arguments show blatant disregard for the job of Patent Examiners in reviewing patent applications and prior art, and the jury in hearing and deciding the case, which listened to both sides of the arguments and decided that the patents are valid.
 
Sequoia's Alfred Lin, Kleiner's Aileen Lee, SV Angel's David Lee, Greylock's James Slavet And Google Ventures' Bill Maris Will Be Disrupting SF Top
Screen Shot 2012-08-27 at 2.34.21 PMAfter a decade bereft of IPOs, venture-backed tech companies have come roaring back into the public markets over the last couple of years. But in case you think this means we're in a bubble, some of these companies -- including Zynga, Groupon and Facebook -- have struggled in their market debuts. So how are top investors handling the opportunities and pitfalls of taking top companies public in the current era? How are they changing their strategies to prepare the next generation of startups for big exits? You'll be hearing all the details at Disrupt SF during our panel with leading VCs on Wednesday, September 12. Here are some of the things we'll touch on... (and get your tickets here!)
 
FAA Reviewing Use Of Gadgets In The Air, But Forget About In-Flight Cell Phone Calls Top
united-plane-1Don't expect to make mid-flight phone calls from your smartphone anytime soon. While the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is putting together a group to re-examine current testing procedures and policies airlines have in place for gadgets, they will not be considering airborne use of cell phones for voice communication. But that is a small price to pay for safety, especially considering that these policies and procedures are way behind the speed at which we adopt new technology. The government-industry group will look at how these devices are tested for use in the air, as well as the current standards for use of portable electronic devices on board an airplane.
 
Apple Promotes VPs Craig Federighi And Dan Riccio, Announces Bob Mansfield Will Stay On Top
mansfield_hero20110204Apple announced today that Craig Federighi, vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and Dan Riccio, vice president of Hardware Engineering, have been promoted to senior vice presidents, where they will report to Apple CEO Tim Cook and serve on Apple's executive management team.  The company also announced that senior vice president of Hardware Engineering Bob Mansfield will stay on at Apple to "work on future products."
 

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