Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Y! Alert: TechCrunch

Yahoo! Alerts
My Alerts

The latest from TechCrunch

Pick Or Skip Is Chatroulette, With Pants Top
For the small percentage of our readers who do not enjoy a random penis sighting, comes Pick or Skip , a cleaned-up version of Chatroulette . The idea behind the new site was to build a safe and more structured experience on top of the random connection/conversation aspect that made Chatroulette such a craze last year. To safeguard from unsightly sightings, Pick or Skip enforces email validation and the ability to report abuse. These reports are reviewed and could result in ‘naughty’ users being barred from the service completely. The penis-free environment will surely be seen favorably by most, but Pick or Skip has a couple of more features that boost engagement. For example, users are able to enter language-centric versions of the site, specifically, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. In that sense, it’s much more reminiscent of startups like Tinychat . Then, Pick or Skip also boasts ‘channels’ in which users can attempt to have random conversations in. These include: Dating, Finance, Technology, Friendship and Sports. Finally, random conversations can become meaningful relationships courtesy of ‘Contacts’ functionality. Users can add other users they randomly ended up talking with, or import contacts from their Gmail and Hotmail and other popular email services.
 
Mobile Firefox Skips Flash In Favor Of HTML5 Top
A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4 , Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market, . The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safar i with your Firefox desktop browser). One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone. Some other features I really like in the browser is the way it handles tabbed browsing, its snapping zoom, and the Awesome Screen. Your tabs are always available in a thin column on the left which can be accessed with a simple swipe. If you are on a webpage that is not optimized for a mobile device, you can snap the zoom with a double tap to align with a column or box on the page and then scroll up and down normally. The Awesome Screen is the mobile version of the Awesome Bar on FireFox desktop. As you type, it makes suggestions based on your previous browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs. CrunchBase Information Firefox Fennec Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google Commerce Gets Updated With Instant Search, In-Store Availability, Recommendations And More Top
For the past two years, Google has offered Commerce Search, a hosted enterprise search product to power online retail stores and e-commerce websites. While Google offers hosted enterprise search to web platforms, Commerce Search was the the company’s first custom-tailored search product for a specific vertical. The search giant has been steadily updating Commerce Search since 2009, but today’s release is the retail search product’s most significant update in the past two years. The first two versions of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, a merchandising dashboard, query autocompletion and more. Google even dropped the starting price of Commerce last year, to $25,000 per year for 3 million searches and 50,000 items indexed. Google’s new version of Commerce Search has been updated with a few more compelling features including instant search, local product availability, search recommendations and more. Google introduced Instant Search last Fall, which enables results to dynamically change as you type. Google has added this feature to Google Commerce search, and will return product results within search with every keystroke from the search bar. Google introduced local product availability in its own Product Search last November, and is now offering the same feature to Commerce Search customers. Online retailers can offer more data on whether a product is available in the retailer’s nearby brick and mortar store, within search results. Another useful feature in the new version are product recommendations. So when a user searches on Commerce Search, Google will show similar products that other customers viewed and bought. Enhanced merchandising tools allow retailers to create product promotions that display in banners alongside related search queries, and to set query-based landing pages (for example, when a visitor types [shoes], they're directed to a "shoe" page). And Google has made Commerce Search mobile friendly, so retailers can easily incorporate search into mobile sites. Google has added a number of well-known retailers to the Commerce Search platform over the past year, including Forever21, General Nutrition Company (GNC) and L'Occitane. Google faces competition from Omniture , IBM , Endeca and others. CrunchBase Information Google Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Kickstarter: The Cosmonaut Stylus Treats Tablets Like Whiteboards, Not Paper (and that's awesome) Top
Kickerstart is really the go-to place for all things iPad/iPhone. If you have a random case you wanna sell, put it up on Kickstarter. It’s kind of a running joke with us right now because of the sheer amount of iPad products on the site. But the Cosmonaut is different . It’s actually clever. Tablet users should understand the benefit here. Writing on an iPad isn’t like writing on paper. It’s different and as the embedded Kickstarter video explains, the experience is more like using a white board and so this stylus was designed with that in mind. The kicker (get it? because it’s on Kickstarter? nvm) is that this project doesn’t have multiple tiers of funding. Pledge what you want. There’s only 3000 funding slots open and pledges start at just a $1. Clever. Read More
 
Benchmark Capital's Stand: We Will Never Do a Seed or Late Stage Fund Top
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one , go here. In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund (for now?), it spun off the top performing UK fund Balderton Capital and retrained its focus firmly on the US. Earlier this year, when early stage investors were losing deals at the hands of the super angels and firm-after-firm launched aggressive seed investing programs, Benchmark Capital did not. It refused to compete with the Ron Conways and Mike Maples of the world; it would wait its turn and invest later. And now – as Benchmark’s early stage peers are raising $1 billion growth funds and throwing huge sums of money at established companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon – once again, Benchmark Capital is refusing to follow suit. It quietly closed its new fund in January. There was no press release, and it was for the exact same amount of money as the last: $425 million. “We are making a very conscious bet here,” said general partner Bill Gurley in an exclusive sit-down interview with TechCrunch. “Where we’ve been has played a big role in who we are today. What we took away from the past is what it is we do well, and that’s classic early stage investing, taking board seats and adding value to each company on a high-service level. Those other things– late stage, seed stage, cleantech, international– all distract from that.” The kind of masters-of-the-universe swagger documented by Randall Stross in his  bubble era book about Benchmark ? Never again, says Gurley. Adds general partner Matt Cohler, “Our aim is to be the entrepreneur’s first phone call. That doesn’t scale.” This is hardly the first time a top Sand Hill Road firm has uttered these sentiments. Everyone said them back in 2002 or so, when nearly every $1 billion fund was “right-sized,” management fees were returned to investors and general partners sheepishly admitted that the venture business was a boutique industry that just doesn’t scale. The difference is that Gurley and Cohler are still saying it at a time when many of their peers seem to have swung back to we-can-do-it-all extremes. Sure, plenty of venture funds haven’t raised a mega-late stage fund. But that’s because most of them can’t. Benchmark is one of the handful of firms that could raise as much cash as it wants, but it is stubbornly refusing to deviate from classic, board-seat-taking, apprentice-style, we-don’t-have-a-million-associates-we-just-have-general-partners style of venture capital. Did Benchmark invest in Facebook? Nope. And unlike competitors, they’ve moved on. Sure, some argue they pay up on sky-high valuations like the rest of the Valley, particularly for companies like Twitter and Quora . But for Benchmark, “paying up” is more like paying a valuation in the hundreds of millions, not tens of billions. What’s the real value of investing in Facebook at a heady $30 billion valuation? It probably won’t lose money, but it’s hard to argue it’ll yield a venture-style return. (That term is thrown around a lot these days. For the record, Benchmark considers a venture-style return to be ten times invested capital.) That means there are two benefits: Marketing and access to the greater Facebook network. When Benchmark missed the early rounds of Facebook, the firm went another route to getting Facebook cred and connections: Hiring Cohler , an early Facebook executive, as a general partner. While other firms have chased later and later Facebook secondary deals, Cohler has been gobbling up some of the better investments from the Facebook diaspora like Quora and Asana. The difference in approach delights some major limited partners who I spoke with over the last few weeks. Each requested anonymity for obvious reasons: Getting in the top firms isn’t easy, and no LP wants to be on the record criticizing one over the other. But this comment was echoed by several pension funds and endowments: “We’ve been a little frustrated at this next level of product extension. We have seen that early stage doesn’t scale. With very few exceptions, the jury is pretty clear.” Besides, many of the top LPs that may be in Benchmark are also in Accel or Greylock– firms that got into Facebook already at a much nicer price . For them, shares at $30 billion don’t have much of an upside. “We like our cost basis in Facebook,” one LP said. “We were fortunate to be in this company early. We don’t need to double and triple down at these levels.” In other words: Let the LPs control their own allocation, don’t try to control it for them. Of Benchmark this LP said, “I am looking for category killers, and that is what they are looking to do.” Now, several funds getting into the late stage business have noted that no one is holding a gun to these LPs’ heads. They’re choosing to back these mega-funds, and if they don’t want to, plenty of others will. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean they love the strategy. Frequently, top firms raise expansion funds at the same time they raise early stage funds and the implication is clear: If you want to keep your place in one, you better pay up for the new vehicle too. “It’s a tough conversation, because capital calls have been running at a pretty fast clip, but the liquidity isn’t covering those capital calls,” one LP said. In other words, LPs have been generous with venture capital allocations and those firms are investing in more and more companies. But for the last decade, returns have been abysmal. LPs get that returns take time in the venture business, but there’s a limit to how long they can wait. As a result, it’s one of the first sustained periods in more than a decade where there is not a flood of capital trying to wedge itself into the venture business. Quite the opposite: Most LPs are uncomfortably over-exposed to the asset class. And then there’s the biggest complaint roiling LPs: The fees. “The ugliest part of this is the same fee streams are attached to these funds, a 2-2.5% management fee and a 30% carry,” said one LP. “Even though some firms say the justification for keeping the growth funds separate is they don’t want lower returns to drag down the early stage fund.” Most LPs I talked to granted many of these late stage deals– like the ones detailed in part one of this series on the new late stage frenzy– were unique opportunities, filling a void in the market for great companies that already have sizable revenues and didn’t want to go public but needed capital. But as we wrote last week, the fear is there are only so many of those companies out there. “We like firms that give us the option, but not the obligation,” said one LP, with several others echoing the sentiment. That’s precisely the reason some firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock do mega-deals out of the same fund– if they never find another good one, they can shift their focus back to early stage. For the broader startup ecosystem, the question isn’t whether Benchmark can ignore late stage deals and still make money. The firm is in solid shape with investments in Yelp and Twitter and up-and-comers like Quora, Asana and Uber, not to mention decent exits in Mint, Riot Games and ServiceSource , which went public just last week. Nor is the question really whether other VCs will lose money on these heady deals. That’s the core distinction between what some in the media are calling a bubble now, and an actual bubble like the one in the late 1990s where the public participated in wild speculation. Top venture firms can lose some money or break even on a few deals, and the economic fall-out will be pretty minimal. The real question for the industry is about the opportunity cost of distraction should the later stage opportunity prove, once again, to look better on paper than in the actual returns paid to investors. Benchmark believes its stance will give the firm an advantage over its peers when it comes to investing in the next generation of winners. The social media giants have been pretty well sorted out, now it’s just a question of who can grab remaining stakes and at what price. But what about the next generation? Conflicts are just now starting to surface, as many entrepreneurs trying to disrupt giants like Zynga, Groupon or Facebook quietly express reservations about taking money from a firm that has more money in those companies than it will ever put in any early stage deal, no matter how good. It’s hard to know where loyalties lie in these situations and the question of conflicts within venture portfolios is coming up again and again on entrepreneur and VC blogs and in our own episodes of Ask a VC . Indeed, some other firms have noted in private conversations that late stage investments not only raised competitive issues with early stage hopeful-competitors, but with international companies competing with Zynga and Groupon in their home markets. The surface of these competitive ramifications hasn’t even been scratched yet. ”It creates weird situations where bigger chunks of money tend to steal the attention,” Gurley says. “At that level, fees can be distracting.” CrunchBase Information Benchmark Capital Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Behold The World's Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoors: 40 Gigapixels Of Awesome Top
We interrupt our live coverage of breaking news about Internet companies from around the world to point you to this phenomenal 360-degrees photo (okay, actually it’s 2,947 pictures stitched together). It is, to our and the photographer’s knowledge, the largest photo ever taken indoors with 280,000 x 140,000 pixels of awesomesauce. In the screenshot above, in the painting on the ceiling, do you see that angel holding a book, right below the cross? No worries if you can’t, because I zoomed in to give you a close-up: That’s how freaking amazing this picture is. The photo was taken by photographer and 360cities founder Jeffrey Martin, and shows the interior of the magnificent, 18th-century baroque library you can find inside the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. For more background, head on over to Wired . The details, for the fans, courtesy of Martin: The photo is 40 gigapixels (40,000 megapixels); 280,000 x 140,000 pixels; made of 2947 images joined together; used a Canon 550D and 200mm lens; print size 23m x 11m; stitched file size 280GB; cut into 85,000 tiles for web delivery. Okay, okay – one more: Oh, so you thought that was it? Nuh uh! Here’s a video for good measure: CrunchBase Information 360Cities Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Amazon Cloud Player Doesn't Work On iOS — But It's Not A Flash Issue Top
As you may have read by now, earlier tonight, Amazon dropped a bomb on their rivals in the online music space: a fully working cloud storage and playback system . And it’s not just working on desktop web browsers, it works on Android devices too. One important place it doesn’t work though: iPhones, iPads, iPod touches — no iOS devices. At first, you might think this is a Flash issue (Apple’s devices famously do not support Flash). But it’s not. I don’t have Flash installed on my MacBook Air and the Cloud Player works fine (as it does when you disable Flash in Chrome). Flash is needed to upload files to Cloud Drive, but not for playback. So that’s not the issue. Instead, it appears that Amazon may simply be blocking the mobile version of Safari from playing back songs through Cloud Player. When you attempt to load the player, you get a warning that the browser isn’t supported. But you can continue anyway and everything seems like it may be fine. But when you click “Play” nothing happens. On Android devices, Cloud Player works by way of the Amazon MP3 app. This app does not exist on the iOS platform because it would compete with Apple’s iTunes Store. Presumably, Amazon could make another stand-alone app for Cloud Player or include it in one of their other Amazon iOS apps, but Apple new platform rules on subscriptions make this a bit murky (Amazon’s Cloud Drive is free for 5 GB but costs a yearly fee for more storage). Of course, even if Amazon wanted to bring Cloud Player to iOS devices, Apple may not want it there. The company is gearing up to launch their own music locker system, though perhaps not until the fall. Google is also working on a similar service. Update : As Gian points out in the comments below, there is a way to play songs on an iOS device from Amazon’s service: you hit the option to download them. This essentially downloads the MP3 file from Amazon’s server and uses Safari’s built-in player to play it. Not exactly ideal, but it does work — with AirPlay too! CrunchBase Information Amazon Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 

CREATE MORE ALERTS:

Auctions - Find out when new auctions are posted

Horoscopes - Receive your daily horoscope

Music - Get the newest Album Releases, Playlists and more

News - Only the news you want, delivered!

Stocks - Stay connected to the market with price quotes and more

Weather - Get today's weather conditions




You received this email because you subscribed to Yahoo! Alerts. Use this link to unsubscribe from this alert. To change your communications preferences for other Yahoo! business lines, please visit your Marketing Preferences. To learn more about Yahoo!'s use of personal information, including the use of web beacons in HTML-based email, please read our Privacy Policy. Yahoo! is located at 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)