Automattic, the company behind publishing platform WordPress.com, has sold $50 million in a secondary offering led by investment management firm Tiger Global. The sale will allow some early investors and employees to get cash in exchange for their shares, while adding another stakeholder in the company.

The share offering wasn’t necessary to raise funds for the company, according to Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. In a blog post, he wrote that the company is “healthy, generating cash, and already growing as fast as it can, so there’s no need for the company to raise money directly.” He also noted that the minority of stockholders who participated in the secondary sale continue to hold on to the vast majority of their shares.

Lee Fixel at Tiger Global led the investment, which follows other high-profile, late-stage deals that the firm has made recently. Those include investments in Eventbrite and SurveyMonkey. Tiger Global is also an investor in companies like Palantir, Square and Warby Parker, as well as Facebook and LinkedIn. With the purchase, Tiger will join existing investors in Automattic, such as Polaris Partners, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and The New York Times Company.

WordPress.com, of course, is the publishing platform (one might call it a CMS) that powers a number of high-profile sites, including the one you’re reading right now. WordPress (the open source project upon which WordPress.com is based*) is just about to celebrate its 10th anniversary on May 27 and will have meetups in cities across the world to celebrate.

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* Confused yet? This happens every time we write about WordPress, WordPress.com, or Automattic

Postmates is looking to expand its business and make mobile, on-demand deliveries a widespread thing throughout cities around the country — that we already know. The company has been operating in San Francisco for a while, and launched in Seattle about three months ago. But where will it land next?

All signs point to New York City.

Postmates has a mobile app that allows customers to get food from restaurants, groceries and even goods from retailers like the Apple Store or Nordstrom delivered within an hour for a low, fixed price. Thanks to a little scouring of the Internet and some clues that the company has left behind (as well as a photo from a local hipster tipster), we have reason to believe that the Big Apple will be the next city to have delicious lunches (or anything, really) delivered with just a few clicks of the Postmates mobile app.

For those of you in New York, don’t get too excited — yet. People who have downloaded the app there can’t quite use it yet, several of my friends sources have confirmed. That said, a tipster in New York swears that he saw a Postmates-branded bike courier tooling around the city, and sent along this photo. (Thanks, Jesus!*)

Anyway, if Postmates is about to launch in New York City, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise. Back when I talked to him about Seattle, Postmates CEO Bastian Lehmann had mentioned it as an ideal market for future expansion.

Oh yeah, and the startup has been trying to recruit couriers on Craigslist for about a month now. The company has also recently been looking to hire an operations manager in New York over the last few weeks.

Want more proof that an NYC launch is probably coming soon? Well, Lehmann is in New York City right now as we speak. Coincidence? We think not.

@ded No idea. I'm in New York. Want me to look into it or is someone on its way?—
Bastian Lehmann (@Basti) May 23, 2013

(For what it’s worth, he hasn’t responded to our requests for comment.)

In March, Postmates announced that it had raised $5 million in funding led by Founders Fund as it looks to expand. Other investors include Crosslink Capital, Matrix Partners, SoftTech VC, AngelPad, David Wu, Thomas Korte, Naval Ravikant, Russell Cook, Russel Simmons, Walter Lee, Andy McLoughlin, Scott Banister, Paige Craig, and Jawed Karim.

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* Tipster’s name was not actually Jesus.

Former Badoo COO and ex-Googler Ben Ling has joined Khosla Ventures, according to sources. Ling, who has held senior operations roles for a number of big companies in the mobile and Internet space, has been added to a growing team at Vinod Khosla’s venture firm. (Update: Khosla Ventures just confirmed Ling has joined, starting this week.)

Ling most recently served as COO of Badoo, where he was hired to oversee product, engineering, partnerships, and business operations at the company. Ling joined Badoo in May 2012, but he left after only about six months.

Prior to Badoo, Ling spent a number of years at Google, where his last role included overseeing images, videos, books, news, and finance as its senior director of search products and local business products. At YouTube, Ling was senior director of partnerships and platform, where he was responsible for music, movies, sports and news, as well as mobile, TV and API partnerships. In his first role at Google, he oversaw the company’s e-commerce products, including Google Checkout and Product Search.

At Facebook, he served as the director of Facebook Platform, working on developer relations at the fledgling social network. There he helped build Facebook Connect, which is the social network’s hook into a number of third-party websites.

In addition to his senior operations roles, Ling has also been an active angel investor and advisor to startups. Recent investments include Fab.com, Palantir, Square, PracticeFusion, and Quora. Ling has also held an advisory position at Pinterest and Pulse.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Ling told us that most of his experience as an entrepreneur has been in operations roles, helping companies like Google and Facebook scale their businesses both in terms of users and bringing in revenues. Meanwhile, over the last four years, he’s been working as an angel investor, identifying great products and teams and helping them to scale.

“In terms of thinking about my next steps, and thinking about what I could do next, I wanted to maximize the impact I could have by helping entrepreneurs to grow their businesses,” Ling said. He said that the opportunity at Khosla Ventures enables him to do that, since there are a lot of “parallels and similarities” to what he was doing as an angel investor — evaluating teams and talent, helping companies scale and with their hiring strategies.

Ling said that we can probably expect to see him make investments in a lot of the same areas that he’s worked in previously — that includes companies focused on e-commerce or shopping, developer networks, search, finance, and local. He’s also had some experience with three-sided ecosystem businesses, such as the Facebook platform’s network of users, developers and advertisers.

Of course, Ling isn’t the only operations specialist to join Khosla Ventures. His hire comes just a few months after former Square COO Keith Rabois joined the firm.

Part of the reason Khosla Ventures has been interested in bringing on entrepreneurs with that type of experience is that they can provide guidance for startups who need operational experience. Rabois, who is now 10 weeks in at Khosla Ventures, said, “Our organizing philosophy is to provide assistance to entrepreneurs and help them to build the most interesting companies they can… It’s about understanding what entrepreneurs need is less capital and more formative advice. Every time we evaluate a company we ask whether we can help this entrepreneur build something special.”

Both Ling and Rabois say that they’ve been impressed with the quality of entrepreneurs and the quality of the Khosla Ventures team as it works with those startups. With that in mind, Rabois said he’s really excited about building several big businesses as part of the Khosla Ventures team.

It was almost one year ago (to the day!) that my colleague Kim Mai-Cutler wrote our first story on Lyft, and how the company was going to offer some lower-priced competition to on-demand ride leader Uber in San Francisco. Now, 366 days later, Lyft is celebrating the anniversary of that launch with some huge news: It’s raised a $60 million round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz.

The new funding will give Lyft a huge shot in the arm as it plans to expand aggressively both in the U.S. and internationally, according to founder John Zimmer. And it will have Andreessen Horowitz to help, as a16z general partner Scott Weiss will be joining the board and the firm will be lending some of its operational experience to Lyft as it scales up.

“Andreessen Horowitz has demonstrated that they are the top VCs in the world to work alongside entrepreneurs and build real and established businesses,” Zimmer told me. “It’s great to work alongside someone like Scott, and Mark and Ben, who have built really large companies and are willing to roll up their sleeves and work alongside us.”

“This is why [Andreessen Horowitz] came together as an organizing principle. All of us have scaled companies,” Weiss said. As it pertains to Lyft and its growth moving forward: “Now it’s an execution play of bringing this out to the entire world. It’s about, ‘How do you bring in management talent and move faster than you thought you could?’ We’re going to put the full weight of the firm behind [Lyft] doing that.”

In addition to its new funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lyft is also confirming a $15 million round led by Founders Fund, which we reported on earlier this year. Altogether, the company has raised a total of about $83 million since being founded as Zimride in 2007. Along with Weiss and founders Zimmer and Logan Green, the Lyft board of directors also includes Founders Fund principal Geoff Lewis, as well as Raj Kapoor, who had invested in the company as managing director of Mayfield Fund.

30,000 Rides A Week

The funding comes as Lyft is already growing rapidly in all of its markets, including San Francisco, where it competes against ride share offerings from Uber and SideCar. There’s also growing adoption of taxi e-hail apps such as Flywheel and hybrid taxi-community app InstantCab. With mounting competition, Lyft has more than doubled its number of drivers in its launch market, and is still trying to keep up with demand.

The incredible growth that Lyft has shown is one thing that impressed Weiss and Andreessen, as they evaluated the company for investment. “Two months ago, they were doing 14,000 rides a week,” Weiss told me. “Now they’re doing 30,000 rides a week.”

Lyft is also seeing fast adoption in new markets. It launched service in Los Angeles in January, Seattle in March, and Chicago earlier this month. In each case, both the number of drivers and passengers who have signed on in the first several weeks of a new market has outpaced the market that preceded it.

With the new funding in place, Lyft plans to accelerate its expansion schedule. The company brought on Cherry co-founder Travis VanderZanden to lead operations and, with three or four launches under its belt, the team thinks it’s got its expansion playbook down. Lyft will be hiring in all aspects of its business — community, engineering, operations, and public policy — as it plans to scale globally. Yes, globally.

Safety First

While it plans to expand into a number of new markets, the Lyft team recognizes that there will be challenges on the regulatory front as it attempts to get regulators on board with the idea of on-demand ride-sharing services. Competitor SideCar has faced regulatory scrutiny in a number of new markets that it has launched in, including Austin, Philadelphia, and New York City.

So how does Lyft plan to convince regulators that its service should be allowed to operate? Safety is key.

“I think this is the year for a lot of that [regulation] to get ironed out,” Zimmer told me. “Our approach is and always will be to work together with regulators and stress what’s important, which is safety. I think technology can actually get us to a safer place.”

For Lyft, that includes background checks and driver safety checks. But the company goes above and beyond that, trying to hire drivers who are actually, you know, friendly and nice to talk to. And, of course, it ties everything back to an identity layer, requiring all drivers and passengers to connect to a Facebook account. That helps to ensure that, even if something does go wrong, Lyft has a way to identify both parties in the case of a ride gone bad.

Weiss admits that requiring someone’s real identity through Facebook Connect could limit the potential market in some ways, but it also builds a required level of trust between driver and passenger. Breaking that trust barrier is necessary when you’re talking about peer-to-peer services, and Lyft appears to have succeeded. For instance, more than 50 percent of Lyft passengers are women, Weiss notes.

So far, its safety record is one of the main reasons that Lyft has won over regulators in jurisdictions like California. And it’s a key part of Lyft’s plan to get regulators in upcoming expansion markets to allow ride sharing in their cities.

Airbnb for transportation?

Lyft has plenty of work ahead, Zimmer admits. But he’s confident that the company is on the right track to bring peer-to-peer rides to the world, and in doing so, fundamentally improve the transportation industry. About 80 percent of seats in cars are empty today, and Lyft wants to change that. The funding is just a small part of what will help get the company there, as Lyft is still on “page one” of a 100-page story, Zimmer says.

“For us, raising money is not what we set out to do,” Zimmer tells me. “We want to change the world and create a new form of transportation. Now we have all the ingredients we need to build out our community and make transportation more affordable and efficient.”

For Weiss, the idea of establishing a peer-to-peer marketplace around transportation was fundamentally different from what others in the space were doing and is part of what attracted him to Lyft’s model. “It wasn’t that Lyft was using smart phone technology to make existing transportation systems [like cabs and limos] better,” Weiss told me. “It was using the existing capacity of cars already on the road.”

The end result, they hope, will be a more efficient use of existing resources. In that way, Lyft reminds Weiss a whole lot of Airbnb, another company that Andreessen Horowitz made a big bet on. Will Lyft do to transportation what Airbnb did to the tourism and hospitality industry? Only time will tell, but the folks at Andreessen Horowitz sure hope so.

Becoming an investor is easier than it’s ever been, and yet the vast majority of people today aren’t making individual investments. To help get more people investing, Loyal3 has built a platform enabling consumers to invest in companies without paying transaction or management fees. And to meet that goal, the company has raised more money in an effort to democratize stock ownership.

Loyal3 brought on another $18 million in Series C financing, which was led by DNS-L3, an entity controlled by the business interests of Michael Pucker and Gigi Pritzker Pucker. Additional investors include former Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly and Loyal3 Chairman and CEO Barry Schneider, both existing investors in the company. Altogether, it’s now raised $45 million to make investing easy and accessible for regular investors.

Despite falling transaction and management fees, as well as wider availability of online tools for investing in stocks, only about 18 percent of people in the U.S. have made individual investments, according to Schneider. Part of the reason for that is the costs involved with making stock purchases, but part of it is also connected to the ease of use — or lack thereof — on most online trading platforms.

Loyal3 seeks to change that, by enabling its users to easily invest in brands that they know and recognize. It allows investors to purchase as little as $10 in stock for the top 50 brands on Facebook, as well as some other brands that the company works with.

Rather than having its users sort through various tickers or search for public companies themselves, Loyal3 provides visitors to its platform with the logos of brands they can invest in. Once they choose a brand they have an affinity for, it takes about three clicks to actually put money into those companies.

Being the curious dude I am, I tested out the platform for myself, putting $10 into a company I have an affinity for — AB InBev.* Sure enough, the process was drop-dead simple, even for someone like me, who tends to think he’s too dumb and poor to make individual investments.

And that is the point: Loyal3 makes it easy enough and cheap enough for basically anyone to buy stock. With a ridiculously low minimum purchase price and a simple purchasing interface, the company makes stock ownership accessible to pretty much anyone. In addition to individual purchases, individuals can choose to schedule monthly transactions to be automatically deducted from their bank accounts. There’s a minimum of $10 per investment, but a maximum of $2,500 per stock per month.

How can it provide this fee-free service? Loyal3 does it by getting brands to pay whatever transaction fees are associated with the trades. For them, giving common investors ownership is another form of brand marketing, and it creates greater affinity between the purchaser and the company itself. According to Schneider, people spend more, refer their friends more, and shop more often with companies they have direct ownership in.

From a capital markets perspective, the program also brings incremental demand for participating companies’ stock. While it won’t necessarily move markets, in the long term this type of program could help stabilize the price of certain stocks. Loyal3 doesn’t allow stock shorting, and it doesn’t lend shares to speculative investors who wish to short certain stocks. Schneider says it also provides a lower cost way for companies to manage retail shareholders.

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* I would have invested my $10 in a tech company like Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, or Google, but that would have been a HUGE CONFLICT OF INTEREST.

Sometimes, when a truly innovative startup is acquired by a larger company, innovation slows to a crawl. And other times, when an acquisition happens, a company gets the backup and investment it needs to keep on innovating. It seems like that latter case is true for Mailbox, which, two months after being acquired by Dropbox, is now ready to release its iPad app to the world.

Mailbox has been working on the app since well before the acquisition, testing out various form factors and iterations in an effort to get it just right. In a video interview last week, Mailbox founder Gentry Underwood showed us the app, explaining how the company reformatted its features specifically for the larger screen of the iPad. For one thing, the app works only in landscape mode, with a list of messages that have yet to be read on the left-hand side, and a preview pane so that users can read emails in full on the right.

“The iPad is an interesting design challenge,” Underwood told me. “It sits halfway between a mobile device and a laptop. Sometimes we use them like luxuriously large phones and other times we use them almost as laptop replacements.” As a result, that changes what people do with their email client.

“Our goal was to create an experience that was as fast and fluid for processing mail as you might do on a phone — so very quickly being able to go through and triage your messages like you can on Mailbox for iPhone,” he said. “But also, leaving enough real estate for those times when you might have a keyboard up… and you’re actually trying to use your iPad as you might use a laptop to actually get through messages in a more intentional way.”

The goal for Mailbox was to try to find a marriage between those situations that satisfied both conditions. To do that, Mailbox took advantage of the greater screen real estate to give users a greater view into the mail that they had to get through. It starts with landscape mode, which brings in both the ability to see which messages you have yet to read through, while also being able to view entire emails at once.

“A large number of people use these [devices] as laptop replacements, particularly people on the road a lot who want to take advantage of the lighter weight, the longer battery life, no need to plug it in during the day,” Underwood said. “For those people, we wanted to create an experience that was as good, or better, than they might find on their own laptops.”

To replicate the experience of those so-called road warriors, Underwood even went without a laptop for a while, living only with his mobile phone and tablet, as a way to “build empathy” for the mobile-only email user. While testing it for himself was helpful, Mailbox also relied on the Dropbox testing community to get feedback for the iPad app before release as well.

What the company learned was that just because it had more screen to work with, that didn’t mean it should add unnecessary clutter. Notably, next to the email list and the preview pane, Mailbox doesn’t also give a window into all of the different folders that you can pre-sort items into. Underwood said that the team had tested that out, but found the experience ultimately too busy. So, like the iPhone app, the iPad app hides the list of folders.

“We spent a fair amount of time trying to create an experience that was consistent with what people are used to today,” he said. Even so, the new app takes advantage of the bigger screen to enable longer-form composition, whether that means using the built-in touch-screen keyboard, or some sort of Bluetooth-enabled iPad accessory designed to make composing on the device even easier.

This is the first major release that Mailbox has had since its acquisition by Dropbox. Being part of the larger company means more infrastructure support, and Mailbox has hired a few new faces in engineering since the acquisition. Some of the other advantages include being able to take advantage of Dropbox’s support team, as well as its recruiting, operations, and administrative infrastructure.

While it’s great that Mailbox now has an app for iPhone and iPad, there are still other platforms for it to conquer. What comes next? Android? Desktop?

“We don’t really speak about the specific order of the future [road map], but I will say that people ask us often for an Android app. We hear often requests for a desktop app as well. We’re going as fast as we can to get Mailbox on as many device and get support for as many email providers as we can,” Underwood told me.

Great non-answer, Gentry! For all you non-iPhone or -iPad users, hold your horses while they work to get the app on more devices. In the meantime, check out the video and demo above to get a look at what you can expect from Mailbox for iPad — that is, if you haven’t downloaded it already.

Social networking and messaging firm Imo.im has an interesting new take on social networking, and it’s raised money to get more people on board! The funding was led by co-founder Georges Harik, who also just happened to be one of Google’s first 10 employees, and therefore is swimming in money.

The funding of Imo.im is designed to help it become a sort of next-generation social network. Today’s social networks are too focused on connecting you with people from work and high school and college. To your annoying neighbors and their pets. But the truth is, why would you just want to talk to people you already know?

This is the 21st century. Get with it. The new social network is all about finding new people you haven’t been introduced to and annoying them with your stupid status updates and teenage-and-pregnant baby pictures.

And so Imo.im, which started out as a platform for communicating with people on various messaging services but has evolved to become a social network in and of itself. Until recently, that was based on a “Meet New People” feature, but now users will be able to try to get to know one another with the addition of a thing called “broadcasts.”

With the Broadcasts feed, users will be given a channel to easily discover new people, information, and topics based on their own interests. Since Imo.im will learn about those interests in the least creepy way possible, it’ll be able to suggest people to you without you even having to make an explicit ask about things you have in common. They’ll be able to take and share photos into that feed, which will be broadcast out to other users.

Cloud encoding vendor Encoding.com launched Vid.ly a couple of years ago to provide video creators with a way to publish a single universal video URL and then have that content accessible on any device. Now it’s providing a way to monetize those videos, thanks to an integration with ad delivery platorm FreeWheel.

The idea behind Vid.ly is that Encoding.com does all the hard work of encoding it into as many video formats and renditions as necessary, then serving up the appropriate copy of the video depending on which device was accessing it. In addition to transcoding, it also provided all of the storage, video player technology, device detection, streaming, and analytics needed by video creators. Customers could simply connect with the Vid.ly API and have a single universal URL created for them.

All of that’s great, especially for brands and agencies and marketers who wish to make their videos playable for all audiences on every PC, mobile phone, or tablet. But what Vid.ly didn’t provide (until now) was a way to monetize all of those videos. Hence, the partnership and integration with FreeWheel.

By integrating with FreeWheel’s ad-serving platform, Vid.ly will be able to provide all the same convenience and reach to publishers, but it will also enable them to monetize those videos across all those devices. By connecting with Encoding.com’s user interface or API, when a video is requested, Vid.ly will pass along user info to the FreeWheel ad server and pass along targeted ads along with the video. Pre-rolls, mid-rolls and post-rolls, as well as banner overlays, will all be supported.

Encoding.com has raised $4.5 million since being founded in 2008. While Vid.ly is a growing piece of its business, the company is still primarily focused on providing cloud encoding services to a growing number of publishers moving their content online.

Food trucks aren’t exactly new, but most only have one specific type of cuisine — even if that cuisine just happens to be all the latest rage in molecular-gastro Indian-Irish fusion. Not only that, but you’re often stuck waiting in a long line to order and pay, then waiting some more for your food to be ready.

EAT Club, which is launching in private beta today, has a unique spin on the way that users get lunch. The service hopes to get rid of all the hassles around waiting in line, paying, and waiting for your food, all with a convenient food truck that serves a variety of foods, and a mobile app to handle ordering and payment.

Over the last few years, EAT Club has served lunchers on the Peninsula with a variety of different food choices, but now it has made its was up to San Francisco, where it will serve startup kids and other hungry office workers. And it’s coming here with a food truck specially designed to provide eaters with a variety of awesome food choices.

EAT Club’s food truck will have a variety of dishes from multiple restaurants available all in the same truck, giving customers a selection of cuisines to choose from. Charter restaurants participating include Bar Tartine, Nopalito, City Smoke House BBQ, and Onigilly, among others. Altogether, EAT Club has more than 30 restaurants signed up so far, and will have options from at least three available on any given day.

How did EAT Club get those restaurants on board? Partly through the food truck itself, which is designed to provide the best experience for customers. A gutted-out old school bus, the EAT Club truck has been renovated with mobile ovens for hot foods and refrigerating units for cold foods. The end result is that all dishes are loaded into the truck right from the kitchen, so that when a customer picks up his food, it’s kept at the desired temperature.

So the food is great, but what about the service? EAT Club handles that with a mobile app that allows you to choose among a bunch of different food options. It provides you with details about why the dishes were picked — EAT Club has a food curator, natch — and more information about the restaurant.

Once you’ve found something you like, you just click to order and the app automatically charges your credit card. After that, you’re free to head down to the truck at your convenience and just pick up your food. No waiting, no fuss.

To start, EAT Club will have its food truck parked around the Financial District and SOMA neighborhoods in San Francisco, hoping to appeal to office workers downtown who don’t have lunch provided to them every day. The app is available now in private beta, as the company tries to measure demand and make sure that it’s got the right amount of food ready for new users.

If you’re a big huge e-commerce business, your time is money. Literally. Amazon.com made $61 billion last year, which boils down to $167 million a day, $7 million an hour, and $116,000 a minute. Every minute counts, which is why you cant afford to have your website go down or be slow, even for just a little while.

That’s why Los Angeles-based content delivery startup EdgeCast launched a new product called EdgeCast Transact, provides a dedicated CDN built just for e-commerce companies, with all the features that e-commerce companies need. EdgeCast Transact is built on top of the company’s new Commerce Acceleration Network, which is built to be PCI-compliant and enable acceleration and optimization of e-commerce pages.

While a number of CDNs tout features that e-commerce websites crave, like application acceleration, page optimization, and small-object delivery, EdgeCast is the only one that has broken its e-commerce offering out and put it on its own dedicated network infrastructure. And the company has spent the last year designing and testing out this purpose-built network for e-commerce providers so that they don’t have to share any infrastructure with media companies or social networks or whatever.

That means that e-commerce companies won’t have to worry if there’s a DDOS attack against a media company, or a surge in traffic during the Super Bowl at a social networking site, or whatever. The network is also built to be fully redundant and have all sorts of failover and elastic provisioning to handle holiday traffic spikes and the like.

For clients, that’s like not just buying a Rolls Royce, but having your own private highway to drive it on. At least, that’s what EdgeCast president James Segil says.

Anyway, in addition to having their own private infrastructure, EdgeCast Transact is designed to provide secure sessions between the origin and end user. It also has mobile device detection and front-end optimization built in, to ensure the best performance regardless of the platform or device someone’s using to access the site.

E-commerce companies benefit from also having access to a dedicated customer support team and “white-glove service,” which Segil says is needed for most of those customers. It’s also going to be updated with the needs of business customers in mind — which means e-commerce business cycles, code freezes during the holidays and other busy shopping seasons.

EdgeCast continues to win business in the CDN market, with more than 6,000 customers. Those clients include some big names, like Twitter, Hulu, Pinterest, Etsy, and Tumblr. (Don’t worry, Yahoo is a client too.) The company now has about 260 employees, most of which are in the United States… Although it’s been expanding its footprint with sales and support internationally.

You remember Snow Fall, don’t you? It was that awesome interactive reporting piece by The New York Times that everyone talked about for a week.

It was called “the future of online journalism.” It was praised as a way for The New York Times to courageously battle back against online upstarts like Buzzfeed and their non-serious cat spreads. Or to not change the company’s fortunes at all.

It even won a Webby! (Oh yeah, and a Pulitzer.)

The New York Times spent months and had an entire team working on the creation of Snow Fall, and it shows. But what if I told you that you could recreate the same interactive experience in just about an hour? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

Well, The New York Times wouldn’t.

Cody Brown, co-founder of interactive web design tool Scroll Kit, did just that.

He recreated the Snow Fall piece using Scroll Kit to show that you didn’t need an army of developers or designers to create the same type of interactive storytelling. In fact, the tools exist today to build other compelling narratives that take advantage of the combination of text, and video, and images.

To show how easy it was, Brown recorded a video of the process, showing how a user could create the same type of experience in under an hour. And he uploaded it to YouTube, and posted it to the Scroll Kit website. There, he introduced it this way:

“The NYT spent hundreads of hours hand-coding ‘Snow Fall.’ We made a replica in an hour.”

The video lived there for about a month, Brown tells me, before receiving a letter from The New York Times legal team, demanding that the video be taken down. After consulting with Scroll Kit’s legal counsel, the team complied with the takedown request, kind of. They actually set the video to private on YouTube so that no one could see it.

But they kept the line about making a replica of Snow Fall on the website. Because, well, it was true.

It wasn’t long before another C&D nastygram from The New York Times arrived, demanding that they not only delete the video from YouTube — which they eventually did — but that they remove any reference to The New York Times from their website.

From Scroll Kit’s perspective, the video was only meant as a way to instruct others about how easy it can be to build a compelling interactive experience, not as a way to aid and abet terrorism copyright infringement.

Brown said the Scroll Kit team was “super excited” to see Snow Fall released and the amazing reception to it. They had been been working on their tools for longer than the NY Times had been working on Snow Fall, and saw it as a validation of their startup. But at the same time, it also represented the inequality between publications that can afford to create interactive stories and those that can’t.

“It’s become a symbol of the potential of journalism, but also the barrier to how something like that could be made,” Brown told me.

If the knock against Snow Fall was that only someplace like The New York Times can afford to create something like that, Brown believes Scroll Kit is the tool that would get costs down enough for smaller organizations and independents to enable a whole new set of unique web experiences.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the legal resources to fight The New York Times — Brown admits that much. But for now, the tiny startup is holding fast and keeping The New York Times reference on its website, and have told the Grey Lady as much.

Unfortunately, she is not amused. She is offended! Peep her legal team’s most recent response, from Senior Counsel Richard Samson:

Dear Mr. Brown:

We are offended by the fact that you are promoting your tool, as a way to quickly replicate copyright-protected content owned by The New York Times Company. It also seems strange to me that you would defend your right to boast about how quickly you were able to commit copyright infringement:

The NYT spent hundreds of hours hand-coding “Snow Fall” We made a replica in an hour.

If you wouldn’t mind using another publication to advertise your infringement tool, we’d appreciate it.

Sincerely,

Richard Samson

Real-time parking startup ParkMe wants to help find you parking — in real-time. The company, which originally started out on the Web, has been making a big push behind mobile apps, which is really smart, because most times when you’re looking for parking, you’re not on a PC, but you have a smartphone nearby.

There was just one problem — this app to find parking spots in real-time was only available on iOS, so there were a whole bunch of people who couldn’t use it. And their real-time parking finding powers were thus severely impacted. ParkMe is trying to correct that, with the release of an Android app that provides parking help to even the most helpless among those seeking to find a place to put their cars.

Android users will not only be able to find the closest parking for where they are now or where they happen to be going, but they’ll also be able to find the cheapest parking. And somewhere in between, maybe even the best value — the mythical “cheapest parking which is not so far away from their destination.”

The app accomplishes that by showing relevant parking rates, hours of operation, payment types, and — for those of you who want to know exactly how many free spots are available in the potential parking garage of your choice — real-time occupancy information for garages and street parking.

Oh, and did I mention the Android app was designed with the new Google maps API? Yeah, that too.

ParkMe CEO and co-founder Sam Friedman told me that the company wanted to make sure the experience on iOS was finished before moving on to another platform. In part, that meant getting as much real-time parking data as possible. ParkMe is available in 28,000 locations, 1,800 cities, and 32 countries around the globe. That comes after it has struck partnerships with Amco and Amano McGann, which are two of the largest parking providers around.

ParkMe has raised funding from Los Angeles-based private equity firm Angeleno Group, as well as IDG Ventures and Fontinalis Partners, the investment firm co-founded by Ford Executive Chairman William Clay Ford Jr.

If the last few years have all been about building compelling mobile-first or mobile-only experiences, the latest trend seems to be bringing those experiences back to the web. (Just look at Instagram!) Anyway, with that in mind, social TV startup Dijit became the latest to follow this lead, with the launch of NextGuide Web.

The new web experience is kind of like Dijit’s NextGuide app, in that it helps people search for and discover new shows they’d like to watch, while providing ways to easily get alerts and set notifications for shows and movies when they come on. That includes shows that are on both live and on the web, providing a way to manage both traditional TV and streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

The site, like the app, is highly personal — when making recommendations, it takes into account shows that you’ve liked, either in NextGuide itself or on Facebook. It also allows you to see what shows and movies your friends have liked or shared, giving you a sense of what’s cool or popular.

But it also includes the necessary search and browse functionalities necessary for “social discovery” apps. And while it hooks into a whole lot of online services — like Amazon Prime, Amazon Instant Video, iTunes, Hulu Plus, and, of course, Netflix — it also lets you know when your favorite shows and movies are going to be on TV.

NextGuide Web allows users to create watchlists and queue up shows they will want to watch later. And it will remind users when a show is on live TV, or when a new episode is added to a streaming service. For those who have DirecTV, it’ll even allow those users to record to their DVR with one click. (Dijit CEO Jeremy Toeman says other cable TV providers will be added as time goes on.)

Those who are already users of the NextGuide iPad app can log in with their account credentials or Facebook Connect right now. But for others, the Web experience is being launched in a closed beta, with Dijit sending out new invitations each week.

NextGuide is just one product that Dijit has rolled out over the years, but it’s the one that the company is (obviously) most focused on. It also still supports the Dijit Remote app. Oh, and not too long ago it acquired Miso and all of its products.

Last fall, fashion commerce startup Monogram launched an iPad app that was aiming to be kind of like a mobile, shoppable magazine for those hip to fashion. It had all the makings of a great mobile commerce app: It looked good, it was easy to use, and it allowed viewers to buy all the latest fashions really easily.

But it didn’t catch on the way that the team had hoped, according to founder Leo Chen. One of the reasons he believes the app didn’t resonate with users was that “the motivation to share individual products wasn’t strong enough.” And there just wasn’t enough content. With the launch of Monogram 2.0, the startup hopes to solve both of those problems. So the team went back to the drawing board.

Rather than position Monogram strictly as a platform for consuming content and maybe buying some stuff, the team decided to leverage the huge existing world of fashion bloggers to help create and share content through its platform.

As a result, the new Monogram provides a full web editing tool suite, which will allow bloggers to publish and share their favorite fashions with others. Bloggers can create posts, or full “magazines,” of all their favorite content, which readers can browse or subscribe to. Each post provides shoppable links to products either featured in, or similar to, the clothes and accessories that are being shown off on the page.

For bloggers, the simplicity of the Monogram platform comes primarily in the tools that it provides for enabling easy purchases through their pages. Not only is the publishing part of the tool beautiful and easy to use, but the ability to add clickable items for purchase is just drop-dead simple. Rather than having to scour the web for the items they want to add, and putting in affiliate links, the Monogram platform provides an integrated search functionality within the platform, which scours the web for the products bloggers wish to share.

On the viewing side, the new version of Monogram enables easy to read and share versions of bloggers’ posts and magazines. Monogram is built as a web app with responsive design that can be viewed on PC, tablet or mobile device. The startup has also built a native app with all the same viewing features. However, users who wish to publish need to do so from the web.

Individuals who are logged in can repost the content of others, kind of like you can do on Tumblr — but all links go back to the original post. The idea is to build a sense of community within the platform, but also to provide the original publisher with the credit for creating the post.

The company is working on adding more features for bloggers — like, for instance, advanced reporting. It’s also working on figuring out an affiliate model so that they can get paid for the products that are sold thanks to their magazines. Chen tells me that he’d like to see the bulk of affiliate revenues go to the bloggers, while the company will take a small cut.

Monogram can afford to do that, he says, because the company’s R&D team is based in Shanghai, which means a low burn rate. The company has raised about $1.25 million led by Quest Venture Partners, with participation from Great Oaks VC, Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan’s Initialized Capital, 500 Startups, Chinese seed fund Innovation Camp, Yintai.com CEO Robin Liao, Rapportive CEO Rahul Vohra, Decide.com’s Brian Ma, and angel investors Jared Kopf Christina Brodbeck.

Just about six months ago, Uber won a big battle with D.C. regulators to have its on-demand car service approved for operation within the nation’s capital. But new regulations from the D.C. Taxi Commission could severely hamper the company’s ability to offer low-cost services in the district.

Last December, the D.C. City Council voted to approve a legal framework that legitimized mobile e-hail applications there, as long as those applications followed certain rules. It defined a new class of for-hire vehicles (taxis and sedans) that could use mobile apps as a way to connect drivers and passengers.

The unanimous City Council vote followed a year of negotiations with local regulators to get its services approved for usage within the district. (The very public fight even included a sting operation by D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton in which he took an Uber and then handed over a variety of fines to the driver.) Still, after a whole lot of back-and-forth, it seemed like Uber was finally in the clear.

New regulations approved by the D.C. Taxi Commission last week could be a setback in the progress that Uber has made there, however. Among other things, those regulations would require mobile e-hail applications to integrate with the payment processor that is used within local taxicabs. That’s a non-starter for Uber, which currently has its own payment processor for in-app payments, and it could mean the end of UberTAXI in the city.

Another set of rules, which is being considered now, would ban cars that weighed less than 3,200 pounds. That would keep Uber from offering fuel-efficient hybrid vehicles, which would affect its ability to offer its lower-cost UberX service there. With the possibility of UberTAXI and UberX being shut down, the company would only have its legacy black car and SUV businesses in the city.

Other regulations that Uber disagrees with would require Uber and other e-hail providers to hand over data related to rides that were booked using mobile applications. According to Uber, another rule could give the Taxi Commission the ability to choose whether or not apps are approved for usage in the city, and unilaterally keep Uber and other services from operating there.

For its part, Uber has tried to once again mobilize its users to reach out to D.C. officials and petition the local government. It’s asked users to email and tweet at Mayor Vincent C. Gray, and has put up a petition on Change.org. That petition has already received more than 2,500 signatures, with 5,000 needed.

Secret sharing app Whisper has seen tremendous growth since launching last fall. But until recently, it’s only been available on iOS. With a launch on Android’s Google Play store this week, Whisper is going to be available to a whole bunch of new users, particularly in its key demographic of young adults aged 18-24.

Whisper, in case you don’t know, is an ultra-hot app designed for easily sharing secrets anonymously with other users. It’s like PostSecret for mobile phones, allowing users to upload or search for images online and then adding text messages on top of them. Whispers are shared with all users of the app, and the most popular are surfaced based on the number of hearts or responses received from other users.

In addition to public responses, Whisper users can also privately message each other, as long as they’re willing to pay for the feature. That not only keeps the amount of marketing down, but it also provides a way for users to connect with other users that they wouldn’t have otherwise known.

The app continues to grow phenomenally fast. When we checked in with Whisper, users were viewing about a billion page views on the app per month. That’s up to about 1.5 billion per month now, according to co-founder Michael Heyward. Messaging on the app, which makes up the bulk of Whisper’s revenues, is growing even faster. Heyward said there’s essentially zero churn among users who sign up — and pay — for messaging.

“Any time there’s a new person that enlists in that feature, we grow it at a more exponential rate,” he told me. As a result, there are more than millions of messages being passed around privately among users.

While Whisper has seen pretty fantastic growth over the last several weeks, being on iOS limited the app’s addressable market. That’s especially true since Whisper’s most important user base — those between the ages of 18 and 24 — tend to overindex on Android devices. As a result, Heyward believes that its iOS app could only access approximately 40 percent of its most important audience.

With that in mind, the team worked around the clock to get its Android app released. It initially started work on the app about six weeks ago, looking to replicate all the features and functionality of its popular iOS app.

The Android app first hit Google Play earlier this week and received about 50,000 downloads in the first 48 hours — all without any real promotion from the company. More importantly, the engagement levels with early Android users have been on par with or better than iOS usage. For instance, about 40 percent of initial Android users have created Whispers already.

Whisper has raised $3 million in funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from investors like Trinity Ventures, Shoedazzle founder Brian Lee, and Flixster’s Joe Greenstein. The company now has 14 employees, but Heyward says they’re looking to add a few more hires over the coming weeks.

Social analytics startup Awe.sm has been growing quickly and getting a lot of interest from brands that want to use its platform for measuring the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. With that in mind, the company has hired a new CEO, industry veteran Fred McIntyre.

It’s been a long time since we checked in with Awe.sm. The company, which started out as a link-shortener but quickly transitioned to focus on measuring the influence of various social sharing activities, raised a Series A round of funding about 18 months ago.

Since then, the company has been quietly tweaking its business model, moving from a platform primarily used by developers to track social sharing data, to one used by brands and marketers. That shift came about at the request of various agencies that were looking to get a deeper look at their earned media through social networks.

Awe.sm provides them with a way to track the value of individual tweets, likes, and pins, as well as their effects on traffic, page views, and sales conversions. That gives marketers insights and measurement to determine the effectiveness and ROI of social media campaigns which they never really had before. Clients include companies like Zynga, Playdom, Topspin Media, Maker Studios, and Groupon.

Anyway, with that new direction (or should we say, new opportunity?), Awe.sm was going beyond just being a pure technology company, and it was looking for someone who would help work with brands and advertisers and agencies. And in that search, it found former CBS Interactive and AOL exec Fred McIntyre.

McIntyre was most recently SVP of CBSi’s music group, which includes brands like Last.fm, MP3.com, and Radio.com. Under his leadership, those brands were consolidated into a single unit and the group acquired lyrics database Metrolyrics.com. Prior to that, he had held various executive roles at AOL, including SVP of business development, as well as overseeing the company’s Video and Music divisions at different times.

According to Awe.sm co-founder Jonathan Strauss, the decision to bring in a veteran executive to run things became necessary as the company began scaling up. Taking the Awe.sm platform and packaging it up for social media marketers meant growing the business, growing the team, managing people, and selling to brands and agencies — all of which left him feeling spread a little too thin. While McIntyre takes the reins, Strauss will take over as head of product management.

For his part, McIntyre was interested in the opportunity to start off on the ground floor of an emerging new industry. After being part of streaming music pioneer Spinner, as well as heading up AOL Video in the mid-to-late aughts, he said he’s used to seeing new markets emerge. Being there for the inevitable growth of a social media marketing business was of huge interest.

According to McIntyre, social media marketing makes up about 8 percent of marketing budgets today, and are expected to grow to about 12 percent by the end of the year, representing a huge opportunity for growth. Awe.sm, he believes, will be a part of that growth, as it provides better tracking than competitive products.

It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for startups in the so-called “sharing economy” to take heat from regulators who seek to hold them to the same business standards as incumbent businesses. The latest company to come under fire from regulators is peer-to-peer car-sharing startup RelayRides, which received a cease-and-desist notice from New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS).

The DFS has charged RelayRides with “false advertising and violations of insurance law,” which it says could put the public at risk. Along with the cease and desist, the department has issued a “scam alert” due to intricacies in New York insurance law that could leave those who use car-sharing services like RelayRides liable in the case of an accident.

In short, the DFS warns that the insurance from RelayRides’ provider Hudson Insurance Company may not cover damages that occur while a car is being rented through the service. Furthermore, participating in these types of car-sharing programs could be a violation of their existing policies and could result in the cancellation of their insurance.

As a result, RelayRides has agreed to suspend new rentals in the state while it tries to work with the department on the issue. In a blog post, CEO Andre Haddad said the company would honor existing reservations in the meantime.

The suspension of service was announced one day after the startup acquired San Francisco-based competitor Wheelz. That acquisition was meant to add some technology in the form or proprietary hardware that could be used to make car sharing more easily accessible.

RelayRides isn’t the only “sharing economy” startup that has come under fire recently. The cease-and-desist against the car-sharing startup comes at the same time that ride-sharing startup SideCar is coming under regulatory scrutiny from local officials in Austin, Philadelphia and New York City. Airbnb also is being looked at more closely in major metropolitan cities like New York, where half of its rentals are deemed illegal.

Well, that was fast: Just about a week ago, Microsoft released a YouTube app for its Windows Phone 8 platform. And today, YouTube is telling Microsoft remove it, saying that the app violates its terms of service.

YouTube Director of Global Platform Partnerships Francisco Varela sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Todd Brix, GM of Windows Phone Apps, demanding that the his company take down the Microsoft-authored app. The letter claims that the application allows users to download videos from YouTube, while also stripping ads from the videos that it displays. It also shows videos that have been restricted from playback on certain platforms — like when a major media company doesn’t give YouTube the right to display videos on mobile phones or tablets.

All of those actions violate YouTube’s Terms of Service and API Terms of Service, which has led it to ask Microsoft to disable existing downloads. The app is also confusing to users because it uses YouTube branding and trademarks despite being created by a third party, the company claims. Due to all of this, YouTube says it’s giving Microsoft a week, until Wednesday, May 22, to withdraw the application.

YouTube says more than a million channels earn revenue through its partner program, including thousands which make more than six figures a year. The letter argues that Microsoft’s app strips them of the ability to monetize on the Windows Phone 8 app. It also violates their ability to decide where and how their content is displayed on which devices.

For its part, Microsoft made the unprecedented decision to author an app on its own after YouTube refused to devote any of its resources to supporting Windows Phone devices with an approved native app. But YouTube points to its own HTML5 standard web experience as an alternative for users with devices running the Microsoft mobile operating system.

YouTube’s live offering took a big step forward today, with the announcement that access to the feature will soon be available to a large number of its partners. While YouTube Live was previously only available to a handful of handpicked channels and partners, the feature will now be rolled out to any YouTube channel in good standing with more than 1,000 subscribers.

The opening up of YouTube Live to more creators comes two years after it first announced the feature. But it also is being rolled out after YouTube has had some serious stress testing on the product, including live streaming of the 2012 Olympics and the big Red Bull dude-jumping-from-space thing.

Now open to more users, the ability to stream live video could change the way that YouTube creators communicate with audiences, as they’re finally able to step beyond the current on-demand paradigm of uploading videos to the site. Now, they’ll be able to schedule live events and launch impromptu live streams to be shared with their subscribers.

To determine eligibility, creators should check their Account Features page for an “Enable” button to sign up for Live. YouTube creators who qualify will get live transcoding in the cloud and the ability to stream multiple camera angles.

YouTube, meanwhile, will take care of all the hard work on the back end to get those live streams to as many devices as possible. YouTube uses adaptive bit-rate streaming to power the feature, giving viewers access to the high-quality video available, regardless of whether they’re watching on a PC, mobile phone or tablet.