The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Estimates Point To 3 Million Nooks Color Sold
- Message Bus: The Start Project’s First Graduate Launches, Pulls In A Cool $3 Million
- Hotmail Adds LivingSocial, Posterous, And More To Active Views Platform
- Pick Or Skip Is Chatroulette, With Pants
- Mobile Firefox Skips Flash In Favor Of HTML5
- Google Commerce Gets Updated With Instant Search, In-Store Availability, Recommendations And More
- Kickstarter: The Cosmonaut Stylus Treats Tablets Like Whiteboards, Not Paper (and that’s awesome)
- Benchmark Capital’s Stand: We Will Never Do a Seed or Late Stage Fund
- Behold The World’s Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoors: 40 Gigapixels Of Awesome
- Inspiring: Kik Founder Donates $1M To Kickstart University of Waterloo Seed Fund
- These Robot Quadrocopter Jugglers Perform For Your Amusement… For Now
- Apperian Raises $9.5M For Enterprise Mobile App Deployment Platform
- Cisco Buys Cloud Automation And Management Software Company newScale
- Glassdoor Puts Numbers on Our Schizophrenic Job Market
- Limos.com Scores $10 Million For Online Limo And Car Services Marketplace
- Cheapflights Invests In Travel Meta-Search Site Momondo
- GE Buys Electrical Engineering Company Converteam For Up To $3.7 Billion
- Will Amazon Drive Music Lockers Like MP3Tunes And mSpot Beyond Oblivion?
- Mark Cuban And Kevin O’Leary Invest In Online Toy Rental Service Toygaroo
- StockTwits Continues To Expand, Steals VP David Putnam From Yahoo Finance
- Acer Releases Dual-Screen Iconia “Touchbook”
- Is This The Greatest VC Pitch Prank Ever Pulled?
- Amazon Cloud Player Doesn’t Work On iOS — But It’s Not A Flash Issue
- Amazon Beats Apple And Google To Cloud-Based Music Storage/Streaming
- PrepMe’s Coursification Offers A Personalized Online Learning Platform
| Estimates Point To 3 Million Nooks Color Sold Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:12 AM PDT
Digitimes “sources” are stating that 3 million Nooks Color have rolled off the assembly line and into stores over the past year, giving the Nook Color firmly at 50% of the “iPad-like” tablet market. They estimated 600,000-700,000 sales per month in January and February during the post-holiday gift card redemption season.        
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| Message Bus: The Start Project’s First Graduate Launches, Pulls In A Cool $3 Million Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:10 AM PDT
Not long after The Start Project’s launch, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, and former Google exec and angel investor Chris Sacca agreed to act as advisors to the incubator’s companies, both before and after launch. At the time, some likely asked, “does Silicon Valley really need another incubator?” Fair enough, but with such an impressive cast of investors and entrepreneurs surrounding the project, I’ve been excited to see what kind of businesses it would produce and what digital problems it would choose to address. Today, for better or worse, Message Bus becomes our first look into what the group has been up to over the last year: thinking about email delivery, open APIs, and infrastructure applications. Like so many other startups before it, Message Bus is aiming to tackle the age-old problem of how to make our email systems easier and, at the same time, more robust. So, Message Bus bifurcates this challenging task into two parts: First and foremost, maintaining and administering email systems no longer makes sense for most companies, so the startup wants you to be able to send an email via a simple API easily and reliably — by providing a scalable engine that ensures the highest deliverability of email. Second is to “focus on an agnostic messaging architecture at the plumbing level, Twitter's road not taken”, says Narendra in a blog post on the company’s website. Thanks to virtual servers, open APIs, and the cloud, deploying applications no longer involves assembling the entire chain, from the top down to the physical hardware. The old form of infrastructure deployment is no longer a requirement, as applications can be created on top of a host of infrastructure services that act like applications themselves. As such, Message Bus pegs itself as an “infrastructure apps company” that is targeting the many businesses that no longer need to build up an entire stack to service their products. Its infrastructure applications will offer a suite of messaging utilities, beginning with email, in an effort to open up the massive data clouds behind every messaging system to allow companies greater insight into the data and analytics behind their applications and businesses. Message Bus is also announcing today that it has completed a $3 million series A funding round, led by early-stage investors, True Ventures. True Ventures joins The Start Project’s seed partner Polaris Ventures, which seeded Message Bus with $275K during incubation, as well as a range of individual investors and advisors. The Message Bus team will be led by former CNET VP and The Start Project co-founder Nick Wilder, who will be acting as CEO, Narendra Rocherolle as President, and co-founder and director of operations at Twitter, Jeremy LaTrasse, as CTO. The startup enters a space occupied by services like Dyn, SendGrid, StrongMail, and Amazon SES, but, again, with a veteran management team and formidable support staff, I’m looking forward to poking around the utility a bit more and seeing how its put into action. For more on The Start Project’s inaugural graduate, check out the startup’s website here and Narendra’s blog post here.        
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| Hotmail Adds LivingSocial, Posterous, And More To Active Views Platform Posted: 29 Mar 2011 09:09 AM PDT
Hotmail’s first iteration of Active Views involves linked content — Dharmesh Mehta, director of Windows Live, says that 90% of email contains a link to an external service like YouTube, Flickr, or LinkedIn. So when Hotmail sees that there’s a link to a YouTube video, it will automatically embed the video so that you don’t have to actually follow the link (Hotmail isn’t the only service to do this). Mehta says that this has been very effective — while only 10% of users click on a normal link to a video, 25% will click on an embedded version. Hotmail’s more unique feature, and the one related to today’s announcement, is the second type of Active View, which launched in December. Microsoft has allowed a handful of select partners to offer dynamically updating emails, which will always present fresh content, even if the recipient doesn’t open it for days or weeks after receiving it. The feature first launched with a handful of partners including Netflix, Orbitz, and LinkedIn, and today’s launch includes LivingSocial and Posterous. Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal showed me a demo of their integration, and it was pretty slick: every time someone submits a new post to Posterous, that post gets distributed via email to their subscribers. Before now that email would omit comments — you’d have to click through the post to see if there was any discussion. But using Active Views, Posterous can display the most current comment threads as soon as you open the email, and you can even submit a comment directly from your inbox. As for the earlier integrations with Orbitz and LinkedIn, Mehta says that partners are learning that it’s best not to simply try to recreate their websites in the inbox, but to rather hone in on the functions people will be most likely to want. In other words, they’re still figuring out what works. Of course, these dynamically updating emails are still only available to select partners, which was one of my original critiques of the product. Mehta says this is for security reasons (each partner is vetted, has to be white-listed, etc), but says that ultimately he hopes that Active Views will be integrated into other email providers, and that it will be available more broadly to senders.
       
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| Pick Or Skip Is Chatroulette, With Pants Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:55 AM PDT
For the small percentage of our readers who do not enjoy a random penis sighting, comes Pick or Skip, a cleaned-up version of Chatroulette. The idea behind the new site was to build a safe and more structured experience on top of the random connection/conversation aspect that made Chatroulette such a craze last year. To safeguard from unsightly sightings, Pick or Skip enforces email validation and the ability to report abuse. These reports are reviewed and could result in ‘naughty’ users being barred from the service completely. The penis-free environment will surely be seen favorably by most, but Pick or Skip has a couple of more features that boost engagement. For example, users are able to enter language-centric versions of the site, specifically, English, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. In that sense, it’s much more reminiscent of startups like Tinychat. Then, Pick or Skip also boasts ‘channels’ in which users can attempt to have random conversations in. These include: Dating, Finance, Technology, Friendship and Sports. Finally, random conversations can become meaningful relationships courtesy of ‘Contacts’ functionality. Users can add other users they randomly ended up talking with, or import contacts from their Gmail and Hotmail and other popular email services.
       
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| Mobile Firefox Skips Flash In Favor Of HTML5 Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:19 AM PDT
A week after launching the official release of Firefox 4, Mozilla is following up today with Mobile Firefox for Android and Maemo phones (for all twelve of you Maemo fans out there). For Android, the browser is now available on the Android Market,. The Android browser fairly rocks. It almost makes me want to switch to Android. The mobile browser syncs all of your bookmarks, browsing history, passwords, and even open tabs with your Firefox browser on your desktop. So you can pick up browsing where you left off when you leave your desk. This syncing is huge. The browser won’t be availabl for the iPhoen anytime soon because of restrictions Apple places on browsing apps—for one thing, it doesn’t use Webkit. (But Mozilla does offer an iPhone app that syncs mobile Safari with your Firefox desktop browser). One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness. The focus right now is on HTML5 and CSS. It is amazing some of the 3D effects, animations, video, and other in-browser graphics you can now get with HTML5. Check out some of the demos here after you download Firefox to your phone. Some other features I really like in the browser is the way it handles tabbed browsing, its snapping zoom, and the Awesome Screen. Your tabs are always available in a thin column on the left which can be accessed with a simple swipe. If you are on a webpage that is not optimized for a mobile device, you can snap the zoom with a double tap to align with a column or box on the page and then scroll up and down normally. The Awesome Screen is the mobile version of the Awesome Bar on FireFox desktop. As you type, it makes suggestions based on your previous browsing history, bookmarks, and open tabs.        
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| Google Commerce Gets Updated With Instant Search, In-Store Availability, Recommendations And More Posted: 29 Mar 2011 08:01 AM PDT
The first two versions of Google Commerce offered a variety of features that are optimized for retail and product search, such as parametric search, sorting of results, spell checker, stemming, a merchandising dashboard, query autocompletion and more. Google even dropped the starting price of Commerce last year, to $25,000 per year for 3 million searches and 50,000 items indexed. Google’s new version of Commerce Search has been updated with a few more compelling features including instant search, local product availability, search recommendations and more. Google introduced Instant Search last Fall, which enables results to dynamically change as you type. Google has added this feature to Google Commerce search, and will return product results within search with every keystroke from the search bar.
Enhanced merchandising tools allow retailers to create product promotions that display in banners alongside related search queries, and to set query-based landing pages (for example, when a visitor types [shoes], they're directed to a "shoe" page). And Google has made Commerce Search mobile friendly, so retailers can easily incorporate search into mobile sites. Google has added a number of well-known retailers to the Commerce Search platform over the past year, including Forever21, General Nutrition Company (GNC) and L'Occitane. Google faces competition from Omniture, IBM, Endeca and others.         
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| Kickstarter: The Cosmonaut Stylus Treats Tablets Like Whiteboards, Not Paper (and that’s awesome) Posted: 29 Mar 2011 07:58 AM PDT
Tablet users should understand the benefit here. Writing on an iPad isn’t like writing on paper. It’s different and as the embedded Kickstarter video explains, the experience is more like using a white board and so this stylus was designed with that in mind. The kicker (get it? because it’s on Kickstarter? nvm) is that this project doesn’t have multiple tiers of funding. Pledge what you want. There’s only 3000 funding slots open and pledges start at just a $1. Clever.        
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| Benchmark Capital’s Stand: We Will Never Do a Seed or Late Stage Fund Posted: 29 Mar 2011 07:38 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: This is part two in an in-depth series exploring the ramifications of the explosion of late stage capital being raised by the Valley’s elite venture firms. For part one, go here. In the mid-2000s when nearly every top venture capital firm was expanding to India and China, Benchmark Capital did not share its peers’ worldly ambitions. In fact, while the firm retained its Israel fund (for now?), it spun off the top performing UK fund Balderton Capital and retrained its focus firmly on the US. Earlier this year, when early stage investors were losing deals at the hands of the super angels and firm-after-firm launched aggressive seed investing programs, Benchmark Capital did not. It refused to compete with the Ron Conways and Mike Maples of the world; it would wait its turn and invest later. And now – as Benchmark’s early stage peers are raising $1 billion growth funds and throwing huge sums of money at established companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon – once again, Benchmark Capital is refusing to follow suit. It quietly closed its new fund in January. There was no press release, and it was for the exact same amount of money as the last: $425 million. “We are making a very conscious bet here,” said general partner Bill Gurley in an exclusive sit-down interview with TechCrunch. “Where we’ve been has played a big role in who we are today. What we took away from the past is what it is we do well, and that’s classic early stage investing, taking board seats and adding value to each company on a high-service level. Those other things– late stage, seed stage, cleantech, international– all distract from that.” The kind of masters-of-the-universe swagger documented by Randall Stross in his bubble era book about Benchmark? Never again, says Gurley. Adds general partner Matt Cohler, “Our aim is to be the entrepreneur’s first phone call. That doesn’t scale.” This is hardly the first time a top Sand Hill Road firm has uttered these sentiments. Everyone said them back in 2002 or so, when nearly every $1 billion fund was “right-sized,” management fees were returned to investors and general partners sheepishly admitted that the venture business was a boutique industry that just doesn’t scale. The difference is that Gurley and Cohler are still saying it at a time when many of their peers seem to have swung back to we-can-do-it-all extremes. Sure, plenty of venture funds haven’t raised a mega-late stage fund. But that’s because most of them can’t. Benchmark is one of the handful of firms that could raise as much cash as it wants, but it is stubbornly refusing to deviate from classic, board-seat-taking, apprentice-style, we-don’t-have-a-million-associates-we-just-have-general-partners style of venture capital. Did Benchmark invest in Facebook? Nope. And unlike competitors, they’ve moved on. Sure, some argue they pay up on sky-high valuations like the rest of the Valley, particularly for companies like Twitter and Quora. But for Benchmark, “paying up” is more like paying a valuation in the hundreds of millions, not tens of billions. What’s the real value of investing in Facebook at a heady $30 billion valuation? It probably won’t lose money, but it’s hard to argue it’ll yield a venture-style return. (That term is thrown around a lot these days. For the record, Benchmark considers a venture-style return to be ten times invested capital.) That means there are two benefits: Marketing and access to the greater Facebook network. When Benchmark missed the early rounds of Facebook, the firm went another route to getting Facebook cred and connections: Hiring Cohler, an early Facebook executive, as a general partner. While other firms have chased later and later Facebook secondary deals, Cohler has been gobbling up some of the better investments from the Facebook diaspora like Quora and Asana. The difference in approach delights some major limited partners who I spoke with over the last few weeks. Each requested anonymity for obvious reasons: Getting in the top firms isn’t easy, and no LP wants to be on the record criticizing one over the other. But this comment was echoed by several pension funds and endowments: “We’ve been a little frustrated at this next level of product extension. We have seen that early stage doesn’t scale. With very few exceptions, the jury is pretty clear.” Besides, many of the top LPs that may be in Benchmark are also in Accel or Greylock– firms that got into Facebook already at a much nicer price. For them, shares at $30 billion don’t have much of an upside. “We like our cost basis in Facebook,” one LP said. “We were fortunate to be in this company early. We don’t need to double and triple down at these levels.” In other words: Let the LPs control their own allocation, don’t try to control it for them. Of Benchmark this LP said, “I am looking for category killers, and that is what they are looking to do.” Now, several funds getting into the late stage business have noted that no one is holding a gun to these LPs’ heads. They’re choosing to back these mega-funds, and if they don’t want to, plenty of others will. That’s true, but it doesn’t mean they love the strategy. Frequently, top firms raise expansion funds at the same time they raise early stage funds and the implication is clear: If you want to keep your place in one, you better pay up for the new vehicle too. “It’s a tough conversation, because capital calls have been running at a pretty fast clip, but the liquidity isn’t covering those capital calls,” one LP said. In other words, LPs have been generous with venture capital allocations and those firms are investing in more and more companies. But for the last decade, returns have been abysmal. LPs get that returns take time in the venture business, but there’s a limit to how long they can wait. As a result, it’s one of the first sustained periods in more than a decade where there is not a flood of capital trying to wedge itself into the venture business. Quite the opposite: Most LPs are uncomfortably over-exposed to the asset class. And then there’s the biggest complaint roiling LPs: The fees. “The ugliest part of this is the same fee streams are attached to these funds, a 2-2.5% management fee and a 30% carry,” said one LP. “Even though some firms say the justification for keeping the growth funds separate is they don’t want lower returns to drag down the early stage fund.” Most LPs I talked to granted many of these late stage deals– like the ones detailed in part one of this series on the new late stage frenzy– were unique opportunities, filling a void in the market for great companies that already have sizable revenues and didn’t want to go public but needed capital. But as we wrote last week, the fear is there are only so many of those companies out there. “We like firms that give us the option, but not the obligation,” said one LP, with several others echoing the sentiment. That’s precisely the reason some firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Greylock do mega-deals out of the same fund– if they never find another good one, they can shift their focus back to early stage. For the broader startup ecosystem, the question isn’t whether Benchmark can ignore late stage deals and still make money. The firm is in solid shape with investments in Yelp and Twitter and up-and-comers like Quora, Asana and Uber, not to mention decent exits in Mint, Riot Games and ServiceSource, which went public just last week. Nor is the question really whether other VCs will lose money on these heady deals. That’s the core distinction between what some in the media are calling a bubble now, and an actual bubble like the one in the late 1990s where the public participated in wild speculation. Top venture firms can lose some money or break even on a few deals, and the economic fall-out will be pretty minimal. The real question for the industry is about the opportunity cost of distraction should the later stage opportunity prove, once again, to look better on paper than in the actual returns paid to investors. Benchmark believes its stance will give the firm an advantage over its peers when it comes to investing in the next generation of winners. The social media giants have been pretty well sorted out, now it’s just a question of who can grab remaining stakes and at what price. But what about the next generation? Conflicts are just now starting to surface, as many entrepreneurs trying to disrupt giants like Zynga, Groupon or Facebook quietly express reservations about taking money from a firm that has more money in those companies than it will ever put in any early stage deal, no matter how good. It’s hard to know where loyalties lie in these situations and the question of conflicts within venture portfolios is coming up again and again on entrepreneur and VC blogs and in our own episodes of Ask a VC. Indeed, some other firms have noted in private conversations that late stage investments not only raised competitive issues with early stage hopeful-competitors, but with international companies competing with Zynga and Groupon in their home markets. The surface of these competitive ramifications hasn’t even been scratched yet. ”It creates weird situations where bigger chunks of money tend to steal the attention,” Gurley says. “At that level, fees can be distracting.”        
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| Behold The World’s Largest Photo Ever Taken Indoors: 40 Gigapixels Of Awesome Posted: 29 Mar 2011 06:33 AM PDT
We interrupt our live coverage of breaking news about Internet companies from around the world to point you to this phenomenal 360-degrees photo (okay, actually it’s 2,947 pictures stitched together). It is, to our and the photographer’s knowledge, the largest photo ever taken indoors with 280,000 x 140,000 pixels of awesomesauce. In the screenshot above, in the painting on the ceiling, do you see that angel holding a book, right below the cross? No worries if you can’t, because I zoomed in to give you a close-up:
That’s how freaking amazing this picture is. The photo was taken by photographer and 360cities founder Jeffrey Martin, and shows the interior of the magnificent, 18th-century baroque library you can find inside the Strahov Monastery in Prague, Czech Republic. For more background, head on over to Wired. The details, for the fans, courtesy of Martin: The photo is 40 gigapixels (40,000 megapixels); 280,000 x 140,000 pixels; made of 2947 images joined together; used a Canon 550D and 200mm lens; print size 23m x 11m; stitched file size 280GB; cut into 85,000 tiles for web delivery. Okay, okay – one more:
Oh, so you thought that was it? Nuh uh! Here’s a video for good measure:         
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| Inspiring: Kik Founder Donates $1M To Kickstart University of Waterloo Seed Fund Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:43 AM PDT
The founder of messaging app Kik, 23-year-old entrepreneur Ted Livingston, has donated $1 million to The University of Waterloo’s VeloCity Residence, a residence-based mobile and digital startups incubator (dormcubator?) where his own startup ambitions were sparked. The University of Waterloo will now also establish a $1 million seed fund for student startups and intends to provide “at least 30 student ventures” with $25,000 as well as four months of office space, incorporation services and mentoring over the next few years. According to the press release announcing the donation, the $25,000 awards match the amount of money left to Livingston by his grandfather – money that apparently kept Kik afloat and fuelled the company's development in its earliest days. Livingston, who studied mechatronics engineering at Waterloo between 2005 and 2009, founded Kik (then called Unsynced) while in the VeloCity residence in Winter 2009. As we reported, Kik recently raised $8 million in Series A funding. Indeed, the $1 million donation to the University of Waterloo was made possible by Livingston selling some of his personal Kik shares in that round to one of three VC investors (in order to prevent further dilution of other Kik employees' shares). It’s an inspiring move, so I’ll leave you with a quote from Livingston to chew on:
Kudos, buddy, kudos. (Photograph by Dave Chidley for National Post, via The Gazette)        
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| These Robot Quadrocopter Jugglers Perform For Your Amusement… For Now Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:35 AM PDT
       
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| Apperian Raises $9.5M For Enterprise Mobile App Deployment Platform Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:24 AM PDT
As more companies turn to tablets and smartphones in enterprise communications, standard consumer apps may not fit within security requirements. Launched by former Apple employees in 2009, Apperian helps developers accelerate app creation within the enterprise. The startup’s EASE platform lets IT administrators deploy, provision and manage mobile apps in a secure environment. Currently EASE supports development for iOS devices and will integrate Android support soon. Apperian has developed apps for Clinique, Newsday, and RueLaLa.        
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| Cisco Buys Cloud Automation And Management Software Company newScale Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:14 AM PDT  Cisco this morning announced its intent to acquire newScale, a global provider of self-service and lifecycle management software for enterprise IT and private/hybrid cloud computing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but newScale is a company that's raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from a wide range of investors, according to CrunchBase. Based in San Mateo, California, newScale develops products and solutions that enable companies to select and deploy cloud services within their businesses, allowing them to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.
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| Glassdoor Puts Numbers on Our Schizophrenic Job Market Posted: 29 Mar 2011 05:00 AM PDT
40% of respondents expect their company’s outlook to improve in the next six months and just 17% are concerned about a possible layoff, down from 26% in the first quarter of 2009. And there’s decent optimism that should they lose their jobs, 40% of them say it is “likely” they would find a new job matching their experience and pay within six months– the highest that number has been in six quarters. Glassdoor notes that “only” 35% of respondents expected to get a raise within the next 12 months, but given the top line economic data for the country, that still seems pretty healthy to me. While unemployment is getting better, the numbers say as much about who uses Glassdoor as anything else. While millions of Americans seem trapped on the less-desirable side of a skills-to-jobs-available mismatch, there’s a full-on talent war going on in Silicon Valley, where not only engineers but talented startup executives and worker bees are flooded with offers. Culprits for this talent bubble are certainly companies like Google and Facebook and Zynga who are hiring large numbers of employees as fast as they can, but also to blame is the relative ease of starting a company and getting funding– which takes an increasing number of engineers and potential CTOs and managers out of the job market. To wit: According to Glassdoor, more than one-third of employees expect to leave their job in the next three years, 28% expect to do so in the next two years and 14% expect to leave in less than one year. Add it up and nearly 60% of respondents in what’s supposed to be one of the worst labor markets in our nation’s history plan to voluntarily leave their jobs in less than three years.
It’s a stunning picture of a whole different kind of dysfunction in America’s job market. Typically even if you feel your job isn’t a risk, the fear of shrinking options makes most people clamp on to whatever job they have. But in this market, while millions lose their houses, those on the other side of that skills/need labor chasm have the world as their oyster and there’s little-to-no sense of clinging to your port in a storm. It’s another sign of how deeply a sense of employee/employer loyalty has eroded in our country in the last few decades. When my generation was coming out of college in the late 1990s, the idea of job hopping every few years was still a radical invention of the so-called “new economy,” but now it’s just how someone plans a career. Part of this comes from employees: Entrepreneurship isn’t just mainstream in Silicon Valley, increasingly most professionals run their careers as if they’re free-agents, merely tied up in contracts from time to time. But it’s also the fault of employers. The rabidly-short term nature of the stock market has dramatically changed how companies view layoffs. Decades ago, layoffs were considered a last resort of a dying — or at the very least unprofitable– company. Today, they are a regular way to trim the fat, compensate for poor hiring decisions and meet quarterly numbers. Is it any wonder a dramatic shift in the use of layoffs has coincided with a dramatic shift in employee loyalty? Companies gripped in the talent-war side of this economy are no doubt struggling to keep their best people. In the Valley this has taken the form of increasingly large retention bonuses, salaries and perks, and every single tech company will tell you that hanging on to employees is their number one risk factor. Part of this is the healthy churn of employees through the Valley’s ranks that keeps startups as competitive as the big companies. But part of it is in-demand employees’ revenge for decades of being increasingly expendable. Glassdoor’s numbers also show another sharp divide in the labor market around gender lines. While nearly 40% of men are optimistic about a pay raise, only 30% of women are. Glassdoor ran the numbers for engineers and found good reason why: Women still make far less money than men. The cap ranges between 4% and 9%, getting larger as men and women become more experienced. That’s not too surprising given numbers that show gender parity in low-levels of management in the US, but that shifting dramatically as women climb the economic ladder. In the Valley, the gap is far less than the 20% gender pay gap nationwide, but it’s worrying for a place that prides itself on being a meritocracy nonetheless.
Mike is coming in town today. Who votes I demand a huge raise? [UPDATE: Glassdoor just sent me a spreadsheet of sample reporter salaries. Whoa, we are in trouble as an industry. Nevermind, Mike.) (Photo by Thomas Hawk)        
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| Limos.com Scores $10 Million For Online Limo And Car Services Marketplace Posted: 29 Mar 2011 04:57 AM PDT
Founded by former employees of travel booking site Hotwire.com, Limos.com, an online marketplace for limo and car services, this morning announced that they’ve secured $10 million in financing from Austin Ventures. The new Austin Ventures investment adds to the company’s original funding of $5 million from Canal Partners. Coinciding with the funding announcement, the company has released a new corporate travel management product, Limos.com for Business. T.J. Clark, Limos.com President and CEO, says he and his team couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an easy way to search, compare and book car services online after their experience with Hotwire.com, and thus set out to build one themselves. Limos.com offers leisure travelers easy comparison of local car service companies, consumer reviews and instant online booking that shows the total cost upfront, including the driver’s tip. Additionally, all Limos.com operators are pre-screened and covered by $10 million in insurance. The startup has partnerships in place with major online booking service providers like OpenTable and Live Nation/Ticketmaster.com to feature booking buttons on their sites. The company today announced Limos.com for Business, an online car service management product that offers advanced controls for corporate travel managers and direct access to local car service operators. Limos.com estimates that its system holds rates and inventory from 80% of the U.S. suppliers who specialize in corporate car services. Last year, Limos.com expanded its reach to China, India and South America. In coming weeks, the company also will launch applications for iOS and Android, which will allow travelers to search and book car services “on the go” in all of its markets worldwide.
       
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| Cheapflights Invests In Travel Meta-Search Site Momondo Posted: 29 Mar 2011 04:42 AM PDT  Cheapflights Media has made a strategic investment in travel meta-search site Momondo.com and its parent company Skygate International, the company announced this morning. Both Skygate and Momondo will continue to operate from Copenhagen as independent brands, led by their existing founding management. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
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| GE Buys Electrical Engineering Company Converteam For Up To $3.7 Billion Posted: 29 Mar 2011 04:17 AM PDT
GE Energy this morning announced that it has acquired a stake of approximately 90 percent of Converteam, a France-based provider of electrification and automation equipment and systems, for approximately $3.2 billion. Converteam's senior management will retain the remaining stake in the company, but GE has agreed to purchase their shares over the next two to five years for a price that it expects not to exceed $480 million. Converteam was previously owned by a shareholder group that includes the company’s management, Barclays Private Equity and LBO France. To learn more about the company’s history, check out its Wikipedia profile. The transaction is expected to close during third quarter 2011, subject to customary closing conditions. Converteam's solutions enable its clients to replace or improve mechanical processes with high-efficiency electric alternatives that deliver better reliability, less maintenance and lower emissions. The company’s portfolio includes drives and other power electronics, advanced rotating machines, generators and controls. Converteam operates across six key vertical sectors: offshore and onshore oil and gas, power generation, wind and solar renewables, industrial, marine and services. Headquartered in Massy, France, Converteam has 5,300 employees, including more than 1,600 engineers, and operates in more than 80 countries. Converteam recently announced 2010 sales of approximately $1.5 billion and EBITDA of approximately $239 million, with approximately 36 percent growth in orders versus 2009. With the addition of the company, GE Energy’s goal is to bring new integrated product offerings to existing customers and apply its technology to new applications in a broad range of industrial verticals. The business expects to realize approximately $250 million in annual operating synergies by year five. In the last six months, GE Energy has announced the acquisition of Dresser, Wellstream Holdings, Lineage Power Holdings and Well Support.        
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| Will Amazon Drive Music Lockers Like MP3Tunes And mSpot Beyond Oblivion? Posted: 29 Mar 2011 03:22 AM PDT
Make no mistake about it: the digital music space will be turned upside down this year, courtesy of giants like Apple, Google, HP, Sony and now, Amazon. Earlier today, the latter announced that it was entering the world of digital music locker services with a bang, introducing services dubbed Cloud Drive and Cloud Player that basically let you store your digital music – and more – in the cloud and stream it from browsers on any computer as well as from Android phones. A lot of the virtual ink that’s already been spilled on the unveiling of those services has understandably focused on the battle between the giants cited above, but I can’t help but wonder how this will impact the many startups in the space, namely the likes of mSpot, MP3Tunes, Maestro.fm, Orb, MiMedia and Audiogalaxy (not to mention the yet-to-launch Beyond Oblivion, which has raised close to $90 million from News Corp and others). I decidedly left out companies offering digital music subscription and discovery services such as Rdio, MOG, Pandora, Spotify and Grooveshark, because I think that’s a different ballgame. Just looking at storage prices for the two better known startups in the music locker space, MP3Tunes and mSpot, I seriously doubt anyone will still find those appealing when you put their offering next to that of Amazon and its Cloud Drive. What you get for free Amazon: 5 GB of storage Pricing for additional storage: Amazon: 20 GB for $20 per year (or just buy a single album from its MP3 store) Amazon: 50 GB for $50 per year In other words, as soon as you need way more than 20 GB, you just might still be better off sticking with the startups than making the switch to Amazon Cloud Drive, but how many people genuinely need more than that for storing digital files (Amazon points out 20 GB comes down to about 4,000 songs and 8,000 photos already)? And even if 5 GB worth of free storage doesn’t cut it for you, remember that MP3Tunes only offers 2 GB of free storage if you put up with advertising. Also, at least for now, upgrading to 20 GB of storage on Amazon’s Cloud Drive costs you about $3.99 for a whole year if you just buy a cheap album from Amazon’s MP3 store, while it will cost you about five times as much to get that kind of storage on MP3Tunes (and about the same price on mSpot if you’d cut their price for 40 GB in half). On a side note: amusingly, MP3Tunes currently even advertises the lower pricing of its new rival on its own website (see screenshot below). To conclude, with this pricing scheme Amazon has made it extremely difficult for MP3Tunes and mSpot to compete with them. Also consider that Amazon has a lot of brand leverage, a wealth of cloud infrastructure expertise and a potentially huge user base from the get-go (courtesy of its popular MP3 store, which is second in the US only to Apple’s iTunes). Sure, music store on Amazon’s Cloud Drive can not be played on iOS devices at this point, but as MG Siegler points out there’s already a work-around for that. Amazon just beat Google and Apple to market with its music locker service (which, again, also works for documents, videos and photos) but has it also priced music locker startups squarely out of that market at the same time? I’ve asked mSpot and MP3Tunes for comment but haven’t heard back yet.
       
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| Mark Cuban And Kevin O’Leary Invest In Online Toy Rental Service Toygaroo Posted: 29 Mar 2011 03:14 AM PDT
In the most recent Shark Tank-isode, co-founder and chief executive of Toygaroo, Nikki Pope, pitched her startup to the panel of honchos, hoping for big-time investment. Toygaroo, the self-labeled “Netflix for toys”, is an online toy rental service in which parents can sign up for and choose a “wish list” of toys that are then sent to their home, played with by their kids, before being returned to Toygaroo via a FedEx box. Before you start shuddering, the toys are, of course, cleaned and sanitized before being shipped. Similar to Netflix, subscribers can sign up for one of three packages ranging from $49.99 to $62.99 per month, in which families receive a fixed number of toys every two months. Then you ship ‘em back. Rinse and repeat. Users can also opt into a premium model that allows your offspring to receive toys every month rather than bimonthly. Look out, Santa, Toygaroo is trying to put you out of business. And Mark Cuban is helping. The success of Netflix must have been a factor for both Cuban as well as Canadian entrepreneur/mogul Kevin O’Leary, who beat out the other 3 sharks to buy a combined 35 percent of Toygaroo for $200K. Considering Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.6 billion and O’Leary sold The Learning Company (he created the software behind the company) to Mattel for $3.6 billion, the two moguls could infuse a serious amount of cash — and toy know-how via O’Leary — into Toygaroo if they so choose. But, in the meantime, both will own a controlling stake in the company and will each be taking a seat on the board, so they’ll likely be calling the shots. Pope was so excited about the investment she was nearly moved to tears, and I have to say it was pretty cool to see the sharks make her day like that. Way to go, Nikki. That being said, I would say that Toygaroo has its work cut out for it in terms of convincing its users that it will be practicing, nay, ensuring, strong quality control when it comes to sanitizing its toys. Definitely also going to need liability insurance.        
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| StockTwits Continues To Expand, Steals VP David Putnam From Yahoo Finance Posted: 29 Mar 2011 01:12 AM PDT
What’s more, the company announced in December that Yahoo would begin pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages, complementing the similar deals it had already forged with CNN, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg. And now it seems that, while Yahoo is pulling data from its API, StockTwits has been busy pulling senior executives from Yahoo’s staff. (I guess turnabout is fair play?) In yet another victory for a company not named Yahoo, David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management at Yahoo, announced on his blog today that he will be joining StockTwits on April 1 as VP of Product. This comes on the heels of StockTwits hiring Chris Bullock as its new VP of Corporate Services. Bullock was formerly the senior managing director for global investor relations services at NASDAQ and is charged with bringing investor relations departments to the StockTwits ecosystem. Putnam, for one, sees a bright future for the up-and-coming stock conversation curator, saying, “StockTwits is big, getting bigger, and going to be huge”. In leaving Yahoo Finance, Putnam is stepping away from, in his words, “the largest financial website in the world”, which he helped to grow to 45 million users a month. Aside from Yahoo’s notorious (and seemingly never-ending) struggles, that’s no easy feat. If StockTwits is hoping to one day take on the big players like Yahoo, nabbing the company’s execs is a great way to start. As Putnam turns his sights to “helping build the biggest financial idea network in the world”, it will be important for the company to remain focused on building a rabid community and not monthly site traffic. Investor relations will be a big area for StockTwits going forward, as quite a few companies have started using the service to disseminate information among investors and answer their questions. As part of its features, StockTwits distributes companies' messages to Bloomberg, Yahoo! Finance, CNN Money and Bing Finance, a big selling point for many companies. If the service can continue to add to its investor relations, we all may be StockTwitting in the near future.        
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| Acer Releases Dual-Screen Iconia “Touchbook” Posted: 29 Mar 2011 12:22 AM PDT
It is rare to find a device that is both baffling and compelling. We’ve been talking about the Acer Iconia for a while now and this dual-screened tablet or “Touchbook” is now available and shipping in the US next month. It runs a Core i5 chip, Windows 7, and has two 14-inch screens made of high-strength Gorilla Glass that allow for typing, multi-touch, and gestures.        
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| Is This The Greatest VC Pitch Prank Ever Pulled? Posted: 28 Mar 2011 11:59 PM PDT
Just like that fake Color.xxx slide deck, this probably fake VC pitch video has been making the rounds across Silicon Valley lately, portraying the saga of a probably fake Rachel Sequoia (heh) and her probably fake startup “Share The Air.” As I just finished doing an Ignite talk, the whole “bullshit for five minutes” thing really hit home with me, but especially the part where the actress playing Sequoia asks an audience presumably filled with VCs for 500K to support her location-based air service, which includes an ancillary app where you can use Google Maps to check into places where you’ve breathed. Yes, breathed. For what it’s worth, I think this whole thing is BS, from the over-Bindied Sequoia to the Venture Capital Fundraising Club and audience to the Sharetheair108 landing page. After all, if any part of this were real, you would probably have heard about it here, first. Via Urlesque        
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| Amazon Cloud Player Doesn’t Work On iOS — But It’s Not A Flash Issue Posted: 28 Mar 2011 10:36 PM PDT
At first, you might think this is a Flash issue (Apple’s devices famously do not support Flash). But it’s not. I don’t have Flash installed on my MacBook Air and the Cloud Player works fine (as it does when you disable Flash in Chrome). Flash is needed to upload files to Cloud Drive, but not for playback. So that’s not the issue. Instead, it appears that Amazon may simply be blocking the mobile version of Safari from playing back songs through Cloud Player. When you attempt to load the player, you get a warning that the browser isn’t supported. But you can continue anyway and everything seems like it may be fine. But when you click “Play” nothing happens. On Android devices, Cloud Player works by way of the Amazon MP3 app. This app does not exist on the iOS platform because it would compete with Apple’s iTunes Store. Presumably, Amazon could make another stand-alone app for Cloud Player or include it in one of their other Amazon iOS apps, but Apple new platform rules on subscriptions make this a bit murky (Amazon’s Cloud Drive is free for 5 GB but costs a yearly fee for more storage). Of course, even if Amazon wanted to bring Cloud Player to iOS devices, Apple may not want it there. The company is gearing up to launch their own music locker system, though perhaps not until the fall. Google is also working on a similar service. Update: As Gian points out in the comments below, there is a way to play songs on an iOS device from Amazon’s service: you hit the option to download them. This essentially downloads the MP3 file from Amazon’s server and uses Safari’s built-in player to play it. Not exactly ideal, but it does work — with AirPlay too!
       
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| Amazon Beats Apple And Google To Cloud-Based Music Storage/Streaming Posted: 28 Mar 2011 09:37 PM PDT
Well, the rumors were true. Not only is Amazon entering the “music locker” space, they’re doing it before both Google and Apple — as their “Cloud Drive” and “Cloud Player” have just gone live on their site tonight. Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You’ll note an absence of an iOS player… A bit more:
So there you go, Amazon has won the race of the big three to deliver a fully cloud-supported music option. Current whispers have Google launching something very similar at their I/O conference in May. And Apple is working on a similar concept as well — but it may not launch until this fall. At least that was the original plan, Amazon’s move may alter things, obviously. More: Amazon Cloud Player Doesn't Work On iOS — But It's Not A Flash Issue
       
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| PrepMe’s Coursification Offers A Personalized Online Learning Platform Posted: 28 Mar 2011 08:30 PM PDT
What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule. Each online course begins with a diagnostic assessment that identifies student learning gaps (specialized to the subject). After the diagnostic test, each student receives a personalized study schedule, which the teacher can simply import into the platform. The schedule is customized based on student proficiencies and the duration of the course. As students complete their assignments online, their comprehension is evaluated in short quizzes and longer tests online. PrepMe will store and analyze every interaction between the student and the curriculum and adjust the study plan based on progress the student has made. The platform also offers the ability to message and chat with teachers within Coursification and the ability to send files as well. Similar to Blackboard and other online learning SaaS offerings, PrepMe allows teachers to upload source materials, tests, quizzes and more. Because much of the learning and testing is based online, Coursification is ideal for professors and teachers who are comfortable with placing all of their content on a web platform. PrepMe’s offering could also be useful for remote teaching. In addition to Blackboard, PrepMe faces competition from Instructure and Moodle.        
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Microsoft Hotmail doesn’t get much love in Silicon Valley these days, but the service has been steadily making improvements to the product, particularly over the last 18 months or so. And today it’s giving a boost to its ‘Active Views’ product — which sets out to make email quicker and more interactive than the sort we’re used to — by adding new partners including Posterous, and LivingSocial.
For the past two years, Google has offered 
Google 
Kickerstart is really the go-to place for all things iPad/iPhone. If you have a random case you wanna sell, put it up on Kickstarter. It’s kind of a running joke with us right now because of the sheer amount of iPad products on the site. 
If you’ve watched some of our previous robotic 
Enterprise mobility company 
As you may have read by now, earlier tonight, Amazon dropped a bomb on their rivals in the online music space: 
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