XYDO.COM: top articles for Venture Capital http://www.xydo.com According to the Interactive Media In Retail Group, global eCommrece sales will surpass $1.25 trillion by 2013. Naturally, everyone and their mother is eager to capitalize on the growth of online commerce, as it hurdles into a new renaissance. Shopify is one of a number of startups that want to help both newcomers and old hands get a piece of the action. The startup’s platform allows individuals and businesses to set up their own online storefront in minutes, quickly adding items to sell, images, tags and group items, and integrate PayPal or other credit card payment processors. To showcase its platform and demonstrate how easy technology is making it to build a successful eCommerce business, Shopify is teaming up with four industry veterans to help aspiring entrepreneurs build a million-dollars business in just a few months. This morning, the company announced the launch of its third annual Build-A-Business competition, in which the team compete for seed funding while being mentored by 4-Hour Workweek author Tim Ferriss, FUBU founder and Shark Tank resident Daymond John, swissmiss creator Tina Roth Eisenberg, and Lean Startup author Eric Ries. To participate, all entrepreneurs have to do is come up with a product to sell — it doesn’t matter what — choose one of the four mentors, enter an existing Shopify store or create a new one (signup here) and get to building a kickass business. For entering, participants receive a free .CO domain for 12 months, $100 in Google AdWords Credits and $100 in MailChimp Credits. The competition runs from July 10th to February 28th, with the four mentor-judges offering advice and guidance along the way. At the end of the two months, the four stores that sell the most doodads or doohickeys receive a $50,000 seed investment for a 5 percent equity stake from their chosen mentor, with the investment valuing each company at $1 million. On top of that, the winners are also flown to NYC to meet the mentors and receive an additional $20K-worth of AdWords credits. Shopify founder and CEO Tobias Lutke says that the competition is a great way to incentivize entrepreneurs to focus on their online storefronts. New technologies have made it easy to open an eCommerce storefront, and the competition allows businesses to learn from a group of businesses and follow the leaders forward as they learn how to build more engaging, sustainable online businesses. Past competitions, the CEO says, led to the creation of more than 4,400 new businesses, which sold over $15 million worth of products — which is both good for Shopify and participating startups. With Tim Ferriss, Eric Ries, Daymond John, and Tina Eisenberg on board this year, Lutke expects the third competition to produce the strongest companies yet. Tim Ferriss says of Shopify’s competition: This is intended as a benevolent and encouraging kick in the ass. This stuff isn’t rocket science, but it does require stepping outside your comfort zone for a bit to realize this isn’t that hard. It’s just unfamiliar. If you do it now, a lot of people will be in the same boat and you’ll take the trip together. Shopify currently hosts over 25,000 active online retailers, including Gatorade, GE, Tesla Motors, LMFAO, Encyclopedia Britannica, and CrossFit, among others. The company is backed by $22 million in financing from Bessemer Venture Partners, FirstMark Capital, Felicis Ventures, and Georgian Partners. Build-A-Business landing page here. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/10/shopify-build-a-business-competition/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/10/shopify-build-a-business-competition/ Ex-Barclays CEO Robert Diamond will give up bonuses of up to $31 million as the bank looks to defuse anger. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303343404577518263465180508.html?mod=asia_home http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303343404577518263465180508.html?mod=asia_home Some more consolidation in the adtech space: the German logistics, communications and postal giant Deutsche Post DHL has acquired IntelliAd, a German online marketing agency that specialises in optimizing search ad buys, as part of a larger strategy to make a bigger push into online advertising and marketing. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately disclosed; we’ve contacted both companies for more details. For now, Deutsche Post says that IntelliAd will become an independent subsidiary, and that all of its 50 employees, including founders Tobias Kiessling, Wolfhart Fröhlich and Mischa Rürup, will stay on post-acquisition. While it may sound slightly left-field for a postal giant to be making online marketing acquisitions, this is actually right in Deutsche Post’s wheelhouse: In August 2010, it acquired ad targeting platform nugg.ad. In 2011 it bought Adcloud, an online performance marketing specialist. Deutsche Post DHL is Germany’s largest mail company, as well as the world’s largest courier and logistics company. The move to alternative revenue streams in digital looks like it has been made to provide a fuller service for companies to manage digital distribution of their services in addition to physical distribution (and possibly to lay the ground work for a time when digital will be a more important point for distribution than physical for some of them… something we can already see happening in basic mail services). “Deutsche Post [already] provides a service for media agencies, marketers and advertisers in online advertising, to help them place ads effectively and efficiently,” said Jürgen Gerdes, a board member of German Post DHL, in a statement (patchy translation here). “With intelliAd we’re building this position, especially in search, the fastest-growing and largest online advertising channel, and becoming an even more powerful partner for our customers.” IntelliAd was founded in 2007 and its speciality is in creating algorithms that help companies game the process of bidding in search advertising auctions, for optimal placements and pricing. Clients have included companies like Air Berlin and the mobile carrier O2, as well as performance marketing agencies. Given that Google is by far the biggest search network in Germany and elsewhere, it’s optimized to work there, but says that it works across all search engines. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/10/deutsche-post-intelliad-adtec/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/10/deutsche-post-intelliad-adtec/ Portalarium, the social game startup headed by famous game developer Richard Garriott, has raised $7 million in funding to complete development of its first game, Ultimate Collector. Austin, Texas-based Portalarium raised the money from m8 Capital, FF Angel, BHV Venture Capital and Garriott himself. The company is planning on releasing Ultimate Collector, now in beta testing, later this summer on Facebook, web browsers, and mobile platforms. They money will also be used to launch production of Garriott’s next role-playing game, Ultimate RPG/New Britannia, for mobile platforms. “Following our early stage investment in Portalarium, announced in June 2011, we’re pleased to further our commitment to Richard Garriott and to Portalarium,” said m8 Capital General Partner, Joseph Kim. “Richard is one of the legendary developers in the gaming industry and his vision for this next era of mobile and social gaming will firmly position Portalarium as an industry leader. We are looking forward to a successful launch of the company’s next game, Ultimate Collector, and to see how Richard will redefine the role-playing genre for the mobile-era.” Garriott said, “This is an important step for the growth of our company. We are grateful for the confidence m8 Capital and Founders Fund have placed in our team and we believe gamers will ultimately reap the benefits from this partnership when they get a chance to play Ultimate Collector and see the unique mobile and social games that we are creating at Portalarium.” Portalarium has cut a deal with Zynga to publish its games on Zynga’s platforms on Zynga.com and Facebook under the Zynga Platform Partners third-party publishing program. Garriott is famous for a lot of things, including the creation of the Ultima series of video games and the failed Tabula Rasa massively multiplayer online game. He is known as Lord British, designer of video games that have been enjoyed by tens of millions of people over three decades. But he also recently made headlines by rocketing to the International Space Station commercial trip financed with $30 million of his own money. Garriott was recently married and he added on his wife’s last name to his own in a legal capacity, so his new name is Richard Garriott de Cayeux. Garriott started Portalarium in September, 2009, and previously raised $3.5 million. Portalarium has 30 employees. It competes with other social game makers such as Zynga, Electronic Arts and Disney-Playdom. In an interview with GamesBeat, Garriott said he has seen a lot of change since starting the company. At first, the company was focused mainly on social games and its first title will come out on Facebook first, mobile platforms later. But the second title will come out on mobile game platforms first, a reflection of the shift toward mobile. “We started with social and mobile, and now are focused on mobile and social,” he said. “The priority of the order reflects the change. Our role-playing game will come out on mobile first, social second. We think over the long haul that mobile will become much more important.” Garriott said that gaming has gone through several eras: single-player games, massively multiplayer online game, and social games. “Social has taken only five years to mature, and mobile is maturing even faster,” Garriott said. “The old markets are still there, but now we’re seeing markets that are an order of magnitude bigger, layering on top of it the older market.” Garriott said he raised money from venture capitalists for the first time because he felt it is becoming more and more important to reach scale faster. Regarding Ultimate Collector, Garriott said it was a lighter game than he normally does but is deeper than many social games on the market. He is interesting in recreating the RPG genre in mobile. [Image credits: Portalarium] Filed under: deals, games http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/10/portalarium-raises-7m-for-facebook-role-playing-games-exclusive/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/10/portalarium-raises-7m-for-facebook-role-playing-games-exclusive/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 We live in a Golden Age of Sales. There are better tools than ever before for quickly crafting and tailoring pitches to reach the right people. We have data to tell us what works, and we have testing tools that can get down to the individual email level. But most importantly, we have unprecedented access to more people. Slowly but surely, a sales meritocracy is supplanting the various “good old boys” networks. A scrappy hustler can connect with anyone, from CEOs and co-founders to just about anyone else on the corporate contact list. The bummer is that most tech companies are fouling up an epic opportunity to pitch in, be memorable, and add value. When I read Sarah’s recent post about Yammer’s tone-deaf pitch to her, I cringed, especially as she had written only days before that she was thinking about leaving Yammer. Nobody to my knowledge reached out to acknowledge that, but she did get an insidious pitch to “upgrade” from her “trial account.” We’ve all gotten the unfortunate emails like the one Sarah got. We’ve picked up the cringe-worthy “How are you?” cold calls that are essentially anti-marketing. This doesn’t win business. Worse, the next time Yammer pitches Sarah, she (and everybody that got that email) will remember the disrespectful pitch she got and will be that much less likely to work with them. Crap pitches create sales antibodies and make it extremely difficult to win business down the road. But, here’s a secret: People in tech, CEOs, and co-founders love to be pitched, as long as it’s done well. A busy person feels relief when someone shows up with exactly what they want, and respects his or her time. When a company has a real problem, even one they don’t know they have, and some hacker or hustler can get it fixed, that person is an asset. If someone called up and said: I noticed your page load time was over 11 seconds, you reference multiple stylesheets and far, far too many http: requests. This is a straightforward fix. It looks like I can probably get it down below 3 seconds for a one-time fee of about $800, which should up your search traffic by 15 percent, since Google now likes speed. Would it really matter who initiated the call? No. Even if the prospect wasn’t in buying mode, that call is welcomed. Even if the person on the other end didn’t buy, the rap would be positive. They did their homework, they reached out with a relevant pitch, and they helped me understand something about my business. If they called again, they wouldn’t be a stranger. And chances are, the percentages are way higher than a spray-and-pray approach. I know that this is the Golden Age of Sales because I built my own company without connections, a network, or anything else but hustle. I did it, because I pitched many, many times (and very poorly at first.) But I got better as time went on. I learned from experience that a scrappy, honest pitch is almost always better than the polished pablum approved by legal and marketing. Getting in front of co-founders, CEOs, directors of marketing, or whoever else is now as easy as sending a Tweet, leaving a blog comment, or sending a late-night email. Such corporate higher-ups give out their emails on Twitter all the time. If you sell a solution to an easily observable problem, it’s easy to get in front of someone with what you have. The basic rules of the efficient pitch are simple and straightforward: You have to add value to the day of the person you’re pitching to. The basic rules of content marketing apply to the personal pitch. Have a point of view and present it honestly. Nobody trusts an ass-kisser. Be brief and realize you’ll get to pitch again tomorrow. Realize that the market is big and that not every company is a fit for what you do (and that’s just fine). Tailor your pitch to your specific audience. With today’s tools you can practically make a custom pitch in minutes. Show that you care and this goes a long, long way towards helping people. Don’t get snotty. If it’s not a fit, be happy to help another time. Five minutes worth of homework goes a long way. You can get so much insight, so quickly. This is an amazing time to be a salesperson. You can be Yammer, and send tone-deaf nonsense, or you can be welcomed with open arms. It all depends on how much effort you’re willing to make on tailoring your pitch. Chris Johnson Chris is the co-founder and managing director of Simplifilm. He pitches every day. You’re more than welcome to pitch him at chris@simplifilm.com or on Twitter. http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/09/missed-opportunity-in-the-golden-age-of-sales/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/09/missed-opportunity-in-the-golden-age-of-sales/ Kleiner Perkins would like nothing better than to make the discrimination suit filed by a junior partner suit go away. Unfortunately for the venture capital firm, a San Francisco Superior Court judge tentatively ruled against it Monday afternoon, saying Ellen Pao could not be compelled into arbitration. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/kleiner-loses-first-round-in-discrimination-case/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/kleiner-loses-first-round-in-discrimination-case/ SAN FRANCISCO, July 9 (Reuters) - A California judge on Monday tentatively rejected venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers LLC's bid to move a gender discrimination lawsuit brought by one of its own partners into arbitration. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/kleiner-discrimination-ruling-idUSL2E8I9F5Q20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=industrialsSector http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/kleiner-discrimination-ruling-idUSL2E8I9F5Q20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=industrialsSector Software-coding start-up GitHub has raised $100 million in its first round of funding. Venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is leading the financing. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577517111643094308.html?mod=rss_Technology http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577517111643094308.html?mod=rss_Technology After half a decade of preaching about the virtues of bootstrapping, the GitHub founders are finally getting in bed with a major VC firm to the tune of $100 million — that’s $1 million per employee at the still-small startup. GitHub’s business is social coding tools for developers; the investing firm is Andreessen Horowitz; and this round is indeed the biggest Series A that’s ever come across our desk. It might be the biggest Series A of all time (we’re still doing some research on that score, digging through the dotcom files). It is, however, the largest investment Andreessen Horowitz has ever made, a firm rep told us. “We’ve been talking to VCs for a long time, and we never found someone with a shared vision,” said GitHub co-founder Tom Preston-Werner in a phone conversation with VentureBeat today. But after reading Marc Andreessen’s Why software is eating the world article, the bootstrapping boys of GitHub changed their tune. “Sitting down and talking with these guys, it was clear that they believe in the same things that we believe in,” said Preston-Werner. “We’ve already established a culture for everything we do, and they don’t want to change us.” But don’t go pouring your 40 on the floor just yet. GitHubbers are still committed to the principles of bootstrapping, especially for younger startups, and Preston-Werner doesn’t think their messaging on that score will change any time soon. “We still belive that taking too much money too early can be bad for a company,” said Preston-Werner. “Too much outside influence can be dangerous. We’re four and a half years old now, so we’ve had a chance to really define ourselves.” While key GitHub founders and team members have been vocal advocates of bootstrapping, Preston-Werner said, “We haven’t ever been anti-VC, we’ve only been [against] people compromising their product for the wrong reasons.” The infusion of cash will help GitHub accomplish a few of its loftier goals: total invasion and domination of the enterprise, flawless clients for all platforms and devices, and new features and products for para-development personnel such as technical writers and web designers. “Specifically, there’s a strategy called ‘GitHub Everywhere.’ We want everyone in software to be using GitHub,” said Preston-Werner, “individuals by themselves, small teams, students, as well as big, massive enterprises.” And that takes money, money for hiring, money for acquisitions, money for marketing. “Where we are now and what’s left for us to accomplish, having some money in the bank is going to… make GitHub better for everyone involved,” said Preston-Werner. “Everything that’s great about GitHub right now, we’re turning it up to 11 with this funding.” Still, the team realizes this news may come as a shock to many in the startup community who have taken GitHub’s previous pro-bootstrapping message deeply to heart. In a separate conversation, 37signals co-founder and Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, also a longtime and vocal advocate of bootstrapping, expressed some healthy suspicions about the deal. “Github has done a world of good to open source, and they appear to have a great business,” he said. “I just hope they don’t put their long-term staying power in jeopardy by handing control to the VC hyenas.” “It’s going to be our job to prove to everyone that this is the right decision for GitHub, and the proof will be in the product becoming even better,” said Preston-Werner. “People will see it as they see it, but once they experience what the future of GitHub is, they’ll make up their minds. Peter Levine, an Andreessen Horowitz partner with particular experience in enterprise and M&A, will be joining GitHub’s four-man board as part of the deal. When the deal is complete, the GitHub founders will still control the majority of the company’s stock. We concluded today’s phone call by asking Preston-Werner if this deal put any extra pressure on GitHubbers to start heading for the exits — a big, fat acquisition, perhaps. “I don’t think it really changes any of that vision,” he said. “We want to do it all on our own terms. I am committed to this company. [Co-founders] Chris [Wanstrath] and PJ [Hyett] are committed to this company. And we want to use this money to make this company better, for the employees, for the customers… “This money is for them.” Filed under: deals, dev, VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/09/github-funding-say-what/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 ThriveHive, a new marketing platform for small businesses, is today announcing it has closed $1.5 million in seed funding in a round which included MIT Professor Ed Roberts, Mitch Roberts and Jean Hammond, as well as seed stage venture capital group Founder Collective, The Birchaven Group, and IBCC, among others. The company, founded by two former small business owners who know the pains of SMB marketing firsthand, offers companies a customized marketing plan which includes a combination of best practices and data aggregated from its online platform, allowing businesses to compare themselves with their peers and then act accordingly on that information. The Cambridge-based startup was founded by Max Faingezicht (CEO) and Adam Blake (COO), both of whom were formerly students together at MIT before receiving their MBAs and heading off to start their own businesses. Faingezicht also worked at Amazon in product marketing and strategy. ThriveHive’s third co-founder, Maria Battaglia, is also a former marketing exec whose experience includes time at Monster.com, NBC, IBM, and OnForce. “We think we have a disruptive approach to local business marketing which, in our perspective, is completely broken,” says Faingezicht. “If you’re a local business owner, you’re passionate about what you do whether it’s being a yoga instructor, martial arts instructor or chiropractor…but getting customers is very hard and painful,” he says. “There’s email providers, there’s social media providers – there’s every type of point solution out there trying to sell to these guys.” The problem with these providers, explains Faingezicht, is that they’re a “one size fits all” type of solution. He doesn’t think that works for small businesses. “Every local business is unique and their marketing should be unique,” he says. So at ThriveHive, they’re answering small biz owners’ top two questions: what should I do for my marketing and how do I execute on it? To answer those questions, ThriveHive walks the business owners through a short assessment, which asks questions like “how many customers do you have?”, “how many employees?,” “where’s your location?,” etc. It then combines those responses with its in-house marketing expertise as well as the aggregate data collected from all the customers ThriveHive serves. The data helps ThriveHive put together a very specific plan for the small business. Each month, the customer is asked to complete just a few steps before moving on, which would be things like “get the website optimized for SEO,” or “set up AdWords” for example. Faingezicht points out that ThriveHive isn’t motivated by pushing one service over another here, because it’s only generating revenue from the SMB’s monthly subscription fee ($99/month and up). This is different from a service like Yodle, which he says is biased. “The more you spend, the more money they make,” he says of Yodle. “There’s not a clear pricing model…if we think what’s best for your company is to do AdWords, we’ll tell you to do AdWords. If it’s postcards, we’ll tell you to do postcards. If it’s Groupon or social media, that’s what we’re going to suggest.” At its core, ThriveHive is an integration play. Under its roof, it combines services like ConstantContact, Twilio’s tracked phone lines, Click2Mail, Facebook and Twitter, as well as in-house developments like web analytics and a contact manager, and asks its business customers to set up each one step-by-step. For $199/month, customers can also receive a 1-hour monthly consultation for additional support on this or for $699/month, they can receive full AdWords management. ThriveHive just exited from its beta at the beginning of the year, and while it won’t disclose the number of customers, they did mention a couple of case studies of interest. In one, a local martial arts studio on the brink of going out of business signed up and, in a few months time, increased its revenue by over 80% and is now generating a profit. Another restaurant on the service began doing well enough that it’s now considering franchising. With the seed financing, ThriveHive is going to focus on customer acquisition and will be hiring for positions in sales, customer service, web development and account management. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/thrivehive-raises-1-5-million-for-small-biz-marketing-subscription-service/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/thrivehive-raises-1-5-million-for-small-biz-marketing-subscription-service/ Paul Tucker, deputy governor at the Bank of England, told a Parliamentary committee that senior officials had kept in regular contact with Barclays' executives to ensure that they were managing their daily financing requirements. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/british-official-defends-central-banks-role-in-interest-rate-scandal/?partner=rss&emc=rss http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/british-official-defends-central-banks-role-in-interest-rate-scandal/?partner=rss&emc=rss Eruptive Games, a Vancouver-based developer that’s shortly set to launch a zombie-killing game called Citizen Grim, just picked up $1 million in funding. Investors include Kevin Colleran, who was one of Facebook’s first 10 employees, Guitar Hero creator Kai Huang and Nadeem Kassam of Zynik. A Russian social game developer called Plarium is also putting funding in and will act as an adviser. Mayfield Fund’s Tim Chang is also an adviser. Like Kixeye and Kabam, Eruptive isn’t targeting casual gamers, but rather more hard-core players. These types of games may not attract the sheer number of users that Zynga games might, but they can monetize far better because they attract a more selective audience that is more willing to pay for items in games. Their forthcoming title Citizen Grim is an RPG arcade game. The plot is about a medical experiment that went wrong in 1945 in the Nevada desert. In the game, the U.S. government had been working on a solution to help fix military personnel who had come back from World War II. They ended up creating a facility to host all of their experiments called GRIM. The town around the facility grew to the point where it ended up being 20,000 people. In the story, something with GRIM’s experiments goes terribly wrong and all 20,000 citizens turn into something like zombies. They’re called “reapers” in the game. “You’re one of the last survivors and you have to fight yourself out of the town,” said chief executive Julian Ing. “That’s what makes it super fun.” The company’s working with an unnamed publisher to bring it out soon. Then is should come out on mobile devices in September or October. Eruptive’s previous title Mercenaries of War hit a peak of 1 million players and monthly actives of about 500,000. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/eruptive-games-takes-1m-for-zombie-killing-action-adventure-social-games/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/eruptive-games-takes-1m-for-zombie-killing-action-adventure-social-games/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 ThriveHive, a new marketing platform for small businesses, is today announcing it has closed $1.5 million in seed funding in a round which included MIT Professor Ed Roberts, Mitch Roberts and Jean Hammond, as well as seed stage venture capital group Founder Collective, The Birchaven Group, and IBCC, among others. The company, founded by two former small business owners who know the pains of SMB marketing firsthand, offers companies a customized marketing plan which includes a combination of best practices and data aggregated from its online platform, allowing businesses to compare themselves with their peers and then act accordingly on that information. The Cambridge-based startup was founded by Max Faingezicht (CEO) and Adam Blake (COO), both of whom were formerly students together at MIT before receiving their MBAs and heading off to start their own businesses. Faingezicht also worked at Amazon in product marketing and strategy. ThriveHive’s third co-founder, Maria Battaglia, is also a former marketing exec whose experience includes time at Monster.com, NBC, IBM, and OnForce. “We think we have a disruptive approach to local business marketing which, in our perspective, is completely broken,” says Faingezicht. “If you’re a local business owner, you’re passionate about what you do whether it’s being a yoga instructor, martial arts instructor or chiropractor…but getting customers is very hard and painful,” he says. “There’s email providers, there’s social media providers – there’s every type of point solution out there trying to sell to these guys.” The problem with these providers, explains Faingezicht, is that they’re a “one size fits all” type of solution. He doesn’t think that works for small businesses. “Every local business is unique and their marketing should be unique,” he says. So at ThriveHive, they’re answering small biz owners’ top two questions: what should I do for my marketing and how do I execute on it? To answer those questions, ThriveHive walks the business owners through a short assessment, which asks questions like “how many customers do you have?”, “how many employees?,” “where’s your location?,” etc. It then combines those responses with its in-house marketing expertise as well as the aggregate data collected from all the customers ThriveHive serves. The data helps ThriveHive put together a very specific plan for the small business. Each month, the customer is asked to complete just a few steps before moving on, which would be things like “get the website optimized for SEO,” or “set up AdWords” for example. Faingezicht points out that ThriveHive isn’t motivated by pushing one service over another here, because it’s only generating revenue from the SMB’s monthly subscription fee ($99/month and up). This is different from a service like Yodle, which he says is biased. “The more you spend, the more money they make,” he says of Yodle. “There’s not a clear pricing model…if we think what’s best for your company is to do AdWords, we’ll tell you to do AdWords. If it’s postcards, we’ll tell you to do postcards. If it’s Groupon or social media, that’s what we’re going to suggest.” At its core, ThriveHive is an integration play. Under its roof, it combines services like ConstantContact, Twilio’s tracked phone lines, Click2Mail, Facebook and Twitter, as well as in-house developments like web analytics and a contact manager, and asks its business customers to set up each one step-by-step. For $199/month, customers can also receive a 1-hour monthly consultation for additional support on this or for $699/month, they can receive full AdWords management. ThriveHive just exited from its beta at the beginning of the year, and while it won’t disclose the number of customers, they did mention a couple of case studies of interest. In one, a local martial arts studio on the brink of going out of business signed up and, in a few months time, increased its revenue by over 80% and is now generating a profit. Another restaurant on the service began doing well enough that it’s now considering franchising. With the seed financing, ThriveHive is going to focus on customer acquisition and will be hiring for positions in sales, customer service, web development and account management. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/thrivehive-raises-1-5-million-for-small-biz-marketing-subscription-service/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/thrivehive-raises-1-5-million-for-small-biz-marketing-subscription-service/ Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increase in the number of high profile hacks and cyber attacks and, as a result, both government and enterprise finally began making security a priority and addressing it from the top down. As a result, Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) has become one of the fastest growing sectors in the security market. AlienVault, a California and Madrid-based startup that provides unified management of critical security systems across networks, like threat detection, vulnerability assessment, and security intelligence, has been among those to benefit from the market growth. Its flagship product, the open-source OSSIM, is one of the most widely-deployed SIEM solutions on the market. In January, the startup’s growth enabled it to steal seven senior security executives away from HP and secure $8 million in series B financing from Trident Capital and others. Today, the cyber security startup is adding another big chunk of change to its coffers, announcing that it has closed a $22.4 million series C round, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and Sigma Partners. Existing investors Trident Capital and Adara Venture Partners also contributed to the round, which brings AlienVault’s total funding to just under $35 million. As a result of its series C raise, KPCB managing partner Ted Schlein will be joining the startup’s board. Schlein is a veteran investor in the security space, having backed Fortify Software and ArcSight (both bought by HP), ISS, Mandiant, Shape, and others. The KPCB Managing Director joins a board that includes former Fortify CEO John Jack as well as the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Peter Pace. With high-ranking generals (literally) on board and a new HP executive team, AlienVault clearly isn’t messing around and will be using its new capital to expand sales, marketing and R&D to position itself as one of the chief players in the global market. Which, by the way, is growing fast as demand increases for cost-effective unified security management solutions. Investment banking and asset management firm William Blair & Co. estimates that the SIEM market is growing at 21.9 percent CAGR and is on track to surpass $2.3 billion by 2014. Since we caught up with the AlienVault team in January, the startup has added 60 new customers and is now working with over 300 companies and governments, including Telefonica, Metro Madrid, the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Company, and the city of Los Angeles. AlienVault CEO Barmak Meftah tells us that the startup doubled revenue in the first half of 2012, thanks to a 50 percent-plus upsell rate for its existing customers. The startup has also attracted attention after creating what it believes to be the largest community-sourced threat intelligence feed and database, the AlienVault Open Threat Exchange, which automatically aggregates and publishes threat data streaming in from a range of security devices, like firewalls, proxy servers, web servers, anti-virus systems, etc. Find AlienVault at home here. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/alienvault-series-c/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/09/alienvault-series-c/ Allen & Co. is tapping Facebook, Yahoo, Amazon, Apple and Google to raise up to $150 million in funding for music video distributor Vevo, according to a weekend Wall Street Journal report. The funding reportedly comes with a valuation of up to $1 billion but, outside of the deal, perhaps is more interesting for what it says about Vevo’s future prospects… Today, Vevo’s main business is not as an own-brand service but as distributor of online music videos to its partners. Owned by three of music’s four major labels and an Arab media vehicle, Vevo is effectively independent from its own clients, those partners, the main of which is Google’s YouTube. Welcoming money and board members from Google or another of the major online content players reported by WSJ, as opposed to dedicated financiers, could negatively tie Vevo to its own clients, who are all fighting each other. That problem could become more chronic given what an investment often represents – a prelude to a full takeover. How would AOL or Yahoo feel about licensing videos from a Google-owned Vevo, for example? The prospect could limit Vevo’s ability to distribute to all comers – something which has picked up over the last year. On the other hand, the doors on which Vevo is apparently knocking reads like such a laundry list of Silicon Valley A-listers, it could just be an attempt to flush out private finance. The funding report comes following chatter earlier this year that Facebook may snatch the exclusive Vevo partnership from YouTube. It seems many options have been on the table for Vevo this year. Vevo is trying to diversify from music video provision to include original video format production, is building its own-brand offering on IPTV boxes and is in the midst of trying to become a global brand by rolling out to new countries this year. But its U.S. May traffic fell by a fifth since last year, according to comScore numbers. Vevo attributed the decline to a comScore methodology change and to fewer views following a YouTube redesign. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Strategic Implications of the Microsoft/Skype DealControversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1 http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/09/what-a-big-tech-investment-could-mean-for-vevo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29 http://paidcontent.org/2012/07/09/what-a-big-tech-investment-could-mean-for-vevo/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29 Knowledge Tree started as an on-premise software company. In 2010, the company pivoted to the cloud. Today, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) company originally from South Africa announced a $4.75 million Series B round of venture capital investmen from River Cities Capital Funds, Core Capital Partners, Hatteras Funds, and lead Series A investor Hasso Plattner Ventures Africa. Knowledge Tree provides a twist the normally mundane task of document management by using social technologies to help in the authoring and subsequent collaboration around documents within a structured environment. The structure comes in its workflow technology and features that include audit trails, activity histories, threaded comments and versioning. Knowledge Tree’s social features combine social discovery with elements of game mechanics. It now has plug-ins to Microsoft Word to collaborate on documents. It plans to offer its own Web-based authoring environment that will allow co-editing, similar to Google Docs. Features also include a leader board on the dashboard that lists the authors who have developed the best content. Knowledge Tree is used by legal and financial teams in mid-market companies. It competes with companies such as Microsoft Office 365 and Spring CM. Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder Daniel Chalef credits Hasso Plattner Ventures in helping his South African company make the journey to the Southeast United States where it has settled in Raleigh, NC. The company started looking to expand to North Anerica from Cape Town after it started getting calls from Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Hasso Plattner’s VC firm provided the initial $2.2 million in funding to make the move. It’s a good story and shows the leverage that SaaS plays have in the market. Ten years ago, on-premise software companies would have been the ones making moves from overseas. Today, it’s the SaaS players most sought after. The enterprise market is shifting Investors are looking worldwide for companies that work int he cloud more so than installed on a server in a corporate data center. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/08/knowledge-tree-raises-4-75-million-to-advance-saas-based-document-management/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/08/knowledge-tree-raises-4-75-million-to-advance-saas-based-document-management/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29 * Could sell as much as 49 pct, valuing firm over $1 bln-source http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/lippo-privateequity-idUSL3E8I911F20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssHealthcareNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FUShealthcareNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Healthcare+News%29 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/lippo-privateequity-idUSL3E8I911F20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssHealthcareNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FUShealthcareNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Healthcare+News%29 JAKARTA/HONG KONG, July 9 (Reuters) - The chance to buy as much as 49 percent of Indonesia's largest private healthcare operator, Siloam Hospitals, is attracting a slew of global private equity firms http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/lippo-privateequity-idUSL3E8I910E20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FfinancialServicesRealEstateNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Financial+Services+and+Real+Estate%29 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/09/lippo-privateequity-idUSL3E8I910E20120709?feedType=RSS&feedName=rbssFinancialServicesAndRealEstateNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FfinancialServicesRealEstateNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Financial+Services+and+Real+Estate%29 It’s a good time to be Kickstarter. The crowdfunding platform has had a blockbuster year, breaking into mainstream consciousness with campaigns that raised millions of dollars, like the Pebble e-paper watch above. The platform has seen almost $275 million pledged to some 63,000 projects to date, with $231 million going towards successful fundings. As Devin wrote at the time, before February, no Kickstarter project had ever raised over $1 million, but since then, seven projects have surpassed $1 million, including the current #1, Pebble, which raised an astonishing $10 million. And this growth applies to multiple categories, not just sexy wrist watches. Prior to February only one gaming project had reached $100K in funding. Since then? 37. Even something as niche as webcomics saw its number of pledges double in February. A lot of people came to Kickstarter for the first time as part of the buzz around those seven projects that surpassed $1 million, and to the startup’s delight, a lot of them have gone on to fund other projects, resulting in a positive net effect both for the platform itself and for project founders. The long-term question/caveat to this, of course, is whether new users coming to Kickstarter tend to just end up amplifying the projects that are already blowing up, or whether they’re actually spreading the love and helping other projects reach their goals that might not have otherwise. After all, when you launch a Kickstarter project, the odds are against you; 56 percent of Kickstarter projects fail to find funding — with some 32K projects in total having failed, compared to the 25K projects that succeeded. The company hides the failures as a gesture to creators, and to help users focus on the projects with traction. To further boost its transparency, Kickstarter also launched a stats page in June, which provides daily updates on metrics like dollars pledged, success rates, etc., broken down by category. Check it out here. A 44 percent success rate ain’t bad. Considering there have been seven $1 million-plus projects since February and that today 82 percent of projects that raise more than 20 percent of their goal go on to become successfully funded, the overall trend is positive. However, keep in mind that 62,711 projects have launched in three years, and only seven have hit $1M. That means your chances of reaching $1M are a fraction of one percent. What’s more, few of the Kickstarter projects that are successfully funded go on to become real, revenue-generating businesses. Many of those projects naturally go on to create eCommerce stores to sell their wares. As a number of those projects have used Shopify to open their storefronts (including the $10M baby, Pebble) the startup has taken an interest in this growing trend. Shopify’s marketing and PR guru, Mark Hayes, even decided to profile the creators of some of Kickstarter’s most successful projects to ask what they’d learned and to get them to share some of the secrets of their success. (You can check the post out here.) As Kickstarter grows, and more and more companies opt to use it as a launchpad and a means to validate their product and measure market demand, learning from those who’ve found success provides an awesome guide future founders. So, piggy-backing on Hayes’ work, herein we’d like to offer a glimpse into what the most successful projects have done right — and what they did wrong. For starters, it’s good to know what areas (or categories) you should be focused on based on past Kickstarter data. It turns out that “Theater” and “Dance” projects have the highest success rates at 64 and 69 percent, respectively — good to know for all you theater and dance geeks out there. Yes, there are people who will fund your avant garde, dance-heavy rendition of “A Confederacy of Dunces.” (Best to do it now in the event Zach Galifianakis beats you to it.) Of course, only 3,256 Theater-related projects have been launched, which is on the lower end, when you compare it to the 18,263 Film & Video projects and the 14,906 Music-related projects that have launched on Kickstarter. These two categories are by far the most popular, having raised over $100 million “successful dollars” between them. While there is far more competition for dollars among these categories (and in Publishing), of the more popular categories, Music projects have the highest success rate at just over 54 percent. Meanwhile, I’m sorry to say, readers, but Technology ranks near the bottom with only 1,236 projects launched and the second lowest success rate at 29.25 percent. Now that you’re aware of what categories are most popular on Kickstarter, let’s dive into some examples. Ministry of Supply Ministry of Supply is a good place to start. (You can read our recent coverage here.) Borrowing technology from NASA (with a dollop of Under Armour), the startup has designed a next-gen line of dress shirts, called “Apollo,” that adapt to your body to control perspiration, reduce odor, stay wrinkle free and looking a badass. Plus, everything from the fabric to the packaging is made right here in the U.S. of A. Ministry of Supply set out to raise $30K and has raised $288K to date, sneaking up on the $291K raised by Flint & Tinder for their men’s underwear — currently the most-funded fashion project on Kickstarter. So, why has Ministry of Supply been so successful? Well, there’s less competition in Fashion and it also happens that the top three most-funded projects in the category tackle menswear and offer either a next-gen, wrinkle-free, durable product or focus on bringing manufacturing jobs to the U.S. For Ministry of Supply, it also helps that working stiffs like you and me who need dress shirts, and futuristic dress shirts that solve all the problems of what’s currently out there (wrinkles, pit stains, etc.) are certainly appealing. Especially when they advertise the fact that they’ve borrowed from the same technology that NASA uses in its space suits. All that makes for a sexy product that solves a real problem, plus there’s a movement to help get the U.S. back on track by keeping manufacturing jobs here. “We used to make things,” you might’ve heard an American lament. There’s also the fact that the founders used to work at companies with recognizable names, like SpaceX, Lululemon, IDEO, and Apple. The founders also attribute their success to focusing on an iterative process, developing a product, releasing it to a small group of testers, taking the feedback to make it better. They made dozens of test runs on Apollo before launching their Kickstarter project. And, for those who are lucky to exceed their goals, the founders tell us that it’s important to keep people engaged with the project page by offering updates. Ministry of Supply has posted videos and updated the text of their Kickstarter page numerous times since reaching their initial goal, as a way to thank their supporters and talk about their plans going forward. They also said it’s important to add further goals. For example, if they become the most-funded fashion Kickstarter project, they’re going to launch their backers’ names into space on a “ridiculous weather balloon.” This keeps people coming back, checking in on their progress, and sharing the concept with friends. Coffee Joulies Dave Jackson and Dave Petrillo, two mechanical engineers from New Jersey, were tired of the foibles inherent to coffee drinking. Baristas seemingly love to use lava to heat coffee, which makes for burned tongues and hands. Plus, there’s the fact that coffee tends to stay at a pleasant, warm, drinkable temperature for less than 30 seconds. So, the engineers developed a stainless steel coffee bean that you can put in your cup. The bean absorbs excess heat, bringing your coffee down to a drinkable temperature — and not only that, but when it starts to get cold, the bean releases heat to keep your coffee warm. Sweet. (Read our coverage here.) The team set out to raise $9,500 but brought in over $300K and is one of the top 15 Design projects on Kickstarter to date. As to their tips for success? The engineers told Mark Hayes of Shopify that the smartest thing they did was to allow potential customers to opt-in to their email list as their project came to a close. Kickstarter brought a ton of referrals to their site, but because they were busy filling orders, they weren’t able to pre-sell their Joulies for several months. For successful Kickstarter campaigns this can be a huge problem. Teams are small and they inevitably have to go into overdrive and rush to fill orders. If they’re not prepared, they can lose a ton of customers as a result. “Instead, we had a compelling opt-in email box that would notify customers when Joulies were ready to order, so that when the time came to sell again, sending emails to the list was easy — and of enormous value,” they said. In describing what went wrong with their project, we find a good lesson both for project creators and for Kickstarter itself. Founders need to be ready for traffic, and Kickstarter needs to get better at providing its companies with more guidance and transparency into traffic and metrics. Here’s Petrillo’s explanation: We didn’t know what our real traffic numbers were like on Kickstarter, and we also didn’t really have a clue what levels of hosting were required to host and protect against traffic spikes since it was all behind the scenes during Kickstarter. When we did get spikes, like when a story about us got syndicated on Yahoo! homepage for 12 hours, our ‘unlimited’ shared hosting crashed within minutes and we lost hundreds of thousands of unique viewers. Bummer. Ramos Alarm Clock The Ramos Alarm Clock was developed by a team of engineers in NYC. It’s an old-school, neat-looking clock that displays time in a funky way and includes a wireless alarm deactivation panel that forces you to get out of bed to turn off the alarm. The team set out to raise $75K, but made double that and was even teased on Saturday Night Live. The Keys to success? The founders said that it’s all about creating a product that solves a real problem, finding an idea that people can relate to and want to use every day. That should sound familiar to entrepreneurs. They also found Kickstarter to me a much better launch platform than just going it alone or trying to reach out to press themselves. “Kickstarter served us well in being a reputable, visible platform to start from … I don’t know if we could have generated that much buzz launching ourselves, or elsewhere,” said co-founder Paul Sammut. He also recommended that companies be ready with their own storefront as soon as their projects expire on Kickstarter. What didn’t work? Easier said than done when the future of your idea is uncertain, but Sammut said that founders should be realistic about what they can achieve in a short period of time. In other words, be careful of over-promising and under-delivering. “We offered things to customers at the onset of the project that seemed easy to do, but ended up adding a great deal of complexity to the manufacturing process,” the co-founder told Hayes. “I would recommend a serious analysis on how to simplify your product and keep variations to a minimum when starting out,” especially if you’re attempting to launch something that will need to be mass-produced. If you’re a small team, even handling communication and customer support for a couple hundred people can be a bear. ZPM Espresso Kickstarter also apparently loves coffee. ZPM Espresso, the makers of a high-tech espresso machine called the Nocturn, set out to raise $20K, but made nearly $370K on Kickstarter. The machine offers PID controls, programmable presets, adjustable temperature and pressure settings, and open-source software to boot — to the delight of coffee geeks everywhere. What worked? ZPM Espresso co-founder Janet Tambasco said that the key to their campaign was focusing on being extremely responsible to questions and feedback. What’s more, when asking for money on a crowdfunding platform (i.e. you’re hitting up strangers for money), she said that the key is being both passionate and transparent. Be honest about your product and what you expect to accomplish. Tambasco said that the team made sure to respond to the thousands of emails they received during their campaign, talked to people who work in the coffee industry about planning next steps, and posted frequent updates on their blog and on their Kickstarter page. As to what didn’t go right? Even if you’re worried about being able to meet your manufacturing (or production goals) at scale, don’t try to slow things down. Roll with it, and don’t be afraid to try to amplify the publicity for your product yourselves — through press and otherwise. Plan for scale in advance in the event you’re lucky to find it. “In retrospect, more funds always helps,” she says, “so we should’ve tried to gather as much momentum as possible, rather than trying to slow things down while we tried to figure out logistics.” Pebble Pebble is the most-funded Kickstarter project to date. The project set a goal of $100K and raised over $10 million. Whoah. (Read our coverage here.) Pebble is an infinitely-customizable smartwatch that is water and scratch resistant and comes with a neat ePaper display (i.e. Kindle-like). Its battery lasts for seven days and can be charged by USB. Users can connect the watch to their smartphones to sync calendars, alerts, emails, and even calls. Essentially, it’s the watch of the future. It makes my Casio calculator watch of yore look like an abacus attached to a sundial that can be worn around the wrist. What worked? Pebble Founder Eric Migicovsky says that (besides all the kickass technology — my words, not his) the key to its Kickstarter campaign was finding effective, demonstrative ways to describe its use cases, which they laid out on their page. “We knew that no one really wakes up in the morning with a desperate urge to buy a smartwatch,” he told Hayes, “so it was our job to figure out exactly how to explain to future users how they will be able to use Pebble.” To do this, he recommends testing out your pitch on people who aren’t going to be your core user base or audience. In fact, he turned to, among others, his mom. Find the best way to pitch every day people and then expand on that to describe your product — advice that has broad/general application, too. And to that point, his other piece of advice echoed that from many others: Above all, one should listen to their users, take care to hear their problems and react accordingly. Be responsive, quick to react, and transparent, and do whatever you can to resolve those pain points as you iterate and go through your product cycle. Amanda Palmer Amanda Palmer has the most-funded Music project on Kickstarter to date. She set a $100K goal and made over $1.1 million. Amanda’s goal was pretty simple: It was to raise money to release her new album. Kickstarter wrote a lengthy description of Amanda’s milestone (becoming the first musician to reach $1M), so we won’t re-hash the whole thing here. But, in case you missed it, there’s plenty that applies to this discussion — and echoes what’s been said by other project founders. Amanda wasn’t famous or particularly well-known before her Kickstarter campaign blew up, which should be encouraging to other fledgling musicians out there. But what we can take from her success is that, for starters is that, when strangers offer up their cash to help you meet your goals, they love being rewarded with experiences just as much — if not more than — items or things. This may not apply to every category, but a significant portion of the money pledged to Palmer’s campaign was for experiential rewards. She offered backer-only performances, or for $5K, she offered to play a show at her funders’ houses, or the chance to have dinner with her in which she would paint you your very own portrait. Backers ate these rewards up, something that’s reminiscent of Ministry of Supply’s offer to send their backers’ names into space on a weather balloon if they become the most-funded Fashion project. As a result, they’re almost there. As Kickstarter says in its post, “traditional marketplaces restrict fans to being customers, but Amanda’s project invited people to participate.” With the evolution of the web to a discovery and entertainment-driven medium, this kind of interactivity is huge. Transparency also came up again in the discussion of the musician’s success, and, for what it’s worth, Kickstarter likes to think that backers reward artists and campaigns that “step out from behind their industries’ protective walls.” If we can agree that the creative economy is in shambles, then it is likely true that fans are eager to support people who are willing to challenge the status quo and take risks. Even if that means you have to paint your investors’ portraits. http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/08/how-pebble-and-other-product-phenomenons-killed-it-on-kickstarter/ http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/08/how-pebble-and-other-product-phenomenons-killed-it-on-kickstarter/ LONDON, July 9 (Reuters) - Private equity dealmakers are sitting on their hands, unwilling to sell their companies until the euro zone stabilises and debt markets improve enough to support higher prices, according to a study from the Centre for Management Buyout Research (CMBOR). http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/08/buyouts-study-idUSL6E8I6A5N20120708?feedType=RSS&feedName=cyclicalConsumerGoodsSector http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/08/buyouts-study-idUSL6E8I6A5N20120708?feedType=RSS&feedName=cyclicalConsumerGoodsSector It may not be long before electric car owners on America’s Pacific coast can drive all the way from Canada to Mexico using quick-charge stations. Thanks to Oregon’s new ‘electric highway,’ it’s now possible to charge an electric car every 25 miles down a 200-mile stretch of Interstate 5. That, says an NBC News video, makes it the longest stretch of electric highway in the country. It’s set to improve even further, as the state has funding for another 35 quick-charge stations. That’ll make things pretty easy for the state’s current 1,200 electric cars, and means that even if one station is occupied, you won’t have to search too long to find another. The Oregon stations join a long string already in place in California, and a number of level 2 and fast charge stations in Washington, too. It’s all part of a larger plan to create the West Coast Electric Highway, which would allow electric vehicle drivers to travel the length of Interstate 5 from Canada through Washington, Oregon and California, right to the Mexican border. That would make an otherwise time-consuming journey little more difficult than it would be in a regular combustion engined car–and likely encourage a wider market for electric vehicles down the West coast. This article originally appeared on Green Car Reports, one of VentureBeat’s editorial partners. Photo credit: Justin Pickard/Flickr Filed under: green http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/08/oregons-electric-highway-a-boon-for-plug-in-drivers-on-the-west-coast/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/08/oregons-electric-highway-a-boon-for-plug-in-drivers-on-the-west-coast/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 Paul Tucker, a deputy governor of the British central bank and considered a candidate to succeed the current governor, will testify on the Barclays rate-rigging scandal on Monday. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/banking-official-faces-panel-in-barclays-scandal/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/banking-official-faces-panel-in-barclays-scandal/ Pitango Venture Capital has reportedly drastically scaled back its sixth fund, after it encountered great difficulty in meeting its target of $300-350 million. The firm began raising the new fund a year ago. Pitango manages $1.3 billion in five funds. It has not been able to reach the first closing on its sixth fund, suggesting that some key investors have decided not to invest, or have postponed a decision on the matter. Pitango, founded by managing general partners Nehemia (Chemi) Peres and Rami Kalish, is considered one of Israel's top venture capital firms, and its difficulties reflect on the industry as a whole. Several Israeli venture capital firms, including Gemini Israel Funds, Magma Venture Partners, and Vertex Venture Capital, have been trying to raise new funds in the past couple of years, and Pitango's problems are liable to affect morale of these firms' partners. Pitango said in response, "Pitango is the midst of raising capital, which is going as planned. We will not comment on the details, until we have completed the fundraising. The fund has never mentioned timetables or amounts to be raised, and any figure on this matter is pure speculation." http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000763626 http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/docview.asp?did=1000763626 There is a widespread belief in technology circles that bundling of cable TV, newspaper, magazine and other information goods will go away now that those products can be distributed à la carte on the internet. The assumption seems to be that bundling is an artifact of another era when distribution was physical. But this reasoning misses the economic logic behind bundling: under assumptions that apply to most information-based businesses, bundling benefits buyers and sellers. Consider the following simple model for the willingness-to-pay of two cable buyers, the “sports lover” and the “history lover”: What price should the cable companies charge to maximize revenues? Note that optimal prices are always somewhere below the buyers’ willingness-to-pay. Otherwise the buyer wouldn’t benefit from the purchase. For simplicity, assume prices are set 10% lower than willingness-to-pay. If ESPN and the History Channel were sold individually, the revenue maximizing price would be $9 ($10 with a 10% discount). Sports lovers would buy ESPN and history lovers would buy the History Channel. The cable company would get $18 in revenue. By bundling channels, the cable company can charge each customer $11.70 ($13 discounted 10%) for the bundle, yielding combined revenue of $23.40. The consumer surplus would be $2 in the non-bundle and $2.60 in the bundle. Thus both buyers and sellers benefit from bundling. This model is obviously dramatically oversimplified. In real life, bundling tends to flatten the demand curve (here is some background on demand curves, and here is academic paper that presents this argument in rigorous mathematical terms). Suppose the demand curves for ESPN and the History Channel look like this: The green boxes represent revenue for the seller. The deadweight loss areas to the right of the green boxes are transactions that would have benefited buyers and sellers but are not occurring because the revenue-maximizing prices are set too high. Now consider what happens when you bundle channels. The key assumption is that individual buyers lie on different x-axis points of the demand curves of different channels. Sports lovers lie on the left of the ESPN demand curve but on the right side of the History Channel curve. To aggregate demand curves, you don’t stack one on top of the other. You add consumers’ willingness-to-pay separately for each channel. Using the above simplified model, the two demand curves that go from $10 to $3 become one curve that stays flat at $13. In general, adding the individual demand curves creates a flatter demand curve: A flatter demand curve lets sellers charge prices that capture larger areas under the curve and pass more surplus back to consumers. The only loser is the deadweight loss area. Some things to note about bundled pricing: 1. Bundled pricing is one reason why subscription models like Spotify should ultimately win out over à la carte models like iTunes. Subscription commerce can also be thought of as a form of bundling. 2. There are other ways to get some of the benefits of bundled pricing – for example versioning goods, and offering bulk discounts. 3. The benefits of bundled pricing are proportionate the buyers’ variance of preferences for the goods. Hence bundled pricing works best in highly “taste-based” goods like media, and wouldn’t have any benefit for fully commoditized goods (e.g. a bundle of stocks) 4. Bundled pricing can also hurt consumers if it is used by incumbents to exploit their broader catalog to “deter entry” by new competitors. This was a common complaint against Microsoft in the 90′s when they bundled applications like Internet Explorer with Windows. http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers/ http://cdixon.org/2012/07/08/how-bundling-benefits-sellers-and-buyers/ Like many of my friends and colleagues, I was touched by this heartfelt post by Dave McClure yesterday. This part really rings true to me: and so here I am: still standing in the arena, in hand-to-hand combat with demons mostly of my own making, aiming to make a small dent in the universe. nowhere near a great success story, yet fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my own. I’ll be 46 in a month, well past the age when most folks have already shown what they’re made of. but I’m still grasping for that brass ring. That one paragraph packs a lot of emotion and pattern recognition for me in it. Going hand to hand with demons of your own making. Check. Nowhere near a success story. Check. Well past the age when most folks have already shown what they are made of. Check. Still grasping for that brass ring. Check. I could have written this exact post five years ago. When I was Dave's age. Venture capital doesn't create 20 something millionaires. The prime of your career in VC is the late 40s. Right where Dave is. I am not exactly sure when I stopped feeling all these things that Dave is feeling. But I did. It happened sometime in the past few years. And I am happier for it. But also worried that I don't have that big chip on my shoulder anymore. We will see. But the best line of all is the one that I ganked for the headline of this post. Helping others to achieve greatness is what VC is all about. If you do it well, you achieve a bit of it yourself along the way. But you have to do the first to get the second. Dave understands that. And so I think he'll get his brass ring soon enough. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/helping-others-to-achieve-greatness-as-i-attempt-a-bit-of-my-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/helping-others-to-achieve-greatness-as-i-attempt-a-bit-of-my-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 Ten years ago today, eBay announced an acquisition that might rank as one of the most successful Silicon Valley purchases ever. In fact, it sits third on Ranker’s list of smartest tech acquisitions. I’m talking, of course, about PayPal, the “subsidiary” that now accounts for well over a third of eBay’s total revenue — and gaining. Since the deal completed, PayPal has moved more than half a trillion dollars in payments and grown from 23 million regular users to over 110 million. VentureBeat spoke to PayPal’s senior director of global communications, Anuj Nayar, about the anniversary. Source: eBayPayPal revenue as a percentage of eBay revenue “There’s very few of these acquisitions that are universally seen as a success story,” Nayar said. “But eBay buying PayPal was maybe the most successful acquisition in Silicon Valley history. PayPal now accounts for 38 percent of the total company’s revenue.” The purchase price was $1.5 billion dollars, but not a penny was actually paid. Instead, the deal was a tax-free stock-for-stock exchange: .39 eBay shares for every PayPal share. In return, PayPal has generated about $20 billion in revenue for eBay over the past decade. In fact, this year alone PayPal expects to process more than three times the initial purchase amount — $7 billion — in mobile payments alone. There’s some irony there, as Nayar notes: “In 1998 the original business model was to move money between two Palm Pilots … and the online payments was a side business.” Now, he says with a trace of humor, “the hot new thing is to use your mobile phone as a wallet.” Source: Dipity.com It all started on a Palm Pilot? Money on a mobile device is essentially how PayPal began. And a recent re-organization by eBay president David Marcus has refocused the company on mobile, putting former mobile chief Hill Ferguson in charge of all PayPal product groups. It’s a needed change, says Nayar. “The payments market is getting more and more competitive … every morning I check VentureBeat and there’s another digital wallet company starting up. We are definitely doubling down on accelerating innovation.” Of course, it’s not just small startups challenging PayPal. As we reported late in June, competitors include Facebook, Google, and Apple. None of those are competitors to be taken lightly: one owns the world’s largest social graph, and the other two have a stranglehold on the mobile devices that hundreds of millions of people currently use … and billions more probably soon will. Nayar knows PayPal is in for the fight of its life, but likes the company’s chances. “There’s a very different level of consumers buying in when you’re talking about your money. You need scale and you need trust.” PayPal will need to grow both to have a future decade as successful as its past decade. A brief history of PayPal: 1998: Peter Thiel and Max Levchin develop a service named PayPal as a secure way to beam money between Palm Pilots 1999: Nokia Ventures and Deutsche Bank “beam” Peter Thiel $4.5 million in venture funding from a Palm Pilot 2000: PayPal enables eBay payments 2001: PayPal goes public on the NASDAQ 2002: eBay acquires PayPal for $1.5 billion and begins to integrate PayPal into eBay 2004: PayPal launches its first API and introduces Web Services 2005: PayPal introduces micropayments 2010: PayPal launches the new Send Money application for mobile devices, processes $750 million in mobile payments 2011: PayPal processes $4 billion in mobile payment volume for the year 2012: PayPal partners with Home depot: can be used for payments at 2000 stores Image credit: Sebastian Kaulitzki/ShutterStock Filed under: deals, Entrepreneur, mobile, VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/08/from-1-5b-to-half-a-trillion-dollars-paypal-celebrates-a-10th-anniversary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/08/from-1-5b-to-half-a-trillion-dollars-paypal-celebrates-a-10th-anniversary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 Like many of my friends and colleagues, I was touched by this heartfelt post by Dave McClure yesterday. This part really rings true to me: and so here I am: still standing in the arena, in hand-to-hand combat with demons mostly of my own making, aiming to make a small dent in the universe. nowhere near a great success story, yet fighting the good fight and perhaps helping others to achieve greatness as I attempt a bit of my own. I’ll be 46 in a month, well past the age when most folks have already shown what they’re made of. but I’m still grasping for that brass ring. That one paragraph packs a lot of emotion and pattern recognition for me in it. Going hand to hand with demons of your own making. Check. Nowhere near a success story. Check. Well past the age when most folks have already shown what they are made of. Check. Still grasping for that brass ring. Check. I could have written this exact post five years ago. When I was Dave's age. Venture capital doesn't create 20 something millionaires. The prime of your career in VC is the late 40s. Right where Dave is. I am not exactly sure when I stopped feeling all these things that Dave is feeling. But I did. It happened sometime in the past few years. And I am happier for it. But also worried that I don't have that big chip on my shoulder anymore. We will see. But the best line of all is the one that I ganked for the headline of this post. Helping others to achieve greatness is what VC is all about. If you do it well, you achieve a bit of it yourself along the way. But you have to do the first to get the second. Dave understands that. And so I think he'll get his brass ring soon enough. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/helping-others-to-achieve-greatness-as-i-attempt-a-bit-of-my-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/helping-others-to-achieve-greatness-as-i-attempt-a-bit-of-my-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 The Currency wars are yet on though, at this point with weak US data the Fed would not think of interrupting ( as it needs to raise more bonds) the Dollar’s big run against some key global currencies. The US citizens ofcourse sooner or later actually lose as the currency refuses to weaken on overseas interest but the Japanese would be a happy lot if the Yen remains weak as a result above 80-81 levels even as restructuring continues making domestic prices even tougher for consumption in the Japanese Economy The Fed Consumer Credit report is out on Monday and the Trade data mid week compares ongoing export strength vis-a-vis consumption led growth in imports. With elections upon us in four months, there is unlikely to be any respite from the Fed but equities may not be without cheer as results begin More international data including Japanese Orders and Chinese Producer inflation gives international currencies a chance to reassess their currency direction vis-a-vis the Dollar wall, and in trade Chinese currency continues to assess the paper agreements it has signed to convert each bilateral trade into Chinese yuan giving each nation comfort to carry out trade on a pegged benchmark Global trade from Asia is slated to grow to half the global trade flos from a third today led by a boom in each Asian trade capacity esp India, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Korea, Singapore and China and demand from the Middle East and Africa with each nation individually transacting in Trillions a three fold jump for India itself Meanwhile the US budget deficit is down almost 10% on year and led by hopes on an April surplus in the Budget, July may also be in line for one of the smallest deficits in the US Budget. The FOMC minutes on Wednesday could hold a ready down tick for the clear writing on No required additional QE as the Feds are wont to adding to low market expectations for the week Also a week of respite from Store sales and Housing data leaving markets to assess incoming Earnings reports Related articles Weakness in Commodities does not a Rupee trade make.(awardz.wordpress.com) Asian Currencies Gain This Week as China Easing Boosts Optimism – Bloomberg(bloomberg.com) Dollar Gains Most in 10 Months Versus Euro on Demand for Safety – Bloomberg(bloomberg.com) Australia and China Strike Another Nail into the US Dollar for Independence Day(silverdoctors.com) China in $10bn Latin America loan(bbc.co.uk) The USD Trap Is Closing: Dollar Exclusion Zone Crosses The Pacific As Brazil Signs China Currency Swap(zerohedge.com) http://advantages.us/2012/07/07/us-week-ahead-july-08-2012-july-14-2012-consumer-credit-trade-data-and-global-currency-downtime/ http://advantages.us/2012/07/07/us-week-ahead-july-08-2012-july-14-2012-consumer-credit-trade-data-and-global-currency-downtime/ The Samsung Galaxy S3 quite literally came under fire earlier this month, when a woman in Ireland claimed her phone spontaneously burst into flames. But after an investigation into the incident, Samsung says the phone did not cause the fire. An independent assessment by the Fire Investigations investigative firm found that "the energy source responsible for generating the heat has been determined as external to the device," according to Samsung's blog. Therefore, the company claims, the phone did not independently burst into flames, as the owner had originally claimed. In addition, the investigators found, the only possible way to produce damage similar to the damage that was recorded would be to put the device into a microwave oven. The incident made headlines in June, when User Dillo2k10 posted pictures of a burnt Samsung Galaxy S3, which she claimed caught fire in her car holster. "So I was driving along today with my Galaxy S3 in my car mount when suddenly a white flame sparks and a bang came out of the phone." "I pulled in to look at my phone, the phone burned from the inside out. Burned through the plastic and melted my case to my phone. The phone kept working but without any signal." "I brought it to the Carphone Warehouse and they told me that they couldn't replace it for me, that they had to send it off to be checked out first. Not even a replacement phone, left with nothing." "The phone was destroyed and it slightly burned a piece of plastic on the inside of my car. "And they are refusing to give me a replacement. They had to send it off. Probably nothing I can do, but I'm really annoyed. That could have burned the side of my face or through my pocket and my leg, or set fire to my bed. It's very dangerous," she posted on www.boards.ie. Since Samsung published the results of its investigation, the device user retracted her statement: "The damage to the phone was cause by another person, although they were attempting to recover the phone from water, which later caused damage to the phone. It occurred due to a large amount of external energy, and there was no fault with the phone. This was not a deliberate act but a stupid mistake," she said http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/360571/20120707/samsung-galaxy-s3-fire.htm http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/360571/20120707/samsung-galaxy-s3-fire.htm Levinsohn took over in May after Scott Thompson resignationAfter a big scandal took down both the CEO and the Board of Directors at Yahoo in May, the company finally seems to be getting back on the right path. Interim Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn, who has been in the position since early May, is now the favorite to take over the job full time, Reuters is reporting. This comes [Read more] http://vator.tv/news/2012-07-07-ross-levinsohn-said-to-become-full-time-ceo-of-yahoo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+vatortv%2Fnews+%28VatorNews%29 http://vator.tv/news/2012-07-07-ross-levinsohn-said-to-become-full-time-ceo-of-yahoo?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+vatortv%2Fnews+%28VatorNews%29 Apple has removed the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) EPEAT (Electronic Product Environmental Assessment Tool) certification from 39 of their product lines, including displays and computers. The Wall Street Journal quotes Robert Frisbee, CEO of EPEAT: “[Apple] said their design direction was no longer consistent with the EPEAT requirements,” Frisbee said. The company did not elaborate, Frisbee said. “They were important supporters and we are disappointed that they don’t want their products measured by this standard anymore.” The general assumption seems to be that with products like the new iPad and the Retina MacBook Air, Apple's design and manufacturing process is emphasizing thinness and lightness over recyclability and repairability. This may or may not matter to consumers, who are increasingly faced with disposable, appliance-like consumer electronics. However, some private and public organizations require EPEAT certification for bulk purposes. Would they bend or break their own rules just to get Apple products on the floor? iMore's Ally Kazmucha, who also operates iOS device repair shop, PXLFIX, has previously taken issue with Apple's increasing divergence from repairable technology, as has iFixit's Kyle Wiens writing for Wired, and Richard Gaywood at TUAW. These certifications are only part of the typical environmental checklist Apple presents during new product announcements. Whether Apple decides they're important enough to go with a different certification, to create their own, or ultimately to blaze ahead with no particular environmental certification remains to be seen. iPhones and iPads aren't certifiable under EPEAT to date, and they've done spectacularly well on the market anyway. Would lack of EPEAT certification stop you from buying any other Apple products? Source: The Wall Street Journal News http://www.imore.com/apple-removes-epeat-environmentally-friendly-certification-their-products http://www.imore.com/apple-removes-epeat-environmentally-friendly-certification-their-products If you’ve been following the Apple/Samsung legal battle, this will raise at least one of your eyebrows: the new Galaxy Nexus is selling right now on Google Play. You can snap one up for $350, and the units will start shipping out in two to three weeks’ time. This device is an unlocked GSM phone that will operate on AT&T and T-Mobile in the U.S. and roughly 200 other carriers worldwide. For those who have not been following the aforementioned legal battle, here’s the tl;dr version: In late June, Apple won an injunction that would prevent Samsung from selling the Galaxy Nexus in the states. Samsung appealed the decision due to insufficient evidence, but a judge upheld the ban. Then, just yesterday, the ban was suspended, paving the way for a nice little sales rush. We’ve also noticed a reduction from Google Play’s original $399 pricetag. An Apple statement on the ongoing case reads, “It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong and, as we’ve said many times before, we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.” Because heaven knows Apple never stole nothin’ from nobody — not the iPad’s name or the idea and icon for WiFi sync or the entire concept of computer desktops. No sir. Samsung’s Nexus 7, which was unveiled at Google I/O last month, is a definite non-iPad-knockoff, however. From the outside, it doesn’t seem like Apple would have much grounds for copycat complaints with this device. But patent law warfare being what it is, we’re sure they’ll find something. Filed under: mobile, VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/ban-be-damned/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/ban-be-damned/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 Not to get all Emily Post on y’all, but have you ever considered how many times a day you’re inadvertently rude because of the ways and moments in which you use your smartphone? From texting while driving to Words With Friends at dinner, smartphone rudeness is ubiquitous these days, mostly because we don’t recognize that our behavior is inconsiderate to others. We accidentally talk a bit too loud in cell phone calls, not noticing that others around us are forced to overhear the whole conversation. Or we blithely text away during a movie, our bright little screens distracting eyeballs in an otherwise darkened room. And don’t even get me started on people who tweet from the loo; think about that the next time you’re scrolling through your friends’ updates. It’s just nasty, y’all. Here’s a lovely little infographic we stumbled on that shows some of the hard numbers behind our total lack of cell phone etiquette. (Personally, I can’t believe the stat about texting while making whoopee, as a ’70s game show host might put it.) So stop shouting, stop tapping, stop tweeting, and give yourself a few moments of well-deserved technological freedom — and give those around you a well-deserved break from our communal and constant smartphone tactlessness. Infographic via OnlineCollege.org Filed under: mobile http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/jerks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/jerks/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 A six-man group of open-source diehards from Nokia have teamed up to form Jolla Mobile, a company focused on building phones using the Linux-based MeeGo operating system. Rather, MeeGo will be a sort of jumping-off point. On its Twitter page, Jolla advisor and former MeeGo product manager Jukka Eklund wrote, “We are developing [our] own smartphone OS based on ‪MeeGo… our own UI… for new products.” Jolla will soon be making announcements about its version of MeeGo as well as a brand new smartphone it’s bringing to market. The company so far is composed of “N9 core professionals and MeeGo community alumni,” the page reads. While N9 folks will be at the helm, there is no intention to offer support for Nokia’s N9 smartphones — more on those later. Leading the team is Marc Dillon, the principal engineer behind MeeGo at Nokia up until May 2012, according the group’s LinkedIn page, which has been disappearing and reappearing all morning. Jolla also employs Marko Saukko, formerly a core maintainer for the Mer Project, a Linux distro for mobile devices; and a few other MeeGo engineers and hardcore Linux enthusiasts. MeeGo was built by a few of these guys along with some folks from Intel. However, the project clearly stagnated within Nokia, and the FOSSies behind it have decided to continue fighting the good (open-source mobile) fight elsewhere. Eklund said that Jolla intends for its OS and apps — as well as possibly the device itself — to be open-sourced. Eklund also revealed Jolla is making good use of Nokia’s Qt SDK, which can be used to create apps for Nokia N9 smartphones as well as desktop environments. More details about Jolla’s OS and product should be available within the next few weeks, Eklund said. The company’s first release is still in development. Although the startup is composed of former Nokia employees, Jolla is said to be working with Nokia on hiring issues so as to avoid triggering non-compete clauses in employees’ contracts. Nokia’s N9 was announced just over one year ago. At that time, it was clear to our staff that the MeeGo-powered device was “clearly a side project for Nokia,” which was primarily investing in a long-term relationship with Windows Phone. Because of that, we recognized the N9 was doomed from the start. In fact, the N9 was never released in North America at all. Jolla Mobile was founded in the fall of 2011 and is based in Finland. The startup has taken funding from “international and domestic private investors.” Top image courtesy of olly, Shutterstock hat tip: The Verge Filed under: mobile http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/jolla-mobile/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/jolla-mobile/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 The following is an excerpt from Scott Steinberg’s new book, The Crowdfunding Bible. The book is free to download at www.CrowdFundingGuides.com, or in e-book form on Apple, Nook and Sony Reader devices. Check out the previous excerpt: How IndieGoGo helped fund a video game documentary. Scott Thomas, Creator of Designing Obama The design director for the 2008 Obama presidential campaign, Scott Thomas was an early pioneer on Kickstarter with his Designing Obama campaign. At a time when few crowdfunding programs had caught the public’s eye, and raising six-figure amounts through online pledges seemed just a pipe dream, he managed to pull in an impressive $84,613 for a historical book chronicling the art and design that helped propel Barack Obama into office. Intriguingly, Scott was also one of the first to encounter issues that new crowdfunding campaigns still encounter today. Here, he offers greater insight into the project, and advice to others hoping to follow his lead. Q. What does a design director for a political campaign do? A: The responsibility of the team and myself was to design the presence of the Obama 2008 campaign both online and offline. So we handled much of the user interface design for the BarackObama.com and my.BarackObama.com websites, as well as a lot of the branding materials such as posters and banners that were used at events. We managed a lot of the visuals that you saw coming out of the campaign. Q. How did you come to assemble a book out of all of those materials? And why turn to crowdfunding? A: Well, obviously it was a fairly defining moment in American history, and I’m a firm believer that if you do something large that you should a little time to come to terms with it. I wanted to chronicle some of the work that we did inside the campaign as well as the coinciding art and design movement that was happening outside the campaign. I felt that it was a pretty remarkable point in history where artists and graphic designers rallied around a presidential candidate. Typically the design and art industry is fairly pessimistic of world leaders and it’s usually hard to rally them to a political cause. As I began talking to publishers, I quickly realized that publishers suck. They were in it to produce their book and put my name on it. They weren’t all that interested in me controlling the process, including one publisher that (when I stated that I wanted to do the design of the book myself) asked if they could review my design portfolio! At the end of the day, I really didn’t see what benefit I would get from using a traditional publisher. I wanted to make an artifact; an object with my own spirit, and my own agenda. So I was toying with a lot of ideas as far as how to bring the book out, and luckily an individual from Kickstarter was in Chicago at that time. We ended up meeting up, and he told me what he was doing with Kickstarter and I thought it would be a perfect platform for the project. Q. That was pretty early in Kickstarter’s life, so there weren’t all that many campaigns to study, and none that were for high-end design books such as this. How did you go about researching how you would put a campaign together? A: My project was a bit unprecedented for Kickstarter at the time. I wanted to raise $100,000 for the project, and one of the folks at Kickstarter actually talked me down, saying, “I don’t know that we can generate that much yet: I want you to succeed, I don’t want this project to fail.” And then he explained that you could go over your goal, and that was probably what would happen if I set the goal lower. So that’s how we wound up at $65,000. But that was a hard decision for me to make, because I knew exactly how much the project was going to cost. (At least, I thought I did.) And I didn’t have a lot to work off of, other than the fact that a video was going to be a good way of talking about what the thesis of the book was going to be, and planned to try to connect myself to it and to the project as a whole. There was also a point in time where I wasn’t sure I was going to have enough control over the platform. I wasn’t sure that people were going to come to this site and “believe” in this Kickstarter idea, so I set up a separate website, DesigningObama.com, just to be able to tell the story a bit more and to make it seem a little more official, because it was so new to people at the time. Q. What sort of PR and marketing did you do around the campaign? A: I was doing a lecture tour at the time, speaking about my experience on the campaign, and I coupled that with the launch of the books. I launched it in New York City at the School for Visual Arts, which turned out to be a great platform to launch the project. And then I reached out to a lot of my friends and folks in my network and let them know I was launching this project, and mentioned to them that it would be great if they told folks on Twitter, and helped me spread the word. And I think that several of the folks in the design community that I reached out to ended up starting their own project campaigns later on, such as Scott Wilson at MINIMAL and the TikTok watch kit. A lot of what I did was reach out to my friends who I knew had large followings on social networks, and had them post or tweet about the project as well. For me, Twitter was pretty much the most fundamental part of the marketing that I did. I think it is what really powered the level of support we garnered for the campaign. The rewards I created were primarily going to revolve around the book, and that was what I wanted to keep the focus on, rather than creating all sort of other incentives for backing the project. And at the time there really wasn’t all that much precedent for having a more complex ladder of rewards. The other thing that I knew and understood was that the more complexity in the rewards, the more cost and difficulty there would be in fulfilling them at the end. I knew the book was going to be a huge challenge just by itself. Even the three different books that I had proved to be too complicated: In hindsight, I wish I’d only done one version and left it at that. Q. How much time did you spend interacting with the community once the campaign was running? A: A lot, actually. It was so early in the life of Kickstarter that people didn’t really understand how the whole thing worked. They assumed that the book had already been produced, already been printed, and were asking why it hadn’t shipped yet. Lots of folks didn’t realize that it wasn’t actually done yet. I had a few renders of the book, and a table of contents, and some of the writing was done, but I was nowhere even close to having the book finished. There were many people who were backing the project, even when it was about to close, wondering, “Where’s my book?” So I spent a lot of time responding to messages about that, explaining what Kickstarter was, and how the platform worked. And then there was the problem of shipping and fulfillment. Designing Obama was, for its time, unusual in that it had an unprecedented number of international project backers. And the book weighs five pounds. So when you walk into the post office in downtown Chicago and say, “I’d like to ship five hundred of these overseas. How do I go about doing that?” Well, let’s just say the folks there were not the most informative bunch when confronted with the challenge of shipping paper by the ton. So I had to go back to all of the backers and explain that the cost did not include shipping, and we’d have to settle that up separately when the books were done and ready to ship. This was a part of the process, that, in hindsight, I simply didn’t know enough about. Fulfillment companies are fairly used to this, but I did it pretty raw, to the point where I was renting trucks, I was loading pallets, and I was packing books with friends and family. And I did it all to keep the shipping costs down and not upset my backers. I do not recommend this as a strategy, but this is what I ended up having to do. Q. What advice would you have for teams that are putting together a campaign now about how to get the word out? A: I would strongly suggest that you reach out to your community. If you can convince them that this is a cool project and something of interest, then word about it just naturally spreads. And I think that is the fundamental way to involve people and to get them to back you and support your project. Q. After the campaign was over, how did you maintain contact with backers? A: I predominantly used updates on the Kickstarter page to just let people know where we were at in the process, how fulfillment was going, and post the occasional “woe is me” update about the difficulties of writing a book. Sometimes it was challenging because commenters online have a tendency to comment in ways that may sound negative, and that can sometimes be a blow to your self-esteem, or your confidence in the project. Comments would include the likes of “Why is this taking so long?” And I’d have to post an update and explain that I was designing, writing, publishing and fulfilling a book myself. Just me. So there were some times that I just had to get away, go home, sleep, and then come back refreshed before I wrote a response. Q. Any last thoughts you’d like to leave today’s crowdfunders with? A: With a lot of these projects, you don’t think to build in a salary for yourself. You think “I’m just going to do this project and it’s going to be cool,” and then you realize that you still have to work a day job on top of it. So I had to take on freelance work, but that ended up taking time away from getting the book done. When plotting a campaign, think through the process, from end to end, and all of the associated costs that go along with it. That way, when you have to move two tons of paper from your garage to points all over the world, you have a plan for how to do it. Also, if you can do the project as a part of a team, it’s far better than trying to do it yourself. This was one of my really important pieces of learning. I really wanted to do the project myself, but looking back I would have been far better off if I had involved more people in it. Steinberg’s co-author, Jon Kimmich, will appear on a crowd-fudning panel at GamesBeat 2012. GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your tickets here. Professional keynote speaker Scott Steinberg is a leading expert on leveraging new technology trends to enhance business strategy and family life. He is also a noted industry consultant and bestselling author. Top photo: Designing Obama website Filed under: Entrepreneur http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/crowdfunding-confidential-how-kickstarter-helped-write-the-book-on-the-obama-campaign/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/crowdfunding-confidential-how-kickstarter-helped-write-the-book-on-the-obama-campaign/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 Do you get the feeling apps are getting dumber? They are, and that’s a good thing. Behind the surprising simplicity of some of today’s top apps, smart developers are realizing that they’re able to get users to do more by doing less. A new crop of companies is setting its sights on changing the small behaviors in your life, hoping to reap big rewards. They’re using the best practices of interaction design and psychology to build products with your brain in mind. Here’s how they’re doing it: Be a Feature Famed venture capitalist Fred Wilson insists that successful mobile products need to do just one thing well. App designers often forget the speed and attention constraints people experience while using their products. Testing your app in the office, while it’s connected to wi-fi and is the focus of your attention, hardly represents the hectic, real-world conditions experienced by most users. Mobile services not only compete for our attention with the other umpteen things we could do with our smartphones but also have to vie for our focus with the many offline distractions associated with life on the go. For example, Voxer‘s simple walkie-talkie interface gives new functionality to the smartphone by replicating the “push to talk” experience within the app. Its few options give users limited functionality but focus on the one thing the app is built to do — send short audio messages. Mobile apps need to get users in and out of the service quickly. By thinking of the app as a facilitator of a single feature as opposed to a rich experience, developers can trim away the steps and options typical of an onerous, and ultimately unused product. Build it Easier Of course, if an app does too little, even if it is a simple feature, users will not find it valuable. In order for developers to create the kind of engagement necessary to grow a substantial business, the software must to make a core behavior substantially easier. Changes in interfaces, such as the one now occurring in the switch from desktop to mobile computing, create new opportunities to make user experiences significantly easier than before. For example, just think how much more often you communicate with people now that the technology to do so is with you at all times. The next wave in mobile computing will move beyond the phone. Several companies are anticipating a world where users wear devices to make difficult behaviors much easier. LumoBack, a company now money on Kickstarter, has built a new way to improve users’ posture. [Disclosure: LumoBack co-founder Charles Wang is a close friend.] A device, worn like a belt around the waste, sends data to an avatar named Lumo on the user’s phone. When he or she slouches, so does Lumo, providing immediate, actionable feedback. Make it a Habit The importance of forming new behaviors will not be limited to health and wellness applications. To stand out from the home-screen clutter of a typical user’s phone, app designers must ensure they can quickly create user habits. Developers are increasingly focusing on how to create repeated user engagement as they realize that viral growth is difficult on a tightly controlled platform like Apple’s. To make the numbers work out profitably, developers must keep the users they have by pushing down churn rates. Evernote’s smile graph demonstrates how the company increased its value to users the more they used it. The habit of capturing notes in Evernote increased the utility of the service. Entering notes while on the go made retrieving them from the desktop more valuable. Of course, there are no guarantees in building a new business. Mobile app development is still in its infancy, and as new interfaces evolve, so will the opportunities. However, as more developers realize that their success hinges on understanding user behavior, the principles above will prove important. The success stories of tomorrow will not come from the most elaborately ornate apps, which try and solve all of the customer’s needs and wants. Instead, it will come from smart developers, building simple, elegant solutions. If you’d like to hear more on this subject, come see me on the “Designing for the Mobile Brain” panel at the MobileBeat conference in San Francisco on July 10. Nir Eyal is a founder of two startups and an advisor to several Bay Area companies and incubators. He is a Lecturer in Marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and blogs about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business at NirAndFar.com. [Top image credit: Maxim Blinkov/Shutterstock] Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here. Filed under: dev, VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/stop-building-apps-and-start-building-behaviors/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/07/stop-building-apps-and-start-building-behaviors/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Venturebeat+%28VentureBeat%29 I've been reading sci-fi and thinking about sci-fi's relationship to technology innovation. I posted last week about Twitter and the Metaverse and noted that Neal Stephenson had imagined things in the early 90s that happened almost twenty years later. But of course it is possible that many of the things that are built by technologists are reactions to reading sci-fi and wanting to realize the fertile imaginations of sci-fi authors. So it's not entirely clear exactly who is inspiring who. Like most things, it is likely a bit of both. Technologists create new things. Writers are inspired and create stories that reflect these emerging new technologies. Technologists read those stories and are inspired by them. It's a virtuous circle. Technology innovation doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in a dialog with society. And sci-fi writers are but one example of the way society impacts technology. I think that's one of the reasons that many of the most interesting bay area startups are choosing to locate themselves in the city. And it is one of the reasons that NYC is developing a vibrant technology community. Society is at its most dense in rich urban environments where society and technology can inspire each other on a daily basis. Steven Johnson wrote about this phenomenon in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From. So if you want to know what is going to happen next in the world of technology, you need to be thinking about society and where it is going, how it is interacting with technology, and how it is inspiring technologists. Which is why I am reading a lot of sci-fi this summer. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/cause-effect.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/cause-effect.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 Say you had been thinking of being bitten by a venomous bug in Colorado backcountry. My experience-driven suggestion: Don't. -> On @BloombergTV rocking an Overlook Hotel t-shirt #TheShiningHomage -> What's a Higgs Boson? Watch Brooklyn hipsters guess what it is. (VIDEO) http://t.co/umft8qqk -> The Fires This Time – http://t.co/vVYDvXtX -> Federer. Nice. -> http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2012/07/twitter-digest-2012-07-06.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29 http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2012/07/twitter-digest-2012-07-06.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+InfectiousGreed+%28Paul+Kedrosky%27s+Infectious+Greed%29 Merchant Data Systems (MDS) announces expanded capabilities for merchants in Alaska, with an innovative team up with search engine marketing agency, Karma Snack. By providing a complete line of merchant services, along with expanded SEO and eCommerce solutions, with Shopping Cart setup, Mobile SEO and commerce capabilities, and wireless credit card processing, world markets can be effectively reached from even remote locations. Teamed with Karma Snack, the expanding Internet market can be fully utilized. By increasing merchant-site traffic and maximizing returns, an increased share in market percentage can substantially improve performance for Alaska merchants. MDS, then, is preparing merchants to leap towards the next generation of online commerce. Karma Snack notes that by 2014, mobile and online purchases will surpass retail purchases. Android and Apple smart phones presently account for 80% of online revenue. Fully utilizing all potential markets is one way of expanding business and keeping in step with competition. Merchant Data Systems offers the most complete services in credit card processing companies, with state-of-the-art technology. A secure online merchant account, allowing acceptance of credit cards, both onsite, online, as well as through purchases from the rapidly growing mobile and smart-phone market increases the depth of Alaska merchants. A variety of options in credit card machines helps provide services perfectly suited for point of sale merchants. Merchant accounts from MDS provides extremely competitive rates with 24/7 customer service. 24/7 customer service from both MDS and Karma Snack adds an extra level of security and support for Alaska merchants. Alaska merchant services from MDS, including mobile credit card processing, provides a complete payment gateway, setting up businesses with a credit card merchant account that allows small and medium-sized businesses to effectively tap into markets previously reserved only for large corporations, and on a competitive level. The high level of professionalism afforded from MDS and Karma Snack, can help bring small and medium-sized business up to the next level. Some of the major lines of service offered by MDS include: Expanded services from MDS include: Complete payment processing including credit and debit card processing, telephone / electronic check processing, mail and telephone order processing, an innovative ISO/MSP agent program, fraud protection, as well as merchant cash advances. Merchant Data Systems also makes a complete payroll program available to participating merchants. Additionally, MDS provides POS Equipment sales and leasing, which includes equipment financing for all hardware components. With MDS, the Alaska merchant will be able to accept Visa®, MasterCard®, AMEX, Discover, Diners Club, and JCB. MDS' robust gift card and loyalty program provide incentives to customers for a continued and lasting relationship with Alaska merchants. Alaska merchants will benefit from the MDS gift card program, which leads to increased sales, customer satisfaction, and professionalism. MDS integrates POS-based, eCommerce, and mobile phone accounts, allowing seamless integration between various merchant markets. This provides real-time POS inventory management. For merchants who work away from traditional locations, such as on job sites, at sporting events, fairs where cardholders are present, wireless processing of credit and debit cards allows the merchant to bring their business virtually anywhere where wireless communication functions. MDS provides secure wireless data transfer that is fully complaint with PCI regulations. For mobile and smart phone applications, MDS codes with HTML5, the industry standard. MDS’ Tier 2 program allows businesses who might be considered high-risk due to the nature of their business, or how their transactions are processed, to secure a merchant account with appropriate equipment. With MDS teaming together with Karma Snack, a leading search engine marketing agency, online businesses receive increased internet traffic with increased conversion rates, providing more return for marketing efforts. Lead generation and increased online sales, as well as higher customer lifetime, result in long-term gains in business revenues. The ability to deliver extreme increases in internet traffic, can be of much advantage to those merchants who engage in online marketing. Whether an Alaska merchant is large or small, streamlined merchant services makes a difference in the level of professionalism that is offered to customers, saving time and money in administrative costs, and allowing the merchant to successfully tap into the expanded market share offered through virtual shopping. http://prstartups.com/business/new-expanding-merchant-services-in-alaska/?utm_source=Cubicx%C2%AE&utm_medium=twitter http://prstartups.com/business/new-expanding-merchant-services-in-alaska/?utm_source=Cubicx%C2%AE&utm_medium=twitter Crowdfunding is disrupting all aspects of the startup fundraising ecosystem, from seed rounds all the way up to full Series A rounds. But the ecosystem most ripe for disruption doesn’t involve professional investors at all — it’s the friends and family round — and it’s the true lifeblood of startups. According to the Angel Capital Education Foundation, startups annually raise $60 billion through friends and family. Compare that to what venture capitalists invest per year ($20 billion) and professional angels ($20 billion), and you’ve got the largest single source of startup capital. Although raising from friends and family is the most likely source of capital, it also happens to be the hardest to extract checks from since there is so much friction when it comes to raising from lots of people. In this case, crowdfunding is really just mechanizing the process of collecting money from a large group of people. But if you’re an entrepreneur like me, and have raised money from lots of people at the same time, you’ll quickly agree that this is a nightmare. The popular metaphor of herding cats doesn’t begin to explain how laborious this process is. Big Friction in Small Checks The only thing harder than raising large sums of capital is trying to raise really small sums. The inherent friction in asking lots of people for money prevents most people from asking to begin with. Imagine calling a friend to ask for a small check — “Hey Matt, I’m thinking about starting a new company and could really use $25. You’re interested? Great, now can you read me off your credit card number?” Not going to happen. Instead, sending an email that points to your crowdfunding profile makes it easy for people to use any number of payment methods in any amount they feel comfortable with. This, in turn, makes it more likely that you’ll reach out to more people than you would through traditional methods. Extending to Fans The small check model also works incredibly well for those that might not quite be friends or family but are fans of what the startup is doing. In many cases these could be potential customers who are willing to make a small bet that a startup will succeed at producing the product. The concept of pre-selling potential customers is powerful in and of itself since it allows startups to raise money directly from customers for products that aren’t even produced yet. Once again, the friction of raising money $50 at a time for a startup would prevent most entrepreneurs from even trying, but the crowdfunding model easily radiates out to strong affinity groups that can provide another bucket of capital. Avoiding the Uncomfortable “No” The worst part about asking others for money is asking at all. It gets progressively more uncomfortable depending on how you interact, with face-to-face meetings and phone calls being at the top of the “most uncomfortable” list. By comparison, asking for contributions through email is relatively easy. The importance of email cannot be understated. Aside from the efficiency of contacting large numbers of people simultaneously, it affords the receiving party a friendly way to pass. This method was actually pioneered in the early days of online charity fundraising. These days you can’t make it a year without getting someone’s request to support their Pelotonia ride or a Race for the Cure. The online ask is a game changer. Visibility Adds Value Moving the funding activity to a public forum also creates visibility on progress. This is critical for generating momentum and social proof. Backers want to support startups with momentum, but they need to know that others are contributing as well. We watched this first hand at Fundable last month when we had our first successfully funded project, the Elevation Training Mask. The founder worked hard to get his friends and fans to get the initial fundraise about 50 percent of its $10,000 goal. He was able to do that within the first 24 hours, which led others to quickly pile on board and surpass his goal in just 72 hours. The value of demonstrating success publicly (and virally) is incredibly powerful. Exposing the participation of backers in real time significantly helps the startup publicize and rally around a specific goal. It’s especially helpful when lots of people need to contribute toward the same end game at the same time. It Adds Up Efficiently soliciting small sums of money is a big deal. When you think about how much capital is essentially locked away from startups simply due to the inefficiency of aggregating the checks, you realize how much untapped potential exists. Considering over 90 percent of startups never receive funding from professional angel or venture capital investors, a highly scaleable and available new source of funding could be a huge win for a lot of entrepreneurs. [Illustration by Hallie Bateman] Wil Schroter Wil Schroter is the co-founder and CEO of Fundable.com, a crowdfunding platform for startup companies. A serial entrepreneur, Wil has founded eight companies, the last three venture funded, and has written extensively about startups in TechCrunch, Forbes, Bizjournals, and GigaOM. Follow him on Twitter here. http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/06/crowdfunding-streamlines-the-friends-and-family-round/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/06/crowdfunding-streamlines-the-friends-and-family-round/ What did peHUB readers want to know about on the holiday week? Returns, personnel moves and fundraisings. Check out our top 10 to get clued in on what you might’ve missed standing around the grill and watching 10-second fireworks displays in San Diego. 1. Reuters had the news of one prominent VC stepping away from an equally prominent position with Groupon 2. Joanna Glasner had the latest on Industry Ventures’ FoF 3. Mark Boslet covered Bessemer’s triumphant return on the Microelectronics investment 4. Angela Sormani was in the know for Oregon’s hits from its PE portfolio 5. Luisa Beltran had some sad news on first half PE M&A activity 6. Reuters had equally bad news for those in the PE fundraising market 7. Luisa Beltran had the latest on a personnel move 8. What’s the good word on VC deal activity? Mark Boslet covered the Prequin report 9. Jonathan Marino had one idea for middle market firms looking to raise capital—wait out the JOBS Act’s approval! 10. Luisa Beltran had the scoop on a PE firm lookin’ to reel in some big bucks Image Credit: Shutterstock.com http://www.pehub.com/158297/pehub-top-10-posts-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pehub%2Fblog+%28PE+HUB+Blog%29 http://www.pehub.com/158297/pehub-top-10-posts-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+pehub%2Fblog+%28PE+HUB+Blog%29 July 6 (Reuters) - Chelsea Therapeutics International Ltd's largest shareholder has urged the board to explore alternative approaches after the company's key experimental drug hit another regulatory http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/06/chelseatherapeutics-shareholder-idUSL3E8I63BC20120706?feedType=RSS&feedName=hotStocksNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FhotStocksNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Hot+Stocks%29 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/06/chelseatherapeutics-shareholder-idUSL3E8I63BC20120706?feedType=RSS&feedName=hotStocksNews&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+reuters%2FhotStocksNews+%28News+%2F+US+%2F+Hot+Stocks%29 The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a controversial pilot proposal from the New York Stock Exchange that will result in some stock trades being diverted away from the traditional exchange. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/regulators-approve-n-y-s-e-plan-for-its-own-dark-pool/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/regulators-approve-n-y-s-e-plan-for-its-own-dark-pool/ Vision is more important than vast business knowledge for venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Peter Levine, General Partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, says that technical founders are best equipped to lead a fledgling company. Why? “Technical co-founders are great at envisioning where the company’s going from a strategic standpoint,” Levine told GigaOm in a video interview. “They have what I call the gut-feel of building out their business.” Levine said that Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in the likes of Foursquare, Groupon, Instagram, and Digg, uses whether or not a tech company’s founder is actually leading the company as an initial screening for early stage investments. “It’s easier to coach a technical founder how to be CEO and manage a business than it is to teach a professional CEO the nuances of that particular business,” said Levine, who joined Andreessen Horowitz last year and focuses on infrastructure companies. “With the premise that we look for technical co-founders to run a company, I view myself as being a coach to that technical co-founder,” he said. “I can help them with their business issues, with the growth issues of taking a company from a very early stage to something much larger.” He added, nothing beats a technical founder’s passion about “the business that they’re going to dominate.” Levine also told GigaOm that he sees the cloud computing space as the next big industry for innovation and opportunity. Jillian D'Onfro is an editorial intern whose work has previously appeared in Making Music Magazine and Dig Boston, an alternative weekly newspaper. @jillianiles http://www.inc.com/jillian-donfro/why-tech-founders-are-the-best-ceos.html http://www.inc.com/jillian-donfro/why-tech-founders-are-the-best-ceos.html The latest moves made by News Corp, Vivendi and Liberty Media signal a shifting landscape of opportunities for snatching up assets as media companies navigate new entertainment platforms, a soft economy, turmoil in Europe, and the upcoming U.S. presidential election. The 30-year-old conference, hosted by boutique investment firm Allen & Co has consistently attracted heavy hitters and spawned blockbuster deals including Disney's $19 billion acquisition of Cap Cities/ABC in 1995. However, with the exception of Comcast Corp's 2009 purchase of NBC Universal, few major tie-ups have come out of Sun Valley in recent years. That may change at this year's event, which runs from July 10 to July 14 at the Sun Valley Resort. Developments in just the past few weeks have industry watchers predicting media companies will peel away more assets while they jockey to grab consumers' attention as entertainment options swell. Most notably, News Corp's board approved a plan to split the $60 billion conglomerate into two publicly traded companies, one focusing on entertainment and the other on publishing, with the Murdoch family controlling both. News Corp Chief Executive Rupert Murdoch and his children - James, Lachlan and Elisabeth - are expected at Sun Valley amid speculation over their roles in the new companies. "I think it'll be more provocative this year. There will be more discussion about whether these bigger conglomerates start breaking up. It'll be the topic du jour considering what happened with News Corp," said Todd Davison, Morgan Stanley's co-head of media investment banking for North America. Between whitewater rafting and hikes in the scenic Pioneer mountains, executives attending the so-called "summer camp for moguls" have the chance for high-level talks about possible sales or collaborations. Close attention will be paid to who lunches together, chats over cocktails, or huddles with the venture capitalists and private equity chiefs expected to attend, including Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz LLC and Henry Kravis of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. Other media titans whose private jets are expected to clog the small airport's runway include Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, talk show queen turned network executive Oprah Winfrey, and Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes, according to a list of attendees obtained by Reuters. On the tech side, guests include Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon.com Chief Jeff Bezos, Google Inc's Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt and Larry Page, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Facebook, one of the most closely watched and highly anticipated companies to go public, fell flat with its IPO in May after technical glitches on the Nasdaq and questions about its ability to increase advertising revenue. The fallout from Facebook's public debut and how that will affect other tech companies' plans of going public will certainly be a topic of conversation among the moguls. So will the fate of Yahoo, an Internet icon that is struggling to regain its leadership status after being usurped by Google, Facebook, Apple, and others. Yahoo's interim CEO Ross Levinsohn is currently on the guest list, but he may not make the event due to the annual meeting of Yahoo shareholders next week while former Yahoo CEOs Jerry Yang and Terry Semel are also expected to attend the conference. Apple CEO Tim Cook appears on the guest list, but the iPhone maker has not confirmed whether he will attend. His predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, shunned the event, though his widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is listed among this year's guests. Even if Cook does not attend, the next version of Apple TV will be on the minds of media executives. "I'm sure there will be lots of speculation with the full version of Apple TV. If and when that happens, that will have a major impact on how Internet video is consumed in the living room," said Ken Allen, director in Blackstone's technology advisory practice. Vivendi, the French media conglomerate, could be looking to unload some assets now that longtime CEO Jean-Bernard Levy has stepped down. One Vivendi asset widely considered to be ripe for disposal is its 60 percent, or $8 billion stake, in U.S. video game publisher Activision Blizzard, whose CEO Bobby Kotick, a Sun Valley conference regular, is registered for this year's edition as well. The company could also spin off Moroccan telecom company Maroc Telecom or mull a Murdoch-style split of its business into a telecom and media arm, analysts and bankers have said. Lucian Grainge, the head of Universal Music Group, another Vivendi asset, will also be in attendance as his company continues its battle for regulatory approval of EMI Group. John Malone, the CEO of Liberty Media is expected, as his media holding company tries to seize control of Sirius XM Radio, the satellite radio provider it floated a $530 million loan to in 2009 to help it avoid bankruptcy. Television and film producers also may be looking for new avenues to sell their content as online players try to bolster their offerings. "The content companies are in the best position. They just need to continue to figure out the best way to monetize their content through new mediums," said Jonathan Boyar, managing director of Boyar Value Fund, which owns shares of Cablevision Systems, CBS Corp, Time Warner and Comcast. The November presidential election is "another source of uncertainty in terms of what sort of regulation we'll have, what the tax outlook will look like, what the healthcare will look like," said Blackstone's Allen. (Reporting By Liana B. Baker in New York and Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles; Editing by Peter Lauria and Alden Bentley) http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/06/us-sunvalley-moguls-idUSBRE8650Q920120706?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/06/us-sunvalley-moguls-idUSBRE8650Q920120706?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews Yahoo and Facebook have agreed to settle an increasingly bitter legal fight over their patent holdings, according to a person briefed on the matter, ending what could have been one of the nastier court battles in Silicon Valley in some time. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/yahoo-and-facebook-said-to-settle-patent-lawsuits/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/yahoo-and-facebook-said-to-settle-patent-lawsuits/ The company's Pankaj Gupta, who runs the Personalization and Recommender Systems, says that search and discovery on the service will "change forever." [Read more] http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57467431-93/twitter-to-unveil-major-search-and-discovery-update-today/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57467431-93/twitter-to-unveil-major-search-and-discovery-update-today/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title Everybody’s heard of the PayPal mafia — the cohort of entrepreneurs who graduated from the payments service when it was bought by eBay and have since left their mark across dozens of Silicon Valley companies, including Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and many more. But was it entirely unique? Skype has plenty of similarities to PayPal— not just in the fact that it is broad, disruptive brand that sold to eBay, but also because it has an alumni network of its own to boast about. True, Skype’s graduating class haven’t made as much of an impact as PayPal’s, and there are a few possible reasons for this. First, most of the ripples that have rolled out from Skype have been concentrated on Europe, rather than inside the Bay Area bubble: that means they’ve got less coverage and less investment to bank on. Second, many of those who made their names at Skype went on to become investors rather than having another crack at running their own businesses — partly to step into that selfsame equity gap. Most importantly, though, is the fact that the profit from Skype deal was less distributed than PayPal’s. While Skype’s exit was nearly twice as large, the lion’s share of the proceeds went to its investors and founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. The share pool for employees was, I’m told, measly by Silicon Valley standards — which meant the graduates, in turn, had less of their own to spread around. Still, that has not stopped those who worked on Skype from going on to become an incredibly active and busy group. Maybe it’s not a full-blown cosa nostra, but it’s a small family at the very least. NIKLAS ZENNSTRÖM The ringmaster of Skype’s circus, Swede Zennström is now the CEO of Atomico, a London-based VC that has investments in the likes of Rovio, Fon, Jawbone, Silk and more. He enriched himself twice over with Skype, after buying back a slice of it when Silver Lake Partners acquired 65 percent of the company from eBay and promptly flipped it to Microsoft for $8.5 billion JANUS FRIIS Skype’s other co-founder, Friis was also in on the buyback. These days his relationship with Zennström is not as tight as in the past, and he has concentrated his efforts on Rdio and now Vdio, where he has taken a number of former Skypers including Malthe Sigurdsson and Stephanie Robesky. TOIVO ANNUS, AHTI HEINLA, PRIIT KASESALU, JAAN TALLINN A quartet of Estonian engineers who formed Ambient Sound Investments after leaving Skype. They do not run the fund directly, but it has been an extremely active investor with interesting moves into companies like Blip.tv and Senseg. Annus has been an active investor in his own right too. CARTER ADAMSON Another with many connections to the group. Adamson (a veteran of ICQ and AOL) was in charge of desktop products at Skype at the time of the eBay acquisition, and went on to be entrepreneur in residence at Atomico. From there, he helped launch Rdio and is currently the company’s COO. EILEEN BURBIDGE Left Skype before the eBay acquisition, but went on to work at Ambient Sound and led some investments including academic software firm Mendeley. After looking to strike out on her own, she ended up forming a London-based seed investment fund, Passion Capital with former QXL executives Stefan Glaenzer and Robert Dighero. TAAVET HINRIKUS Credited as Skype’s first employee, Hinrikus — who had worked with Zenstrom Friis in the past — now runs the London-based currency exchange startup Transferwise. On top of that he is also an angel investor who participated in seed rounds for the likes of Tweetdeck and CheckThis. He also acts as an advisor for Ambient Sound. SHIN IWATA, CARLOS PIRES, KELLY POON, GEOFFREY PRENTICE, HIRO TAMURA This group of former Skype executives are now working for Atomico, helping to expand its remit into new territories such as Japan, Brazil and China. MICHAEL JACKSON Once the COO of Skype, Jackson — who worked alongside Zennstrom at Swedish telco/ISP Tele2 — is now an incredibly active investor on the European scene, popping up all over the place. He’s a partner with Mangrove Capital, which has a portfolio including Rdio, OpenX and Seatwave. He often invests alongside Atomico. SAUL KLEIN Not a core member of the Skype team, having joined at the same time as the eBay acquisition, but previously founded one of the companies that became Lovefilm, Europe’s rival to Netflix and later sold to Amazon. These days he’s one of Europe’s top investors with Index Ventures, often working alongside Atomico and other Skype alums — although it’s not always been an easy relationship. SUPPORTING CAST Of course, this is just a handful of people who worked on Skype: there are many others who currently work in less visible roles or went through the Skype later in its life. Here a few of those who are less well-known but still claim links to Skype. ERIC LAGIER Worked on mobile strategy at Skype, joining shortly before the eBay acquisition. Now runs social media aggregation startup Memolane. ANDERS HALLIN Left Skype in 2007 after three years to join Stardoll (founding CTO? Spotify’s Daniel Ek) and has since gone on to found social network Duego, which is live in Poland, Russia and Latin America. NILS HAMMAR Founded genealogy site Kindo, which was later bought by Israeli powerhouse MyHeritage — a company backed by Skype investor Index Ventures. Now working on Saltside, a webapp studio. STEFAN OBERG Another Tele2 old-timer who joined Skype later on, Oberg has gone on to found the curation tool Remby. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Euro 20: the European startups to watchStartup growth and the new recruiting ecosystemCES 2012: a recap and analysis http://gigaom.com/europe/say-hello-to-the-skype-mafia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29 http://gigaom.com/europe/say-hello-to-the-skype-mafia/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OmMalik+%28GigaOM%3A+Tech%29 Mobile is a less reliable environment than the fixed web. Things don't always work exactly right. And so failing in a friendly way is really important. I particularly like the way Instagram handles this. I went on a bike ride this morning out to Lazy Point. I saw a sign that I thought was great. I took a photo of it and shared it to Instagram and Foursquare. Except, of course, there wasn't good cell service out at Lazy Point. Which is a feature not a bug. So after sharing the photo into Instagram, geolocating it on Foursquare, sharing it out, the upload failed. In many cases, all the work I had put into getting to that point would have been wasted. The app would have just said something like "upload failed" and I'd be back to the starting point. But in Instagram, you get something that looks like this: The first time I got this fail message on Instagram and saw that reload icon, I thought "brilliant." That is friendly failing right there. So I finished my bike ride this morning and when I got home, I took a photo of my phone, then using my home wifi, hit the reload icon, and the photo got posted, shared, and all was good. There's a lot to learn from the way Instagram handles this experience. They save the action you wanted to do in its entirety, and they keep the app in that state until you choose to try it again, or choose to exit out on your own. All mobile apps should work this way. Many don't. http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/feature-friday-friendly-failing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/07/feature-friday-friendly-failing.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AVc+%28A+VC%29 A former director involved in the merger that formed the nation's largest electric utility is lashing out at an abrupt leadership change at the combined company. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/uproar-over-c-e-o-s-ouster-at-merged-energy-giant/ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/07/06/uproar-over-c-e-o-s-ouster-at-merged-energy-giant/