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- The Echo Nest Grabs More Data: Partners With Concert Listing Provider JamBase & SongMeanings
- PayDragon May Be The Easiest Way To Order Food On Your Phone
- This Is The Best Glimpse Into Foxconn Yet (Video)
- LogMeIn Prepares To Take On Dropbox & Box With Launch Of Cloud Storage Service Cubby
- Sony’s $149 SmartWatch Finally Lands In The U.S.
- Nest Labs Files Counterclaims In Honeywell Suit, Makes Apple’s Former Chief Patent Counsel A VP
- Online Fraud Detection Startup 41st Parameter Raises $13M From Kleiner Perkins And Others
- Men’s Clothing Brand Bonobos Raises $16.4M From Accel; Lands Nordstrom Investment And Retail Deal
- Help Gratefully Received: On-Screen Web Guidance System WalkMe Picks Up $1M+ From Mangrove
- Microsoft Inks Its Biggest Cloud Deal Yet: 7.5M Students And Teachers In India
- New Livestream Broadcaster Will Let You Stream From Almost Any Camera
- With Punch, Tablets Get Their Own Humor Magazine
- How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger
- Selling Versus Selling Out
- Sony Confirms 10,000 Jobs To Go As Part Of Its Big ‘One Sony’ Reorganization
- LoveThis Launches Social Recommendation ‘Anti-App’ By Adding Facebook, Email Tips To The Mix
- Viadeo Raises $32M To Expand Its Professional Social Network In China, Russia And Beyond
- Instagram Aftermath: It’s Time For Entrepreneurs To Go All-In
- Walkie Talkie App Voxer Goes Big, IVP And Intel Lead $30 Million Round
- InnoSpring Launches First U.S.-China Accelerator & Seed Fund, Backed By Kleiner Perkins & More
| The Echo Nest Grabs More Data: Partners With Concert Listing Provider JamBase & SongMeanings Posted: 12 Apr 2012 08:08 AM PDT  Music intelligence startup Echo Nest, which you might know better as the company powering Spotify Radio and Vevo’s recommendations, is announcing two new partnerships today which will give developers access to more data to build their apps with. The company is teaming up with JamBase, which provides concerts listings and tour schedules, and SongMeanings, which you’ve surely come across while googling to find out what the eff that guy is actually singing about. The new services will become part of The Echo Nest’s Rosetta Stone project, essentially a data resolution service aiming to offer a common language to music applications. Currently, the platform includes lyrics from LyricFind and musiXmatch, music from Spotify and Rdio, tweets from artists on Twitter, concert tickets from Seatwave, and links to relevant Facebook pages. Specifically, JamBase will integrate its artist IDs into Echo Nest’s API, to make its concert listings available. At present, JamBase says it has access to the show listings for 80,000 artists across 50 genres who perform in 100,000 venues worldwide. SongMeanings, a community-oriented website for discussing the meaning behind a song’s lyrics, reports having 2 million lyrics with over 1.7 comments available in its database. While Echo Nest isn’t yet announcing any of its companies on its API will be rolling out support for the new additions, it certainly would make sense for music streaming apps to continue to make their apps more intelligent and feature-rich in the future. In addition to Spotify and Vevo, The Echo Nest has deals with Nokia, EMI, and Clear Channel. Companies building on top of its APIs also include MOG, the BBC, MTV, and Discovr, to name a few. The Echo Nest is backed by $8.31 million in funding from Matrix Partners and Commonwealth Capital.
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| PayDragon May Be The Easiest Way To Order Food On Your Phone Posted: 12 Apr 2012 08:05 AM PDT  A new iPhone and Android app called PayDragon is trying to bring the one-click shopping experience to buying meals on your phone. The app was created by Paperlinks, a Y Combinator-backed startup that helps businesses create QR code-enabled materials. CEO Hamilton Chan demonstrated PayDragon for me last week, and it sounds like a great fit for anyone who’s trying to grab lunch or dinner while they’re busy — say if they’re frantically trying to finish a blog post, as is so often the case during my meals. Each restaurant has only four to six items on its PayDragon menu, usually its most popular dishes in combo meal form. You tap on the item you want, hit pay, and the order is complete. Then you just wait for the alert saying that your food is ready and head to the restaurant to pick it up. The idea of ordering food on your phone isn’t new, but Chan says he wanted to create an entirely new experience for the phone, rather than just porting over a Web-based like GrubHub. Hence the stripped-down menus and the lack of customization — it’s all about creating as few barriers as possible to submitting an order. It might not be the best fit for picky eaters, but if you just want that sandwich ASAP, and you don’t want to think too hard about it, it’s perfect. It’s also good for restaurants, especially during the busy periods, because it helps them serve customers much more quickly. (And as a vegetarian, I was relieved to hear that most restaurants are trying to include at least one vegetarian option in their slimmed-down menus.) Other features include a Discover tab to see nearby participating restaurants and Facebook integration so you can tell your friends about the meal you’ve eaten. There’s one feature that comes out of the app’s connection to Paperlinks — restaurants can also create QR-enabled menus. Customers can scan the item they want and pay with one tap. (That’s something Paperlinks was trying out pre-PayDragon.) Chan says he tested the concept out at South by Southwest, and is now launching it with Los Angeles food trucks, including The Bun Truck, CambalaCHE's, Auntie's Fry Bread, Chunk n Chip, The Grill Sergeant, The Wien, and Rounds Premium Burger. You can download the iPhone app here, and you can download the Android app here.
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| This Is The Best Glimpse Into Foxconn Yet (Video) Posted: 12 Apr 2012 07:50 AM PDT  The shroud surrounding Foxconn is slowing being pulled back. Once a very secretive OEM manufacturer, the company has started to let reporters and their cameras inside their facilities in an effort to clear its name. The video here comes by way of Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, the publication’s Shanghai Bureau Chief Rob Schmitz partly responsible for the unraveling of Mike Daisey’s Foxconn exaggeration several weeks ago. His look lacks some of the sensationalism of ABC’s Bill Weir report, but Schmitz’s videos shows a first-rate manufacturing facility with the most dangerous aspect being the tedious work that comes naturally with mass manufacturing. Foxconn is currently operating under the world’s eye. After Daisey’s account was found to be more theatrics than facts, activists and rivals mostly took to the sidelines, just waiting for another incident at Foxconn to rekindle the world’s anger. And it will come. Something else will happen at Foxconn that will cause people to raise their arms and yell at Apple while mostly ignoring HP, Dell, Amazon, and all the rest of Foxconn’s clients. But Foxconn will soldier on, pumping out shiny iPads and critical Cisco routers as if nothing happened. TechCrunch’s John Biggs spent a few days in Foxconn’s Shenzhen compound last year. As did Rob Schmitz, Biggs found a modern facility void of any of Daisey’s reported atrocities. Read Biggs’ fantastic series here.
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| LogMeIn Prepares To Take On Dropbox & Box With Launch Of Cloud Storage Service Cubby Posted: 12 Apr 2012 07:12 AM PDT  LogMeIn, the company known best for its remote access tools, is today launching its own cloud storage service, as an alternative to those from Dropbox or Box, for example. With “Cubby,” as it’s called, users can share files across Macs, PCs, iPads, iPhones, or Android devices. The difference between some of the other cloud offerings and the new service is how it works: instead of having to copy files over to a different folder, Cubby lets you keep your existing file structure, allowing you to “cloud-enable” the folders you want synced. In addition – and this may be one of Cubby’s better selling points – all peer-to-peer syncing is free. That is, it doesn’t count against the service’s storage limits (currently 5 GB during beta, with more options to come in the public release). So if you just want your files to be available across all your devices, without saving an extra copy in the cloud, that costs nothing. It sounds sort of like a cross-platform iCloud. Actually, scratch that. Since iCloud doesn’t require you install a separate app to access your synced files, Cubby actually sounds more like Microsoft’s Live Mesh, an innovative file-syncing service that sadly (though not surprisingly) never went anywhere. For those needing more control over the syncing, Cubby also lets you configure which files or folders are synced where. So, for instance, if you don’t want some of your personal files showing up on your work computer, you can stop that from happening, while still having them show up on your mobile phone. Folders can also be shared with friends, as is typical. Mobile support is enabled through apps available now in the iTunes and Android app stores. Meanwhile, for desktop users, there’s a downloadable client app to install. To “cloud-enable” a particular folder, you have to load the app then browse to select the folder, or drag-and-drop the folder over. An option that makes Cubby available from the right-click menu was also recently added, but is only available in Windows for now. There’s also a default “My Cubby” folder available, for people who prefer a more Dropbox-like experience, and don’t care about file structure. As for how the technology actually stacks up in terms of ease-of-use, design, stability, etc., it’s too soon to say. The beta only became available this morning for testing, so it needs more hands-on time before we could give it a “yea” or “nay.” But even if LogMeIn had built something great, Box, Dropbox and even Google Docs, are much further ahead in terms of user adoption, brand awareness and making an inroad in the enterprise market. LogMeIn, however, has a good-sized business user base to market Cubby to, given its other product offerings, which include tools for remote support, remote access, and remote administration. That at least gives it a fighting chance, more so than some early stage startup trying to take on more established leaders. The company also points out that it built Cubby on top of its own cloud, not AWS, which it claims gives it cost advantages and security benefits. Sign-ups for Cubby are now being accepted here on the company homepage. The beta is free, and LogMeIn has not yet set pricing for the public release.
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| Sony’s $149 SmartWatch Finally Lands In The U.S. Posted: 12 Apr 2012 06:55 AM PDT  After the disappointing LiveView failed to make much of an impression when it launched in 2010, Sony surprised us when they revealed yet another wearable device — the SmartWatch — at this year’s CES. After taking a brief spin in the U.K., Sony has just announced that their newest diminutive wrist-mounted gadget is now available here in the States for $149. Like the LiveView before it, the SmartWatch is essentially just a small secondary display that can connect to any Bluetooth-enabled Android device running Android 2.1 or later once the corresponding app has been installed. Thankfully, Sony saw fit to include a full multi-touch display this time around instead of the awkward edge-only navigation scheme seen in the SmartWatch’s forebear. The question then is, well, what do you do with the thing? Aside from using it to tell time, users can read full length emails and text messages on the 1.3-inch OLED display, as well as control the music playing on the phone. That's really just the tip of the iceberg too — Sony released the SDK for the SmartWatch platform right when this year's CES was getting into full swing, and I'm told that there are nearly 60 mini apps waiting in the Google Play store for all you fans of wearable computing to play with. Some of them already seem like must-haves — I would use the hell out of this Find Phone app when my Galaxy Nexus inevitably goes missing around the house, and quick access to the Endomondo app could save me a fair bit of hassle on my runs. Plenty of people have picked up the concept and run with it in recent months — Motorola comes to mind, as do the WIMM folks, and this particularly handsome Kickstarter project. Sony definitely seems to be gunning for the masses with the SmartWatch’s relatively inexpensive price tag and its slew of eye-catching wristbands ($20 each, in case you were curious), and it’s definitely worth a second look if you feel like the hassle of digging your phone out of your pocket is just too of a hassle.
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| Nest Labs Files Counterclaims In Honeywell Suit, Makes Apple’s Former Chief Patent Counsel A VP Posted: 12 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT 
A press released issued today calls the complaint “meritless allegations.” It goes on to quote its new vice president and general counsel, Richard "Chip" Lutton, Jr., who was Apple’s former chief intellectual property office, “Instead of filing lawsuits, Honeywell should use its wealth and resources to bring innovative products to market. Nest will defend itself vigorously in court and we'll keep our company's focus where it should be – on developing and delivering great products for our customers." Grab some popcorn, folks. This is going to get good. During his 10 year stint at Apple, Lutton worked with Nest Labs founder and CEO, Tony Fadell. The two likely worked closely as Tony Fadell led the iPod development team for 18 generations and the first several iPhone dev teams. As Apple’s chief patent counsel Lutton was involved in all aspects of Apple’s patent development, acquisition, licensing, enforcement, and dispute. So yeah, Nest Labs hired a big gun. "I've worked with Tony for more than a decade – first at Apple and more recently as an advisor to Nest," said Lutton in a released statement today. "What he and the Nest team have built is incredibly inspiring – the company has been disruptive from Day One and has no plans to slow down. I'm excited to help Nest drive and defend its innovative products and business culture." Nest Labs is essentially fighting the establishment. In today’s Answers and Counterclaims, Nest Labs labors on how the Nest Learning Thermostat product threatens the “blah-looking controller”, a controller that most often happens to be made by Honeywell. Nest Labs also refutes claims that its product uses Honeywell’s patents. But even if they did, Nest Labs insists said patents would be invalid as they’re retreads of older, expired patents or, not even worthy of a patent as in the case of Honeywell’s ’504 patent referring to a controller using “complete grammatical sentences". As the document later points out, some of Honeywell’s older patents are invalid on the grounds that even older patent applications were abandoned when prior art was discovered. It’s hard to say if Honeywell knew that Nest Labs would respond with such vigor. Start-ups often tend to roll-over and settle, content with pivoting rather than fighting. But not Nest Labs. They’re fighting to keep selling their clearly disruptive learning thermostat.
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| Online Fraud Detection Startup 41st Parameter Raises $13M From Kleiner Perkins And Others Posted: 12 Apr 2012 06:00 AM PDT  Fraud detection company 41st Parameter has raised $13 million in Series D financing from Georgian Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers (KPBC), Norwest Venture Partners (NVP) and Jafco Ventures. This brings 41st Parameter’s total funding to $38 million. 41st Parameter provides companies software, called FraudNet, for detecting and preventing fraud across a number of verticals, including finance, e-commerce, and travel. The company aims to protect against cybercrime threats including card not present fraud, new account origination fraud, phishing and account compromise, credit bust outs, and fraud ring attacks. As cybercrime and online fraud has increased on the web, 41st Parameter has seen growth in usage of its product. The company says FraudNet is used by 75 percent of the world's top banks, two-thirds of the world's largest airlines,and more than 120 of the top global e-commerce brands. 41st Parameter, which saw 40 percent growth in revenue last year, also offers AdTruth, a patented device recognition technology for advertisers. "As electronic and online payment methods continue their rapid growth, there is– and will continue to be – a critical need to identify and stop fraud in the global e-commerce, banking and travel industries," said CEO Alan Naumann. "Coupled with the demand in the digital media space, we have a real opportunity to solve two critical business problems with our best-of-breed core technology.” The new funding will be used to further fuel R&D as well as to support 41st Parameter's expansion as it builds up its presence in Silicon Valley and grows its sales and customer operations
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| Men’s Clothing Brand Bonobos Raises $16.4M From Accel; Lands Nordstrom Investment And Retail Deal Posted: 12 Apr 2012 05:21 AM PDT  Bonobos, a brand that sells men’s clothing online, has raised $16.4 million led by retail giant Nordstrom, with Accel Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners participating. This brings the company’s total funding to nearly $40 million. In addition to the funding, Nordstrom will now sell Bonobos clothing at a number of its stores and on Nordstrom.com. The news was originally reported by the New York Times. Bonobos is best known for launching an online site to help men find better-fitting pants. The company debuted in 2007 with their signature pants, and eventually expanded to offer a full menswear line, including dress shirts, suits, shorts, sweaters and more. The site was originally founded by Brian Spaly and Andy Dunn while at Stanford Business School, Spaly has since left Bonobos to lead online men’s stylist and platform Trunk Club. The deal with Nordstrom will be the first time the brand is available in-store and online outside Bonobos.com and the company's New York City headquarters' showroom store. Beginning in April, Nordstrom will carry the top two product lines of Bonobos: the best-selling Washed Chinos as well as the Bonobos Weekday Warriors, a collection of non-iron cotton trousers. In addition, some seasonal pants and shorts will be offered at select stores and online. The brand will launch at 20 of Nordstrom's full-line stores and within the Men's Shop on Nordstrom.com. What makes the partnership interesting is that the clothing brand has been able to launch on the web, scale, and then expand into offline sales. It’s a model that could eventually become more popular with other online brands. For example, you could imagine Warby Parker, the New York-based startup that sells prescription, designer glasses, cutting a similar deal. Dunn said of the Nordstrom integration: "We understand there are people who still want to touch and feel clothing before they purchase. We realized we needed help expanding beyond our web-only roots.” Nordstrom, in particular, hasn’t shied away from approaching some of the newer e-commerce models for retail. Last March, the retailer acquired flash sales site HauteLook for $270 million. The New York Times reports that Nordstrom plans to spend $140 million on e-commerce this year, a 40 percent increase from 2011. And with the company’s investment in Bonobos, Nordstrom is making another bet on an online e-commerce model.
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| Help Gratefully Received: On-Screen Web Guidance System WalkMe Picks Up $1M+ From Mangrove Posted: 12 Apr 2012 05:11 AM PDT  Microsoft has Clippy the Office Assistant to help confused users make their way around Word, and a startup from Israel called WalkMe earlier this month launched a service that offers the equivalent for the web: an interactive, on-screen guide that helps users get around complicated web pages. And two weeks out in the market, WalkMe has announced its first round of funding, from Luxembourg-based Mangrove Capital Partners. The exact value of the Series A investment was not disclosed but TechCrunch understands it is over $1 million. Since going live earlier this month, WalkMe’s CEO Dan Adika says it has signed up over 1,000 sites to incorporate it into its user interface (much to the delight of the designers who toiled over the original plans). WalkMe is aiming the product at the kinds of companies that you may have grumbled about yourself when trying to figure out where to go and what to do on a website: target clients are those working in the realm of business software, online shopping, banking and really anything that requires web input to work. WalkMe says its service works as an overlay on top of existing designs, making implementation relatively quick and painless. That means potentially cost reductions in two areas: serving customers and site operations. WalkMe says that it will use the funding to market the service to more sites, and well as increase the functionality of the product. Mangrove has focused a lot of its activity in early stage investments like this one, and WalkMe is also part of the VC’s bigger strategy of investing in the SaaS space. In this case, partner Michael Jackson, who was once the COO of Skype, says that this investment might have more immediate, cross-pollinating benefits: "We invested in WalkMe's technology after seeing the benefits that their initial implementations already deliver to our portfolio companies."
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| Microsoft Inks Its Biggest Cloud Deal Yet: 7.5M Students And Teachers In India Posted: 12 Apr 2012 04:34 AM PDT  Microsoft has announced that it has signed its largest-ever cloud services deal, an agreement with the All India Council for Technical Education to deploy Microsoft’s Live@edu service to some 10,000 technical colleges in the country, covering 7.5 million users. The deal is significant not just for its size but also as a mark of how cloud services are developing in two big areas at the moment: education and emerging markets — and how Microsoft is staking out a claim to be a player in both. Under the terms of the deal, the AICTE, an association representing both technical colleges and institutions of technology, will use Live@edu, Microsoft’s hosting communication and collaboration service specially customized for the education sector, to offer collaboration services, email, web apps, IM and storage to 7 million students and half a million faculty members. The deployment will take place over the next three moths, Microsoft said in a statement. Microsoft has not disclosed the value of the deal, but it won it over competitive bids from some of its biggest rivals in cloud services Google and IBM, another key reason for Microsoft to have secured the deal. AICTE went for Microsoft, it says, because of the broader portfolio of services that Microsoft offers, and also its competitive pricing. IT in India is one of the fastest growing segments of its economy — combined with back-office and outsourcing it’s an industry worth around $100 billion at the moment. Microsoft has a strong presence in the country already, so getting buy in from students who will be working in that sector in the country longer-term is a good way to ensure more loyalty to Microsoft’s products in the future. To give an idea of the relative size of the AICTE deal compared to others Microsoft has signed, one of its more recent deals was with the Kentucky Department of Education covering 700,000 users. In all, there are around 22 million people using Microsoft’s Live@edu service, meaning that this newest deal in India represents about one-third of all of Microsoft’s cloud/education business. [photo: Microsoft in India, flickr]
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| New Livestream Broadcaster Will Let You Stream From Almost Any Camera Posted: 12 Apr 2012 04:30 AM PDT  Livestream, the premium live video streaming service, is announcing an interesting new product today: a $495 hardware encoder that can be connected to virtually any camera and that can stream HD video directly to the Web through a WiFi connection or most USB wireless modems. The small device is fully integrated into the new Livestream platform. The purchase price includes three months of free access to Livestream’s ad-free HD streaming service (normally $45/month). Livestream describes the device as “the industry's first affordable unlimited ad-free HD live streaming end-to-end solution.” The Livestream Broadcaster connects to the Internet through a 3G or 4G modem (in the U.S., Livestream recommends using a USB modem that connects to Verizon’s 4G LTE network), but producers can also opt to connect to a local WiFi or wired network. Once it is connected to the Internet, producers can control it through a small LCD screen on the encoder or over the web. The Broadcaster supports virtually any camera that can feed it with an HDMI signal (including 1080i, 720p and 480i). The output is encoded in real-time in H.264 video and AAC audio at up to 720p and 2.3 Mbps. The device also has a 3.5mm audio input. Thanks to its tripod mount, users could even install it right on their cameras with a simple tripod to hot shoe adapter. As the company’s CEO and co-founder Max Haot told me earlier this week, Livestream isn’t planning to become a hardware platform. While he wouldn’t tell me whether the company actually subsidizes the product to keep the price this low, he did note that this is basically a play to get more producers onto the Livestream platform. Because of this, making high margins on the device itself doesn’t really matter to the company. Hardware encoders – even small and affordable ones – aren’t really new, of course. The real breakthrough here, says Haot, is that the hardware is fully integrated with the online service. In his view, “the missing link to accelerate the adoption [of live video streaming] was seamlessly integrating live video from any prosumer camera to our service without the need for a computer.” Ideally, Haot, told me, he would like to see mainstream retailers like Best Buy sell devices like this in the future. The company is aiming the device at pretty much the same market as the Livestream service itself: large and small event producers who want to stream their events live to the Web and mobile devices. The company’s customers use the service to stream anything from wedding ceremonies to large movie premiers. Facebook, for example, uses Livestream for the live video stream from its press events. The closest competitor to the Livestream Broadcaster is likely Cerevo’s Live Shell. At around $299, the Live Shell is cheaper than the Broadcaster (though once you count the three free months of Livestream service, the difference really isn’t that big). Unlike Livestream’s Broadcaster, though, the Live Shell isn’t fully integrated with any third-party service (it only supports Ustream right now) and it also doesn’t stream in HD. The Livestream Broadcaster is available for pre-order today in the U.S. and Europe. It will start shipping in May.
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| With Punch, Tablets Get Their Own Humor Magazine Posted: 12 Apr 2012 04:04 AM PDT  Have you ever wanted a chance to dress Rick Santorum? What about listening to a playlist of your favorite dictators tackling your favorite musical standards? Now you can, thanks to a new iPad app called Punch. Punch Media co-founder and CEO David Bennahum says the goal was to create “culturally relevant content that could only exist on a tablet” — not on a website or a printed magazine. The format is something called “The Culture Shelf,” where you can tap on different icons leading to Punch’s features. Most of those features are like pop culture games, or are at least interactive in some way. Bennahum describes the format as an updated version of the variety show, where users are exposed to a range of sketches that are (hopefully) funny without being preachy — he cites Spy Magazine and “The Daily Show” as two influences. The company was co-founded by Maer Roshan, who previously founded Radar Magazine. I had a chance to play with an early version of the app with, yes, the Rick Santorum and “Despots on the Record” features. Other items included a general pop culture quiz and a chance to sort out whether different names represented hedge funds or organic farms. (The joke? It’s almost impossible to tell the difference.) One sign that it was a pretty engaging experience — I had some friends over, and pretty soon they were all gathered around the iPad, trying to take a turn ranking the box office success of Farrelly Bros. movies or dressing a Santorum figurine in bunny slippers. One of the challenges, Bennahum admits, is figuring how users can share their favorite Punch content with their friends — each feature will include social sharing options, but since these are interactive features, what gets shared is just “a snapshot of the experience, not the thing itself.” The app is free. Bennahum says the goal for now is to just get the content into the hands of as many users as possible and see how they engage with it. In the future, the company could make money by adding advertising, offering premium upgrades, and also licensing the publishing technology to other companies. Punch might also expand to Android tablets when they get “more critical mass,” Bennahum says, and maybe smartphones too. Punch Media has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from Betaworks, David Tisch, Jason Calacanis, and New Enterprise Associates. You can download the iPad app here, and get a flavor of the sense of humor in the intro video below.
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| How To Scale A $1 Billion Startup: A Guide From Instagram Co-Founder Mike Krieger Posted: 12 Apr 2012 03:32 AM PDT  Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have been noticeably silent since their photo-sharing app Instagram was bought by Facebook earlier this week for $1 billion. In the meantime there has been a lot written about that deal, from praise to backlash, parsing what it means and why. But if you’d like to hear a little (actually, a lot) about how Instagram got to where it did, read on. Last night, Krieger gave a presentation at an Airbnb event for employees and members of the network, part of a regular series called the Tech Talk. The subject was “Scaling Instagram.” Considering his company was just bought for $1 billion, it’s a pretty remarkable effort, 185 slides in all. The talk, as the name of the event would suggest, is mainly about engineering and back-end work. It goes through some of the obstacles and solutions that Krieger and team faced as Instagram instantly picked up millions of users. Some notable points:
And simplicity, one of the things that makes Instagram so attractive, appears to be a philosophy and approach that Krieger & Co. follow right through to the most back-end parts of the site. “The cleanest solution with the fewest moving parts as possible,” he says is the goal. We look forward to seeing how that evolves with Instagram’s next chapter. The full slide deck is here:
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| Posted: 12 Apr 2012 01:39 AM PDT 
“They could have done so much more,” is a quip I’ve been hearing a lot the past few days, about, who else? Instagram. The news that the Silicon Valley darling sold to Facebook left so many people heartbroken. Paul Ford over at New York magazine even wrote a long article about why so many people were heartbroken and, gasp, threatening to delete their Instagram accounts. When I found out that Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger sold (and if you ever have the chance, ask me to tell you this funny story in person) I was shocked, but also delighted, mostly because I have been around enough entrepreneurs to understand that, although they share many of the same characteristics as artists, they aren’t artists purely — They are also businesspeople. And businesspeople, and especially businesspeople with VC-backing, have one goal only: Exit. Sure “exit” is a vague term, sometimes, rarely, it means IPO, but more often than not it means “sell.” And in the Valley “sell” doesn’t neatly equate with “sell out” as it does in the music and art worlds. Former Digg CEO Jay Adelson, who has learned this the hard way, assuaged some of the guilt surrounding this issue,"If someone offers you a billion dollars for your business you should say 'Yes’ [Caveat: With some exceptions]." But a funny thing happened as tech went mainstream; All of a sudden network news pundits and your parents were weighing in on startup M&A activity, and mainstream rhetoric was slowly projected onto a somewhat niche industry. Everyone knows what it’s like to cringe when you hear your favorite song used in a car commercial. It’s a purely emotional thing, you get attached to a song and feel like it’s signifying you, but now it’s also signifying Toyota. Bands, well at least indie bands, aren’t supposed to sell out. And Instagram was as “indie” a startup as you can get, employing 13 people and working out of a small office in SOMA. Systrom, who coded all the filters himself, is a self-taught programmer who interned for Jack Dorsey and worked at Google before starting Burbn out of Dogpatch Labs. Mike Krieger, who famously carried a laptop with him everywhere he went as Burbn scaled, built the startup while on a H1B visa from Brazil. They’ve got the tech equivalent of street cred. While, as a backseat startup CEO, I would have done something differently — like said no to Facebook and leaked the offer to press — you can’t really begrudge Systrom and Krieger for building their business to do what most businesses were built to do, in one way or another create value or more concretely make money (Fun fact: Sequoia, which dropped $25 million in the startup’s most recent funding round, made back its Color investment with Instagram). It’s sort of a selfish, myopic impulse to want the products you love to subvert this natural order of things and stay “indie.” Startups want to scale! It’s truly an exception to be that startup that keeps up momentum and control to the point where its scale takes over everything: You can count them on one hand, Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon — Schmidt’s “Gang of Four.” Instagram had a real chance at being the world’s mobile-only social network, hitting more than 30 million users in a little under two years. Which is why Zuck rapidly panicquired it after it received funding on Thursday, doing the deal in a weekend according to what we’ve heard. Same thing with Zynga target OMGPop, which was showing similar potential for mobile market domination as it overcame the Zynga games in the App Store. But not every company is cut out for manifest destiny, it is seriously just fine for a small company to partner up with a larger company in order to grow. In fact that’s the way the ecosystem works — It is extremely difficult to build a giant network, giant team and big company. There are a lot of variables that go into any decision to sell a startup, and I am sure there are a lot of variables that we as outsiders are not seeing here.
Just think, Ford could have easily written these words if Facebook had succumbed to Microsoft’s acquisition offer years ago. Is something there now something evil/alien about Facebook simply because its gotten bigger? Maybe. In any case Ford does a really great job of dramatizing sort of simple events, as media are wont to do. “Borg” rhetoric aside, there are many good things about being acquired, namely, seriously though, more resources to feed employees, fight lawsuits, keep the servers running, etc. If anything it’s just awesome that Krieger won’t have to run around chained to his laptop anymore. I guess this is what people mean when they debate whether or not Instagram “sold out,” like, did Systrom and Krieger cave for the “right” reasons or were they purely motivated by cash? Well we won’t be able to tell, really, until six months from now when we know whether the product has kept growing and kept getting better. Hell, all they’d really need to do is find a way to let you edit individual post comments and they’d break even in the court of public perception, with me at least. Image via.
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| Sony Confirms 10,000 Jobs To Go As Part Of Its Big ‘One Sony’ Reorganization Posted: 12 Apr 2012 12:51 AM PDT  So the reports have proven to be true: Sony has now officially said that it will be reducing its headcount by 10,000 people worldwide, some six percent of its workforce, as the struggling electronics giant reorganizes under new management and its new “One Sony” plan. Sony says the employee reductions will be made over the course of this fiscal year, and will also include some employees leaving the company through sale and transfer. Meanwhile, the organizational restructuring will see Sony strengthen its focus on the core units of digital imaging, gaming and mobile; attempt to turn around its ailing TV business and expand in emerging markets. Altogether Sony estimates that the restructuring will cost it ¥75 billion ($926 million). Sony has a huge task ahead of it: it is coming into this new financial year (which started on April 1) with a $6.4 billion loss for FY 2012. Once a gold standard for consumer electronics, the company will have to work hard to convince those who have strayed away from the brand that it is still current and still setting the pace in the field. Although Sony is calling its plan “One,” there are actually five different areas that it says it will tackle under its new management (that in itself could make this strategy problematic). They include strengthening core businesses (Digital Imaging, Games and its new Mobile division); turning around the ailing television business; expanding in emerging markets; the generic area of creating new businesses and accelerating innovation; and realigning and optimizing the business (the last is where the layoffs come into play). At least one of these initiatives — innovation and new business — will see Sony moving into new areas altogether like medical technology; another — emerging markets — will be a challenge because of how it will impact margins for Sony’s traditionally not-cheap products; and yet others, like mobile (and possibly TV if reports are to be believed) will see Sony face the formidable task of going up against the likes of Apple, which has effectively replaced Sony as the pace-setter for the rest of the pack, although as we have seen in mobile Sony is attacking the new business with gusto. Through this, Sony says it is aiming by 2014 for sales of ¥6 trillion in electronics — with 70 percent of those sales coming from imaging, games and mobile — on overall sales of ¥8.5 trillion by 2014. Sony is positioning digital imaging, game and mobile as the three main focus areas of its electronics business and plans to concentrate investment and technology development resources in these areas.
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| LoveThis Launches Social Recommendation ‘Anti-App’ By Adding Facebook, Email Tips To The Mix Posted: 11 Apr 2012 11:56 PM PDT  Feeling overloaded by social recommendation apps? Get ready for another one hitting the market, although this one says it will come with a twist: LoveThis, the UK-based social recommendation service that launched last year with $2 million in funding, today has launched an iOS app to let friends recommend across 10 categories, from books and films to places to eat. But unlike apps like Amen or Foursquare that rely on people using the app to suggest or tag things, this one says it will also take into account recommendations made by contacts elsewhere, such as Facebook and email, who do not have to be signed up to LoveThis to put their two cents into the mix. And, unlike many other apps that focus first on scale before trying to work in the business model, Alex Dormandy, the CEO of the company, says LoveThis already has a plan here, too. LoveThis is free to use, but the idea will be that something recommended through LoveThis can subsequently be bought via the app. It’s not there yet but is in the works. “We will have a buy button sitting there at exactly that moment,” he tells me. “And it’s not just people with the app who can buy, non registered friends who receive or make recommendations will also receive the purchase links.” He says that LoveThis is trying to work some viral elements into the new service as well: while the functionality allows for discussion on your own topics between the app, Facebook and email, LoveThis will also include an invite to download the app if you want to see friends’ other recommendations. That could come in useful especially in the early days when most people will not have the app. LoveThis doesn’t say how many people have registered with the service since it launched last year, but it picked up around 40,000 recommendations in its first eight weeks of launch: that quick growth speaks to how there is still a hole in the market waiting to be filled. And how people are still looking for the “killer app” that gives them more trusted and intelligent discovery tools beyond the more anonymous search results that you get today. For now the service works around three points of engagement: the app, Facebook and email. But Dormandy also says that LoveThis is already working on integrating with other social sites like Foursquare and Twitter. “Absolutely there are a lot of options,” he says. “The work on integrating with them is going on now.” LoveThis should be watched to see if this kind of cross-platform, semi-opted-in model of social networking can work, but another reason to keep an eye on it is because of the track record of the people who are behind the startup. Dormandy is a veteran of Branson’s Virgin group, having founded both Virgin Mobile and the fitness chain Virgin Active. Another exec helped design and launch one of the UK’s biggest online grocery-and-beyond shopping/delivery outfits, Ocado. Angels include Gi Fernando (founder of Techlightenment, later sold to Experian).
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| Viadeo Raises $32M To Expand Its Professional Social Network In China, Russia And Beyond Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:55 PM PDT  Paris-based business social networking site Viadeo may have put a planned IPO into a holding pattern last year, but it is not having any trouble raising capital elsewhere as it forges ahead with its international expansion. Today, it has announced that it has picked up funding worth $32 million — one of the largest recent tech investments in Europe and the biggest ever for a social network in the region. Investors in this round included government-backed funds the French Sovereign Wealth Fund and the Fonds Stratégique d'Investissement; institutional shareholders Idinvest and Ventech; and several new investors such as Allianz, Jefferies, and Middle Eastern private funds. This most recent round of funding, Viadeo’s fourth, takes the total amount invested in the company to $50.2 million. Viadeo says the investment will be used to grow its business in Europe and China. In the latter market, it operates as Tianji and claims to be the biggest professional social network in the country, with 10 million members — nearly one quarter of all of Viadeo’s 45 million registered users. Following through on that success in China, Viadeo says funds will also be used to expand operations in more emerging markets such as Latin America, India, Africa and Russia. In Russia, the company established a JV with Finnish publisher Sanoma Oyj in December 2011 to create a more localized version of the site for the Russian market. Viadeo describes itself as the world’s second-largest social network for business people. Indeed, LinkedIn is still far ahead of it, with 150 million users as of February 2012. But while LinkedIn can claim that it has users spread across 200 different countries and territories, Viadeo says its unique selling point is that it takes more of a local approach than its rivals. That has seen, for example, Viadeo’s Chinese site attracts a much younger demographic than the rest of its footprint, with the average age of a Tianji user being only 30. “We have always been laser-focused on our ‘multi-local’ approach, which goes beyond simple translation and focuses on catering to, and understanding, the business and cultural needs of each market,” said Dan Serfaty, CEO, Viadeo. “This approach has awarded us tremendous growth and success in both European and emerging markets.” Considering that both LinkedIn and Viadeo offer a similar range of services within the app — the opportunity to network, enhance reputation and visibility, chatter about business with others, and so on — it will be interesting to see whether this more “laser local” approach will draw more users to Viadeo over the promise of bigger scale from LinkedIn. So far, the signs for expansion have been promising. Viadeo says that each month it adds 1 million new members, creates 10 million new connections and facilitates 100 million profile views. The company also says it achieved profitability back in September 2009.
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| Instagram Aftermath: It’s Time For Entrepreneurs To Go All-In Posted: 11 Apr 2012 07:49 PM PDT  Editor’s note: Adeo Ressi is founding member at TheFunded and The Founder Institute. Follow him on Twitter @adeoressi. Q: What does the Instagram acquisition mean for startups? A: A LOT. At the close of 2011, there was a lot of uncertainty for startups. Stock market fluctuations, underwhelming talent acquisitions (“acqui-hires”), and structural investment problems threatened the prospects for startups. But what a difference a few weeks can make. The passage of crowdfunding legislation in the U.S. coupled with the $1 billion acquisition offer of Instagram, signals the beginning of a full startup boom. In preparation for the good times, venture capitalists have started to raise new fund money at their pre-crash highs. Two and a half years ago, Mint.com was acquired for $170 million, and everyone thought that was an amazing deal following the great recession. Now, a fledgling company with a small team gets acquired for $1 billion. My best guess is that it is about to get crazy. And, only fools sit on the sidelines. Many strong and older entrepreneurs that I know are wealthy today because they made intelligent decisions during the dot-com bubble of the late ’90s. Success was not easy then, and it will not be easy now, either. But, the likelihood of a great outcome is much higher in a boom. There are a lot of newly minted entrepreneurs that pursue their dream company in a halfhearted way. You may tinker with your idea while toiling at a day job. You may refuse to put in the work required to recruit the best talent. You might be afraid of launching an imperfect product. Or, you may put a mediocre effort into fundraising. However, if you want to take advantage of a boom cycle and reap the rewards, you need to slide all of your chips on to the table. You need to go all-in. And, you need to play smart. Every move that you take and every bet that you make needs to have the best odds of success. You can’t enter the game too late, either. If what I predict happens, very soon you will start to read about more and more crazy deals. When “crazy” becomes the new normal, the opportunity will have already passed you by. So, let me get really specific. As an entrepreneur, you have a decision to make. Ask yourself, “is this my boom?” If your answer is “yes,” then you have a lot of work to do. Look around you. If everyone that you deal with is not top-notch, from co-founders to vendors, fire them immediately and bring on the best. Now. Right now. Seriously. Now. To really win during a boom, you need to play at the top level, and the winners in every boom always have the best talent. Always. Is it your time? Is this your boom? [image via flickr/V1LL14N]
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| Walkie Talkie App Voxer Goes Big, IVP And Intel Lead $30 Million Round Posted: 11 Apr 2012 06:03 PM PDT  Voxer, a walkie talkie mobile app that lets you talk to friends across iPhones and Androids, looked like an overnight success last November when it soared to its current place as a top social networking app in the app stores. But the company is five years old and has been working hard to figure out the software and design it needed to win big. It’s ready to go all the way, having just closed a funding round of more than $30 million led by Institutional Venture Partners, Intel Capital and numerous angels including SV Angel, CrunchFund, Chris Dixon and Roger McNamee, I’ve heard from multiple sources. The company has confirmed the amount and agreed to share more — but it didn’t confirm the valuation, which I hear ended up at $180 million pre-money after a couple months of discussions with many interested investors. Its long history helps explain why it went with firms known for their later-stage investments. Over the course of its life it has raised nearly $20 million, the majority of which has come from founder Tom Katis. Conceived of during his time serving in the Special Forces in Afghanistan, he originally thought the company would be for enterprises — large dispersed groups that needed a way to quickly share what was happening. And it is, to some degree. He says that big organizations like hospitals and businesses are using it. But the app turned out to be fundamentally viral, as it discovered in November. Starting in a few Midwestern cities and growing out from there, Voxer has anecdotally spread to high schools, small towns, families… Katis says that based on the numbers and the inbound emails from users, it’s getting used in most circumstances you can think of. Usage numbers are healthily in the “double digit millions [of monthly uniques],” he adds. Less anecdotally, it has top rankings in the app stores for countries around the world, according to App Annie. So how has it grown? While the app has made heavy use of Facebook to help users find and invite friends, Katis and Gustaf Alstromer (its head of growth, a long-time mobile entrepreneur), tell me that it's word of mouth more than anything else. How do they know? “When new users discover how to use it they tend to get excited and tell friends to get it, because it is a brand new experience that seems to fill a void. It's the etiquette of text messages but is faster and easier and uses live voice." The future of voice is what the big plan is really about. The company believes it can be one of the key services of the mobile-first world, like Instagram has become for photos and like Path intends to become for social networking. Smartphone penetration has only just grown to the point that the combined market size of iOS, Android and other platforms are surpassing feature phones in the U.S. and across the world. Mobile is where the next billion users are at. “We’ve seen Zynga and others do it in games, we’ve obviously witnessed first-hand with Shazam, Pandora, Spotify and others in the music space,” IVP’s Dennis Phelps adds, managing to include some of his firm’s investments in that statement. “We think Voxer has the ability to become the 800-pound gorilla when it comes to voice messaging — a fundamentally different and more convenient way to communicate.” Voxer’s size isn’t the only attractive part. Along its way in the early years, it has picked up a number of voice-related patents,and a keen understanding of Node.js, a Javascript-based system that it is now possibly the largest user of. Which points to where the new funding will go — infrastructure, and hiring more engineers, particularly out of the Node.js developer community. Katis, a serial entrepreneur who still co-owns his previous hit, security contractor Triple Canopy, says the long-term plan here is to build a big-freestanding business. So, a possible IPO candidate, that his new investors could provide the follow-on rounds to help it get there.
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| InnoSpring Launches First U.S.-China Accelerator & Seed Fund, Backed By Kleiner Perkins & More Posted: 11 Apr 2012 05:58 PM PDT  As research from the Startup Genome is beginning to show, the world has become a global entrepreneurial playing field, as cities from Tel Aviv to Santiago evolve into thriving startup ecosystems, becoming both regional and global engines of job creation. With such a large, increasingly Internet-connected population, China, too, has become an important part of this conversation for web startups. (See TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing.) In spite of the huge market opportunities, however, historically it’s been tricky for foreign technology businesses to gain significant traction inside the Eastern power. (Groupon, anyone?) Today, a consortium of Chinese and American financial institutions are looking to change that by launching Silicon Valley’s first U.S.-China tech accelerator, called InnoSpring. The new incubator officially opened its doors today, giving the world a sneak peek at its first batch of 12 startups, which will be making their home in the company’s new 13,500 square-foot facility in Santa Clara, Calif. The accelerator itself was established by a joint partnership between Tsinghua University Science Park (TusPark), Shui On Group (Shui On), Northern Light Venture Capital (NLVC) and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). And, during its ribbon-cutting event today, at which more than 100 investors turned out to see its new digs, the Sino-American accelerator also announced its new Seed Fund, backed by both Chinese and American VC firms. The seed fund is being backed by Kleiner Perkins, Northern Light VC, GSR Ventures, China Broadband Capital, and TEEC Angel Fund. Thanks to these contributions, the 15 companies which InnoSpring plans to select every six months for its “Seed Program” will receive an initial $25K investment at the outset of the program, with the potential to receive an additional $250K in capital from TEEC upon graduation. As to the equity stake InnoSpring is taking? Zhang says that will be decided on a case-by-case basis, but I’d expect the average to be in the one to five percent range. As it stands today, InnoSpring is the first accelerator to focus on supporting American and Chinese startups to expand beyond their home countries and, although it will be in part focused on jumpstarting Chinese startups, its program is not restricted to founders hailing from China, it is also looking to seed American startups with Chinese expansion strategies — in both the long-term and the short-term. Like those tech accelerators before it, InnoSpring will be offering a mix of services and support for its startups, including funding, mentoring, workshops, in-house resources like accounting, bookkeeping, and paralegal advisement, access to VCs and angel investors, as well as physical office space and professional services for both U.S. and Chinese startups looking to increase cross-border development. InnoSpring is being managed by Eugene Zhang, the co-founder of the TEEC Angel Fund and JEDA Technologies (and also formerly of Juniper Networks, Cisco and Sun). Zhang and team have located some impressive office space, which can accommodate as many as 40 startups during the accelerator’s 6-month startup bootcamp. If it wasn’t made clear by the accelerator’s impressive collection of founding financial partners, seed fund investors, or the fact that it’s a 6-month program, InnoSpring is showing that it wants to be a full-service resource for Chinese and American startups by going beyond its “Seed Program.” In a move that’s somewhat unusual for domestic accelerators, it’s offering both “Pre-Seed” and “Post-Seed” programs, aimed at both helping very early-stage companies get off the ground by providing office space, mentoring, and help with raising seed fund, as well as giving more established tech startups the ability to find workspace in satellite offices of big corporations, among others, which are in turn looking to tap into that energetic startup environment. If an accelerator is serious about kickstarting viable companies, ensuring that they have the resources and office space to grow their businesses — both before and after they’re at a seed-ready stage — can be critically important to the difference between building a viable company and stuttering along the road to the deadpool. What’s more, the accelerator has established what it calls a “China Gateway Program”, which is intended to provide domestic startups with strategy consulting services that help them design the most effective approach to entering the Chinese market. In turn, for Chinese startups looking to come to Silicon Valley, InnoSpring offers integrated services, like virtual offices and office hours, to connect Chinese startups to American talent and help them establish business in the U.S. InnoSpring also today unveiled its inaugural batch of startups, some of which will be beginning the accelerator’s 6-month program this month. So, without further ado, here is a brief look at InnoSpring’s first 12 startups. Note: Most of these startups are in stealth mode or in early-stages of growth (with the exception of Hillstone Networks, which is China-based), and a number of them do not yet have websites, but stay tuned for more.
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