The latest from TechCrunch
- Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz All Ready To Disrupt In NYC
- Intel's 3D Transistors Promise Small Physical And Electrical Footprint
- Socialcam's 'Instagram for Video' Is Now On The Web, Too
- With A New API, Aviary Wants To Become The Twilio Of Photo Effects (Video)
- TaskRabbit Gets $5M From Shasta Ventures, First Round And Others To Help People Get Stuff Done
- Obama 'Situation Room' Photo Is Already Half Way To Becoming Flickr's Most Viewed Pic
| Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz All Ready To Disrupt In NYC | Top |
| TechCrunch Disrupt NYC starts May 23rd—less than a month away. And we are very excited to announce four more guests to our growing list of speakers who will be joining us at this year’s Disrupt in NYC: Howard Lindzon, Yossi Vardi, Greg Tseng, and Bradley Horowitz. Howard Lindzon, co-founder and CEO of StockTwits, is a force to be reckoned with. With over twenty years experience in the financial community acting as both an entrepreneur and investor (his sold his last startup, Wallstrip, to CBS) , has incredible insight into new media and is also a very active angel investor in the financial and internet business sectors. Yossi Vardi is an award winning Israeli investor, most famous for being the original investor in ICQ . Currently co-founder and board observer of WeFi, Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies and has acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world. Greg Tseng is the co-founder of Tagged and has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. As VP of product for Google apps, Bradley Horowitz oversees Google's communications products and social applications including Google Talk , GrandCentral , Blogger , and Picasa . Before joining Google, Horowitz was the former vice president of Yahoo's product strategy group and led Yahoo's efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. We are incredibly excited to have all four guest speakers with us for this year’s Disrupt in NYC. We will keep announcing new guest speakers week after week as we get closer to the event. You can read the full list of announced speakers here . Early bird ticket prices end tonight at midnight PDT, so make sure to purchase your tickets soon. Tickets are available here . If you'd like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for more information. Howard Lindzon Co-founder and CEO, StockTwits Howard Lindzon has over twenty years experience in the financial community acting in both an entrepreneurial and investing capacity. Mr. Lindzon spent the last ten years managing his hedge fund, Lindzon Capital Partners, and is Partner and Principal of Knight's Bridge Capital, a private equity firm based in Toronto. Mr. Lindzon has tremendous insight into new media and is a very active angel investor in the financial and internet business sectors, invested and involved with over 30 companies. He sold his startup videoblog Wallstrip to CBS Corp. and has made many successful angel investments including: Rent.com, (sold to Ebay in 2005 for $415 million), Golfnow.com (purchased by Comcast in June 2008), Lifelock (lead investors include Bessemer Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers), and Internet Brands (NASDAQ). Mr. Lindzon's new media and internet business investments include: MyTrade.com (purchased by Think or Swim in December 2008, NASD SWIM), Limos.com (sold December 2008), Covestor.com, Blogtalkradio.com, Foodzie, and Tweetdeck, to name a few. Mr. Lindzon is actively involved in his latest venture, Stocktwits, an open, community-powered investment idea and information service built on the twitter platform. Mr. Lindzon received an MBA at Arizona State University and an MIM from The American Graduate School of International Management. Yossi Vardi Co-founder & Board Observer, WeFi Inc. Yossi Vardi is an Israeli investor most famous for being the original investor in ICQ – the first Internet-wide instant messaging system. Vardi has invested in over 50 tech companies in diverse areas of software, energy, Internet, mobile, cleantech, and others. Vardi has been an active civil servant in Israel through projects involving energy and infrastructure. He also co-founded Alon, an Israeli oil company. Vardi acted as an advisor to the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program on issues of energy in the developing world. Vardi has received many awards including The Prime Minister Award, The Industry Award, Entrepreneur of the Year (Tel Aviv University), and the CEO!'s Entrepreneurs Hall of Fame from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs' Organization. Greg Tseng Co-founder and CEO, Tagged Greg Tseng co-founded Tagged in October 2004 and has served as Chief Executive Officer since its inception. He has been a driving force in creating Tagged.com with his partner, co-founder and long-time friend, Johann Schleier-Smith. Greg holds an A.B. in Chemistry & Physics & Mathematics from Harvard University, where he served as a Director of the Harvard Entrepreneurs Club (HEC) from 1998-2000 and co-authored The Harvard Entrepreneurs Club Guide to Starting Your Own Business (Wiley, 1999). Greg is presently on leave from Stanford University, where he is pursuing the Ph.D. in Physics on a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship. His academic research lies in the field of nanotechnology and he has published his results in top journals such as Science. Bradley Horowitz VP Product, Google Apps, Google Bradley oversees Google's communications products and social applications including Google Talk, GrandCentral, Blogger and Picasa. Before joining Google, Bradley led Yahoo's advanced development division, which developed new products such as Yahoo! Pipes, and drove the acquisition of products such as Flickr and MyBlogLog. Bradley Horowitz is the former vice president of Yahoo's product strategy group. He led Yahoo's efforts in building innovative products and technologies across the company. Horowitz drove innovation and leveraged Yahoo's platform to deliver compelling Yahoo products and services to a community of 500 million users. In addition, he was responsible for the company's initiative to open up its platform which included overseeing the Yahoo Developer Network (YDN). Prior to that, he managed a portfolio of products for Yahoo including media search, desktop search and the Yahoo Toolbar. Prior to joining Yahoo, Horowitz served as both the chief technical officer and the vice president of engineering for the Virage division of Autonomy, where he was responsible for the technical delivery of five major product lines. Prior to Autonomy, he founded Virage, the company widely recognized as the market creator and leader for advanced media indexing and analysis. Horowitz helped grow the company from "a garage startup" through its NASDAQ IPO. Horowitz was a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. While at the Media Lab, he worked on a number of topics related to computer vision, graphics and image processing, which resulted in a patented new technique for the recovery of structure, motion and camera parameters from video sequences. Horowitz holds an MS in Media Science from MIT and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Michigan. | |
| Intel's 3D Transistors Promise Small Physical And Electrical Footprint | Top |
| Intel has made an interesting advance in microprocessor technology after years of research , and it seems that 2011′s processors will be the first to feature 3D transistors and tri-gate technology. By optimizing the shape of the transistor at a nanometer level, Intel has made it possible to both reduce the size of individual transistors and improve their efficiency. Now, it’s important to differentiate this 3D method from others under investigation, like IBM’s . This isn’t a multi-layer solution, merely a more complicated shape for the single layer of transistors we know and love. I say merely, but of course sculpting things at a near-atomic level is no joke. So what exactly is the advance here, and what will it enable? Continue reading… | |
| Socialcam's 'Instagram for Video' Is Now On The Web, Too | Top |
| Socialcam , the video sharing app that was created by Justin.tv , is quickly fleshing out its feature set. The app — which is a lot like an ‘Instagram for video’, minus the effects filters — launched just in time for SXSW and had 250,000 downloads in its first month (the total download number is significantly higher than that, though they aren’t releasing figures until they reach their next ‘big’ milestone). A few weeks ago the company launched a 2.0 release that streamlined the video upload process, and today it’s adding another key feature: a web version of Socialcam. Now, in a sense Socialcam has had a website since it launched — every time you shared a Socialcam video via email or Twitter, you sent out a link to a landing page with your video embedded. You could retweet or share that page on Facebook, but that was it. There weren’t profile pages, so you couldn’t browse through the other videos your friends had recorded, and you couldn’t see who was tagged in each video (one of Socialcam’s features is a quick way to tag your friends in clips). With today’s launch, you’ll now be able to view user profiles, which showcase all of a user’s Socialcam videos, the friends who are tagged in each, and a list of which users they’re following on Socialcam. This functionality has been available on the service’s iPhone and Android apps, but this is the first time it will be available on the web to people who aren’t actually Socialcam users. One question that came to mind when I first saw the new feature: Socialcam’s privacy features are basically non-existent (everything you share is public) — will making these videos so easy to browse upset users? But CEO Michael Seibel says that, on the contrary, they’ve gotten very few requests for more privacy settings. It sounds like they haven’t ruled out adding a ‘private video’ feature, but for the time being they’re sticking with the ‘everything is public’ model, which may be exactly what people are looking for. | |
| With A New API, Aviary Wants To Become The Twilio Of Photo Effects (Video) | Top |
| Mobile apps like Instagram and PicPlz made photo filters popular, and now every photo app needs to have filters and effects. But not every developer wants to spend the time and resources to come up with his own effects. Online image-editing service Aviary hopes to fill that need with a new photo effects API it is launching today. Alex Taub, head of business development for Aviary, took me through a demo of the new APIs and what they can do in the video above. Developers can choose from a variety of effects and filters—everything from red-eye reduction to “Bad Ass” (which makes photos look like Andy Warhol prints). There are also effects like Toy Camera, black and white, or adding a logo. watermark. Aviary hopes to become the Twilio of photo effects for developers (much like Twilio gave rise to apps like GroupMe through its SMS and telephony APIs). Aviary will be at the Disrupt NYC Hackathon this year showcasing this new API. The API is free now during a beta period. Aviary will eventually implement a tiered pricing plan. Aviary also revamped its homepage to better highlight its different products. CrunchBase Information Aviary Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| TaskRabbit Gets $5M From Shasta Ventures, First Round And Others To Help People Get Stuff Done | Top |
| Task management service TaskRabbit is announcing a raise of $5 million in Series A this morning, in addition to its already existing $1.8 million in seed and angel funding. The financing was lead by Shasta Ventures and followed on by First Round Capital, Baseline Ventures, FLOODGATE, Collaborative Fund, 500 Startups and The Mesh author Lisa Gansky. In addition to the financing, Shasta Ventures’ Sean Flynn will be joining TaskRabbit’s Board of Directors. Founded in 2008 and formerly RunMyErrand.com , TaskRabbit is a two way marketplace that helps its community of over 1500 task runners connect with the the thousands of tasks posted on the site monthly. Task senders can sign up to the site for free and post a task which will be bid on by runners, who are vetted through a three step background check. Senders can accept task bids and re-route payment through the site, scoring a runner on their performance once a task is complete. Founder Leah Busque tells me that the average task response time is 10 minutes, down from 30 minutes a year ago. As a service networking platform hooking up people who need stuff done to people who want to do stuff, the service is in the same space as Craigslist but with a “layer of safety” attached, because of its stringent approval process. The variety of tasks posted range anywhere from “Do laundry” (the most popular task), to “Pick up groceries,” to “Write a Mother’s Day Poem,” to “Wrap my officemate’s desk in cellophane as a joke.” Busque says she is currently seeing an increase in skills based tasks like “Help me redesign my WordPress blog.” The TaskRabbit platform facilitates the entire transaction between sender and runner, with a posting and bidding system and payment platform focused on providing an optimal user experience to both sides of the task equation. “There’s a lot that goes into building a platform like this,” Busque tells me. ”It’s a robust system including everything from messaging to alerting to payments to our reputations system. We’ve cracked the nut and learned how to provide a great user experience for both sides of the marketplace,” she says. “The TaskRabbit marketplace is revolutionizing the way people get things done- stranded drivers can find a person with jumper cables in just minutes, florists can get the extra delivery help they need on Valentine's Day to keep their customers happy,” investor Flynn said on the market impetus behind his firm’s vote. The service also keeps its ecosystem of runners engaged with the addition of gamification elements like points for completing each task. Runners also get points for engaging in community building actions like sending email invites encouraging friends to become runners and even just for bidding on tasks. A TaskRabbit leaderboard, monthly TaskRabbit meetups and text message task notifications also ensure that runners keep their heads in the game. TaskRabbit currently monetizes by taking a 15% cut of all tasks being performed. Busque plans on using the additional financing to expand beyond the current markets of San Francisco and Boston and to double her team of 13 people, hiring specifically into engineering and sales. CrunchBase Information TaskRabbit Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Obama 'Situation Room' Photo Is Already Half Way To Becoming Flickr's Most Viewed Pic | Top |
| If you ever wanted a glimpse of what the Spiderman “With great power comes great responsibility” quote looks like actualized, take a second to digest the above photo of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and various other PCs in the White House Situation room, captured as they “receive an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden.” Because I look exactly like Clinton when I receive “updates.” Not surprisingly the unnervingly human photo has captured popular imagination over the past day and a half, becoming the point of origin of a multitude of Photoshop memes which range from Jersey Shore’s The Situation being placed in the Situation Room, to the Royal Wedding’s Grumpy Flower girl joining in on the fun, to everybody wearing Princess Beatrice’s absurd Royal Wedding hat, which was particularly inspired. Sure this is great guys, but I’m still waiting for the Tiger Wood’s cigar dude , Dramatic Squirrel and Disaster Girl insertions, granted I’m a dork. The photo was posted post-Bin Laden death announcement on May 2nd at 10am PDT via the White House’s Flickr account. Flickr for some reason was tracking the pic, and graciously has given us the following viewer stats; 390,000 views at 3:30pm (5.5 hours later at 71,000 views per hour), 600,000 at 5pm (7 hours later at 140,000 views/hour) and 1,400,000 at 11am today (25 hours later at 44,000 views/hour). The White House Flickr account averages 100K views per day, and yesterday it received 2.5 million views, and as of 7pm today it already had 3.6 million views an order of magnitude greater than normal. People familiar with the matter are saying that this is the probably the fastest viewed ever photo on on Flickr. Flickr itself will only officially say that it’s the fastest one they’ve tracked and that a certain photo from the Royal Wedding has amassed over 1.3 million views since Saturday. At 1,597,561 views currently, the Situation Room image is already more than half way towards beating the current most viewed Flickr photo, the relatively banal snapshot of Nohkalikai Falls, Cherraphunjee which was taken in 2006 and has garned 2,978,625 views after five years. The Situation Room photo amassed its 1,597,561 views after a little under 38 hours. Damn. Image via The White House CrunchBase Information Flickr Information provided by CrunchBase | |
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