8/3 TechCrunch

Please add updates@feedmyinbox.com to your address book to make sure you receive these messages in the future. TechCrunch Polaris Ventures Makes A Hire To Bolster Its Dog Patch Labs August 2, 2009 at 9:22 pm Dog Patch Labs is the name of Polaris Ventures‘ San Francisco-based startup incubator, that it launched a little over a year ago. So far, it has helped launch LOLapps and Thing Labs, the startup behind Brizzly, a new Twitter app that was first shown at our Real-time Stream CrunchUp last month. And now they’re adding to the team. Ryan Spoon, formerly the Vice President of Marketing & Business Development at Widgetbox, is joining Polaris as a senior associate, with Dog Patch Labs being one of his key areas of focus. Like other senior associates, Spoon will also be helping to generally assess investment opportunities and work with portfolio companies, but he will be working out of the Dog Patch Labs at Pier 38 in San Francisco. Polaris general partner Mike Hirshland describes the space, which they share with the startup Social Media, as sort of a “frat house for geeks.” It offers space for promising young entrepreneurs to work out of, giving them desks, bandwidth, lunch and coffee. And it offers all of this for free, with no commitment to Polaris required. The idea is that many of these startups aren’t quite at the investment-ready yet, but they can use the labs to work towards that. Hirshland expects Spoon, who is also the founder of the sports social network InGameNow and the high school althete college recruiting service beRecruited, to be a great resource for the entrepreneurs that hang out at the Dog Patch Labs. And he certainly has the right experience for the labs, Spoon is also the founder of sfEntrepreneurs, and SF-based collective for young entreprenuers. He also worked at eBay for nearly 5 years as the manager of the Internet marketing efforts. Here’s Spoon’s own post on the move. Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. Family In India Or The Philippines? Cheaply Boost Their Mobile Accounts With Aryty August 2, 2009 at 7:58 pm The concept may sound strange to Americans, but in some regions around the world cellular telephones are used almost exclusively on pre-paid plans, where users ‘charge’ up their phones sporadically with credit that can be used to place calls and send text messages. Unfortunately many people, particularly in poorer areas, find their credits dwindle toward zero with alarming frequency. Enter Aryty, a new startup that’s looking to help mobile phone users in India and the Phillipines by giving them a highly efficient way to receive money from their loved ones abroad. Aryty CEO Nils Johnson says that it is quite common for families in America who have loved ones in the Philippines or India to send money on a fairly regular basis as a reminder that they’re thinking of them. But standard wire transfers, especially for small amounts of money, tend to be highly inefficient because of the way fees are structured — you might pay in excess of $10 in fees for a wire transfer of only $20. In contrast, Aryty has no fees. Families can send money directly into the cellular accounts of their loved ones without losing anything in the process, which makes it more appealing for these ‘thinking of you’ transfers. To initiate a transfer, you simply enter your credit card information, and the credit is instantly added to the cellular account of your loved one abroad (they also receive a SMS message alerting them to the addition). Generally speaking, Aryty users will send relatively small amounts of credit on a regular basis — say, once a month or every two weeks. The reason for the fairly small amounts is that most carriers in India and the Philippines don’t allow for ‘roll-over’ credit, which means any excess amount left at the end of the month will expire. Fortunately, Aryty also offers a scheduling feature that lets you send money as often as you’d like without having to remember. Aryty has forged deals with major carriers in the Phillipines, and is now expanding into India, where it expects to have support for around 98% of the market by the end of the year. And while Aryty doesn’t charge any fees, it can still make money — carriers sell the company minutes at a discount, which it can then resell at the standard rate. Carriers like Aryty because it lowers user churn (users don’t want to switch carriers after they’ve established accounts that their family members are depositing money into). Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Dr. TweetLove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the @Ev Bomb August 2, 2009 at 5:50 pm This guest post was written by Leonard Speiser, a founder at Twables, an application platform for Twitter that launched earlier this year. Prior to founding Twables Leonard worked at Trinity Ventures as an EIR. Before that Leonard co-founded Bix, a website that enables anyone to create, enter or join a contest. Yahoo acquired the company in February of 2007 and Leonard took on the additional responsibility of running the Yahoo Groups business. Leonard has also previously worked at eBay and Intuit, and has founded two other companies. It’s 11 p.m. on a Sunday night when I notice that Twitter founder @ev has just tweeted about FB140, our company Twables’ days-old service that helps you find your Facebook friends on Twitter. Since our launch, I’ve felt like a surfer, waiting for a wave of users to start using our service. A few smaller waves have trickled through in our first days since launch, but Ev’s post represents something totally different. I mean, here’s someone who has more than a million followers and receives personal messages from Lance Armstrong. I was beyond excitement until I realized a tweet from @ev has the force of nuclear explosion. And a nuclear explosion makes a very, very big wave. I quickly IM’d my only developer to warn him. Then I ran a Twitter search on Ev’s tweet and saw that it was getting retweeted. A lot. Between midnight and 6 a.m. alone, 170 people had retweeted him. “Frak,” I thought, “we might not scale.” For the next six hours, my developer began spinning up machines on Amazon, reworking our code and rolling it out overnight as we tried to ride the wave without having it crash down upon us. By then, we were doing more traffic in an hour than we had all week. Fortunately, he’s a killer Java programmer, and we’ve stayed afloat so far. By 6 a.m., exhausted, I reflected on three things I’ve learned since stumbling into development on the Twitter platform just two months ago. 1. Business hours are dead. 24/7 is the new 9 to 5. Real-time messaging means that anyone can start talking about your product at any time and that talk can snowball before you know it. I happened to see Ev’s post nine minutes after he sent it, but what if I hadn’t checked Twitter at all? Our site would have been down and a golden opportunity missed. As much as I love all the new technology (Amazon Web Services, Twitter APIs, Google Apps) that makes it possible for a two-person company to operate, it’s tough, if not impossible, for two people to be on call at all times. Perhaps this means that business guys like me are going to have to start wearing ops pagers (what? business people actually earning their paycheck?). How can you sleep for fear that someone will say something to tens of thousands of people that you really need to respond to. Is our only solution to never go to sleep? 2. The Borg has finally arrived. On Friday afternoon, I popped my head into Dave McClure’s office to shoot the breeze and mentioned a thought that Twitter was a bigger threat to MySpace than to Facebook. Before the words were out of my mouth, he had tweeted it, Dave-style. Instantly, people started to respond with their thoughts, and I realized that Dave was crowdsourcing our discussion before he’d even formed his own opinion. Will we all use the real-time world to have conversations? While Dave has the unfair advantage of a lot of followers, most of you are just at the beginning of your Twitter experience. I predict that you’ll join the Borg soon enough. The reality is that many of you are accustomed to asking those around you for advice. The difference is that now you’ll be able to accomplish your information-gathering process in minutes instead of weeks. Our company gets advice from users within hours of our initial launch and we are able to release changes for those users on the same day. If the dialogue with customers is now real-time, then the process of incorporating feedback needs to be real-time, too. Sorry big companies, life is about to suck for you! 3. The Patriot Act can’t hold a candle to Citizen Paparazzi. An hour before Ev’s post, I was talking to two friends about Twitter. They mentioned that a friend of theirs had tweeted about their two-year-old son a few times, which they characterized as an “unusual” experience. Celebrities will finally have their revenge as two out of every three of your neighbors starts tweeting about everything you’re doing. The Supreme Court will have to revisit the definition of “reasonable expectation of privacy” when a father’s kid tweets that daddy is reading Playboy in the bathroom. (That happened to a buddy of mine. Not to me. A buddy of mine.) This may not seem like a new phenomenon, what with YouTube videos and the like already starting this trend. However, the pace at which things spread is now so close to real-time that it almost erases the line between past and present. Real-time communication invites the world to experience your life with you, as it happens. I don’t know if the world after Twitter will be better or worse. (For me, I think it will be better.) But when your tidal wave approaches, will you be ready to ride it? Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors Barron's Makes Waves With Vague Tapplet Rumors August 2, 2009 at 3:46 pm Looks like the mythical Apple Tablet (or "Tapplet") has been handled in prototype form. I can believe that this guy is telling the truth because he's old-school journalism, working for Barron's. Not that Barron's is some infallible and extra-dignified news source, but it's an establishment and they have to be extremely careful about respecting confidentiality. And since this article is so incredibly vague, I can only assume that Apple did actually show the guy something, but also told him exactly what he could and could not write. Taser Shockwave Will Take Out a Herd of Charging Rhinos August 2, 2009 at 3:42 pm Taser, taser, burning bright in a show of force tonight When I posted that triple Taser the other day (apparently it's for taking down your female coworkers, watch the video), I speculated that the criminals would come back with greater numbers, creating an arms race between muggers and the mugged. But if there was one of these on every corner, all you'd have to do is get behind it and hit the trigger, and everything you can see gets Tasered. Boom, no more muggers! Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On August 2, 2009 at 11:46 am “I agree on the one condition it’s not going to be a girl power post, ok”? That’s what Gali Ross requested when I asked to profile her for TechCrunch. So this isn’t going to be a ‘girl power’ post, but the fact of the matter is that female entrepreneurs are a rare breed. Let’s all try a mental game together… How many female startup CEO’s can you name off the top of your head? I am embarrassed to say that I have trouble coming up with more than a handful, but I don’t think I am alone. Here’s what I find strange about all this: I speak to VC’s and private investors regularly, and have never EVER heard anyone comment negatively on deal-flow based on the entrepreneur’s gender. Startups—at least this has been my experience—are weighted on the merits of the product, market and the team, but never on gender. Frankly, I can’t explain why female entrepreneurs are a rare commodity in our industry. (Feel free to enlighten me about the gender bias underpinning the tech industry in comments). The situation in Israel is not much different. But it should only be the quality that counts… To that end, here are three Israeli female entrepreneurs worth keeping tabs on: Amit Knaani is best known in the Israeli startup industry as the former Senior Product Manager of Wix.com. She quit the hot startup to join forces with Yami Glick, another well-known figure in the local startup scene. Together the two founded Vikido, a video messaging service designed to allow kids (3-9) and their parents to send and receive video messages using an an interface with no reading prerequisites. A mother of two girls (hence her familiarity with the need for such a product), Amit has been in our little industry for 10 years now, starting as a photo editor at Israel’s largest news site Ynet. She then moved on to manage the biggest medical site in Israel doctors.co.il, doing everything from spec’ing to selling media to business development. It was there that she started thinking about the idea for Vikido, mostly due to gaps of communication experienced by sick kids (information, connection with friends and parents). By then it was clear to her that she wanted to be involved in consumer products with strong community reach and the ability to make an impact on people and what they do on the web. That’s when the Wix gig came about. Team Vikido is planning to launch its product in September. In the mean time they are hustling to get funding, writing code, and chronicling the trials and tribulations of startup life in a weekly article series on Ynet called ‘The Transparent Startup’. Beta Access: Register here. Twitter: Amit Knaani (@amitos), Team Vikido (@vikidoteam) Orit Hashay has also been active in in Israeli startups for over 10 years, having taken on software and business development posts with public companies such as Emblaze and Comverse, as well as consulting for various Israeli startups. Orit is also somewhat of a local serial entrepreneur. She’s founded a Yelp-ish review site called Ramkol.co.il and mit4mit.co.il, the second most popular wedding review site in Israel. Most recently Orit held the Entrepreneur in Residence role at Decima Ventures, where she was responsible for technical and market analysis. Decima is also where her newest venture, Vetrinas was born. Vetrinas is a virtual shopping window to hundreds of stores from across the fashion Meccas of the world, be it London, New York, Paris or Milan. Vetrinas is targeting three segments: Consumers with an interest in high-fashion. Retailers that want to expose potential on/offline shoppers to specific products or brand advertising. And finally, shop window designers that can display their work (art) in order to attain job offers. Orit coded all of Vetrina’s herself and intends to generate revenue by way of affiliation through the site and rev-share through widgets that will syndicate content to blogs and websites. Vetrinas is currently in Alpha. Twitter: Orit Hashay (@orithashay), Vetrinas (@vetrinas) Gali Ross is one those people you (or at least I) hated in school because she made you (me) look so lazy and unfocused. She took physics, math and political science. Not having gone unnoticed, she went on to become an intelligence officer in the Israeli Defense Forces and then later an Information Systems Engineering graduate of the Technion (Israel’s MIT). She then joined eWave where she kept busy with project management and, afterward, marketing, sales and business development. Two years later she joined Israeli dev house Clementina as COO. That’s where she worked with Israeli startups such as my6sense, Spikko, and Footbo. Temptation was in the air and Gali couldn’t resist so she recruited a partner and founded Razoss. Gali is still very protective of her product so details and access are limited. In vague terms it can be described as a browser-based content promotion platform, where the idea is to enhance the browser beyond content display, to content management and distribution. Initial funding was provided by Dr. Yossi Vardi a little over a year ago and a second investment is near closing. The product is in private alpha, with a wider release intended in a few months. Beta Access: Register here. Twitter: Gali Ross (@galiross), Razoss (@razoss) Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.   This email was sent to topblogsofthenet@gmail.com.  Manage Your Account Don't want to receive this feed any longer? Unsubscribe here.