Pre-IPO Filing, Facebook Trading Privately At $84 Billion Valuation

As everyone waits for Facebook to file for its IPO this week, one of the big questions is what will its valuation be. Will it hit the magic $100 billion?
Well, we are not going to find out this week because IPOs don’t get priced unti right before the offering, which isn’t expected until April or May. And a lot can happen between now and then. (What will be filed is the preliminary S-1 with all of Facebook’s financials and other corporate information).
But if Facebook went public today, chances are that it would get a valuation of around $85 billion. We know this because there is a pretty good proxy. Facebook shares trade on provate markets like Sharespost and SecondMarket. In fact, there is an auction going on right now on Sharespost for a block of Facebook shares which ends on February 2 (the same day the filing is expected to hit). The last contract was yesterday at $35.50, which gives Facebook an implied valuation of $83.5 billion. The last auction on Sharespost closed at a “clearing price” of $34 on January 20, which gave it an implied valuation of $80 billion.
Sharespost is an illiquid market with limited supply, so this is a very loose proxy. But it sets an important benchmark.
Another benchmark to look at is other social networking stocks that are already trading publicly, most importantly Zynga and LinkedIn. Both fell after their IPOs, but have been rallying so far this year ahead of earnings. (Zynga is finally above its $10 IPO price). Who knows where they will be in April or May, but a bull market for those stocks will mean a higher valuation for Facebook at its IPO. If they tank again, then Facebook’s valuation could also come under pressure.
If $85 billion sounds familiar, that is because that is where Facebook was trading on the private markets almost a year ago. Valuations kept going up after that, helping LinkedIn and other Internet companies go public. Then all the IPOs sank, and now they are climbing back.
For public investors who believe that Facebook will be the next great tech stock, a lower valuation at the IPO will be better. Whether it is $85 billion or $100 billion, a huge chunk of Facebook’s valuearguably has already been captured by private investors. Even if Facebook is eventually worth more than Apple’s current $422 billion market cap, that would only be a 4X to 5X return on an IPO over time, depending on where it starts. For context, Amazon has returned more than 125X on IPO investors.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/facebook-84-billion-valuation/

Paying To Serve: Microsoft Offers Accelerator-Backed Startups $60,000* In Azure Cloud Usage

The perks of getting into a top startup accelerator just got a little better. Microsoft is now offering startups in its new BizSpark Plus program $60,000 worth of costs for using its Azure cloud computing program. This includes any company that’s a part ofTechStars or its affiliated Global Accelerator Network, as well as Seedcamp, Dogpatch Labs, and a list of others.
Let’s say your hot new startup has just launched to the public, gotten TechCrunched, and is dealing with its big first wave of traffic. This deal will let you quickly scale up to meet the demand without blowing your seed funding on emergency virtual machines. An open cloud services platform, Azure works with major development languages including node.js, java, php and Microsoft’s own . net, among others — the point, from Microsoft’s perspective, is to get in with the next batch of companies before they get hooked on offerings from rivals like Amazon.
Or let’s say you’re working on an enterprise app, that also needs to get in front of lots of potential clients. Beyond the broad technical options available in Azure, there’s another selling point. Microsoft will work to connect Plus startups with its many enterprise and mid-market customers, corporate vice president Dan’L Lewin tells me.
BizSpark has already been around for a few years, with the general goal of supporting startups while introducing them to .net and other Microsoft-backed languages and resources. The Plus branch of the program, which is officially launching today, is planning on offering other services in addition to Azure. But, per the asterisk in the headline, you should note that the $60,000 doesn’t last forever — according to the Plus web site, the first year is free and the second year is half off the retail price.
TechStars, which is headlining the Azure announcement today, has previously worked together with Microsoft on a variety of other projects, including an incubator focused on its hit Kinect devices.
The deal, generally, is another example of accelerators upping the benefits they can provide startups. TechStars began offering $100,000 convertible notes to each of its accepted companies last fall, on top of its initial seed funding. Y Combinator partnered with Yuri Milner, SV Angels and Andreessen Horowitz last summer to provide $150,000 notes.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/freeazurecloud/

Is Bebo Finally Dead? (Update: Not Quite)

Update: Apparently all the online grieving was over a false alarm. A Bebo spokesperson just emailed me to say that the site was down due to “a technical clusterfuck” — it’s not actually dead. He also says that the site still has a niche audience, largely in the United Kingdom, and it will be launching more products soon.
Largely forgotten social network Bebo may have shut down today.
Bebo users certainly seem to think that this is the end. The Bebo website is down, and as a result there’s a steady stream of sad tweets using the “#bebo” and “#ripbebo” hashtags. And if it’s a false alarm, the company isn’t doing much to combat that impression — the most recent posts on both theBebo and Team Bebo Twitter accounts date from November.
Bebo co-founder (in its first incarnation) and investor (in its latest) Michael Birch also tweeted: “Am super sad that Bebo has actually gone. Some very fun times with very cool people. #RIPbebo – keep sharing that luv!” (He later corrected himself: “Hold the press (too late for that), Bebo should be coming back in a matter of hours. #LongLiveBebo”)
You probably haven’t heard anything about Bebo lately, but you may remember that AOL (which, of course, currently owns TechCrunch) acquired the site for $850 million back in 2008. AOL never really figured out what to do with the site, and eventually sold it to Criterion Capital Partners for less than $10 million.
After that, there were signs that things might start picking up — Xbox co-creator Kevin Bachus joined as chief productive officer, and Birch, one of Bebo’s original co-founders, invested in the new company. There was a redesign, too. There weren’t, however, any obvious signs that Bebo was gaining real momentum, and the company has been silent for the past few months.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/is-bebo-finally-dead/

Codecademy Becomes A Platform: Now Anyone Can Write Programming Tutorials

One of the most buzzed-about startups over the last few months has been Codecademy — a site that looks to make programming accessible to just about anyone, with a variety of interactive, web-based courses that have users writing their first lines of code within a few seconds. The site’s ‘Code Year’ program, which invites users to receive one programming lesson each week, racked up a whopping 100,000 signups in only 48 hours — and it even has the White House on board.
But, as anyone who has spent much time on the site can attest to, Codecademy has had one big problem: there just aren’t that many lessons available. And the ones that are on there sometimes seem to be moving too quickly, without many practice exercises to explore and reinforce what you’ve just learned.
Today, the company is launching a feature that will go a long way toward fixing that. Meet the Codecademy Course Creator.

Cofounder Zach Sims says that as soon as Codecademy first launched, the site was inundated by requests from teachers and programmers who were eager to contribute their own lessons. To date that hasn’t been possible — all lessons on Codecademy were written in-house, or by special guest contributors. Starting with today’s launch, which the company is considering a beta, anyone will be able to write their own interactive lessons using the site’s tools (with documentation available explaining how to use them).
Sims says that these tools are essentially identical to what the team uses to craft their own in-house courses, so it’s possible to make lessons that are just as good (or better) than the ones that are already on the site. And the tools suport both Ruby and Python in addition to JavaScript (which has been the site’s focus so far), so we’ll be seeing lessons covering more languages very soon.
There’s no approval process involved in publishing a lesson — you write it, and Codecademy will give you a link that you can distribute as you wish. However, there will be a screening process that’ll determine which lessons Codecademy will feature on the site. In other words, users won’t be presented with lessons that aren’t any good, but if you want to create a lesson that’s applicable to a class you’re teaching, or to explain an internal company tool to coworkers, you can use Codecademy’s platform to do it.
The site doesn’t have any current plans to pay contributors, but to help incentivize users to write high-quality courses, Codecademy aims to provide significant exposure to the best lesson creators.
I also asked Sims if Codecademy has any plans to make the site friendlier to users who have no programming experience — in my use of the site I’ve noticed that there isn’t much hand-holding after the first few lessons, and I’m pretty sure I’d be lost if I hadn’t previously been introduced to these concepts. Sims says that the startup is indeed hoping that these additional lessons will help fill in the gaps, and that Codecademy is also introducing new features to help with this: for example, you’ll now be able to click on certain keywords (like ‘Variable’) to jump to the lesson where that concept was explained, in case you need a refresher.
Above all, this is a very important shift for Codecademy. With only six employees, the company would have had to to go on a hiring spree if it wanted to keep up with demand and produce a comprehensive collection of lessons addressing both the basics and more advanced concepts. By turning to the community, it can sidestep that problem — it’ll still have the challenge of identifying the best lessons (and incentivizing the best teachers to write them), but given how much traction the site has already, I suspect it won’t have too hard a time collecting an impressive array of course materials in the coming months.

 

 Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/codecademy-becomes-a-platform-now-anyone-can-write-programming-tutorials/

Nerve Dating Re-Launches To Put The Humanity (And Humor) Back In Online Dating

Last year, Nick Paumgarten wrote an interesting article for The New Yorker that detailed the rise of online dating and the effects it’s had on web culture. What struck me most were some of the eye-opening statistics he shared about the size and popularity of the industry, beginning with the fact that fee-based dating sites have become, collectively, a billion-dollar industry — that “one in six new marriages is the result of meetings on Internet dating site.” What’s more, online dating is now the third most common way for people to meet.
It’s clear that much of the early blush (read: stigma) around using online platforms to meet new people and pursue relationships has worn off. But anyone who’s spent any time on dating websites knows that plenty of friction still exists, whether it be in the awkwardness of online-to-offline interaction, the inherent dangers of meeting an eStranger, or the problem of having to rely on algorithms and science to find your perfect “match.” As much as dating sites strive to find a scientific method (or a more efficient way) by which to introduce us to the loves of our lives, many of them still feel impersonal and gimmicky, and, as Paumgarten points out in his article, it’s for this reason that online dating remains an isolating pursuit.
Sean Mills, the CEO of Nerve Dating, agrees that online dating today still feels like a search for the best deals on airline tickets. It seems as if, in playing online games, we go to buy more missiles, and in doing so suddenly find out that we’re the proud member of an online dating community.
Dating sites will do anything to attract new customers, promising true love, infinite happiness, and walls filled with fewer cat pictures. And thus, people are itching for a better way to meet their match, and they’re no longer content with an industry where the prevailing methodology for introducing us to other humans is based on these gimmicks, or on pseudoscience, robot matchmakers, and the deployment of virtual fruit, as Mills said in his introductory letter to the Nerve community.
In 1997, Rufus Griscom and Genevieve Field launched a website and eMag dedicated to sex, relationships, and culture called Nerve. After spending eight years as president of everyone’s favorite satirical news source, The Onion, Sean Mills took over as the chief exec at Nerve, looking to bring the same brand loyalty and affinity people had for The Onion to Nerve’s community of sex-addicted readers. Early on, Nerve was defined by some amazing editorial content, boosted by contributions from writers like Jonathan Lethem, Chuck Palahniuk, and Joyce Carol Oates (to name a few), and it evolved into one of the few early success stories of New York’s Silicon Alley.
Created as an online sex magazine that both men and women could enjoy — a less raunchy, more highbrow Penthouse, with broad appeal — Nerve has since become a site dedicated more broadly to love and culture. Having witnessed the success of The Onion’s dating site firsthand, which capitalizes on a more relaxed and humorous approach to online dating, Mills officially re-launched Nerve Dating in New York in December as an extension of the existing site.
Because Nerve already had a loyal readership and fanbase (about 2 million monthly uniques), there was a readymade audience for Nerve Dating, making it easier, Mills says, to reach critical mass. When creating a new dating website (or really any other consumer-facing web business), scale is one of the biggest challenges, and online dating really doesn’t work unless there is a crowd of people on the site ready for love. Nerve Dating already has over 10,000 users, and Mills says that the team is already hearing success stories.
Today, the team is launching Nerve Dating in San Francisco, with plans to continue rolling out across the U.S. The main thrust of Nerve’s bi-costal dating service is to create a platform that “celebrates individual voices,” without the taxonomy inherent to dating websites that tends to lump people into categories so that matching technology can do the heavy lifting.
As Mills tells us, the challenge facing the users of online dating sites is not so much in figuring out whether you like someone (people are already pretty good at doing that on their own), but simply in starting the conversation. Walking across the room to introduce yourself to someone you don’t already know? Gulp. That can be challenging, and it’s something that sites like Commonred identify with, as they attempt to meld the meetup and “new people” discovery space, inhabited by startups like Sonar, Meetup, and LetsLunch, with professional networking sites/apps like Branchout and Hashable.
Just as Shaker launched to bring a fun, interesting way to socialize on Facebook, Nerve is trying to make dating more like an enjoyable cocktail party, something that’s more natural and casual than an awkward blind date.
Thus, on Nerve, users can actively share their thoughts and opinions about restaurants, bars, movies, music, and books, and are instantly introduced to other people who enjoy the same things. Mills equates it to seeing someone at a bar who’s wearing a t-shirt with your favorite band on it — this makes it much easier to approach them and strike up a conversation.

On the other hand, an online dating site lives or dies based on the attempts it makes to make its users feel safe and secure, and Mills believes that many sites make the mistake of trying to offer an online dating service for free. If you can make it affordable, he says, it’s to everyone’s benefit, because it boosts the quality of the service offered and helps to keep out unsavory types. (Neve Dating costs $20 a month.)
And to that point, Nerve has made it their mission to monitor activity on the site, and the team keeps a close eye on suspicious activity, flagging users for abnormal behavior, and booting them if necessary. In fact, Nerve recently flagged a user for setting up what looked to be a fake profile, and when they contacted the owner, they found that the profile was created by none other than OkCupid Co-founder Chris Coyne. (It’s always a good sign when your nominal competitors are setting up profiles on your site to “check it out.”)
While Nerve Dating costs $20 a month, users can respond to messages they receive for free, unlike many other sites. The idea here is to encourage people to interact with each other, to socialize, and reach out, but initial messages are kept to a Twitter-length 141 characters, with the idea being that this takes the pressure off and is a little more casual.
Nerve also has a “Last Night” feature, which Mills says is a bit like a checkin, in that users are encouraged to write what they did the night before. And, on that note, an additional perk is that Mills says that he’s enlisted some of the writers at The Onion to pen questions about culture and what users were up to last night.
The site will also soon be introducing something which is now internally called “The Like Machine,” which will enable the site to create virtual affinity groups, and help daters meet other people who are interested in similar music, books, and so on. The topics and categories that you follow will show up on your profile, and the site will also be hosting a database of categories people can search through to find users with similar interest graphs. The site also has a “Notice Him/Her” function, which is akin to “poking” someone on Facebook, a nonverbal expression of interest.
Building a profile on dating sites can be excruciating, and this is designed to make that process easier, as few people enjoy creating their own personal statements for dating websites. The process is awkward to say the least. When I asked Mills if the team had plans to establish Facebook connect or allow users to pull in their other social profiles, he said that, interestingly, dating sites that implement Facebook Connect have seen a 50 percent drop in signups. This seems to be evidence that, while people want their dating lives to be social, it’s all about discovering new people, they don’t want to be followed by their social graphs, people want to be anonymous. Though Mills is open to potentially integrating with Spotify, or GoodReads — sites that would enable people to share personal information without porting their entire social profiles.
Nerve is also hoping to leverage the community its created around its lifestyle and culture publication, hosting live events for people to mingle and hang out, to facilitate yet another opportunity for users to move their online identities into the real world.
Innovating in online dating is tricky, and Nerve seems to be off to a great start by giving people a more casual platform through which to interact and meet new people. It’s a tough nut to crack, but check them out at home here, and let us know what you think. (Oh, and mobile apps are in the works.)
Readers interested in testing out the site can get two free weeks on Nerve Dating by registering here.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/nerve-dating-launches-to-put-the-humanity-and-humor-back-in-online-dating/

SocialCam Is Growing, But It’s The Latest Alum Startup Returning To Y Combinator Anyway

Having spun out of online broadcaster Justin.tv last year,SocialCam has managed to get a strong footing on iOS and Android. It passed 3 million downloads in December, and it’s now sending 3 million notifications a day, with video uploads and following counts up by 700% and 800% in the last few months, according to cofounder Michael Seibel.
But the three-man team is going back into Y Combinator, the early-stage seed fund that Justin.tv had grown out of, instead of taking the more obvious routes of raising venture funding or simply continuing to build on its own.
This is part of a trend within YC, that has begun to show itself over the last year or so. Previous double-alums include Steve Huffman of Reddit/Hipmunk, Patrickand John Collison with Auctomatic then Stripe, Tikhon Bernstam of Scribd and Parse, and Kulveer Taggar with Auctomatic and Tagstand.
I caught up with Seibel recently to learn more about why he and other entrepreneurs are returning.
Having been a cofounder at Justin.tv (which by the way is killing it with its Twitch.tv video game site, I keep hearing), Seibel says that first off the YC environment is helping his company get more productive. “We love the challenge of sprinting with 60-plus companies, many of which will go from idea to product launch in 3 months or less. It’s like living in a barracks with 200 Olympic athletes — it would be impossible to not be healthier.”
While YC has grown its class size over the years from a dozen to dozens, it has also managed to grow its partners to help provide more hands-on advice to new companies. “Just the other day our team was wrestling with a design/UI problem,” Seibel says, “and [Posterous cofounder] Garry Tan rolled up his sleeves, pulled out his laptop, and helped use wireframe our way to a solution. On another occasion, we were tackling the challenge of tracking users through iOS download process and Harj Taggar and Paul Buchheit offered a suggestion that ended up saving us at least two weeks of work.”
A couple more obvious reasons are loyalty, and the who’s-who speaker list. “It’s not a coincidence that a large number of YC alums come back to do YC again.” I would have never been introduced to the tech world it if wasn’t for my Justin.tv co-founders Justin Kan and Emmett Shear [alums of the very first YC class, via Kiko]. Justin.tv would never have gotten off the ground without Paul Graham’s and Jessica Livingston’s support and encouragement.”
Are we looking at a trend that will sweep accelerator programs worldwide as they mature, where each program pulls successful people from previous classes? If so, it will further cement the place these programs have in the startup ecosystem as the go-to spot for venture investors. The returning founders listed above all had successful products and exits in some form, which is evidence that they can do so again.
If they’re successful this time around, these second-time alumni could inspire other programs to bring in more past founders. Y Combinator was arguably the first modern seed-stage fund/accelerator so it has the biggest set of potential founders to re-attract, but now there are lots of other prominent ones out there, including TechStars, SeedCamp, and others variously associated with universities, large companies, cities, venture funds, etc….
For more on the returning-to-YC phenomenon, be sure to check out this post from the other day by Tagstand’s Kul Taggar.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/socialcamyc/

SoftKinetic And Intel Partner For Minority Report-Style Ads

Startup SoftKinetic just announced a new kind of advertising, one that combines its gesture-control technology with Intel’s video analytics.
The goal is for people to walk up to a digital display equipped with SoftKinetic’s 3D cameraand move their arms (or the rest of their body) to interact with the display, similar to Microsoft Kinect. Then, as you’re moving, Intel’s AIM technology can identify your age and gender, which is crucial information for advertisers — and also useful for personalizing the content to each viewer.
For example, as outlined over email by SoftKinetic’s vice president of marketing and communications Virgile Delporte, a young woman might walk up to SoftKinetic-equipped display at an airport, and she could browse information about nearby malls and fashion-related shops. If the viewer was an older man, they might see an ad for a nearby cigar shop.
The description reminds me of one of the most famous scenes in Minority Report, when Tom Cruise’s character runs through the mall and all of the advertisements start delivering personalized messages. (The movie is also famous for featuring gesture-controlled computers, so clearly the SoftKinetic team was watching very closely) Of course, not everyone thinks the Minority Report future is positive, but for people worried about privacy, Delporte assures me that SoftKinetic’s data will be anonymized.
“Only statistical information will be stored, and this anonymous data will be shared in the cloud to provide real-time data to the advertisers, who can easily test different advertising scenarios,” he says. “Think about the way web advertising is managed today. Combined with 3D imaging analysis, the data will get even more accurate.”
SoftKinetic doesn’t have any customers to announce yet, but it’s demonstrating the technology at the Integrated Systems Europe conference in Europe starting January 31. I’ve included a video of SoftKinetic’s technology in action at Yahoo, as well as the Minority Report scene, below.


Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/softkinetic-and-intel-partner-for-minority-report-style-ads/

Synacor Files For IPO, Acquires HTML5 Cloud OS Carbyn For $1.1M

Online content, portal and front-end technology solution Synacor filed its amended S-1 today for an IPO looking to raise $75 million. The filing revealed that this month Synacor acquiredCarbyn, an HTML5 operating system that lets users put their files, applications and more in the cloud and access them from any device’s browser. It paid $1.1 million in total for the company, with $600,000 paid up front with $500,000 to be delivered in April 2013, and it hired 7 Carbyn employees.
The companies are a great fit, a veritable match made in the cloud. Synacor helps telecom and cable service providers set up websites on its managed, hosted platform where their customers can access ”e-mail, security, online games, music and authentication of TV Everywhere”. That means Synacor already handles all your web-based, and TV services, but is missing what lives on your OS. Carbyn’s OS that can be accessed from anwhere will fill this gap and let Synacor’s clients provide their customers with an expansive set of services in a single-sign on package.

Major stockholders of Synacor who will each be selling about a quarter of their shares include Intel Corporation, Walden International, Crystal Internet Ventures, Advantage Capital Partners, andNorth Atlantic Capital. These companies all contributed to Synacor’s $17 million Series C round in 2006. Some additional facts from the filing include:

• 6,818,170 shares will be made available at between $10 and $12 a share, 5,454,545 shares from the company and 1,363,625 shares from stockholders
• 2011 revenue was roughly $91 million, up 37% from its $66.2 million revenue for 2010.
• 2011 income from operations is estimated to be between $3.8 million and $4.2 million, compared to a loss from operations of $3.3 million in 2010
• Over the three months that ended December 31, 2011, Synacor-powered sites had an average of 18.7 million unique visitors per month, as measured by comScor

As mobile demand for access to television and OS-based content increases, Carbyn should become an increasingly valuable component of Synacor. The Ontario-based Carbyn started just a year ago, and the founders said it was looking for its first funding when it made waves in September when it launched at TechCrunch Disrupt. Seems like Synacor picked up Carbyn’s anywhere OS at just the right time.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/synacor-ipo-carbyn/

Former RIM Co-CEO Will Invest $50 Million As Heins Takes The Reins

Whether a “drastic change” is needed or there is already “a lotof change”, former RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis (the same one whoflipped out on the BBC during an interview) still believes in the BlackBerry.
Forget the fact that the company’s balance sheet is half they were at the beginning of 2011, and never mind the fact that the stock dropped 8 percent on the first day after new CEO Thorsten Heins started. Lazaridis still thinks an out-of-pocket $50 million investment in RIM stock is well worth it.
In an interview with The Record, Lazaridis said “I absolutely know he will take this company to new heights,” referencing Heins. Heins replaced Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie as CEO last week after shareholders became fed up with poor stock performance in the past year.
Despite the fact that shareholders have been grumbling, Lazaridis claims that the decision to put Heins in charge has been in the works for over four years, calling the alternative of choosing leadership outside of RIM “a guess.” For now, Lazaridis will be an investor in the company, and the head of a newly formed “innovation committee” at RIM.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/former-rim-co-ceo-will-invest-50-million-as-heins-takes-the-reins/

Twitter’s Dick Costolo: “We’re Growing Faster Than We Have Ever Grown Before”

Does Twitter need Google or does Google need Twitter? It’s a question complicated by recent events, such as the two companies not coming to an agreement to extend their previous partnership through which Google showed Tweets in search results. That deal wasn’t renewed,and then Google decided to promote its own Google+ results in search, which didn’t go over well with Twitter at all.
Asked about this at by Peter Kafka at the D: Dive Into Media conference this evening, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded: “All of us look to Google as the shining light on the hill, a mission-driven company. We think when people are searching for things like a hashtag on a billboard, people will go to Google to look for them and we think Google should return the results they are looking for.”
Costolo was visibly fuming. (Or maybe that was just his regular intense demeanor). But then asked whether Twitter can be successful without Google and all that lost search traffic, Costolo insisted: “We’re growing faster than we have ever grown before, irrespective of whatever Google or Facebook is doing. All of these services can co-exist.”
Later on during the conversation, Costolo reported that Twitter’s advertising business is growing and engagement rates on promoted Tweets, trends, and profiles is high. “We’ve figured out the business,” he says. “The advertising model is working, we just have to scale it.”
Costolo wouldn’t discuss whether or not the company could turn a profit this year or other financials. He did mention a few stats, however. The company now has “about 900 people,” some advertisers such as Volkswagen and Barclays are seeing better than 50 percent engagement rates on Twitter ads, and “40% of our active users don’t tweet” (meaning that they just consume other people’s tweets and don’t tweet themselves).
In terms of politics, he predicted: “2012 is going to be the Twitter election.” Campaigns will be forced to respond in realtime. “Candidates who don’t participate on Twitter while the debates are going on will be left behind because the next morning is too late to respond.”
Asked to comment about his role in board changes last year in which VCs and board observerslost their seats, he says: “People like to ascribe this palace intrigue to tactical changes in the organization. It is just not that compelling. It just so happens we had new people coming in . . . we were able to create a leaner board with more independent directors. It is nice to say that I did some kind of crazy ninja move. The reality is much more boring than that.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/twitters-dick-costolo-were-growing-faster-than-we-have-ever-grown-before/

T-Mobile Plans To Limit Domestic Data Roaming On April 5

If you tend to play on the magenta network, a leaked document out of T-Mobile may require your attention.
According to TmoNews, the carrier will impose new rules for domestic data roaming on April 5. Instead of the unlimited data goodness you’ve likely grown accustomed to, the carrier will cut you off after you burn through an allotted amount of data. Here’s how it’ll work:

Domestic data roaming will not be subject to data speed reduction. The allotment will be reset with each bill cycle. After the allotment is reached, the customer will no longer have data roaming access until they return to the T-Mobile network or connect via Wi-Fi if they have a Wi-Fi capable device.

Truth be told, a good deal of you won’t notice the difference at all. The same system is in use across most of the wireless industry and T-Mo claims it will “help T-Mobile reduce data roaming costs in order to continue providing the most competitive pricing options.”
International voice and data roaming will be left alone, as will domestic voice roaming.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/t-mobile-plans-to-limit-domestic-data-roaming-on-april-5/

Dot429: A Fast-Growing, Multi-Platform LinkedIn For The Gay Community

When it comes to networking, there is no shortage of ways to connect with other professionals to talk shop. LinkedIn has become the most popular professional networking platform, with over 100 million users using the site to post their work experience, look for jobs, and connect with prospective employers. Facebook, too, has its own professional social network in BranchOut, or you can try startups like Identified or just go for some good old fashioned meetups.
Yet, when it comes to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community, there traditionally haven’t been many substantial resources for gay professionals to network and make business connections, especially with other gay professionals. So, in mid-2010, Bill Stewart and Richard Klein co-founded dot429 to help address this problem. Tagging itself the “Gay LinkedIn,” the San Francisco startup set out to build a platform that would offer gay professionals a more robust alternative option to networking on LinkedIn.
While discrimination and intolerance remain entrenched across the planet, dot429 Founder and CEO Richard Klein tells us that the LGBT movement has been on the brink of a new era, as it transitions “from acceptance to cultural leadership.” Klein said that, as a result, gay professionals are increasingly looking for richer ways to help connect their careers and their lives, and both the community and the country at large are at a point where a network facilitating this kind of connectivity has the chance to make an impact.
And in that sense, dot429 is aiming to be more than just the “gay LinkedIn,” as its service has become a hybrid: Part social network, part LinkedIn, part events company and publishing platform. Klein says that there is a need — not just for the LGBT community — to capture the networking happening on LinkedIn and connect it with offline environments, which is why dot429 is playing host to “produced, polished, and professional” live events intended to connect content and people both through work and in their offline lives. It’s a similar idea to the one that inspired Meetup.com, and many others.
Klein also sees a lot of opportunity for in the market for a startup like dot429, owing in part to the virtual absence of any large national competitors. While there are strong local groups, and organizations like Startout (a non-profit focused on LGBT entrepreneurs) as well as the U.K.’s Jake, which targets professional gay men, many of these are offline-focused. But, Klein says that, in the end, he sees these groups as collaborators, rather than competitors, working behind one cause.
With its mission and market opportunity, dot429 was able to raise $500K in seed funding in 2010, and is in the process of raising a multi-million series A round. The startup’s community has also been growing fast, and today stands at over 60,000 people, something that has not gone unnoticed by brands, as dot429 has struck partnerships with prominent brands like FIAT, Saks Fifth Avenue, Infinity, and General Motors — to name a few.

These partnerships have become an increasingly important source of revenue for dot429, and Klein says that the startup is in the process of bringing on whole slew of others. In terms of monetization, the CEO says that the team is also considering introducing a premium membership which, among other things, will provide comped entrance to its live events and a benefit card
While there’s always been opportunity for startups that serve niche audiences, their businesses have to offer a value proposition, or a unique advantage, that serves that niche better than the mainstream option (or network or app). And thus, Klein says that the goal with dot429 has been to create something more sophisticated than what’s already out there, as in bringing the next generation of social networking to the LGBT community.
Beyond connecting online and offline networking, Klein says that the startup will introduce a mentoring section later this year to match mentors with mentees, along with an online collaboration tool. The startup is also undergoing a major editorial redesign (the site has both video and eMagazine components), and has brought on “an editor from a pulitzer prize winning paper who has written for the New York Times and New York Observer” to lead the editorial department.
dot429 is hoping that by combining content with networking connections, it can fill a void in the marketplace at the right time, while leveraging technology to deliver its content and services more efficiently and effectively — to a community that is increasingly active online, on blogs, and social networks. Klein is also quick to point out that dot429 is not exclusive to the LGBT community, as it has a number of “straight allies” (over 10 percent), who have joined the group to show their support for equality.
Fabulis, once a social networking site for gay men, pivoted into Fab.com and began focusing on online flash sales of design items, showing that gay men weren’t necessarily overly enthusiastic about having their own social network — they were content to use Facebook and already-existant options. Kleing believes that having a separate forum for this type of community-specific networking is important and in high demand, however.
Bringing this networking online (and eventually to mobile) has the potential to be even more powerful, and dot429′s growth seems to be corroborating this.
For more, check out dot429 at home here.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/dot429-a-fast-growing-multi-platform-linkedin-for-the-gay-community/

Salesforce Launches Assistly-Powered Social And Mobile Customer Service Platform For SMBs, Desk.com

Last September, Salesforce bought social customer service SaaS startup Assistly for $50 million-plus to help expand its service cloud offerings to small businesses. Today, Salesforce is debuting a brand new Assistly-inspired social and mobile customer service platform for small businesses, called Desk.com.
As you may remember, Assistly helped companies collect and organize all of their customer conversations into a prioritized actionable list and equips support staff with the tools to respond to customers. The application allows businesses to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. And Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.
Desk.com includes much of the same help desk functionality as Assistly but with a few changes. As Assistly co-founder and vice president and general manager, Desk.com, Alex Bard and explains, the customer service platform has been completely rebuilt from the ground up, including the infrastructure and back-end. There’s a new user interface, new APIs, a new HTML5 mobile client, and a new reporting service. Additionally, Desk.com is launching with an in-depth integration with Salesforce’s CRM Sales Cloud, so you can see customer service cases in the CRM product and more.
Built with social at its core, Desk.com allows small businesses work with and respond to customers over Twitter, Facebook and more. Basically, Desk.com integrates Twitter and Facebook customer service comments with other channels like email, phone and web within the agent desktop. Agents can also see data on how many cases customer service agents have opened, resolved, replied to, reassigned, or reopened—regardless of who was assigned the case. Desk.com includes twelve pre-built reports providing data for average handle time, time to first response, first contact resolution rate, and more.
Salesforce is also touting the simple deployment of Desk.com for small businesses. With only four required fields, a company can register for its own social help desk in a matter of seconds. Desk.com also provides a checklist to help companies get started, and each task that a company works through earns the company flex hour credits that anyone in the company can use.
Clients can use the Desk.com HTML5 mobile app to respond to customers on the go from a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads and Android devices. Users respond to support cases using the same filters from their desktop client and access the entire macro library without having to type long replies. Users can also re-assign, change groups, change status, change priority for cases, and modify customer information associated with cases.
Pricing starts at $49 per full-time agent, per month, for unlimited usage. Salesforce says there is flexible pricing is also available for $1 per part-time agent, per hour. Desk.com already has a number of well-known web companies using its customer service platform including Yelp, Square, Spotify, Vimeo, Pandora, and One Kings Lane.
At the time of the acquisition, Salesforce’s CEO and founder Marc Benioff said of Assistly: Salesforce has spent over a decade democratizing enterprise applications in the cloud…The Assistly acquisition doubles down on that strategy by putting us at the heart of the new trend of customer service help desk applications that have instant sign up and zero-touch onboarding, expanding the potential reach of the Service Cloud to millions of companies around the world.
Salesforce already offers the Service Cloud to companies, which helps businesses connect with customers across both traditional and social channels, and counts customers such as Southwest Airlines. For Salesforce, this is a way to aggressively go after the small to medium-sized business community who needs a simple and mobile SaaS for help desk support. Desk.com will face competition from another popular customer service app for small to medium-sized businesses,Zendesk.
And unsurprisingly, social and mobile are central to how Salesforce is positioning Desk.com to be the premier (yet cost-effective) customer service alternative for businesses and companies. Next up for Salesforce’s new products—leveraging the Rypple acquisition with the launch of a human talent management SaaS Successforce.



Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/salesforce-launches-assistly-powered-social-and-mobile-customer-service-platform-for-smbs-desk-com/

MEDIAS ES N-05D: NEC’s New Android Phone Is 6.7mm Thin, Connects To Casio’s G-SHOCK GB-6900

NEC did it again: about 11 months after unveiling the world’s slimmest smartphone at that time, the company is ready to release another super-thin Android phone with a set of impressive specs (via Japan’s biggest mobile carrier NTT Docomo). Dubbed MEDIAS ES N-05D [JP], the handset will hit Japanese stores in February or March this year.
NEC rolled out quite a few Medias-branded Android phones in recent months, but this model is just 6.7mm thin and has the best specs.


Here are the main features:

• Android 2.3.6
• waterproof body
• 4.3-inch LCD with 720×1280 resolution
• 8.1MP CMOS camera with NEC’s Exmor R for mobile engine
• dual-core MSM8260 CPU (1.5GHz)
• 1GB RAM
• 4GB internal memory
• Bluetooth 4.0
• Wi-Fi
• NFC e-wallet function
• infrared connection
• digital TV tuner
• microSD card slot, microUSB slot
• 1400mAh battery
• connectivity to Casio’s G-SHOCK GB-6900 watch
• size: 130×67×6.7mm, weight: 110g

The MEDIAS ES N-05D might reach markets outside Japan at some point in the future, but there is no official word from NEC yet.

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/31/medias-es-n-05d-necs-new-android-phone-is-6-7mm-thin-connects-to-casios-g-shock-gb-6900/

On The Heels Of Nabbing 7 HP Execs, Cyber Security Startup AlienVault Raises $8 Million

Two weeks ago, we covered a fast-growing security startup called AlienVault, which had just stolen seven senior HP security executives. At the time, Barmak Meftah, who left HP Fortify to become president and chief executive at AlienVault told us that the allure was the startup’s technology, which he said is “one of the more widely-deployed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) on the market.”
With the number of cyber attacks and high profile hacks that took place over the last year, both government organizations and corporations are making security a priority and realizing that it’s an issue that needs to be addressed from the top down, and SIEM, he said, is one of the fastest growing segments within the security market.
The startup and its flagship product, OSSIM, an open source SIEM solution, are focused on providing unified management of critical security systems and processes across the network, like vulnerability scanning, etc., and have attracted customers like the Telefonica, Metro Madrid and the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company.
On top of its raid of HP Fortify and HP enterprise security execs, AlienVault is today announcing that it has closed an $8 million series B financing round, led by Trident Capital. Existing investors, Adara Venture Partners and Neotec both contributed to the round, bringing the startup’s total funding to over $12 million.
As part of the series B round, Trident managing director J. Alberto Yepez and Trident principal Michael Biggee will be joining the startup’s board of directors. The team said that it will be using its new infusion of capital to expand its sales and marketing initiatives and expand research and development to meet the growing demand for unified security management.
Trident Capital has funded a number of successful cyber security companies, including Sygate, which was acquired by Symantec, Tablus, acquired by EMC, Thor Technologies, which was acquired by Oracle, and Tricipher, acquired by VMWare.
The Trident team helped recruit AlienVault’s new HP executive team, and is clearly banking on the fact that this new capital can help AlienVault position itself as a player in the global market, where cost-effective, unified management approaches to security are in demand. According to global investment banking and asset management firm William Blair & Co., the SIEM market is growing at 21.9 percent CAGR and is on track to surpass $2.3 Billion by 2014.
For more, check out AlienVault at home here.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/31/on-the-heels-of-nabbing-7-hp-execs-cyber-security-startup-alienvault-raises-8-million/

GeeknRolla rocks into the London Web Summit, March 19

Way back in 2009 there was no large event dedicated to technology startups in the UK. TechCrunch, under Mike Arrington, was busy trying to get its TechCrunch50/Disrupt programme going in the US, and outside of local meetups, the TC event juggernaut still had yet to arrive in Europe. My friend and colleague Robin Wauters was doingPlugg in Brussels, but there wasn’t a startup event in London. So I launched a personal project, an event I called GeeknRolla, the name for which I literally dreamt up in a London pub. Despite those amateurish beginnings, about 400 people turned up that year, and I ran it again for the next couple of years as a fun side project. But times move on and after running it single-handedly for three years in a row, I’m going to bring the GeeknRolla “mojo” to a new event (while we wait for the TC event machine to spin up in Europe, and more on that later so stay tuned).

Thus, GeeknRolla and the Dublin Web Summit, are merging to create the London Web Summit. It’ll be on March 19th in The Brewery Venue, in London’s “Tech City” area.

I’ll be co-curating the Summit along with Paddy Cosgrave of the Dublin Web Summit and chairing the start up competition, which you can apply to enter by clicking here.

We think the Summit will provide great opportunities to hear from international speakers, networking with leading start ups, investors, media and digital leaders.

Tickets go on sale in the coming days, until then, you can apply for a voucher for 2 tickets for the price of 1 below here.

I hope to see you there, and we can keep on rocking Europe!

Source:http://eu.techcrunch.com/2012/01/31/geeknrolla-rocks-into-the-london-web-summit-march-19/

Log Data Management And Analytics Startup Sumo Logic Raises $15M From Greylock And Others

Sumo Logic, a startup focused on enterprise log management and analytics, has raised $15 million in Series B funding round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with participation from previous investors Greylock Partners and angel investor Shlomo Kramer. The new funding brings the startup’s total venture capital backing to $20.5 million.
Today, Sumo Logic emerged from stealth to unveil its log management and analytics platform, aiming to help companies to uncover operational and security insights buried in enterprise log files. The startup was founded by ArcSight veterans Christian Beedgen and Kumar Saurabh in 2009, to provide a cloud based system for managing the massive amounts of enterprise log data.
similar to other cloud based data management offerings, Sumo Logic wants to eliminate the need for expensive on premise-based log management applications. Using algorithms, the service provides enterprises with operational and security insights from their log data in real time, at a massive scale. We’re told the service can analyze terabytes of log-data a day.
Sumo Logic’s architecture features an elastic petabyte scale platform that collects, manages and analyzes enterprise log data, reducing millions of log lines into valuable operational insights in real time. The cloud-based service is powered by Sumo Logic’s Elastic Log Processing, which is a scalable architecture that enables log analytics at a large scale; and LogReduce, which are a set of adaptive algorithms that reduce millions of logs into a small number of patterns.
The platform also features real-time interactive forensics and push analytics to provide proactive detection and notification of trends, changes and anomalies in data. Sumo Logic’s service also mines global trends and anomalies across customer organizations.
As Beedgen explains, there is a major opportunity behind providing a cloud-based alternative to log management because enterprises have real problems managing and analyzing log and machine data. He says existing products can suck in data but have poor analytics and data analyzation with too many false positives.
Sumo Logic has an innovative approach, he says, because it provides a scalable elastic architecture, applied machine learning for IT intelligence, and the horsepower to process massive amounts of IT data.
The new funding will be used towards expanding engineering and marketing. Sumo Logic faces competition from Splunk, which just filed for an IPO.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/31/log-data-management-and-analytics-startup-sumo-logic-raises-15m-from-greylock-and-others/

iOS App Downloads & Marketing Costs Hit Record High In December

Mobile app marketing company Fiksu just released new data revealing the impact the holiday season had on iOS app downloads and user acquisition costs. According to the company’s App Store Competitive Index, a measurement of the average aggregate download volume of the top 200 free U.S. applications, December saw 6.04 million daily app downloads. That’s a nearly 7% increase from November’s 5.65 million, and a clear indication of how many folks were unwrapping new smartphones during the holiday season.
That last half of December was the most competitive for mobile marketers, says Fiksu, with the traffic and dollars spent in the final week up 100% over prior weeks. “December is a strategically critical month for app discovery,” said Micah Adler, Fiksu’s CEO. “What we witnessed during the month was a ‘land rush’ in which advertisers earnestly spent marketing dollars in order to achieve ranking before the traditional App Store freeze which then would generate substantial organic downloads through increased visibility.”
The App Store “freeze” being referred to is the time period when Apple itself goes on holiday, shutting down the queue for new app submissions and updates. For advertisers, it’s critical to get the apps in the best position possible before the freeze occurs, so as to improve discoverability during the December rush. Notes Fiksu, on Christmas Day alone, there were over 6.8 million new iPhone and Android devices activated.
The company also measures the cost to acquire loyal (that is, returning) users for mobile applications. In December, this index hit a record high: $1.81 per user, up 26.5% from November’s $1.43. The increase was due to brands participating in bidding wars, in their attempts lock in top ratings before the freeze.

Data for the Fiksu Indexes was sourced from more than 11 billion mobile app actions, including things like app launches, registrations and in-app purchases, as well as from the more than 200 million downloads recorded by apps marketed via the Fiksu for Mobile Apps user acquisition platform.
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/31/ios-app-downloads-marketing-costs-hit-record-high-in-december/

LivingSocial CEO: Lumping Us With Groupon Is Like Lumping eBay With Amazon

The local commerce industry as represented by daily deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is still barely learning to walk, even though Groupon has 10,000 employees and LivingSocial has5,000. While the two companies look nearly identical today, don’t be surprised if they diverge.
LivingSocial CEO Tim O’Shaughnessy reminded me in a conversation last week that “a lot of people lumped eBay and Amazon together 10 years ago” because they both were “ecommerce” companies. And while there were plenty of similarities and direct competition, each one ended up taking a different path. He suggests the same thing will happen with local commerce between Groupon and LivingSocial. “Fundamentally, I am sure we don’t think about things exactly the same way,” he says, “so we will have different strategies.”
And just as it would have been foolish to define Amazon as nothing more than an online bookseller in the mid-1990s, thinking of LivingSocial or Groupon as only daily deal sites is too limiting. “Where do you go to search?” asks O’Shaughnessy. “The answer for most people is Google.” Where do you share things with your friends online? The answer is Facebook or Twitter. “Where do I go to interact with local merchants in my city?” he continues. There is no default answer yet.
“Daily deals can clearly be part of that equation, but they are not sufficient to answer that question. It is the start,” says O’Shaughnessy, “what allows us to build and scale a substantive member base and base of merchants. There are a host of opportunities where we can be that catalyst between our members and merchants.”
Which opportunities is he planning to go after? He wants LivingSocial to “be viewed much more as the local commerce platform.” Imagine more dashboards and tools for local merchants which help them figure out things like the lifetime value of a customer or their retention rate. ” You need automated closed-loop capabilities to do that,” he says. (Closing the redemption loop is the big challenge right now in local commerce—how do you track offers all the way through to payment?)
The offline component of the business is just as important as the online. “We are an online to offline business,” he points out. “People focus on the online portion, not the offline portion. Over the course of the year that will be an area of emphasis, real touch points. Something physical and real can be more emotive than a click.”
Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/29/livingsocial-ceo-lumping-groupon-ebay-amazon/

Flying People Spotted Over New York City…Film At Nine

In a recent publicity venture for their new movie “Chronicle”, 20th Century Fox enlisted the help of viral marketing agency Thinkmodo to design and execute a rather unique campaign element that surely caused several doubletakes over the New York City skyline.
If you thought you saw some flying humans in the sky over parts of New York City and New Jersey in the last couple of weeks you are, in fact, not crazy. You were merely exposed to a new kind of avant garde marketing technique brought to you by the same folks that unleashed the iPad Head Girl a few months back.
Michael Krivicka from Thinkmodo explains:

“Since the three main characters of the movie have the ability to fly, we came up with the idea of staging a few “flying people” sightings around NYC. We achieved that illusion by having 3 custom-made aircraft (which were shaped like human beings) fly above designated areas in NYC and NJ.”

Here’s a quick video documenting the concept and the flights.

I personally think it’s a ballsy, creative and unique advertising tactic, yet I struggle with wondering how a person would tie the two things together — the movie and the freaky sightings.

In my mind, I guess the optimal scenario would be that a person who had already seen the movie trailer, would later see flying people and then make the connection. Or a person might connect the dots after a sighting, when seeing an additional advertisement for the film. If you never see the trailer at all, you might just end up calling the police or your local Area 51 support group for advice.

Whatever the effect, I am still a proponent of these kinds of marketing exercises and I don’t think this is money spent in vain. This was only a single component of a larger campaign so it’s not like the whole movie is riding on it. Plus, the word of mouth generated by events like this can be powerful.

Even if it’s only realized after the fact, an event like this can bring a smile to the face of a consumer and bring some cool cred to 20th Century Fox for being gutsy and reaching a local area with a unique message. That ephemeral “oh, now I get it” moment can be extremely valuable even if the number of people experiencing it measures only in the hundreds.

Bravo!

Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/flying-people-spotted-over-new-york-city-film-at-nine/

The Obama Campaign Is Now Using Mobile Payments Device Square For Fundraising

The latest technology to be adopted by the Obama campaign—Square. The mobile payments device is now being used by the Obama for fundraising, says the company. Staff, fundraisers and others are being equipped with the card reading devices, says Square, enabling the campaign to take donations on the go via Android devices, iPhones or iPads.
“Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, running for president or local assembly, Square makes it easier than ever for candidates, organizations and volunteers to fundraise for their cause,” said a spokesperson for Square.
There’s no doubt that using a mobile payments device from Square makes fundraising much easier. With traditional forms of fundraising, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.
With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations. We’re told the same processing fees (2.75 percent) apply for use by non-profits and political campaigns.
Similar to the way Square created a special platform for the Salvation Army, the company has also worked with the campaign for a tailored way to take campaign donations. The special app for accepting Square payments for the Obama campaign is currently being used by staff but will be available to the public soon. We’ve embedded screenshots below.
Square has been used for campaigning and fundraising at political events for the past few years. For example, in 2010, Square was used for the state assembly campaign of Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, and for Reshma Saujani, who ran for Congress in New York’s 14th district.
Considering that the Obama campaign raised $42 million in the fourth quarter of 2011 alone, that’s a lot of potential money that could be flowing through Square’s platform. And the marketing exposure is also a bonus for the mobile payments startup to scale even further.


Source:http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/30/the-obama-campaign-is-now-using-mobile-payments-device-square-for-fundraising/