Tuesday, March 1, 2011

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GroupMe Gives Push Notifications A Big Hug, Also Maps And Foursquare Checkins Top
Well, well, looky here . GroupMe just got a lot app-friendlier. The group texting app is pushing out a massive new update today for both the iPhone and Android that supports push notifications as the default messaging option instead of costly SMS, maps, inline photos in chats, better Foursquare integration, and contact syncing with Twitter, Facebook, and email. Up until now, the GroupMe app was basically a way to set up texting groups, but that was it. The actual messages would then go over SMS outside the app. With the new release, you can choose to get your messages inside the app and through push notifications instead. If the cellular data channel is weak, messages can always revert back to SMS in a pinch. Not only is this a much better experience for the user, but it could end up saving the startup a hell of a lot of money. With more than a million text messages a day , anything it can do to offload those messages to the free data pipe is smart. (Which is exactly what I’ve been arguing it should do all along). All group texting apps start out the same, with support for the lowest common denominator—SMS—as paramount. But then their apps get better, and pretty soon if you have an iPhone or Android phone, you forget about the SMS channel altogether. I believe this will be the case for most of GroupMe’s users who own iPhones or Android handsets. In addition to the push notification feature, now all your group chats appear in the app. You can add photos and see them in the chat stream instead of as a link. Now, you can see where everyone in the group is on a map (a feature already on competitor’s apps such as Fast Society and Beluga ). And you can even checkin via Foursquare. This last integration goes beyond the Foursquare friend lookup feature the company recently hacked together. You can checkin to Foursquare locations through the GroupMe app. It all adds up to an impressive update that puts the app front and center, just in time for SXSW. Fast Society and Beluga, you’d better come up with something equally awesome quickly. CrunchBase Information GroupMe Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Social Software Company Mzinga Appoints Former Novell And CA CTO As CEO Top
Big shot joining the management team over at social software company Mzinga today: Alan Nugent , former chief technology officer of well-known technology giants like Bellsouth, Xerox , Novell and CA Technologies , has been appointed as its new CEO . Mzinga provides social intelligence solutions, services, and analytics for businesses. The company has raised more than $42 million since it was founded back in 2007. Nugent is expected to guide the company’s long-term technology vision and R&D strategies, manage customer acquisition and day-to-day operations. He’ll be based in Mzinga's corporate headquarters in Waltham, MA. He’s succeeding former CEO Barry Libert, Mzinga's co-founder and chairman. Prior to joining Mzinga, Nugent served as EVP and CTO at CA. Earlier in his career, Nugent was senior vice president and CTO of Novell, and before that senior vice president, CTO, and CIO at MunichRe/American Re; senior vice president and CTO at Xerox Corporation and chief technologist and software architect for BellSouth Corporation. He began his career at Hewlett-Packard Company. Oh, and he has apparently also played competitive poker for more than two decades. CrunchBase Information Mzinga Information provided by CrunchBase
 
MeFeedia Reports 63 Percent Of Web Video Is HTML5-Friendly Top
The battle between Flash and HTML5 has largely revolved around video, with Flash proponents pointing out how lame it is to open up your browser on an iPad and not be able to play a Flash video. And yet HTML5-friendly video has quickly been adopted by a majority of video websites and video players. Today video search engine MeFeedia released some stats showing that 63 percent of the 30 million videos in its index are now HTML5-compatible. That number is up from 10 percent a year ago, 26 percent last May, and 54 percent in October, 2010. MeFeedia indexes 30,000 video sites large and small, including Hulu, CBS, ABC, YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, and DailyMotion. Among larger media sites, HTML5 video already reached two thirds last May , and is already above 90 percent, according to Encoding.com . In terms of mobile devices that don’t support Flash, they now account for 5 percent of MeFeedia’s video playbacks, up from 1 percent a year ago. MeFeedia’s numbers may be more conservative, but they point in the same direction. HTML5 video, and the H.264 codec specifically, is the new standard for video. Okay, good. Now that we have that settled, we can all move on and keep watching videos on our iPads. Except maybe not because Google doesn’t like H.264 . Uh-oh, here we go again . CrunchBase Information MeFeedia Information provided by CrunchBase
 
MaxPoint Interactive Lands $8M For Neighborhood-level Targeting Technology Top
Founded back in 2007 by former PayPal, eBay, Luminex and Tesla Motors execs, MaxPoint Interactive this morning announced that it has secured its second round of funding to the tune of $8 million , led by Madrona Venture Group . Trinity Ventures , which led MaxPoint's initial financing round of $3 million in 2010, also participated. MaxPoint offers advertisers proprietary targeting technology that allows its clients to “pinpoint” prospects up to neighborhood level, in a bid to increase in-store sales for brands across a variety of sectors. The company’s system, which it says is already in use by consumer packaged goods brands, retailers, pharma companies and financial service organizations, is said to employ two unique technologies to drive in-store purchases for national and local brands. By combining multiple data sets to form what it refers to as “Customized Consumer Profiles”, MaxPoint says it is able to identify the best potential customer for any brand – those that are both interested and capable of purchasing the product. To accomplish this, MaxPoint draws from point-of-sale data from more than 65,000 retail stores nationwide, demographics, psychographics and other publicly available data sources – pretty much everything apart from personally identifiable information, in other words. Subsequently, the company uses its so-called Digital Zip technology to find the best neighborhoods across the U.S. for the product or service in question, based on the characteristics of the people who live there. The company says it recently moved its sales office in New York City to a larger location in Manhattan and also expanded its sales team. CrunchBase Information MaxPoint Interactive Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Wellington Partners, Reid Hoffman And Sherry Coutu Invest In Artfinder, The LastFM Of Art Top
Pan-european VC Wellington Partners, together with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and angel investor Sherry Coutu have invested in hot new UK startup Artfinder , which is setting out to the ‘the LastFM’ for the global art world, letting people catalogue and follow the art they love. The first-round funding – which is undisclosed – was led by Wellington (which has invested in Xing, Qype, Spotify, Livebookings, Adconion and others), while Hoffman invested via the Greylock Discovery Fund (which is also in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pandora and Groupon among others). Sherry Coutu, best known in the UK as founder of Interactive Investor International (which went public) and serial Angel, will act as Chairman of the company. Artfinder has partnered with galleries, libraries, museums and artists worldwide to build an extremely comprehensive online catalogue of fine art featuring over 250,000 works from over 400 institutions. I’ve seen the demo and it’s pretty amazing – and you can too as the site goes live today.
 
Apple Geniuses Get Down To Business Top
Apple’s new JointVenture service is a business-grade Genius Bar for small to medium-sized business. For $499 you get support for 5 employees with the option to add employees for $99 a year. You get priority Genius Bar support and are allowed to attend special events geared to business users. You also receive phone support from folks who know about your specific needs and wants. Read more…
 
Kleiner Perkins Leads $10M Round In Cloud Storage And Syncing Platform Egnyte Top
File storage and synchronization service Egnyte has raised $10 million in series B funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers with previous investors Floodgate and Polaris Venture Partners participating in the round. This brings Egnyte’s total funding to $16 million. As we’ve written in the past, Egnyte is essentially a Dropbox-like service that focuses primarily on helping small and medium-sized businesses sync and store their files. The startup uses a hybrid cloud solution, where businesses keep a Network-Attached Storage device linked up to their office's computers, which serves as a 'local cloud' — all files are synced and backed up on this local, network connected hardware. These Local Clouds can consist of Netgear Ready NAS devices, or VMware-based virtual appliances. The 'local cloud' NAS is also hooked up to Egnyte's servers so any changes made between the client computers and the files on the NAS are also synced up to the web for remote access. Once these files are in the cloud, company admins can enable file sharing between employees and also to business partners, who can be given restricted access to specific files. This cloud portion also serves as a remote backup, and files can be accessed from Macs, Windows, and mobile phones. As more businesses move to the cloud for storage options, Egnyte has seen its customer base grow exponentially. The startup quadrupled its customer base in 2010 and is syncing more than 5 billion files with more than 500,000 user licenses. Egnyte is seeing than 2 million file operations in a single 24-hour window—an average of more than 3,000 file uploads and downloads per minute. Egnyte, which faces competition from Sugarsync, Box.net, Dropbox and others, plans to use the new investment to expand into international markets and increase domestic engineering, sales and marketing efforts. The company also plans to launch an enterprise application for the next version of the iPad. CrunchBase Information Egnyte Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Lightbank Adds Former Playboy And NBC Exec Paul Lee As Partner Top
Lightbank , the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky , is announcing its first partner hire today—seasoned media and technology venture exec Paul H. Lee. ​Lee is joining Lightbank from Playboy Enterprises where he was Managing Director and Group Head of the company's digital ventures group. Prior to joining Playboy, Lee was a Senior Vice President for the Peacock Equity Fund, the venture arm of NBC Universal in New York and was responsible for onvesting in emerging ad platforms including gaming and mobile/wireless advertising sectors. As a founding partner of the fund, Lee helped lead investments in 4INFO, Greystripe, Healthline, Ramp, and Rubicon Project. While Lee’s venture experience has centered in the media world, he plans on making investments in a variety of technology sectors. Lightbank’s venture strategy focuses on four major themes, says Lee, “mobile, social, local and global.” This year, the fund is committing anywhere up to $10 million in seed stage investments, but the firm may look at later stage investment opportunities in the future. And for now, Lightbank has mostly invested in Midwest startups (including Sprout Social , Where I’ve Been , and Watermelon Express, ) but Lee says the firm is not tied to the area anymore and will be looking to fund entrepreneurs regardless of where their startup is based. CrunchBase Information Lightbank Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Click Forensics Acquires, Becomes Adometry And Launches Ad Analytics Suite Top
Click Forensics this morning announced that it has purchased display ad verification technology provider Adometry and that it will be changing its company name to Adometry as a result of the transaction. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Adometry is today launching an integrated online advertising analytics suite designed to help advertisers verify, measure and optimize campaign performance across a variety of ad networks, publishers and media properties. Adometry was originally founded in 2006 and raised $450,000 in angel funding according to its CrunchBase profile . Click Forensics was founded in 2007 and raised $21 million from Austin Ventures, Sierra Ventures and Shasta Ventures. CrunchBase Information Adometry Click Forensics Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Boxee Raises $16.5 Million For Its Vision For The "Future Of TV" Top
Boxee has announced on its blog that it has raised $16.5 million in third-round funding. This brings the total capital raised by the company to $26.5 million . The investment comes from new investors Pitango and Softbank , with participation from prior backers General Catalyst , Spark Capital and Union Square Ventures . Boxee points out it has grown from 12 to 34 employees since its last ( $6 million ) round of funding, and that it plans on hiring some more. The extra capital will be used to enhance its software, solve bugs and build new functionality into their product(s). In the company’s words: One of our greatest challenges will be to add more movies, TV shows, and video while at the same time making it easier to discover and watch them. We have ideas on both fronts and are excited to get to work.Many of you would like to see Boxee handle all the video on their TV with no need to switch inputs. We'd like to get there, too. In addition to product enhancements, the funding will be used to strike more content and hardware manufacturer partnerships. Also see: Boxee CEO To Big Media: "Resistance Is Futile" CrunchBase Information Boxee Information provided by CrunchBase
 
HackNY Doubles Effort To Match Top Tech Students With NYC Startups Top
In a quest to start something as big as the Apple in the Big Apple, a number of incubators, funds and fellowship programs have sprung up in New York City in recent months. The FinTech Innovation Lab made its debut in December 2010, and the NYC Turing Fellows program in January. Incubators like TechStars and DreamItVentures moved into town around the same time, too. One program that predated these all by about a year, hackNY , today announced that it has doubled the the size of its summer program, and will match twenty four “computationally expert” students with area startups this year. The hackNY summer program is distinct in offering free, NYC-based dormitory housing to its fellows. Co-organized by professors from New York University and Columbia, the program also requires startups to pay selected interns at least $400 a week, and requires its young guns to participate in events and attend lectures by technologists, investors, and startup founders. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis from students via the hackNY.org website, here . Startups that want to bring on top, tech students also have to apply. A co-founder of hackNY, Evan Korth , said the non-profit looks for startups from the earliest to a more mature stage, that can offer fellows “an ideal mentoring environment.” He explained: “The startup should have a strong technologist who has time and a desire to mentor young people. Believe it or not a lot of technologists really enjoy doing this kind of thing. Typically, this would be a CTO or VP of engineering who wants to work with the student, directly. They also have to offer a good project for a student to work on — we do not want to send future hackers into a company where all they do is the most basic kind of object oriented programming, like writing ‘getters and setters’ all day. We want the best student technologists we can find to work on more interesting things.” The summer class of 2010 hackNY Fellows worked with buzzworthy startups including: Aprizi; Aviary; bit.ly; Business Insider; Buzzd; BuzzFeed; Comixology; Designer Pages; Knewton; OkCupid; Parse.ly; and 10gen. Korth said New York startups that have offered to potentially hire hackNY fellows for summer 2011 include: FourSquare, Bit.ly, Tumblr, OMGPop, SecondMarket, Buzzfeed, YipiT, Knewton, Hunch, BankSimple, Group.me, HyperPublic and others. Participation will be determined through a matching process as summer approaches. Backers of hackNY include: AOL Ventures [disclosure: part of the company that owns TechCrunch]; Andreessen Horowitz; DFJ Gotham; ff Asset Management; First Round Capital; Firstmark Capital; Google Ventures; Gunderson Dettmer; IA Ventures; Lerer Ventures; Lowenstein Sandler; Techstars NYC; and Union Square Ventures; as well as Columbia Technology Ventures at Columbia University; ISOC-NY; Marks Paneth & Shron; NYCEDC; NYCIF; NYC Tech Connect; the NYU Department of Computer Science; and Wilson Sonsini. Image: Washington Square Park, via Heather Harvey under creative commons license CrunchBase Information HackNY TechStars Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Google's New In-App Payments Product Set For Launch In May 2011 Top
Google was originally set to debut in-app payments support for Android applications in the fourth quarter of 2010, but recently said that the launch would be delayed until the end of this quarter . Now, it appears the real launch date of the much-anticipated (at least by many a app developer or publisher) product is May 2011. Jambool , the company behind a virtual monetization platform dubbed ‘Social Gold’ that was acquired by Google last August, this morning started sending the following email to users: Hello, Thank you for your use of the Jambool Social Gold platform. As you know, Jambool was acquired by Google last August. This acquisition meant that some changes to our business were inevitable, and we’d like to share them with you today. First, the existing Jambool Social Gold product will be discontinued in favor of a new Google in-app payment product in May 2011 . Rest assured that you will be able to sign in to the Jambool merchant console through September 2011, and you will receive year-end financial statements in February 2012. Second, we’d like to invite you to participate in the pre-release beta of the Google in-app payment system. This system will enable developers to accept payments within an app, but it will not have the full functionality of Social Gold at launch . We understand that this will not meet the needs of all developers currently using Social Gold, but we highly encourage interested developers to join the Google in-app payments beta by submitting your information at http://google.com/checkout/inapp. Again, we thank you for your flexibility during this transition period. Please feel free to respond to this email with any questions about your Jambool account or the new Google in-app payment product. Sincerely, The Jambool Team Three big take-aways: - Jambool’s Social Gold service will be shut down, even though it offers more features than Google’s new in-app payments product will have upon its formal debut (which already ruined one game developer’s day , apparently). - The Jambool team was commissioned to work on Android in-app purchases functionalities, and not – as some had proclaimed – the monetization of Google’s always-imminent-yet-elusive social networking and online gaming blitz. - Google’s in-app payment product, currently in beta , will be launched in May 2011. Update: Google I/O will be held on May 10 and 11. It would make sense for the company to announce the new product at the developer event. In-app payments are of course vital because they enable app developers and publishers to sell virtual goods and premium features, both major sources of mobile revenue in addition to paid apps and mobile advertising. In a recent blog post , Jambool specified that its Social Gold product will function through May 31, 2011, after which all payment processing will be discontinued: We are hard at work developing a web-based, in-app payments solution that combines the simplicity of the Jambool API with the power of the Google Checkout and Google accounts infrastructure. We're very excited about the ease of use of the new system, with features such as one-click purchasing. While this work is underway, we made the difficult decision to close new signups to the Social Gold platform today and will discontinue all payment processing on May 31, 2011. Existing developers will be able to continue processing payments through Social Gold until the end of May and log in to the Social Gold merchant console through September. The Google in-app payments system will enable developers to easily accept payments within an app. This is the first version, and we will focus our investment in this API moving forward. Developers should expect the same innovation, and more, from us on this new platform. The FTC will no doubt be watching with wary eyes . (Thanks to Sagada Hapiness for the tip) P.S.: Through carrier billing, Android developers were already able to process in-app transactions using solutions from the likes of Zong , PayPal and BOKU . Angry Birds developer Rovio event went for payments by SMS , underscoring the need for Google to get this in-app payments product up and running as fast as possible. CrunchBase Information Jambool Google Android Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Yet Another Entry Into The 404 Page Hall Of Fame Top
As we’ve mentioned before , having an awesome 404 Page is a source of pride among startups. From the Twitter Fail Whale, to the Google Fail Whale (of course) to the Digg Fail Ox to Blippy’s Fail Double Rainbows you have to admit that these things freaking make your day. Social gaming startup EightBit.me (which has yet to launch whatever its planning on doing with its armies of 8-bit Twitter avatars ) has moved a step beyond fail animals and memes, to yes, a Fail Nintendo Game Cartridge, above. The “Blow me …” here is referring to the once sacred art of blowing into video games to get them to work AND NOT ANYTHING ELSE. And while they’re not the first ones to match this image with this phrase , this is definitely the best, most relevant use case I’ve come across so far. Don’t want to wait until the March 9th launch? Learn how to make your own bootleg avatar here. h/t @Fromedome CrunchBase Information Eightbit.me Information provided by CrunchBase
 
For 40,000 Gmail Users, Google Has To Leave The Cloud To Review The Tapes Top
Yesterday, the tips started flowing in. “Google has deleted all my email.” “Check Twitter, massive Gmail failure.” “Gmail just melted down.” Users were freaking out. And that’s understandable. Many were apparently opening up Gmail to find that all of their emails had vanished. Had it happened to me, I would have been on Twitter swearing at the top of my digital lungs and promising to do something crazy — like switch to Hotmail. Of course, the reality of the situation wasn’t quite so dramatic. While the initial reports had around .29 percent of Gmail users affected by the bug (about 600,000 users), those estimates were quickly revised to .08 percent (about 150,000 users). And today, those numbers were further revised to .02 percent. This means that only around 40,000 of Gmail’s 200 million (or so) users were affected. Now, 40,000 pissed off people is still 40,000 pissed off people. But there was even better news out of Google today: all of their data is safe and sound . But it isn’t safe and sound in some remote server attached to the cloud. Instead, it’s safe on back-up data tapes somewhere in an undisclosed location. Yes, despite all the ‘cloud this’ and ‘cloud that’ talk, when it comes down to it, Google still backs up everything on tape. And thank god they do. Just imagine if this bug had affected a significant percentage of users? All of those affected plus millions more would have likely never trusted Google with their data again. Worse, it may have slowed the flow of such data to the cloud across the entire industry. That may have made Microsoft smile, but we’d all have been worse off for it. But again, luckily, that didn’t happen. Still, it’s fairly alarming that all of those insane data redundancy policies that Google has in place fell because of what seems to be a fairly standard “storage software update”. Google notes that it’s going to take a little bit more time to get all of the data off the tapes and back into the cloud. But at least it will get there, instead of being gone forever. [photo: flickr/ akakumo ] CrunchBase Information Gmail Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Bump Founder Talks Rapid Growth, Push Notifications Top
The two-year trajectory of Bump Technologies , the designers of the app that makes it easy to swap contact information, music, and other data between mobile devices,is a somewhat interesting case study in the evolution of early-stage app startups. Speaking from the DEMO Conference today in Palm Springs, Founder Jake Mintz told the audience that Bump started as a “nights and weekends project” among close friends. Co-founders Mintz, David Lieb, and Andy Huibers launched Bump in March of 2009, and a month-and-a-half later, their nights and weekend project had already pulled in 1 million users. The founders then decided to move their operations to San Francisco, where they began couch hopping in earnest. Mintz said that between May 2009 and February 2010, even though Bump raised nearly $3.5 million in Series A in November 2009 from Sequoia, they slept on couches, devoting all waking hours to their project. Originally, Mintz said, Bump was conceived as a “replacement for business cards” and had more “serious” contexts in mind, but when they began to see that Bump was being used to share more than just CV data, they began adapting. Contact sharing remains at the core of Bump’s business, but Mintz said that, in the last year, many users have come to Bump as a way to share photos, and maximizing the value of both aspects of their mobile business has been “a delicate balance”. Somewhat serendipitously, Bump went to Marc Andreesen, Ben Horowitz, and John O’Farrell for advice on how to grow the business, although they were not looking for investment at the time. Mintz said that the partners later came to them saying they would like to invest in spite of Bump’s reluctancy to raise additional funding. So, in January, Andreessen Horrowitz invested a sizable $16.5 million in Bump, with Andreessen joining Bump’s board. When asked what they wanted to do with so much money, Mintz said that it would be used primarily to hire designers and developers, indicating that, as Andreessen had said to him, there will be multiple social networks in the future — beyond Facebook — and the team wants to build a social technology that “interfaces with the real world.” It remains to be seen, he said, whether Facebook would eventually become a competitor for Bump, but today they continue to collaborate and make strides in areas that Facebook does not yet control. Part of this growth, Mintz said, is from recognizing the important element of user experience. Bump remains determined not fall victim to spamming its users with notifications: "We all know apps can also be used as a tool for evil — an app that will send you a push notification every 15 minutes," he said. "Some apps have used that mechanic and grown very quickly, and you have this really powerful opportunity to be a part of someone's life — but in the long-term you have to focus on the user experience." Early Bump incarnations essentially allowed customers to download and begin using immediately without having to register or specify user settings. And while this approach worked initially and avoided breakage, a few core features went unused, because the app didn't guide its users through a setup process, Mintz said. The Bump team is now looking to add a short registration process and tutorial that will offer detailed instructions and walk users through how to optimize the niche features that will be arriving later this year. As to what to expect from Bump’s future additions, Mintz added, “if your vision involves finding the best and easiest ways to use a smartphone in the real world, we know that our users might walk into store and want to interact with a brand, or interact with a product, and we want to ask ‘how do we facilitate our growth around that?’” Keeping an eye on customer experience has worked so far for Bump, as Mintz said that the application has become the eighth-most downloaded app on the Apple App store, attracting 8 million active monthly users, and 27 million downloads. Not too shabby. CrunchBase Information Bump Technologies Mark Mintz Andreessen Horowitz Information provided by CrunchBase
 
What Makes @ACarvin Tweet? (TCTV) Top
The recent compounded protests and revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa have had the unintended side effect of highlighting information nodes/elites like @Ghonim and @Sultanalqassemi , people who electively become human routers of related information on Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. NPR’s Senior Strategist Andy Carvin has been one of the most prominent Western information routers, spending 15-17 hours a day tweeting out news about the region, getting rate limited and subsequently whitelisted by Twitter, and at one point becoming so synonymous with #Egypt that someone anonymously sent him a shirt , “I followed @ACarvin before #Egypt did.” I sat down on Sunday morning to talk to Carvin about why he’s decided to devote his tweet stream to this new form of curation, what his process was for the filtering and repackaging of information, and what digital tools exist or could exist to make it easier for people like Carvin to continue to refine the closest we’ve come to the ideal form of Twitter journalism. You can watch the entire interview (please get past my  beginning awkwardness) above. CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Ron Conway, Chris Sacca And Others Invest 800K In PaaS Dotcloud Top
Hosted application platform DotCloud is announcing 800K in angel funding today, from notable angel investors Ron Conway, Chris Sacca, Jerry Yang, Raymond Tonsing, Roger Dickey, Ash Patel, Eric Urhane, Kenny Van Zant, Trinity Ventures and others. In the same space as Heroku (before it got bought by Salesforce for $212 million) and a slew of 1st generation platform-as-a-service Heroku clones, what the 2nd generation DotCloud does differently is that it gives developers flexibility. To make it easier to make server administration changes downstream, DotCloud lets companies “mix and match” components and use multiple languages and tools instead of focusing on one language and development stack. Says founder Solomon Hykes, “The problem is that developers don’t want to be tied to one language or framework anymore. They still want simplicity – but now they want flexibility, too. And for that you need a completely new breed of platform.” When asked on why he went in on the round, investor Chris Sacca said, “Hackers building stuff other hackers will pay for is too good to pass up.” Well, if Heroku has taught us anything … Hykes plans on using the financing to further focus on building what he considers to be a “developer’s dream platform” with an emphasis on flexibility and user experience in addition to world class support. CrunchBase Information dotcloud Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Ning Launches Slick New Mobile Social Tool Called Mogwee Top
Mogwee launches this evening, an ambitious new product from Ning unrelated to its core social networking service. It’s a new social/communications tool that’s built from the ground up for mobile platforms, beginning with iOS for iPhones, iPod Touches and iPads. For now, Mogwee’s main feature is to let you have on the fly public and private instant message-like conversations with people via the app. It updates in real time allowing for synchronous conversations, or you can wait for notifications to come in to have a more asynchronous experience. Unlike most new services we see, there’s no friending or following with Mogwee. If you invite someone to the service, or interact with them in a group “hangout,” you can then have one on one conversations with them. It ends up being very similar to services that have mutual friending, but it worked effortlessly in my testing without al the hassle of adding and removing friends. For one one on communications it works a lot like text messaging, albeit with a synchronous flow that makes it more fun to use. In group hangouts, though, it really shines. If you want to have a quick group chat with some friends or coworkers from your mobile, this is something you’ll enjoy using. You can also post pictures and videos, give gifts, and do fun stuff like throw zombie sheep at each other. I’ve tested Mogwee on iOS and have been using it over the weekend via an unlaunched Android version that works quite well (you’ll have to wait a while for the Android version to be released publicly). You can download it here for iOS now , though. And you can also use the browser version at Mogwee.com. You have to actually create your account via your phone, though, before you can use the browser version. Try it out. At first it just seems like another fun chat application. But it’s actually quite a useful chat and productivity tool that is almost certainly finding a permanent home on my phone. CrunchBase Information Ning Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Nexus EnergyHomes Raises $1.5 Million To Build Luxury, Net Zero Energy Houses Top
Annapolis-based Nexus EnergyHomes raised the first $200,000 of a $1.5 million dollar series A round, a new SEC filing revealed. The company designs, sells and builds pre-fab homes that are “net zero,” or zero energy homes (ZEHs). According to the U.S. Department of Energy ZEHs are “connected to the utility grid but can be designed and constructed to produce as much energy as they consume [or more] annually.” Nexus EnergyHomes also makes and sells green building materials, and offers software to optimize the installation of, and manage the use of equipment in a net zero energy home — like air conditioners, filters, lights, meters, geothermal wells and solar power generating systems. The company’s software, under the brand name Energyze, also helps home builders attain rebates and incentives to build a ZEH. Representatives were not available immediately after the filing was made public to answer questions about the company’s investors, or how the firm plans to use its new-found capital. Because Nexus Energy Homes focuses on building in and around Maryland, they are guarded, at least for the time being, against competition from established zero net energy home designers, like Ecofutures in Colorado or Vert Design in Ottawa. A regional specialization will not, however, protect the business from competition on software and systems that it sells. Giant technology providers to venture-backed startups are angling for a piece of the green homes market, including GE and Fuji Electric, and OPOWER and Tendril which both specialize in home-based, energy management technology. CrunchBase Information Nexus EnergyHomes General Electric OPOWER Information provided by CrunchBase
 
YC-Backed TellFi Is Like "Google Voice" For Companies Top
Launching today is Y Combinator -backed company TellFi , a Internet-based phone system that is specifically tailored to enterprise needs. In building TellFi, founders Jason Corwin and Conor Lee asked business customers what their most desired features were in a calling system, and came up with voicemail transcription, multiphone forwarding, call scheduling, individual extensions for each user, toll-free numbers and support access. TellFi is in the same space as Grasshopper and Google Voice. But unlike Google Voice , TellFi is not free, so you get what you pay for in a sense. The tiered plans at $70 a month, $24 a month and $10 a month add extra numbers and additional minutes as they increase in price. But the features remain essentially the same. Says Corwin, “One of the ways we differentiated ourselves was that the other [enterprise] products were bulky to use … And Google Voice [doesn't] really have a lot of the business class features.  Connection quality is really important to people, as is lack of support. People looking for robust business class features as they dug into it found that TellFi was a better alternative.” TellFi prides itself in having better call quality and fewer dropped calls than competitors and robust analytics like call logs across all plans, useful for companies who want to track things like whether sales people actually made the sales calls they claimed to. And because it’s not VOIP, users do not need to be connected to the Internet to receive calls. TellFi also prides itself on its simplicity, eliminating the need for an IT setup. All you need to do to set up a business phone system is visit the website and set up an account from an interface that’s designed for non-techie users, “It allows people to jump in, do what they want and jump out” says Lee. TellFi now has over 50 clients and hopes to add even more enterprise-friendly features like conference calling and more in depth analytics for users in the near future, rolling out a new feature every two weeks. TellFi is also offering the first 50 interested TechCrunch readers one month of the starter plan free when they sign up for an account, by using the access code “TCReaders.” CrunchBase Information TellFi Y Combinator Information provided by CrunchBase
 
AOL's Awesome Weekly Drinking Binge Top
One great thing about big corporations are all the rules. AOL has a twenty nine page Standards of Business Conduct policy that all applies to all employees. The document covers things like harassment, safe work environments, privacy, conflicts of interest and gifts. The best part is near the end when it gets into bribery and corruption. “AOL strictly prohibits…bribery of government officials,” is an example of the rules that we are forced to live by. As you can imagine, it’s mostly common sense, and has been a subject of great amusement around the office for the last several months . AOL is also very strict about alcohol in the office, and I’ve heard people complaining that HR won’t let them bring in a few beers to celebrate a new product launch. The only real question I had was why in the world they asked permission in the first place. Our Company prohibits the abuse of alcohol or prescription drugs while performing your job duties or while on our premises. Anyway, the no alcohol policy is one which we have violated each and every day since we were acquired. See, for example, the TechCrunch kegerator . I guess it all depends on how to define “abuse” though. Which is why we’re confused by AOL’s weekly drinking binges, called Accelerator Thursdays. We get a deluge of emails urging us to participate in this weekly program, which as far as we can tell consists of very heavy drinking, and lots of drinking games, in all of the AOL’s offices. From the Dulles office: In Dulles we will be enjoying beverages from the The Refueling Station (our bar). Beverages will include melted snow (white wine), quick start (red wine) and brew icicles (beer). Our ice luge drink is fast track (blue caracau, vodka, lemonade). Detroit: In Detroit we are kicking off the Luge with White Russians & Margarettia’s! We encouraged everyone to bring forward ideas for future Accelerator events. Baltimore was less energetic: We are kicking our AT off with a beer cart. The last thing I want to do is put a stop to all this. But the next time someone in HR starts bugging me about bribing a government official to get the inside scoop on a story, I’m just pointing to the picture above of that poor AOL employee being forced to drink blue caracau, vodka, lemonade luges from the ice track. :-) CrunchBase Information AOL Information provided by CrunchBase
 

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