The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Thiel, Zuck, Conway To Select $100K TechFellow Awards Winners
- Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform
- IA Ventures Doubles Down On Big Data With A New $105M Fund
- Live Matrix, The “TV Guide For The Web,” Acquired By OVGuide
- PowerInbox, The Service That Turns Emails Into Apps, Launches API
- Stealthy Legal Startup DocRun Raises $1.1M From Resolute.VC, Don Dodge And Others
- RockYou Cofounder Lance Tokuda Keeps It Old School With New Classmates Competitor SchoolFeed
- LG Takes A Chance With The Oddly-Proportioned Optimus Vu
- Amazon & Viacom Announce Streaming Video Deal
- The Curious Vaporization Of Jesta Labs, A $15 Million Startup Incubator
- Google Ventures-Backed Nettle Wants To Make Watching Movies Social With MovieGoer
- Akamai Acquires Website Performance Company Blaze Software
- Boxee Stands With The CEA Against Cable Companies, Courts The FCC Chairman To Stop Proposed Ruling
- Yep, People Research Movies On Their Phones — Especially On Apps
- Crunchie-Winner Fotopedia Launches New App With World Bank
- Apple Restores Qihoo 360 Mobile Apps In The App Store
- Nine Months From Launch, Chartboost’s Mobile Ad Marketplace Reaches 1 Billion Impressions
- Blip COO: “We Essentially Doubled Revenue In 2011″
- Sprint Sold 1.8 Million iPhones Last Quarter, 40 Percent To New Customers
- Social Marketing Platform Extole Raises $10 Million
| Thiel, Zuck, Conway To Select $100K TechFellow Awards Winners Posted: 08 Feb 2012 09:25 AM PST  The TechFellow Awards is the Oscars of high-tech entrepreneurship. As selection committee member Sean Parker puts it “We're shining a spotlight on individuals who are on the cusp of bringing us something revolutionary.” On February 22nd at the SFMOMA, 20 innovators will be presented with $100,000 grants to invest in startups of their choice. Nominations are open through February 17th at the TechFellows website. Today, the TechFellow Awards announced that Emmy-winning nerd hero Jim Parsons, star of hit tv show The Bing Bang Theory, will host the awards ceremony. Marissa Mayer, Dave McClure, and Terry Semel will also join the all-star selection committee, which includes Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Ron Conway. The TechFellow Awards are presented by Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA) to honor visionary technology leaders with the opportunity to support the next generation of innovators. 5 winners will be selected in each category – Engineering Leadership, Product Design and Marketing, General Management, and Disruptive Innovation. Along with the $100,000 grant, the winners will join an elite technology community think tank of past winners including Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter; Maria Thomas, former CEO of Etsy, Adam D’Angelo, co-founder of Quora and former CTO of Facebook, and Paul Graham, co-founder and Partner at Y Combinator. They’ll attend quarterly dinners, livestream events, and Q&A sessions where they’ll receive expertise and insight to help them shape the future through investment and their own projects. Visit the TechFellows website now to nominate who you think are the most disruptive figures in tech, and check back on February 22nd for live coverage and interviews from the awards ceremony. Here’s the full list of selection committee members for this year’s awards:
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| Pivot Smart: Social News Network XYDO Goes Pure B2B With New Content Marketing Platform Posted: 08 Feb 2012 09:00 AM PST  In case you haven’t noticed, the Internet has become a content fire hose. There’s a lot of junk floating around out there (my posts not included, of course), and, as a result, a spate of digital readers and aggregators have popped up to offer our blood-shot eyes improved filtering mechanisms that channel the noise into signal. Some of them even get snatched up by Twitter, a la Summify. One of these startups, the Summify competitor and Utah-based XYDO, launched in May of last year, followed shortly thereafter by closing a $1.25 million round of series A financing from EPIC Ventures and a host of angels. But, in case you’re unfamiliar, XYDO’s value proposition has essentially been that it creates a social news platform that combines the best parts of Digg and, say, Hacker News, on the back of technology that combs a swath of content to serve you with relevant, curated news from trustworthy sources. Initially, XYDO (pronounced “zy-doo”) focused on offering its socially curated, personalized news streams through a consumer-facing web platform. It quickly followed that up with XYDO Brief, which capitalized on this renaissance of email newsletters by delivering the same news it curated based on users’ social interactions, networks, and foot prints on its web platform — via your inbox. XYDO co-founder Cameron Brain, who, besides having a great last name and holding three patents for his innovations in the delivery and display of video on mobile devices, told us that XYDO Brief was launched as a kind of side project — after all, curated email newsletters were nothing new. But, to the team’s surprise, XYDO Brief quickly became the most popular aspect of the service, with a bunch of tech industry honchos signing on. (TC’s Erick Schonfeld is a subscriber.) In addition, XYDO’s curated content sources found a foothold among businesses looking to offer relevant, popular content to supplement their existing marketing services. As has always been true, content is king, but many businesses, blogs — really any service with a web presence — struggle to create engaging content, generate and convert leads, and establish themselves as viable (or at least interesting) content producers. Due to flagging interest in its web platform, XYDO is officially announcing today that it’s pivoting to a business-to-business (B2B) approach. For those familiar, you may have noticed that the startup’s homepage looks a bit different today. That’s because the team is doing away with its existing social news platform (though it will continue to offer XYDO Brief to the public), and is instead taking a semi-PaaS approach, launching an email marketing solution for businesses. The company has already signed on a roster of companies, including the Utah Jazz, Lendio.com, Interbank, and BYU Athletics — to name a few. Most of them are Utah-based, as the co-founders are of the mindset that, if you can’t get adoption in your own backyard, then you might as well call it quits. To that end, XYDO sent over 12 million of its curated emails on behalf of its customers. Again, most businesses have a story to tell, and a brand to hawk along with that story, but many find more than a little difficulty in sharing that message in a way that is authentic, relevant, and drives engagement. Typically, when businesses look to bolster their content production, they employ bloggers, try their hand at blogging themselves, or hire a team of awkward interns to produce that content. Businesses have also been saturated with the “you have to get social, or perish” message, and try to create content for social networks to boot, but that usually just means they manually copy-and-paste their stories into social feeds. Some even outsource content production to foreign lands, paying a sweat shop of quasi-bloggers $10K a pop to create content for their Facebook brand pages. All in all, it’s an expensive, time-consuming, and messy process. Thus, XYDO has developed a white-label email solution that goes out to sources like Reddit or Drudge Report, finds the hottest, freshest content (piping hot), and includes it businesses’ Twitter streams, on their sites, etc. That’s really XYDO’s secret sauce: It’s not just about finding content that’s relevant to the business and their audience, but within those topics, locating a small subset of content that’s accelerating on the Web — just starting to become popular. Using the same tech behind XYDO Brief, which analyzes up to 300K articles per day, and then matches it against some three million influential, social media taste-makers, keeping score of what’s being shared, accelerating the velocity metric associated with that content. You want 10 articles on startups or banks and loans? XYDO wants to give you stories on those topics that are just starting to take off, in near-realtime. Not unlike a Hootsuite for email, XYDO’s platform offers the ability to produce these weekly curated content reports, personalizing content feeds by category, schedule email newsletters, and so on. The new XYDO will do all the curation for businesses, and let them control it from a single dashboard. The startup is also offering re-targeting services via Google in addition to their own analytics, which analyze and present data (on a per subscriber basis), like what links subscribers are clicking, how they’re sharing and interacting with the content, etc. The goal is, simply put, to try and limit the amount of spam businesses send to their customers, while giving them share-able content and the tools to measure its share-ability. Another result of the startup’s pivot? It’s becoming a paid service, with pricing being dependent on the size of a company’s subscriber list. On the bottom end, the co-founder says, businesses would pay about $250 a month, while larger list customers can pay up to $1K. (More on pricing here.) While some XYDO fans won’t be thrilled with losing its consumer-facing social news platform, the truth is, many entrepreneurs and startups are catching on to the value of creating B2B services. It’s difficult to resist the urge to build for the consumer web, what with the funding available, and the hopes of millions of users, but the B2B and B2B2C spaces, generally have lower barriers for entry, and business models are more defined. As I wrote here, there are lots of B2B companies out there that don’t have millions of users and may not be sexy at first glance, but they have solid, sustainable customer bases, and enough revenue to continue building. XYDO is hoping that by taking a B2B approach, it can ride the growing wave of content marketing and businesses demand for smart solutions to the marketing and content engagement issues — to glory. The XYDO co-founder said that email is just the beginning, next they’ll look to implement additional publishing tools, further extend functionality in social media, likely in the form of designing tools to help businesses automate content publishing in their Facebook feeds, etc. I think it’s a smart move. XYDO wasn’t seeing the kind of user adoption they wanted from their web platform, so they’ve pivoted to focus on bringing their email service to businesses. They’re currently in the process of inking deals with companies that have 3 million+ sized subscriber lists, and with that, they are able to gain a ready-made audience. No more having to fight tooth and nail for one subscriber. For more, check out the startup at home here. What do you think, readers? A smart pivot?
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| IA Ventures Doubles Down On Big Data With A New $105M Fund Posted: 08 Feb 2012 08:54 AM PST  Before big data was a hot investing theme, Roger Ehrenberg was one of the first seed investors to focus almost exclusively on startups using data as a competitive edge. His NYC-based fund, IA Ventures, has backed companies such as Billguard, Coursekit, DataSift, Next Big Sound, Simple, ThinkNear, and Yipit. His first fund, raised in 2010, was a $50 million seed fund. Now, IA Ventures just raised $105 million to double down on data plays in Fund II. The bigger fund will give IA Ventures the ability to make bigger bets, while still sticking to early stage deals. “I think the biggest difference is we now have the firepower to lead seeds, As and also Bs,” says Ehernberg,, “and we can take companies through the growth stage.” Up until now, IA Ventures mostly backed pre-revenue companies somewhere “between a Powerpoint and a prototype,” says Ehrenberg. Those require a lot of hands-on work to help get them to a revenue-producing stage, which IA Ventures will continue to do, but its team can only help so many companies. With Fund II, IA Ventures will try to achieve a more balanced portfolio made up of both seed and later-stage companies already generating revenues. It is expecting to invest in about two dozen companies over the three-year life of the fund. The first investment from Fund II was the Next Big Sound’s recent $6.5 million series A, which IA Ventures led (writing a check for $4 million, it’s biggest ever). Ehrenberg is among a new class of VCs with roots as an angel investor. He personally backed Buddy Media, bit.ly, TweetDeck, Invite Media, Clickable, and Stocktwits. In another life he was an investment banker, but he doesn’t like to talk about that now. He turned his angel investing into a real seed firm, which is now moving up the stack. Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech Ventures, which also just raised a new $55 million fund, is a similar angel-turned-VC, but with a different investing style. In fact, there seems to be a divide between East Coast and West Coast superangels. “There is a huge ideological argument right now at play,” says Ehrenberg. Investors like Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and even Clavier make a lot of small bets—60, 100, or more per fund—hoping a few of them will pay off massively. They know that somewhere in their portfolios could be the next Google or Facebook. The East Coast seed investors are a little bit more cautious (they would say “disciplined”). Ehrenberg models IA Ventures more like a small Union Square Ventures or Foundry Capital—a more concentrated portfolio where the investors use their contacts or domain expertise to help take some of the risk out of the companies. “The optimal point on the risk-return frontier,” says Ehrenberg, “is putting small amounts early, being close, and being in a position to put in more money when there is an opportunity to de-risk as opposed to holding a portfolio of lottery tickets and hoping that one of those lottery tickets looks like Google or Facebook.” His limited partners seem happy with that approach. They know what they are getting and they can invest in a lucrative theme. Although, truth be told, Ehrenberg doesn’t really talk about “big data” that much anymore. “We never use it because it doesn't mean anything,” he admits. Data is not valuable unless you do something with it. It only means something when you drill down to the specifics. IA Ventures likes to invest in companies that create contributory databases, where consumers give their data in return for something more valuable (like TC Disrupt finalist Billguard which gives you fraud protection in return for your credit card billing data); core enabling data technologies, or applications that leverage large data sets (like Simple, the new banking product still in private beta).
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| Live Matrix, The “TV Guide For The Web,” Acquired By OVGuide Posted: 08 Feb 2012 08:53 AM PST  Live Matrix, the TechCrunch Disrupt ’10 finalist that proclaimed to be the “TV Guide for the web,” has been acquired by online video guide OVGuide.com in an all stock deal. As a part of the deal Live Matrix co-founder and CEO Sanjay Reddy will become OVGuide’s new CEO. Although Live Matrix will continue on as a standalone website, both companies will integrate their databases, allowing OVGuide to deliver a unified service covering all upcoming, live and on-demand content. Live Matrix was founded by former SVP of M&A at Gemstar TV Guide, Sanjay Reddy and serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack, also co-founder of The Daily Dot, Bottlenose, StreamGlider and formerly the CEO of Radar Networks. The idea behind the startup was to offer a guide to all live web content. To be clear, that’s not just video, but also audiocasts, auctions, live chats, MMO games and more – anything that you would have to “tune in” to. Users can search the guide, view trending events and RSVP to those they like, while publishers can use Live Matrix widgets on their own site to promote upcoming happenings. The company’s angel investors include Chris Kelly (Facebook), Leonard Kleinrock, Paige Craig (Betterworks), Allen Morgan (Mayfield, Idealab), and Spivack’s own Lucid Ventures. Their equity will now remain with the combined company going forward, which includes both databases, Live Matrix’s 6 patents and its trademarked “What’s When on the Web.” OVGuide, for those unfamiliar, is an older service founded in 2006 by Dale Block. It sees 12.4 million monthly uniques, including 7 million mobile pageviews. The site indexes over 3,600 video sources, including TV shows, movies, sports and viral videos, among other things. Meanwhile, Live Matrix offers over 4 million tracked events across 400+ brands and channels, which works out to about 300,000 events tracked per week. With the Live Matrix acquisition, OVGuide shift its focus, as it will now be able to track the entire life cycle of a video, including when it’s “upcoming,” “live,” and “on-demand.” As new CEO, Reddy succeeds Peter Lee, who will remain on the board and resume his full-time duties as a partner at Baroda Ventures, OVGuide’s primary investor.
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| PowerInbox, The Service That Turns Emails Into Apps, Launches API Posted: 08 Feb 2012 08:00 AM PST  PowerInbox, the email platform that lets you run apps for Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Google+ inside your inbox, is today announcing the launching of its API. With this addition, companies that want to make their own emails interactive can now do so. To kick off the launch, PowerInbox signed up ten partners who used the API to build email apps across multiple verticals including video, shopping, games and more. As a refresher, PowerInbox is service that runs on top of email (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail or Outlook), augmenting the messages sent to you by various services, like Facebook or Twitter, for example. With PowerInbox installed via a browser extension (or Outlook add-in), those emails become interactive. In other words, you don’t have to click through on a link in an email to take a specific action, you can do it right from within the email itself. From your Twitter emails, you can follow, message and @reply users. From Facebook emails you can like and reply to posts. You can also add people to Google+ circles or see how long you have left to grab the newest Groupon. With today’s API launch (beta), companies can add their own interactive elements to the emails they send out, including e-commerce functions, videos, photos, real-time updates within the email’s body, and more. Ten companies have teamed up with PowerInbox, and are announcing their own interactive emails. These include:
PowerInbox is also debuting support for Outlook today (2003, 2007, 2010), as well as browser extensions for Safari and Internet Explorer. Previously, it only supported Chrome, Firefox and Rockmelt. While it may not be as exiting as a Facebook IPO, email is still the most used application for many people. “We spend more than 1.5 trillion minutes in email a year,” says PowerInbox CEO Matt Thazhmon. “This is an incredible amount of time and we wanted to make sure it was time well spent.” Despite email’s ubiquity, it hasn’t turned into a platform. “Email hasn’t really changed in the last 20 years,” Thazhmon says. “I have no doubt that in the future we will all be able to shop, play games, watch movies etc, right in our email.” Early metrics from the service’s first users show that making emails more interactive can have an effect. Roughly 30% of users have followed someone on Twitter, tweeted, DM’d or liked something on Facebook via the platform. Going forward, the company will focus on API improvements, adding more partners, and, in the near-term, on maintenance, tutorials, and launching hackathons and contests. PowerInbox raised an additional $800,000 in funding in October, bringing its total funding to $1.9 million, with both VC and angel backers. The toolkit, API and documentation will be live this morning at Powerinbox.com/learnmore.
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| Stealthy Legal Startup DocRun Raises $1.1M From Resolute.VC, Don Dodge And Others Posted: 08 Feb 2012 07:56 AM PST  A new legal startup is launching to the public soon, hoping to shake up the legal documents space. LA-based DocRun is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding from VC Michael Hirshland’s new fund, Resolute.vc, Google’s Don Dodge, and Kima Ventures. While some details of what DocRun is doing are still unclear, but we know the startup is trying to disrupt the online legal documents and advice space, but by adding quality, personalized documents to the mix as opposed to simply offering form contracts like LLC agreements, rental agreements and more. DocRun wants to provide highly customized, attorney-level, state-specific legal documents at a fraction of what they would cost from a lawyer. At public launch, DocRun will eventually provide hundreds of personalized documents, including everything from prenuptial agreements to operating agreements to employment agreements, all specially tailored to each individual user using an adaptive Q&A engine. The startup is the brainchild of CEO and lawyer Jennifer Reuting, who has actually founded two legal startups previously, InCorp, a registered agent and compliance firm, and MyLLC, and company that helps companies incorporate as businesses. She’s also the author of Limited Liability Companies For Dummies. There are a number of companies who offer form legal documents on the web including LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer. As Reuting explains, the aim of DocRun is to democratize the legal space by not only providing legal documents to consumers, but also to offer tools that can fully customize personal and business documents. The startup is in invite-inly alpha right now but stay tuned.
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| RockYou Cofounder Lance Tokuda Keeps It Old School With New Classmates Competitor SchoolFeed Posted: 08 Feb 2012 07:48 AM PST  Lance Tokuda was one of the masterminds behind viral apps on Facebook back at the end of last decade. He cofounded and led RockYou as its chief executive through the evolution of the Facebook platform, all the while inundating users with hugs, horoscopes, birthday cards and other lightweight social app communications (which some may refer to as “spam”). RockYou ended up finding its business in social advertising and social gaming, and in late 2010 Tokuda stepped down from his CEO role. Now he’s back with a new company on Facebook today, called schoolFeed, that’s trying to connect older users with long-lost high school classmates. Designed as a Facebook canvas app and a standalone site that you use via logging in with your Facebook identity, schoolFeed basically creates a new layer that looks not dissimilar to myYearbook, Tagged and other entertainment-focused social networks that have survived Facebook’s world domination. But It’s going after Classmates.com, which charges a fee, by providing its service for free, and by mining Facebook data to discover missing connections. At this point you might be thinking, “hey wait, isn’t this what people already use Facebook for?” Tokuda’s response is that Facebook has not offered class-based high school search for years. There’s no way within Facebook, currently, to specifically search for class year. Instead, you just see everyone who ever went to the school (albeit you can piece together quite a bit of your old class by seeing who you have friends in common with). Tokuda also says that most older users have relatively few classmate connections on Facebook, based on the research he’s seen. Take a closer look at the app and you can see that there’s a lot more going on than anything Facebook is trying to do. First off, the app has its own news feed, that shows you activity from people that it already knows you went to high school with. And yes there’s a feature to help users plan real-life reunions. It also has a virtual currency system built in, that it uses to reward users for creating engagement — posting status updates, inviting friends and the usual types of incentives like that. The earnings can then be spent on games like Bingo, or on accessing real-life yearbooks. Via a recently introduced feature, one user from each high school can have their yearbook professionally scanned and uploaded in exchange for a bunch of virtual currency. Then, every other user who went to the same school pays using their currency to access each page in the book. From my understanding, one page is free each day but you pay if you want to flip through faster than that. The app does work fairly hard to strike a balance between virality and a quality user experience. For example, you can’t pile up the points by repeating the same actions over and over again. But if you become a serious user you’ll still find yourself blasting out a lot of messages. The site and app launched seven months ago, and so far it has been booming. It has more than 7 million registered users and nearly half a million daily active users, according to Tokuda; AppData meanwhile shows it hitting DAU numbers far higher than that on some days. When I asked Tokuda if he was interested in building a fuller-featured social network, he did say that he’d like to build out more features for young users as well, but that the focus is going to stay around classmates not anything else. The company has also convinced some RockYou investors to go in on it, too. It’s announcing what it calls a “seed” round of $1.75 million led by First Round Capital, with CrossLink Capital, Interwest Partners and SK Telecom participating.
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| LG Takes A Chance With The Oddly-Proportioned Optimus Vu Posted: 08 Feb 2012 07:46 AM PST  After spending the past few quarters in the red, LG recently turned things around with a bit of growth in their once-ailing smartphone division. By focusing half of their 2012 capital expenditures budget on developing smartphones, LG wanted people to know that some big mobile plays were on the horizon. As it turns out, their plans for the year include the newly-leaked Optimus Vu, which isn’t exactly the sort of big we were hoping for. The first thing you notice about the Optimus Vu is its large 5-inch display, followed shortly by the realization that it’s awfully square. LG opted to run with a 4:3 screen aspect ratio this time around for some reason, which has led to a handset design that’s more squat than I’m accustomed to seeing. Now LG isn’t the first to toy with this sort of form factor. Fellow Korean manufacturer Pantech introduced the blocky-looking Pocket late last year, but to see a major player run with it is a surprise. Meanwhile, someone has reportedly managed snap a shot of Optimus Vu in the wild (above) and with it comes a solid spec sheet. If true, the OV sports a dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm chipset, 1GB RAM, NFC support, and an 8-megapixel camera. Sadly, there’s no Ice Cream Sandwich to be found here — the Optimus Vu is all about Gingerbread. It’s easy to take potshots at the Optimus Vu — comment reels across the web (or at least the part of the web that cares about phones) are full of people decrying the device as a Galaxy Note knockoff. The comparison may be harsh, but in fairness, LG could do worse than to try to follow Samsung’s example here. The Galaxy Note enjoys substantial popularity in the international market, and if the rumors of the Optimus Vu having a stylus pan out, the phablet market may soon grow a bit more crowded. Potential stylus inclusion aside, LG’s decision to go with a 4:3 display could come back to bite them when it comes time for people to decide on a new phone. Smartphones have historically grown taller instead of just wider, and while LG certainly has the novelty factor going with the Optimus Vu, whether or not that will translate into unit sales is still up in the air.
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| Amazon & Viacom Announce Streaming Video Deal Posted: 08 Feb 2012 07:46 AM PST  Proving the rumors right, Amazon today announced a video deal with Viacom, Inc. which will allow Amazon Prime members to instantly stream TV shows from MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon, TV Land, Spike, VH1, BET, CMT and Logo. The deal increases the total number of Prime Instant Videos to more than 15,000, the company reports. In December, there were 13,000 movies and TV shows available, so it’s a moderate increase in terms of quantity, but a big step in terms of Amazon becoming a more viable Netflix competitor. Since the launch of Prime Instant Videos last February, Amazon has signed licensing deals with CBS, Fox Broadcasting, PBS, NBCUniversal, Sony, Warner Bros, Disney-ABC Television, ViacomMedia Networks and others. Over the course of the past 12 months, the service has gone from 5,000 videos to now 15,000. The videos can be played on over 300 different devices, including of course, the new Kindle Fire tablet, as well as on Macs and PCs. As with Netflix, Amazon’s videos are streamed commercial-free to its paying customers. The Amazon Prime service which provides this access currently costs $79/year, and also offers unlimited two-day shipping on millions of Amazon products and Kindle books that can be borrowed for free with no due dates. The new Viacom titles will roll out over the next several months and include MTV shows like The Hills, Jersey Shore, The Hard Times of RJ Berger, several seasons of The Real World, and Comedy Central shows such as Chappelle’s Show and The Sarah Silverman Program. For kids, Amazon brings Nickelodeon episodes of iCarly, Dora the Explorer, SpongeBob SquarePants, Yo Gabba Gabba, along with TV Land favorite, Hot in Cleveland. Although Netflix is currently the market leader in streaming video, both Amazon, and others, including yesterday’s Verizon/Redbox venture as well as whatever Apple’s up to (it’s probably not a hobby, despite what Apple says), are proving to be new challengers in the space. But Netflix isn’t relying on its streaming library alone these days – it’s now funding original programming, too. Its first scripted series called Lilyhammer debuted on Monday, and is now available to watch online. Original, scripted content represents a start of an entirely new vertical for the company, one that doesn’t rely on streaming deals like this to make it worth paying for. Amazon will eventually have to do the same to continue to compete in the space, let alone come out on top.
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| The Curious Vaporization Of Jesta Labs, A $15 Million Startup Incubator Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:45 AM PST  Here’s a puzzler. Back in September 2011, less than 6 months ago, Jesta Digital loudly committed $15 million to establish Jesta Labs, a New York-based mobile services startup incubator. Fast forward to today, and the incubator has vanished from the face of the planet. Their website has been taken down, and we hear pretty much everyone who had anything to do with Jesta Labs has moved on. For the record, I’m not the only one who caught on to the incubator’s curious disappearance – see Ben Yoskovitz’s report (Next Montreal). Here’s the full account of what we’ve pieced together. Jesta Digital, which owns notorious mobile ringtones, games and apps provider Jamba / Jamster, used to be Fox Mobile Group when it was still part of News Corp (which acquired Jamba back in 2006 and combined it with its Fox Mobile Entertainment assets). Jesta Group took the division off News Corp’s hands for an undisclosed sum in late 2010. Still with me? Jesta Digital also operates Bitbop, an interesting wireless subscription service for TV and movies delivered on-demand to smartphone, in case that brand is more familiar to you. Update: PaidContent recently reported that the future of Bitbop is also uncertain. Anyway. When the company launched Jesta Labs, they said it would become “an independent business unit dedicated to the entrepreneurial development and growth of new direct-to-consumer products for the web, mobile and social spaces”. From the release, which was widely picked up:
Sounded good, and the first startup to come out of Jesta Labs was actually rather nice: Gush let people store an infinite amount of photos on a ‘hard disk in the cloud’. I used Gush, and liked it. But, 5 months after its debut, Jesta Labs is no more. A source familiar with the situation asserts that the division is going to kill every product that was being developed under its wings (3 according to Next Montreal’s report), and that Jesta Digital simply “lost interest in the whole incubator thing”. My source tells me there’s no one left working on Gush anymore, though the service is still live, and that Jesta’s NYC offices are now basically empty. Most of the people that were working on Gush have moved on to mobile payments company ISIS, I gather. Judging by his LinkedIn profile, former Jesta Labs managing director Joe Bilman has also moved on from the incubator – he’s now CEO of gogofire, which has a mission statement that sounds suspiciously similar to that of Jesta Labs. And thus, quietly, a $15 million incubator vanishes less than half a year after its debut, almost without a trace. If there’s anyone reading this that knows more about this, and would like to share it – on or off the record – it would be great if you could let us know what happened.
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| Google Ventures-Backed Nettle Wants To Make Watching Movies Social With MovieGoer Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:40 AM PST  Nettle, a startup that has raised funding from Google Ventures, 500 Startups and others, is looking to make the act of going to the movies a more social experience. With the company’s free iOS app, MovieGoer, the startup wants to make the moviegoing experience more interactive. The Moviegoer app allows you to view trailers, descriptions of the latest movies out in theaters and critics’ reviews. You can also see what movies are showing nearby your locations. Via the app, you can follow specific movies, sign in with Facebook and Twitter to see which movies your friends are going to, and comment on movies after viewing. The app also includes a feature called MovieGoer Circle, which allows you to create a close network of friends and family with whom you share all of your moviegoing details. The thought behind this particular part of the app is that you may only value the recommendations of your closest contacts when it comes to choosing and rating movies. As the startup explains, the app wants to create a set of trusted influencers for your moviegoing experience. Basically, the app aims to be a one stop shop for the moviegoing experience. Not only does MovieGoer include showtimes for movies, but also highlights those showtimes that your MovieGoer Circle are going to. And users can record brief 15-second video reviews using their iPhone. Co-founder Brian Dear explains that he believes the concept of “check-in” doesn’t work that well for movies because when you arrive at a theatre, usually the movie is about to start, so it doesn’t do much good to tell friends you are there if you expect them to then meet you. What makes more sense in the MovieGoer world is declaring intent, he explains, by saying you want to “go” to a movie hours or days in advance, and recording relevant information (reviews, etc) afterwards. Other companies playing in the space include Warner Bros.-owned Flixster.
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| Akamai Acquires Website Performance Company Blaze Software Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:12 AM PST  After scooping up rival Cotendo for $268 million recently, content delivery and web services giant Akamai is making another acquisition today—Blaze Software. Blaze’s technology helps accelerate speed of Websites, and optimizes load times while cutting bandwidth costs. Financial details of the dealn were not disclosed except that it was an all-cash transaction. As Akamai explains, there are more performance bottlenecks for website load and speed times, as richer web applications and mobile web sites become more popular. Blaze’s cloud-based service automatically optimizes the code on a web page during the delivery process to ensure faster transmission of content and a faster rendering of the page, whether served to a PC, tablet or smartphone. “As businesses provide rich, interactive web experiences online and across devices, it is vital that end users receive a consistently high-performing site,” said Rick McConnell, executive vice president of Products and Development, Akamai in a statement “We believe Blaze has developed a powerful solution for frontend optimization, and that its cloud-based services approach is synergistic with Akamai’s offerings. The team at Blaze will be an important addition to our focus on site acceleration. Our goal continues to be providing customers with the most comprehensive set of technologies to optimize all aspects of their site performance.” Akamai plans to integrate the technology into its global cloud platform to help its enterprise customer provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere. the company was founded in 2010 and is based on Ottawa, Canada.
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| Boxee Stands With The CEA Against Cable Companies, Courts The FCC Chairman To Stop Proposed Ruling Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:02 AM PST  Anti-consumer legislation SOPA and PIPA might be all but dead, but there isn’t time to rest. There is a seemingly never-ending flow of proposed legislation, statutes and bills queued up, ready to bust down doors and storm living rooms. One of the latest involves the forced transition from analog to digital cable — something I wrote about back in 2008. If the FCC caves to massive lobbying from the cable companies, the days of unencrypted cable stations in the US will be numbered. Cable subscribers would be required to have a cable box (which will likely cost money) or CableCard-compatible box to receive even local network stations. Boxee just recently started taking an active role in this fight. The Boxee Box has always been uniquely positioned as a legitimate cable alternative, but it wasn’t until Boxee Live TV launched last month that the company has gone against cable companies face-to-face. But if this proposal passes, it will stifle products not only from Boxee, but also products from El Gato, Silicon Dust and others — and let’s not forget about the likely millions of cable TVs currently enjoying living a box-less life. Right now most cable providers are required by a 1996 FCC rule to provide a basic set of unencrypted stations. These are most often just local broadcast stations also available through an OTA tuner (think ABC, PBS, and a random religious station). Under the current rules, cable companies are not allowed to encrypt these stations, therefore allowing them to work with any TV, tuner, or as the FCC calls them, navigation devices like the Boxee Live TV. As cable providers started transitioning to a more efficient digital signal, these channels remained, able to work with older TVs most often found in guest bedrooms, garages and the like. But soon even those stations might go dark. This process started several years back when Cablevision became the first provider to petition the FCC for a waiver (pdf alert) allowing the provider to completely ditch analog channels in some markets. The FCC granted the request, which caused several other providers to file similar petitions. But this isn’t as nefarious as it sounds. Analog cable systems are notoriously inefficient. Cablevision went on to launch the US’s first residential 100mbps service way back in 2009. This was partly possible because the company freed space by using an all-digital TV transmission. At the time Verizon’s FiOS topped out at 50mbps, and as former TechCrunch writer Nicholas Deleon found out, the service lived up to its expectations. Plus it was only $100 a month. In 2009. Comcast pointed out in 2009 that the provider can fit 10-15 digital stations or 2-3 HD stations onto a single analog transmission. Per AllVid’s press release citing Comcast’s Comments on the FCC’s docket number 11-169, Comcast went on to respond to the FCC in November 2011 that the digital transition goal set by Congress was achieved. So if the leak was fixed, why completely shut off the water now? The National Cable & Telecommunications Association argues it’s time to move forward. Digital boxes allows cable companies to remotely troubleshoot problems therefore reducing the amount of trucks needed to respond to service calls. You know, it’s better for the Earth. Each time a cable truck is saved from rolling out to a subscriber’s house, Al Gore plants a tree — or something like that. The NCTA goes on to state in its comments to the FCC that 77% of cable subscribers are already on a digital service, more on the larger providers: it’s 90% for Comcast, 95% for Cablevision, and 74% for TWC. The trade association insists that it’s time for the FCC to drop outdated rules and allow for a level playing field. Netflix has more subscribers than any cable provider, it states. As “the marketplace is robustly competitive and video services are being delivered over a range of different platforms to a wide array of different devices” a level playing field is warranted. Yes, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association says cable providers need the FCC’s to help stop people from cutting the cord. Comcast started implementing a mostly digital line-up in my area in 2008. I was furious. I was going to lose service on several TVs. Now, my TV in my garage and office sit unused (first world problem, I know) because I’m not going to pay the $3 a month for additional boxes. The march to 100% digital will raise rates and alienate millions, I said. Now, Comcast and others are marching up the FCC stairs again, fueled by nearly endless lobbying money. Boxee points out in their blog post that cable companies spent more the $50 million on lobbying. That’s $50 million, that rather than improving their service, was spent on courting the FCC and legislators into redefining consumer friendly statutes. Boxee doesn’t have that kind of cash. They instead received an audience with the FCC Chairman and staff and presented their argument that modifying the existing rules will slow innovation, harm start-ups and hurt consumers by raising rates. But moreover, the move to an all-digital service can be achieved in different means. The CEA agrees. The Consumer Electronic Association indicated that the proposed ruling should not be enacted by itself. There are other, more pressing matters that the FCC must address alongside this issue. Granting cable providers a sweeping ruling does not solve the underlining issues of lack of competition, “downloadable security”, and allowing the private sector to enact their solutions (AllVid). “If [the FCC] is going to continue with fixes that are only "interim," it should proceed, as well, with a true solution,” says the CEA at the end of its comments on the matter. The AllVid Tech Company Alliance, a group of industry leaders founded to advance the FCC’s proposed AllVid standard, also oppose the ruling. The alliance states that the FCC should continue issuing waivers on a case-by-case basis. Anything less would stifle competition and force more consumers to rely on “proprietary leased devices.” Boxee is winning. Consumers are winning. Cable companies are starting to feel the heat from people tired of paying for hundreds of stations but only watching a few. Cable companies need to do what ever they can to lock consumers in, but they’re driving them away at a faster rate. Prices constantly rise without any noticeable improvement in service. Consumers deserve choices. Sure, they have a choice whether to subscribe to a given cable company, but they should also have a choice to use 3rd party hardware and boxes. In 1996 Congress entrusted the FCC with the task to adopt regulations that would ensure commercial availability of navigation devices such as set top boxes. As Boxee, the CEA, and AllVid point out in their FCC comments, caving to the cable companies would be in direct violation of these instructions.The FCC is supposed to look out for the lowly consumer, not the mighty cable company. Hopefully they’ll keep this in mind as Comcast and others wine and dine Washington DC.
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| Yep, People Research Movies On Their Phones — Especially On Apps Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:01 AM PST  Adding to the stream of reports about how people do more and more on their mobile devices, mobile ad network Greystripe just released the results of a survey about the movie research process. The network says it recruited participants through, yes, a mobile ad in its network, ultimately surveying 248 smartphone users (including iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android) and 298 iPad users in November of 2011. It found that those smartphone and iPad owners are indeed movie goers, with 39 percent of smartphone respondents and 41 percent of iPad respondents watching movies more than four times a year. And they’re using their gadgets to decide what and when to watch, with 52 percent of smartphone users and 27 percent of iPad users who see movies in theaters saying that they searched for listings or times on their devices. In both categories, apps were used more often than the mobile web for research. The breakdown was 30 percent apps vs. 23 percent web on smartphones, and it was 17 percent vs. 10 percent on iPads. Of course, the real message of this survey is the fact that Greystripe (which was acquired by ValueClick last year) wants movie studios to spend their ad dollars in its network, so there were some ad-specific questions, too. It found that more than 60 percent of respondents in both categories hear about movies from ads, and that 52 percent of smartphone users and 44 percent of iPad users make decisions on what to see based on those ads — so they’re not quite as influential as friends’ recommendations, but they’re more important than reviews or the movie’s cast. You can download a PDF of the report here.
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| Crunchie-Winner Fotopedia Launches New App With World Bank Posted: 08 Feb 2012 06:00 AM PST  Just a week after winning Best Tablet Application at the Crunchies, Fotopedia is launching its latest iPad and iPhone app. The app lives up to its title Women of the World, showcasing photos of women in more than 75 countries. It was developed in partnership with the World Bank. All of Fotopedia’s apps employ a similar design, creating a beautiful, color-rich interface for browsing high-quality photos from around the world. This isn’t the first time Fotopedia has partnered with an international organization — its first app, Heritage, was developed with UNESCO and displays photos from UNESCO World Heritage sites. In this case, founder Jean-Marie Hullot (an Apple veteran who was also the CTO at Steve Jobs’ company NeXT) said the goal was to promote gender equality, in particular the World Bank’s Think Equal campaign, while packaging the information in a compelling way. To do that, Hullot settled on the photographs of Olivier Martel, which are paired with text about the situation of women in different countries (written by Fotopedia with data from the World Bank and elsewhere), as well as more general information from Wikipedia. The Women of the World app also reflects Fotopedia’s new direction. Its initial apps were essentially photo libraries with enormous amounts of content. Now, it’s taking a more magazine-style approach — the photo library is still there, but each week the app highlights different pieces of content. That’s led to a dramatic increase in engagement, Hullot says — Fotopedia now says it’s seeing 200,000 visits a day, up 400 percent from the previous quarter. (The company says its apps have been downloaded 7.8 million times.) Hullot says he’s also moving toward an advertising-supported, free model, although some of the older apps still cost money. You can download Women of the World here.
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| Apple Restores Qihoo 360 Mobile Apps In The App Store Posted: 08 Feb 2012 05:31 AM PST  On Saturday, February 4, something strange happened to Qihoo 360, a security software company. Their apps, at least the ones in the Apple App Store, were missing. After reaching out to Apple, the company learned that Apple had removed their apps based on “unusual user rating activities by unknown sources on certain Qihoo 360 applications.” There was no further explanation. However, today Apple has reinstated Qihoo 360′s iOS apps, without asking the company to modify any of them. Seems fishy, right? Bloomberg reports that these “unusual user rating activities” included both negative and positive comments towards the company, but didn’t have any further information on the nature of these ratings. In the interim, Qihoo fell 6.1 percent on the NYSE on February 6 for a share price of $17.89, the company’s lowest share price since January 4. Luckily, analysts speaking with Bloomberg estimate that only about five percent of the company’s user base are Apple product owners.
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| Nine Months From Launch, Chartboost’s Mobile Ad Marketplace Reaches 1 Billion Impressions Posted: 08 Feb 2012 04:58 AM PST  Mobile advertising took off in 2011, as tablets went mainstream and it seemed as if half of the world woke out of a daze to find they were holding some sort of Apple device. Meanwhile, advertisers and developers are increasingly relying on mobile and in-app advertising to boost revenues as consumers become more comfortable with being served ads while on the go. The mobile app community needs to monetize via ads, which is why San Francisco-based startup, Chartboost, launched a direct-deals advertising marketplace for mobile gaming in May of last year. For those unfamiliar, Chartboost’s mission is to enable mobile app developers to use cross-promotion to increase the size of their user base (and in turn, revenues). Created by former Tapulous employees (Tapulous was acquired by Disney in 2010), Maria Alegre and Sean Fannan, the marketplace differs from traditional mobile ad networks in that game publishers have the ability to construct direct deals amongst themselves, allowing them to bypass the hefty price of revenue-shares with ad networks. As Sarah wrote last month, Chartboost offers a freemium model, meaning that “the ad-server technology is free when used for direct deals or internal cross-promotion, but the opt-in ad network offers revenue sharing with publishers.” Chartboost’s play has represented big potential for mobile game app developers, filling a serious need with its direct deals marketplace model (by providing an alternative to mediating deals through ad networks with technology and an SDK), enabling developers to easily fill unused spots with ads when the need arises. Not to mention the most disruptive part: It’s free and claims to give developers a 50 percent boost in revenues. This has led to fast growth for the young startup, as its network already spans more than one thousand iOS and Android apps, leading Chartboost to begin rolling out its network in Asia last month, with plans to pursue further international expansion in both Europe and Latin America over the course of the year. Since its launch in May of last year, just nine months ago, the startup announced yesterday that it has served up more than one billion impressions. According to the Chartboost team, the marketplace’s traffic has seen a jump in traffic over the last few months, contributing the bulk of its one billion impressions. The company is off to a promising start, signing a deal with TinyCo in November, bringing its marketplace to Android in December, and has forged partnerships with Nexon, Com2US, and Devsisters. Gaming has become a global market, and Chartboost is well-served by expanding its reach into hot, developing markets, allowing its developers to buy and sell traffic on an international playing field (in localized versions of the marketplace), while cutting user acquisition expenses. That being said, it’s a competitive and bustling gaming ad market out there, with some big, well-established players in the international gaming space looking to gobble up more marketshare. With bright prospects, it will be interesting to see if it becomes an acquisition target. Chartboost raised $2 million in Series A financing in October from Translink Capital, SKTVC and XG Venture, though the team said it was already profitable in August. For more on Chartboost’s direct-deals mobile ad marketplace, check ‘em out at home here.
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| Blip COO: “We Essentially Doubled Revenue In 2011″ Posted: 08 Feb 2012 04:45 AM PST  Blip.tv is going through some changes, with founder Mike Hudack gone and a search for a new CEO still ongoing. But the company raised a $6 million C round from its two main investors in December, and now just added to that with another $6 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. There is also a new logo, and the company is now called just Blip. So how is the indie Web video distribution service doing? “We essentially doubled revenue in 2011,” reports COO Steve Brookstein. He tells me that revenues in 2011 were $10 million, and the company expects to nearly double again this year, although profitability is still being pushed off until 2013. But the new cash should tide it over until then. With 54 employees, Blip is a decent-sized startup with a long history on the New York scene. Originally, it appealed to independent Web video producers as an upload-once, distribute everywhere platform. Last year it started to try to become more of a destination site promoting its biggest stars, some of with whom it signed distribution deals. Blip claims 13 million monthly unique viewers across its network of embedded players,and about 70 million “monetizable” views (videos it can sell ads against). Brookstein says the CEO search is going well, and Blip is working on redesigning its dashboard for Web video producers to give them better analytics. But it really all comes down to serving the best Web video producers. “We will work with top producers to build audience and give them additional financial incentives,” he hints, without revealing any more details.
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| Sprint Sold 1.8 Million iPhones Last Quarter, 40 Percent To New Customers Posted: 08 Feb 2012 04:21 AM PST  Sprint Nextel this morning released its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2011 as well as the full-year results. The company reported a net loss of $1.3 billion for the quarter, and $2.9 billion for the whole of 2011. The company reported total net subscriber additions of 1.6 million during the quarter, the best quarterly result in six years and bringing total subscribers to the highest level in Sprint's history. Now serving roughly 55 million customers, the company said it is seeing “strong iPhone sales”, selling 1.8 million of the popular smartphone in Q4, of which 40 percent was to new customers. However, the iPhone launch also had a negative impact on its balance sheet, due to increased equipment net subsidies and sales expenses, the company said. From the press release:
Based on internal estimates, Sprint Nextel says the combined impact of iPhone and Network Vision costs reduced fourth quarter Adjusted OIBDA of $842 million by approximately $684 million. In case you were wondering: OIBDA is operating income (or loss) before depreciation and amortization. Adjusted OIBDA excludes severance, exit costs, and other special items.
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| Social Marketing Platform Extole Raises $10 Million Posted: 08 Feb 2012 04:00 AM PST  Extole, a startup which offers a suite of social media marketing has raised $10 million in Series C round funding, led by Shasta Ventures with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, and Trident Capital. This brings the company's total financing to $22 million. Extole's technology makes it easy for brands to power social referral programs, social promotions, social testimonials, and social analytics. Products such as Refer-A-Friend and SocialBuilder are designed to enable brands to leverage referral marketing services and viral Facebook sweepstakes apps to increase sales and brand awareness in a measurable way, such as through likes, recommendations and more. For example, Refer-A-Friend rewards advocates for promoting a brand to their friends. Customers include Shutterfly, Redbox, Zazzle, AAA, Kate Spade, and SkyMall. Extole was founded by Brad Klaus, former chief exec of Syndero and VP of Sales at Qualys before that. Last year, revenue grew 400 percent, and is on track for record revenue in 2012. The company will use the new funding to fuel growth, scale operations, and accelerate product and platform investments.
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