Friday, March 30, 2012

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(Founder Stories) Kayak's Paul English Discusses Big Wins & Important Strategic Alliances [TCTV] Top
Kayak Video 1 Out -tc_upload.mp4Having recently posted its 2011 revenue numbers, Kayak.com's co-founder, Paul English stopped by TCTV to tape an episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon. In part I of this conversation, English describes serendipitously meeting co-founder Steve Hafner (who previously co-founded Orbitz), speaks to the importance of striking the right business partnerships and offers insights into how Kayak tests its products.
 
Skolkovo: Cisco, Bessemer Venture Partners Put Millions Into Russia's Latest Answer To Silicon Valley Top
skolkovoIn the debate over whether there can ever exist "another Silicon Valley" and where, exactly, it would be, add in another contender: Skolkovo, an ambitious high-tech sprawl being built outside of Moscow, which this week announced the latest two companies to invest in its big idea: Cisco and Bessemer Venture Partners. Bessemer has promised investments worth $20 million over the next two years into startups that are resident at Skolkovo, while Cisco has dedicated an unspecified part of a $1 billion injection it is making into Russia over a number of years to build an R&D lab in the area -- part of big push from the government to take some of the technology know-how that Russia has been producing for decades and give it a significantly more commercial spin.
 
Social, Mobile Video Sharing App Klip Doubles Down On Visual Effects In New Version Top
klipKlip, a mobile app that allows users to capture, share, discover and view videos, is debuting a new version of its iOS app that allows users to shoot videos with visual effects and filters in real-time. The company has also added seven new video effects to the app. Klip, which launched in September, is focused on mobile video discovery and providing the highest quality video streaming around for iOS. You simply shoot a new 'Klip' or grab one from your Camera Roll and share it with the community, your friends on Facebook, Twitter, on your YouTube channel, or by email. Within the app, you can watch Klips from around the world, follow other Klippers, re-klip the Klips you think are worth sharing again, or stay on top of hot topics by following hashtags.
 
It's A Disney Party! DeNA & Disney Team Up To Launch Mobile Games Worldwide Top
20120330_party01Disney and Japanese mobile gaming giant DeNA announced a new partnership this morning that will see their first jointly developed mobile social games launched on DeNA's Mobage social gaming platform, beginning later this month. The first title to arrive, "Disney Party," was released on March 28th to the Mobage network in Japan, which serves a mobile gaming audience of over 35 million. On April 2nd, a second title will arrive in Japan called "Disney Fantasy Quest." These two games will involve Disney's own characters, but will be followed by a third, (yet to be named) card game battle that's based on Marvel Comics characters.
 
New Google Drive Leak Points To 5GB Of Free Storage, Release In Third Week Of April Top
GD1Evidence of Google Drive's existence has been sporadically surfacing for months now, and MG reported last September that Google employees have been using the reborn service in-house for a while now. Now, as the service's supposed launch draws ever closer, we're starting to get our first clear glimpses at what Google's had under lock and key for so long. According to a leaked screenshot obtained by TalkAndroid, Google Drive could offer even more functionality than earlier reports suggested -- if legitimate, then Google Drive users could have access to 5GB of free storage right out of the gate. Their mysterious source also confirmed to them that the service is on track for an official launch in just over two weeks on April 16.
 
Jordan Mechner, Creator Of Prince Of Persia, Finds Original Source Code In His Dad's Closet Top
photo-300x225Prince of Persia and Karateka, were two of the best action games of their era. Why? Because they gave us an inkling of what real, fluid graphical motion would look like in a few years' time and, more important, were pretty much amazing if you were used to the Atari 2600 and River Raid. I remember playing Karateka before school at age ten, chopping my way through enemies on my way to save my sweetie and then, a few years later, playing PoP. Both were amazing. Why? Because he created smooth, believable animation at eight frames per second on machines that were more suited to games like The Oregon Trail. He also created action games that led to realistic titles like Tekken that used real, human motion in order to add amazing realism. A funny thing happened about ten years ago. The creator of these games, Jordan Mechner, apparently lost the original PoP source code and hunted all over for it, asking former Broderbund employees and digging through old files. The files - stored on 3.5-inch floppy disks - contained the original machine code for the game. The only way to actually play the game, until today, was run an emulated, extracted ROM.
 
Plukka Founder Joanne Ooi On Merging Manufacturing And Group Buying Top
Screen shot 2012-03-30 at 9.20.41 AMWe've seen a lot of group buying services cross the home page here at TechCrunch, and almost all of them have one thing in common: they sell you the stuff that has been marked down, and couldn't be sold at the time intended. But a new startup called Plukka, an e-commerce site focused on high-end designer jewelry, is going in an entirely different direction when it comes to group buying. I had the opportunity to sit down with founder Joanne Ooi, who stressed that the most important part of the Plukka equation is something she refers to as "just-in-time" manufacturing.
 
Sources Say Richard Branson Has Joined Dave Morin's Slow Ventures Top
bransonAmen, the 'strong opinions' app that's making waves and has high profile investors like Ashton Kutcher, released a new version of its iPhone app this week. It's staying deliciously simple but Version 1.5 of the app added some long needed new features. It also took in a fresh $1m (taking its total pot to $2.9m) from Sunstone Capital and Path's Dave Morin, came on board as an Angel angel investor via his vehicle Slow Ventures. But we understand that Amen may well take in a new investor who you might have heard of: noted global entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson. We have also heard from well placed sources that Branson is a silent partner in Slow Ventures with Morin.
 
Amid UDID Uncertainty, AppRedeem Creates New ID Scheme, Groupon Adopts Top
UDID-e1292882803383As you've likely heard, the "UDID-calypse" is upon us. Because of mounting privacy concerns (from Congress, etc.), Apple has begun rejecting iOS apps that access UDIDs, and will eventually do away with them altogether. For now, it remains unclear how long that will take, but, in the meantime, developers are scrambling to find alternatives. (Yesterday, Kim-Mai laid out some of the options available to those looking to take preemptive action.) There's no question that the UDID issue has big potential ramifications for mobile advertising, as Amit Runchal points out. Developers and mobile ad companies unilaterally need to find a workable solution, and one advertising startup thinks it may have just that. Mobile ad platform AppRedeem is developing an ID scheme it's calling the "Organizational-Specific Device Identifier" (ODID), which it believes provides a long-term alternative to UDIDs.
 
Wikipedia's Next Big Thing: Wikidata, A Machine-Readable, User-Editable Database Funded By Google, Paul Allen And Others Top
wikimedia-logo2Wikidata, the first new project to emerge from the Wikimedia Foundation since 2006, is now beginning development. The organization, known best for its user-edited encyclopedia of knowledge Wikipedia, recently announced the new project at February's Semantic Tech & Business Conference in Berlin, describing Wikidata as new effort to provide a database of knowledge that can be read and edited by humans and machines alike. There have been other attempts at creating a semantic database built from Wikipedia's data before - for example, DBpedia, a community effort to extract structured content from Wikipedia and make it available online. The difference is that, with Wikidata, the data won't just be made available, it will also be made editable by anyone.
 
The Ground Beneath Apple's Walled Garden Top
800px-Eglinton_Walled_garden_wallApple's blanket rejection of apps accessing UDIDs is just the latest in a long line of erratic behavior on Apple's part of enforcing the rules of the iOS App Store. Sure, Apple warned developers that they were deprecating UDID, but like many of Apple's Solomonic pronouncements about the iOS App Store it was a little unclear, vague and open to interpretation. Many developers assumed that they would have at least until the release of iOS 6 to clear things up, but that turned out to be too optimistic.
 
Israeli-American Accelerator UpWest Labs Graduates Its First Batch Of Startups Top
screen-shot-2012-02-07-at-12-49-35-pm2When it comes to countries with thriving startup ecosystems, Israel ranks among the best. With nearly 5,000 startups currently in business -- second only to the U.S. -- the country's pool of entrepreneurial talent has been attracting Western businesses and entrepreneurs for years. But, in January, Gil Ben-Artzy and Shuly Galili launched a startup accelerator that aims to reverse this trend in favor of Israeli entrepreneurs, by bringing the country's promising founders to Silicon Valley to help them kick start their businesses. And, today, after 10 weeks of mentoring, networking, and iterating, UpWest Labs is revealing the six graduates of its inaugural batch.
 
Best Buy To Shut 50 Stores In Streamlining Effort Top
wreckinTechCrunch's Best Buy tag isn't exactly a heartening place to visit. In the last few months, it "stole Christmas," been "finished," and is now "going out of business." Dire straits indeed for a company that has defied the odds not only against big retail competition but against deadlier online opponents as well for nearly 50 years. But an announcement today seems to give a little weight to the doom and gloom expected from a tech community that views Best Buy as an anachronism. Best Buy will be closing 50 of its big box stores and laying off some 400 people, mostly on the administrative side. Is it rightsizing or just plain attrition?
 
Patients Are More Than A Vessel For Billing Codes Top
Patient as Billing Code VesselIt will be virtually impossible to succeed in the new reimbursement model without recognizing what has long been said, but little done about it -- "the most important member of the care team is the patient." Having implemented or reviewed over 100 health IT systems, there is one common purpose at the core of the architecture of these systems -- how to get as big a bill out as quickly as possible. That has been an entirely rational response to the flawed reimbursement model at the heart of healthcare's hyperinflation (here's a not-so-fun fact: Since the 60's, while all non-healthcare expenditures increased 8x, healthcare increased 274x).
 
Kickstarter Shares The Effects Of Its Blockbuster Season Top
df_pledges_per_week_logo.largeFebruary was a big month for Kickstarter. Not only did they have a number of record-breaking projects, but they were shoved into the mainstream consciousness with a flood of traditional news coverage. But there was always the question of whether these thousands of pledges would have any lasting effect on the site. Could such a rush of attention actually have negative effects, increasing competition and bringing in more projects than the site's population of donors can handle? Fortunately, that doesn't seem to have been the case. The site's big month appears to have made a lasting increase in both projects, users, and funding.
 
Confirmed: LivingSocial Co-founder Eddie Frederick Steps Down From Leadership, Board Top
6a00e553b7e58b8834010536b4bf69970c-800wiStartupStats got wind of news this afternoon that LivingSocial Co-founder Eddie Frederick is stepping down from both his leadership position today, and from his role as a member of the company's board of directors. We've since been able to confirm the news by way of LivingSocial Director of Communications Brendan Lewis. Frederick co-founded the daily deal giant back in 2007 with CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy, CIO Val Aleksenko, and CTO Aaron Batalion. The four met while working for Revolution Health, and, after completing work on the consumer healthcare portal, they decided to leave to pursue their already-launched Facebook app, Virtual Bookshelf. The book solution, formerly known as Hungry Machine, was initially the company's flagship product, before it became the Groupon competitor we know today.
 
The Cloud Will Cure Cancer Top
Moneyball-Jonah-Hill-boardMuch ink has been spilled on the huge leaps in communications, social networking, and commerce that have resulted from impressive gains in IT and processing power over the last 30 years. However, relatively little has been said about how computing power is about to impact our lives in the biggest way yet: Health. Two things are happening in parallel: technology to collect biological data is taking off and computing is becoming massively scalable. The combination of the two is about to revolutionize health care. Understanding disease and how to treat it requires a deep knowledge of human biology and what goes wrong in diseased cells. Up until now this has meant that scientists do experiments, read papers, and go to seminars to get data to build models of both normal and diseased cell states. However, medical research is about to go through a tectonic shift made possible by new technological breakthroughs that have made data collection much more scalable. Large amounts of data combined with computers mean that researchers will have access to data beyond just what they can themselves collect or remember. A world with affordable massive data in the clinic and in the lab is on the horizon. This will mean exponentially faster medical progress.
 
WSJ: Google Planning To Sell Tablets Straight To Consumers Top
nexustabHere we go again: the rumors of Google branching out into the tablet space have been floating around for what seems like ages now, and the Wall Street Journal has jumped into the fray. They cite the usual handful of unnamed sources, who this time say that Google is planning to open up their own online store a la Amazon to sell Android tablets. Not just any Android tablets, mind you -- co-branded ones that bear Google's name along with that of the manufacturer. Google does many things (some better than other), but they're definitely not in the consumer hardware production game.
 
Algorithmic Essay-Grading: Teacher's Savior Or Bane Of Learning? Top
roboA contest is underway at data-crunching competition site Kaggle that challenges people to create "an automated scoring algorithm for student-written essays." This is just the latest chapter in a generations-long conflict over the nature of teaching, and to that end it's also just one of many inevitable steps along the line. Automated grading is already prevalent in simpler tasks like multiple-choice and math testing, but computers have yet to seriously put a dent in the most time-consuming of grading tasks: essays. Millions of students write dozens of essays every year, and teachers will often take home hundreds to read at a time. In addition to loading the teachers with frequently undocumented work hours, it's simply difficult to grade consistently and fairly. Are robo-readers the answer? Mark Shermis at the University of Akron thinks it's at least worth a shot.
 
What Does A Post-UDID World Look Like For iPhone And iPad Developers? Top
UDIDThis past week has been a big wake-up call for the iOS developer community. The need to move away from UDIDs, or an ID scheme that many developers rely on to power advertising and store data about their users, took on extra urgency after Apple issued a few app rejections related to UDID use over the past week and a half. Even though Apple told developers that it would deprecate UDIDs about six months ago, the community hadn't yet converged on a good alternative. There is a lot of misinformation right now. Because Apple often communicates policy changes through one-off app rejections instead of publishing a clear and transparent notice to everyone, developers get aggravated by rumors. While being super secretive stokes consumer appetite for Apple products, it's a ridiculously awful way to operate a platform that 700,000 apps rely on. Chartboost, which does direct advertising trades between developers, sent out an e-mail last night saying that the stories about UDID rejections are "completely fabricated." But another indie developer, TapBots, posted an actual copy of a rejection notice they received this morning (pictured below). So what is going on?
 

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