The Latest from TechCrunch

Getting Married? Wedding Party Collects Photos From Guests’ Phones To Create Beautiful Online Albums
Yammer Is Launching A Chat Feature Called Online Now ‘In A Couple Of Weeks’
Twitter Launches Its Own Political Barometer To Track U.S. Presidential Elections
Content Recommendation Startup Thirst Brings Its Twitter App To The iPhone
Microsoft Officially Signs Off On Windows 8, Releases It To Manufacturers
YC-Backed Zapier, The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform
CardSpring Gains New Investors, First Data Partnership, As Its App Platform For Payment Cards Nears Launch
AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon’s Walled Garden
Curiosity Piqued By The Mars-Bound Rover? Watch The Mission Unfold In Times Square
ComScore: US Smartphone Penetration 47% In Q2; Android Remains Most Popular, But Apple’s Growing Faster
Standing On Its Own: Wix Spin-Off daPulse Scores 1.5m Series A For Its Internal Communications Tool
What Startups Should Do Before They Get Into The VC’s Office
Eat The Rich: The App Economy’s Middle Class Is Booming…And So Is The Poor
BigArtMob Plans To Turn Urban Street Art Into Cash Via Tourist Maps And API
Content Crunching App Silk Raises $1.6 Million Seed Round
The Denon Cocoon Home And Portable Are High-End, Impressive iPhone Speaker Docks
Summit Partners Raises $520 Million Credit Fund For Growth Companies
Smule’s AutoRap App Helps TC Spit Fire, Tops 2.5M Installs In A Few Days
Groupon Sued By Blue Calypso Over Two Peer-To-Peer Ad Tech Patents
First Day Of Apple-Samsung Trial Yields Troves Of New iPhone, iPad Prototypes

Getting Married? Wedding Party Collects Photos From Guests’ Phones To Create Beautiful Online Albums

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 10:05 AM PDT

Many of the startups targeting the weddings space today are focused on offering better services for the bride and/or the couple, but with a new mobile application called Wedding Party, that model has been flipped on its head. Wedding Party wants to offer a better wedding experience for the guests first, which then, in turn, will benefit the couple being married.

The app offers a simple way to allow wedding guests participate in the creation of a digital wedding album by sharing photos, notes, and later on, videos. It’s the modern-day equivalent of the guy running around with the video camera, bugging you to “say something nice about the couple.”

After all, doesn’t that guy always appear right when you’ve shoved a big bite of wedding cake in your face, or when you’ve gotten too tipsy from the open bar? Oh, that’s just me?

The idea with Wedding Party is that, instead of putting people on the spot, guests can share the photos they captured during the celebration, or even write their own their own personal messages to the couple which will later be compiled into an online album. The startup has also just inked a deal to have that album integrated into the wedding websites from MyWedding.com, which will help it gain exposure in the increasingly crowded weddings space.

Based in Mountain View, the bootstrapped company was founded by Ajay Kamat, Himani Amoli, Gordon McCreight and Dan Perez, all with previous social community building experience thanks to their earlier project called MicroMobs, except for Dan, who was at Coupons.com. After seeing many of their friends getting married, they saw there was a big opportunity to build something in the mobile and social weddings space, instead of the more general “friends and family” space which MicroMobs addressed.

“From the moment a couple gets engaged to the time they get married, there’s an incredible amount of excitement, not only only on the part of the couple but on the part of their friends and family as well,” explains Kamat. “And people close to the couple are really looking for an outlet to share in this joy and excitement….[Wedding Party] allows friends and family to participate in an engaging way that really wasn’t possible,” he says.

When the big day is over, Wedding Party sends a link to the couple’s inbox the next morning with all the photos collected, and it also organizes them in an online gallery and minute-by-minute timeline for later viewing. This same photo collection is available to MyWedding.com users as well, allowing it to be another feature of the couple’s wedding website.

Prior to today’s public debut, Wedding Party has been in private beta testing with a couple of hundred of weddings, and Kamat says the response so far has been “tremendous.” Today, the application is becoming available to all, as a free download in the iTunes App Store. Don’t worry: an Android version is on the way. The app will always remain free, but the company may offer some premium features in the future. You can also find the company tweeting away at @wedding on Twitter, which they fortunately managed to grab.

Yammer Is Launching A Chat Feature Called Online Now ‘In A Couple Of Weeks’

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:46 AM PDT

Yammer, the enterprise social networking company that was recently bought by Microsoft for $1.2 billion, is getting ready to add a new instant messaging feature called Online Now to its main service, enabling users to chat to each other in real time. Online Now will sit alongside existing services that let users post status updates and media as well as send private messages.

The feature was spotted earlier today by TNW, and we have now confirmed exactly what is happening with Yammer itself, including the name: “We will be announcing the chat feature through a press release in a couple of weeks as part of our summer release,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch.

If you are one of Yammer’s five million users and haven’t spotted an option to chat already, that’s because the chat that is coming out now is part of Yammer’s testing process. Yammer says that it has been implementing different versions of the upcoming User Interface (UI) and randomly displaying them to our users to test it.

“Analytics will then show how users are adopting the various feature versions and we will make the decision based on those results so we can then roll out the best possible product to our customers,” the spokesperson said.

The addition of a new chat feature demonstrates that Yammer is wasting no time sitting on its $1.2 billion laurels post acquisition by Microsoft. But nor is it rolling out products that point to it integrating with its new parent and its sister divisions so quickly, either.

“This is a Yammer developed feature. You will be able to use it within your normal Yammer environment,” the spokesperson said. Meaning: no Skype integration, no Sharepoint integration, and if anything a wider enhancement of Yammer’s own functionality and feature set.

One possibility for how Online Now will work — although, again, this may change before the final product comes out — is that it will feature as an additional tab in the lower right hand corner of the main Yammer communication screen, not unlike Facebook’s own instant messaging feature.

Cindy Alvarez, director of user experience at Yammer, posted a picture earlier this month on Yammer’s customer forums showing what the service looked like in testing mode:

Now all we need is some auto-refreshing action on the main feed and we might just be in business.

Twitter Launches Its Own Political Barometer To Track U.S. Presidential Elections

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:45 AM PDT

Twitter just announced the launch of its Twitter Political Index. This index, says Twitter, is “a daily measurement of Twitter users' feelings towards the candidates as expressed in nearly two million Tweets each week.” Every day, twitter will evaluate and weigh the sentiment of tweets mentioning both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney relative to every other message that passes through Twitter’s systems. The system then calculates a score for both candidates. Currently Obama‘s score is 34 (and trending down) and Romney, whose follower count on Twitter may be somewhat inflated, is at 25 (and trending up a bit). The Twitter Political Index will be updated every day at 8pm ET.

Twitter, of course, has been used to study political sentiment for quite a while not and the company even has its own Government & Politics team to analyze this data and assist third parties with their own efforts. For this project, however, Twitter also partnered with the data analysts at Topsy, as well as polling firms The Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research. USA Today will also use Twitter’s election meter in its coverage of the ongoing presidential campaign.

According to Twitter, its own data generally shows the same trends as Gallup‘s approval ratings surveys and frequently “hints” at “where the poll numbers are headed.” There is some evidence, however, that “the predictive power of Twitter regarding elections has been greatly exaggerated.” That study, however, mostly looked as message volume while Twitter’s barometer focuses on sentiment analysis.

Content Recommendation Startup Thirst Brings Its Twitter App To The iPhone

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:35 AM PDT

Thirst, an app that helps users get caught up with important news as it’s shared on Twitter, is expanding beyond the iPad today with the launch of a “universal” app that works on the iPhone and iPod Touch, too.

Thirst launched in May, and as co-founder and CEO Anuj Verma tells me, its goal for the current app is to bring people up-to-speed on the most important Twitter updates. So when you open Thirst, you get a personalized “newspaper” with the hottest news stories since the last time you opened the app — which could be an hour or a week ago.

Behind the scenes, Verma says Thirst has developed a natural language processor that determines which tweets are related to a given news topic, regardless of the exact words used. As an example, Verma says that on the day of the Supreme Court decision on healthcare, Thirst automatically aggregated all of the related tweets, whether they used a specific phrase (“Obamacare”, “health care”, “SCOTUS”, etc.) or not.

You can also tweet links and commentary from within the app, with Thirst suggesting the most appropriate hashtag for a given topic.

Verma demonstrated the iPhone version for me last week. The look and functionality are pretty similar to the iPad version — it’s just that instead of splitting a single screen into multiple columns for navigation and content, you now swipe between different screens.

With today’s launch, Thirst is also adding a “featured” section to the app. The initial Thirst interface took a personalized approach to news — tweets from the accounts you follow that were posted since your last visit. As Verma puts it, the featured story section is more like the front page of a newspaper, presenting a more general view of the most important topics today, regardless of who you follow. (The front page metaphor gets a bit confusing, since it’s the personalized view that’s called a “newspaper” in Thirst’s navigation.)

As Verma has said before, the company’s vision goes beyond any one social network. He says it made sense to start with Tweets: “Let’s start with the hardest one first.” That’s because a tweet, with only 140 characters, provides relatively little of the context that helps Thirst understand “what it might be about.” Now that Thirst has made its approach work on Twitter, Verma says, “Technology-wise, it won’t be too hard for us to move on” to other types of content — though it sounds like there aren’t any concrete plans.

Verma adds that Thirst’s technology can do more than recommend news articles, with possible expansion into other topics and types of content.

You can download the iOS app here.

Microsoft Officially Signs Off On Windows 8, Releases It To Manufacturers

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:32 AM PDT

Right on schedule, Microsoft has just announced on its Windows Team blog that Windows 8 has emerged from its long development and testing phase, and will soon be in the hands of manufacturers and OEMs for installation on new PCs and devices.

Among those on the list to receive the final build (build 9200, if you were curious) are Lenovo, Acer, ASUS and Toshiba, though that’s clearly just the tip of a very large iceberg.

While average users won’t be able to get their collective hands on the new OS before its official launch on October 26, Microsoft revealed when certain subsets of users could access the final build. Developers can download Windows 8 via their MSDN subscriptions on August 15, as can IT professionals with their TechNet subscriptions — lucky devils.

In a separate blog post, Microsoft’s Stephen Sinofsky dives into greater detail about the RTM process and the steps that led up to it. One of the juicier tidbits Sinofsky addressed was just how many people participated in the Windows 8 preview program — over 16 million PCs took part in the preview, with a full 7 million of those PCs running on the company’s Release Preview build. Solid numbers for what the company has referred to as a substantial “reimagining” of Windows as we know it, and the company hopes that same sort of momentum carries over into retail sales.

With Windows 8 finally complete, Microsoft has begun to bring other parts of its ecosystem online. Take the Windows Store for instance — developers will soon able to submit paid apps into the new marketplace, though they’ll have to have their RTM builds installed and ready first. That said, Sinofsky was quick to note that “no software project is ever really ‘done,’” so the company will continue to monitor feedback from both users and its myriad hardware partners.

YC-Backed Zapier, The IFTTT For Business Users, Launches Developer Platform

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:20 AM PDT

Zapier, the Y Combinator-backed service that allows you to automate common tasks on the web and sync data between web apps, just announced the launch of its third-party developer platform. With Zapier, even non-technical users can easily create connections between the more than 60 apps the service currently supports. This means, for example, that you can push a notice to your Basecamp account whenever you sell a ticket on Eventbrite or get an SMS alert every time somebody signs up for your Campaign Monitor or AWeber email marketing campaigns.

With its new development platform, the Mountain View-based company says, developers will be able to easily add their own apps to the service instead of having to wait for the Zapier team itself to support them. Zapier currently supports over 60 services, including popular tools like Asana, Dropbox, Campfire, MailChimp, Salesforce, Stripe, Shopify and Zendesk. Developers will be able to hook into all of these apps, as well as any new ones Zapier itself adds in the future. This, says Zapier co-founder Wade Foster, will save “app developers weeks to months in developer time building integrations and lets an app developer spend more time focusing on their own apps.”

Zapier is launching its development platform with twelve partners. These include marketing platform HubSpot, collaborative work platform Podio and invoice and time tracking service Ronin.

Zapier’s core feature set and mission is similar to the popular IFTTT, but while Zapier also supports Twitter and Facebook, the company’s focus is squarely on business and enterprise tools like Campaign Monitor, Basecamp, Asana and Stripe. As Foster told us earlier today, the service currently processes over 10 million events per month. Zapier is available in a slightly limited free version. Premium accounts start at $15/month.

CardSpring Gains New Investors, First Data Partnership, As Its App Platform For Payment Cards Nears Launch

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

CardSpring, an ambitious payments startup founded by former Netscape engineers, is building a platform that connects web and mobile applications to payment cards. It’s a card-linked payment infrastructure that can work across any bank or card type (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AmEx, etc.), because it sits in the cloud, and is attached to the payments network directly. This enables developers to build card-linked applications that trigger when a consumer pays by credit or debit card, whether it’s an app delivering coupons, offers, loyalty points, frequent flier miles, recommendations, or more.

Today, the startup is taking a big step in terms of making this all happen, as it has partnered with the First Data payments network, the largest payment processor in the U.S., reaching over 4 million merchant locations, and accounting for over half of the U.S.’s payment infrastructure. Also new, CardSpring has added a handful of big-name strategic investors who cover every aspect of its business: API franchises, online advertising, big data, and finance.

The new investors are Jeff Hammerbacher, the Chief Scientist at Cloudera, and who led the Data team at Facebook; former Yahoo exec now LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner; Founding Partner at Ignition Brad Silverberg; and Chairman of the Board and former CEO of Intuit Bill Campbell. All these investors, and some who are undisclosed, joined after CardSpring’s $10 million Series A announced in January.

Silverberg, who spent nearly a decade at Microsoft leading development of the Windows Platform, Internet Explorer, Office and MS-DOS, has known CardSpring CEO Eckart Walther for years, competing with him while Walther was at Netscape and he ran Microsoft’s Internet efforts, and later working together on Microsoft acquisition Tellme where Walther led product development before moving on to Yahoo and LiveOps. He describes Walther as “an unbelievably brilliant technologist, one of the deepest platform thinkers I’ve ever worked with.” Silverberg admits that he basically nagged Walther until he agreed to let him participate in the A round.

“When he told me what he was working on, it was like lightning bolt of clarity…it seems so obvious that something like this should be done, I was stunned that no one else had done it before,” says Silverberg of hearing about CardSpring for the first time. “The market need for CardSpring is huge.”

The payments space is seemingly a tricky one to gain traction in at present. There are so many startups begging for attention, with consumer-facing mobile wallets, mobile payments startups, mobile coupons, daily deals, local offers, loyalty platforms, card-linked merchant platforms, and more, all jostling for position. But this fragmentation is actually an opportunity for something like CardSpring to come in over top and provide a platform for unification. And by partnering with First Data and other payment networks (this deal is the first of many), it allows CardSpring to grow its reach, while also all enabling all this innovation to grow around them.

The way CardSpring works is that any payment event (a swipe, an NFC tap, Square’s “say your name at checkout,” etc.) could trigger an event to occur. This event could be anything from being sent a coupon for a future purchase to having a receipt sent out via email to checking you in on a social network and a lot more. The credit card, in this way, acts something like an application – with control over the associated permissions in the hands of the user. This one can email me, this one can post to Facebook, this one can deposit cash back into my bank account, etc.

In merchant speak, CardSpring could also enable apps that “close the redemption loop,” which means it connects an offer (deal, discount, coupon, etc.) to a transaction at the point-of-sale, whether that offer first appeared on web or mobile. However, CardSpring itself – unlike card-linked competitors edo and Cartera – is not a merchant-facing platform. It’s infrastructure. What Twilio is to voice, or Stripe is to e-commerce, for example.

And because it’s critical that a service tied so closely to the payments network itself is secure, it’s notable that CardSpring’s CTO Jeff Winner was head of crypto at Netscape, and came up with things like SSL. You don’t want rogue apps when you’re building a platform like this.

The company already has $10 million in funding from Accel, Greylock, SV Angel, Morado Ventures, Felicis Ventures, and Maynard Webb's investment arm, WIN. It can now add the strategic investors above to that already impressive lineup. With its funding in tow, CardSpring is now quickly moving towards its launch. There are hundreds of companies already participating in its private beta, including Boutiika, Cardify, Choicepass, FanPlayr, Giftly, ifeelgoods, Key Ring, Local Bonus, Mirth, ParkMe, Place Points,Roximity, Savored, Scout Mob, Tello and Toodalu, to name a few. Around 20 companies have quietly gone live already, and there are more in the works. CardSpring expects to exit private beta this year.

AppFog And Rackspace Want To Break Your App Out Of Amazon’s Walled Garden

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 09:00 AM PDT

During the great Amazon Web Services outages of April 2011 and June 2012 many users were stuck. They could, in theory, move their apps to another AWS region, or to another cloud provider altogether. But in practice the architecture of AWS regions are unique – each one supports slightly different features and APIs.

The thing is, every cloud provider will eventually have some downtime. Quite possibly less downtime than your on-premise apps. But if you can’t wait it out, you’re going to need to architect your applications so that they can live in different environments. And today AppFog and Rackspace announced a partnership that promises to make it easier to do that. But there’s no word on when, so for now this is still vaporware.

AppFog is a platform cloud, like Heroku or Google App Engine, that supports several programming languages and frameworks. It’s based on the private platform-as-as-service software Cloud Foundry, which VMware open sourced last year. So far AppFog has only been available on AWS’ infrastructure, but CEO Lucas Carlson has been promising a one click migrate between clouds for a while now. What AppFog announced today is that its service would be available through the Rackspace Cloud Tools Marketplace. Its inclusion will bring the the platform-as-a-service marketplace I described last weekend a bit closer to reality.

Seamless app migrations between clouds is a tall order and I’ll believe it when I see it. But it would be a killer app for platform clouds, which so far have left many developers asking “What’s the point? I can configure all this stuff myself.” But AppFog’s not alone, the platform market is increasingly crowded. For example, just this week Uhuru, another Cloud Foundry based provider that adds-on .NET support to the core offering, launched its beta. Cross-cloud deployments are likely on the roadmaps of many, if not most, platform cloud companies.

If nothing else, hopefully this move will put some pressure on AWS to make it easier to fail-over to other regions.

Curiosity Piqued By The Mars-Bound Rover? Watch The Mission Unfold In Times Square

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:55 AM PDT

In case you hadn’t already heard, NASA’s Curiosity rover — which is the largest rover NASA has ever launched — should touch down on the Martian surface in just over four days.

That fateful night comes after nearly eight months of interplanetary travel, and thankfully for New York-based space nuts, the sizable Toshiba Vision screens perched above Times Square will be broadcasting all the action as it happens. All the rest of you will have to make do with the two live video feeds that NASA will be streaming come August 6.

That said, I’m using the term “action” rather loosely here. It’s not exactly going to be prime time programming — assuming all goes well during its seven minute atmospheric entry (cross your fingers and toes), the Mini Cooper-sized rover is expected to make landfall at about 1:30 AM Eastern Time. Those of you expecting live video from the surface of the red planet may come away disappointed though, as most of the coverage will be of the happenings inside Mission Control, “including receipt of the first signal from Mars following a successful landing,” according to a statement issued by NASA.

Still, it’s a huge boon for we nerds who never quite made it into the space program. While mankind’s exploration of the solar system has been stymied by budget cuts and technical failures, this is a terribly exciting time for us. Gutsy endeavors like SpaceX’s Dragon capsule docking offers up some hope for the future of commercial space activity, and the Curiosity’s multi-year stay on Mars could potentially pave the way for a manned mission down the road. But that’s a rant best saved for another time.

In the meantime, what better way to familiarize yourself with the Curiosity rover and its two year mission on the red planet than with some Star Trek alumni? NASA recently commissioned William Shatner and Wil Wheaton to narrate a pair of near-identical informational videos, so it’s simple enough to pledge your allegiance to some fictional spacefarers

ComScore: US Smartphone Penetration 47% In Q2; Android Remains Most Popular, But Apple’s Growing Faster

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:51 AM PDT

ComScore today released its latest quarterly figures on the state of the mobile market in the U.S. based on active users, and while the exact numbers are different, the basic picture is the same as the one that Strategy Analytics painted earlier in the week around smartphone sales: Apple’s iOS continues to see the strongest gains and Android has remained in the lead but with its lead reduced somewhat. There are now 234 million U.S. residents using mobile devices, with smartphone usage up 4% to 110 million — giving the country a smartphone penetration of 47%.

ComScore’s survey, based 30,000 U.S. consumers, also found that the number of subscribers using Samsung and LG devices, both smart and feature phone devices, declined, as did the number on Motorola handsets. Apple and HTC, meanwhile, both went up.

Samsung in the last quarter saw some of its strongest sales yet worldwide, so why did usage of Samsung decline last quarter in the U.S.? I think part of the story here has to do with feature phones continuing to be replaced by smartphones: the table above takes both into account, and Samsung (down to 25.6%), LG (18.8%) and Motorola (11.7%) all sell a mix of feature and smartphone devices. Apple and HTC, meanwhile, which grown their marketshares to 15.4% and 6.4%, are smartphone-only.

ComScore does not break out how those handset makers are doing in the smartphone-only category but it does outline how smartphone platforms have been performing.

Here Google’s Android has continued to remain in the lead, with 51.6% of the market, and it’s even grown — although by only 0.6 percentage points. Apple remains in second position with 32.4% share, but even without a new device on the market, it’s actually grown its share the most of any other platform — meaning that for one reason or another consumers continue to grow their engagement on the iOS platform. The remaining three smartphone platforms — RIM, Microsoft and Symbian — all saw declining usage.

Putting these figures together with those from Strategy Analytics (it pointed out that Android accounted for less sales last quarter than a year ago, while Apple saw a 10 percentage point spike in sales), we can infer that Android’s slow growth (and maybe even some decline) might continue into the quarter ahead, unless a blockbuster Android device or two hits the market (the Galaxy S3 could be a contender there), or something else happens to boost Android smartphone usage.

As usual, comScore has also delved a little into what it is that people are actually doing on their devices, too.

Interestingly, text messaging has had a slight uptick in its usage over last year — showing that some legacy services have a lot of staying power; a full 75% of all mobile consumers sent SMS messages last quarter.

Also the gap between app usage and mobile web usage is growing ever so slightly larger: 51.4% of consumers used an app, while 50.2% used a browser. Both grew, but apps usage is growing faster.

Social networking on mobile devices also continues to rise: social media sites and blogs were accessed by 36.9% of all consumers. And similarly 33.4% played a game. Music was the least popular on the list but it grew the best: 27.6% of all users listened to music on their phones, a rise of 2.3 percentage points.

Standing On Its Own: Wix Spin-Off daPulse Scores 1.5m Series A For Its Internal Communications Tool

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:44 AM PDT

It's always interesting to see when a company builds a product on the side purely to scratch its own itch, and then decides that said product has the making of a startup in itself. That appears to be the case with daPulse which, broadly speaking, plays in the enterprise social network space, and spun out of web publishing platform Wix as a venture in its own right in February of this year.

Today, daPulse is announcing its first funding round: a Series A to the tune of $1.5 million from GenesisPartners. The investment will be used to further develop the startup's topic-based internal communication tool — a sort of Yammer, Saleforce’s Chatter, or Socialcast competitor — and to enter new markets, specifically giving its marketing efforts a shot in the arm in the US and Europe.

Designed to encourage employees to share updates without creating too much noise, daPulse places greater emphasis on topics — known as pulses – which users follow instead of each other. This way, they only follow and interact with projects, news, developments, teams, customer updates and the like, that are of interest. Or so the pitch goes.

Started in 2010 as an internal project, daPulse's approach to company internal communication was born out of the needs of the distributed team working at Wix. "We cracked it by being topic-centered. Employees can easily screen the information they're exposed to by opting to follow only pulses that are relevant to them and ignoring those that aren't", says daPulse CEO and co-founder Roy Man in a statement.

To date, however, the product has only seen a limited roll out. It's currently used in "over 15 companies and by thousands of employees", says daPulse. After today's investment, we'd expect this to begin ramping up — although, suffice it to say, the startup is playing in a very crowded space. A space that, thanks to Microsoft's recent acquisition of Yammer, now includes the behemoth that is Redmond.

What Startups Should Do Before They Get Into The VC’s Office

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:43 AM PDT

This is a guest post by Eze Vidra, Head of Campus London, Google’s dedicated startup space in East London housing accelerators and cowering spaces. He tweets at @ediggs and blogs at VCCafe.com.

An experienced VC would have heard thousands of pitches in his day. The good ones would tell you that they have developed a “pattern recognition”. After a while, they are able to determine (at least in their own minds) what startups would succeed or fail in a matter of minutes. There’s obviously lots going on in a pitch – verbal and non-verbal communication, chemistry etc. In this post, I will outline both platforms and tools startups should consider to improve their pitching success, before they get into the VC’s office.

Fundraising tips for startups

1) Put your startup on AngelList – if you’re on to something solid, you should have no problem getting noticed by the top guys. Best way to get noticed is to be referred by a member – let me know if you need help with that (angel.co)

2) Spend $19 and treat yourself to this course on raising capital for startups and what to include in your pitch slides. This online course consists of 8 lectures and over 6.5 hours of content (including a sample pitch deck) . Speakers include Naval Ravinikant (co-founder of AngelList), Dave McClure (500 startups) and Adeo Ressi (founder Institute) providing different angles to the pitch. It’s cheap coaching to nail the structure you need in any fundraising presentation.

3) In his class CS183, on startup conception, launch, scaling, and growing of a successful tech company, valley investor Peter Thiel referred to two different decks for the same company. A good deck and a bad/traditional deck, explaining the relevant differences. Access the “good deck” on Blake Masters’ class notes posts (converted to PDF thanks to Andreas Klinger)

4) Look at other pitching examples – recently launched PitchEnvy has over 20 recent pitch decks that
raised money!

5) Create an intro video as a teaser – while it’s risky, creating a video can be cheaper than you think, and it can help establish the concept of your startup in a clear/clever/fun way for users and investors alike. I found Startup-Videos to be an excellent resource for seeing what’s out there. There are some platforms out there like PowTown If you’re going to do it yourself, you better get some training. Crowdsourced education platform Udemy comes to the rescue with How to Create an Awesome video demo for your startup. Animation platform PowToon, an Israeli startup, is another free tool to help.

6) Equity Crowdfunding – I’ve covered the different types of Crowdfunding on the post Startup Equity Crowdfunding grows in Europe. In a nutshell, equity-based platforms like FundersClub (US), Seedrs (UK), and CrowdCube (UK, mostly non-tech) and others, enable anyone (not just accredited angel investors), put small sums as little as $1000 towards an equity investment in a startup. The sector is yet to be regulated and there are concerns about alignment of investors, but nevertheless it is a viable way to get the first bucks to build a product.

7) Donation Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter, Rally and IndieGogo are essentially early-sales platforms, which works especially well for physical products. For example, Pebble was able to raise $3.4 million in 3 days for its smart watch, which grew to over $10 million in one month from 68,000 backers, without losing a single percentage of equity in the process. People who pledged money towards the project got in return units of the product, or the ability to choose a color for their Pebble watch depending on how much they paid. Another example is Ze Frank, who raised $146,000 from 3,900 people since March. He included several ‘awards’ for different levels of fundraising including “I will whisper words of encouragement into a small jar, label it, and send it to you + One black on black fuzzy duck t-shirt” for people who pledge $250. It doesn’t work for everyone, but is certainly a channel worth considering, for the right product.

Crowdfunding on kickstarter proved to be a great fundraising technique for Pebble after traditional investors turned down the company

8) Get on accredited lists – this is a bit of a chicken and egg. You need funding, VCs like traction. If you can show you have traction, it will be easier to get funding. One way of doing that is getting ranked by industry accredited lists. Associates at VC funds will regularly go through lists like Deloitte Fast 50, Telegraph 100 to look for hidden gems. If your startup was ever on one of these lists you probably received unsolicited phone calls asking for meetings. Another way of accomplishing the same effect is to sign up for visible pitch competitions like the Startup Bootcamp’s Tech Allstars (a competition for startups in EU who were part of accelerators), or LeWeb’s pitching competition.

9) Get media/blog coverage before you launch – staying on the traction point, any prospecting investor will do its due diligence on the company, product or team. Since there aren’t too many data points in the early stages of a startup, getting featured by a reputable media outlet (ideally national, but niche works too) will create another entry point for people to find out about your product or service. A friend of mine got featured by Wired, GQ and BBC before he went live with the product because he was focused on a ‘sexy’ area. The result: oversubscribed angel rounds and a long waiting list of beta testers for when the company is ready to flip the switch. Of course if you aren’t ready for publicity it’s better to wait before you attract all that attention. A ‘soft’ way of getting noticed is answering questions on UGC sites like Quora or LinkedIn, submitting a guest post on your area of focus without being too salesy and starting your own blog, to establish your voice within the community.

10) Get on stage - practice your pitch as much as you can. If you live near a vibrant startup community, there should be plenty of opportunities to do pitch practice. From community meetups to university clubs, getting on stage will not only improve your confidence, but can also produce valuable feedback before you get on to the real thing.

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Any of these techniques is most likely to work best for kick ass teams with experience and products that tap big and growing markets in a scalable way. No harm in trying, but don’t put the cart ahead of the horse! You are of course also welcome to visit the VC Cafe Startup Resources page for additional tools, reading lists and recommendations

This post originally appeared at VCCafe.

Image credit to HowardLake, Flickr

Eat The Rich: The App Economy’s Middle Class Is Booming…And So Is The Poor

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:05 AM PDT

In the mobile application ecosystems offered by the iOS and Android platforms, there’s now a booming “middle class” of mobile application developers, according to new data from analytics firm Flurry. Even the long tail is benefiting – something that goes counter to traditional industry trends, which tend to see wealth established at the top as an industry matures. Typically, established players and brands invade from other platforms, then start to depress the opportunities for many of the platform’s earlier players, Flurry’s report explains. But the opposite appears to be true for the app economy. Here, there’s a rapidly growing middle class of app developers, and even the long tail is generating a larger portion of the revenue than ever before.

First, a look at the revenue picture in today’s market. Using data from over 200,000 mobile applications on its network – a good-sized sample for app stores which each now have over 600,000 apps available – Flurry calculated worldwide app revenues for this year and years past. Since 2012 isn’t over yet, Flurry estimated the growth rates based on proportional changes from 2011.

In 2011, revenue from premium (paid) apps and in-app purchases was 82% ($5.4 billion) of the total revenue generated, and ad revenue was 18%. In 2012, Flurry predicts revenue to grow by 60% to reach $8.7 billion, with ad revenue growth climbing by over 100%, going from $980 million in 2011 to $2 billion in 2012. That means that for this year, ad revenue will be 23% of the total, with paid apps and in-app purchases accounting for 77%.

Drilling down into paid apps and in-app purchase revenue only (excluding ads), Flurry found that the distribution of revenue was spreading out across the long tail of mobile apps in a rather surprising way, which goes counter to the trends you’ll often see in other industries. In 2010, the top 25 ranked apps accounted for 28% of the revenue, the top 26-100 generated 27%, and the “long tail” was 45%. Now look at 2012: the long tail is responsible for 68% of the revenue generated, with the top 25 at 15% and the top 26-100 at 17%. (See chart below). That’s quite the shift.

Flurry also normalized the data for revenue by rank in order to compare revenue generated for the top 100 apps from 2010 to 2012 estimated. The results show two major trends: one, that being in the top rankings means more revenue than before, which is not surprising due to industry growth. The second trend is that the revenue for 2012 stabilizes after the top 5 positions, then gently drops down through the top 100, but stays much, much higher than before. Remember, this is normalized data (percentage from top spot, set at 100%), not actual dollars here, so what this means is that the middle class of apps – is also growing like crazy too, in terms of earning power.

Bottom line, in the new app economy, there’s no struggle of the 99% here. The richer are getting richer, but so are the middle class and the poor. And those last two are gaining fast.

BigArtMob Plans To Turn Urban Street Art Into Cash Via Tourist Maps And API

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Back in the day BigArtMob was originally a cultural project backed by UK broadcaster Channel 4, but now it’s being re-animated as a full-blown startup. It’s starting from an interesting – shall we say – position. It allows people to upload and tag ‘public art’ to a map, which, in simple terms, can be everything from street graffiti to an outdoor sculpture by an established artist. They make no differentiation between ‘Institutional art’, Street Art, temporary art or graffiti (that’s the interesting bit, given that not all graffiti is very artistic). But if you think it’s art and it’s on the street or out there in the wild backwoods, they plan to map it and create a community around it. This is definitely not Art.com, RiseArt, Artfinder or Artspace. Now, while Artspotter aims to do everything – street art as well as galleries and exhibition – BigArtMob will just focus on street/public art. The first 500 users can sign up for the closed beta here.

Admittedly almost every major city in the world has grass roots orgs dedicated to public art documentation and probably a thriving art scene and audience. The question is, is that enough of a draw to create some kind of traction and a business?

Well, because of their prior heritage, founder Alfie Dennen is already sitting on top of a database of 12,000 pieces of public art posted and mapped.

“We want to de-fragment how public art is documented and talked about, making a global hub for public art discovery,” he says. Dennen has a long history in this space, having won 2009′s Webby for experimental and innovation with Britglyph and run a ‘Bus-Tops’ project for London 2012.

Part of the route into this will be a sort of street art tourism, allowing people to create walking routes for a particular artist or region, and then share those with people using the iPhone app, which is planned for release. So for example you could make a Street Art only app for whatever city you are in.

From a commercial point of view BAM hopes to monetize its app’s walking routes, partner with art institutions and organisations globally, and do something with its Point Of Interest database via an API third parties can use, like regional tourist authorities and others.

But personally I think they have a better future as a sort of A&R man for the next Banksy. That’s worth millions. They could also produce illustrated books also of public art.

An iPhone app will be out in about 2 weeks.

Content Crunching App Silk Raises $1.6 Million Seed Round

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 08:00 AM PDT

Silk, makers of a free web-based personal database/content crunching app, today announced a $1.6 million seed funding round led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Atomico, Anil Hansjee, Jens Christensen and Philippe Cases.

The founders of Silk don’t actually describe their product as a personal database, but it reminds me most of Filemaker Bento, though you’ll find the two products differ quite a bit, most notably in that you can publicly share your Silk content on the web.

Silk lets you create and store structured information and then filter, visualize and manipulate it in various ways, all without the need to edit code. For example, Silk can a list of locations using Google Maps, filter a list based on tags or create a pie chart.

Silk’s Head of Operations Sander Koppelaar explains that the usecases for the app tend to fall into two categories: information that needs to be shared in real time publicly or privately and/or information that needs to remain available for search in the future. Koppelaar gives the example of a list of Olympic medal winners. You may want to keep track of all of this year’s winners, and be able to filter it by country and sport. You may also want to keep it handy so that you can search and filter that information years from now.

Koppelaar says the company has a few ideas for monetization. In the near term it will offer services to customers with specific needs, such as custom domains and templates. Eventually Koppelaar says the company will be able to offer a marketplace for templates and customizations, and later still act as a marketplace for data sets, which could put it into competition with companies like InfoChimps.

The company was founded in 2009 by Lon Boonen, the founder of Xopus, and CEO Salar Al-Khafaji, a physics major who interned for CERN before going to work at Xopus, which sold to SDL in 2009. Silk announced its first round of funding in May 2011.

The company also scores some serious geek cred by being one of the few companies using the Haskell in production.

The Denon Cocoon Home And Portable Are High-End, Impressive iPhone Speaker Docks

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 07:46 AM PDT

Apparently Denon just discovered the iPhone. The audio company just released the Cocoon Home and Portable speaker dock. In traditional audiophile nonsense speak, Denon describes the Cocoon’s shape as a “sculptural design with premium execution that blends in while standing out.” They look like beans to me.

I’m only half-joking about Denon just discovering the iPhone. The Cocoon is Denon’s very first iDevice all-in-one speaker dock. Previously, Denon only had dedicated charging docks and several component mini systems with docks built-in — but never a traditional speaker dock. These two docs are entering a crowded high-end market. currently dominated by the B&W Zeppelin, B&O BeoSound 8, and Bose SoundDock 10. But these Denons might have the goods to stand tall.

Available in black or white, the Cocoon Home features two 4mm tweeters and two 100mm woofers powered by a four channel Class D amp. The speaker dock is DLNA and AirPlay-enabled, but also features a 3.5mm input and a full size USB port for playing back from external sources.

The Cocoon Portable is more of the same but employs dual 100mm full range speakers rather than the four channel setup. It also lacks the USB port and metal base found on the Home model. However, the Cocoon Portable earns its name from the built-in battery, which Denon claims can power the speaker dock for 5 hours. This model is also water-resistant and still connects via DLNA or AirPlay.

Both models use retractable docks that an OLED screen on the front to display album info, volume level and the like. Denon also brags that since the clear plastic enclosure is painted from the inside, the Cocoon has a super glossy appearance unlike any dock currently available.

Denon announced today that both models will hit the market yet this summer with the Home model at $599 and the Portable running $499.

Click to view slideshow.

Summit Partners Raises $520 Million Credit Fund For Growth Companies

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 07:42 AM PDT

Lately investing in Rocket Fuel, WestWing and Delphix so far this year, Summit Partners has been stepping up to the plate and is now joining the ranks of this Post-Facebook-IPO era of VCs which are raising capital for so-called middle-market companies who are still a ways off the IPO track. They also had a recent exit in the form of Wildfire’s acquisition by Google.

Summit has today announced it’s raised a $520 million credit fund for these growth companies. That brings Summit's total equity and credit capital base to nearly $15 billion. The fund will be run in Boston by Managing Directors Todd Hearle and Jamie Freeland who joined Summit in 2010.

While they had aimed for $300 million, the Credit Fund will now target credit investments in “profitable companies with proven business models”, growth and great teams. They invest in technology, healthcare and life sciences, financial technology and services, consumer and industrial.

Founded in 1984, Summit has raised nearly $15 billion in capital and has offices in Boston, Palo Alto, London and Mumbai.

Smule’s AutoRap App Helps TC Spit Fire, Tops 2.5M Installs In A Few Days

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 07:33 AM PDT

Smule is on fire. Just take a look at the work these guys have done since their 2008 launch: $25.5 million in funding, more app releases than I can keep up with and a pretty sweet acquisition.

And the latest app, AutoRap, is seeing some incredible early success. After less than a week on the App Store, AutoRap has seen over 2.5 million downloads with over 12 million raps created.

Yes, raps. Like, Snoop Dogg, Tupac, Eminem style raps.

Like many of Smule’s offerings, the app takes your spoken word and autotunes it, corrects the rhythm and helps with rhyming to turn your boring monologue into a badass rap. You can choose from lesser known songs which are free, or buy a set of “plays” through an in-app purchase to lay down some mad beats over a song that’s more popular, like “Drop It Like It’s Hot” or “California Love.”

We couldn’t resist simply writing about the latest statics without playing pretty extensively with the app, which has led to rap versions of these very famous posts. Check it out:

Sex.com Introduces A Pinterest For Porn:

How To Get Our Attention: A Case Study:

Click to view slideshow.

Groupon Sued By Blue Calypso Over Two Peer-To-Peer Ad Tech Patents

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 07:26 AM PDT

Groupon is gearing up to report quarterly earnings later this month, but in the meantime the daily deals giant has another issue on its hands: it’s been hit with a patent infringement lawsuit by Blue Calypso, a digital marketing firm that claims Groupon is infringing two of its patents, 7,664,516 and 8,155,679, focused on peer-to-peer marketing technology. What’s more, from the sounds of it, Blue Calypso’s legal fights may be just beginning.

The complaint against Groupon has been filed in the U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Texas, and a separate statement from Blue Calypso’s CEO, Bill Ogle, notes that as social media companies continue to expand into areas like advertising, they are crossing into Blue Calypso’s patented territory. “As companies try to monetize their social media connections, they are rapidly moving into our technological area of expertise and it is imperative that we protect and secure what we have built,” he said. Blue Calypso’s full complaint, in which it requests a full jury trial, is embedded below.

Groupon declined to respond to questions about the case. “We do not comment on litigation,” a spokesperson told us.

This is not the first time that Groupon has been sued for patent infringement. A year ago SellerBid sued the company over some of its mobile-based services: location-based offers and group selling over wireless networks.

In November 2011, Groupon was sued, along with Yelp, by Mobile Commerce Framework, also over a mobile commerce patent.

The fact that the patents are all for slightly similar-sounding services underscores how tricky (and problematic) the patent landscape is, and also how a lot of social media and online services in particular may, essentially, be all built on the same blocks. That was one of the issues that was brought to light especially around the Yahoo/Facebook patent dispute, which has since been settled amicably.

Indeed, as with so many patent cases (although not all), Blue Calypso v. Groupon may well simply end in an out-of-court licensing deal, but until then, more legal headaches for Groupon, just as it is moving past an $8.5 million class-action lawsuit (which seems to be continuing to attract controversy).

Blue Calypso went public in September 2011, and in addition to owning patents, it has its own social marketing business.

Among the clients that have used its services — focused around the company’s CALYP platform — were Ogle’s former company, Motorola Mobility (prior to joining Blue Calypso in June, Ogle was the former CMO of Motorola Mobility and before that CMO for Samsung). Motorola used Blue Calypso to market Motorola handsets to mobile users.

View this document on Scribd

First Day Of Apple-Samsung Trial Yields Troves Of New iPhone, iPad Prototypes

Posted: 01 Aug 2012 06:58 AM PDT

Yesterday, in one of the biggest tech trials to hit U.S. soil, Apple called longtime Apple employee and designer Christopher Stringer to the stand as its first witness. Testifying that Samsung “ripped them off,” Stringer showed off dozens of images depicting various iPhone and iPad prototypes that were developed by Apple. There are over 60 images, some of which we’ve seen before, and some of which are brand new.

In one iPhone prototype, Apple included a thin little shelf at the bottom that’s just the opposite of the Droid line’s chin. There are also models that look incredibly similar to the Lumia line, with flat tops and bottoms and rounded sides, as well as prototypes that have flat sides and rounded tops and bottoms. There’s even a model shaped like an elongated octagon.

Clearly, the iPhone was a risky move for Apple, and according to Stringer’s testimony, even Steve Jobs had doubts. This explains why the company went through so many different design iterations from 2003 until 2007, to make sure the revolutionary mobile phone would be “something that people can love.”

You’ll also see various iPad prototypes, including ones with ridges along the edges of its backside to help with grip and others with sharpened corners.

In any case, the trial is set to continue at 9:00AM PST, so we’ll keep you up to date as things progress. In the meantime, get a little insight into Apple’s design process below:

Click to view slideshow.

[via The Verge]