The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Made.com Secures $3.75m To Assault Designer Furniture Industry
- Mozilla Engineer Writes Steve Ballmer; Promptly Takes Foot Out Of Mouth
- Pierre Omidyar on eBay and Pez Dispensers, Leaving the Valley and the Most Important Thing He’s Ever Done
- Hunch’s Twitter Predictor Game Is Awesomely Accurate
- Excelerate Labs Brings A Startup Incubator To Chicago
- Novell Rejects Hedge Fund’s Offer To Take The Company Private For $2 Billion
| Made.com Secures $3.75m To Assault Designer Furniture Industry Posted: 20 Mar 2010 06:41 PM PDT  Made.com, a web-based furniture company, has raised £2.5million from investors to launch its service which connects buyers directly with manufacturers thus cutting out middle men. The backing comes from Lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman now of mydeco.com, PROfounders Capital (whose investors include Michael Birch ex of Bebo), investor John Hunt and Marc Simoncini through his investment vehicle, Jaïna Capital. Made.com was created by 28 year-old serial entrepreneur Ning Li, who was a cofounder of Paris based MyFab.com which has proved the feasibility of connecting furniture buyers with makers. 
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| Mozilla Engineer Writes Steve Ballmer; Promptly Takes Foot Out Of Mouth Posted: 20 Mar 2010 04:47 PM PDT
Hoping Microsoft might allow Firefox on their new Windows Phone 7 Series, Sayre wrote an open letter this morning to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. “Hola, amigo. I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya,” is how it starts. He then proceeds to make fun of Windows Phone 7 Series, the iPhone, Cocoa Touch, and Unix — all in three concise paragraphs. He notes that Windows Phone 7 Series has a “busted” UI, calls the iPhone’s UI “ugly jelly beans,” and mocks the “allegedly cool” Cocoa Touch “stuff.” Once he’s done with all of that, he asks Ballmer to consider making an NDK for Windows Phone. An NDK is a companion tool for an SDK that allows you to build parts of apps in native code. For example, it’s the Android NDK that allows Mozilla to make Firefox for Android. There’s currently no plans to make an NDK for Windows Phone 7 phones — hence Sayre’s post. Without it, a version of Firefox for the OS is probably unlikely. And that’s may be a good bet anyway, considering Microsoft seems to be pivoting its new phones closer to the iPhone’s closed model rather than Android’s open one. Sayre’s approach to the post apparently didn’t go over too well — he quickly followed up with an apology post, “Things I’ve Learned.” “Blog posts that sound like Jim Anchower really irritate people for some reason. I won't do it again, I promise,” he writes.      
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| Posted: 20 Mar 2010 04:04 PM PDT
But don't let the top line narrative fool you, Omidyar hasn't just been looking at sunsets all these years. He's been busy making good on his commitment to give away some 99% of his multi-billion dollar fortune and lately has been launching Peer News, a new kind of online news service that won't have reporters or articles in the classic sense, nor will it allow anonymous comments or make money off advertising. He's definitely got at least the media world captivated once again. eBay, philanthropy and now a local Hawaiian news site may seem like wildly disparate ventures for the same man to take, but as Omidyar explains in the video below they're all connected by the ideas of platform and community—two words that have also underlined much of the Web 2.0 movement. Just like eBay was a platform that gave people everywhere the opportunity to build out a business and change their economic reality, so too does the Omidyar Network seek to give passionate, would-be entrepreneurs an opportunity to change their world and their reality. As Omidyar puts it, he doesn't have a "cause;" he gets excited about other people's causes. Similarly at eBay he wasn't a collector, but he loved hearing about other people's collections. On community, eBay was one of the first places that pioneered trust online through its reputation and feedback systems. Omidyar is hoping to bring that same kind of trust and fair-dealing to the local news world with Peer News—which is the reason anonymous commenters will not be welcome. Omidyar talks about all of this and more in the video below, shot in his office in Honolulu. I started out by asking him about that great founders myth that he started eBay so his wife could trade Pez dispensers. (The one people claimed years later was just a good pitch for reporters.)
     
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| Hunch’s Twitter Predictor Game Is Awesomely Accurate Posted: 20 Mar 2010 03:29 PM PDT When I first read about Hunch’s Twitter Predictor game, I was pretty skeptical. The game asks you to put in your Twitter user name and based on who you follow and who you are followed by, it predicts how you will answer questions on Hunch. Then I used it. It’s awesome. Well, pretty awesome. Out of 35 questions I answer, Hunch correctly predicted by my answer to 32 of them and was only wrong with 3, 91% correct. And these aren’t just “yes” or “no” question, some have several possible answers. In fact, the game got so many right that at first I was sure it was all fake and they were just saying they were going to pick what I eventually did. Then I noticed the “take a peek” link, which tells you before you answer the question how you’re going to answer it. I also wondered if Hunch was simply predicting how I’d answer based on other Hunch questions I had answered on my account. But actually, the game works even if you’re logged out of your Hunch account. So yes, the predictor made by new Hunch employee Ben Gleitzman (a former Googler) is very accurate. But then I noticed something. As I played it again in another browser, the game asked the exact same questions. And the first question is always about my age range. So this is likely one of the keys to how the predictor works. Another friend had a series of questions that made it clear she was a woman — likely another key predictor. I would bet the game is quickly scanning your Twitter followers and getting some obvious topical data, such as age range and sex. Then it uses the aggregate Hunch data that the service has collected over the past several months. Still, it’s a pretty cool idea. And a great way to show off the data Hunch is collecting. The team answers more about the game here.      
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| Excelerate Labs Brings A Startup Incubator To Chicago Posted: 20 Mar 2010 12:34 PM PDT
Excelerate is the brainchild of OKCupid entrepreneur Sam Yagan, Kapil Chaudhary, Kelli Rhee, and Troy Henikoff. Yagan says the Chicago-based incubator has a similar model to TechStars and Y Combinator. Six to ten startups will be chosen for a three month long program, where founders will be given resources to build their products, access to mentors and funding. Each startup will receive anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000 (depending on the number of founders) for five percent of equity. The program is currently accepting applications until April 2. Yagan says that one of the reasons that we wanted to start the program was to help make Chicago become “the Silicon Valley of the Midwest.” Sandbox Industries and i2a Fund have invested in the incubator, but Yagan says that other venture funds have taken an active interest in Excelerate, including DFJ Mercury. Mentors include TechStars founder David Cohen, OpenTable’s Chuck Templeton, Apex Ventures Partners’ Lon Chow and a host of other notable entrepreneurs and investors. Groupon directors Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell, also recently launched Lightbank and will invest as much as $10 million annually in early-stage technology companies through a new fund dubbed. Similar to Excelerate, the fund aims to help establish Chicago as a technology hub. It’s always great to see investors and former tech executives investing time (and money) in promising startups and ideas. And we are seeing a plethora of innovative startups emerging from a variety of incubators around the country and world, including Y Combinator, TechStars, The Founder Institute, Launchbox Digital and more.      
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| Novell Rejects Hedge Fund’s Offer To Take The Company Private For $2 Billion Posted: 20 Mar 2010 10:28 AM PDT
Elliott Associates at the time said it already owned 8.5 percent of Novell and wanted to take the company private for $2 billion. This morning, Novell’s board publicly responded to the letter, deeming the “unsolicited, conditional proposal” from the hedge fund “inadequate”. It’s not hard to see why Novell feels that way: immediately after the initial purchase offer was made, its shares surged as investors hoped for a better bid, and stock value hasn’t decreased much since. Shares were valued at 5.64 at market’s close on Friday – it was priced 4.20 at the beginning of this year and 4.75 when Elliott made its purchase offer public on March 2. Unsurprisingly, Novell’s board of directors said it would start looking for alternatives for the company to “enhance stockholder value”, including a sale to another entity, joint ventures, partnerships or a return of capital to stockholders through a stock repurchase or cash dividend program.      
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Mozilla platform engineer Rob Sayre has probably had better ideas.
It seems that 
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