The latest from TechCrunch
- 33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups
- Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital
- Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work
- Bump Now Lets You Swap App Recommendations With A Tap
- Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP
| 33Needs Brings Crowdsourced Funding To Social Startups | Top |
| The crowdsourced funding craze is picking up steam. Tonight we see the launch of 33needs , a site where socially-minded startups can raise initial seed funding from individual contributors on the Web. It is Kiva meets Kickstarter . Social startups post their “needs” in terms of how much money they are looking to raise, what problems they are going to solve and how they are going to do it, along with a video to help spread the word virally. People can invest $10, $100, $1,000 or more, and in return instead of getting shares in the company, they get a promised percentage of revenues for a specified period of time like 5 percent of revenues for three years. The startups seeking funds are for-profit ventures, as is 33needs. Some of the launch startups include Emergent Energy Group , which wants to bring renewable energy projects to different communities in the U.S., and HalfUnited , a new clothing company which feeds hungry children with part of its profits (see video below). 33needs itself takes a 5 percent cut of any money raised, and nothing if the goal is not met. Generally, thee social startups are trying to raise anywhere from $50,000 or more get their businesses off the ground. They all try to mix profits with creating social good, which increasingly also resonates as a marketing strategy to consumers who want to feel like they are making a difference in the world. Whether or not they actually are is a different matter, but the most enduring social startups will end up being those who create a measurable impact. The company was founded by Josh Tetrick, a social entrepreneur and former Fulbright Scholar who worked in Africa and for President Clinton. He doesn’t see 33needs as a replacement for angel or seed capital, but rather as a launching pad for ideas that may otherwise never have made it beyond a dinner conversation. “It’s a launching pad that builds fans, breeds a loyal base of people who’ll buy your stuff and use your product,” he argues. “There is so much pent up demand to invest in this stuff—not donate, but invest.” But using crowdfunding to help start companies, as opposed to microloans for projects (Kickstarter) or people (Kiva), sets a higher bar. These require more money than a simple project. One of the key learnings from Kickstarter, for instance, is that small projects can grow into full-blown startups, but they don’t have to (watch this interview with Kickstarter founder Perry Chen ). With 33needs it will be all or nothing. So the startups better make their pitches really good. CrunchBase Information 33needs Kickstarter Kiva Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Real Estate Community RentJuice Gets $6.2 Million From Tim Draper And Highland Capital | Top |
| RentJuice , an online community that allows real estate agents and brokers to view rental data in real time is announcing its Series B round of $6.2 million in funding today, led by Highland Capital and esteemed Draper Fisher Jurvetson founder Tim Draper . While not consumer facing, RentJuice is still useful to consumers as it can provide a broker with up to the minute data on whether a given property is available, thus preventing inaccuracies. It gives brokers “one-click syndication” or the ability to automatically post properties to consumer real estate sites like Craigslist, Trulia and Zillow. RentJuice also offers premium accounts where users can upgrade to features that automate administrative work like lead gen, advertising and paperwork. RentJuice attempts to disrupt the days it usually takes for landlords to complete paperwork and manually fax over hotsheets to agents and is focused on speed. Said CEO David Vivero , "With this capital, we can speed up development of our real-time rental platform and make it available to property managers and leasing agents all across the country." RentJuice will also be using the money to expand its staff, and is currently hiring. CrunchBase Information RentJuice Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Err, Call Me: Vumber Gives You Throw-Away Phone Numbers For Dating, Work | Top |
| By now you’ve probably heard of Google Voice, a service that lets you take one phone number and configure it to ring all of your phones — work, mobile, home, whatever — with plenty of settings to manage your inbound and outbound calls. But what if you wanted the opposite: a service that lets you spawn a multitude of phone numbers to be used and discarded at your leisure? That’s where Vumber comes in. The service has actually been around for four years, but it was originally marketed exclusively toward people on dating sites. The use case is obvious: instead of handing out your real phone number to strangers, Vumber lets you spin up a new phone number, which you then redirect to your real phone. Then, when your date reveals that he hates animals and has lived in his mother’s basement for a decade, you can simply deactivate the number. Around 30-40% of the service still caters to online dating, but Vumber can be used for other things. Cofounder Cliff Wener says that some of Vumber’s biggest customers are advertising agencies that use it to assign different phone numbers to regional ad placements in print media, so that they can track the response rate (this isn’t unique to Vumber — other firms that cater exclusively to advertisers offer similar features). Beyond these two examples, Wener says it’s tough to track down the more niche use cases, because the whole service is anonymous, and you don’t have to tell Vumber what you’re using a phone number for. But it’s not hard to come up with some creative ideas. The service works with just about any phone, and it’s now bolstering its smartphone presence to streamline its interface. An application is already available for iOS, with an Android app coming next month and SMS support on the way as well. Vumber isn’t the only service that lets you set up a secondary phone number — Line2 , which we’ve covered before, does as well. But Line2 is really catering to users who just need one extra number, not a slew of them. Vumber costs $9.95 per month for your first number, with additional numbers available on a sliding scale starting at $3.95 (you can negotiate bulk discounts). Vumber raised $2.5 million in private capital before the company was acquired by video chat community Paltalk in November 2009 for an undisclosed sum. CrunchBase Information Vumber Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Bump Now Lets You Swap App Recommendations With A Tap | Top |
| You can tell a lot about a person from their mobile app library. Are they avid Doodle Jumpers, or do they prefer to challenge their wits with a few rounds of Civilization? Do they stretch their vocal chords to the beats of T-Pain or Glee’s background choir? You get the idea. Given how much time people spend building out their app libraries, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that they love to share their collections with friends. In fact, Bump — an app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices — says that users have been asking for an easy way to share lists of their favorite apps for ages, and that it’s the second most popular request overall (behind music sharing, which has already been implemented). Today, all of those users are getting their wish granted. Bump has just launched a new version of its iPhone application that makes it easy to share apps with your friends. Fire up the new feature, and you’ll be shown a list of apps that have been installed on your phone (more on that in a moment). Tap the ones you want to recommend to your friend, Bump your phone with theirs, and they’ll immediately receive a list of your recommendations along with links to the App Store for each. Now, Bump isn’t the first application that lets you get a list of your iPhone applications. We’ve seen others like Chomp and Appolicious , which let you share app recommendations with friends and can also suggest applications based on your previous ratings. Update : Appsfire allows you to detect the applications on your phone and share them over the air. The difference, says Bump co-founder David Lieb, is that the app exchange using Bump is more personal. You aren’t posting your recommendations to followers on Facebook, or through the application’s internal social network — you’re tapping your phone together with a friend and swapping recommendations immediately (assuming they have Bump too). Now, Apple doesn’t actually let developers do this through a native API — every service that generates a list of your installed apps has to find a workaround. Lieb believes that Bump’s is generally better than the competition’s, and while he wouldn’t get into details on how it works, he says it involves looking at the list of applications that are currently running on the phone. The only catch: apps that you don’t run frequently won’t show up. Of course, if you’re recommending an application to your friend, then it probably isn’t sitting dormant on your phone. Bump isn’t just available for the iPhone — it has a strong Android presence as well. Lieb says that the Android version already supports basic app sharing, and it’s currently working on an overhaul due out later this month. This new version is going to allow users on iPhone to recommend apps for Android and vice versa (assuming, of course, that the same application is available for both operating systems). CrunchBase Information Bump Technologies Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Egypt Shuts Down Noor, Its Last ISP | Top |
| We’re hearing reports on Twitter that the coverage of Noor Group’s DSL service, Egypt’s last standing ISP which powers the Egyptian Stock Exchange as well as sites of major brands like Coca Cola and Exxon Mobile is being shut down, meaning the nation will lose nearly all the remaining high-speed links to the outside world. According to Jacob Applebaum the shut down is occurring in stages and certain sites are still online, “noor.net shut all except NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors.” The ISP’s website itself is offline. @ioerror Jacob Appelbaum It looks like our last terrestrial hope has been shut down; my connections to systems on Noor are all down. #egypt #jan25 about 7 hours ago via web Retweet Reply Effective Measure CEO Scott Julian confirms that the traffic from Noor has trickled to a halt and the last two ISPs are offline, “Effective Measure was recording active traffic from Noor coming in the hour of 11pm last night up until midnight Egypt time but from 12am onwards, we have no active sessions from Noor IP addresses and no data has appeared in the logs.” Julian also points out these connectivity blackouts happened around same time as the last batch and posits that this is a well organized effort. Dial-up is presumably still working as Google and Twitter have just launched a speak-to-tweet service at http://twitter.com/speak2tweet . Update: Internet Monitoring service Rensys is confirming the Noor shut down. Applebaum has tweeted out this graph of the current set of IPv6 addresses online in Egypt. Noor is not one of them. | |
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