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• EmployInsight Grabs $1M For Its Employee Measurement Platform (And NYSE As Its First Client)
• Tello Raises $2.7M From True Ventures To Give Businesses Consumer Feedback On The Fly
• Sonastand Is A Stunning Aluminum iPhone 4 Amplifier Dock You'll Actually Want
• iPad 3 Rumor Roundup
• Why Google+ Doesn't Care If You Never Come Back
• Vocus Buys Email Marketing Company iContact For $169 Million
• Startups: Durham Wants You In Their Smoffice
• Groupon Acqhires Uptake To Build Out Palo Alto Office
• Twitter's Promoted Tweets & Accounts Arrive On Mobile Apps
• What's Happenin' Youse East Coast Staaht Ups? We Want To Hear From You!
• Apps Round-up From The Streets Of Barcelona
• Google's Schmidt: If Google Gets It Right, There Will Be An Android In Every Pocket
• ASO (App Store Optimization) Is The New SEO, And Here's A Tool To Do It
• ClassPager Lets Teachers Quiz and Remind Students Via SMS
• Keen On… Cary Sherman: The RIAA Needs To Give Music Consumers What They Want (TCTV)
• iZettle Launches In The Nordics, UK Launch On The Cards
• Niklas Zennstrom To Speak At The London Web Summit
• Is The $300 3D Printer Finally Here? Makible Thinks So
• It's Official: Apple Sends Out Invites For March 7th iPad 3 Event… In San Francisco
• Ad.ly Founder Sean Rad Developing Location Product At Hatch Labs

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EmployInsight Grabs $1M For Its Employee Measurement Platform (And NYSE As Its First Client)	Top
EmployInsight, a web-based platform for measuring and quantifying employees' "soft skills" in the workplace, has raised $1 million+ from Founder Collective, Launch Capital, Sean Glass, Phil Bronner, Jarrod Yuster, David Cohen, Gus Fuldner and other angels, the company is announcing today. The startup is also revealing one of its first enterprise clients, and it's a big one: the New York Stock Exchange is up-and-running on EmployInsight's first product, a hiring application called HireInsight.
Tello Raises $2.7M From True Ventures To Give Businesses Consumer Feedback On The Fly	Top
Tello,, a SaaS and mobile app that allows customers to give businesses realtime feedback on customer service, has raised $2.7 million in new funding led by True Ventures and Bullpen Capital. The company, which debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2010, previously raised $1 million in seed funding from Dave McClure, True Ventures, Founder Collective, Chris Sacca, Aydin Senkut, Russ Siegelman, Marc Goines, Ron Conway, Naval Ravikant, and Shervin Pishevar. On the consumer side, Tello is a free web and mobile service that aggregates ratings for businesses (business listings are aggregated from Localeze) from across the web and allows users to post comments about their experience at a business. Users can provide feedback on specific employees, recommend an employees and share a positive or negative story about the employee. Via iPhone and Android apps, users can select a specific business, choose and employee at the business and rate the service with a thumbs up or a thumbs down.
Sonastand Is A Stunning Aluminum iPhone 4 Amplifier Dock You'll Actually Want	Top
Kickstarter is seemingly a place where people go to make iDevice accessories. Some are hits, most are not. The Sonastand is clearly the former. Apple's Johnny Ives would probably even approve of this one. The story goes that the Sonastand's creators are, as one of them puts it on Reddit, two normal nerdy dudes trying to do their thing. To be honest their creation is not very novel but it's still rad as hell. All the Sonastand does is prop up the iPhone 4 in a way that connects the dock's passive speaker horn to the phone's tiny speaker. But it's not just empty claims compensated by sexy looks. The creators tested the Sonastand and found its passive horn significantly boost mid and high-end frequencies. TWiT will never sound the same.
iPad 3 Rumor Roundup	Top
Unless Apple is conning the world, the iPad 3 should be announced next week. It, like its forbears, is the subject of many a rumor, some more likely than others. We've collected most of them here in this post with arguments for and against, for your convenience and flaming pleasure. Of course, we'll be there to cover the event live, and will (if past events are any indication) get a nice hands-on as well.
Why Google+ Doesn't Care If You Never Come Back	Top
Ad targeting. Google+ is designed to power ad targeting, and for that it only needs you to sign up once. This lets it combine the biographical information you initially enter such as age, gender, and places you've lived with your activity on Search, Gmail, Maps and all its other products to create an accurate identity profile. And this powers targeting of more relevant ads it can charge more for. So despite comScore showing that the average Google+ user only spends 3 minutes per month on Google+, VP Bradley Horowitz wasn't lying when he told the Wall Street Journal "We're growing by every metric we care about".
Vocus Buys Email Marketing Company iContact For $169 Million	Top
Big M&A news in the email marketing world. Vocus, the publicly-listed provider of cloud-based marketing and PR software, has acquired iContact, a company that provides email marketing services for small and medium sized businesses. The total acquisition price is $169 million. iContact's email marketing software automates the process of creating, sending and tracking email communications for businesses. iContact, which has raised over $50 million to date, also allows users to track email campaign effectiveness, accessing data around opens, clicks and more.
Startups: Durham Wants You In Their Smoffice	Top
Durham (a city in North Carolina) is looking to vitalize their already burgeoning startup scene by giving away the "World's Smallest Office," a moniker I once reserved for my attic bathroom but can now be rendered unto a bit of space in the front of a Cafe in Durham's beautiful Downtown. Although the office shown above appears to be more like a monkey cage than a formal workspace, the Smoffice (as it's called) will be available to one small startup for six months. The startup will also receive living space in downtown Durham and (this is just conjecture) a supply of Scuppernong grapes, known also as North Carolina's state fruit.
Groupon Acqhires Uptake To Build Out Palo Alto Office	Top
Groupon is acquiring travel startup Uptake. Liz Gannes at AllThingsD broke the news. We spoke to a source with knowledge of the deal who confirmed the details of the AllThingsD report. The purchase price was apparently between $10 and $20 million.
Twitter's Promoted Tweets & Accounts Arrive On Mobile Apps	Top
Twitter announced today an update which will impact its mobile applications on iPhone and Android: it's bringing additional "Promoted Products" to the mobile platform, specifically Promoted Accounts and Promoted Tweets. The Promoted Products suite of advertising products, which includes Promoted Trends, Promoted Tweets (in search and in the timeline), and Promoted Accounts, have been available on the web for some time, including the mobile web interface at m.twitter.com. In select cases, they've also been available within the native applications. However, with the recent app updates being launched today, Promoted Accounts will now be added to both Twitter for iPhone and Twitter for Android, with Promoted Tweets to soon follow.
What's Happenin' Youse East Coast Staaht Ups? We Want To Hear From You!	Top
With all this fuzz and fizzle going down with TC inside politics, departures, and whispered depictions of TC as a sinking ship populated by the shambling walking dead, rats clawing through our brainpans and dropping out onto our laps as our fingers shamble across our filthy, befouled keyboards, low groans of agony and anger gurgling out of our deepest, darkest spaces, I thought it would be a good idea to go over some of the things we're focusing on here on the site and offer a bit of guidance for start-ups looking to make it in Boston, DC, NYC, and Hilton Head, North Carolina. We're a very SF/Valley-centered blog, but what are New York, Washington, Virginia, and/or Florida? Chopped liver? I think not. What about Chicago, Atlanta, and Scranton? They may not have In-N-Out, but by gum they do have hamburgers just as good as those found in Palo Alto.
Apps Round-up From The Streets Of Barcelona	Top
We've been trawling Barcelona for apps and startups during Mobile World Congress, so here's a little round-up of some of those that have been plying their wares - many of whom don't have the cash to exhibit at the official Congress, but who are pitching like mad in the hotel bars of Barcelona. BearCare from Tagofjoy is an Augmented Reality game with a freemium business model. In the game you have to protect your beloved helpless Teddy Bear and cuddle him to keep him happy (go with it, it gets better). The fun part is that it takes place in a real environment, which is blended with lively and playful 3D bears. The games ha two modes. One is a fast-paced action game, in which you have to protect your helpless bear from unearthly, evil toy bears. Another mode lets you take care of him and keep him happy by cuddling him, playing with him and feeding him when he gets hungry. It's a Tamagotchi basically, but re-done for a new world. PlayTales is a an interesting virtual store and publishing platform. It publishes interactive children's ebooks in 7 languages on Android, iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone and soon a flash web site. It's basically a dream come true for parents who want to read stories to their kids on an iPad. Mafuta Go! is a one from left field for you. Coming out of Uganda, this is an app that lets users find the nearest gas station with the cheapest prices. Should you need that. It's worth also pointing out that Swiftkey, which we've covered before, won the official GMA award for most innovative app, beating Google Wallet. Here's a few others:
Google's Schmidt: If Google Gets It Right, There Will Be An Android In Every Pocket	Top
The number of people in the world has now reached 7 billion people, but the number that have been online are only at 2 billion, Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, said today at a keynote presentation at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. "We need to be realists about technology," he said. The future, most easily, belongs to "ultra connected people" who can embrace the future of technology, but the majority of people do not fall into that category, he said as he kicked off a speech about what he sees as the role of technology in the world today, and carefully suggested what role Google could play in the game.
ASO (App Store Optimization) Is The New SEO, And Here's A Tool To Do It	Top
What's the hardest thing about building a successful mobile app? If you answered "building a mobile app," you're wrong. It's getting your app found. With over 600,000+ iOS applications, and now some 450,000 on Android, the real challenge for developers is having their app surfaced higher than hundreds of other competitors in the app store search results. Doing this correctly involves ASO, or app store optimization. It's basically SEO repurposed for mobile, and because we're still in the early days of the mobile ecosystem, it's simpler to optimize apps than webpages. But developers are often lacking knowledge, and especially tools, to help them out on this front. That's where the newly launched App Store Optimization Keyword Volume estimator (whew!) comes in.
ClassPager Lets Teachers Quiz and Remind Students Via SMS	Top
Why ban phones from the classroom when you can harness them? Bootstrapped startup ClassPager today launches its Twilio-powered SMS system that lets teachers and professors efficiently send their students quizzes and reminders, and receive answers and feedback. ClassPager can re-engage bored or shy students, and show teachers who's falling behind. The 30-second set up provides a classroom code students can text to participate, so teachers and students don't actually have each other's phone numbers. That means better grades with no prank calls and no inappropriate advances.
Keen On… Cary Sherman: The RIAA Needs To Give Music Consumers What They Want (TCTV)	Top
So has the Internet been the best or the worst of things for the music industry? Some musicians, like Camper Van Beethoven's David Lowery, argue the latter; while some technologists, like BitTorrent's Bram Cohen think the former. And this all important question - the real impact of the Internet on both musicians and music consumers - is one that I asked Cary Sherman, the Washington DC based CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), when we Skyped yesterday.
iZettle Launches In The Nordics, UK Launch On The Cards	Top
iZettle, the Swedish mobile payments startup that basically competes with Square, has gone live on the App store in the Nordic markets today (Denmark, Norway and Finland). It's making 5,000 card reader devices available in each country. They've also appointed a UK managing director, Stewart Roberts. Stewart was former Director of Global Innovation at Barclaycard. A launch in the UK is therefore all but confirmed. Unlike square, iZettle's card reader is a chip and pin, which makes it more secure than Square. However it doesn't have quite the same advantages, as its reader uses Apple's proprietary connector so it has to pay Apple for the license on that.
Niklas Zennstrom To Speak At The London Web Summit	Top
As I previously announced, the startup conference I've run for the last three years has merged with the Dublin Web Summit to create the London Web Summit on March 19, in The Brewery Venue, in London's East End, already the single biggest cluster of tech startups in London. I'll be co-curating the Summit along with Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter here.
Is The $300 3D Printer Finally Here? Makible Thinks So	Top
MakiBox is a riff on the open source RepRap 3D printer that fits a print head and motor inside a box about the length and width (but not the thickness, silly) of a sheet of paper. The MakiBox kit will start at $350 while an assembled kit will cost $550.
It's Official: Apple Sends Out Invites For March 7th iPad 3 Event… In San Francisco	Top
Looks like CNBC was wrong. Apple just sent out invites for a March 7th event where they promise to have something we really want to see and touch. The event will be held next Wednesday at 10AM PST at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco where they will no doubt unveil the next iPad.
Ad.ly Founder Sean Rad Developing Location Product At Hatch Labs	Top
Mobile technology incubator Hatch Labs is announcing two new additions — Ad.ly founder Sean Rad (pictured) and former Apple employee Alan Tran. Describing itself as a "technology sandbox," Hatch Labs was announced last year as a joint venture between IAC and Xtreme Labs. It has already launched several startups, including app monetization service Blu Trumpet.

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