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- comScore: 170 Million U.S. Internet Users Watched Online Video Last Month
- Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude)
- All You Need To Know About The NYTimes.com Paywall
- Exclusive: Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Leads $6.5M Round For Jumio
- SMS On Steroids – eBuddy Debuts Realtime, Cross-Platform Messaging App
- Zong Expands Mobile Payments Platform To TVs, Gaming Consoles, Tablets And More
- Hydrovolts Wins Imagine H2O Prize, Harnesses Energy From Canal Water
- Startup Veterans Launch Imagine K12, A “Y Combinator For Education Startups”
- FriendFinder Revisits Plans To Go Public
- 10-Year Google Ad Vet To Lead Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center
- Tinychat Lets Anyone Put A Group Video Chat Toolbar On Their Website
- U.K. Beats The U.S. To A Tech-Friendly Startup Visa
- GroupMe Won The SXSW Group Messaging Wars, Says Infographic
- Danny Sullivan On How Viable It Is To Build Your Business On Google, Among Other Things
- HeyZap Goes After Social Discovery, Launches Check-in For Mobile Games
- San Francisco Pledges Support For Life-Saving ‘Fire Department’ Mobile App
- At SXSW, Advertising Was This Year’s Twitter, iPad 2 Was This Year’s Foursquare
- Sony To Subpoena Two Years Of PS3 Hacker’s PayPal Records
- Pinger’s Textfree Exchanging 1 Billion SMS Messages A Month, 1 Million Voice Minutes A Day
- Gamestaq’s Peer-To-Peer Game Sales Are The Love Child Of GameStop And Craigslist
- Jawbone Raises $49 Million from Andreessen Horowitz to Dominate Your Mobile Accessory World
- Would You Buy A Wetsuit On eBay From A Bear At A Urinal?
- Google Upgrades Program To Help U.S. Nonprofits Use AdWords, Apps And More
- Former Flickr Product Chief Lands At Bitly
- As Facebook Eyes Online Deals Space, Groupon Plots Facebook Ad Blitz
| comScore: 170 Million U.S. Internet Users Watched Online Video Last Month Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:44 AM PDT
ComScore has just released data from its Video Metrix service, showing that 170 million Internet users in the United States watched online video content in February for an average of 13.6 hours per viewer. According to the audience measurement giant, the total U.S. Internet audience engaged in more than 5 billion viewing sessions during the course of last month. Google Sites (read: YouTube) again ranked as the top online video content property in February, with an impressive 141.1 million unique viewers. Microsoft notably surged from the seventh to the second place in the ranking with 48.8 million viewers. It was followed by Yahoo and Facebook, who both logged 46.7 million viewers. VEVO ranked fifth with a decent 45.9 million viewers. Hulu only came in ninth with 27.3 million viewers in February, but according to comScore did generate the highest number of video ad impressions (more than 1.1 billion). Looking at the top online video content properties last month, Google attracted as many viewers as the three challengers that make up the rest of the top 4 of the ranking, combined. According to comScore, Google Sites also boasted the highest number of viewing sessions with 1.8 billion, and average time spent per viewer at 262 minutes (or 4.4 hours).
       
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| Whom Should You Hire at a Startup? (Attitude over Aptitude) Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:20 AM PDT Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable
Whatever you're working on now, the half-life of innovation is so rapid now that your product will soon be out-of-date. Your existence is irrelevant unless you continue rapid innovation. Your ability to keep up is dependent on having a great team of differing skills. Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do. The nature of the Internet and global knowledge is such that even if you've stumbled on to a super interesting area of innovation there will be many teams tackling the same problem at exactly the same time. If you develop something novel that catches a spark you'll have the world gunning for you over night. In this globally connected world product leads disappear in nano-seconds. The company with the best team on the field will win. The team which hires the most talented people, channels them in the most productive configuration and gets the most output from their unique capabilities. So how exactly do you assemble such a team? 1. Only hire A players Is this a universal truism? Of course not. But it is general pattern matching. And it's why VCs tend to look for uber-talented founding teams. We know that if you start with ho-hum founders you'd less likely to assemble a world-class team. So if you're trying to scale your team be focused on quality. Don't sacrifice. Don't hire too quickly just because you raised money or because you feel pressure to make things happen. The minute you compromise on quality you've already begun the descent. Aim high. 2. Find people to "punch above their weight class" It means that many management teams I know feel the need to hire people who have "done it before" and frankly many VCs encourage this. It's a mistake. When you hire somebody too early who has already "done it" you often find somebody that is less motivated in tough times, less willing to be scrappy (as many startups need to be), more "needy" and less mentally flexible / willing to change their way of thinking. Importantly, you also find people who are too quick to undermine the authority of the founders. They “know more.” You don’t want sycophants - don’t get me wrong – you want people who challenge your thinking and a meritocracy of ideas. But you don’t want team members who openly question your judgment, your authority. At least not publicly. So what do it mean to "punch above one’s weight class?" It's a boxing analogy. It means a welter weight who wants to fight in the heavy-weight category. It means a "young Turk" who has something to prove. It means somebody who held the director of sales in their last company but in this company wants to be VP. Their last company said, "you don't have enough years of experience." You said, "Eff experience. I want to know whether you can deliver. If you can, you're golden. You'll go a long way. If you can't – you're toast. Are you up for it?" It's Tristan Walker of FourSquare. They hired him when he was an MBA. He had no right asking for a senior biz dev role at one of the hottest companies in the US. But he was ready to punch above his weight class. And he pushed for it. And heavy-weight he has become. He is out innovating people with 10 years' his experience. He is hungry. He is an A player. His innovation and execution are proving his worth. 3. ABR: Always be recruiting In my busiest days I was still taking early-morning coffees or end-of-day beers to meet as many people as I could. Sunday mornings often became recruiting coffee sessions. One of the "tells" for me of a management team that will not be extra-ordinarily successful is that they're not always recruiting. I've seen it before – I send a talented member to a team and they say to me, "we don't really have a role for that person." Really? I always have a role for talented people. I may not have a BUDGET for talented peole – but I always have a role for them. What role? Who the F knows. But let me at least have a coffee and feel out their enthusiasm, talent and ambitions. I might choose to do an upgrade on my existing team. I might be grooming them for when I have more money or more revenue. I might not be able to persuade them now but I want them to know my company so that when I'm ready to step on the game I have a list of A players I want. Sure, the challenges to me are obvious: If you're not dedicating a large chunk of time to continually "recruiting" then you're high. Or maybe you're "low" – as in "not likely to succeed." Remember. Always be recruiting. ABR. 4. Don't worry about exact "roles" Get out there and find them. Ask others for intros to their talented friends. Meet talented people and sell them the vision. Get them exited about what you're doing. Be relentless. If they’re amazing, then be radical. Give them controls that they don’t have in their current company. Allocate them enough options to salivate. Convince them that even if they stay only a year they'd learn great stuff that would be valid for the rest of their future. You might several meetings to bag top prospects. But if you never start you'll certainly never hire them. 5. Attitude over Aptitude If you’re doing a great job at continually recruiting and if you have a company ready to hire several people, at some point when you have enough of a pipeline of talented people you need a way to separate them. I have a long-standing mantra, "attitude over aptitude." This is assuming a raw minimum of MIPS in the candidate. They need to be seriously smart / talented in their field to make the minimum grade. But within this "minimum acceptable talent level" you still have a wide variance of "employee types." Let's be honest – some uber talented people are PITAs. I never hire them. One bad apple spoils things for everybody. You don't see it coming. You figure, "sure, they're a pain but they produce such high quality work I'm willing to put up with them." Don't. The last thing you need is some rat bastard fomenting trouble. They're the ones who are talking pop at cocktail parties when they've had one too many. They're having private lunches with other employees talking about how they've lost faith in your vision. When you hit internal moments of doubt you need the team members who say, "Guys, we can do this! We're up against the ropes but we're not down. Let's dig in.” You need team members who do that when you’re NOT there. If you have a trade-off between somebody who is more talented but a "bad seed" versus somebody who is very talented (but perhaps less so) who is a motivator – I'd hire the latter any day of the week. Choose attitude over aptitude. 6. Culture matters Try to set out guidelines for hiring. Try to live them yourself or people will see through it. As times get tough you'll value this culture. Even in uber successful times where you're hiring like mad you'll want to know what somebody who embodies your culture is like. The best book I ever read on this topic was Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos). It’s a must read and has great advice on building a company culture. 7. Don't over-sell I don't mean you shouldn't sell hard on the virtues of your company and why you're the next Google – you should. If for nothing else you want all of the talented people you interview to spread the gospel whether they join or not. What I'm talking about is this – if somebody is thinking about joining but you can tell they're not convinced don't cross the line to get them to join. What does this mean? It means don't tell them that they're stake will make them $20 million if you're not convinced it will. Don't promise them that their role will be much bigger than you're planning. Don't promise revenue or growth faster than you know you can achieve. Sell hard, sure. But don't over sell. Why? Because if somebody is not convinced in their own mind and you arm-twist them to join they're bound to be unhappy and eventually leave. I've seen it a loads of times. You promise the world. You don't deliver. They are frustrated. They feel duped. They express this to others. Now you have more than one problem. And it's never a good thing when a high-profile hire quits unexpectedly. It causes otherwise happy people to second-guess things. So sell, by all means. But don't over sell. Don't promise unrealistic things. Don't over promise. So that's it. So go and schedule your next coffee meetings. Increase your number of interviews. ABR.        
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| All You Need To Know About The NYTimes.com Paywall Posted: 17 Mar 2011 08:04 AM PDT
As we heard earlier, the subscription plan allows for free access to a set amount of content across digital platforms. When the monthly reading limit is reached, users who are not already home delivery subscribers will be asked to become digital subscribers. The subscription model will be implemented in the United States and globally on March 28, 2011. In Canada, digital subscriptions will be launched today. For non-home delivery subscribers, the basic package – NYTimes.com plus Smartphone App – will start at $15 every four weeks. For tablet access, the subscription will cost $20. The NYTimes.com plus Smartphone App package is currently available for purchase only by users in Canada. Here are the details:
       
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| Exclusive: Facebook Co-Founder Eduardo Saverin Leads $6.5M Round For Jumio Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:59 AM PDT
Jumio is still gearing up for the launch of its online and mobile payments solution, due for release in 6 to 8 weeks, but the company has lined up an investor that is sure to draw even more attention to the stealth startup than the recent appointment of Google, Amazon and NASA vets to its board of directors. Eduardo Saverin, who will forever be remembered as the co-founder of Facebook, has taken the lead in the startup’s fresh round of financing. We’ve exclusively learned that Saverin put up more than half of the round, which totals $6.5 million, alongside other private investors. The 28-year-old Brazilian-American entrepreneur will also be joining Jumio’s board of directors.
Saverin, who currently spends most of his time in Singapore, will become actively involved in Jumio's roll-out into the Asian market. Says Saverin: "I'm usually a critical person, but the last time I have seen such a disruptive idea was actually Facebook". Quite the endorsement indeed. Saverin, who is a billionaire thanks to his stake in Facebook, also led the recent investment in TC Disrupt winner Qwiki. His investment, and even more so his active operational involvement in the young company, makes me anxious to learn what Jumio is building, exactly. Jumio was co-founded by Daniel Mattes, who sold his latest company, Jajah, to Telefonica for $207 million. Mattes is called the “Bill Gates of the Alps” in some parts. Worth noting: Jumio chose an unorthodox way of financing. Instead of raising a regular Series A round with an institutional VC, the company has established a so-called SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), a collective investment scheme that allows public stock market investors to invest in PE-type transactions, particularly leveraged buyouts. A participation in Jumio was placed privately to ‘Ultra High Net Worth Individuals’ (also called Ultra HNWIs). The use of SPAC is rare amongst startups, but has become popular lately as a result of Facebook's funding deal with Goldman Sachs. "The advantages are obvious," says Daniel Mattes. "There is a lot of interest from high net worth individuals to participate in start-up success stories like Facebook, Twitter, Zynga or Groupon. We offered the market such an opportunity and it was received extremely well to the extent that we were over-subscribed."        
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| SMS On Steroids – eBuddy Debuts Realtime, Cross-Platform Messaging App Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:28 AM PDT
eBuddy, the Dutch company that enables millions of people worldwide to communicate with each other on the Web and a wide range of mobile phones, is today introducing a brand new application for iPhone and Android. With the app, dubbed eBuddy XMS, the company aims to go “beyond SMS” with a free realtime messaging tool that functions across a range of platforms (BlackBerry coming soon). eBuddy believes it can add value to the fast growing mobile messaging apps category based on its wealth of digital messaging expertise and by focusing primarily on the user experience. Already, the company enables over 30 million monthly active users to send and receive more than 17 billion messages, which they say is an advantage to service providers that are not used to such scale in terms of being able to deliver consistent reliability and speed. I wish I could say you can try it out right now, but the app launch isn’t worldwide but limited to users in The Netherlands and Australia, at least for the time being. The company promises to add more features to the service and roll out internationally in the coming weeks. I gave the beta product a whirl, though, and I believe it definitely has some potential. After installation, the eBuddy XMS application will let you add friends via Facebook or by invitations sent via SMS and email. The app offers personalization options for messages, including more than 100 funky emoticons. With tools like eBuddy XMS (and alternatives such as Kik, WhatsApp, Pingchat or even the likes of ChompSMS, TextPlus, Grouped{in}, Beluga, GroupMe and admittedly loads of other messaging applications), who really needs SMS anymore?
       
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| Zong Expands Mobile Payments Platform To TVs, Gaming Consoles, Tablets And More Posted: 17 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PDT
In case you aren't familiar Zong works, here's a quick tutorial. When a user wants to purchase a virtual item, he can enters his cell phone number on a site, the site sends a text message to the phone, the user confirms the transaction with a short reply, and all the charges show up on his phone bill. This entire transaction is powered by Zong. Previously, Zong was only available for the web and on Android phones, but today is expanding its platform to work in a number of environments, including Flash, Unity, Interactive TV, gaming consoles, and the mobile web. Zong’s CEO and founder David Marcus tells us that Zong’s payments system is optimal on a variety of platforms, but specifically is receiving interest from developers looking to integrate Zong in TVs and game consoles. For example, Zong could be used to power payments within a game on a game console. Instead of having to enter credit card and billing information via a remote (which can be a tedious process); Zong’s payment system would only require users to enter their phone number. Zong would then send a message to the cell phone number, the user would text back to verify security, and the payment will be included on the user’s mobile phone bill. Clearly this scenario could also work with movie rentals, and more. Zong is also announcing that in-app payment system on Android has been expanded for use on Android 3.0 Honeycomb tablets. Marcus says that the seamless payment system (one-click) is suited for tablets that lack a physical keyboard. Zong isn’t the only payments company eying the connected TV market. PayPal has also expanded its payments platform to be used with televisions as well. The company, which faces competition from well-backed Boku, is currently in late-stage talks with a number of high-profile brands to incorporate its mobile payments system into other interactive platforms. “We made a tremendous amount of progress on the web, including Facebook,” says Marcus, “But now we are ready to expand into new customer types and other platforms.”        
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| Hydrovolts Wins Imagine H2O Prize, Harnesses Energy From Canal Water Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:36 AM PDT
The Seattle startup makes small-scale hydropower turbines. They can be used to harness energy from the flow of water in canals. Unlike hydropower turbines in rivers or the ocean, Hydrovolts turbines take advantage of already zoned and installed water infrastructure. That means they’re not likely to disturb marine life where they’re installed. They also float and are portable. The Imagine H2O prize (which we wrote about here here in December) included $20,000 in cash and $15,000 each in accounting and legal services from PWC and Cooley LLP, respectively for Hydrovolts.        
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| Startup Veterans Launch Imagine K12, A “Y Combinator For Education Startups” Posted: 17 Mar 2011 06:00 AM PDT
Everyone thinks they know exactly what schools need to do to start actually educating the youth of America well enough that they’ll have a fighting chance in the world. I, for example, think all we need is to bring good, old fashioned corporal punishment back into our school system. Right after we fire all the teachers, of course. I kid. But opinons really are all over the place. But one thing we all agree on – education could be and needs to be a lot better. Movies like Waiting For Superman help focus the attention on a possible solution. And people like Mark Zuckerberg are trying grande and noble experiments to see if they can make a difference. What if you’re a successful entrepreneur that wants to make real change in education? You find a way to bring technology, capitalism and entrepreneurism into the party, that’s what. Ralston, who was last seen selling his music startup LaLa to Apple in 2009, told me last week over coffee all about the new project. “We don’t have $100 million to give to a foundation like Mark Zuckerberg did, so we’re going to do something different,” he said.
The first class will work over the summer. Applications are being accepted until May 1 on their website, and they hope to accept 8 – 10 new companies. Y Combinator, by comparison, accepted more than 40 startups in their most recent batch, and have two separate “classes” per year. Is Y Combinator threatened, or even annoyed, by a niche focused clone? Absolutely not, says cofounder Paul Graham. By email, Paul said:
One of the ways Imagine K12 will help startups is by forging relationships with charter schools, public schools and education platform companies that can provide testing and distribution. “We will be able to test new products very quickly via these partnerships,” Ralston told me. It will certainly help these new startups avoid lengthy and overlapping business development cycles. Imagine K12 is self funded by the three founders, who hope to quickly expand to two classes a year. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, in the new AOL building.        
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| FriendFinder Revisits Plans To Go Public Posted: 17 Mar 2011 05:42 AM PDT
More than a year after cancelling its IPO, citing terrible market conditions, FriendFinder this morning announced that it has filed an amendment to the Registration Statement on Form S-1 with the SEC in connection with a re-launch of its proposed initial public offering. The company says it intends to use the net proceeds of the public offering to repay a portion of its existing indebtedness. Imperial Capital and Ladenburg Thalmann & Co. serve as joint bookrunners for the offering. Florida-based FFN (formerly Penthouse Media Group) operates sites like Penthouse, Adult FriendFinder, Bondage.com, Cams.com and BigChurch.com and many more. The company originally filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission back in December 2008, hoping to raise $460 million in the initial public offering at the time (this was later adjusted to $220 million). Penthouse acquired Adult FriendFinder in December 2007 for approximately $400 million. The company recently set up a new subsidiary called FriendFinder Ventures to focus on partnerships and investment opportunities in online, gaming, mobile and software companies.        
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| 10-Year Google Ad Vet To Lead Chicagoland Entrepreneurial Center Posted: 17 Mar 2011 05:38 AM PDT
Willer co-founded Google’s Chicago office in late 2000 and has helped grow the Google Chicago office to more than 400 professionals. Willer developed Google partnerships with advertisers and agencies, including Dell, United Airlines, FTD, State Farm, Omnicom, and Publicis. Willer also spearheaded advertising relationships with AT&T, Sprint, Dell and Motorola. As a resident of Chicago, it’s great to see such a seasoned exec lead entrepreneurship efforts in the Windy City. As technology companies like Groupon, 37 Signals, GrubHub, Appolicious and others see success, Chicago is just another city proving that all innovation and entrepreneurship doesn’t take place exclusively in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.        
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| Tinychat Lets Anyone Put A Group Video Chat Toolbar On Their Website Posted: 17 Mar 2011 04:13 AM PDT
Video-based communication startup Tinychat is attracting a lot of interest of late, not just from professional investors but also from celebrities from around the world. The company just raised a $1.5 million round of financing from Ashton Kutcher, Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs and Madonna manager Guy Oseary, among others, and hot artists like Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Bruno Mars have embedded Tinychat functionality deeply into their official websites. Now any website owner can get Tinychat’s robust group video chat features onto their own pages, as the startup has just debuted an easy way for publishers to create and integrate a custom toolbar. Similar to the Meebo Bar, the Insite Bar, Wibiya and the Conduit toolbar, Tinychat offers a simple solution for publisher that want to add group video discussions, chat and social sharing functionality to their sites without too much hassle. You can see a demo of the bar in action at the bottom of PetitionSpot.com. Tinychat says its growth is still accelerating, and that traffic is up 700 percent year-over-year. The company logs some 30 million minutes of usage on a daily basis, from a little over 8 million users today (up from 1 million in August 2010).        
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| U.K. Beats The U.S. To A Tech-Friendly Startup Visa Posted: 17 Mar 2011 03:08 AM PDT
However, what the media is missing is the new rules governing entrepreneurs wanting to enter the UK. Now, beginning April 6th, “high-potential” entrepreneurs will be allowed to come to the UK so long as they have £50,000 in funding from a reputable organisation. That is ridiculously good news for tech startups wanting to set up shop in the UK, and startups in the UK wanting to hire in talent they can’t get locally – CTOs for instance. Plus, entrepreneurs will be allowed to enter the UK with their business partners as long as they have access to joint funds.        
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| GroupMe Won The SXSW Group Messaging Wars, Says Infographic Posted: 16 Mar 2011 11:58 PM PDT
Group messaging was not as useful as we thought it would be this year at SXSW. Whether you were using Beluga, GroupMe, Kik, Yobongo or Fast Society or others, everyone had high hopes for a breakout group messaging app, simply because we spoiled tech brats are already bored with the ones we already have. I know it’s old school, but towards the tail end of the conference simple SMS won out (for me at least), because SXSW isn’t about hanging out with the same groups of people all the time, but rather about having variety of exclusive options. In practice group messaging is kind of weak on the exclusivity thing, because you’re almost always roped into groups with at least one person you don’t like which prevents you from sharing potentially useful information regarding your whereabouts. While my co-worker MG doesn’t seem to think there is any clear SXSW winner, if you had to pick a frontrunner among the group messaging apps, in my opinion, it would be good ole’ GroupMe, if only because it seemed like the one most people used (unless you count Instagram as a group messaging app). The data above (provided above by the folks at Pop Agency) agrees with me, in infographic form — tracking how much each app was mentioned on Twitter and sentiment analysis from March 11th through March 15th, with the added bonus of providing a helpful features checklist for the SXSW group messaging Winner, Second Place and Best In Show. And yes, this graphic does beg the question, “If we’re judging the winners by Twitter mentions, doesn’t that mean Twitter actually won?” Well, welcome to tech.        
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| Danny Sullivan On How Viable It Is To Build Your Business On Google, Among Other Things Posted: 16 Mar 2011 09:11 PM PDT The search engine wars have been heightened since January, when TechCrunch contributor Vivek Wadhwa wrote about why we need a better system of search, because his college students could no longer find the information they were looking for due to spammy results. Since then, both JC Penney and DecorMyEyes have been called out for questionable search-related business practices, as have content farms like eHow and content aggregators like the Huffington Post. Google has accused Bing of scraping its results, and both Google and newcomer Blekko have taken very public steps to block sites that attempt to game the system. Before he hosted a search Q&A panel at SXSW, I sat down with Search Engine Land founder Danny Sullivan to talk about the viability of building a business on Google, his opinion on the Google vs. Bing vs. Blekko “smackdown,” what search engines are doing to try to filter out lower quality content, and what he thought about the difference between a quality driven company like Stack Exchange versus the volume driven Demand Media. Highlights:
       
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| HeyZap Goes After Social Discovery, Launches Check-in For Mobile Games Posted: 16 Mar 2011 08:24 PM PDT
The company aims to build on its foray into social gaming last year, when it announced a partnership with fifteen social game developers, like Aeria Games, Game Duell, and TheBroth, to name a few. Using Facebook connect, the partnership made the developers’ games available on the 450,000 sites across the Web that had already integrated HeyZap’s platform. Social networking sites and tools Ning and myYearbook are among the sites that host Heyzap games. Yet, in spite of the success of its partnerships with social game makers, Heyzap Co-founder and President Jude Gomila told me that significant deficiencies still exist in today’s online and mobile gaming communities. Chief among them is the lack of an easy and trustworthy method by which to discover new games that target the individual’s specific interests. Gomila also sees an absence of viral channels and secure communities for mobile games. The startup’s new Android app attempts to fill these gaps through its check-in feature, which allows users to connect with friends and view check-ins that occur in a news-feed format on the app’s principal interface. This enables gamers to discover and play new free and paid games as well as discover which games their friends are playing. Essentially, Heyzap is trying to do for gaming communities what Foursquare and Instagram did for check-ins and photos. And maybe it can: Over the last month, despite being in alpha, the company tallied over 250,000 check-ins across 3000 Android games in one month. But Heyzap wants to retain these early adopters, so to address the lack of community functionality in mobile games Gomila referenced, the Heyzap app offers a tab for users to share tips and comments within games, hoping to create a community around each individual game. Users can win badges by exploring games and performing social actions in the Heyzap app. Heyzap is also announcing the release of a developer SDK, which has been integrated into 20 of the most popular games on Android, including Bubble Buster, X Construction, Wheelz, Slot Machine and Plumber. This is significant because it is designed to quickly increase the virality of a game by allowing users to check-in (and broadcast) to Facebook, Twitter, and the Heyzap graph by way of a simple button. The SDK also enables users to more easily find the games played most recently on the Heyzap app and to check-in both at the end of a game’s level and when gamers unlock achievements. For more info and to download the SDK, click here. While Gomila told me that Heyzap is working on adding an iPhone app in the near future, he says that, at this point, Android offers developer features that make it much more appealing than iOS. The instant release cycle on Android, for example, allows developers and distributors to iterate quickly and take advantage of the weekly release cycles — far more frequent than that which is enabled by Apple. What’s more, Android special features offer the ability to install or launch a game from directly within the Heyzap app, which is pretty cool. I’m not aware of any apps currently out there that tell gamers what their friends are playing, but just because the idea hasn’t been done before doesn’t mean Heyzap has too much time before potential competitors like OpenFeint and Ngmoco jump in.        
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| San Francisco Pledges Support For Life-Saving ‘Fire Department’ Mobile App Posted: 16 Mar 2011 06:15 PM PDT
The application itself is called Fire Department. Download it, and you’ll be asked if you’re trained in CPR. Click ‘Yes’, and the application will then passively monitor your location (without draining your phone’s battery). Here’s where the life-saving comes in: if someone calls 911 to report a possible heart attack victim, 911 dispatchers can send an alert to anyone in the vicinity with CPR training who has this app on their phone. They’ll immediately receive a push notification with the location of the victim, as well as the locations of any nearby automatic external defibrillators (AEDs). The whole process only takes a matter of seconds. Minutes are absolutely critical in these situations, and the immediate initiation of CPR before an ambulance arrives can be life saving. But there’s still a lot of work to be done. At this point the service is only available in the San Ramon Valley Fire Protection District where the initiative got its start (Lucas Hirst, who has helped spearhead the effort, is a friend of mine from high school). San Francisco is now on board, and is asking volunteers to help build a map of AEDs (which frequently go unused in emergencies because people simply don’t know they’re there). San Francisco hopes to have the technology working by the end of the year. The city’s website for the initiative is right here. The news was announced at an event today by SF Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White and City Attorney Dennis Herrera, along with Fire Fighters Union Local 798. Now if only they’d fix the startup tax situation.        
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| At SXSW, Advertising Was This Year’s Twitter, iPad 2 Was This Year’s Foursquare Posted: 16 Mar 2011 05:41 PM PDT
Now that the interactive portion of the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas is over, the key question is already rolling in: who won? What this really means, of course, is: what service was the breakout hit of the conference? After all, in past years, the conference has helped launch both Twitter and Foursquare into widespread usage. So the question really is: who was this year’s Twitter? Or what was this year’s Foursquare? The answer this year is a bit different, a little disappointing, and perhaps not all that surprising. While all the hype leading up to the conference focused on the red-hot mobile group messaging space, the real “winners” of SXSW 2011 were advertising, marketing, and branding — oh yes, and the iPad 2. Bleh, I know. But absolutely true. Everywhere you turned at the conference, an insane amount of advertising is what you saw. And that’s what people were talking about. Well, when they weren’t talking about the iPad 2. Or waiting in line at the brilliant pop-up Apple store to buy one. Don’t get me wrong, a number of the group messaging apps like GroupMe, Beluga, Fast Society, Yobongo and others undoubtedly saw record numbers that I’m sure we’ll be hearing about shortly. But in talking with other attendees throughout the show, the consensus was clear: there was no consensus winner among those apps. Some people preferred one, some preferred another. And some preferred none at all — they simply networked the old fashioned ways: those being yes, Twitter and Foursquare. But everyone agreed that the amount of corporate and startup advertising and branding going on this year was amazing — not necessarily in a good way, just in a way that you had to talk about. Just look at some of the images above and below.
There was a nifty foursquare court (as in, the actual game run by the company) area that was one giant Pepsi Max ad. We had a GroupMe taking over a big grill house. CNN took over an entire Austin bar and completely rebranded it — complete with a big glowing, rotating sign. Uber took over a hundred or so pedicabs. Even our parent, AOL, took over a huge portion of the conference center for a TV studio that we used. The list goes on and on. Obviously, marketing and branding has always been a big part of SXSW. But this year was exponentially beyond anything seen in years past. Some conference-goers compared it to Disneyland. But it was actually much worse than Disneyland. It was Disneyland if they had rides with names like: It’s A Small Red Bull World. That’s not necessarily to say that any of this had an adverse affect on the conference itself. In fact, all the sponsorships meant more parties than ever before, more free food and drinks than ever before, and enough free shit — er, schwag — to clothe a small nation. And when the discussion wasn’t about the crazy advertising at the conference, it was about the iPad 2. People who had them were constantly showing them off everywhere you looked. Meanwhile, everyone was either talking about the pop-up store that Apple set up on sixth street just to sell the product (and its magnetic cover), or they were standing in line to get in the store. I walked by the store each day. There was home to a constant, often massive group of people waiting to get inside to buy one. Some walked away with the one they wanted, others walked away with any one they could get. At one point, I stopped by the store just in time to hear an employee telling those in line that unfortunately, they only had one model left in stock: the white, 64 GB, WiFi version. Almost no one got out of line. I think employee could have said that all remaining models had broken screens and the reaction would have been the same. People wanted the thing, no matter what. When we look back, I think we’ll recognize SXSW 2008 as the year of Twitter, SXSW 2009 as the real year of Twitter (and the launch of Foursquare), SXSW 2010 as the year of Foursquare, and SXSW 2011 as the year of branding, advertising, and the iPad 2. A little unconventional, yes, but that’s the way it was.
       
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| Sony To Subpoena Two Years Of PS3 Hacker’s PayPal Records Posted: 16 Mar 2011 05:21 PM PDT
A new request from Sony has been granted that is, well, not quite as heinous as the last one, but is still troubling and overreaching. They want his PayPal records for all of 2009, 2010, and January of 2011. Because that whole period is relevant to a hack he worked out less than three months ago, right?        
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| Pinger’s Textfree Exchanging 1 Billion SMS Messages A Month, 1 Million Voice Minutes A Day Posted: 16 Mar 2011 04:57 PM PDT
For those that haven’t used it, Textfree gives users a free, unique phone number which they can use to send and receive free text messages through the service’s mobile app. That’s nice on mobile phones (you don’t burn through your carrier SMS allotment), but it’s proven especially popular on the iPod Touch, which can’t typically send or receive text messages. Users are now exchanging over 1 billion text messages per month through the app (to give some context to that, in September Textfree had exchanged 3.5 billion messages cumulatively since its launch in March 2009). But Textfree isn’t just for texting any more. In December, the application added support for free voice calls. This is especially important for those iPod Touch and iPad users, who typically can’t make or receive phone calls — Pinger says that 80% of calls are from non-phone devices. Users are allotted some free minutes for starters, and they can opt to ‘earn’ more minutes by completing Offers inside the app (these include offers incenting users to download other iPhone apps). Pinger says that 1 million voice minutes per day are being consumed on the app, and that 2 million minutes are ‘earned’ daily via these offers. Textfree’s competitors include GOGII’s textPlus, which has 7.7 million active users and a bigger focus on groups and media sharing (and doesn’t offer voice calling).        
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| Gamestaq’s Peer-To-Peer Game Sales Are The Love Child Of GameStop And Craigslist Posted: 16 Mar 2011 04:01 PM PDT
Gamestaq is a service that allows gamers to sell their used games directly to other gamers, for an automatically-generated standard price based on eBay and Amazon listings — so you know you’re not getting ripped off, though of course it’s also impossible to find a bargain. It’s intended to combine the best DNA from Craigslist and GameStop, and operate as transparently as possible. Continue reading… (link fixed – nice one, WordPress!)        
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| Jawbone Raises $49 Million from Andreessen Horowitz to Dominate Your Mobile Accessory World Posted: 16 Mar 2011 03:59 PM PDT
This round brings Jawbone’s capital raised to date to just under $100 million. That’s a lot of money. But I’m actually surprised they hadn’t raised more. The biggest reason VCs give for not backing more consumer electronics companies is how capital intensive they are, compared to lean and mean Web companies. But getting to a point where you sell 10 million devices in three years doesn’t sound capital intensive– especially when you consider the mega rounds it’s taking to scale the biggest consumer Web names. Part of that is discipline. Rahman can’t promise investors some wild yet-to-be-discovered business plan, nor can he rely on A/B testing or a release that can be tweaked after it ships. He simply has to make great devices from the beginning that people will buy for more than it costs to make them. And China has been indispensable in making that happen, he says. He’s far from alarmists who worry about the threat of those cheap China goods encroaching on American innovation. He’s not particularly concerned with knock-offs, because he considers Jawbone’s emphasis on software a differentiator that plays to Silicon Valley’s strengths. But even if that were a concern, the benefits from China have far outweighed that risk. “We couldn’t have done this without the ability to do business over there,” Rahman says. “The difference between China now and when we first started going over there in 2002 is amazing in terms of craftsmanship and attention to detail.” The impact in terms of flexibility, cost and speed to a product enabled by China’s manufacturing rise and sophistication is analogous to the role open source software played between Web 1.0 and 2.0– when the cost of creating a product fell by more than 90%. The difference is that unleashed a fury of new innovative Web startups. Meanwhile, the Silicon Valley establishment has mostly ceded this current renaissance in gadgets to Apple, Google and a few other giants. I’m hoping the success of companies like Jawbone and Square could finally spark a new Valley grown gadget revolution. Not that navigating the Asian manufacturing world is easy. What Rahman has learned since 2002 will be especially important as Jawbone continues to rapidly get new products to market as the smartphone boom takes off, enabling the digital lifestyle of a new generation of road warriors and bored Asian kids sitting in traffic. Last year’s Jambox speaker has sold better on a relative basis than any device Jawbone has made, and it’s recently announced a creepy-sounding new product called Thoughts that combines audio Tweeting and Blackberry messenger. (This may not sound that exciting to an iPhone generation, but I’m writing this from Indonesia where, trust me, the very idea of this is like peanut butter and chocolate; a combination of their two favorite things in the world.) We’ve invited Rahman to keynote our Disrupt conference in Beijing next fall to talk more about how Web companies between Silicon Valley and China can benefit from the same win-win cooperation between hardware companies in the two countries. Feel free to apply more public pressure in the comments.        
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| Would You Buy A Wetsuit On eBay From A Bear At A Urinal? Posted: 16 Mar 2011 03:23 PM PDT I don’t even surf, but after reading this eBay UK listing for a slightly worn wetsuit I almost want to buy it. The seller, Dan Morgan, manages to work in “an old man’s testicle,” his own hygiene habits, and a “bear using a urinal.” The key to good advertising copy is to tell a story. He’s doesn’t just describe the “used XCEL 3-2mm Infiniti Drylock Summer Wetsuit” for sale, he wraps a narrative around the wetsuit. And it’s hilarious. I’ve reposted the description from the eBay listing below for posterity. Remember, the key takeaway here is that he has “NEVER urinated in this suit.” The listing is already going viral. Seeing a marketing opportunity, XCEL Wetsuits is donating a second, brand new wetsuit to the winner, and DryRap is getting in on the action too by throwing in their changing towel, so to speak. The bidding is up to 640 Pounds, even though Morgan bought the original for only 300 Pounds. He will donate 90 percent of the proceeds to the Red Cross for Japan relief. The listing is brilliant, as they say in Britain. Unfortunately, eBay doesn’t think so. Morgan says he’s been contacted about some of the language and “unprofessionalism” of the listing (they don’t like the picture of the bear, apparently. Maybe it’s got something to do with false advertising). As a result, eBay is threatening to remove the listing. But it’s not offensive. (Brits are allowed to swear, see all of Paul Carr’s posts). It’s just good marketing. And almost all the money is going to charity, so eBay would look pretty callous if it does remove it.
       
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| Google Upgrades Program To Help U.S. Nonprofits Use AdWords, Apps And More Posted: 16 Mar 2011 02:52 PM PDT
Google offers select nonprofits the ability use Google Apps for free, also offers financial credits on Google AdWords, and more. Instead of having to apply to use all of these services separately, Google now allows users to apply via a one-stop shop application process. If approved, nonprofits can access Google’s suite of product offerings designed for nonprofits. This includes up to $10,000 a month in advertising on Google AdWords, free or discounted Google Apps and premium features for YouTube and Google Maps. The company is also rolling out Google for Nonprofits Marketplace, which connects nonprofits with professional service providers who have agreed to offer their services for a free or discounted rate. Google says these these providers are already partners from Google’s other marketplaces, such as AdWords Authorized Resellers, Google Apps Marketplace and the Google Earth Outreach Developer Marketplace. It looks like nonprofits are already benefiting from using Google’s products. Direct Relief International has raised more than $1 million using Google AdWords, Samasource saved tens of thousands of dollars using Google Apps and the Natural Resource Defense Council earned 100,000 views from one video on their YouTube channel with no paid advertising.         
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| Former Flickr Product Chief Lands At Bitly Posted: 16 Mar 2011 10:36 AM PDT
Flickr’s recently departed product chief Matthew Rothenberg is landing in a new job in New York City. He was just hired by bitly to become its new VP of Product. He will be moving from California. Score another one for the New York startup scene. Rothenberg’s decision to leave Flickr, which he says has more to do with personal reasons, is nevertheless seen as yet another sign that Flickr is ailing under Yahoo. As MG noted:
On the bright side, the fact that Bitly is hiring him says a lot about its ambitions to build out more consumer-facing services. Flickr is still arguably one of Yahoo’s best products, and the man who was in charge of making them an enjoyable experience will now be bringing his talents to bitly. You might think of bitly as just a URL shortener, but stay tuned. Theres a lot more coming. Bitly CEO John Borthwick tells us that the company is “about the real time link data stack,” and a handful of services will launch in the coming months, including News.me, that illustrate the value of this data stack. He also revealed a few impressive stats regarding Bitly’s business and link-sharing. Last month, Bitly saw 7 billion clicks on its links and currently supports 8500 white label partners.        
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| As Facebook Eyes Online Deals Space, Groupon Plots Facebook Ad Blitz Posted: 16 Mar 2011 09:59 AM PDT
As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, Facebook is looking to shake up the social ecommerce industry with yesterday’s expansion of Deals, its location-aware rewards program. The company is expected to turn Deals into a serious rival to online coupon, collective purchasing and location-based daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial. We’ve learned that Groupon, in turn, has tapped a startup called AdParlor to exclusively manage their advertising spend on Facebook. The group buying site will let AdParlor run “tens of thousands of ad variations” on the wildly popular social networking service. In a way, Groupon will thus be increasing Facebook’s revenue, which will enable the social network juggernaut to more effectively compete against Groupon. This, of course, is a very simplistic way to look at these things – the truth is that for Groupon, like many companies, Facebook could prove to be a phenomenal platform for massive user acquisition. In essence, AdParlor will run all of Groupon ads on the right-hand column of Facebook through a wide variety of campaigns – from generic ads driving users to sign-up for daily emails to deal-specific advertising units with a focus on driving direct sales. Through dynamic ad creation and bid optimization, AdParlor, which has official access to the Facebook Ads API, says it manages to purchase advertising on the social networking site more effectively than any other party. AdParlor says it already works with the some of the largest advertisers on Facebook, including companies like Ubisoft and Playfirst, and currently manages over 15 billion monthly impressions. Kristaps Ronka, chief technology officer at AdParlor, explains how the startup will try and help Groupon grow its business by advertising on Facebook:
Indeed, the integration with Groupon's API allows AdParlor to instantly create and micro-target effective ads to Facebook users the minute a deal goes live. Let’s hope – for Groupon’s sake in particular – that the startup does a better job at not randomly throwing around Botox ads left and right.
       
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The New York Times has just put up more 
A competition designed to accelerate innovation in water technology, Imagine H2O, chose a winner last night in San Francisco for its
Startup veterans 
The company is called Imagine K12. Like Y Combinator it will hunt for very early stage startups, give them enough funding to get through a few months of coding, and mentor them along the way. Each startup will receive $15,000 – $20,000 and give up an average of 6% of its equity. It’s a model that continues to work very well for Y Combinator. Ralston (pictured right) is joined by cofounders Tim Brady (left), previously CEO of education startup QuestBridge, and Alan Louie (center), who helped create Google.org. 
Great news for Chicago entrepreneurship. Google exec Kevin Willer has been 
Right now the UK media is making a lot of noise about new Visa rules which mean “super-investors” willing to put £5m into a UK bank account will get the right to stay indefinitely in Britain after only three years. This is two years faster than the average migrant who still has to wait five years. Deposit £10m and the time drops to two years. Clearly 
Back in January I 
Query: If I donated $10 to Geohot’s legal defense fund, does that make me liable for his actions, and do I have no right to keeping that donation private? It was, after all (if I made it), a perfectly legal transaction between two private citizens. Well, according to Sony and Federal Magistrate Spero (who just a short time ago 
The biggest business in the world right now is cutting out the middle man. One way or another, that’s what many of the most promising start-ups and services are providing. It’s not so good for the middle man, of course, but some are more secure in their jobs than others. Taking advantage of the long tail and stocking or listing every item on earth is something Amazon will likely be doing for some time. But what about, say, a predatory business like GameStop, which is essentially a clearing-house for other people’s used property? It is, as we might say at one of our conferences, a prime target for disruption.
Google has had a 
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