The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Spotify Details New Global Partnership With Coca-Cola
- Forecast Takes The Hassle Out Of Ambient Check-Ins Without Draining Your Battery
- Analysis: Chinese PC Market Will Grow 12% In 2012
- Internet Ad Revenue Reaches $31B In 2011, Mobile Up 149 Percent (IAB Report)
- It’s Official: AT&T To Launch $199 HTC One X On May 6
- PowerInbox Goes Plug-in Free With Email Client API; Adds Apps For Instagram & Pivotal Tracker
- Cloud Emailer Mailjet Hits 1 Billion Emails Sent, Launches Apps For Tracking Emails In Real Time
- Q&A With Bill Amend, Creator Of FoxTrot (And Certified Geek)
- Calling All Startups: TechCrunch New York Just Posted Office Hours
- The Noteboard Is An Amazing $10 Foldable Pocket Whiteboard
- Uber Experiments With Lower-Priced Taxis In Chicago Through Newly Launched Labs Group, ‘Garage’
- Marketo Buys Social Marketing App Developer Crowd Factory
- Backed With $1.5M, CircleUp Aims To Be The AngelList For Consumer And Retail Startups
- Open Source Private Cloud Software Startup Eucalyptus Raises $30M From IVP, Benchmark To Take On VMware
- Research: Only 6% of UK Consumers Care About TV Apps; 12% Want Mobile TV; 19% Want 3D
- Online Education Startup Coursera Lands $16M From Kleiner & NEA, Adds John Doerr To Its Board
- The Game Is Not Over For Facebook, Google In Russia (But There Is Work To Do)
- A Sign Of The Hiring-pocalypse
- DealAngel Helps You Find The Best Hotel Deals — Not Just The Cheapest
- How RocketSpace Is Building A ‘Hit Factory’ For Tech Startups
| Spotify Details New Global Partnership With Coca-Cola Posted:  Right now I’m sitting in a room covered in Spotify and Coca-Cola logos. That’s because Spotify and Coke have just announced a global partnership to help both brands expand their ubiquity. The folks at Coke explained that music has always been a huge part of Coke’s marketing efforts, going all the way back to a Ray Charles ad. That said, the partnership will focus on four key pillars: global, technology, social, and a commitment to music. Spotify explained that Coca-Cola will be a huge factor in bringing Spotify to new markets and new corners of the world. As far as technology is concerned, Spotify is incredibly proud of its platform that allows people share across the world. “We’ll be working really closely with Coke as a technology partner to do things that only Coca-Cola could think of with music,” explained Spotify. “We want to bring new experiences with music to consumers everywhere.” From a music perspective, Coca cola takes advantage of music properties for big events like The Olympics. In 2011, Coke launched Coca-Cola Music, and 2013 will mark the evolution of that program. Spotify will be at the core of it. Users will be invited to Spotify through live shows, unpacked events, and Coke even mentioned that a Hackathon took place this weekend. Meanwhile, Coke will be building content on top of the Spotify platform to deliver to users not only as a marketing effort but as a way to curate the content already available in a more useful, and convenient way. Here’s what Spotify founder Daniel Ek had to say:
Ek also said that this will benefit users by bringing new users around the world onto the platform, which will in turn create a better experience for current users. This morning, the company announced new brand apps with Intel, AT&T, McDonalds, and Reebok. The apps will be a subdivision of Spotify’s desktop app, and give users new features based on which brand app they’re using. Spotify has some pretty huge bills coming in in the form of licensing fees, and the brand apps should help foot the cost through advertising, while also adding a touch of curation to the massive music library. According to The Verge, the AT&T app will give users the ability to check out locations where certain songs were originally recorded. Pretty cool stuff for the music buff. I know, I know. You want to hear about the iPad app. Ek, unfortunately, had sealed lips, but he did say that it’s “in the works.”
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| Forecast Takes The Hassle Out Of Ambient Check-Ins Without Draining Your Battery Posted: 18 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT  There are a number of different schools of thought about how useful Foursquare-like check-ins really are. Forecast, especially, is taking a very different approach from most of Foursquare’s competitors by emphasizing where you are going to be later in the day over just checking in at a location when you arrive. Now, with the latest version of its iPhone app (an update for the Android app is coming soon), the company is taking this concept a bit further. Instead of just telling people where you will be, the app will also automatically check you in when you arrive at a location (assuming you opt in for this service) and let your friends know that you have arrived. So instead of having to remember to check in when you arrive somewhere – which is also the most awkward time to fiddle around with your phone – Forecast will now do this for you. You can use the app as a stand-alone product or connect it to Facebook and Foursquare to reach a wider group of your friends. As the app already knows where you are going, Forecast can take a more conservative approach to checking where you are as you go through your day. Instead of constantly checking where you are and trying to check you in to places as you walk around, the app just checks your location periodically and once it notices that you have arrived at your forecasted location, it will just check you in. Given how unreliable location services can be in dense urban environments, this approach also helps to ensure that you are indeed checking in to the right place. Currently, about 76% of Forecast check in when they use the app. With the auto check-in feature, the company expects that number to get close to 100%. This, as the company’s CEO and co-founder Rene Pinnell told me earlier this week, the app’s concept of “future tense check-ins” opens up a range of possibilities for the company in the long run. Once you have checked in somewhere, after all, chances are that you won’t change your plans anymore. When you tell the app where you will be in the future, though, those plans are still malleable and the right offer from the right advertiser, for example, still has the potential to make you go somewhere else instead. Pinnell also told me that quite a few Forecast users look at the app as a calendaring service. This is another avenue for future development that the company wants to explore soon.
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| Analysis: Chinese PC Market Will Grow 12% In 2012 Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:52 AM PDT  If you were wondering where all the PC growth was, look East, young person. IHS, formerly iSuppli, expects that desktop sales will rise 8% and ultrabook sales will take up 15 to 20 percent of notebook shipments. Windows 8 and Intel’s Ivy Bridge are to be driving factors in PC growth this year. In comparison, IDC found that 2011 PC shipments shrank in Europe and the United States by 9%. Lenovo is still the number one PC maker in China, followed by Acer. HP has declined to fifth place with 5.3% market share. IHS doesn’t really break out Apple sales vs. Windows but knowing the penchant for Made in Cupertino over there, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were high in the list. "And amid a period of slowing PC sales growth worldwide, China's consumers and businesses continue to generate healthy increases,” said Elaine Zhi, IHS analyst. Enterprise around the world still hasn’t hit the refresh button on their internal IT so it’s clear that things probably won’t change much until after Windows 8 launches. Considering most machines made in the last six years can run just about any heavy duty app thrown at them – my own Mac Pro is from 2008 and it runs like a clock – there’s little need to upgrade. That will change when Snow Lion obsoletes a number of Mac models while Windows 8 potentially forces a move towards touchscreen devices.
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| Internet Ad Revenue Reaches $31B In 2011, Mobile Up 149 Percent (IAB Report) Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:36 AM PDT  Internet ad revenue revenue grew 22 percent in 2011, to $31 billion, according to the IAB Internet Advertising Revenue Report. That’s an all-time high.The final three months were also the all-time best quarter at $9 billion, an increase of 20 percent from the same quarter in 2010. Search remains the biggest piece of the pie, with $14.8 billion in revenue, up from $11.7 billion in 2010. Not surprisingly, however, as a percentage, mobile is the fastest-growing sector, more than doubling from $0.6 billion 2010 (the first year that the report tracked mobile numbers) to $1.6 billion 2011. Display advertising grew 35 percent to $11.1 billion overall, with video in particular accounting for $1.8 billion. PricewaterhouseCoopers prepared the report for the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and representatives ffromrm both organizations are discussing their findings on a conference call right now. Apparently, the IAB always kicks off the call with a quote from a notable figure that seems to reflect the general theme of the report. This year, it went with Oliver Wendell Holmes: “The great thing in this world is not so much where we stand and as in what direction we are moving.” It’s not all about growth. For example, Sherrill Mane, the IAB’s senior vice president of research, analytics, and measurement, said that the noteworthy thing about CPMs (the price paid per thousand ad impressions) is that they’re not falling quite as quickly as they used to be, so there’s hope they’ll stabilize or even rise in the future. As you look across the numbers, she also said that the movement of brand dollars online slowed in the second half of 2011 compared to the first six months of the year.
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| It’s Official: AT&T To Launch $199 HTC One X On May 6 Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:17 AM PDT  Well, there you have it. After turning plenty of heads at this year’s Mobile World Congress, HTC’s latest and greatest handset now has an official release date for the United States. AT&T has just announced that the HTC One X will hit store shelves on May 6 with a $199 price tag (2-year contract included, of course), and that pre-orders for the hotly-anticipated handset will begin on April 22. Though it sports the same 4.7-inch 720p Super LCD2 display, 8-megapixel rear shooter and Sense-ified take on Ice Cream Sandwich that its more worldly cousin does, US-spec One X is still a slightly different affair. AT&T’s model forgoes the Tegra 3 chipset for instance, opting instead for a 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and an LTE radio. While some are sure to lament the loss of that quad-core horsepower, LTE should stand to give the device’s mobile web and data experience a real kick in the pants. All of those components are wrapped in a sturdy — not to mention handsome — polycarbonate body, unlike the micro arc oxidized aluminum frame seen in One S. That’s probably for the best, all things considered, as some One S owners have managed to chip the supposedly more robust material just weeks after launch. Of course, AT&T’s One X isn’t the only one slated to hit our shores shortly. Though they declined to lock down a specific date, Sprint also recently revealed the Evo 4G LTE, their own (heavily-redesigned) variant of HTC’s flagship handset that’s second to launch some time in Q2. Meanwhile, T-Mobile will be hosting an event in honor of HTC’s One S tonight where they’re expected to reveal the device’s official release date.
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| PowerInbox Goes Plug-in Free With Email Client API; Adds Apps For Instagram & Pivotal Tracker Posted: 18 Apr 2012 08:00 AM PDT  PowerInbox, the email platform that lets you run apps for Facebook, Twitter, Groupon and Google+ inside your inbox, is today launching its new “Connect API” which allows its service to be directly integrated into third-party mail clients without requiring users to install the PowerInbox software. To kick off the launch, PowerInbox has partnered with a few lesser-known email brands (sorry, no Gmail), including UnifiedInbox, SMAK, and Fuser. In addition, the service has expanded its lineup of email apps to now include Instagram, Pivotal Tracker, and a Boston-based restaurant called Boloco. For those unfamiliar with PowerInbox, the startup is building an email platform that, until now, worked via a web browser extension. Once installed, the emails sent to you from third-party services were turned into mini-apps that let you do things like comment on a Facebook post, send a tweet, follow a user, add someone to a Google+ circle, see the status of a Groupon deal, and more. The idea is that instead of clicking the links in the email to respond to whatever the company sent, you could quickly interact with the service in question without ever leaving your inbox. However, raising awareness about PowerInbox and the hassle of having to install a browser add-on, could have limited PowerInbox’s adoption. That’s why the introduction of the Connect API today is so critical to the company’s future growth. Now, email providers can implement PowerInbox on their end, making it available to all their users at once. CEO Matt Thazhmon tells us that the Connect API is but one step the company has been working on to create this new market for email apps. Going forward, PowerInbox will also be working to integrate with ESPs like MailChimp, email marketing agencies and businesses to send out more interactive emails. They will also work with developers to build apps for the platform and help promote those apps to consumers. Currently, PowerInbox supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Groupon, and now Instagram, PivotalTracker and Boloco. With Instagram, you’ll be able to see comments in your emails and then comment back, plus like photos and see tag and location information about them. For Pivotal Tracker emails, a service popular with developers, you’ll see story details and all the comments inside the notification emails, see subtasks, and accept and decline stories right inside the emails. Boloco is a bit of an odd one – it’s a burrito company - which makes it the first business to sign up for PowerInbox. The restaurant is active in social media and wanted to make their customer emails more interactive. Thazhmon says they got the business up-and-running on PowerInbox in about an hour. PowerInbox is now working on integrating other popular services next, including Pinterest, Netflix, Amazon, Southwest, Turntable.fm and more. And they’re reaching out to other email client makers, to hopefully integrate their new Connect API into those services, too. Thazmon says he knows there are challenges ahead for PowerInbox, given its goal of creating a market for email apps. “The email app market today is similar to the mobile phone app market from seven years ago (basically non-existent). Five years from now, email apps will be at the same level as mobile and social,” he says. ”But it’s a long journey ahead to create that ecosystem of senders and email clients and killer apps and thought leaders and so on. It’s not a technical problem. Market creation is a very, very hard nut to crack.” Boston-based PowerInbox has $1.9 million in funding, with both VC and angel backers.
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| Cloud Emailer Mailjet Hits 1 Billion Emails Sent, Launches Apps For Tracking Emails In Real Time Posted: 18 Apr 2012 07:54 AM PDT  Mailjet, a cloud emailing service for tracking marketing and transactional emails, has just launched a mobile application for its business customers offering real-time email tracking. Within the mobile application, users can monitor email deliveries, plus keep an eye on metrics like bounces, opens and clicks. The company, which just rolled out a new version of its platform a couple of weeks ago, is also announcing today that it has now reached 1 billion emails served. For those unfamiliar with Mailjet, the startup is taking on more established and VC-backed players like SendGrid, Postmark, and Mailgun, to name a few. The service targets businesses who need to buy or rent SMTP email servers, by offering a cloud-based solution. Emails sent out through Mailjet are tracked in a number of ways, including through the use of specialized links, transparent images that tell Mailjet how many times it was displayed, through the analysis of SMTP exchanges for bounces and deliveries, and more. Mailjet is one of the first companies in this space to add a mobile app (for iOS and Android) which allows customers to track their emails while on the go. The app requires a Mailjet account to use, of course, but it’s a freemium service if you’re interested in testing it out. Included in the app are tabs featuring the email feed, campaign activity, analytics and personal settings. The company, based in France, also recently went global, with the opening of offices in San Francisco, London, Berlin and Madrid. Mailjet raised a small round of 180,000 euros from Brussels-based eFounders back in December and now reports having some 10,000 active users on its platform (up from 3,000+ in December).
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| Q&A With Bill Amend, Creator Of FoxTrot (And Certified Geek) Posted: 18 Apr 2012 07:53 AM PDT  As we noted yesterday, cartoonist Bill Amend has released three sets of his popular Foxtrot comic strips as $1.99 downloads. This move, prompted by the creation of Apple’s iBooks Author software and, more important, the rise of the self-publisher, is probably one of the first times I’ve seen a “traditional” comic strip enter the e-book realm in this way. I wanted to find out what Bill Amend was thinking. Luckily, he played along. TC: What made you try this? How did this compare to the “traditional” book release system? Amend: The first time I played around with an iPad on launch day all I could think about was how awesome it would be to somehow get my comics on this thing. Unfortunately, the comic strip eBooks I’d seen all tended to be a little clunky for my tastes, so I assumed I’d need to build a custom reader app, which proved too big a task for me. And then iBooks Author came out and changed everything. You have no idea how much fun it was to make these things. I love working with the people at Andrews McMeel on my print books, but the finished product always feels like their creation more than mine. These iBooks are all my doing and it’s a great feeling. TC: What would you say to folks with kids who are still looking for paper books? Is that medium going away? TC: Folks like MAD magazine and most comics companies are going digital. What does that mean in terms of “experience?” Is something lost? A: At some point I’m sure downloadable books will replace print books sort of the way downloadable music has largely replaced CDs. It’s just so much more efficient. But I do think there’s something to be said for the permanence of print and I doubt it’ll die, just become more scarce. Maybe print-on-demand will grow. To be honest I have no idea. I’m just a cartoonist. But I do worry for my friends in publishing as we enter a world where anyone with a computer can upload an eBook to sell on iTunes or Amazon. The standard 75% cut of eBook revenues they take becomes hard to justify in that world. TC: Are you a big geek? You seem to write about them well. A: Am I a geek? Well, I was a physics major in college. And I dressed up as George Lucas for Halloween back in 1983. And I have my 1st edition boxed set of D&D manuals from high school on my office bookshelf. Do I qualify? TC: What kind of gadgetry do you have? TC: What does it take to get a comic published these days? Is it harder to gain traction? To get popular? A: Well, the beauty of the Web is it doesn’t take much of anything for a cartoonist to self-publish. Of course, attracting an audience and earning a decent income off of it is a whole other matter. But there are more and more success stories out there, so it’s definitely doable. As for getting published in newspapers, it’s always been a one-in-a-zillion shot to get syndicated, but the difference now is it’s probably harder than ever for newly syndicated strips to get into papers. As for getting popular, that’s just one of those hard-to-predict things. I’ve always mainly just tried to do strips that I like, and hope that enough people share my sense of what’s funny. TC: What are some pointers for folks who might want to go into comics? Where should they intern? What should they do? A: As I just said, try to write and draw things that you find funny or interesting, so even if no one else likes your work, you at least made yourself happy for doing it. The web is probably the best way to go these days. It’s cheap to launch a site and with luck you’ll attract some readers who can give you feedback. Also show your work to family and friends to gauge if your jokes are working as intended. And develop thick skin. A career in comics will include lots of rejection and criticism. If you’re still in school and there’s a newspaper or other outlet for cartoons, by all means get some practice there. My college cartooning was invaluable experience, especially in the area of drawing stuff under deadline at 4 am. Also, as my parents told me over and over back when I started, make sure you have a Plan B. There’s a lot of luck involved in being able to do what I do for a living.
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| Calling All Startups: TechCrunch New York Just Posted Office Hours Posted: 18 Apr 2012 07:50 AM PDT  The other day, I had the idea to open up Office Hours here in New York. And when I say “I had the idea,” I mean that I stole it from Mike Butcher who had the brilliant plan to do the same thing in Europe. There’s no reason to get all long-winded, so I’ll just hit you with the specs. First, this isn’t a panel or wonkathon or even a formal interview. This is a chat with myself and John Biggs, East Coast Editor. Maybe you have some news to tell us, or maybe you just want TechCrunch to know that your startup exists. In fact, you may just want a little feedback. Whatever it is, we want to talk to you. After John and I took a road trip to DC, Norfolk and Richmond to meet-up with entrepreneurs in the area, I’m basically champing at the bit to see what you New York-based geniuses have in store for the world. Here’s the plan: Our first session will be relatively low-key, at The Grey Dog located at 90 University Pl. at 12th St. on Wednesday, April 25. The first session will begin promptly at 2:30pm and last until 4:30pm. You can sign up for a 20-minute slot here. The second session will be on Wednesday, May 9 at a location TBD. UPDATE – We’ll run two concurrent meetings. You can sign up for the second meetings here. So who’s down? You can also follow John and I on Twitter at @jordanrcrook and @johnbiggs.
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| The Noteboard Is An Amazing $10 Foldable Pocket Whiteboard Posted: 18 Apr 2012 07:08 AM PDT  Traditional whiteboards are great for nearly everything but portability. Scribbling down physics problems? Sure. Impromptu game of tic-tac-toe? Of course. Folding up and putting it in your pocket? Not really possible with a normal whiteboard. But the Noteboard isn’t a normal whiteboard. It’s a dual-side, foldable whiteboard that might just change the world (but probably not). When unfolded the Noteboard is about the size of 27 notecards but it collapses into a pocket-friendly package. The Noteboard costs just $10 and includes a band to keep the whole thing together along with a black whiteboard marker. Sure, you could probably make one yourself, but not for $10. As the creator notes on the website, the Noteboard is a great alternative to tablets and even paper. What he doesn’t mention is that whiteboard markers can be pretty messy at times, leaving behind a sort of greasy junk. However, for $10, it could be a novel tool for the constant note taker, occasional scribbler or the start-up founder desperately brainstorming ideas for a pivot.
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| Uber Experiments With Lower-Priced Taxis In Chicago Through Newly Launched Labs Group, ‘Garage’ Posted: 18 Apr 2012 05:51 AM PDT  Back when Uber launched in San Francisco, it was heralded as a service that would disrupt the taxi industry by providing black cars on-demand via mobile phones. Thus far, the service has gained a loyal following, and expanded to a number of cities including Seattle, New York, Paris, and Chicago. Today, we’re seeing a possible evolution of Uber with a new experiment in Chicago—using Taxis. Here’s how Uber works. The service allows you to order a black car to come to your location via an Android or iOS app. You can actually track your car as it comes to your location as the app tracks the car via GPS. Payments are handled automatically by charging the card you have on file (no swiping necessary and gratuity is included), and it costs at least 50% more than a taxi. But you can order comfortable transportation on demand, which to many, is well worth the premium. Today, Uber is debuting their own version of Google Labs, called Uber Garage, a workshop where the company will experiment with new ideas for urban transportation. The first project Garage is launching is Taxis in Chicago, where users will be able to see participating taxis, as well as black cars, on the their mobile apps as a transportation option. This is the first time Uber has experimented using different car types with lower price points. Why Chicago first? Uber’s CEO Travis Kalanick says it’s because the city has a larger than normal capacity (50% more cabs per capita than NYC) and low prices, which offers potentially high availability at a greater price point. The benefit for the consumer is that you can order a taxi from your iPhone without getting out your wallet, swiping a card, dealing with cash and more. The benefit for the taxi driver is that they can get more trips, as well as guaranteed tips via Uber. So when Chicago users pull out their Uber app now, select riders will find a way to see just taxi cabs that are close to them on the map of the Chicago area. Similar to the way you order a black car via Uber, you simply choose the taxi and waiting time that works for you, set your exact location and then you’ll receive a message when the taxi driver has arrived at the location. While only a few riders have the taxi service enabled today, this will be rolled out to a number of users over the coming weeks. We’re told that Uber’s car service option will remain the default in the Uber application. Uber says it will be recruiting taxis directly on a driver-by-driver basis. So far, taxi drivers in Chicago have been very responsive to the idea of Uber, says Chicago Uber manager Allen Penn. These taxi drivers simply have the Uber driver app open on their Android or iPhone and can see possible fares and rides coming in. Penn adds that Chicago is growing at a fast rate for Uber in terms of adoption, seeing 30-40 percent month over month growth. In terms of pricing and payment, drivers will input the meter fare from the taxi ride into the Driver application. A 20% charge to cover gratuity and service fees will be added to the fare. Kalanick says that taxis are getting a large portion of the 20 percent charge, with Uber’s take in the low single digits. He says that as Uber experiments with lower price potions, margins definitely go down, but feels this could be a compelling way for Uber to offer better personal transportation choices to users. Kalanick emphasizes that this is an experiment with different car types, and the company will be learning from this test. He says Uber will do a city by city analysis to determine if working with taxis makes sense in other urban areas. Other options could be trying black Camrys or Prius’ at lower price points. Uber, which just raised $32 million from Shervin Pishevar's Menlo Ventures, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Goldman Sachs, Benchmark Capital, recently experimented with pedi-cabs and on-demand BBQ at South by Southwest in Austin. Kalanick says that he likes to think of things as “FedEx delivers packages tomorrow, but Uber delivers transportation in five minutes.” Obviously, this could be extended to deliver a whole bunch of other things, he says. “We are really excited about the potential of rolling out an urban logistics fabric and car types is the first step in this,” he explains. Expanding to taxis could also put some of Uber’s potential competitors on notice, including Europe’s Hailo, which is looking to expand its taxi network to the U.S. For Uber, experiments with pricing have been a way to figure out what riders want and need. In the past Uber has tested reducing pricing in San Francisco, and dynamic pricing over New Years’. And with the new Garage, we’re going to see a number of more interesting ways Uber can try to satisfy the needs of both consumers and drivers in the future. And we’ll see Uber hit London before the Olympics this summer.
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| Marketo Buys Social Marketing App Developer Crowd Factory Posted: 18 Apr 2012 05:00 AM PDT  Marketo, a company that provides an on-demand marketing software that allows businesses to optimize their sales and marketing efforts has acquired Crowd Factory, a startup that creates white-label social marketing applications. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Crowd Factory’s social marketing applications allows marketers to amplify and optimize campaigns, and view social-analytics and interactions. The platform allows marketers to add social applications and messages to every channel – Facebook Pages, Twitter and LinkedIn feeds, landing pages, websites, banner ads and emails. For example, Crowd Factory will take a contest held by a brand and socialize the campaign, increasing interactions and responses. The company’s social offers applications lets marketers build group buying and social gaming elements into their promotions. And marketers can then track and optimize engagement from a single dashboard. The startup has worked with companies such as HBO, Jive, Molson Coors, Sony, Speck and Universal McCann. So how does this fit in with Marketo? In case you aren’t familiar, Marketo aims to help businesses create revenue via channels like e-mail, lead generation, and optimization of site visits. The company’s software helps businesses create everything from email campaigns to other online and social channels, and then tracks the effectiveness of each one from a dashboard. And Marketo will measure the impact of each campaign and program in real-time including email volumes and leads generated, so users can see which campaign is successful and tweak accordingly. Crowd Factory, says Marketo CEO Phil Fernandez, fills in the missing social link. With the addition of social campaigns to the Marketo family, the company is able to offer a more comprehensive platform for online marketing. Marketo says it will soon be debuting a new unified product family integrating social campaign management. The company says that customers have seen as much as a 40% improvement in revenue from using its marketing platform. Last year, Fernandez says revenue was in the $35 million range, and sales are expected to double in 2012. And Marketo, which raised $50 million last year, is bullish on an IPO in the next year or so, with Fernandez saying “the possibility of an IPO is strong in next 12 to 15 months.”
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| Backed With $1.5M, CircleUp Aims To Be The AngelList For Consumer And Retail Startups Posted: 18 Apr 2012 04:30 AM PDT  The funding environment for technology-focused startups these days is getting to be a bit ridiculous, so some tech industry folks may need to use their imaginations for a second to understand this concept. There are a lot of companies out there today — with real products, real employees, and, yes, real revenues — who have a very hard time finding the investors needed to take them to the next level of growth. Think about businesses like your favorite energy bar maker, organic pet food brand, or craft brewery. To get from the stage of being on some local store shelves to being featured in a large-scale retailer like Whole Foods, they are almost certainly going to need some extra money from outside sources. But VCs and private equity firms aren’t quite as spendy when it comes to these types of companies as they are with the latest batch of consumer web apps: They typically want to see a consumer retail brand have at least $10 million in annual revenue before they’ll even consider taking a stake in it. Meanwhile, there are a lot of rules and regulations surrounding who is legally allowed to invest in private companies, so they can’t just go raising funds from any customer, friend, or family member who wants to support them. In the end, it’s even more difficult than you probably think to start the next Clif Bar, Burt’s Bees, or American Apparel. That’s where CircleUp aims to help. Like AngelList With A Crowdfunding TwistCircleUp is a San Francisco-based startup that has built an online platform to allow consumer product companies to raise money from accredited investors. Much like AngelList does for tech startups and the angel investment community, CircleUp allows both retail companies and the people who would potentially like to invest in them to evaluate each other and communicate in a private social networking setting. It then goes a step further. CircleUp also serves as a broker-dealer to allow the funding transactions to take place via the site. It is currently doing this through a partnership with WR Hambrecht, but it is now in the application process with securities regulator FINRA independently. This makes CirlceUp a true “crowdfunding” site, where accredited investors can take equity in companies that they give money to. CircleUp launches in public beta today, backed with $1.5 million in its own seed funding from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz’s Maveron venture capital firm, Triple Point Investors, and JP Morgan veteran David Topper, among other angel investors. CircleUp has four full-time employees: Co-founders Ryan Caldbeck and Rory Eakin have backgrounds in finance and business consulting, and they’ve brought on two full-time engineers and designers for the tech side of the house. How It WorksHere are the numerical details of how CircleUp works: In order to be considered as an investment opportunity on CircleUp, companies must deal in the consumer product or retail/restaurant space and have booked at least $1 million in annual revenue in the previous year. Qualified companies can use CircleUp to raise between $100,000 to $1 million in growth equity from investors who each pitch in $1,000 to $25,000 each. The website lets companies and investors conduct the financing round and talk online throughout the whole process. CircleUp takes a commission on the funding companies raise from people they met on the site (it doesn’t take a commission from donations received from existing friends, family and acquaintances.) CircleUp will be open to all individual accredited investors right away, but is featuring just a few consumer product companies at launch. More companies will certainly be added going forward, but with lots of vetting, CircleUp CEO and co-founder Ryan Caldbeck says. “Every week or two we will add a few more companies, but it will always be heavily curated. We think an important part of maintaining credibility is delivering high quality investment opportunities.” CircleUp has already had some seriously positive traction from operating in stealth mode for several months. More than 150 companies have reached out asking to be included on the site, and during CircleUp’s private beta a West Coast apparel company raised $1 million in new equity through the platform. What It Could Mean For People In TechTo me, CircleUp seems to be coming to the right space at exactly the right time. Lots of people are making their own small and large fortunes in tech right now, and many of them are keen to become active as investors themselves. Sure, they can join AngelList and invest in the web startup scene they know best, but maybe they want to branch out and take a small stake in a company that’s not so closely related to their day jobs — to be a partner in a custom bicycle company, or a handbag designer, or an ice cream shop. CircleUp will make it easy for them to do just that, and it will be interesting to see what comes out of the site in the months ahead.
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| Posted: 18 Apr 2012 02:58 AM PDT  Eucalyptus Systems, the developer of an open source, on-premise private cloud computing platform, has raised $30 million in Series C funding led by Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Benchmark Capital, BV Capital, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). To date, Eucalyptus has raised a total of $55.5 million in capital. Led by former CEO of MySQL, Marten Mickos; Eucalyptus helps companies create private cloud computing infrastructure on their own servers. Eucalyptus’ software sits inside businesses’ firewalls, using their own hardware. As Mickos tells us, IT administrators install the software on their servers, which sits on top of the severs, and are then are able to create private cloud. The company, which competes with VMware, also recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services to use the cloud giant’s API to connect Amazon's cloud services with the Eucalyptus-powered private clouds created by companies. And the company says its partner ecosystem has more than doubled to include over 200 of the top cloud and infrastructure automation vendors. Eucalyptus enables 25,000 cloud starts each year at organizations including Aerospace Corporation, InterContinental Hotels Group, Plinga, PUMA, USDA, and USASpending.gov. This includes instances at more than 20 percent of Fortune 100 companies. For example, Puma uses the startup’s software to run its consumer facing site. “We are rapidly expanding operations to meet the needs of advanced cloud deployments by customers and partners worldwide. This funding will help us move even faster in a rapidly growing cloud market,” said Mickos. He adds that Eucalyptus has nearly tripled its employees in the last year and half, and will be looking to use the funding to add additional sales and technical support.
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| Research: Only 6% of UK Consumers Care About TV Apps; 12% Want Mobile TV; 19% Want 3D Posted: 18 Apr 2012 02:25 AM PDT  Attention TV world: consumers, it appears, are not as tech-friendly as you might think. According to a new survey out in the UK, the vast majority of the public is not interested in fancy new 3D or mobile TV services, and even less of them care about TV apps. What they would like are better players to watch on-demand content on their main TVs and better TV guides for discovering what is on where. These conclusions come from Freeview, the UK’s subscription-free digital TV service, which canvassed opinion from some 2,000 UK consumers for its survey. Only 12 percent of consumers said they consider mobile TV an appealing service, and only 19 percent thought the same of 3D TV. And TV apps — something that has become standard among producers and broadcasters — fared worst of all, with only six percent saying these apps were appealing, and only eight percent thinking they were in any way “useful.” But the company also notes that this year could potentially be a watershed for these newer technologies: with the Olympics coming to London this summer, this will be the first year that the games will be broadcast in HD to a mass market in the UK, and Freeview believes that this, plus general interest in the event (especially since most of us UK residents haven’t even been able to get a sniff of a ticket to the actual event… grrr) may drive uptake in some of the newer ways of consuming that content. Freeview found that “players” — either in the form of set-top boxes or something more integrated in a smart TV — were considered to be the most appealing and useful of the wave of new services that have arisen out of the connected TV revolution. This rated at 62 percent and 63 percent among consumers. Freeview notes that the results proved to be largely the same, whether the respondent considered himself a technophile or a technophobe, and regardless of that person’s age. And as you can see from the table below, the results didn’t change all that much (but did get slightly better for new technologies) when owners of smartphones and tablets were asked the same questions. These conclusions paint a picture of a mass market not as interested in new technology as some might think — in the UK at least — and are a sign that companies that are investing money into developing services like TV apps, mobile TV and 3D technology might not be seeing a lot of return on that investment in the near future. It also is a likely indicator of where Freeview — a disruptive presence in the UK market in that it offers a range of digital TV channels free of charge, against paid offerings from the likes of Sky and Virgin Media — may choose to invest (and disrupt) in the future. That disruption is already coming home to roost: Freeview notes that as of last quarter, it has overtaken Sky TV, its largest competitor and a Pay-TV provider, in terms of number of active users in the UK. Freeview is now being used on the main TV sets of 10.8 million homes, compared to Sky’s 10.1 million active base.
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| Online Education Startup Coursera Lands $16M From Kleiner & NEA, Adds John Doerr To Its Board Posted: 18 Apr 2012 02:10 AM PDT  It has already been a year since Peter Thiel called public attention to the bubble growing in American higher education. Yet, the cost of receiving a college degree in the U.S. has continued to grow, as student debt in the U.S. today has pushed north of $1 trillion, with the average debt per student standing at more than $25,000. With the current fiscal trajectory of our educational system now unsustainable, an infusion of new blood has begun to enter the space, and a growing number of startups and entrepreneurs have turned their focus to upgrading education’s legacy infrastructure. In turn, investors now seem ready to provide edtech companies with the type of capital that has typically been reserved for consumer businesses. The latest example of this trend is the Mountain View-based Coursera, one of a growing set of edtech startups looking to combat the rising costs now endemic to higher education with smart, scalable, web-based solutions. Traditionally, online education has been seen as an underwhelming, ineffectual approximation of its on-campus sibling — defined by micro-correspondence courses that are supplemental to the classroom experience, rather than a viable alternative. That’s why Coursera is on a mission to bring Ivy League-caliber courses to online education — for free. To help steer it down this path, the startup is today announcing that it has raised $16 million in venture funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). As part of its investment, veteran investor, long-time KPCB partner, and public education reform advocate John Doerr and NEA General Partner Scott Sandell, have joined the startup’s board of directors. The startup plans to use its new capital to expand its content and feature set and to continue developing partnerships with institutions in the hopes of increasing its global student body. And part of what I think defines this new set of edtech companies is the understanding that, to bring true innovation to education, issues can’t be addressed from the outside. In democratizing content and in bringing historically exclusive material to the masses, for it to be most effective, this can’t be something that is forced on institutions by entrepreneurs, but instead, in partnership. Like edtech’s top-funded 2tor and newly capital-flush StraighterLine, Coursera is partnering with top-tier universities to co-develop course material. Unlike 2tor, which focuses its web and mobile platforms on post-graduate education, and thus specific vocations, (and just like StraighterLine), the startup is looking to provide courses across a broad range of disciplines, including medicine, literature, history, and computer science. The cool part about StraighterLine is that its courses are ACE Credit recommended, meaning that they can be transferred for credit at a number of degree granting institutions. Its solution acts as a great complement to community colleges and equivalent feeder programs that funnel students into four-year institutions. In our coverage last week, I noted that the one thing missing was “big name” institutions accepting StraighterLine credit. Coursera, on the other hand, seems to be going directly after top-tier universities. Accompanying its funding news, the startup also announced that Princeton University, Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and UPenn will be using its platform to make web-based courses available online for free. The startup believes that it is the first education platform to host content from multiple top universities in one place. The one drawback, however, is that its courses, while emanating from respected institutions, aren’t offered for formal credit. There’s a chance they might offer “certificates,” but the startup will likely need to work this out if it has hopes of building a legitimate online university. Or making money, for that matter. Of course, all this theoretical talk is fine, but we have yet to address what Coursera’s platform actually does. Currently, the startup’s platform includes video lectures with interactive quizzes, mastery-building interactive assignments, and collaborative community forums that encourage students to participate actively with classmates from across the globe. In other words, Coursera’s offers lectures that are broken down into 10 to 15 minute-long video chunks, with these interactive quizzes embedded into its lecture videos. It also enables students to complete auto-graded exercises that provide them with instant feedback. Naturally, it falls on the faculties of participating universities to provide the coursework. Over the last several weeks, seven courses from Stanford, UC Berkeley and University of Michigan have acted as beta testers, but the team said that it expects to launch an additional 30 courses beginning next week and continuing through late summer. Obviously, for these large-scale plays into open education to be successful, faculties can’t be half-assed in their adoption. And without significant incentive for professors, administrators at colleges often struggle to get their faculty on board for these types of initiatives. Yet, as UPenn President Amy Gutmann told Inside Hire Ed, even though they’re not offering major incentives, faculty members have gotten really excited about teaching open, online courses. Even though some edtech purists knock Salman Khan for not being a “real” (read: trained) educator, the prospect of reaching thousands of eyeballs Khan Academy-style (KA’s YouTube channel has over 100M views) certainly has its appeal. Being professors themselves, this is something the founders of Coursera understand. Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng, the startup’s co-founders are both Computer Science professors at Stanford and had previously helped develop the university’s own free online classes, which have gone on to tally 350K enrollments across 172 countries. But, what’s so interesting is that two such similar startups have come out not only out of the Stanford faculty, but out of the same department. In the same year, no less. Udacity, which was founded last year by former Stanford Computer Science professor Sebastian Thrun has a similar mission: To bring free, university-level education to the masses. Like Coursera, Udacity’s online classes are interactive and feature embedded quizzes that test viewers on the material as they’re watching. Udacity’s classes are also designed in such a way as to eschew the traditional lecture format in favor of enabling students to learn at their own pace. The major difference, however, is that Thrun and co-founders are roboticists, and the majority of Udacity’s classes are currently CS-focused, like “Building A Search Engine and Programming A Robotic Car,” for example. Of course, as the team was initially inspired by Khan Academy, Udacity plans to begin offering other subjects soon, with the goal of eventually building a full-service online university. (You can check out Ben’s recent interview with the Udacity co-founder here.) Coursera has a head-start on Udacity in terms of offering a more liberal arts-style education, and if Udacity opts for the Salman Khan approach of one teacher for all subjects, Coursera may be on to a more sustainable, or perhaps even more effective model, by facilitating the distribution of courses taught by those who are experts in their particular field. Either way, both startups represent an important step forward for education (and its cost) by making college-level classes accessible to anyone who wants to learn. “Higher education is ripe for innovation: it is too expensive and limited to a few,” KPCB Partner John Doerr said in a statement. “Coursera is unique in partnering with the best universities to offer free, global access to the world’s best teachers and courses. The potential is profound opportunities for personal — and economic — growth and development.” And seeing as Doerr is a long-time advocate of entrepreneurs working in public education and in 2009 was appointed to President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board to help the administration devise a way out of the country’s economic downturn, it’s safe to say he knows what he’s talking about. For more on Coursera, check out the startup at home here.
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| The Game Is Not Over For Facebook, Google In Russia (But There Is Work To Do) Posted: 18 Apr 2012 01:45 AM PDT  Russia, like China, is a market full of tech promise, but in the face of strong local competition, it is one that has also proven to be tough nut to crack for big U.S. companies looking for international growth. But according to one IT leader in the country — Alexander Turkot, executive director of the IT Cluster at Skolkovo, Russia’s multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley-like work in progress — the game is not over for the likes of Facebook and Google. In a briefing this morning, he also had some good insights into what is happening in early-stage investing in the country, and what Russian startups need to be doing to get ahead. The search market is still largely dominated by Yandex, which as of this month has a 61.3 percent share of all searches to Google’s 24.9 percent, according to LiveInternet. Mail.ru is the third-largest with an 8.5 percent share. In web mail, Google doesn’t even make the top-ten providers, with mail.ru holding over 90 percent of the market. But there appears to be a sign that Google is looking to redouble its effort in the country, perhaps as a route to growing a more local operation that can better tackle the market here. According to Turkot, Google may soon also be joining other Western companies like Microsoft, IBM and Intel in the Skolkovo initiative. Turkot notes that Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and ex-CEO, already sits on the board of directors of Skolkovo, and “our guess is that sooner or later Google is going to start [at Skolkovo].” Ironically, he added that Google’s other obvious Russian connection, co-founder Sergey Brin, has almost worked in the “opposite direction” for Google doing more in Russia. “Sergey’s memories of Soviet Russia do not help us much with Google,” he said. Facebook, meanwhile, has an arguably bigger challenge ahead of it. The social network currently only has less than five percent market share in the country, according to figures from LiveInternet, with Vkontakte leading the market with a 63.6 percent share this month, and Odnoklassniki at 13.8 percent. Turkot says that the best thing for Facebook to do, if it wants to get serious about entering a market like Russia, is not to invest in existing rivals (or try to acquire them outright) but to focus on building up its own business in a more locally-focused way. “Facebook as a platform has a lot of technology,” he said, and that needs to be used to make investments not in basic socializing — “not an attraction any more in Russia” — but in media and content partnerships. This would also help it chase business that its main competitor, Vkontakte, has been cornering at the moment. Whereas three years ago Vkontakte “was a complete copy” of Facebook, now it has become more content-oriented — sometimes illegally, but always with a lot of traction, bringing in close to a billion dollars in revenue in the process. Turkot speaks from experience: one of his past role was as the head of Myspace in Russia, a project he says failed for two reasons: not enough local content and a simple fact of being late to the market. Some other interesting points from our meeting earlier today: Angel investing, seed rounds, grants. This is still in its early stages in Russia, Turkot says. There has been some development in early-stage funding — for example Yuri Milner and Pavel Durov’s StartFellows project, giving ‘no strings attached’ grants of $25,000 to select early-stage companies, with Milner in Moscow just last weekend to promote the program. And Skolkovo is also offering grants of up to $50,000 to companies, with an annual budget of $50 million and last year distributing some $45 million in grant money. These too are not investments. However, by and large what passes for angel investment here is discouraging, Turkot says. “There is no culture of seed or angel money available here yet,” he said. “You cannot call it a civilized market when an investor wants to take a 45 percent share in a business in return for a $60,000 investment. They're killing the business and the idea if from the first round they take control of the business right away.” He seems frustrated, too, that Skolkovo hasn’t done more in this area. He says when he came on board to run the IT cluster, the question of whether Skolkovo should also consider investing in projects was still being considered. So the moment, Skolkovo can only give grants, with the only hope of influence on a project being a slow release of funding with goals set throughout the process. That’s something Turkot says he will be looking to change soon, by getting involved in investing himself. He says that this is a recent development: permission was only granted “a week ago” for those involved in Skolkovo to invest money directly into Skolkovo startups. He cannot be a general partner in any investment vehicle but he will be able to contribute. He says this is an important thing to do: “It’s a public show of my approval, that I believe in what I do,” he says. And if it’s not already clear: this is also a signal to investors from abroad that there may be a lot of opportunity in angel investing here. The rise of “me-too” tech projects. One area where Skolkovo will not invest under Turkot is in “me-too” startups, effectively recreating what has been done already. For example, no more social networking sites, he says. “I personally believe that one big social network is enough. It used to be Myspace and now it is Facebook,” he says (notwithstanding the fact that there is still more growth to be had in countries like Russia). Act locally, think globally. Turkot says that Russia is still trying to recover from the “brain drain” that took place just before the end of the Soviet Union and subsequent years, where talent either left to pursue work in the U.S. and other countries like Israel, or left the field of tech altogether to go into more “prestigious” areas like banking, law and medicine. This is something that still needs to be repaired, he said. But although he wants a better national culture for tech innovation, he says that when it comes to startups their ambitions should be anything but national — unless they are solving a specific Russian need around an area like biomedicine. Nationally-focused tech startups, he says, are dead-ends and need to set their sites further afield if they want to succeed, so this is a chief criteria for when he is assessing Skolkovo grants. More on Skolkovo from our story last month here.
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| A Sign Of The Hiring-pocalypse Posted: 17 Apr 2012 11:13 PM PDT  Oh San Francisco, has it really come to this? Are we now at the point where the disheveled men on street corners no longer ask for change, but rather developers? Apparently so. I walked out of the TechCrunch offices yesterday afternoon and passed this guy at the Caltrain station. He handed me a business card, cut out of cardboard with the URL fingg.com scrawled onto it in black Sharpie pen. “Find me a programmer and we’ll buy an island together,” he said. Sure. Okay. What is Fingg.com? I have no idea. But does it really matter? That guy’s cardboard sign is — well — a sign of the times. It’s a time when startups are competing against Google and Facebook offers of $150,000 in base salary for fresh computer science graduates. A time when any young person out of a decent engineering school seems to be able to raise $500,000. A time when the latest Y Combinator batch is attracting angel rounds with valuation caps that are north of $10 million. A time when a 13-person team can be acquired for $1 billion without any revenue in about 48 hours. It’s a time when investors and founders are bemoaning the fact that engineers are spread between too many companies, making it hard for any single startup to have the necessary critical mass of talent to break out. An entrepreneur-turned-venture investor told me over the weekend: Booms are the worst time to build a company. Only capital is cheap. Everything else is expensive — talent most of all. P.S. This dude also spelled “programmer” wrong and crossed it out. Probably intentionally.
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| DealAngel Helps You Find The Best Hotel Deals — Not Just The Cheapest Posted: 17 Apr 2012 09:06 PM PDT  Not all hotels are created equal. That’s why paying $150 for a night at one hotel might be a rip off, but it could be a great deal somewhere else — and that, in turn, is why DealAngel is launching a new way to search for hotels. When you go to the DealAngel site and select your dates, it provides a list of hotels and prices for your trip. Each of those rooms is assigned a “value” score — basically, how the offered price compares to the expected market rate for the room. If a room on a given night would normally cost $300, and instead it’s priced at $150, that’s a great value — but you might not see that if you’re searching purely based on price. That “market rate” estimate for the room is based on pricing data from both that hotel and surrounding locations — in fact, DealAngel says its algorithm looks at millions of data points across the Web. Co-founders Roman Peskin (the CEO) and Bob Rogers (the COO) bring different kinds of industry experience to the table — Peskin managed revenue at a group of hotels in Prague, while Rogers worked at Expedia. Peskin says that with their experience, and the technology they’ve developed, searching for hotel rooms on DealAngel is like playing the slot machines in Vegas while the slot machine maker looks over your shoulder and gives you advice. The real question, ultimately, is: How much do consumers care? If you find a cheap, decent hotel, do you really care if it’s a great “value”? Conversely, are you going to want to stay at a hotel that costs $50 more per night because of that value? “Who doesn’t like staying in a five-star hotel for the price of a three-star hotel?” Peskin counters. He also points to the success of companies like Groupon as a sign that people aren’t just looking for the lowest price, but also the best deal. (And even though there are hotel deals on Groupon, Peskin says it can be a challenge to apply those deals to the dates you want — not a problem at DealAngel, where you’re reserving a room for a specific night.) Peskin and Rogers first built a market intelligence product for hotels, but they decided that they had a bigger opportunity turning that technology into a consumer product. DealAngel is launching this week at DEMO, the technology conference co-produced by VentureBeat (my old employer). The company has raised a seed round of less than $500,000 from Foresight Ventures.
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| How RocketSpace Is Building A ‘Hit Factory’ For Tech Startups Posted: 17 Apr 2012 06:54 PM PDT 
So TechCrunch TV stopped by RocketSpace’s four-story offices in San Francisco’s SOMA district to get a first-hand look at how exactly its ship is run. In the video embedded above, you can see footage of RocketSpace denizens at work and watch our interview with its founder and CEO Duncan Logan. He’s a really interesting person to talk to, so you should check out the interview in its entirety, but here is a sample of a few topics we touched on:
We also got pitches from a few of the companies that are currently working within RocketSpace. You can watch the video below to see pitches from Michael Eiser, the CEO of cloud-based file processing automator Wappwolf; Andrew Mulvenna, the co-founder of retail software company Brightpearl; and Dominic Williams, the CEO of gaming company for kids Fight My Monster.
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