Wednesday, April 14, 2010

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Twitter Chirp: Our Full Coverage (And Live Stream)

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 09:11 AM PDT

Today, Twitter is kicking off its first ever developer conference, Chirp. Speakers include Ev Williams, Biz Stone, Ryan Sarver, Dick Costolo, and John Battelle, who will be speaking on topics like Twitter’s @anywhere platform, geo-location, monetization, and third party developers. The last topic, in particular, will likely be an ongoing theme throughout the day, as Twitter will need to explain to developers how not to fill holes in its product but to instead build their own killer apps. And through all of it, there’s bound to be plenty of announcements. I’ll be taking live notes and covering breaking news throughout the day (we’ll include links to each new post below) and we’ve embedded Justin.tv’s live stream.

Watch live video from twitterchirp on Justin.tv

Rally Software Buys Up Kanban-Based Project Management Startup AgileZen

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 08:10 AM PDT

Rally Software, a company that provides agile project management applications to for software development, has just acquired AgileZen, a startup that creates a visual project collaboration tool that manages work using the concept of Kanban. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Rally says the acquisition will strengthen the company's position in the emerging Kanban market, and extends Rally's project collaboration and process improvement offerings used throughout the Agile business. AgileZen is a simple, elegant project collaboration tool that supports software development by providing a Web-based Kanban board. Kanban literally means "sign board," and is the signaling tool for visualizing and tracking work as it flows through various stages of a process. A Kanban board does this by exposing bottlenecks, queues and waste in a process so that teams can deliver high quality, high value work.


Assistly Grabs $2.2 Million From True Ventures And Howard Lindzon’s Social Leverage

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:45 AM PDT

Assistly, a startup that's looking to provide businesses with a robust platform for engaging customers on everything from email to Facebook and Twitter, has just raised $2.2 million in series A funding from True Ventures and Howard Lindzon’s new investment fund Social Leverage. We first caught wind of Assistly back in October when its founding members left AOL in tandem, and then reported on the startup when it came out of stealth and added Mark Cuban and David Liu as advisors.

Assistly, which is in private beta until June, has developed a platform that offers a robust customer service application with self-service ease of use. A key part of the Assistly platform is a case management features that organizes all of the information related to your customer support conversations, including notes, status, assignment and priorities.

The application also allows you to filter conversations, access customer histories, automate processes and even tap into social media conversations on Facebook, Twitter and other sites. Assistly provides users with key metrics and analytics, such as case volume, interaction volume by channel, response time, service levels, agent performance and more.

While the startup is still in private beta, the team behind it speaks to Assistly’s potential. The site was founded by Alex Bard, Gary Benitt, Jeremy Suriel, and Brad Birnbaum, each of whom previously worked together in building customer service-based companies back in the 90’s. The first, called eShare, was acquired in 1999; the second, called eAssist Global Solutions, was eventually acquired in 2004 after stumbling through the dot com bubble burst. Following the eAssist acquisition three of the team members left the space to start Goowy, a Flash widget maker. Now the team has reunited to develop Assistly in the customer service space.

Assistly just set up offices in San Francisco and is currently looking to boost its developer team. Co-founder Bard says the new funding will be used to grow the team, continue to build out the product, and take Assistly to market.

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Cramster Raises $6 Million, Plans To Triple Users

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:40 AM PDT

Cramster, a top provider of online homework aid, has raised $6 million in Series B funding from Primera Capital. The web service currently boasts 200,000 active members but hopes to triple that figure over the next 12 months with new product offerings. Cramster specializes in homework help for quantitative subjects, like geometry and chemistry, but plans to launch new tools for the humanities starting next month. It’s an ambitious plan, but Cramster’s co-founder, Robert Angarita, says it’s on a solid trajectory: revenues have doubled every year for the past two years.
“We took this funding to widen the gap and solidify our position as the leader in the field,” Angarita says.

Founded in 2003, Cramster has raised a total of $9 million, including a $3 million Series A funding round in 2008 (led by investor Shai Reshef). The site, which competes with TutorVista and Global Scholar, provides homework help through several platforms, you can post questions to a community of experts, sift through a database of study guides, lecture notes and practice exams, form or join a study group and review interactive step-by-step textbook solutions. The community of experts, which includes retired professors, teacher assistants, professionals, peers, etc., receive a small monetary incentive to contribute. Experts accumulate points for their answers and those points can be redeemed for rewards, for example an Amazon gift card or electronics.

While many resources are free, the site includes a mix of paid content. Surprisingly, the conversion rate from free to pay user is relatively high, well in the double digits, according to a source.

Angarita says Cramster is preparing for a period of high growth with the upcoming introduction of humanities resources (a potentially larger market than the quantitative field). Because the vast majority of college students are concentrated in the humanities– not math and science– there should be a significant opportunity for Cramster to capture that market. Currently 90% of the site’s active users are college students, only 10% are at the high school level.



CrunchGear Reviews the Bare-Bones Aluratek Libre eReader Pro

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:39 AM PDT

Short Version The hardware is a little old but the fact you can by a fairly capable ebook reader for under $150 is an interesting thing, especially in this overpriced world of iPads, Nooks, and Kindles. A great device for those who want to experience the ereader revolution with no frills. Because this device is so old I'm approaching this as a public service rather than a full review. Essentially, here's what's going on with this ereader: It costs $149 online at numerous outlets and has a 5-inch LCD screen. It lasts about 24 hours on one charge and supports a plethora of formats including ePub and PDF. In short, you can drag almost anything onto here and have it work.


Google Rolls Out Twitter Timelines In Realtime Search

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:21 AM PDT

One of the biggest conundrums in realtime search is how to show more than just the most recent results. Sometimes you want context or the ability to see the most important status updates about a specific topic, but if the results go back too far they are no longer realtime. The various realtime search engines and Twitter itself are addressing this issue in various ways, such as by highlighting extra-popular Tweets up top and then flowing the rest chronologically below (that is Twitter’s own method). Bing is starting to pull in realtime results into the main search results and showing the most Tweeted links for given keywords.

Google is going a different route by adding a timeline view of realtime updates. The feature is rolling out over the next few days, and includes more than just Twitter updates. (It will be under options, when you click the “Updates” link). Until then, you can check it out here.

The timeline lets you go back in time to see what people were saying about any particular topic. It searches updates on Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, and MySpace. It is an attempt to recreate the conversation which occurred at a specific point in time about any topic.

For instance, you can see when all the chatter erupted on about the most recent flap between Apple and Adobe over Flash on April 8.

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Q&A With Jim Zemlin, Executive Director Of The Linux Foundation

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:03 AM PDT

Today marks the start of the fourth annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which is "an exclusive, invitation-only summit gathering core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations for plenary sessions and workgroup meetings to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today." All the names you'd normally expect at a Linux event are going to be there -- IBM, Google, Hewlett Packard -- along with companies jumping on the MeeGo bandwagon -- Nokia, Intel, and more. The agenda lists some interesting topics, but the Summit itself raised a number of questions for me. I exchanged emails with Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, about the Summit, and the state of Linux in general.


In Time For Chirp, Apigee Adds A Twitter API Dashboard For Developers

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 07:00 AM PDT

Thousands of developers rely on Twitter's APIs to build their apps and Websites. In time for this week's Chirp conference for Twitter developers, Apigee is coming out of public beta and launching a special dashboard to keep track of the Twitter API. Apigee is a Google Analytics for APIs. For developers who rely on data from other sites and companies, it monitors how much data they are using (message requests), the error rate, response times, and downstream users. For the Twitter API, Apigee added the number of Tweets and retweets going through a developers app, as well as the location of users on a map for geo-coded tweets. For instance a developer with a Twitter iPhone client could use Apigee to monitor how many times an hour his app is making data calls to Twitter.


Apple Magically Delays iPad’s International Launch

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 06:25 AM PDT

Apple says that although it has "delivered more than 500,000 iPads during its first week" the demand for the iPad in sales and pre-orders is "far higher than we predicted". The upshot of all these US sales? The international launch - that's including us here in Europe folks - will be postponed by one month, until the end of May. However, make a date in your diary as Apple says it will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10.


LaunchBox Digital Brings An Incubator To North Carolina’s Research Triangle

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 06:00 AM PDT

LaunchBox Digital a startup incubator similar to Y Combinator that offers founders small amounts of seed funding and a mentorship program in exchange for equity stakes of around 4-8%, is expanding its program to the Research Triangle Park area of North Carolina. LaunchBox Digital, which already has a program in Washington D.C., will hold a 12-week incubator in Durham, NC, during the fall of 2010.

John McKinley, co-founder of LaunchBox Digital (FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski is another founder) says that an incubator in Research Triangle makes sense, as the area is a hotbed of entrepreneurship and innovation. Research Triangle is home to one of the largest research-focused office parks in the country, with Red Hat, Cisco, IBM, and NetApp, and other technology companies all housing R&D facilities in the area. Additionally, the research and educational facilities of Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University are nearby.

Chris Heivly, the founder of fellow local incubator Triangle StartUpFactory, will be the executive director of the Research Triangle outpost. His incubator will be folded into Launchbox Digital’s program.

LaunchBox Digital is currently accepting applications for its fall 2010 program, which will be held in Durham, NC and will begin on August 31. Applications can be submitted here and will be accepted until June 30, 2010.

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Symbian Still Leading In Mobile Ad Click-Through Rates, Android Dropping Fast

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 05:58 AM PDT

Mobile advertising and ad optimization company Smaato has released its March figures on mobile ad click-through rates around the world, and some of its findings are quite surprising.

According to Smaato, Symbian still reigns supreme in its global OS click-through rate index, outshining feature phones (non-smartphones with a proprietary operating system), Windows Phones and Apple iPhone and iPod touch devices, in that order. Android, at the number 2 spot in both January and February 2010, has dropped by around 50% and into fifth place. The only operating systems with lower CTR are those of Palm and RIM (Blackberry).

The index consists of the average click-through rates across all devices (set to 100).

Smaato's metrics are based upon 36 mobile ad networks and over 4 billion ad requests served in the Smaato Network of more than 3,300 registered mobile publishers in March 2010. According to its report, Android has dropped fast in the past few months on a global level, although it still “outshines competition” in terms of click-through rates in South East Asia.

The biggest increased in mobile ad CTR actually come from feature phones and Windows Phones, which is upbeat news for the likes of Nokia and Microsoft.

Symbian's lead has shortened in the CTR Index table yet remains the OS to beat with regards to CTR performance in mobile advertising. Feature phones have been making steady ground ever since since the first Smaato Metrics Report was released in December 2009, whereas Apple has remained consistent across February and March.

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Cuil CEO Rips Users, Asks Them To Please Shut Up

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 03:24 AM PDT

Something tells me the wheels may be coming off the car at Cuil, the once promising search startup that had one of the most miserable launch debuts in Silicon Valley history.

On April 8 the company launched a new service, cpedia, which creates automated articles about queries instead of simply returning search results. The results are sort of strange, but as an experiment it certainly has legs. As in, I find it interesting, not necessarily that it can be a business. For things not covered well by Wikipedia, it can be useful and I can imagine, years from now, after many iterations, well, you get what I’m saying.

Some of the feedback on the new service wasn’t so positive (GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram wins best title with Cuil Failed at Search, Now Fails to Copy Wikipedia). And Cuil CEO Tom Costello has now made the extremely unwise decision to lash out at, well, just about everyone.

He begins his blog post with “Wow, the haters are out in force today” and specifically calls out Dave Parrack, Farhad Manjoo, Louis Gray, who have been critical of cpedia. “Cpedia does very badly with people who write much more on the web than people write about them,” he snipes. He then goes on to explain the service more fully, and ends, with spectacularly poor judgement, by suggesting that people who don’t like the results they see from cpedia simply shut up. Via a poem.

I’ve copied the entire post below, because it may not be around for long.

Cpedia and its Detractors
Apr 13, 10:20 AM

Wow, the haters are out in force today. We launched our alpha version of Cpedia last week, and have gotten a little feedback. Some of it was positive, a lot of it questioned whether or not we deserved to live (consensus: no). I was a little surprised at how vituperative things were.

So, I'd like to review some of the top issues we've heard about.

First up, Cpedia does very badly with people who write much more on the web than people write about them. Given the 1 billion people on the web one might think this unlikely, but it happens. When we try to summarize the information mentioning these people, we run into a problem. Almost none of it is about them. It's about random things they have opined on. Dave Parrack, Farhad Manjoo, Louis Gray, I'm talking about you.

Another complaint was that we have stolen, plagiarized, looted, thieved, etc., the information we were providing. People were shocked that all the sentences came from other sources. Yes, all the sentences come from other sources, and we have links to exactly which sources they come from. We do not have a vast array of tiny sensor bots collecting information across the globe on all topics (I'm not even quite sure how this would work for the past). We crawl the web, and use bits of web pages, citing every bit.

A third complaint was that our machines did not seem to really understand the material. People complained of rote recitation, rather than an in-depth understanding. It was ever so. As a child I was made to learn Irish. The Christian Brothers believed in a Platonic theory of learning, where all knowledge was recollection, so they would beat us with leather straps until we "remembered" our Irish vocabulary (this actually works). I, however, could never get full marks, no matter how well I remembered, because my Irish, while technically correct, had no "blas".

Blas, for those of you not from the West of Ireland, is the polish a hurley gets from the sliothar when used by a player of unusual skill, a patina on the surface of the wood testifying to the depth of talent of the player that had used the stick. Fair enough. Cpedia does not have blas – it's a machine.

I think a lot of commentators had a misunderstanding about what machines can do, and what Cpedia is trying to accomplish. Cpedia is not an attempt to build something that knows all current knowledge and can write a meaningful essay on any topic – that would be a stretch goal. Rather, we are trying solve a much simpler problem. When people search the web for information, a lot of times the first few results do not contain all the information there is about the subject. Almost no one can continue through all the other pages, because they are almost all regurgitations of the same material, with perhaps a few extra nuggets. Cpedia processes all the pages about a topic, and extracts the unique ideas.

You can see the ideas that we have considered similar when you look at the sources page. There you see how we have collapsed away many other similar sentences to the sentences we show.

Because we remove all this duplication, unique ideas have more chance of coming to the top. We organize the ideas into rough clusters so that information about the same topic is close together.

I'm sorry if people were expecting Skynet. I can understand how it would be upsetting to get psyched up for life, the universe and everything, only to get a different UI on a search engine.

Cpedia has errors. That is intentional. We have tried to be inclusive, and dredge to the bottom of the web. This is great sometimes. For instance, I was meeting a VC recently, and I was able to discover that he has a tendency to over-imbibe. He doesn't have a Wikipedia page (not that Wikipedia is in the business of random slander) and his firm's bio on him elides this trivia. If we did not seek out the lower reaches of the web, I would have missed his one redeeming feature.

But bottom-feeding does ensure that we will have mistakes. Some are just algorithmic. For instance, our anaphora resolution (working out who a "he" refers to) is wrong about one in 20 times. This is on par with the accuracy of Hobbs' algorithm. We sometimes get two senses confused. For example, we have made several pages about Django – one about Django Rheinhart and one about the python framework named after him. There is a little cross bleeding here, as the distinction is not as sharp as it might be. The notion of the identity of objects is not a settled matter – the classic example is Theseus's Ship, but a simple one is of an axe: if you replace the handle twice, and the head once, is it still the same axe?

The promise of Cpedia is that you will find information that you might otherwise miss. It often works for me. Your mileage will vary. If you find that the page about you is completely random, the only advice I can offer is a poem my six year old recited at breakfast:

A wise old owl sat in an oak,
The more he heard, the less he spoke,
The less he spoke, the more he heard,
Why aren't we all like that wise old bird.

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Peer Lending Site Lending Club Raises $24.5 Million Series C Round

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 03:14 AM PDT

A big round for a company that originally started out as a Facebook app: peer lending network operator Lending Club has secured a $24.5 million Series C financing round led by Foundation Capital and joined by existing investors including Morgenthaler Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners and Canaan Partners.

This brings the total of capital injected into the company to $52.7 million.

Lending Club says the additional funding will be used to further develop its platform, which brings together lenders and borrowers who want to cut out banks in the process of investing among peers. Lending Club says it will also use the extra money to launch new products, improve customer service and expand sales and marketing efforts.

The company hasn’t had it easy over the past few years. In April 2008, it put a hold on lending activities because of regulatory issues, and ultimately filed for SEC registration during the summer of that year. Then, the economy collapsed and Lending Club along with other P2P lenders were heavily affected. One of its main rivals, Zopa, hightailed it out of the U.S. market not long after.

According to a press release issued by the company earlier this morning, Lending Club has now managed to capture 79% of the US peer lending market in March 2010 with a whopping $8,664,750 (PDF) in monthly loan originations.

Its biggest competitor is Prosper, which has also raised tens of millions of dollars (and is reportedly raising some more).

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Joost Video Network Stuns With Big Reach: 67 Million Viewers Per Month

Posted: 14 Apr 2010 02:49 AM PDT

Straight out of left field, the Joost Video Network has assumed the number 2 spot in comScore’s Video Metrix "Top 100 Properties", second only to Google.

The Joost network, which is now operated by Adconion after the company’s acquisition of the ill-fated European startup’s assets back in November 2009, claims a reach of 67 million unique viewers per month.

To put that in perspective: that’s approximately 38 percent of the total US Internet population who are consuming videos each month.

According to Adconion’s press release, the Joost Video Network, which consists of hundreds of major video destination sites, showed an aggregate of over 100 million videos to consumers in February. Perusing through the current selection of channels on Joost.com, I’m fairly surprised that the network is drawing so many views, as it consists mainly of niche video destinations that I would estimate only a small number of people would be interested in.

Apparently, at least according to comScore, the long tail in online video is really long.

Update: a commenter says:

Adconion have been delivering "video" ads as rich media banners. Effectively embedding video creatives into standard 300×250 display units – and doing this under the brand of "Joost". This number is therefore a measure of the reach of Adconion's rich media display network, and is in no way connected to the numbers of viewers watching video content on the joost portal.

This is correct – comScore Video Metrix is a report of consumer video consumption of both content and ads across the Web. Nevertheless, the same goes for Google and a host of other video networks in the list of top 100 properties, so the position of the Joost Video Network on that ranking is still highly notable. Even if just for potential advertisers.

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Datameer Raises $2.5 Million For Apache Hadoop-Based Analytics Platform

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 11:56 PM PDT

Datameer, a startup that offers a big data analytics solution built on Apache Hadoop, has raised $2.5 million in Series A funding from Redpoint Ventures. John Walecka, a partner of Redpoint Ventures, has joined Datameer's Board of Directors. Datameer is also publicly launching its Analytics Solution, which integrated the data mining power of Hadoop with a spreadsheet interface, enabling business users to run analytics against very large data sets, with no programming required. The product is designed to help users with little to computer engineering experience handle massive amounts of data.


Kevin Rose Says Digg Is Going To Launch Some “Crazy Sh*t.” We’re Not So Sure

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 11:18 PM PDT

So far Digg founder Kevin Rose has been pretty quiet about his new role as CEO of Digg. But he and cohost Alex Albrecht opened up a little on the most recent Diggnation podcast.

iPads in hand, Kevin and Alex thanked outgoing CEO Jay Adelson for all his hard work, and then Rose said he’s “excited to make sure Digg will kick some ass” going forward. “There’s going to be some crazy shit to announce” over the next six months, he says, although the only product changes he talked about specifically were the killing off of the Diggbar, and he says he wants a Digg iPad application. Not exactly earth shattering stuff.

He didn’t talk much about the new version of Digg, now massively behind schedule and getting more so every day. Please, Kevin, accept my invitation to sit down with us on video to talk about the future of Digg. It was just about a year ago that we talked about Digg’s serious plans to get back in the game. iPad apps are great, but there has to be more to the plan than that.

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Betaworks Really Is “Filling Holes”

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 10:47 PM PDT

Twitter investor Fred Wilson’s post about too many Twitter developers simply “filling holes” instead of building killer apps became somewhat literal today. The company that has probably funded more hole fillers for Twitter than anyone else – Betaworks – has a huge hole outside of their office in New York. And that’s a picture of that hole.

OATV partner Bryce Roberts took the picture this morning while he was at Betaworks for a Bit.ly board meeting, and tweeted about it. “Yeah, I took that while I was in their office this morning for our bitly board meeting. Don’t make me regret posting it!” he said in an email.

Too late for that. Funny enough, Bit.ly is one of the hole fillers that Wilson pointed out – a URL shortener. As are many other Betaworks investments like Tweetdeck and, probably, Tweetup.

I say keep filling those holes, Betaworks. Your Summize hole-filler brought in a ton of Twitter stock, we heard. Maybe some of your newer investments will, too.

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Is Twitter’s Ad Platform TweetUp’s Early Death Knell Or Starter’s Pistol?

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:51 PM PDT

Last night, Twitter finally unveiled the details of its long-awaited ad platform, Promoted Tweets. The news, at least at first glance, couldn’t have come at a worse time for TweetUp, the ‘AdSense for Twitter‘ startup that had launched out of the Idealab incubator a mere 24 hours earlier. So did TweetUp have the worst startup launch timing ever? Earlier this afternoon I spoke with TweetUp (and Idealab) CEO Bill Gross — best known as the founder of Overture and the man who pioneered search advertising — who is confident that the startup is not headed to an early grave.

For those that missed the news, Twitter’s Promoted Tweets allow advertisers to display tweets they’ve written in a more prominent position than they would normally receive. For starters, Twitter is showing them at the top of results pages for its real-time search engine, but in the future it intends to roll out Promoted Tweets to third-party Twitter clients and users’ Twitter streams. These Promoted Tweets look a lot like regular tweets, and users can engage with them as if they were ‘normal’. TweetUp has some major similarities —  it also shows sponsored tweets based on search keywords.  But Gross contends that there are some key differences.

The Differences

The biggest difference, Gross says, lies in the search results themselves. For a long time, Twitter’s search engine would only show results in reverse chronological order, with new tweets flowing in the order they were created. This is great for keeping tabs on breaking news, but it also has a relevance problem — the best tweets get lost in the noise. Twitter recently made a major improvement by pinning up to three of the most  popular tweets matching a given query to the top of results pages, with the real-time stream filling in below them. That’s a big step, but the focus is still largely on the most recent tweets as opposed to the most interesting ones.

TweetUp, on the other hand, puts less focus on the most recent tweets and instead reorders the entire page of results based on relevance, using metrics like retweet frequency, popularity, and how popular links in each tweet are. The site also has an authority ranking for each user on each topic — if you’ve previously tweeted a lot about the iPad over an extended period of time, you’ll probably have a higher authority than someone who is mentioning it for the first time.

Another difference Gross points out lies in how the sponsored tweets themselves are displayed: on Twitter, they’re at the top of the page (for now). On TweetUp, bidding on a sponsored tweet doesn’t guarantee that it will be the top result on a given page. Bidding does boost your authority on that topic and makes it much more likely that your tweet will appear in results, but if a well established expert in the field is tweeting about the same topic, their tweets might appear above your sponsored tweet. This is meant to help the results feel more organic, so that tweets don’t feel “forced” into your feed. Twitter’s official ad platform uses a metric called resonance to get rid of bad ads, but it doesn’t have an impact on the ad’s position onscreen (it’s either at the top of the page or it isn’t).


The last difference Gross highlighted was the market he was trying to address. He believes Twitter is going after the bigger brands and agencies with large CPM buys for its Promoted Tweets, whereas TweetUp is meant to be more of a self-service model, allowing users to bid on the long-tail of keyword matches. Of course, it’s entirely possible that Twitter will offer its own self-service tools, so this may not be a difference after all.

What Will Actually Matter

Ultimately, I don’t think many of these differences will last for long if they are proven to be advantages for TweetUp.  Twitter is almost certainly working to further improve its search results using relevance algorithms. Likewise, if Twitter sees that TweetUp’s self-service model is working well for a long tail of local businesses looking to run their own ads, then I can’t see a reason why it wouldn’t launch one itself.

What will matter is how much distribution TweetUp can get in the next few months. Remember, Twitter is only offering its Promoted Tweets on its own site for now, which means that third-party Twitter clients (which many people use exclusively) are left to their own devices to integrate ads themselves. And TweetUp is making a very tempting proposition: it’s giving developers who integrate the service 50% of the ad revenue. Likewise, publishers can integrate a TweetUp widget that uses AdSense-like technology to display sponsored tweets relevant to the content on their site. TweetUp is also paying some developers up front to integrate the service. Its roster of partners already include Seesmic, Twitdroid (a popular Android client), twitterfeed and Answers.com.

And, in a much-needed nugget of good news for TweetUp, Twitter COO Dick Costolo said earlier today that Twitter would not require developers to exclusively offer its Promoted Tweets, so TweetUp and Twitter’s own ads could potentially co-exist in third-party clients.

That said, once this window of opportunity ends and Twitter does open Promoted Tweets to third parties, there won’t be much reason for a Twitter client to include both TweetUp and the official Twitter search unless TweetUp brings something extra to the table. Which means TweetUp will need to keep its own search engine significantly ahead of Twitter’s, and/or continue to tempt developers with revenue sharing agreements that are better than what Twitter offers.

I still think the odds are stacked against TweetUp. But Gross is an industry veteran — he’s responsible for the search advertising model that turned Google into a giant (his own company, Overture, went public and was acquired by Yahoo for $1.6 billion). So while it’s never surprising when a startup executive claims that their company will survive apparently insurmountable odds, Gross may have what it takes to pull this off.

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Former Googlers Launch TellApart, Raise $4.75 Million From Greylock

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 08:13 PM PDT

Silicon Valley based TellApart, founded by ex Googlers Josh McFarland and Mark Ayzenshtat, unveiled its service today. They also are announcing a $4.75 million first round of financing in a round led by Greylock Partners, and Greylock partner James Slavet has joined the board of directors. The service helps ecommerce companies increase revenue by analyzing and targeting buyer behavior.

Here’s how it works – ecommerce services share deep user data with TellApart, which then targets those consumers with advertising and other mechanism to get them to return to the site and buy more stuff. This includes targeting ads at those buyers when they are out surfing the web, identifying them via the cookie from the original ecommerce site.

The company has been in trials with at least three ecommerce sites – Hay Needle, Ebags, Diapers.com – since late last year. They charge the sites only for a percentage of increased sales (basically an affiliate fee), and they say that the value a user brings to an ecommerce site through them is roughly 2x the original value of the customer. Revenue run rate is “in the seven figures” already, Greylock tells us.

I sat down with the founders and Slavet earlier today to talk about the service and the funding. The video is below.

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To Steve Or Not To Steve?

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 06:17 PM PDT

The Steve Jobs school of management is back in vogue. According to the most recent surveys, the business person young people most admire is the 55 year-old Jobs, not the 25 year-old CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg. The management advice venture capitalists are now offering entrepreneurs is to be like Steve.

It hasn't always been this way. When I was 26, the company I co-founded hired a very wise and gifted CEO, John Kunze, who cited the founder of Apple and NeXT in explaining how to become a better manager.

"Steve Jobs," John said, "insisted on picking the hardwood floors at NeXT headquarters."

I paused. "Was that good or bad?"

"It was bad, Glenn," John said. “How do you think that made NeXT’s floor-picker feel?"

This was in 1998, when Jobs was a cautionary tale of an exiled founder. Since then, I've always viewed Jobs's comeback through the floor-picker's eyes.

Even as Apple has grown into a $200-billion-market-cap colossus and Jobs has delegated more responsibility, the company has in many ways become more narrowly defined by Jobs's personality. There were 2,500 self-help books on entrepreneurialism published last year, but few account for the role of Jobsian mania in building a company. Business schools and conferences have institutionalized entrepreneurialism as an avocation like law or medicine when it is more often a streak of temperament, luck and inspiration. Far from a program taught by somebody else, entrepreneurialism has always been for me my only shot at being myself.

Personality as Pressure

But what if, as John rightly noted, being yourself means disregarding everybody else? Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin personally approved most of Google's 20,000 hires, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg special-ordered insulting business cards, and Tesla's Elon Musk announced his intentions to out-breed an entire planet of lesser beings. We treat this outrageousness as an idiosyncrasy or a side-effect when it actually feels to me like a company's driving force. Nothing less can make the work of so many feel individual and authentic.

At the company I now lead, Redfin, I drive myself nuts evaluating perfectly well-done projects wondering why each isn't more Redfin, more wonderful. But what if my taste in wonderful isn't actually wonderful? And is it even fair to ask for wonderful? What are the words you use to ask?

One of my first bosses, the brilliant Kirill Sheynkman, knew how to ask. Whenever I tried to show him my work he'd hold up a hand and say: "WAIT… Is it sweet?"

I still remember running out of time on a design, and just sending him what I had. When I walked into his office, he'd printed out the design and left it lying on an ominously clear desk. He sat at the desk, hands folded together. How long had he been there? His posture was magnificent.

"What is this?" he asked.

"You mean it's a little late?"

"I mean what THE **** is this?"

"And it's kind of half-done?"

"I mean WHAT?" Kirill said, with real emotion. It's so hard to know which surrender to mediocrity will be your last.

"And even if it was totally done it would just be really, really lame?"

"I mean… YEAH," Kirill said.

The Company is the Ultimate Work of Art, Not the Product

Kirill made me feel how he felt: that a startup can be almost as individual and coherent as a work of art, not simply in what it makes but in and of itself, how it runs, who it is.

Take Zappos, one of 2009's hottest companies. What sets Zappos apart isn't its technology or business model—shoe e-commerce—but its culture. When I toured Zappos, it was like visiting a new planet: the visitor beside me was asked to ring a bell and share his most embarrassing memory; employees cheered as we walked by; I got photographed wearing a Burger-King-style crown.

A company's personality is the most profound innovation of a founder and her team, as ubiquitous, unnoticed and essential as air. It becomes a source of meaning for employees and consumers, and then it becomes a source of revenue.

People don't pay more for an iPhone based on features and facts. We pay for its strong opinions—about the primacy of beauty and simplicity—which connect with what we like best about ourselves. What this whole Astroturf-covered, media-drenched world is starved for is a little personality.

This personality is so deeply embedded in a great company's DNA that it can be found in its smallest fingernail clipping: Richard Branson's bull-and-matador Virgin Air videos, the Flickr cofounders' cheery "Mabuhay" greeting ("Now you know how to say hello in Tagalog") or, more seriously, Google's decision to abandon the world's largest market—which could never have happened at a company not driven by its founders.

We all applaud Google's decision. But how many objections from reasonable people did Larry and Sergey squash to get their way? What most of us lack isn't our own idea of right and wrong, but the conviction to see it through.


It's hard to do that if you're sensitive to how others feel. For the first time in centuries, the creators in our economy are its rulers, their personalities shaping not only their products but entire companies. It's as if, instead of being confined to an insane asylum, Vincent Van Gogh were allowed to direct the activities of thousands. As John realized, the results are harrowing, but also occasionally beautiful on a scale the world could have hardly imagined.

Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, an online real estate broker trying to change the real estate game in consumer’s favor. Previously, he, Kirill Sheynkman and Joe McVeigh co-founded Plumtree Software, which went public in 2002 and was later bought by Oracle. Elsewhere for TechCrunch, Glenn has written about second-time entrepreneurs, surviving a recession, what you learn raising money and how to divvy up stock.

Photo credits: Steve Jobs by macevangelist on Flickr; Kirill Sheynkman by Kirill S. on Flickr

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OffiSync Now Lets You Co-Author Files With Most Versions Of Microsoft Office (And Google Docs)

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 04:17 PM PDT

Over the last year we’ve been tracking OffiSync, a plugin for Microsoft Office that serves as a bridge between Office and Google Docs. When it first launched, the app’s primary feature was to save Office documents to your Google account. It’s since integrated Google Image Serach into Office, and support for Google Sites. And today it’s getting another major upgrade: you’ll now be able to sync changes between the same document being edited simultaneously by multiple users using any modern version of Office and/or Google Docs.

That’s a big deal, because Microsoft has been heavily promoting real-time collaboration as one of the key features of Office 2010. With OffiSync, you wouldn’t necessarily need 2010 — you’d be able to coauthor a document using Microsoft 2003 and 2007 as well, and you won’t need SharePoint, either. The application allows you to do Office-to-Office collaboration, and you can also have users editing the same document from Google Docs’ online interface. Changes aren’t synced as you type in each character, but rather each time you hit the ’save’ button.

The new version of OffiSync adds support for the ‘any file upload‘ feature that Google Docs added in January. It also has better integration with Google Sites (it will automatically pull in your Google Sites file hierarchy within Office, and allows you to create a file on Sites from Office as well).

While OffiSync offers a free version of its product, most of these new upgrades (including coauthoring) are for premium users only. Premium seats cost $12 a year, or there’s an option for a $30 one-time fee. And, sorry Mac users — OffiSync is still only available for Windows.

OffiSync has been doing quite well lately — it’s currently the top rated app on the recently-launched Google Apps Marketplace, and has the third most installs on the Marketplace overall. CEO Oudi Antebi says that OffiSync now has over 300,000 users The company hasn’t disclosed its funding, but says that it closed a Series A round of over $1 million.


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Bit.ly Links Get Clicked 3.4 Billion Times A Month, New Features Coming

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 01:45 PM PDT

The default link shortener on Twitter, bit.ly, just keeps getting bigger. In March, 3.4 billion bit.ly-shortened links were clicked on, up from 2.7 billion in February and only 87 million a year ago. Yesterday was a record day for bit.ly, with 147 million clicks (see chart).

Even though Twitter still dominates, more than half of all bit.ly links are encoded somewhere besides Twitter.com. Of the 40-50% created within the Twitter ecosystem, a large chunk occurs via Twitter clients and services. But other services such as Facebook are growing as well. About 100 million clicks last month went to Facebook. The diversification will only matter if Twitter ever decides to replace bit.ly as the default shortener with something like twee.tt, which Twitter owns. But there is no indication any change is imminent. The Promoted Tweets which Twitter is about to roll out as its first advertising effort, for instance, use bit.ly links.

The service is about to get an update with a host of new features coming soon. For example, on the site when you paste a URL to be shortened, it will just shorten it automatically without the need to click a button. Managing your shortened links will also become easier. A new search functionality will index the underlying pages of the links you’ve shortened and let you find those links by typing in search terms that match any words on those pages. Also, all the links you share publicly via bit.ly will appear in your own public timeline of shared links.

Finally, bit.ly Pro will also add premium features for which bit.ly will begin to charge companies to access. Since the launch of the beta, 6,000 organizations have signed up for the free version of bit.ly Pro, which provides custom short URLs for nyti.ms, tcrn.ch, 4sq.com, pep.si, and n.pr. The enterprise version, which will cost $995 a month, adds a management dashboard showing all traffic to the custom domain, a realtime feed for click data, and automatically shortens all links from the publisher’s site to their custom short link on bit.ly or any app that uses the bit.ly API.

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Groupon Raises Huge New Round at $1.2 Billion Valuation (Updated)

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 01:19 PM PDT

Fast growing Groupon, fresh off a $30 million round of financing that valued the company at around $250 million, is back raising new money. They have closed or are in the process of closing new venture money at a $1.2 billion valuation, say multiple sources (one source says that’s not exactly correct, but close).

Groupon offers a daily deal in several cities each day, offering steep discounts of 40 to 90% off a variety of services (i.e, spas, restaurants, etc.), if enough people buy the deal, everyone gets it, if it doesn’t reach a critical mass, no one gets the deal. The site has accummulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. 3 million “groupons” have been purchased since November 2008, says the company.

We interviewed Groupon CEO Andrew Mason last week about a number of clones that have popped up recently.  In the interview, he said he was focused on increasing the number of cities to 100 by the end of this year. He declined to speak to us about this story, however.

Update: We’re hearing from another source that Russian Internet holding company Digital Sky Technologies, which recently took significant stakes in Zynga and Facebook, may be the lead investor. We’re also hearing valuation may be $1.35 billion.

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Fox, NBC and Other Broadcast Giants Launch Joint Venture To Create Mobile Content Service

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 12:44 PM PDT

According to a release issued today, Fox, Gannett Broadcasting, Hearst Television, NBC, and eight other broadcast giants are launching a joint venture to develop a new national mobile content service.

The release says that the consortium will utilize existing “broadcast spectrum,” to enable member companies to provide content to mobile devices, including live and on-demand video, local and national news from print and electronic sources, as well as sports and entertainment programming.

Broadcast technology will come from to three station groups, Fox, NBC & Telemundo, and ION, and and the nine local broadcast groups, which are Belo, Cox, E.W. Scripps, Gannett, Hearst, Media General, Meredith, Post Newsweek and Raycom. Separately, these nine local broadcast companies formed Pearl Mobile DTV Company LLC as a vehicle for their involvement in the venture.

The idea is to aggregate all of the broadcast technology from the 12 stations to offers mobile video and print content to nearly 150 million U.S. residents. In addition to broadcast spectrum, the partners will commit content, marketing resources and capital to the new venture. The service will employ ATSC-M/H, an open broadcast transmission system developed by the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) specifically for mobile devices.

The venture is “designed to complement the Federal Communication Commission’s (FCC) National Broadband Initiative by giving consumers mobile access to video content while reducing congestion of the nation’s wireless broadband infrastructure. In addition, the service’s mobile content network will have the capacity to deliver local and national time-sensitive emergency information to citizens across the U.S.”

The FCC’s plan calls on broadcast companies to sell spectrum to provide mobile internet access for citizens in the U.S. It looks like the broadcast companies are pooling their resources together to provide local content for mobile device in the U.S.

It seems like the venture is early-stage at this point, with the networks still building out a management team and raising more funding.

Photo credit/Flickr/James Cridland

SugarSync Ports Their Syncing Magic to the iPad

Posted: 13 Apr 2010 12:42 PM PDT

I've been wondering how, exactly, I'll be able to do work on my iPad. With the assistance of programs like Dropbox and SugarSync, it is possible to cobble together a workflow that doesn't drive me crazy. When I last looked at SugarSync the service was in it's infancy and I found it slightly lacking. All of my concerns, two years ago, have been address and now you have a fully versioned storage system that you can use to feasibly upload a plethora of files including, but not limited to, MP3s, videos, and documents. Audio and video files, for the most part, played natively on the iPad. However, if you need to transfer odd formats or edit Office or iWork documents (you can view them just fine) you'll need to email the files to yourself and them open them in Pages. This two step process, while upsetting to those afraid of more than one step, is frustrating at worst and a non-issue at best.


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