Saturday, December 1, 2012

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For A Stranger In Silicon Valley, Success Isn't Only About Who You Know Top
cherian-thomasEditor's note: Cherian Thomas is founder and CEO of Cucumbertown, a recipe-publishing platform. Cucumbertown raised its first round from the Valley a month ago and during the course of this journey, I realized that, as a first-time entrepreneur without any solid Valley footing, my run toward raising funds as a non-American co-founder was somewhat unique.
 
Why Did Google Buy BufferBox? Because The Entire Mail And Package Delivery System Is Broken Top
4372183674_874289f939_zToday, Google bought an Ontario-based company called BufferBox. In a way, it kind of came out of left field. Since it's a Google Ventures company, one can guess that those on Google's campus were very familiar with the service, which provides an easy alternative to waiting around for packages at your house. Not only is package delivery a bummer, because things get lost, hitting up your mailbox when you get home isn't that much fun either. The worst is when you don't even have a mailbox and you come home to twenty pieces of junkmail slipped under your door. The mail delivery system is broken and old. It's ripe for...disruption.
 
Enterprise Apps Are Moving To Single-Page Design Top
zendesk-logoEditor's note: Alexander Aghassipour is chief product officer and co-founder of Zendesk, and Shajith Chacko is lead software engineer at Zendesk. Our traditional app had been serving our business and customers quite well. Yet we recently decided to shift from an HTML browser-based app to a modern JavaScript-fueled single page application. We're here to tell you why and how.
 
The Weekly Good: Gurbaksh Chahal, BeProud.org And Putting An End To Hate Top
gchahal_1305182544_42Sometimes, it's not political powerhouses who have the power to change the world, sometimes it's true-blue entrepreneurs who live to solve problems. One such person is Gurbaksh Chahal, who has launched BeProud.org, launched after the shootings at the Sikh Temple of Wisconsin in August 2012, with some pretty impressive backers. The point of the multi-million dollar campaign is to put an end to hatred, and to encourage self-pride. Using the web to help bring attention to this is a fantastic idea. I had a chance to chat with Chahal on his background and the future of the BeProud initiative.
 
Backops Outsources Your Startup's Back Office Using The Best Enterprise Apps, Raises $1.5M Top
Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 3.24.42 PMEarly-stage startups die if they don’t nail their core products quickly. But like all companies, they also need to process loads of paperwork required for basic operations, from crunching numbers in Quickbooks to churning out piles of human-resource forms for new hires. So, as any startup executive knows, the balance between product development and rote paperwork is a constant frustration — which is where Backops comes in. The company, which has just closed a $1.5 million seed round, combines 15 or so modern business productivity tools with crowdsourced labor from stay-at-home workers. Startups get a simple dashboard that shows them what’s happening across the organization, from accounts received to job offers accepted. If the exec wants more detail than the dashboard’s accounting summaries and human resource statuses provides, they can request custom reports or data dumps from Backops. So, sure, there are a few established office outsourcing businesses out there already, like TriNet for human resources, but a closer look at Backops plans shows why it’s such a smart new idea. The first is the overall “consumerization of IT” trend. A wave of well-designed online business software has been gradually rising over the past decade, sweeping away expensive legacy systems for accounting, HR, content management, customer relations, and more. The result is that workers can learn new systems and produce results more easily. This fits in well with the other trend that Backops takes advantage of, which is crowdsourcing labor from people who work from home. A long list of companies, like Amazon and its Mechanical Turk, have created marketplaces for workers. Perhaps pushed by high unemployment and underemployment, more and more workers are looking for additional income through online jobs. Backops does a few other smart things to capitalize on these trends. On the software side, it’s staying nimble, swapping in new productivity apps as they become available. Right now it’s using Expensify to help process expenses, Bills.com for bill processing, and popular accounting software like Quickbooks. It doesn’t disclose the full list of vendors, but cofounder Mark H Goldstein tells me that they just brought in a new HR system over the weekend. That adaptability is in sharp contrast to the time it would take a business to change its own internal software, or the time it would take a traditional vendor. Even if business software is getting easier to use, experienced workers can do a better job
 
Settle Down, Facebook Users, 'Cause You're Not Getting $1M For Sharing A Pic Of A Fake Lottery Ticket Top
705372_10151174983342730_1814883642_oIn today's edition of Facebook scams comes the story of Nolan Daniels and his $1M lottery ticket picture. "Looks like I won't be going to work EVER!!!! Share this photo and I will give a random person 1 million dollars!", says the Facebook pic. Of course this is legit. It's on Facebook. Never mind that the numbers on the ticket are out-of-order.
 
Court Rules Yahoo Must Pay $2.7 Billion For Mexican Yellow Pages Breach Of Contract Top
Yahoo CourtYahoo says it "will vigorously pursue all appeals" of a non-final judgement by a Mexico City court ruling Yahoo must pay $2.7 billion for breaching its contract with Ideas Interactivas and its parent company Worldwide Directories. The web giant seems to have had a partnership to work with Interactive Ideas to release a printed Yellow Pages of business telephone numbers for Mexico.
 
Apps Like Rockmelt Ditch Social-Only Signup, Add Email So Privacy Buffs Can "Try Before You Pry" Top
Email SigninRockmelt's recently released iPad app only offered signup through Facebook and Twitter, leading 50 percent of users not to sign in at all. So today it followed Pinterest and Spotify by moving away from social-only signup and offering email as a login option. "Users don't want to add social up front and give access to their information," Rockmelt's Eric Vishria tells me. "People want a little dating before marriage."
 
Review: Squier By Fender Strat Guitar With USB Connection Top
scaledwm.IMG_1137The Squier Strat by Fender (or Squier by Fender Strat or however they want to name this thing) is one of the first guitars with a built-in digital signal processor. The guitar plugs right into any computer or 30-pin iOS device (Lightning cables are not yet available) so you can play directly into any sound editor including GarageBand and Logic Pro. It's a $200 guitar that's designed primarily to plug into a PC or Mac and allows you to almost entirely eschew a standalone amp.
 
Cinemagram Raises $8.5M Series A Led By Menlo Ventures To Make Mobile Photo Sharing More Animated Top
mzl.mkabytvj.320x480-75Cinemagram, a startup founded in Montreal that's now moving to San Francisco, today announced an $8.5 million Series A round via AllThingsD. The investment comes from Menlo Ventures, Khosla Ventures, Real Ventures and Atlas, and stands as an exception to the decidedly reserved climate for follow-on capital after a startup's seed round. So what's Cinemagram's secret?
 
Paul Maritz To Lead New Group At EMC That Merges Greenplum With VMware's Cloud Foundry, SpringSource, And Gemstome Top
maritz_paul_vmware_370Paul Maritz will lead a new platform group that will combine VMware's Cloud Foundry, SpringSource and Gemstone with Greenplum, EMC's big data platform.
 
Productivity App Evernote Gets Another $85M, ~$64M In Secondary Financing, Led By London's AGC Equity Top
evernoteEvernote, the personal data and productivity app that now has over 40 million users, is today announcing it has raised another $85 million, with 75% of that, $63.75 million, in the form of a secondary investment. We have heard that the raise was looking to be done on a $2 billion valuation.
 
Update: Facebook Website Experienced 20 Minutes Of Downtime, Mobile App And Website Were Still Working Top
fb-downPeople on Twitter are complaining that Facebook has been down for about 10 minutes at the time of writing this article. Many TechCrunch writers could confirm the issue. The mobile app and website are still working though.
 
With 1B Pageviews Under Its Belt, UGC Giant Wikia Raises $10.8M From IVP, Bessemer & Amazon Top
Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 11.48.32 AMUser generated content company Wikia is breaking the news of its raise of over $10.8 million in Series C funding today in a press release soon to be sent out to tech media. The financing was led by Institutional Venture Partners with a follow on from existing investors Bessemer Ventures Partners and Amazon.com. The company, which is already profitable according to the release, will use the cash to bolster its mobile and video efforts. With the added financing, Wikia's total funding is now $25 million.
 
Kngine Aims To Build A Natural Language-Driven App That Can Answer Any Question Top
Kngine-for-iphoneKngine (pronounced kin-gin, short for knowledge engine) is one of those startups with a goal that's both straightforward and impressively ambitious — it wants to build an app that can answer any question. In fact, when you open the app, it prompts you to "ask me anything." When I watched the promotional video (embedded below), the first thing I thought of was Apple's Siri. And while Kngine co-founder and CEO Haymad ElFadeel doesn't shy away from the Siri comparison, he also said Kngine has a slightly different goal. One of Siri's big selling points is allowing you to access a lot of the iPhone's functions through voice, so when your questions are more fact- then task-based (i.e., Kngine's strong point) it relies on Wolfram Alpha.
 
Fab Has Its First Million-Dollar Day; Sold More Than $6.5M Worth Of Products This Past Week Top
fab-comDesign-focused e-commerce site Fab released a number of data this morning, and it's impressive to say the least. Fab has sold more than $6.5 million worth of product this past week, up from $1.7 million during the same period last year. That's up 300 percent from last year.
 
What Will Happen When The Surface Pro Isn't The Only Flagship Win8 Tablet In Town? Top
2012-11-30 13.58.43The Surface Pro launches in January, just after the holiday rush. It's a pricey bauble at $899 plus an extra hundred for the Touch Cover. But everyone is excited. This is the model most of the Surface sympathizers are waiting for. It has the full Windows 8 experience, a capable Intel chipset, and an ecosystem two decades in the making. But here's the problem: come January the Surface Pro could have serious competition from Asus, Samsung, Lenovo and maybe even HP. In short, what happens when the big guys finally catch up to Microsoft?
 
Foodspotting Launches A Pilot Rewards-For-Photos Program In San Francisco Top
foodspotting rewardsFoodspotting is launching a new feature today that allows restaurants to promote themselves to hungry locals — and also provides one of the first big opportunities for the startup to make money. Co-founder and CEO Alexa Andrzejewski said that the app's development has had three distinct stages. First, it needed to recruit the "foodspotters" themselves, namely the people who want to share photos of their favorite dishes. Then, with the redesign in February, the company tried to expand beyond the foodspotters to "food seekers" by making it easier to rate food and browse dish recommendations. Now the company is starting phase three — "connecting foodspotters and food seekers with restaurants."
 
Google Acquires Waterloo-Based E-Commerce Startup, Amazon Locker Competitor And YC Graduate BufferBox Top
BufferBoxOfficialGoogle today announced their acquisition of YC alumni BufferBox, a Waterloo-based startup that specializes in providing users with temporary lockers to receive delivery of packages from online e-commerce retailers. The company is led by a founding team of three University of Waterloo graduates, Mike McCauley, Aditya Bali and Jay Shah. The startup actually already shares a building with Google's Waterloo office, and is located in the Communitech accelerator offices in that city.
 
Flash Deals Site NoMoreRack Raises $12M, Hits 5.8M Members Top
screen-shot-2012-07-05-at-4-38-39-pmBack in July, we caught up with New York-based startup NoMoreRack, a flash sales site that, unlike some of the most popular players in the space, isn't relying on luxury products or fashion to drive traffic. Instead, the young startup offers everyday products at reduced prices -- an average of 70 to 80 percent off everything from consumer electronics to clothing -- in an effort to become the Walmart or Target of deals.
 

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