Tuesday, November 27, 2012

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Economic Impact Of Startup Accelerators: $1.6B+ Raised, 4,800+ Jobs Created, 2,000 Startups Funded Top
startup-seed-funding-300x200Today, there seem to be more business accelerators than there are startups to fill their classes and cohorts. It seems that not a week goes by without the launch of another accelerator or seed starter fund. In fact, as Peter Relan said in a recent post (riffing on Chris Dixon), accelerators have become an industry segment in their own right. He also goes so far as to surmise that -- just as it is for startups -- 90 percent of accelerators are likely to fail.
 
Churn: The Problem Of The New Tech Journalism Top
coffeegrinderEnterpriseA decade ago, the news cycle for a CE product worked like this: a PR person contacted a major title - Laptop, say, or PC Magazine - and offered an exclusive for a cover story. "Hey," they'd say. "Hot new laptop coming out! It's got that new Wi-Fi!" An early version of the laptop would arrive at the title's office and someone would write a detailed review of it because, let's face it, there was little else to do at the office before the Internet was pervasive. Then, two months later the story would go to press and then maybe end up on some nascent Internet CMS hacked together by a designer after hours. The circle of life, then, for a tech product was about half a year. Plenty of time for back and forth, hand-holding, and handsome product shots.
 
Google's 'Defend Your Net' Campaign Implies That All Of The Internet Is 'Fair Use' Top
vanilla-ice-pictures-eba969edb86e9971aa5cb3e397a0cc16Does the Internet exist to inspire and inform society and therefore limits copyright holders ability to block information? Hidden between the lines of Google's otherwise predictable "Defend Your Net" campaign in Germany, where the legislature may allow publishers to charge for snippets of content on Google search results, is a very intriguing argument: information on the Internet is a public good.
 
Mozilla Launches Custom Firefox With MSN Edition Top
Firefox with MSNMozilla just launched a special customized edition of Firefox for fans of Microsoft's MSN portal. Firefox with MSN comes with MSN as the default home page and automatically opens msnNOW, the memetracker-like version of MSN as a Firefox app tab. And of course, this edition offers an MSN theme and uses Bing as the default search engine instead of Google, which is the standard for regular Firefox releases.
 
Ex-Foursquare Designers Focus On Sunrise, Want You To Do More With Your Calendar Top
ClouDrop 27 nov. 2012 15-46-54Two of the team of eight designers at Foursquare have recently left to focus on Sunrise, a calendar product to do more with your calendar, with data from Google Calendar, Facebook, LinkedIn and others. They currently offer a daily email and are actively working on the next version. According to them, the calendar can be a very powerful tool and nobody has figured it out yet.
 
Microsoft Says It Has Sold 40 Million Windows 8 Licenses To Date Top
windows8Microsoft just announced that it has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses so far. This is the first update the company has given since it announced that it had sold 4 million upgrades over the first weekend after Windows 8 went on sale earlier this month. According to Microsoft, "Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades."
 
Social Discovery Platform At The Pool Emerges From Beta With Funding, A Redesign & Users In 50 Countries Top
Logo500At The Pool, a Los Angeles-based social discovery network that aims to be the anti-Facebook (and anti-Twitter for that matter), today announced it has emerged from beta and is in the process of closing a $1 million seed financing round led by Clearstone Venture Partners. Also participating in the investment are a bevy of Los Angeles-based angels, including Buck Jordan of Canyon Creek Capital and existing investors David Carter (a founding member of Amplify), and distinguished professor at UCLA and one of the fathers of ARPANET, Leonard Kleinrock.
 
Style Site Polyvore Debuts Its First Ever iPhone App, Touts Cash Flow Positive Operations Top
0 followingPolyvore, the interactive fashion and style website that lets people create collages of apparel and accessories using images from any online store, has had solid growth since it first came on the scene back in 2007. Its monthly unique visitor count has steadily grown to more than 19 million, and, co-founders Jess Lee and Pasha Sadri tell me, the 55-person company's operations recently went beyond being merely profitable to achieve cash flow positive status. What's kind of surprising is that Polyvore has achieved this kind of scale all without having any native mobile apps. The company has seen a decent amount of traffic from its HTML5-powered mobile website, but having a native app for the iPhone especially has been an oft-requested feature from users for some time now.
 
Drop Everything Immediately And Make Your Own Gangnam Style Video With JibJab Top
mikeA TechCrunch tradition: wasting time in the office by putting ourselves and coworkers into JibJab videos (and then posting them). They just released a Gangnam Style one, starring you as Psy. Get to it.
 
Amazon Web Services Expected To Hit $1.5 Billion In Revenues For 2012 Top
Amazon Web Services LogoAmazon Web Services (AWS) is expected to earn $1.5 billion in revenues this year, but overall the organization still remains under-appreciated as a core asset of Amazon.com. But that may change this week as AWS holds its first conference in Las Vegas. The event should give more attention to an organization that has had arguably the deepest impact on IT and the enterprise software market.
 
Mihir Shah Is Out As Tapjoy CEO in Surprise Shake-Up. Former Disney Exec Wadsworth Steps In. Top
tapjoyIn a surprise shake-up at mobile app marketing company Tapjoy, CEO Mihir Shah resigned today while a former Disney executive Steve Wadsworth stepped in. There was an all-hands meeting at around 11 a.m. this morning and Mark Leschley, who is now chairman of the board, introduced Wadsworth. Shah wasn't present. Wadsworth had been at Disney for 17 years, working on the company's digital media and technology business, and he oversaw the company's roughly $700 million acquisition of social gaming company Playdom.
 
With 6.5M Members, AppTrailers Adds A Free Daily App Top
AppTrailers-Free Today ExampleAppTrailers, an app that rewards users for watching videos that promote other apps, just released an update with a new "Free Today" section. The section will highlight one app per day — either a paid app being offered for free or a freemium app with normally a paid virtual that's being provided for free.
 
Democratic Whoopsy: Kim Jong-Un and Mohamed Morsey Lead Time's 'Person Of The Year' Poll Top
1101081229_400The Internet has a hard time taking things seriously and will happily enact silly vengeance on websites daring enough to leave important tasks up to a vote. Time's coveted "Person of the Year" poll has been hijacked by thousands of pranksters who have voted up the not-so democratic icons, North Korea's Kim Jong-Un and Egypt's Mohamed Morsey. The up votes could be legitimate exercise in satire, punishing Time for even floating the idea of those two in a poll next to Obama and brave political dissidents. But, if Morsey--or worse, Kim--actually wins the poll, Time will have egg on its face (both Kim and Morsey have nearly twice the number of votes as 3rd place).
 
Microsoft Says Many Gmail Users Would Consider Switching To Outlook.com, Launches Android App, Conversation Threading & More Top
6087.SUMMARY_Outlook_300x166_for outlook.com.jpg-550x0In typical Microsoft fashion, the company just announced a number of momentum numbers for Outlook.com and also launched quite a few new features for its web-based email service at the same time.
 
Google Drive Now More Tightly Integrated Into Gmail: Lets You Share Files Up 10 GB Top
drive1Remember when entire companies were launched, primarily to work around the fact that Microsoft Exchange-based email systems had message size limits that impacted the size of email attachments you could send? How far we've come. Today, Google announced it's integrating its online file storage and collaboration service Google Drive (formerly Docs) even further into Gmail, enabling emails to be sent with up to 10 GB of files attached.
 
Apple Reportedly Fires The Manager Directly In Charge Of The iOS 6 Maps Team Top
ios6mapsA report today from Bloomberg claims that Apple SVP Eddy Cue, who took over control of Maps from Scott Forstall when that senior executive and iOS architect departed the company, has fired Richard Williamson, a manager who oversaw the Maps team. The move is part of Apple's continued efforts to right the faults consumers reacted negatively to in Maps.
 
Revl Comes Out Of Beta, Promises To Help Students And Other Job Seekers Get Noticed Top
revl logoDennis Albinus recently told me that it's time for a new kind of job site, which is what the CEO is trying to build with Revl. Albinus wants job seekers to build their profiles on Revl, which is coming out of beta today. Obviously, many people already do that on LinkedIn, but Albinus argued that the existing site mostly serves older, white-collar workers. He pointed to a Royal Pingdom report which found that 79 percent of LinkedIn users are 35 or older (compared to 65 percent for Facebook and 55 for Twitter). At the same time, unemployment/underemployment numbers remain high for people under 25. So Revl is aiming for that younger crowd, as well other folks who may be reentering the job market, such as military veterans.
 
Gift Guide: The 5th Generation iPod Touch Top
giftguide-1280px-ipod-touchApple's iPod touch is arguably among the last of a dying breed, being a standalone media player that isn't also a phone. But just because you're among a species on the verge of extinction doesn't mean you can't shine, and the 5th generation iPod touch brings a lot of goodness to the table for a connected mobile device that can't call anyone.
 
Apprenda Launches A Hybrid Development Platform For Developing Apps On-Premise And The Cloud Top
cloudThere is a lot of news this week in the platform-as-a-service market (PaaS), with companies like Apprenda extending its technology to offer on-premise and hybrid methods for deploying enterprise applications.
 
Obvious-Incubated Lift Lands $2.5M From Spark Capital, SV Angel To Help You Build Good Habits Top
Screen shot 2012-11-27 at 6.34.24 AMAfter nearly a year in development, Lift launched its first mobile product in August behind an ambitious goal: Boost human potential by helping people achieve their goals. It almost sounds New Age-y, but co-founders Tony Stubblebine and Jon Crosby are serious about doing their part to change the world and support personal achievement. The founders aren't alone. From the get-go, Lift has been incubated and seed-funded by Obvious Corp., the hybrid accelerator created by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone, Evan Williams and early Twitter VP Jason Goldman. And now Lift is adding more believers to its support network, announcing today that it has closed a $2.5 million series A round, led by Bijan Sabet of Spark Capital, who joined the co-founders and Ev Williams on Lift's board of directors.
 

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