Tuesday, March 29, 2011

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Keen On… Bob Metcalfe: Yes, There Is a Social Networking Bubble (TCTV) Top
When Bob Metcalfe says that there's a social networking bubble, we should take notice. Inventor of the Ethernet, coiner of Metcalfe's Law, founder of 3Com, a technology pundit and publisher at InfoWorld, VC at Polaris Ventures, and now Professor of Innovation at the University of Texas, Metcalfe is one of the true pioneers of Internet technology and business. But, in spite of Metcalfe's sense that the social networking bubble will burst, he remains bullish about innovation on the Internet. In particular, he sees three sectors which are about to be radically disrupted by the Internet: healthcare, education and energy. That's where we’re going next, Metcalfe predicts. So forget about your social media start-up, he advises, and focus on reinventing the education, healthcare and energy industries. This is the second in a two-part interview with Metcalfe. Check out yesterday’s interview when he talks about his invention of the ethernet and Metcalfe's Law, as well as his infamous 2000 prediction that the Internet was about to collapse. Encouraging Innovation The Social Networking Bubble CrunchBase Information Bob Metcalfe Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Startup Incubator TechStars Raises $8 Million Top
Startup incubator TechStars has raised $8 million in new funding for its programs in Boston, Boulder, New York, and Seattle. The new funding comes from more than fifty venture funds and over 25 individual angel investors. This brings the incubator’s total funding to nearly $11.5 million. TechStars, which launched in 2007, is a "startup boot camp" for tech entrepreneurs in which selected startup receive up to $18,000 in seed funding (or $6,000 per founder up to three founders in exchange for 5 percent of the company), three months of mentorship from successful entrepreneurs and investors, and the opportunity to pitch to angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the program. David Cohen, co-founder of TechStars, tells us that for the past few years, the incubator has been raising money incrementally for each program and location. But this raise enables TechStars to operate and fund startups for the next four years. He says that more than 70% of TechStars companies go on to raise venture or angel capital after the program ends and 7 of the first 20 companies incubated have now been acquired. Cohen explains that the TechStars model takes a mentor and community-driven approach to incubating startups and supporting founders. The company pairs at least 10 mentors in the local technology industry with each startup to give founders access to both seasoned entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. While Cohen says that there are no immediate plans to expand TechStars to other locations, he said the new funding will also be used to run existing programs more frequently. For example, TechStars’ New York program will have two sessions this year. TechStars has also open sourced its model , recently announcing the TechStars Network as part of the White House's Startup America initiative to spur entrepreneurship. The incubator’s model is now being used by 22 programs globally, says Cohen, including Chicago’s Excelerate Labs. CrunchBase Information TechStars Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Estimates Point To 3 Million Nooks Color Sold Top
This, multiplied by a million minus 1 million Digitimes “sources” are stating that 3 million Nooks Color have rolled off the assembly line and into stores over the past year, giving the Nook Color firmly at 50% of the “iPad-like” tablet market. They estimated 600,000-700,000 sales per month in January and February during the post-holiday gift card redemption season. Read more…
 
Message Bus: The Start Project's First Graduate Launches, Pulls In A Cool $3 Million Top
In late 2009, a group of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors came together to form The Start Project , a Silicon Valley-based incubator focused on idea generation, software development, product vision, and bringing great ideas to market. The project is the brainchild of Narendra Rocherolle of 83 Degrees and Webshots , among others, and Josh Felser of Spinner , Crackle , and Freestyle Capital fame. Not long after The Start Project’s launch, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and former Google exec and angel investor Chris Sacca agreed to act as advisors to the incubator’s companies, both before and after launch. At the time, some likely asked, “does Silicon Valley really need another incubator?” Fair enough, but with such an impressive cast of investors and entrepreneurs surrounding the project, I’ve been excited to see what kind of businesses it would produce and what digital problems it would choose to address. Today, Message Bus becomes our first look into what the group has been up to over the last year: thinking about email delivery, open APIs, and infrastructure applications. Like so many other startups before it, Message Bus is aiming to tackle the age-old problem of how to make our email systems easier and, at the same time, more robust. So, Message Bus bifurcates this challenging task into two parts: First and foremost, maintaining and administering email systems no longer makes sense for most companies, so the startup wants you to be able to send an email via a simple API easily and reliably — by providing a scalable engine that ensures the highest deliverability of email. Second is to “focus on an agnostic messaging architecture at the plumbing level, Twitter's road not taken”, says Narendra in a blog post on the company’s website. Thanks to virtual servers, open APIs, and the cloud, deploying applications no longer involves assembling the entire chain, from the top down to the physical hardware. The old form of infrastructure deployment is no longer a requirement, as applications can be created on top of a host of infrastructure services that act like applications themselves. As such, Message Bus pegs itself as an “infrastructure apps company” that is targeting the many businesses that no longer need to build up an entire stack to service their products. Its infrastructure applications will offer a suite of messaging utilities, beginning with email, in an effort to open up the massive data clouds behind every messaging system to allow companies greater insight into the data and analytics behind their applications and businesses. Message Bus is also announcing today that it has completed a $3 million series A funding round, led by early-stage investors, True Ventures . True Ventures joins The Start Project’s seed partner Polaris Ventures , which seeded Message Bus with $275K during incubation, as well as a range of individual investors and advisors. The Message Bus team will be led by The Start Project co-founder Nick Wilder , who will be acting as CEO, Narendra Rocherolle as President, and co-founder and director of operations at Twitter, Jeremy LaTrasse, as CTO. The startup enters a space occupied by services like Dyn, SendGrid, StrongMail, and Amazon SES, but, again, with a veteran management team and formidable support staff, I’m looking forward to poking around the utility a bit more and seeing how its put into action. For more on The Start Project’s inaugural graduate, check out the startup’s website here and Narendra’s blog post here . CrunchBase Information Message Bus The Start Project Narendra Rocherolle Nick Wilder Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Hotmail Adds LivingSocial, Posterous, And More To Active Views Platform Top
Microsoft Hotmail doesn’t get much love in Silicon Valley these days, but the service has been steadily making improvements to the product, particularly over the last 18 months or so. And today it’s giving a boost to its ‘Active Views’ product — which sets out to make email quicker and more interactive than the sort we’re used to — by adding new partners including Posterous, and LivingSocial. Hotmail’s first iteration of Active Views involves linked content — Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live, says that 90% of email contains a link to an external service like YouTube, Flickr, or LinkedIn. So when Hotmail sees that there’s a link to a YouTube video, it will automatically embed the video so that you don’t have to actually follow the link (Hotmail isn’t the only service to do this). Mehta says that this has been very effective — while only 10% of users click on a normal link to a video, 25% will click on an embedded version. Hotmail’s more unique feature, and the one related to today’s announcement, is the second type of Active View, which launched in December . Microsoft has allowed a handful of select partners to offer dynamically updating emails, which will always present fresh content, even if the recipient doesn’t open it for days or weeks after receiving it. The feature first launched with a handful of partners including Netflix, Orbitz, and LinkedIn, and today’s launch includes LivingSocial and Posterous. Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal showed me a demo of their integration, and it was pretty slick: every time someone submits a new post to Posterous, that post gets distributed via email to their subscribers. Before now that email would omit comments — you’d have to click through the post to see if there was any discussion. But using Active Views, Posterous can display the most current comment threads as soon as you open the email, and you can even submit a comment directly from your inbox. As for the earlier integrations with Orbitz and LinkedIn, Mehta says that partners are learning that it’s best not to simply try to recreate their websites in the inbox, but to rather hone in on the functions people will be most likely to want. In other words, they’re still figuring out what works. Of course, these dynamically updating emails are still only available to select partners, which was one of my original critiques of the product. Mehta says this is for security reasons (each partner is vetted, has to be white-listed, etc), but says that ultimately he hopes that Active Views will be integrated into other email providers, and that it will be available more broadly to senders.
 
Glassdoor Puts Numbers on Our Schizophrenic Job Market Top
Glassdoor is reporting an Employment Confidence Survey today that shows robust and increasing confidence in the job market– never mind most of the nation remains gripped in 9% unemployment with only a little hope of things getting better. 40% of respondents expect their company’s outlook to improve in the next six months and just 17% are concerned about a possible layoff, down from 26% in the first quarter of 2009. And there’s decent optimism that should they lose their jobs, 40% of them say it is “likely” they would find a new job matching their experience and pay within six months– the highest that number has been in six quarters. Glassdoor notes that “only” 35% of respondents expected to get a raise within the next 12 months, but given the top line economic data for the country, that still seems pretty healthy to me. While unemployment is getting better, the numbers say as much about who uses Glassdoor as anything else. While millions of Americans seem trapped on the less-desirable side of a skills-to-jobs-available mismatch, there’s a full-on talent war going on in Silicon Valley, where not only engineers but talented startup executives and worker bees are flooded with offers. Culprits for this talent bubble are certainly companies like Google and Facebook and Zynga who are hiring large numbers of employees as fast as they can, but also to blame is the relative ease of starting a company and getting funding– which takes an increasing number of engineers and potential CTOs and managers out of the job market. To wit: According to Glassdoor, more than one-third of employees expect to leave their job in the next three years, 28% expect to do so in the next two years and 14% expect to leave in less than one year. Add it up and nearly 60% of respondents in what’s supposed to be one of the worst labor markets in our nation’s history plan to voluntarily leave their jobs in less than three years. It’s a stunning picture of a whole different kind of dysfunction in America’s job market. Typically even if you feel your job isn’t a risk, the fear of shrinking options makes most people clamp on to whatever job they have. But in this market, while millions lose their houses, those on the other side of that skills/need labor chasm have the world as their oyster and there’s little-to-no sense of clinging to your port in a storm. It’s another sign of how deeply a sense of employee/employer loyalty has eroded in our country in the last few decades. When my generation was coming out of college in the late 1990s, the idea of job hopping every few years was still a radical invention of the so-called “new economy,” but now it’s just how someone plans a career. Part of this comes from employees: Entrepreneurship isn’t just mainstream in Silicon Valley, increasingly most professionals run their careers as if they’re free-agents, merely tied up in contracts from time to time. But it’s also the fault of employers. The rabidly-short term nature of the stock market has dramatically changed how companies view layoffs. Decades ago, layoffs were considered a last resort of a dying — or at the very least unprofitable– company. Today, they are a regular way to trim the fat, compensate for poor hiring decisions and meet quarterly numbers. Is it any wonder a dramatic shift in the use of layoffs has coincided with a dramatic shift in employee loyalty? Companies gripped in the talent-war side of this economy are no doubt struggling to keep their best people. In the Valley this has taken the form of increasingly large retention bonuses, salaries and perks, and every single tech company will tell you that hanging on to employees is their number one risk factor. Part of this is the healthy churn of employees through the Valley’s ranks that keeps startups as competitive as the big companies. But part of it is in-demand employees’ revenge for decades of being increasingly expendable. Glassdoor’s numbers also show another sharp divide in the labor market around gender lines. While nearly 40% of men are optimistic about a pay raise, only 30% of women are. Glassdoor ran the numbers for engineers and found good reason why: Women still make far less money than men. The gap ranges between 4% and 9%, getting larger as men and women become more experienced. That’s not too surprising given numbers that show gender parity in low-levels of management in the US, but that shifting dramatically as women climb the economic ladder. In the Valley, the gap is far less than the  20% gender pay gap nationwide, but it’s worrying for a place that prides itself on being a meritocracy nonetheless. Mike is coming in town today. Who votes I demand a huge raise? [UPDATE: Glassdoor just sent me a spreadsheet of sample reporter salaries. Whoa, we are in trouble as an industry. Nevermind, Mike.) (Photo by Thomas Hawk)
 
Mark Cuban And Kevin O'Leary Invest In Online Toy Rental Service Toygaroo Top
Just in case you missed it: Mark Cuban’s most recent investment took place in what is a fairly unusual setting for early-stage startup seed funding — a shark tank. That’s right, the controversial billionaire and media mogul was a recent guest shark on ABC reality show “Shark Tank” , in which 5 business moguls listen to entrepreneurs pitch their companies and decide whether or not to devour them like so many sardines. Great premise. (I’m also pretty sure ABC lifted the show’s name from Ron Conway’s boardroom, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.) In the most recent Shark Tank-isode, co-founder and chief executive of Toygaroo , Nikki Pope, pitched her startup to the panel of honchos, hoping for big-time investment. Toygaroo, the self-labeled “Netflix for toys”, is an online toy rental service in which parents can sign up for and choose a “wish list” of toys that are then sent to their home, played with by their kids, before being returned to Toygaroo via a FedEx box. Before you start shuddering, the toys are, of course, cleaned and sanitized before being shipped. Similar to Netflix, subscribers can sign up for one of six packages ranging from $24.99 to $52.99 per month, in which families receive a fixed number of toys every two months. Then you ship ‘em back. Rinse and repeat. Users can also opt into a premium model that allows your offspring to receive toys every month rather than bimonthly. Look out, Santa, Toygaroo is trying to put you out of business. And Mark Cuban is helping. The success of Netflix must have been a factor for both Cuban as well as Canadian entrepreneur/mogul Kevin O’Leary, who beat out the other 3 sharks to buy a combined 35 percent of Toygaroo for $200K. Considering Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.6 billion and O’Leary sold The Learning Company (he created the software behind the company) to Mattel for $3.6 billion, the two moguls could infuse a serious amount of cash — and toy know-how via O’Leary — into Toygaroo if they so choose. But, in the meantime, both will own a controlling stake in the company and will each be taking a seat on the board, so they’ll likely be calling the shots. Pope was so excited about the investment she was nearly moved to tears, and I have to say it was pretty cool to see the sharks make her day like that. Way to go, Nikki. That being said, I would say that Toygaroo has its work cut out for it in terms of convincing its users that it will be practicing, nay, ensuring, strong quality control when it comes to sanitizing its toys. Definitely also going to need liability insurance. CrunchBase Information Toygaroo.com Mark Cuban Kevin O'Leary Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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