In the big new world of business intelligence, RJMetrics has found a market helping e-commerce companies easily analyze operations data and make smarter decisions as a result. Big startups have signed on, including Fab, Bonobos, Threadless and thousands of smaller businesses. Today, the momentum has landed the Philadelphia enterprise startup a $6.5 million first venture round led by Trinity Ventures.

SaaS BI, as online business analysis software is called within the industry, is full of competitors. Tableau Software, which is planning to IPO, along with GoodData, Domo and others have been successfully selling to big companies that need complex integrations to best analyze their own data. On the low end, Datahero and Chartio provide quick and inexpensive ways for a small business to get some quality integrations.

RJMetrics has focused on what e-commerce companies need, Moore explains, although he notes that its clients range from online gaming companies to nonprofits. The secret isn’t some magical new type of BI software, but a better focus on lucrative online transactions businesses. If an online retailer wants to analyze how colors of different types of hats are selling against each other, for example, a non-technical sales analyst at the company could go into RJMetrics and quickly create a visual explaining what’s happening.

The company promises to replicate client data to hosted, secure servers and optimize it for analysis within seven days, versus the months required for more complex products, with a set of APIs developed around systems that e-commerce companies are already using. Then it makes a dashboard of data visuals available to the company, including key stats for transaction businesses, such as customer lifetime value, repeat purchase probability, and cohort analysis on database segments. This lets a company answer questions like which types of customers are likely to regularly buy red fedora hats. For clients with technical staffers, it provides access for them to run their own queries on more complex data sets hosted on its own servers. Prices for the basic version of the online service start at $500 per month.

Fab cofounder Jason Goldberg has written effusively about his experience with RJMetrics, and how its analysis helped him prove Fab’s worth to investors when it raised $40 million in 2011.

From a fundraising standpoint, providing access to the RJ data basically said to the VC’s, “here we are, here’s the data, we’ve got nothing to hide, take a look and decide for yourself if you want to pursue investing in Fab.” Effectively, we turned the pitching on its head. Since the RJ data updates several times per day directly from our database, it was many times more powerful than providing powerpoints and excel spreadsheets. This was the real stuff, auto-updating! And, since RJ enables all the data to be downloaded into excel, the analysts at the VC firms were able to do all of their own analysis on the front end of the investment process.

The core RJMetrics product grew out of Moore’s own data analysis work (which has separately resulted in some great guest posts for TechCrunch, like this formative 2009 analysis of Twitter user behavior). The new funding round, which includes participation from existing investor SoftTech VC, will go towards sales and marketing. With the overall growth in the Saas BI industry, Moore says it’s time to focus on the e-commerce part of it.

Microsoft is offering to pay $1 billion to buy the digital assets of Nook Media LLC, the digital book and college book joint venture with Barnes & Noble and other investors, according to internal documents we’ve obtained. In this plan, Microsoft would redeem preferred units in Nook Media, which also includes a college book division, leaving it with the digital operation — e-books, as well as Nook e-readers and tablets.

The documents also reveal that Nook Media plans to discontinue its Android-based tablet business by the end of its 2014 fiscal year as it transitions to a model where Nook content is distributed through apps on “third-party partner” devices. Speculation about the plan to discontinue the Nook surfaced in February. The documents we have are not clear on whether the third-party tablets would be Microsoft’s own Windows 8 devices, tablets made by others (including competing platforms) or both. Third-party tablets, according to the document, are due to get introduced in 2014.

Nook e-readers, meanwhile, do not appear to fall into the discontinuation pile immediately. Rather, they’re projected to have their own gradual, natural decline — following the general trend of consumers moving to tablets as all-purpose devices.

Microsoft and B&N representatives declined to comment for this story.

A deal to buy the digital assets of Nook Media is the natural next step for Microsoft, which first announced a plan to work with Barnes & Noble on its Nook devices and content in April 2012, ponying up $300 million at the time to help. That plan included an additional $180 million advance to develop content for its Windows 8 devices — which Nook has been doing.

To date, there have been 10 million Nook devices sold, including both tablets and e-readers, with more than 7 million active subscribers. Microsoft has seen limited interested in its Windows 8 devices (although it says it has sold more than 100 million licenses for the OS to date). Currently the Nook app is available on every major platform, including Android, iOS and Windows.

Nook Media split from the retail arm last October with a $300 million investment by Microsoft for a 16.8 percent stake in the company. The partnership was aimed at getting B&N content on then-nascent Windows 8 tablets. At the time, President of Digital Product at Nook Media, Jamie Iannone, said “It’s hardware, software, content: everything Nook is part of Nook Media. There will always be a long-term relationship between Barnes & Noble and the Nook business.”

Nook’s decline seems to have helped alter company strategy. Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio proposed buying back the whole of the company’s retail operation.

The documents TC has seen values B&N at $1.66 billion. When Nook Media was first formed, the valuation of that division alone was $1.7 billion. When Pearson invested $85 million at a 5 percent stake in January, it was valued at $1.8 billion. If the deal goes through, Microsoft’s $1 billion purchase will be well below the price it had originally bought in at.

The documents, which are based on company filings and management discussions, show the Nook unit brought in total revenue of $1.215 billion for fiscal year 2012 (which for Barnes & Noble ends every April 30th), for a loss of $262 million in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA). It expects revenue to fall to $1.091 billion in fiscal year 2013, for a loss of $360 million as tablets are phased out — and estimates revenues to gradually recover, up to $1.976 billion by fiscal year 2017, for EBITDA profit of $362 million.

In the meantime, the Nook division has taken a beating this year following a slow holiday season. The new models have sold at a discount for weeks at a time and their flagship 10-inch Nook HD+ fell from $269 to $179. Kindle is offering the Fire HD for the same price. The hardware, while in many ways superior to Amazon’s, seems to have fallen behind in the race to market share and revenue. If Microsoft steps in, the dedicated e-reader race between the stalwart B&N and Jeff Bezos’ Amazon could be over.

John Biggs contributed to this article.

Update: Publishers’ Lunch notes that there may be other factors in a calculation of the valuation, for example counting Microsoft’s equity stake in the College division, and what impact additional payments made by Microsoft would have. Read more details here.

More than 2,000 people have filled up the historic Manhattan Center with our biggest hackathon and Startup Alley yet, and a set of incisive discussions with tech leaders. Now it’s time for the battlefield finals, and we have our seven finalists picked out.

But first, tomorrow will feature Ashton Kutcher, Joe Lonsdale, a big panel on transportation, an interview with hardware startup leader Limor Fried, the Rap Genius guys, and more.

Finals judges include Nancy Peretsman (Allen & Company), Roelof Botha (Sequoia Capital), Chris Dixon (Founder Collective), David Lee (SV Angel), Michael Arrington (CrunchFund), and Chi-Hua Chien (Kleiner Perkins).

Enigma.io makes it easy to analyze data from more than 100,000 data sources, and is already being used by journalists to break stories and financial firms and companies to make smarter business decisions.

Floored scans office spaces, apartments and houses using 3D camera technology and proprietary software to build customizable 3D models for real estate purposes.

Glide lets you enjoy video chat on your own schedule, and has made it into the finals round from our Startup Alley.

Handle helps you manage your email overload via a rich web app as well as a companion native iOS app that integrates with Gmail (and soon Microsoft Exchange and Yahoo).

HealthyOut provides users with personalized menus of food from local restaurants, set up as a subscription delivery service to help them lose weight or just eat better overall.

SupplyShift is an enterprise tool that lets companies and organizations track everything that’s going on with suppliers around world, collecting sustainability data to help them reduce risk exposure.

Zenefits helps small businesses manage payroll, health care and other human-resources services for employees.

We’re happy to have Allen & Company Managing Director Nancy Peretsman and Kleiner Perkins’ Chi-Hua Chien lend their judging expertise to our TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition. One of the most powerful women in New York business, Peretsman worked on Google’s IPO and the Aol Time Warner spin-off, among other things. And from the West Coast, rising star Chien has already worked at two top-tier VC firms and advises startups like Path, Twitter and Spotify.

And for those of you who haven’t been reading TechCrunch for the past two weeks, TechCrunch Disrupt New York kicks off tomorrow with a Hackathon and officially starts Monday with three days of some of the best of tech onstage at the Manhattan Center. Tickets are available here.

Peretsman and Chien join our list of Disrupt NY speakers, whicih currently includes Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley, Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investors Roelof Botha, Chamath Palihapitiya, and, yes, Ashton Kutcher and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Nancy Peretsman
Managing Director, Allen & Company

Nancy Peretsman, Managing Director at Allen & Company LLC, has served as advisor to many of the world’s largest media, communications and consumer companies.

Since joining Allen & Co. in 1995, Nancy has provided advice and capital to over one hundred small high growth businesses, including Priceline.com, on whose board she continues to serve.
Prior to Allen & Co., Nancy worked as a Managing Director at Salomon Brothers, heading the worldwide media investment banking practice.

Over the last decade, Fortune has named her among the 50 Most Powerful Women in Business. Additionally, Ms. Peretsman serves on the Boards of Trustees at Princeton University and Institute for Advanced Study and on the Board of Directors at Teach For America.

She received an undergraduate degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School in 1976 and earned an MBA from the Yale School of Management in 1979.

Chi-Hua Chien
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Chi-Hua Chien joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in 2007. At KPCB he focuses on investments in consumer web and mobile. He serves on the Board of Directors or works closely with the teams at Booyah, Chegg, Erly, GOGII, Home Value Protection, Klout, Path, Reputation.com, Spotify, and Twitter. Prior to KPCB, Chi-Hua worked with Accel Partners as a Venture Advisor and Associate focusing on software as a service, consumer Internet, and online advertising infrastructure. Chi-Hua was instrumental in Accel’s investments in AdECN (acquired by Microsoft) and Facebook, while also working on the firm’s investments in BitTorrent, fbFund, Glam, Trulia, and YuMe Networks.

Previously, Chi-Hua was the Director of Marketing at hosted software provider Coremetrics, where he led the marketing and inside sales teams as the company grew from 20 to more than 200 customers. He also served as the company’s interim CFO through two rounds of venture funding. Chi-Hua’s prior roles include corporate development at Google, business development at start-up eCoverage, and investment banking with Morgan Stanley’s Technology Group.

Chi-Hua has an MS in Industrial Engineering, BS in Industrial Engineering, and BA in Economics, all from Stanford University where he was named a Mayfield Fellow and President’s Scholar. He also earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. Chi-Hua was named one of the Top VCs Under 35 by VC Journal and a member of the Elite Eight VCs To Watch by Forbes.

After a long decade of media destruction, no one in the industry was surprised to see “Reporter (Newspaper)” ranked as the worst job of 2013. But life is starting to look better for some online publications — like at Vox Media. Its SB Nation network of local sports sites has become a foundation for a national edition, tech-oriented news site The Verge, and most recently video gaming site Polygon.

On the business side, it has begun cracking the display advertising market.

The CEO who is behind its ongoing growth is Jim Bankoff, who you may also know as the guy who previously led Aol’s content businesses for many years. He’s going to have a couple of newsy things to say about Vox and the business of high-quality media today when I interview him Monday at Disrupt NY. If you’re interested in media, advertising, and startups trying to get into these industries, you’ll want to see this.

Tickets are available here.

He joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Nasty Gal’s Deborah Benton, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and hardware creator Limor Fried, with more still to be announced.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Jim Bankoff
Chairman & CEO, Vox Media

Jim runs all aspects of Vox Media, one of the fastest growing online publishers, focused on the sports, personal technology and gaming categories. Vox is solving the problem of developing high-value digital journalism, storytelling and brand advertising at scale. Its audiences are among the most engaged and affluent on the web.

SB Nation, its sports brand, boasts over 30 million users per month across 300 individually branded, fan-centric sports communities, each covering a specific professional or college team, league or sport. In November 2011, Vox Media launched The Verge, which has quickly established itself as a category leader and the fastest growing site that covers technology. In October, Vox launched Polygon, a site dedicated to news and community for fans of gaming, anchored by an all-star roster of writers. All Vox Media sites are built upon, Chorus, its world-class proprietary publishing platform.

The company enjoys support from leading investors including Accel Partners, Comcast Interactive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Allen & Company.

A veteran of the online industry, Jim developed and led dozens of the most popular websites on the Internet including Aol, Mapquest, Moviefone, AOL Music and Engadget as an Executive Vice President at Aol. He co-founded TMZ.com and also oversaw Aol’s industry-leading instant messaging services, AIM and ICQ, and social networking and community applications including Blogsmith and Netscape.

His accomplishments have earned him wide recognition, most notably the first Emmy ever awarded to a webcast, for his role as Executive Producer of the Live 8 concerts online. Jim also serves as a Senior Advisor at Providence Equity Partners, the largest private equity firm focused on media and communications.

Chris Dixon is back in New York quite a bit, he tells me, even though he recently got a place in San Francisco as part of his new job as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He’ll be at Disrupt NY the week after next, for example, to talk about his big transition from life as a founder and angel investor to his new job at a top venture firm. I’ll be interviewing him about what he’s planning to focus his new portfolio on. Bitcoin startups? Less consumer startups? More gadgets and wearable health devices?

For those who don’t know, Dixon has paved the way for this generation of New York tech founders. He most recently cofounded recommendation service Hunch, which sold to eBay for around $80 million in 2011 and became an R&D office for the company in the city. Before that he cofounded SiteAdvisor and sold it to McAfee in 2006. He gradually moved deeper into angel investing over the years, becoming prolific over the last couple.

His background and hands-on approach to helping founders got a16z’s notice and they hired him on last year (his great reputation also got him the Angel Of The Year award at this year’s Crunchies).

Dixon joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, top investor Fred Wilson, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Buy tickets here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Chris Dixon
Partner & Co-founder, Founder Collective

Chris Dixon is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

He previously was a partner and co-founder at Founder Collective, the CEO and co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee, and Hunch, which was acquired by eBay. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode.

Silicon Valley didn’t believe in actor-investors, just a few years ago. Then Ashton Kutcher stepped in and started making a bunch of smart, well-informed bets. He has money in Skype, Foursquare, Flipboard, Airbnb and Path, as well as less consumer-y startups like Optimizely and MemSQL. He’s continued into a solid range of earlier-stage startups via his own investment fund, A-Grade.

He’ll be joining us at Disrupt NY to talk about his firm’s current approach to investing and the trends and products he’s thinking about these days. And, he may share a little more about the Jobs movie he’s been working on.

Ashton joins our list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Chamath Palihapitiya, John Donahoe, Roelof Botha, and Ron Conway, with more to be announced. Tickets and Startup Alley packages are available here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Ashton Kutcher

Ashton Kutcher is an actor, tech investor and producer. In 2011, Kutcher created a venture fund, A-Grade Investments, with Ron Burkle and Guy Oseary. A-Grade has invested in multiple tech companies including Spotify, Airbnb, Foursquare, Fab, Uber, Dwolla and Path. Kutcher is also co-founder of Katalyst, a media company creating original content for digital media, television and film. In 2010, Kutcher was named one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People. In that same year, his company, Katalyst, was named one of the year’s Top 50 Most Inspiring Innovators by Ad Age and one of Fast Company Magazine’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies.

Currently Kutcher stars in the CBS comedy series “Two and a Half Men.” Averaging more than 14 million viewers per week, the show ranks as the second most-watched comedy on all of network television. Kutcher first gained recognition as Michael Kelso on the Fox/Carsey Werner series “That 70’s Show,” which aired for eight seasons. Kutcher went on to star in a variety of box office hits on the big screen, including “What Happens In Vegas” with Cameron Diaz, “The Guardian” with Kevin Costner, “Valentine’s Day,” “No Strings Attached” with Natalie Portman and the cult hit “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Kutcher has long been recognized for his tech investments and social media prowess, beginning with Twitter. In 2009, he was the first Twitter user to obtain 1 million followers, beating out CNN in a highly publicized race.

Online display advertising has been a murky business — who is actually viewing all those ads, and do those ads make a difference to them? Quantcast has been quietly trying to solve this problem since 2006, and now it’s starting to break out.

I’m hearing from a reliable industry source that it has been EBITDA-profitable for a couple of years and reached a $100 million revenue run-rate six months ago. That number, I’m told, should go significantly higher by the end of 2013.

What’s going on here? Quantcast sits in an interesting market position. You’ve most likely heard of it for its precise public traffic data about websites and apps via tracking pixels that publishers install on the pages of their sites. On that front, it is competing against comScore, Hitwise, Omniture and other digital-measurement firms.

But these pixels are enabling its growing ad business, too. Essentially the company tracks users by pairing pixel data with browser cookies, and models it all out to generate profiles about the users of each site without collecting personal information.

It then works with publishers to help them target their own ads, or it sells ad inventory directly to advertisers. Either way, the ads are reaching users in real time based on their interests and browsing habits, via the company’s big data technology.

Given the broad shift to mobile usage it has also recently added features for mobile web and app data, via tracking software installed by its publishing partners. I’ve included a couple of screenshots of that data, one for reading site Goodreads’ mobile usage and another for the top 10 sites it tracks.

This all sounds fancy, but do people use it? The company is now working with more than 1,000 brands, and more than half of the top 1,000 publishers on the web, CEO and cofounder Konrad Feldman tells me. It is processing more than 800,000 transactions per second.

I don’t have a better view of its financials, but the revenue numbers I’m hearing indicate everything has come together well after all these years.

One big reason is the growth of ad exchanges, Feldman says. Google’s DoubleClick Ad Exchange, AppNexus, Rubicon, Pubmatic, OpenX, Yahoo’s Right Media and others provide online ad tech companies and publishers with a place to sell their inventory. Advertisers and their agencies can bid on this inventory and run campaigns across the Internet.

Quantcast has found its place in this ecosystem by helping buyers pull the most relevant ads from the exchanges and target them immediately to the right users. Competitors in this ad-targeting area include Turn and Rocket Fuel, with others like BlueKai providing some of the same sorts of ad-targeting tools for publishers.

If you’ve noticed higher-quality ads appearing to you on your favorite websites in recent years, it is probably one of the companies you can thank (or blame, if you hate ads in the first place).

The big problem for online publishing and advertising is that most of the ad dollars are still being spent on television. The shift to web has already happened for search, given that Google can target and convert purchases much better than traditional media ads. But many advertisers and ad agencies still feel most comfortable with the time-tested TV format for massive audience reach.

It was this problem — using big data to help advertisers and publishers succeed on the web — that first intrigued Feldman. He’d previously started and sold a security compliance firm for large organizations, eventually discovering that the market size was just not that big.

Feldman cites MLB.com’s experiences with Quantcast as an example of how the advertiser shift is taking place.

“MLB teams want to sell tickets — they have that in common,” he explains as an example. “But audiences in each local market are different and change fast over time, based on factors like what else is happening in the home team’s city that day, how well team is playing, who the visiting team is, etc.

Giants fans probably care more about a game against the Dodgers than against the Brewers.

“Rather than hypothesize about how these factors are affecting interest and prices that fans will pay,” he continues, “we track how users who care about this team are behaving, compare it against all of our other data on baseball ticket buyers, and target users who will want to buy right now.”

The result of MLB’s campaigns? It spent 20 percent of its online budget with Quantcast last year, but got 40 percent of its sales out of it, with users buying tickets twice as often as other online ad channels.

What’s next for the company? Having raised $64 million in three rounds to date, and now able to fund its own growth, it’s investing across its organization.

It now has 335 employees, with 100 people joining last year and another 75 on board so far in 2013. When I visited Feldman at the company’s San Francisco headquarters the company had already nearly filled up two floors of its SOMA office building and was struggling to figure out where it was going to put everyone as it continued to grow.

Beyond large volumes of new employees, it’s also been bringing on some industry leaders. OpenTable CEO Matthew Roberts is joining its board. With his many years of executive experience, including its IPO, the addition could hint at an IPO for Quantcast in the near future. Although on that point of speculation, Feldman hedged.

“I can tell you we’re focused on building an important, substantial and enduring business and that means having the very best leadership across our entire organization, including our board. Matt brings perspective and experience that will be valuable today and in the years to come, whatever that may bring.”

Anyway, Quantcast has also been filling out its ad sales team with a string of senior hires in recent months.

David Scacco, Google’s first ad exec, will be running its partnerships with search and SEM advertisers and agencies to try to grow its display business. Another former Google exec, Peter O’Sullivan, will be focusing on large advertisers in the Western U.S. Another long-time ad sales leader, Rick Boyce, will be leading corporate sales in North America.

Here are some other momentum points to note. The company has also recently opened a big new office in Dublin, where it plans to hire more than one hundred people in the next couple of years. In addition to the mobile features, it has also recently acquired ad-data startup MakeGood.

In a community-friendly (and technically hiring-friendly) move it has also open-sourced its file-system software and has other companies using it.

There’s a lot to like about Quantcast. For publishers, it provides a great alternate data set about your own traffic and about anyone else you’re trying to research — and it helps you make money. For advertisers and users, it helps ads matter more.

And, on a personal note, Feldman is an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur. I first met with him over a year ago, on the day I got the TechCrunch editor job. As I walked out of the meeting, preparing to face a very screwed-up situation, he pulled me aside and gave me some advice I haven’t forgotten: ”Some days are going to be terrible, but all that matters is that you keep trying, and keep moving towards your goals.”

He’s lived that with Quantcast progress over the years, and it’s been on my mind as we’ve turned TechCrunch around this past year.

The TechCrunch SF staff normally goes to your parties, but tonight you can come to ours. And this one has a mission beyond drinking and tech talk — we’ll be donating the proceeds to a nonprofit, like we’ve done in the past. This time to Teach for America.

Teach For America trains and places recent college grads and professionals in low-income schools. Programs like this can give students the exposure and mentorship they need to develop the skills required for rigorous work in the tech industry, like coding for example.

The venue is at the Temple night club on Howard Street. So come hang out with us tonight — and support teachers — by purchasing tickets for $15.

The party is not open bar, but if you have a problem with that, ask Alexia or Eldon to buy you a drink. Because, charity. All the proceeds will go to Team TechCrunch’s fund on Causes and help us continue to kick Path’s ass.

TechCrunch, fuck yeah.

[Facebook Event page]

People want to get their news on their phones, but many publishers are struggling to offer a set of mobile web sites and apps that users truly love. Meanwhile, mobile advertising is currently making much less money than web advertising, which is already a fraction of what print used to bring publishers. Basically, modern publishing is tough.

But Mike McCue’s Flipboard is already making a big difference in the industry by helping publications succeed on mobile. Its popular native mobile apps let users read beautifully presented stories from across their favorite sites, then it sells ads on these sites and splits the revenue with publishers. It recently launched a way for anyone to create their own magazines, which has helped lead to a record 53 million registered users today — check out TechCrunch’s weekly edition here for a good example.

I’ll be talking with McCue about his plans for the company, where he sees media going on mobile, and how his past experiences as an entrepreneur have shaped his present work.

McCue joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, top investor Fred Wilson, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available here.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Mike McCue
CEO & Co-Founder, Flipboard

Longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur Mike McCue founded Flipboard in early 2010, with former Apple iPhone engineer Evan Doll. Together they set out to build a global service that would let people make all of their news, photos, and videos from across social networks accessible from a single place.

In July 2010, they launched Flipboard for iPad, a social magazine that brings people the most informative, entertaining and amazing stories from around the world and from their daily life. With each flip, people can learn about stories and events that take place thousands of miles away or right at home; see life’s great moments in one place; and be inspired by what others share. Today, Flipboard works across iPad, iPhone and Android.

In 1999, Mike founded Tellme Networks, one of the world’s largest Internet networks for voice communication. He successfully led the integration of the company’s technology into Microsoft’s infrastructure following its acquisition. Microsoft bought Tellme in 2007 for $800 million.

Before founding Tellme, Mike worked at Netscape as Vice President of Technology. He joined Netscape after their successful acquisition of the first company he founded, Paper Software, a leader in 3-D browser technology. Mike was honored with a Kilby International Award as a Young Innovator for his work bringing 3-D technology to the world through Netscape’s Web browser.

[image via telegraph]

A few top venture firms are seeing big returns on their investments, but most of the industry is struggling to beat mutual funds. Meanwhile, angel dollars are still flowing at the seed stage and alternative forms of financing are emerging. How should startups think about raising money these days? Who should they raise it from, and when?

At Disrupt NY 2013 I’ll be asking those questions and more from a panel of investors who are not only in the midst of these changes, but pushing the changes.

Aaref Hilaly recently became a partner at Sequoia Capital after leading two companies to big exits in the last decade. Mike Abbott has built his own companies and led key engineering initiatives for Microsoft, Palm and most recently Twitter, before joining Kleiner Perkins a couple of years ago.

As new additions to storied Silicon Valley firms, they’ll have fresh perspectives on how VCs are thinking about venture funding.

Meanwhile, serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant has changed how new companies get backers through AngelList. It allows any new company to post extensive information about their products and metrics, and receive funding from a wide network of experienced and accredited investors — to the degree that some of them don’t even need to seek early-stage venture money.

Finally, David Tisch has been funding and mentoring this generation of startups in New York, first as the co-founder of TechStars NYC, and now as the founder of seed-stage firm Box Group. The other panelists are coming over with their Silicon Valley perspectives, he’ll be helping us understand what is happening in our host city today.

Aaref Hilaly
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Aaref works with enterprise, Internet, and mobile companies. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2012, he was the CEO of Clearwell, a leading provider of analytics software for electronic discovery. Aaref grew Clearwell from a handful of engineers into a profitable company with an annual revenue run-rate of over $100 million, leading to its acquisition by Symantec in 2011.

Prior to that, Aaref was the Founder and CEO of CenterRun, a pioneer in datacenter automation, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems.

Aaref holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master’s degree in Economics from McGill University, and BA degree from Oxford University.

David Tisch
Founder & Managing Partner, BoxGroup

David is the Founder and Managing Partner of BoxGroup, a New York City boutique seed-stage capital firm.

David is also the co-founder of TechStars NYC and previously served as Managing Director of the program.

David was named to NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and serves on the Investor Board of Venture for America. He is also a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s ‘The Accelerators’ online blog.

Prior to joining TechStars, David served as Executive Vice President of Interactive Strategies at kgb, a global information services company. While at kgb, David founded and led Knowmore.com, a social aggregation startup within kgb.

David has a B.A. in American History from the University of Pennsylvania and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

Mike Abbott
Senior Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers

Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. He focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.

An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. Mike is also an expert in “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software. Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Mike led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter’s infrastructure, growing the engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in less than a year and a half, and scaling Twitter’s architecture to support 250 million daily tweets. Before joining Twitter, Mike led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Earlier in his career, Mike was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. He was also co-founder of Passenger Inc. Mike has advised and invested in numerous software companies throughout his career, including Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone and Saynow.

Mike holds a bachelor’s degree from California Polytechnic State University and has completed coursework toward a Ph.D. at the University of Washington.

Naval Ravikant
Founder, Angel List

Naval is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-maintainer of AngelList.

Previously, he was a co-founder at Genoa Corp (acquired by Finisar), Epinions.com (IPO via Shopping.com), and Vast.com (large white-label classifieds marketplace).

He has advised Bix.com, iPivot, and XFire, among others, and invested in many companies, including Twitter, Foursquare, DocVerse (sold to Google), Mixer Labs (sold to Twitter), Jambool (Social Gold), SnapLogic, PlanCast, Stack Overflow, Heyzap, and Disqus.

The letter counters Allen’s allegation that Arrington raped her on March 5 of last year by stating that travel and credit card records show that Arrington was in Seattle at the time, while Allen was in San Francisco. It also claims that Allen previously lied about being pregnant.

“Please consider this letter to constitute a demand for an immediate retraction by you of each of the previous statements. I would appreciate the courtesy of your written response to this demand no later than close of business Monday, April 15, 2013. Indeed, failing a response by you that unconditionally retracts your false and defamatory statements, you will have left us with no choice but to proceed with legal action against you. Litigation is an absolute last resort for Michael, but we will pursue all options to undo the reputational injury caused by your misconduct.”

The letter is embedded below and ends with a good amount of digital correspondence from their relationship. It is not for the faint of heart.

Demand Letter to Jennifer Allen

Some of us in tech are self-taught geniuses who never needed school — but that’s mostly not the case, and you know it. Great teachers in math, science, reading and other core areas have helped this generation of tech leaders get the skills they needed to succeed, and those teachers are busy training the next generation right now.

Now, help them. Here, we’ll make it easy for you: We’ve put together a meetup in San Francisco this coming Tuesday, April 16th at the Temple night club on Howard Street. Come hang out with us — and support teachers — by purchasing these $15 tickets.  All the proceeds will go to Team TechCrunch’s fund on Causes. We’re right behind Dave Morin’s Path on the leaderboard at the moment, and quite honestly we think we can take them.

Even if you can’t come out to the event, jump over to Causes and donate to help the TFA’s Bay Area efforts.

The goal is to raise $250,000 through Causes, which would fund at least 50 teachers in the Bay Area. Teach For America has been working in the Bay Area since 1991, with 430 TFA corps members working in Richmond, Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose — reaching over 30,000 students at 127 schools.

The contest will run until April 18th, and there will be two grand prizes. The individual, or team, that helps Teach For America fund the most teachers will win a table for 10 at Teach For America – the Bay Area’s 3rd Annual Benefit Dinner on April 23rd, featuring keynote speaker Sheryl Sandberg.

If TechCrunch wins, we’ll give those tickets to the people or startup that contributed the most to the Team TechCrunch till. So help us beat Path, at least.

Tickets are $15 and give you entry to the event. All proceeds will be donated to Teach For America. Get your tickets here. Now.

We’re very pleased to announce that Dwight Merriman, the co-founder and former CTO of DoubleClick and now the co-founder of hot New York startup 10gen, will be joining us onstage at Disrupt NY this month. He’s been at the forefront of Internet advertising and engineering for the past two decades and is an icon of New York startups.

DoubleClick began life in 1995 by serving some of the first banner ads on the web. Merriman led its technology side for the first 10 years, through an IPO in 1998 and a merger as it grew to become a main way that websites made money. Google eventually bought it in 2007 for $3.1 billion, and the company now exists as part of its core display ads business.

Merriman is now the chairman and co-founder of 10gen, which sponsors the widely used open source NoSQL database MongoDB. The company has been quietly surging, with total funding north of $80 million and an employee headcount expected to reach 500 in the next couple of years.

He joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes Mailbox CEO Gentry Underwood, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, super angel Ron Conway, and more to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available with the early-bird discount ending tomorrow, April 11.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

.

Dwight Merriman
Chairman & Co-Founder, 10gen

Dwight is one of the original authors of MongoDB, the open-source document database. In 1995, he co-founded DoubleClick (acquired by Google for $3.1 billion) and served as Chief Technology Officer for 10 years. Dwight was the architect of the DoubleClick ad serving infrastructure, DART, which serves tens of billions of ads per day.

Earlier he was Co-Founder, Chairman, and the original architect of Panther Express (merged with CDNetworks), a content distribution network (CDN) technology. Dwight is also a Co-Founder of, and investor in, Business Insider and Gilt Groupe.

Dwight received a B.S. with honors in Systems Analysis from Miami University of Ohio.

[image via tie.org]

Mailbox launched to much fanfare earlier this year. Heralded as “the best email management app you’ll ever use“, iOS users virtually lined up to try the app. It was a hit. So much so that Dropbox quickly scooped up the team led by CEO and co-founder Gentry Underwood. And now, at the end of April, Underwood will be onstage with us at Disrupt New York.

As we talked at SXSW, Gentry led his team through the pivot from Orchestra to Mailbox, and finally to Dropbox via the $100M acquisition. Pivoting takes guts, but Gentry proved it can be done successfully while taking on Apple and Google. We’re excited to have him.

Gentry joins our growing list of Disrupt NY speakers that currently includes eBay CEO John Donahoe, Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and more coming to be announced in the weeks leading up to Disrupt NY. Tickets are currently available with the early bird discount ending Thursday, April 11.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Gentry Underwood
CEO and co-founder, Mailbox

Gentry is a designer and entrepreneur who has a passion for creating simple products that help people work together. He co-founded Mailbox, now a part of Dropbox, where he continues to build the mobile inbox that puts email in its place. Before Mailbox, Gentry led IDEO’s Knowledge Sharing domain and the creation of IDEO’s TUBE, an award-winning social intranet.

Gentry has a BS in human-computer interaction from Stanford University, a MA in psychology from Santa Clara University, and an MS in anthropology and community development from Vanderbilt University.

None of the claims made on my behalf over the past week are accurate. I’m not inclined to comment on my personal life, Mike and I remain friends.
I’m focused on business and my career.

I hope we can all get back to the business of building innovative companies in the spirit of what makes this industry great. I wish everyone well who is involved. I have no further comment on the matter.

As we continue to look into this matter, we appreciate any parties with more facts to come forward, on the record or anonymously if they have to.

TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington is facing very public accusations involving physical threats, assault and rape. Given his relationship with us this past year, and the culture of transparency that he helped create, we’re sharing where we are at with our reporting on the story.

We take all of these allegations seriously. We are treating them like any other story of this magnitude, in that we have been working to understand the situation as thoroughly as we can before publishing about it. We have a little more to add at this point, while we are continuing to report the story.

The original claim, posted on Facebook by former girlfriend Jenn Allen, is that he physically abused her, then threatened to kill her if she told anyone about the episode. Gawker found her post, and she followed up with additional comments there claiming that he had raped her as well as another woman.

Rumors of similar alleged abuse have circulated in previous years amongst our peers. Many tech reporters have investigated them, but no stories had been published until those based on Allen’s posts this week.

Some former friends of Arrington’s, including Jason Calacanis and Loren Feldman have come forward this week to support her general claim, saying they have heard similar rumors. Another Arrington friend from that era, Nik Cubrilovic, is now saying that he lived in the same house as Arrington when Allen was also staying there and knew of no abuse.

Today, Gawker unveiled another story detailing an alleged assault by Arrington that took place at a company he worked at in 1999, RealNames. A colleague of Arrington’s, Cecile Sharp, is quoted in the article saying that he had assaulted another coworker. The article also quotes sources alleging that in 2009 he threw then-girlfriend, Meghan Asha, against a wall.

Neither Allen nor Arrington have provided us with comments at this time.

Regarding Allen’s claims, we are not yet able to determine if they are true or not. She has not filed any police complaint or lawsuit to our knowledge.

Regarding the RealNames allegation, we have confirmed that there was an accusation, the conclusion of which did not result in a punishment for Arrington. We are still trying to understand the details of that from other people who were at the company at the time. So far we have this from RealNames founder and long-time Arrington friend Keith Teare:

“Mike was indeed the subject of an accusation at RealNames. As is normal in these circumstances an outside party was hired to conduct an investigation. This was extensive and I was never directly involved in it as I was not a witness to any events. The investigation concluded that there was no behavior to answer for. Mike was never reprimanded in any way. Both parties asked for confidentiality and to date this has been honored.”

Regarding the claim that Meghan Asha was thrown against a wall by Arrington in 2009, we have spoken to a number of secondary sources, some of whom claim that it happened and some who say it did not. Asha has not spoken publicly on the matter. [Update: she has replied here, saying that "None of the claims made on my behalf over the past week are accurate," although she doesn't say much more.]

We have also spoken to two other women who Arrington had previously dated. One is Rebecca Woodcock, who some rumors had indicated had suffered abuse from him while dating. She tells us this is absolutely not true. The other woman, who wishes to remain anonymous, also said that there was no abuse.

In sum, there have been some claims and more rumors about Arrington, as well as counterclaims and most of all, lots of missing information. We are continuing our reporting to find definitive evidence. We hope that anyone who knows more facts as to what happened between him and the women he is accused of abusing will come forward publicly, or privately.

We’re pleased to announce that John Borthwick will be back for another TechCrunch Disrupt. As the founder and CEO of betaworks, Borthwick has a unique vantage point on the New York City startup scene. There’s likely no one better to give us a solid understanding of the tech city that never sleeps.

This isn’t Borthwick’s first time on the Disrupt stage. He joined us last May where he told us that the NYC VC scene was just as vibrant as, but less overheated than, San Francisco’s. Borthwick and betaworks have been pretty busy themselves since then, working on several new products including famously acquiring and quickly relaunching Digg. Hopefully Borthwick will reveal some details about Digg’s Google Reader replacement.

Starting on April 27, our 24-hour Hackathon precedes Disrupt NY. The conference officially kicks off at the Manhattan Center on April 29 with a schedule filled with speakers, product demos and of course, happening each afternoon, Startup Battlefield where 30 startups compete for the Disrupt Cup and a giant $50,000 check.

Early-bird, general-admission tickets are available until April 11. Or sign up for the Hackathon for a chance for the same ticket for free.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

TechCrunch is like most other publications founded before 2011 in that our readers have gone mobile way faster than our products have. In 2010, 10 percent of our readers were reading us from mobile devices. With the launch of a mobile-friendly version of our website, as well as an increasing breadth of new native apps and mobile magazine Flipboard, mobile platform readers now represent 35 percent of our total traffic.

Which is why we’re particularly excited about Flipboard‘s new version coming out tonight.

The company is already aggregating our content into a beautiful new format while actually trying to help us develop our mobile business. It provides a solid chunk of our mobile traffic now, and today it has some 50 million total (not monthly unique) visitors.

The new version pushes its mission forward in two key ways: universal content search and a way for anyone to create their own “magazine.” Think of the latter feature as a much sexier personalized homepage than iGoogle and its ilk that you can share with the world.

Let’s say you, a TechCrunch reader, want to create your own magazine. You’re mainly visiting us for posts about 3D printing, like this one by John Biggs about a couple of guys who made a robot hand for a boy born without fingers. Using either a new Flipboard bookmarklet (here) while browsing the web, or the + button now appearing on any story in Flipboard, you pull the robot hand story into a magazine editor window. You’ll then be presented with options to create a new magazine starting with this article or add it to existing ones.

If you choose to make a new magazine, you’ll also be able to enter a name, description and category for it to enable easier distribution.

Then, Flipboard adds the article headline, body text, images, and any available audio or video. In this case, you’d get the story image, as well as the YouTube video that Biggs had embedded about the robot hand.

The story will appear as the lead in your magazine. Attribution to the original publisher is maintained. Any interactions from your readers, including commenting, retweeting and liking, shows up in the original social network.

You can also add as many article links, images, videos and soundtracks as you want, creating a permanent record of all your favorite 3D printing stories. If you want to change the cover image and story of your magazine, you can just tap and hold any item to promote it.

This isn’t just about news content, though. Flipboard also has a new partnership with Etsy, which lets you pull in items for sale on the handmade marketplace. This would let you pull in your favorite homey 3D objects from its store for your magazine, like this handy spoon rest.

A little Pinteresty, sure, but founder Mike McCue tells me that he still thinks the biggest business will be in ads (which includes revenue splits with, in full disclosure, publications like TechCrunch). The affiliate model is intriguing, though, and you can see how it could expand this type of affiliate relationship to other e-commerce sites.

Once you have your magazine going, you can share it to Facebook, Twitter and other social services. A new sidebar feature, marked by a red ribbon in the main interface, shows you all your subscriptions, your own magazines, and any notifications from other users interacting with you across the site (including your own magazines). It also shows you curated categories like “News,” “Business” and “By Our Readers” to further help discovery.

But the content search part will likely be the biggest cross-promotion driver. There’s now a search box at the top of each page, based on people, topic or hashtag. If you click through it you’ll get a Flipboard-style magazine format of all of your search results, which you can then browse through or add to your own magazines.

Stepping back from all the details, my biggest issue with the new version is that it commoditizes great design. Just like a rash of personalized homepage and “daily newspaper” web startups let any user curate anything — usually in meaningless ways —the Flipboard features are certainly going to lead to garbage user creations.

The company has thought that through pretty well, though. Popular user magazines will float to the top of the recommended sections. And those of us who create content for a living get some added features — beyond monetization, these include sidebar modules so readers can flip to different sections. These are currently based on RSS feeds, so TechCrunch readers will be able to sort by “Startup,” “Mobile,” “Venture” and other versions of our feed once we get this set up.

Overall, Flipboard is already delivering the usage numbers that we hope for from an aggregator. Monetization is starting to kick in as advertisers come to appreciate the superior mobile browsing experience.

The features in this new version, meanwhile, should only increase distribution, as readers discover more of our content and think of new ways to remix it to their own tastes. You can get it now in the App Store if you have an Apple device (support for other OSes coming later).

We’re pleased to announce John Donahoe, President and CEO of eBay, as a Disrupt NY speaker. Under his tutelage, eBay and its subsidiary PayPal have grown tremendously, with each company expecting to do $20 billion in 2013 mobile commerce.

Donahoe took eBay’s reins in 2008 after Meg Whitman’s departure. Since then, he’s managed to dramatically increase the company’s revenue and maintain its spot as a global leader in ecommerce. He’s an expert in his field and we’re very excited to have him speak at Disrupt NY.

With the conference just a month away, kicking off on April 27 at the Manhattan Center, he joins our growing list of speakers that currently includes Fred Wilson, Ben Lerer and Ron Conway among many others.

Tickets are currently available with the early bird discount ending on April 11. Of course you can snag a ticket for free by participating in the Hackathon.

Our sponsors help make Disrupt happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team here sponsors@techcrunch.com.

John Donahoe
eBay, President and CEO

John has been President and CEO of eBay Inc. since March 31, 2008. Under John’s leadership, the company has become a global commerce platform and payments leader, with revenue in 2012 of $14.1 billion. Across its eBay, PayPal and GSI Commerce platforms, the company enabled $175 billion of commerce in 2012, which represents about 18 percent of e-commerce worldwide and about 2 percent of global retail. The company also is a mobile commerce leader, with eBay mobile commerce volume of $13 billion in 2012, and PayPal mobile payments volume of $14 billion. The company is focused on enabling commerce as a partner — not a competitor — to sellers of all sizes, from entrepreneurs and small businesses, to global brands and retailers.

John joined eBay in March 2005 as President of eBay Marketplaces, responsible for all elements of eBay’s global ecommerce businesses. In this role, he focused on expanding eBay’s core business, which accounts for a large percentage of the company’s revenues. John also oversaw a number of strategic acquisitions, including Shopping.com, StubHub and classifieds sites, such as Gumtree. During his three-year tenure as President of Marketplaces, revenues and profits for the division doubled.

Prior to eBay, John spent more than 20 years at Bain & Company, a worldwide consulting firm based in Boston. Starting as an Associate Consultant, John rose to become the firm’s president and CEO in 1999, overseeing Bain’s 30 offices and 3,000 employees.

John received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from Dartmouth College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Additionally, John serves on the Board of Directors for eBay Inc. and Intel Corp.