TinyTap is a new iPad application designed for kids which introduces a different angle on the “record-your-own-voice” storybooks craze, by offering a playable book or game you and your kids can customize with your own photos, camera shots, music, narration, and more. The resulting creations can then be shared with family and friends. And, for a little inspiration, the built-in TinyTap store offers a collection of pre-made games which kids can customize with their own voice and actions.

The app is targeted at 4+ and up, so I couldn’t really enlist my in-house kid app beta tester (aka my 2-year old kid) to give it a rundown. But in testing it myself, I have to admit that I’m not 100% convinced they’ve nailed it on the user interface. For example, some of things you can add to your story, like photos and questions, are centered as thumbnails within the application’s design dashboard. Meanwhile, the add music option is oddly hovering above next to another add photo button, the sharing option and an edit button. It’s a layout that doesn’t quite make sense.

That’s too bad because if TinyTap’s workflow was more streamlined and simplified, it would be easier for them to add additional elements to the story/game design process.

That being said, TinyTap is still a lot better than much of the kids’ apps crapware out there in the iTunes App Store. And it’s hard not to fall in love with the concept at the very least. Instead of burning up brain cells with the mind-numbing games out there, TinyTap enables kids to become game creators, not just players. 

The idea immediately reminded me of Kodu, Microsoft’s visual programming language for kids, which allows them to create PC and Xbox games – and more importantly, helps them to start thinking like a programmer. But Kodu is not only for different types of platforms, it’s for a slightly older child, too.

The bigger concept with TinyTap is that it could potentially become an entry-level tool for game development, which starts kids young, allowing them to wrap their little minds around the “if/then/else” concepts that go into process of game creation. The building blocks are already there: e.g., if you touch the nose in the picture when asked, you’re right and can go to the next question, but if you get it wrong, the game says “try again.”

There are a ton of DIY app building tools for adults, so it’s great to see someone thinking about building a platform for kids, too.

TinyTap is an Israeli-based company, co-founded in January 2012 by UX designers Yogev Shelly (formerly of Rounds.com) and another (who can’t disclose his name right now, as he’s still employed elsewhere). The team is based in Tel-Aviv and is currently looking to raise.

The app is a free download in iTunes here.

MoPub, an ad serving startup for smartphone apps, is announcing a new way for its publishers to offer their inventory to advertisers — a private marketplace limited to select publishers and advertisers.

Basically, the market creates a more direct relationship, where publishers get more control and predictable pricing, while advertisers get early access. Advertisers will get first look a publisher’s inventory — MoPub compares the marketplace to a eBay’s Buy It Now model, where buyers can skip the auction process and just purchase an item at a set price (in this case, an ad impression). They also get access to special data like demographics, geography, and in-app purchase history.

MoPub was founded by former AdMob and Google employees, and its investors include AdMob-backer Accel.

When I spoke CEO Jim Payne last year, he compared MoPub’s ad serving technology, which helps publishers manage a mix of advertising from a number of sources, to desktop ad companies like DoubleClick and AdMeld, but dealing with the specific issues of mobile. Similarly, Payne says the private market is similar to marketplaces for desktop ad impressions, but it’s dealing with the specific data points that are interesting to mobile advertisers, like latitude/longitude coordinates. Among MobPub customers, Payne predicts the marketplace this will be of most interest to “large publishers with high-quality inventory.”

The company has been testing the marketplace in private beta mode, but now it’s opening it up to more publishers and advertisers. The next step, Payne says, is to make it more sophisticated about what data gets passed to advertisers.

To find out more, you can email info@mopub.com.

Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company’s Kickstarter project skyrocketed from $10,000 in funding before stepping on the Disrupt stage, to a current $220,000.

This is big, considering that Disrupt is a web/software conference and a hardware startup went all the way to the very end. Even Michael Arrington was impressed, which says quite a bit. But none were more impressed or intrigued than myself, which is why I wrangled the Incident guys together backstage and begged and pleaded to play the gTar.

Kindly, they obliged. I have no experience playing the guitar whatsoever, and my greatest claim to musical fame would be completing Free Bird on expert in Guitar Hero. Now, I won’t say my rendition of Blackbird a la gTar is the best in the world, but for having absolutely no practice or experience, my few moments with the hardware should be a testament to the gTar’s potential.

I also spoke with the founders about the difficulties of distribution, and more importantly, music licensing. Eventually the gTar app will come with a content store, from which you can buy different songs. For now however, this is a bare bones iteration that is sure to improve over time.

If you move now, you can get the gTar on Kickstarter for $50 off the expected retail price, at just $399.

Exec, a mobile app that instantly gets people to do your errands, has raised $3.3 million, according to an SEC filing. The company’s co-founder Justin Kan, who is also behind Justin.tv, Twitch.tv and SocialCam, says he’s not ready to disclose investors yet, except to say that there are around 25 different individuals in the round. The filing only shows Exec’s team on it, so it’s hard to tell who the firms or angels in the round are.

What’s Exec? It’s kind of comparable to TaskRabbit, because you can call on people to run your errands from an app. But Exec doesn’t require a bidding process and it calls up ‘Execs,’ or people to do your tasks, instantaneously. It also has a flat rate of $25 an hour. Exec covers all sorts of errands — deliveries, chores, cleaning, even art. One ‘Exec,’ who cleaned my house once, has also coached YC founders on their pitches for Demo Day. Seriously.

“This money is for building out the San Francisco Bay Area market,” Kan said.

Belly, the Chicago-based loyalty platform which just closed its $10 million Series B from Andreessen Horowitz earlier this month, is today announcing a pretty significant milestone: its 1 millionth check-in. The startup allows customers to check-in to a location using a physical loyalty card or mobile app which they scan via a consumer-facing iPad installed at point-of-sale. By doing so, customers collect points that can later be redeemed for unique rewards tailored specifically for the business in question.

The company has been growing fast, and CEO Logan LaHive tells us that in some of Belly’s locations, there have been more Belly check-ins within its first month of being up-and-running, than the total number of Foursquare check-ins the business has seen to date.

“I’m not here to make outlandish statements,” says LaHive, referring to this impressive metric. “Some stores are more active and engaged than others, so it would be ridiculous for me to say 100% of locations. But in our active locations, they’re surpassing all-time Foursquare check-ins in their first month.”

For those unfamiliar with Belly’s operations, the now 50 plus-person team works with each business to develop custom and unique digital loyalty programs for retailers’ stores. Merchants pay a monthly subscription, and Belly provides an iPad, physical cards and key chain tags, the consumer-facing mobile apps, marketing materials, and a backend analytics system. For consumers, the idea is that Belly could eventually grow large enough to replace all the different loyalty cards cluttering up customers’ wallets.

Given that the startup works directly with the businesses in question, very much one-on-one, some may wonder if Belly is hard to scale.

“That’s a question we hear often, particularly from folks out in the Valley,” says LaHive. “Look, loyalty in general is not a new concept. There are a lot of competitors out there in the space trying to build an app with three guys in a garage and trying to scale it to all small business owners. But we’ve found that’s not the way this business works,” he says.  ”Loyalty is successful when it’s built on relationships. In order for us to really build and sustain that with a business over time, it takes a hands-on approach. We’re building and staffing a team that can support that.”

The company is currently up-and-running in 1,500 locations across the U.S., including recently added markets of New York and Boston, plus Chicago, Austin, Madison, Milwaukee, D.C., Phoenix and Miami. LaHive says that they’re growing at a rate of about 100 locations per week.

While some new startups are hesitant to reveal their metrics early on, Belly gladly shares practically everything they have on file. The company’s over 200,000 users are delivering 10,000 check-ins on average per day. A third of Belly’s users check in to more than one business, 55% have checked in more than once, and 22% have checked in more than five times.

It took Belly 166 days to reach its first 100,000 check-ins, 27 more days to reach 200,000, and is now seeing around 100,000 check-ins every eight days. Around 2,000 to 3,000 new users are added per day to the service, and customers have redeemed over 14,000 rewards since the company’s launch in August 2011.

Belly has nearly $13 million in total funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightbank, and others. The company is now working to transition to HTML5 for its apps, and is planning aggressive expansions to new markets, thanks to the recent infusion of capital.

To any member of the tech media, Techmeme is the first site you visit in the morning, and the last site you check before bed. It’s a thermometer of today’s news, with more context per headline than any single news source can offer. This is the beauty of aggregation, which some more traditional media outlets frown upon.

But founder and CEO Gabe Rivera has been doing this since 2004, and has incredible insight into the differences between old media and the young guns. I grabbed him backstage during Disrupt NYC 2012 after his panel on the tech media to see how he felt about new media’s dependance on sources like The New York Times, the myth of objectivity, the difference between click bait and link bait (if there is one), and his personal source preference when he sits down with a cup of coffee to read the day’s news.

“In the area we cover, I think we could do pretty well without [traditional media],” said Rivera. “It’s a very artificial experiment but if they disappeared overnight, I think that the remaining tech sites would cover everything just fine. I think some of the financial stories would be the exception to that, but all these blogs would reorganize very quickly to cover that.”

But one of the most glaring differences between new and traditional media is their views on objectivity. While old media holds true to a bias-less existence, blogs offer news through the filter of an expert, injecting opinion when necessary. Rivera believes that the beauty of aggregation (also new media) is that you can offer both point A and point B almost simultaneously and adjacently so the reader has as much context as they desire.

In the interview, Rivera also discusses the difference between link bait and click bait, and how Twitter makes it really simple to disguise a story within the headline.

Rivera said that his personal preference changes based on the content itself. Some days he doesn’t read very much news at all, despite the fact that Techmeme reads just about everything. But on days when he’s consuming current events, it all depends on the story type and who’s breaking it.

“The site that has industry people as its target readership will contextualize in a way that’s more meaningful to me,” said Rivera. “That’s usually TechCrunch or AllThingsD. Once in a while, the New York Times will uncover the story and have enough exposure to the details first so that they have the best account. For the first half hour, at least.”

A big win for healthcare expense-tracking platform Simplee, fresh off its $6 million Series A from earlier this month: the company is now announcing a partnership with top HSA provider in the U.S. ACS (a Xerox company). This is the first major HSA partner for Simpleee, which now introduces its service to ACS|BNY Mellon’s The HSA Solution’s 800,000 members.

While perhaps not as exciting as a brand-new, Instagram-like Facebook Photos app (I’m so downloading that), Simplee is one of those companies solving a real-world challenge that has a big impact on our lives: health care expense management. The company takes a consumer-friendly angle to the problem with its service, which helps patients track their bills and payments, while also visualizing, in something of a Mint.com-like style, what their current situation looks like.

The dashboard shows things like total costs, how much you’ve paid out-of-pocket, your deductible, how many doctor visits you’ve had, and more.

For doctors and insurance companies, the service also helps them get paid faster, because it integrates bill payment on the site itself. A forthcoming feature will automatically spot billing errors, too, which will further reduce issues surrounding the bill payment process.

As for ACS’ The HSA Solution, it’s the most frequently selected HSA product in the U.S. by employers and individuals, and is now the largest administrator of HSAs in the country, based on the number of consumer accounts. Members on The HSA Solution will be able to review, track and pay their medical claims and bills from all insurance providers, including health, PBMs (pharmacy benefit management), dental, and vision insurance carriers, through a co-branded single sign-on portal. As with Simplee’s direct solution, things are simplified (get it? Simplee?) for end users, allowing them to read plain language benefits and claims explanations, get notifications about their deductible usage, track their historical spending and very soon, be alerted to billing errors, as noted above.

This partnership is going to allow Simplee to scale its service significantly, and is the first of many still in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

SittingAround, the new service that allows parents to quickly and easily find and schedule a babysitter online, is now getting their sitters clients equipped with Square credit card readers. CEO Erica Zidel tells us that, starting now, all sitters are being offered a free Square dongle as a part of the signup process on the website, and can then indicate whether or not they accept credit cards in their online profile. Parents, meanwhile, can now search and hire sitters based on the payment method they accept.

Granted, this may not be huge news, but it’s a perfect example of Square’s momentum and potential for disruption in the industry. In this case, Square isn’t the one that’s marketing directly to the babysitters – it’s the babysitting service that is. (And frankly, as a parent myself who never carries cash, it would be great if all sitters carried a Square. Having to make an ATM stop part of date night is kind of a bummer.)

Zidel also says that SittingAround is working to add other payment options in the future and plans on integrating these into the company’s forthcoming mobile app, due out soon.

Boston-based SittingAround has doubled its user base and now has over 7,000+ families on the site and 1,500 registered sitters since its launch at the beginning of this year. The site has coordinated over 3,000 bookings to dates since then as well.

While newer than more well-established players in the online child care space (like UrbanSitter, Care.com, etc.), SittingAround isn’t about leveraging Facebook to find social recommendations, but is rather about helping you bring your current “trust network” online – including both parents and sitters alike. It also offers unique features like support for babysitting co-ops, free background checks for parents and sitters, and a “date night deals” section so parents can fully plan their night out.

The site is free to use, as it’s currently ad-supported, unlike the paywalled Care.com. “We want sitters to look at their SitterProfile as their online babysitting resume,” says Zidel. “Because we have an open platform, this profile can be used wherever sitters respond to parents – on Facebook, through a local newspaper, from Craigslist, etc.”

Well, that’s one way to get some attention for your product launch.

Manpacks is announcing a new Startup Perks program, and to promote it, the company mailed boxes of free condoms to more than 100 startups, including Path, Udemy, Scribd, and GetAround. Supposedly, the boxes started arriving today — includes a custom URL where workers at that specific company can sign up for the program.

Co-founder and CEO Ken Jonson says Manpacks has been working to build a corporate perks program aimed at larger organizations, but then he decided it felt “a little weird” to leave out startups. So it’s launching with startup perks, then expanding to more corporate targets in a couple of months.

Basically, the program allows entrepreneurs and their employees to sign up for discounted Manpacks shipments, which include things like underwear, socks, razors, and, yes, condoms — things that guys may not want to spend time shopping for.

Startups may be the ideal customer base for Manpacks, since people at a startup often put their lives on hold and work ridiculously long hours, so anything that reduces the time spent on the responsibilities of everyday life will probably be welcomed.

So why the condoms? (It probably won’t help with the complaint that startups are increasingly dominated by a “brogrammer” culture that’s hostile to women.) Johnson says he wanted to do “fun and a little irreverent.” I’d say he succeeded.

BetterWorks, the employee perks startup led by Los Angeles entrepreneur and investor Paige Craig, has told its customers that it will be shutting down May 31.

The company offered tools to help businesses manage discounts and rewards programs for employees. In the past few months, BetterWorks still seemed to be rolling out a steady stream of new features like catering and groups and permissions. In fact, Director of Product Varun Krishna told me that BetterWorks was seeing growing interest from larger enterprises (though in retrospect that may have been a polite way of saying that it wasn’t making enough money from small- and medium-sized businesses).

However, last week the company laid off all of its sales and marketing staff and half of its operations team. It looks like today’s note to customers (which was first reported by socalTech) is the final nail in the coffin. Here’s the copy that one of our readers sent in:

Thanks for being a supporter, and a user a of the BetterWorks platform.

We’re proud to have helped make work rewarding for your team and company. I’m writing to let you know that for business reasons, as of May 31st 2012 the BetterWorks perk platform will no longer be in service to customers. We’ve been unable to sustain a large enough market and have decided to close our doors. It’s been a privilege having you as a customer and I deeply apologize for any inconvenience this creates.

Because the site will be retired, please take the following actions to make sure you are able to retain key information:

• Please print out your vouchers by May 31st: Because these vouchers have been pre-paid, vendors will continue to honor services until August 31st 2012.
• Spend May Allowance and Bonus Bucks by May 31st: As of midnight May 31st, you will no longer be able to spend budget on the platform and they will be returned to your employer. Please use any remaining funds in your account by this date.
• Memberships will cancel on May 31st: If you have gym memberships – they will be cancelled automatically at the end of this month. While it is not an obligation, many vendors will continue to offer corporate rates and we encourage you to discuss this directly with them.
• Food Ordering Closed on Monday May 28th for Memorial Day: Note that food ordering will be closed in observance of Memorial Day. During this time, all other perks are available for purchase.

Please email support@betterworks.com or call us at 1-888-601-9675 extension #2 if any issues arise and we will be happy to assist you. Thanks for believing in our vision and for using BetterWorks at your company.

Paige Craig
CEO – BetterWorks

BetterWorks raised a total of $10.5 million from investors including Redpoint Ventures. Craig co-founded the company with Geni co-founder George Ishii and Farmville co-creator Sizhao Yang.

Entrepreneurs, please start paying more attention to healthtech. Rather than trying to build the next billion-dollar mobile photo app, go lean and deep into bigger problems. As ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi said recently, healthtech is underrepresented among startups, with many (and founders are not alone) failing to recognize the size of the market (and the corresponding opportunity): Healthcare alone is a $2.7 trillion industry in the U.S., for example.

Yet, healthtech is just as desperate in its need for brain power, entrepreneurial enthusiasm, and a little elbow grease as it was five years ago. Speaking to a crowd at TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday, the ZocDoc CEO essentially issued a call-to-action, declaring that access to healthcare “is one of the greatest challenges to face our generation.”

Today, thanks to the increasing number of health-focused startup accelerators, like San Francisco-based Rock Health and New York City-based BluePrint Health, to name a few, lacking intimate familiarity with HIPAA or med school experience is no longer a categorical disqualifier. What’s more, there are plenty of problems to tackle, some of them low-hanging, and there is in fact growth capital to be found for healthtech.

To that point: One of the first graduates of BluePrint’s healthtech accelerator is a startup called Meddik, which wants to give consumers a better way to search for health information and find targeted and personalized support. The startup is still in the early stages, so the fine points are still gelling, but the idea is to build a platform that aggregates user-submitted content, identifying the best advice, articles, and solutions based on the specific conditions and topics of interest of the individual.

Thought it’s still early in the cycle, Meddik is already finding validation from investors, as the startup is today announcing that its has raised $750K in seed funding from a flock of notable angels and early-stage VCs, including Chris Dixon, Nat Turner, Zach Weinberg, Bob Stern, Vivek Garipalli, as well as Collaborative Fund, Founder Collective, Great Oaks, and Silicon Badia.

Co-founder Tim Soo, who’s currently on leave from the University of Pennsylvania as he and co-founder Ben Shyong work towards to launch Meddik later this summer, told us that they had originally set out to build a kind of Google Search for health. Much in the same way that Noodle is currently doing for education.

But the co-founders eventually came to the realization that their scope was too wide, as crawling the entire web resulted in an unfavorable ratio of spam and junk to quality health content. Of course, this touches on a problem that’s fundamental to online health portals. Unless your leg is falling off, thanks to the high cost of health care and doctor/hospital visits, when it comes to basic health questions, our first move is to ask Google. Just as true now as it was then.

Naturally, that Google search then leads to general answers, confusing encyclopedia entries, or long-winded forums. But, what if you find someone just like you (a clone?!), who had experienced the same medical issue, ailment, or had already asked the same question and could tell you what worked — and what didn’t.

Of course, while this is a great start, that information is still anecdotal. Thus, the key, Shoo said, is to scale that experience, adding personalized, aggregated public and academic information, traditional and alternative remedies, in an effort to not just find a good answer to your health questions, but find the right answer. Which is so much easier said than done.

We still haven’t applied Web 2.0 answers where they matter most, the co-founder continued, so a health networking play “doesn’t just mean a better news feed, or a good restaurant recommendation, it means making the right health-related connection can save lives.”

Of course, even though Massoumi reminded us of the fact that health startups are underrepresented in the ecosystem, Meddik has plenty of competition — at least nominally. WebMD and PatientsLikeMe, and Healthline each offer extensive resources for patients, yet the majority of existing health solutions tend to focus on specific conditions (like chronic illnesses), which makes them inherently boxed-in. And in the case of the above examples, the barriers to entry can also be high, requiring users to fill out involved online profiles.

While solutions like Fitbit and Fitocracy are finding adoption among mainstream audiences, there’s a lot of focus on Considering most health attributes are intrinsically interrelated, the co-founders began building out a large ontology table that connects all common health language (via a Wiki and internet scraping) to actual medical code.

Companies such as WebMD, PatientsLikeMe, Healthline and Alliance Health also provide an online heath resource for patients, but Soo said those sites either have higher barriers to entry (in that users have to complete more involved profiles) or target patients with more chronic illnesses. Fitbit, Fitocracy, Nike’s Fuel band and others appeal to a mainstream audience, but they only focus on general fitness, not the larger category of personal health. Meddik wants to play across that spectrum, Soo said.

Based on those codes, Meddik calculates a clinical similarity index between the searcher and every other user connected to the site, with the goal being to create a health network, in which users remain anonymous while being able to connect with those who will be best suited to help you.

At this point, as you may already be able to tell, Meddik is still in the early stages of building its MVP. The service is in closed beta with a limited number of beta testers beginning the process of seeding its content. When the site is up and fully functional, Soo says, it will likely monetize by leveraging its unique data set to serve targeted health advertising — not unlike Facebook’s social data/advertising model.

To give readers a taste of the site, Meddik will be peeling the doors back the foor a opening its doors over the next few days to a few hundred early participants. Check them out at home here, and let us know what you think.

This is guest post by Julia Szopa , program director at the blackbox.vc incubator in Silicon Valley which specialises in moving European startups into the US.

It is not uncommon for European entrepreneurs to come to the Silicon Valley to learn how to launch globally. However, they often play “the startup game” by the wrong rules. With scarce venture resources in Europe, founders learn to compromise way too much and accept what’s typically unacceptable by those who build great, successful companies with global potential.

Having talked to dozens of entrepreneurs from outside of the U.S. shortly after they arrive to take their first steps in Silicon Valley, I have observed a set of common false beliefs that most of them share. Even if they have great products, great teams, and endless motivation for working hard in their startups, the crucial first step for them should be to get rid of some misconceptions about the startup game… ASAP.

Co-owning the company with your team is crucial to its success

As Tim Draper noticed during his recent visit at Blackbox Connect, the concept of co-ownership is often misunderstood and underestimated outside of the Silicon Valley. Giving stock options to employees with a vesting schedule, which is one of the most natural ways to establish a real sense of ownership and motivate, often takes the last place on their lists of priorities (if at all).

There are countries, like Denmark, that explicitly discourage entrepreneurs from giving shares to employees, as their tax laws impose an additional 25% tax on any shareholder in possession of less than 10% of a company. In case of an exit, a stock-owning employee would owe the Danish government around 67% of what he’d made by investing his blood, sweat, and tears into building a successful startup.

Many entrepreneurs from Europe often point out that potential employees they talk to usually don’t even recognize the value of owning shares in a startup. In the culture of scarcity the short-term tangible benefits matter much more, and too few success stories among their peers make them believe that having shares in a startup could not really bring any profit.

Giving away too much for seed money limits your agility

Standards of equity amounts given away to investors, angels or advisors in Europe are incomparable with those in the Silicon Valley. While the well-established YCombinator asks for somewhere between 6%-8% for $11K-$20K, there are multiple local acceleration programs in Europe that take as much as 10% for as little as $10K of seed funding. I’ve also met entrepreneurs who have given away 35% of their company during the seed round and they weren’t just rare foolish exceptions.

While sometimes it’s crucial for startup founders to raise whatever seed money they can, they need to understand that giving away that big of a share of the company to investors will make it harder for them to raise future rounds of financing.

Furthermore, it also minimizes the incentives to reap meaningful rewards, as it sets the frame for inequitable partnership between the entrepreneur and the investor.

There are a couple of totally legitimate reasons for small markets VCs to demand more equity for less. First, they count on small exits, as the markets are smaller. Second, they have few competitors, so they simply can ask for more and still get a good deal-flow. But that doesn’t mean that the entrepreneurs have to accept these rules of the game, just because they have to prove the concept on the home market. Of course, having achieved decent traction in home country definitely makes entrepreneurs look more legitimate in front of the VCs from the Valley, but it doesn’t prove anything about their capabilities to scale to the global market.

Thus the very common assumption that “first we need to prove ourselves locally, and then go global” is not always true. Sometimes it just makes more sense to start globally, and then localize (as most of the Silicon Valley startups do).

Making quick decisions doesn’t always mean you are desperate

Whenever a VC invited to give a talk at Blackbox Connect mentioned that it takes her or him around 4 weeks to close a deal with a start up, the audience reacted with huge disbelief. How come it can take such a short time? while back in their home countries they would talk to VCs or angels for months before they get funded.

Apparently SV is much faster with making decisions, and the entrepreneurs are expected to act quickly too. Being able to make a decision fast is not a sign of desperation.

Thinking small doesn’t protect you from failure

Almost all of the companies that come to the Valley from a different startup ecosystem bring here the fear of failing with their startup. They pitch their tiny little projects — an app for this, an app for that — believing that maybe they will not change the world, but at least they’ll build something in order to start playing the startup game and move forward. And if they fail, that will be just a tiny little failure — much easier to digest.

Non-US startups must learn that failing is always an option. While small failure is less painful, no big win comes from playing it too safe. To succeed in the world of global business, they must adopt the Silicon Valley mindset. That means making fast decisions, taking bigger risks, giving shares to everyone in the company, and being smart about financing their company growth.

Dan Misener, in a fit of inspired data mining, scraped half of Kickstarter to find failed projects. He could not, it seems, find a single one. Why? Because Kickstarter hides them behind a non-searchable wall. They exist, sure, but you won’t find them with Google and they never, ever show them in their “Discover” browsing system.

And good for them.

In a general sense, Kickstarter isn’t a marketplace. It’s not like Etsy or eBay or Amazon where the slow-sellers sit next to the hot items. It is, instead, more of a competition. It’s a competition for eyeballs, for cash, and for media attention. It is more a dog show than flea market, and you don’t keep the ugly dogs on stage after the first round of judging.

What Misener discovered, in short, was that Kickstarter surfaces only successful or nearly successful projects and hides the failed ones. For example, Instaprint failed and if you search for it none of the original Kickstarter content will come up. It’s been norobot’ed.

GTar, on the other hand, is alive and well.

As is Shadowrun:

In short, in the 26,000 or so searchable Kickstarter entries there is not a single dud.

To his credit, Misener does not call this an outrage. However, as a source for potential crowdsourcing wisdom Kickstarter’s failures are as important as its successes. Although the variables are few, the configurations are many and there are reasons that project X didn’t succeed while project Y – a mere permutation of project X – pulled it off.

He writes:

It is well within Kickstarter’s rights to yank junk projects off the stage. It keeps the site fresh and vibrant and a graveyard of garbage iPod Nano straps is no one’s idea of a good time. That said, to push failed projects down the memory hole with such vigor is a bit harsh. Those who do not learn from their mistakes are, after all, doomed to make another damn iPad stand.

There’s a lot of talk these days about what you can do with “big data.” Here’s one of the more eye-catching uses: A startup called Recorded Future pulls data from around the Web to give customers a better handle on — that’s right — the future.

The company just announced that it has raised $12 million in Series C funding from Balderton and Google Ventures. Balderton partner and former Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud is joining the board.

Recorded Future says it’s continually scanning “tens of thousands of high-quality, online news publications, blogs, public niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more.” Then it analyzes that content and visualizes the data in a way that should help you answer questions about what’s ahead.

For example, the demo video below includes mentions queries like: Where are world leaders traveling next month? What’s going down in Mexico City over the next 60 days? Which source best predicts correct Apple product releases? The Recorded Future website suggests that the company is targeting three main use cases — financial services, competitive intelligence, and defense and intelligence.

The company has now raised a total of $20 million, with past investors including In-Q-Tel (the venture arm of the CIA), IA Ventures, Atlas Venture, and Google Ventures. Co-founder and CEO Christopher Ahlberg says Recorded Future is coming out of “semi-stealth mode” today — a fuzzy term, since the company has already attracted some customers (including the Defense Department) and headlines, but one that suggests we’ll be hearing more from the company soon.

While it’s far from being the only offender, the online travel industry (particularly travel search engines) is in dire need of better segmentation and targeting — for offers, deals, and all their related services. For example: Currently the top 10 percent of travelers are responsible for 40 percent of revenue and 50 percent of the profit in the industry, yet, generally speaking, they still see the same promotions and deals as everyone else.

In fact, Orbitz, Kayak, American, United, and a handful of other top travel sites still get most of their flight inventory info from ITA, which they sort and serve based on price, i.e. the cheapest ticket. Yes, cheap tickets are appealing, but if we’re looking for that which characterizes the next generation of travel sites — like the proliferation of user data profiles, personalization and granularity — then the experience demand more than basic price comparison. (Plus, let’s be honest, the cheapest ticket doesn’t always offer the best value, anyway.)

Today, Israeli startup Superfly, which offers a secure tool that combines worldwide flight information with personal travel preferences to help people organize and maximize the value of their travel rewards among other things, is quietly launching a shot across the bow of the industry’s giants — in this case, the uber popular metasearch engine, Kayak.

That’s because the startup is now able to call on the significant operational and financial experience of Willard (Bill) Smith, who was, until recently, Kayak’s CFO. Smith joined Kayak in May of last year (as the company’s first-ever CFO) to help the startup prepare for and actually move forward with its perpetually-delayed IPO.

What do we mean by “perpetually delayed”? Well, Kayak first filed its IPO docs in November 2010, and it was reported last week that the company may, just may, embark on its road show next week. Why has it taken a year-and-a-half? The answer varies depending on whom you ask, but it would be safe to point a finger at both the long-running unsteadiness of IPO market conditions and the company’s erratic earnings.

As to Smith and Superfly, the CFO officially stepped down from Kayak in March, and although he declines to reveal the reasons behind his departure, he has definitely been clear about his growing interest in Superfly. Regardless of how one paints the CFO’s departure from the most popular (but erratically performing) metasearch engine for travel pre-IPO, along with his ensuing interest in advising a next-gen travel search engine that could spell trouble for that very incumbent (although a number of pieces would need to fall into place before one could consider Superfly a legitimate threat) — but in the end it would just be speculation and innuendo.

However, it is fair to say that the above, alongside Smith’s genuine interest, equates to some great early validation for Superfly (especially as it’s operating in a crowded space where startups have to work even harder to stand out), and at the very least implies that there could be significant opportunity for travel sites that can improve upon the Kayak model. As to Superfly, Smith said of its value proposition:

Superfly is a fresh take on a common task — travel search — and while other sites may offer good results for a broad base of travelers, Superfly gets YOU the best results based on how YOU travel.

Superfly first debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in 2010 and later launched its flight search beta. Today, the startup is taking another step forward, with the official removal of its “beta” tag, finally making its flight search tools available to non-users.

Travel search right now is in the process of being commoditized, the former Kayak CFO says, which unfortunately results in users being treated the same way — as a commodity. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that will leverage Big Data to collect and create segmented profile data on its users to better target ads and offers to elite travelers.

For frequent fliers, earning miles and an elite status is the result of hard work, so Superfly aims to provide value by making it easy for them to organize their rewards and find flights that consider their frequent flier status. As the space stands today, 95 percent of travel search lacks segmentation and Superfly wants to help change that.

Of course, without creating value for airlines, this line of thinking means nothing. That’s why the startup is looking to tailor its approach in such a way as to transform the entire dynamic between channel and supplier from one of cutthroat competition (by showing results based on fares or distance) to one of value for both the consumer and supplier, Smith says.

With Superfly’s new tools, suppliers can now leverage its aggregated traveler data to provide valuable offers and promotions to the most influential and active members of its user base, and, in turn consumers will be able to receive these offers by joining Superfly and beginning their travel search. From there, Superfly’s suppliers can begin targeting their elite customers as they search, providing offers, deals, and more in realtime — at times when they are most useful.

Superfly also recently integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph to allow its users to share their achievements to their Facebook pages. While social functionality is essential, the real winner both Smith and Superfly CEO Jonathan Meir said, will go beyond intent to build meaningful customer profiles based on social activity, travel interests, and more.

For more on Superfly, check ‘em out at home here.

Ad startup 140 Proof is opening up a partner platform for companies that want to take advantage of its social ad targeting.

The company currently delivers ads to 50 social apps, including Echofon, TweetCaster, and Plume. Underlying the network is something that 140 Proof calls “Interest Graph Targeting,” where users are assigned different “personas” based on what they say and who they follow. Those personas allow advertisers to serve ads to people with specific interests, and the new platform makes this interest targeting available to other companies.

Among other things, co-founder and CTO John Manoogian III pitches this as a way for brand advertisers to extend their reach beyond traditional advertising like TV. For example, if an advertiser wanted to reach people interested in Glee, they could run an ad during the show, but they could also target social network users who have commented about Glee or follow Glee-related accounts (as illustrated in the image above). Interest-based targeting will also be key if mobile ads are going to make money, he says.

Several mobile and social ad companies have already signed up, including Jumptap, Celtra, and OneLouder.

It seems like 140 Proof might face one of the common challenges of platform companies sometimes — balancing the needs of the platform with the other parts of the business. In this case, an ad network might be a customer of the platform but also a competitor with the 140 Proof network. However Manoogian says the market dwarfs any individual company, so it will be “a long time before we run into any channel conflicts.”

And while advertising is an obvious place to start, Manoogian and his co-founder and CEO Jon Elvekrog see broader possibilities for the platform. For example, they say that an e-commerce site could use 140 Proof targeting to deliver improved recommendations.

Kony Solutions, the unfortunately named makers of a write once, run everywhere mobile app development platform today announced that it has closed a $15 million series C round of financing. The funding was led by New York City-based venture capital firm, Insight Venture Partners, a 17-year-old firm that has invested in companies like Tumblr, Buddy Media, Wix, Chegg, and Twitter — to name a few.

Insight also led Kony’s $19.1 million series A financing, which it closed in January of last year. With its latest infusion of capital, which brings total funding to nearly $39 million, the startup is looking fund the deployment of new sales and marketing programs, regional expansion, and to ramp up hiring.

For those unfamiliar, Kony is on a mission to develop technologies and apps that both facilitate and accelerate customer engagement on any mobile operating system, device or channel. Through its flagship product, KonyOne, the startup offers a development environment and mobile middleware that allows big businesses to build and launch both enterprise and consumer apps.

As a result, Kony now offers support for nearly every technology and deployment option out there, from native apps on all native OSes, HTML5-capable browsers, single page apps, wrappers, hybrids, and more — even support for BYOD deployments. The agility and scalability of its platform have attracted more than 70 Fortune 500 companies, banks, airlines, as well as automotive and insurance companies.

Kony CEO Raj Koneru says that the startup will use its newest round of funding to continue managing and expanding on its recent growth, which (as of the end of its FY2012) had seen more than 200 percent growth in bookings and has added more than 30 new global customers, including Aetna, CIBC, Independence Blue Cross, Scottrade and Sun Life Financial.

What’s more, the company recently launched a suite of off-the-shelf, vertical-specific apps for banking, healthcare, retail, and travel, while earning the business of more than 30 new customers, including Aetna, CIRC, BlueCrossBlueShield, Scottrade, and Sun Life Financial.

With patents-pending for its flagship product, KonyOne, support of more than a billion user sessions annually, and its being named a “Visionary” startup by Gartner, Kony is really starting to find the kind of traction it will need to compete in a crowded space.

For more, check out Kony at home here.

Bre Pettis of MakerBot stopped by our little show today and spent some time on the stage with John Biggs and other notables in the manufacturing space. But afterwards Pettis, co-founder and CEO of MakerBot, joined me on the TCTV couch to geek out a bit over the fantastic MakerBot Replicator. The company also has two MakerBot Replicators printing out random doodads and toys in our first ever Hardware Alley.

As Bre explained, the original MakerBot buyers were geeks and hackers but now it’s moms and dads (like me). With the MakerBot, kids and parents can create and manufacture toys together. The Replicator can make nearly anything. It is essentially a desktop toy factory — or, for anyone else, a prototype printer allowing for rapid manufacturing.

In short MakerBot is changing the world.

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.

The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.)

The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on Java patents that Oracle acquired as a result of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google responded by saying that, at the time of development, it was not aware of Sun’s patents and that Android was in fact free to use.

Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, in which the copyright infringement issues were to be followed by consideration of Oracle’s patent infringement claims (the focus of today’s hearing) and, finally, the damages Google might be liable for were it found found to infringe.

However, much of that speculation was rendered moot today, as a week of deliberation came to a close today at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, with the jury unanimously declaring that Google did not in fact infringe on the six claims set forth by Oracle in regard to U.S. Patent RE 38,104 as well as the two claims regarding U.S. Patent 6,061,520.

Of course, this does not mean that the whole case has been decided; instead, the decision marks the end of the trial’s second phase, which, again, focused solely on Oracle’s claims of patent infringement.

While the jury had previously found that Google was in violation of Oracle’s copyrights, as stated above, it could not come to a unanimous decision on the issue of fair use. Meaning that, although Oracle ostensibly “won” its copyright case, it effectively has a hold on its ability to collect on any of the $1 billion in copyright damages it is seeking from Google — a conclusion that was supported by the tweets of legal reporter Ginny LaRoe, who attended today’s hearing.

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

On top of that, there are a number of other legal questions surrounding the copyright case on which Judge Aslup has yet to issue a final ruling, although he is expected to come to a decision next week.

Updating

As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere – an app that has allowed countless people to meet and greet each other in meatspace – has launched a video chat service that lets folks connect when and where they want.

The update embeds video chat into the standard text and voice chat already available through the app. Rather than allowing random video and photo encounters immediately, however, the system turns off most media sharing by default.

From the PR:

Although it will never replace seeing a nearly naked man staring at you out of murky darkness on Omegle, it’s definitely a step forward for mobile dating and chat apps.

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