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- Google Ventures And Others Put $5M In Enterprise Mobile Security Company Duo
- To Meme or Not to Meme, That is the (Startup) Question
- CNBC: Apple To Announce Quad-Core, 4G LTE iPad Next Week… In NYC!
- StarStreet Launches A Daily Fantasy Sports Game That Turns Athletes Into Stocks
- Unlimited Data Throttled By AT&T, Verizon? Here’s How To Take Them To Court And Hopefully Win
- TC@MWC: The Huawei Ascend D Quad Is One Of The Nicest Phones You’ll Never Buy
- Textbook Rental Site BookRenter Spawns Rafter, A Course Materials Management Network For Colleges
- Brayola Wants To Help Women Find The Perfect Bra
- LTE-Packing Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 Hits VZW Shelves On March 1
- We Watch Our Phones More Than We Watch TV, But The PC Wins The Day
- Verizon CTO: Shared Data Plans Coming Mid-Year
- Float Does Simple Scheduling For Teams (And Simple Is Hard!)
- YouTube Improves Captions With New Formats, Languages, And More
- Hearsay Social Signs Up Northwestern Mutual And Other Financial Firms To Social Media Management Platform
- Charles River Ventures Raises $375 Million For Its 15th Fund
- Millennial Media Aims For Smaller Advertisers with Self-Service Launch
- Reply Relaunches MerchantCircle As A More Consumer-Focused Merchant Marketplace
- Ginger Software Raises $6.3M For Its ESL Writing Tools; Adds Former Facebook Exec As CEO
- TC Interview: Nokia CEO Elop On Phablets, 41 Megapixels And Competition
- HBO GO Finally Lands On Xbox 360 On April 1 (And No, It’s Not A Joke)
| Google Ventures And Others Put $5M In Enterprise Mobile Security Company Duo Posted: 28 Feb 2012 09:09 AM PST  Enterprise mobile security company Duo Security has raised $5 million from Google Ventures, True Ventures, and Resonant Venture Partners. This brings startup’s total funding to $6 million. Duo Security essentially provides a two-factor authentication service to companies who want to protect employee phones, with not just one but two secure log-ins. The company says that deploying two-factor authentication has traditionally been expensive and time-consuming with hardware requirements and other protocols. Duo Security lowers this barrier and expedites deployment with self-service enrollment. Via mobile apps for iOS, Android, BlackBerry and other platform, Duo Security allows for secure logins and transactions. Users can generate secure passcodes without the hassle of hardware tokens. Here’s how it works. Once the app is downloaded, users type in their usernames and passwords as usual. If primary authentication succeeds, they are offered a second choice of authentication method. Duo says it seamlessly connects to servers and company infrastructure as well. And the startup says one of its differentiating features is usability. Both from the deployment and employee user interface standpoint, Duo has worked to make its product easy to use. In two years, Duo Security has added over 500 customers with users across 80 countries for their two-factor authentication service, including Tumblr, University of Michigan, Central Ohio Primary Care, and Toyota. The new funding will be used to expand Duo’s team, mobile security research, and for authentication platform development.
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| To Meme or Not to Meme, That is the (Startup) Question Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:44 AM PST  Editor's note: This guest post was written by Dave Chase, the CEO of Avado.com, a patient portal & relationship management company that was a TechCrunch Disrupt finalist. Previously he was a management consultant for Accenture's healthcare practice and founder of Microsoft's Health platform business. You can follow him on Twitter @chasedave. Smart B2B companies have long known that winning big is predicated on redefining the rules of competition to your advantage over incumbent vendors. A more difficult question is whether you want to own a meme. In other words, do you want to define a new categorical term. Microsoft did that to great effect when they created the office suite category. More recently, Salesforce.com did a similar thing becoming the de facto player one thinks of when they think of cloud computing. It’s a very high risk, high return strategy. For my money, the best recent example of this approach is HubSpot. HubSpot that has created and “owned” the Inbound Marketing term and category. Having recently started discussions with investors, there is a paradox that I’ve discovered: On the one hand, investors like startups that shoot for big opportunities. On the other hand, they get sweaty palms when you describe how you are going to own a new category. Most of them would rather have you go after a known category. I thought it would be interesting to hear how Hubspot went through this decision process. Hubspot’s Biggest Internal Debate In the early days, the choice wasn’t obvious for Hubspot. There was known market demand for search terms like Internet marketing optimization, SEO, etc. As Hubspot’s CEO, Brian Halligan, said “we decided if we wanted to own something big, we’d need to create our own solar system rather than live in someone else’s.” At that point, they spent ~60% of their time building the concept of Inbound marketing and 40% on marketing Hubspot itself. Today, the mix has flipped as their competitors are picking up the tab for category marketing. Hubspot Becomes a Content Production Machine
Hubspot has demonstrated that if you are long on your opportunity, building your own meme that you can own reaps major dividends. Naturally, one has to be particularly deft at producing interesting content (or apps) that isn’t marketing pabulum. However, if an organization produces valuable content that grows a category that it “owns” the ROI of that content production is likely the highest ROI item that a company can invest in. Related Links: Most popular webinars
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| CNBC: Apple To Announce Quad-Core, 4G LTE iPad Next Week… In NYC! Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:44 AM PST  CNBC just tweeted that Apple is set to announce the next iPad next week. Like previous unconfirmed reports, the next iPad will rock a quad-core CPU and 4G LTE data connectivity. But unlike every other leak, CNBC is stating that the unveiling will happen in New York City. Apple is reportedly thinking different in the post-Steve Jobs era. The company actually held intimate briefings with media outlets regarding Mountain Lion rather than holding an overblown dog and pony show. But launching the next iPad on the East Coast is thinking completely outside the box — but not that us East Coasters are complaining. This report is of course unconfirmed but it’s slightly strange that Apple hasn’t sent out invites for the unveiling yet. Nearly every so-called leak over the last month has placed the iPad launch event in the first week of March. That’s next week.
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| StarStreet Launches A Daily Fantasy Sports Game That Turns Athletes Into Stocks Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:39 AM PST  You may remember StarStreet from last year’s launch – it’s the TechStars and SV Angel-backed sports investing game that turns fantasy sports into a stock market system where you build up portfolios of top players as if they were stocks. Today, the company is launching a new, more addictive game that lets you play head-to-head with other players on a daily basis, both for fantasy wins or for real cash. The new game will run alongside its older counterpart, offering a more casual gaming experience for those not interested in the commitment of building a season-long portfolio. In traditional fantasy sports gaming, setting up a team, adding and removing players, and continually tracking their performance often continues throughout the season, whether it’s for the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLB or another sports market. StarStreet originally wanted to offer a twist on that type of gaming experience, by allowing users to make stock market-like portfolios, where gamers “invest” using real money, instead of playing in fantasy leagues. To date, that effort has only been moderately successful – the company says it has gained 1,000 registered users playing with real money on the site. But with the launch of the new daily gaming option, users can now play the same type of game for a day, betting on who will earn the most fantasy points by night.
Here’s how it works: you get a fantasy budget of $100,000 to build your portfolio, then enter into a head-to-head contest with another player through a random match. The contests can be anywhere from free to $53 (to win $100). Throughout the game, you watch the live stats update in real time on StarStreet. Then at the end of the night, whoever has the most fantasy points wins the money (or just the glory, if you played for free.) StarStreet, meanwhile, takes a small commission on each entry. On the older stock market game, it’s 4% on the sell side, and on the new daily game, it’s between (8%-6%). To kick off the launch, StarStreet is focusing on the NBA, but will move into the other sports verticals in the future. To be clear, this isn’t sports betting, explains founder Jeremy Levine, as StarStreet is a game of skill, not one that depends on a single outcome or result. So it’s not subject to the same legalities that surround real money gambling outfits. But it is fun. “It’s a very addicting game,” Levine says. “We saw a lot of of opportunity in this concept of daily fantasy game, and given that we can move pretty quick on that, we said let’s take no more than a month, build the game, and see if people like it,” he says. “In testing, it’s been exciting – we saw people getting really addicted.” That’s right, the game was built in a month. That’s fast! The team says they have other plans for StarStreet’s daily game in the future, including a mobile interface (initially mobile web, then native app), social integrations and more. Users will be able to invite Facebook or Twitter friends, instead of being randomly matched, or they can email out invites or get matched to other StarStreet users they’re following on the company’s internal social network. The company also wants to move into hosting larger tournaments between top players further down the road, to extend beyond just the head-to-head matches. The first of these new features (mobile and social) will arrive in around a month. To date, StarStreet has raised $250,000 from SV Angel, TechStars, Jarr Capital (Jarrod Yuster), Don McLagan, Andrew Blachman and Ben Littauer, and is in the process of closing another round right now. To sign up and play the daily game, head over here: starstreet.com/daily.
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| Unlimited Data Throttled By AT&T, Verizon? Here’s How To Take Them To Court And Hopefully Win Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:29 AM PST  Throttling is a dirty trick employed by wireless data providers. The carriers say that it’s a necessary tactic to cap heavy data users seemingly hoarding all the available bandwidth. Several studies say that’s nonsense, explaining the top percentage of users do not consume that much more data than the average users. No matter the cause, it’s shady for carriers to limit data on plans that were advertised as unlimited. At least one court agrees. Last week, Californian Pro-tem Judge Russell Nadel ordered AT&T to pay Matt Spaccarelli $850 for throttling his data — $85 for each of the ten months remaining on his contract. AT&T is appealing. Spaccarelli successfully argued that his data was being throttling despite paying $30 per month of for what was called an unlimited plan. He even admitted to technically breaking his AT&T contract by jailbreaking his iPhone and shared his data connection with his iPad. As Spaccarelli notes in a tweet, cell phone contracts often prevent subscribers from filing a class action lawsuit and so he choose to take AT&T to small claims court since neither parties can use an attorney. Here is a primer about how you can do the same thing. Don’t be intimidated by large companies like AT&T. As long as you follow the rules, the legal system is a powerful tool. Bradley Sniderman, an attorney from Southern California, penned a small claims tip sheet for MacTech. Most of his advice is common sense. You cannot simply walk up to a judge and demand AT&T pay you damages. Here’s the key excerpt,
Matt Spaccarelli won $850 after proving AT&T violated their end of their agreement. That’s enough money to justify the trouble in my opinion.
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| TC@MWC: The Huawei Ascend D Quad Is One Of The Nicest Phones You’ll Never Buy Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:15 AM PST  After hearing that Huawei had revealed “the world’s fastest smartphone” in the form of the Ascend D Quad, we knew we had to seek it out. Well, we finally managed to score a little hands-on time with the Chinese company’s newest device, and we didn’t come away disappointed. The D Quad is a handsome, understated device, and it feels great too: the device’s back is covered in a slick, soft-touch plastic, and it fits nicely in my hand despite its 4.5-inch 720p display. It’s not even close to being the most ostentatious phone I’ve seen in my days in Barcelona, but Huawei’s design team livened things up a smidge with some red highlights along the device’s rear. It’s clear that in their push for U.S. and global relevance, they’re making sure that the fit and finish of their devices is up to snuff — good on them. To my pleasure, the Ascend D Quad was running stock Ice Cream Sandwich — not a single modification was made from what I could tell, and when combined with Huawei’s seemingly formidable 1.5 GHz K3V2 processor, swiping across homescreens, app pages, and websites was no big thing. What’s more, the D Quad also performed admirably when it came to games like Riptide GP, although I’m sure Huawei knew that would be the case when they preloaded it on their devices. Still, horsepower is horsepower, and the D Quad seems to be doing just fine on that front. And it’s a good thing, too. With Huawei preparing to enter the U.S. market shortly, the D Quad is exactly the sort of device they should have at the ready. And in fact, that’s exactly what’s going to happen — the device will be released in North America as well as all the other usual markets in Q2 of this year. The big question is if anyone will actually buy one. While the company has recently doubled their market share in China, Huawei has little (if any) brand power in the United States — in order to really make the dent in the market they hope for, it’ll take gobs of money, manpower, and marketing to push past (or even just run alongside) more prevalent brands like LG or Samsung. It’s going to be an uphill battle for Huawei — they’ll have to fight to break out of the low-price, low-end handset niche they’ve managed to carve for themselves. Having only seen Huawei handsets occupying the lowest possible rung at my local big box electronics store, getting the chance to play with a seriously respectable Huawei phone was something of an eye-opener. I get the feeling it would be for more than a few consumers too, provided Huawei could get their hardware in front of people’s eyes. Still, I get the impression that transforming their brand isn’t exactly the only thing Huawei has to worry about. Now that people are more aware of how smartphones are produced, I can’t help but wonder what sort of effect Huawei’s Chinese roots will have on their U.S. market push. Even the name could be problematic: I’ve met more than a few people who couldn’t wrap their tongue around the name, with “Wowie!” being one of the most common pronunciations I’ve heard. We’ll soon see how Huawei’s latest and greatest fares here in the States, but hopefully the device will at least get a fair shake.
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| Textbook Rental Site BookRenter Spawns Rafter, A Course Materials Management Network For Colleges Posted: 28 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST  College textbook rental startup BookRenter is announcing an interesting new venture today, pivoting slightly from the singular focus on rentals to a broader market. Rafter is launching as a network of software services basically allows college administrators and educators to better control cost and manage course materials and products for their students. BookRenter will continue to operate, but as a division of Rafter. As BookRenter and Rafter CEO Mehdi Maghsoodnia explains to me, the sourcing of course materials is actually a challenge for many professors and administrators for a number of reasons. First, discovering the best course materials for a particular subject has been a process that has taken place largely through word of mouth and offline conversations. Second, there are major complexities in accessing the rights to content as well as fulfillment. Maghsoodnia is bringing this entire process online. Bookrenter has already been working with schools (over 500 to be exact) to license its textbook rental platform, so the company says it is aware of the challenges that these schools face in the fragmented course materials sourcing and fulfillment market. Rafter partners with to provide the Course Materials Network, which manages content discovery, supply, distribution, pricing, and commerce of everything from textbooks, lab instruments, online learnings software and more. Rafter’s course materials discovery platform leverages eight years of adoption, bibliographic and economic data to give professors insight into adoption patterns, prices and content of more than 11 million textbooks and other course materials. Discover will also provide course material adoption information and reviews by educators across the country to enable them to share best practices and make more informed content adoption decisions. Rafter Discover includes information on editions, publication dates, inventory, life cycle, adoption patterns and current market pricing. While BookRenter has been growing, a broader scope could be a more strategically sound move as textbook rentals giant and learning platform Chegg has become a formidable opponent. Armed with massive amounts of funding, the textbook rentals giant is expected to pursue an IPO this year, and has been extremely acquisitive. Rafter could find a place in the education technology market as a comprehensive sourcing platform for educators.
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| Brayola Wants To Help Women Find The Perfect Bra Posted: 28 Feb 2012 07:59 AM PST  For many women finding the right bra is a challenge. Enter Israeli startup Brayola, a new site that aims to make it easier for women to find their next favorite bra. Brayola helps women find their perfect bra size and discover new bras that match the style she likes. Founder Orit Hashay explains that online stores currently rely on e-commerce software fails to consider how important bras are to women, and that finding a bra is a highly personal experience. Additionally, an ill-fitting bra can cause serious discomfort, including back pain and other problems. The result is that most online shoppers buy a bra that they already own, since they are familiar with the brand. Brayola takes a different approach. The website helps women find bras by asking them a simple question: “What is the bra that you love to wear?” When a Brayola user first gets started with the service, she is asked to create her own personal Brayola drawer. This is a collection of bras that she already owns and loves, that fit perfectly, and match her own personal style. Brayola then looks at the bras a user has selected, and finds other users in the system who own the same bras with the same size. Brayola employs its bra fitter technology, a smart recommendation algorithm, to suggest new bras from e-commerce sites for the user based on the preferences of similar women. Brayola gives each user a custom set of virtual drawers filled with different styles and types of bras. Each bra is chosen especially for the user based on her Brayola bra size. Brayola aggregates bras to purchase from a number of different sites including Macy’s, Amazon, and others. You actually purchase the bras through the retailers’ sites but in the future you’ll be able to buy through Brayola. Brayola has received seed funding from Roi Mor and Shahar Smirin.
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| LTE-Packing Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 Hits VZW Shelves On March 1 Posted: 28 Feb 2012 07:58 AM PST  For those of you who feel that the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is too big and the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus is too small, the LTE-packing Galaxy Tab 7.7 should feel just right. And according to Verizon, the little 7-incher should be available on March 1 on the big red network, just as we expected. The GalTab 7.7 was announced way back in September alongside the international Galaxy Note, and as my controversial review proves, we’re already playing around with the Note here in the States. That said, a little memory refresh seems to be in order. The Galaxy Tab 7.7 sports a 1280×800 resolution Super AMOLED Plus display at (obviously) 7.7-inches. A 1.4GHz dual-core processor can be found under the hood, and both the front and back of the tablet are equipped with cameras, 2-megapixels and 3.2-megapixels respectively. The rear camera can shoot video in 720p. Unfortunately, the Galaxy Tab 7.7 won’t ship with ICS so hopefully you’re a fan of Honeycomb. Even more unfortunately, the GalTab 7.7 wears a $499 on-contract price tag. This means it’s going up against the likes of a 10-inch iPad, or priced way more expensively than the $200 Kindle Fire. The good news is that you have two whole days (thanks, leap year) to mull over these options. Good hunting.
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| We Watch Our Phones More Than We Watch TV, But The PC Wins The Day Posted: 28 Feb 2012 07:19 AM PST  Earlier today we saw a significant move from MTV to launch a social mobile TV service and some research out from InMobi today underscores just why these kinds of moves are so important right now for TV companies: In its most recent quarterly report on mobile media consumption, InMobi surveyed some 20,000 consumers using both feature phones and smartphones across 18 different markets and found that they are, on average, spending 27 percent of their time on the mobile web, while they are only spending 22 percent of their time watching TV. (We’re assuming that’s leisure time, not all time.) PC usage trumps them both, though: they spend 32 percent of their time online. The findings call this “mobile web” usage, so that means if you factor in other kinds of content — for example videos or music on your handset — there’s a chance that the gap between traditional media like TV and new media like mobile and PC could be even bigger. InMobi also found that the most-popular categories among mobile web users are social media, entertainment and search. That points to the fact that mobile is seeing very much a dual-track growth in terms of how it is used: it’s for fun, but also for practical uses, too. That speaks to the opportunities that are there not just for media and entertainment companies like MTV but for those who are focused more on information and productivity. On the latter point, there are some encouraging signs for all those many companies trying to do more in mobile commerce: some 76 percent of respondents said they would probably use their phones to buy services or products in the next year. Of course, that could mean one measly app purchase, but more optimistically it could mean more. InMobi itself focuses on mobile advertising and marketing — it claims to be the largest independent mobile ad network in the world — so it drilled down also into how those areas are progressing: Some 66 percent of respondents said that they were as comfortable with mobile ads as they are TV or online ads. That’s not a brilliant number: turned around 36 percent said they felt uncomfortable with mobile ads. (That’s a problem that was highlighted in another survey last week, from Upstream, which provided a pretty dismal picture for how mobile ads are viewed today.) Among those that are happy with mobile ads, InMobi’s numbers seem to point to small numbers when it comes to the benefits of these ads: only 14 percent said a mobile ad influenced them to buy something via a mobile device; and only 23 percent said that mobile ads saved them time and money. (Photo: stickwithjosh, Flickr)
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| Verizon CTO: Shared Data Plans Coming Mid-Year Posted: 28 Feb 2012 07:15 AM PST  We’ve been hearing about Verizon’s forthcoming shared data plans for quite a while, but it’s possible that we’ve finally been given a timeline, albeit a vague one. At an investors conference Verizon CTO Fran Shammo said that family data plans will probably be offered around the middle of this year. But it won’t be as simple as a launch date. Mr. Shammo explained that the company has spent a great deal of time (a year, basically) researching shared data. It’s “a very complex equation because we have to make sure that it’s good for Verizon and it’s also good for the customer,” said Shammo. “It’s important to realize that the day we launch this account billing, everbody won’t be migrating to the account billing day one. This is going to be a long-term migration into where we want to get data plan sharing, but this will be more of a 4G play.” Speaking of 4G, it would seem that only 5 percent of Verizon’s customers have transitioned to the superior network. The service is currently available to 200 million Americans on 20+ devices. Still, we’re just now picking up momentum on the hardware front with some really stellar 4G LTE offerings, so I’d expect to see more customers make the transition in the next few months. Of course, Verizon will do everything it can to help push that along. We’ve already seen plenty of 4G LTE ad campaigns out of Verizon, and with the release of the Droid Razr Maxx, customers can finally believe in a solid battery when they look into 4G devices.
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| Float Does Simple Scheduling For Teams (And Simple Is Hard!) Posted: 28 Feb 2012 06:45 AM PST  Float (no, not that Float – what is with the duplicate names for startups lately?), is a new, minimilist scheduling application for teams. The software comes from the New York-based startup Pixel Paddock, whose three co-founders have some 30 years of combined digital agency experience behind them. They know first-hand what agencies need, and designed the software to suit. But agencies aren’t the only one who could benefit from using Float – studios, firms, and other small teams that need a simple scheduling complement to their project management suite or current workflow may find Float useful. Although the project/task management space seems to be a crowded field, with all-in-one solutions like Clarizen and Podio, Basecamp, and new entrants like Schedule and ResourceGuru, just to name a few, Float was designed to be easy and straightforward to use. It’s also not meant to replace more complex PM tools, only to run alongside them. To use Float, admins set up project tasks, which they can drag-and-rop into the scheduling space. Employees are tagged with their skill set (like “Photoshop,” Javascript,” etc.) for easy search and assignment, and several built-in reports give you both a view of your team’s current utilization, their utilization over the coming weeks, or in the past. There are also built-in email notifications, so Float can send out weekly schedules to team members, as well as schedule updates. “The trouble with agencies is that they’re the ones that have the most problem with having multiple teams and multiple projects and having to balance the time between those,” explains Glenn Rogers, CEO of the bootstrapped startup’s focus on the digital agency. “But to be honest, Float would apply to any group of people, whether that’s freelancers with a small team under them, small studios, or even accounting firms that have clients they need to service,” he says. To that end, Float already has 120 active accounts helping it beta test the software (for free, it should be noted). And it will continue to offer a free version in addition to the three pricing plans starting at $19/month. (Just scroll down on the pricing page – they’re sneaky about tucking away the free plan below the fold). As for the simplicity? That was the hardest part. “Simple is hard. Every feature that’s in this had to fight to be a feature,” says Rogers. “And we took a lot of features out because it either complicated the user flow or just wasn’t quick enough. It’s very easy to add a feature, but it’s very hard to take a feature out.” More info on Float is available on the homepage here.
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| YouTube Improves Captions With New Formats, Languages, And More Posted: 28 Feb 2012 06:20 AM PST  Captions on YouTube videos can’t be all that exciting. It’s been around since 2006. But apparently caption functionality has been widely extended, according to a blog post by YouTube. The video sharing platform that takes up half the work day for most of us has introduced new languages to YouTube’s caption feature. Automatic captions and transcript synchronization are now available for Japanese, Korean and English, and there are over 155 supported languages for manual captions and subtitles. YouTube rentals will also start telling you what subtitles are available to you before you rent. Channel owners will also now have support for their chosen format when it comes to broadcast video captions. In other words, text will be seen in its original position and style, and can be placed near the speaker, italicized to indicate off-camera voice over, or even set to scroll if the captions were generated in real-time model. Of course, we’re looking for videos on YouTube more often than we’re posting them (in most cases). That said, YouTube has added a new search option for closed captions. Simply add “, cc” to any search or click Filter > CC. And while finding what you’re looking for is great, customizing what you’re looking at can be even better. YouTube has added caption settings to let you change the font size and colors used. Just click on the “CC” icon and then the “Settings” menu. It should be self-explanatory from there. Last, but certainly not least, YouTube has added support for new caption formats used by broadcasters including .SCC, .CAP, EBU-STL, and more. Any closed captions created for TV or DVDs will be converted by Youtube.
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| Posted: 28 Feb 2012 06:16 AM PST  Hearsay Social, a SaaS dashboard for national businesses and their local branches to manage Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Twitter pages, is announcing that a number of financial firms have been added to its customer roster, including Northwestern Mutual, Thrivent Financial for Lutherans, and California Casualty, an insurance provider. Hearsay Social, which launched to the public in February and has raised $21 million in funding from New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital, aims to help big brands who have local branches (i.e. Starbucks, BestBuy), manage Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages. Because of the highly distributed nature of some companies that have local branches, managing social media pages for stores or offices that are still in compliance with a company’s regulation is a challenging process. Hearsay Social is optimized for “corporate/local” enterprises to allow local representatives, agents, advisors, franchisees or store managers to manage social media pages while ensuring local representatives stay in compliance with brand guidelines, and content regulations. The SaaS application puts compliance, workflow, content management and analytics on top of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and most recently, Google+. For Hearsay, Northwestern Mutual, which will be using Hearsay’s full suite of products, is a huge customer wine. The firm announced this week that it has standardized its more than 6,000 FINRA-registered representatives using LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook onto the Hearsay Social platform. Northwestern Mutual The startup is also announcing that it is debuting new FINRA and SEC compliance capabilities, making it easier for compliance staff to safeguard firm liability at scale. Basically, the Hearsay Social Compliance Module provides complete compliance and coverage for all firm employees on all major networks, no matter their point of access. The platform allows advisors to use social media to build their books while meeting FINRA and SEC regulations on advertising, monitoring, and record retention. For example, Hearsay is launching continuous monitoring and real-time remediation for infractions. So if anyone posts prohibited words and phrases (e.g. free, guaranteed, profanities), private customer data, stock ticker symbols, and other infractions, these are identified as they happen and automatically deleted or flagged for resolution. As CEO and founder Clara Shih explains to us, “We are confident in saying we own financial services for social media.” She explains that in particular, the realtime monitoring for infractions is key for financial services compliance. She adds that the company is also seeing adoption across other industries including hotels, auto, and real estate.
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| Charles River Ventures Raises $375 Million For Its 15th Fund Posted: 28 Feb 2012 06:03 AM PST  Veteran VC firm Charles River Ventures is announcing its 15th fund today, increasing its fund size from $325 million in its last raise to $375 million in its latest “heavily oversubscribed” round. Charles River Ventures partner George Zachary tells me that the firm, which has 42 years of investment behind it, is looking to go in early and at a high percentage in “change the world” companies. It eschews fancy later stage grandstanding in favor of the undervalued treasure. Putting its money where its mouth is, CRV was the original investor in Twitter and the lead investor in Yammer, Millennial Media, Zendesk and Udacity. Current portfolio companies with promise include the aforementioned as well as Hubspot, iControl and Orchestra. The fund has recently seen over $2.6 billion in IPO market cap from its exits for RPX Corporation, Broadsoft and The Active Network (Millennial Media plans to go public by the end of this year). It recently sold BNI Video to Cisco and Vlingo to Nuance Communications, Inc.. The modest firm has the distinction of being the first VC to get into early stage seed investing through its Quick Start program, “We pioneered and successfully delivered on the "venture seed investor" model since 2006,” Zachary tells me, “We were the first and now most other firms have attempted to clone our program when they mocked it.” In addition to Zachary, CRV consists of partners Izhar Armony, Jon Auerbach, Saar Gur, Bruce Sachs and Devdutt Yellurkar. “We are a partnership of equals (in every way) where founders can easily talk with and tap each and every partner's relationships and networks,” Zachary tells me, “Zero politics to bring founders fast answers and introductions.” The raise is impressive in and of itself in this fiscal climate, as many in VC are finding that the gap between “haves and have nots” and the distance between the first tier firms and everyone else is increasing. According to Dan Primack, the fund was aiming for a $300 million target, and exceeded that in a little under two months. While CRV isn’t doing massive late stage rounds like A16Z or isn’t as storied a local brand as Sequoia, it’s definitely one of the haves.
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| Millennial Media Aims For Smaller Advertisers with Self-Service Launch Posted: 28 Feb 2012 06:01 AM PST  Mobile ad network Millennial Media says that it’s now making its self-service advertising product mMedia available to the general public. The company filed for an IPO last month with documents stating that it reached 200 million unique users in December 2011, and that it was nearly profitable (losing $417,000) in the first nine months of the year. Adding a self-serve option should expand its usage among smaller advertisers without having to significantly grow its sales team. Millennial says it started testing mMedia in January. The company’s announcement says mMedia provides “a comprehensive dashboard” where advertisers can control their bids, targeting, and creative. It also highlights a “hyper-local targeting feature,” where advertisers can draw a virtual fence around their desired area, and only deliver ads to users in that area. The ad network already offered a self-service option for smaller app developers, called mmDev. Millennial says the new mMedia ads will be available to developers through the same portal.
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| Reply Relaunches MerchantCircle As A More Consumer-Focused Merchant Marketplace Posted: 28 Feb 2012 05:59 AM PST  As we reported last year, Reply acquired online marketing network for small business owners MerchantCircle. Merchant Circle which provides a business directory for merchants in smaller towns and currently lists over a million small businesses has long targeted merchants in small locales versus catering towards the consumers, as sites like Yelp and CitySearch do. Today, Reply is relaunching MerchantCircle has a more consumer-focused destination. Basically, the newly redesigned site allows consumers to find qualified providers in their local area, receive quotes and find expert advice, while giving merchants tools for servicing their local markets. Consumers can search for and find providers across all business categories, including home repair and improvement; health and beauty; financial and professional services; construction and real estate services; restaurants; and more. Currently the site has more than 1.2 million active member merchants. Consumers can request a quote from providers, access ratings and reviews, get questions answered by a community of experts, and find discounts and special offers from local merchants. As the company explains, MerchantCircle is trying to compete with the giant in the space, Yelp, by allowing consumers to move from search to transaction. For example, consumers searching for “roof repair” in their local area will be presented with the option to connect to the best local roofers and/or “request quotes” from multiple local providers. On the merchant side, MerchantCircle now offers a "LeadStore", which gives local merchants the ability to purchase relevant local leads for their business on an on-demand basis; and is debuting a “DealStore,” to increases the visibility of merchant' deals, coupons and other promotions. The transition over to becoming a consumer focused-site is certainly a challenge but could be interesting considering MerchantCircle is trying to help consumers actually connect to merchants and service providers. MerchantCircle is similar in some ways to home services marketplace RedBeacon, which was recently acquired by Home Depot.
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| Ginger Software Raises $6.3M For Its ESL Writing Tools; Adds Former Facebook Exec As CEO Posted: 28 Feb 2012 05:58 AM PST  Ginger Software, the makers of contextual grammar and spell-checking tools, announced today that it has raised $6.3 million in series D financing, led by Israeli investment firm, Vaizra Ventures. Founded in 2007, Ginger has raised $15 million to date from investors which include serial entrepreneur and Lightspeed partner, Yoni Hefetz, and well-known Israeli angel investor Zohar Gilon, who has funded companies like Radvision, Ceragon Networks, Metalink, Radware, and Outbrain. As a result of its new investment, Shlomo Kalish of Vaizra will be joining the startup’s board. In conjunction with its funding announcement, the Israeli and Massachusetts-based company is announcing today that former Facebook and AOL executive Net Jacobsson will be joining Ginger as its new CEO and as a board member. Jacobsson was, among other things, formerly the director of business development at AOL in the early 2000s, before going on to join Facebook in 2007, where he led international business development and user acquisition for nearly two years. The entrepreneur and exec is also an advisor to and shareholder in both the open source mobile/social gaming network, OpenFeint, as well as social games developer CrowdStar. Jacobsson brings his social gaming and international business development experience to a company that is looking to expand its footprint overseas and capitalize on what it sees as an underserved market. For those unfamiliar, Ginger Software’s contextual spell-checking and grammar tools target both those learning English as a second language as well as those suffering from Dyslexia, providing its users with an online service that automatically corrects text as they type. For the billions of ESL learners and the more than 50 million people with Dyslexia in the U.S. and the U.K. alone, Ginger’s patent-pending technology allows them to produce error-free documents, emails, and so on and learn to communicate as a native speaker — with support for Microsoft Office products as well as IE and Firefox. The company’s “Proofreader” product, for example, corrects both spelling and grammar mistakes based on the context around the typed words, learning from each error the user makes, before offering personalized educational tips, lessons, and quizzes based on those miscalculations through its “Personalized Tutor.” Ginger’s technology was developed by a team of natural language processing experts, statisticians, linguists, educators, and more, who created a text-correction algorithm to automatically analyze the context of errors written in English and to select the most appropriate semantic and grammatical correction. “Initially, I quickly dismissed Ginger as boring software for grammar correction,” the company’s new CEO said, “but after digging much deeper into the technology, the platform and the potential usages, I realized that I had just seen the tip of the iceberg and that perhaps the company just did not have the right positioning and message.” Giving it the right message, the former Facebook exec continued, is a meaningful challenge, considering the billions of people around the world who want to learn English (China, in particular, has 325 million English learners), but struggle to maintain their proficiency because they don’t live in an English-speaking environment and thus lack that level of immersion. Thus, the new CEO believes that Ginger’s software not only has serious market opportunity, but that it has potential to be scaled across technologies, as the company currently has a text-to-speech product as part of its premium offering, but has not yet productized around the the technology’s capabilities to contextually help users search for images, videos, etc. As of now, the CEO says that the company’s technology can eliminate up to 95 percent writing errors common to people with dyslexia, as well as those learning English for the first time. For more, check out Ginger at home here.
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| TC Interview: Nokia CEO Elop On Phablets, 41 Megapixels And Competition Posted: 28 Feb 2012 05:35 AM PST  It was over a year ago that Nokia and Microsoft announced their partnership to make Windows Phone the primary operating system for Nokia's smartphones. But the real test in the consumer market starts now, the first full year of Nokia selling its new handsets, with a portfolio of four models shipping in a range of markets, including China. Stephen Elop, the CEO of Nokia, is all too aware of the challenge ahead. Although his company is still the world's biggest handset maker, its leadership is now much more narrow, at 23 percent, according to Gartner. And its fightback strategy on Windows Phone is effectively starting from scratch: Windows Phone accounted for only 1.9 percent of smartphones sold in Q4 2011, a decline on the 3.4 percent it took in the same quarter in 2010. We got a chance to sit down with Elop earlier today, in a meeting room at the top of Nokia's ginormous MWC stand, to talk about some of the challenges and opportunities the company is facing up ahead, and how its news this week will play into that: On innovation and whether Nokia is moving fast enough to change its ways and adapt to a new world dominated in mindshare and market share by Android and iOS. "We have absolutely changed the clock speed of Nokia," Elop insisted, citing the Lumia 800 and 710 introduced in October, and the 900 and 610 that have come out since. "The pace we're accomplishing this, including the next builds of the WP software, will continue at an accelerating pace." He says it's a two-way street: with the lower-priced Lumia, the 610, and its aim for the Chinese market, actually helping influence how Microsoft was developing the OS. "That's a good example of that collaboration working." On that 41 megapixel camera, and why it is that Nokia put it into a Symbian device rather than its line of Windows Phones. Elop says it's because Nokia wanted to introduce the product as soon as possible; then work out the engineering to get it on to a Windows device. "This is the type of innovation that Nokia has traditionally been known for," he said. "It was more important to bring that to the market, and to see what works and what needs to be improved." He says that the technology will make it into its Windows devices, too: "This will live on in the future," he said. Unlike Symbian, he might have added. On tablets. Recall that yesterday Nokia introduced, Reader, which will be its first foray into e-reading and possibly one of the surest signs yet of what it needs to get in order before it really launches a tablet. Today he would not be drawn out on whether Nokia will be making one and when. The software from Microsoft is getting more uniform across screens: "That is something really interesting to us." The future of Symbian. So many rumors that Nokia is pulling out of Symbian altogether, and that what they've announced there this week (the 808 Pureview, with the 41 megapixel lens), could be their last. No answer to that, but Elop is also aware of alienating those who have remained loyal to that platform. Indeed that is a tricky line to play because those are his first natural customers for the new devices. What's next in line for innovation, after the camera? Location-based services, he says, citing the rise in citizen journalism, and people walking around and photographing and documenting events, as a mark of that. "I think you will see more innovation around that activity. A big part of our strategy going forward will be location-based services." That makes sense, given how many assets Nokia already has in this area: Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive and Transport among them. What's interesting is that Nokia is keen to spread as much of that to other OEMs building on Windows Phone as for itself — which of course can help the services gain better critical mass. Going cheaper and smarter. Elop says that the 610, the least expensive yet of Nokia's Lumias, at $250, is probably just the first step before we see devices that are priced even lower. He calls this model the "realistic first step." He notes that the more expensive 710 is being offered for $50 on contract in the U.S. With this phone priced substantially lower, that could imply free Lumias. On Motorola and Google. He's in the dark on what happens next. "They now have in their hands a hardware platform." It's a mark, he says, of how "the Android ecosystem has shifted quite a bit over the last year… It's a hard one to predict." He notes that he doesn't see the Google/Motorola deal impacting Nokia. "Whatever goes on there will be activity in Android. But just think if we made a decision to go Android instead of Windows Phone, how would we feel right now?" On following an Apple (few) versus Samsung (many) model for handsets. "If you think of Nokia a few years ago where there was a large number of devices, we will be a lot more pared down going into the future. It's not a single device strategy but there will be a paring down." On competition from other Windows Phone makers. He welcomes the likes of ZTE, HTC, Samsung and others making devices on the same platform as Nokia's because "The principal competition is Android, and then Apple." He notes that "a factor of the perceived success of Windows Phone" will be whether those many handset makers develop and sell those devices: "When it comes to competing because there are too many Windows Phones? That would be a nice problem to have." The "phablet" devices like the Galaxy Note from Samsung, that straddle the break between tablets and smartphones. "Tablets are an opportunity, and smartphones up to a certain size are an opportunity," he says. "We are looking at closely [at the phablet market] and looking to see whether it will catch on." He says he likes the form factor of the Lumia 800 the most because he can reach across the whole screen with his thumb. "But different things for different people in different markets."
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| HBO GO Finally Lands On Xbox 360 On April 1 (And No, It’s Not A Joke) Posted: 28 Feb 2012 05:30 AM PST  I remember back when HBO GO first launched, and it was only available to Verizon Fios subscribers. All that True Blood, and so very few viewers to enjoy it. But in the past year, HBO GO has extended itself to the far reaches of our Internet-connected universe, and according to a report out of Engadget, it’ll stretch even further. HBO co-president Eric Kessler said at an HBO event last night that HBO GO would come to the Xbox 360 on April 1. Unfortunately, we have no way of deciding whether or not this is legit or a very calculated April Fools joke that is already in pre-production. I’m leaning toward its validity, though. According to a video released by Microsoft, the Xbox 360 has seen over 66 million sales. If even half of those people get on board with HBO GO, it’ll put the service on an entirely new level.
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