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| | | | | Cloud based task management service and Disrupt Startup Alley alumnus Cohuman has raised $600K in additional angel funding. Investors in the round included Diamond II Investments, Jupiter Partners, Stage One Capital and other angels. This is the second round of angel funding Cohuman has received and is added to a $800K raised in the fall of 2009 for a total $1.4 million. On Cohuman people can assign individual tasks and because it is web-based any group of people can collaborate through it. "We really think co-human is a better way to get things done, it really addresses some of the shortcomings of contemporary messaging technologies," says CEO Matthew Work. In the same organizational management space as Salesforce, Chatter and Basecamp, the web-based Cohuman, whose usership has tripled to over 15,000 users since launching at Disrupt in September, is currently freemium and monetizes with a subscription based "Professional" version. Cohuman is headquartered San Francisco and comprised of 8 people, and while Work doesn't plan on hiring more staff the company will be using the money to focus on business app integration and mobile moving forward.
       
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It was almost exactly two years ago that my colleague Robin Wauters first wrote about a service called Imo with the title: IMO.IM Is The Best IM Web Service You've Never Heard Of. I'll be honest, I didn't listen to him at the time (though, to be fair, I didn't even work at TechCrunch yet). He followed up a few months later when the service added Facebook chat support. But since then, they sort of dropped off our radar. So it's time tonight to give them some more love, because the service really is pretty great — and after three years in alpha, they're finally dropping that label. The idea is super simple: Imo is an IM client that allows you to sign in to many different types of IM accounts at once, all managed through their service. Obviously, there are many services like this out there. But the key to Imo is that it's fast and easy to use. I mean really easy. All you have to do is enter your user name and passwords for the different services and you're off and running in a way that's very seamless. And they've just launched a complete redesign of their web experience. It actually makes the service even easier to use. Now Imo on the web sort of looks like a blank canvas just waiting to be filled up with chats. Chats that you can drag and drop to position anywhere in your window on the browser. And like the new version of Gmail launched today, Imo.im can send you desktop notifications for new chats. And like their mobile clients, you can now send instant voice messages of up to 30 seconds in length as well (another feature that has fascinated me recently). That's the other key to Imo.im: their great mobile clients. Whether you have an iPhone, iPad, or Android device, Imo offers a nice, simple way to connect with all your various chat services. Below, find a demo of the iPad app in action. While it may seem a bit odd that the service has been up and running for three years and is just now dropping the alpha label, remember that one of the Imo co-founders is Georges Harik, one of the first 10 employees at Google. He's learned well. 
       
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| | | | |  YCombinator-funded WebMynd, which launched in 2008 and was most recently responsible for the browser addon Search Smarter, is today announcing that it is the recipient of one of our heralded 2010 TechFellows Awards, from none other than Paul Graham himself. WebMynd will be using the 100K in financing to concentrate on its new product, the WebMynd Addon Developer Platform.
As the Search Smarter browser plugin was pretty popular, with over a million installs across Internet Explorer and Firefox, co-founder Amir Nathoo told us that the experience of building his own app led to WebMynd's current incarnation (nay pivot). Nathoo realized there was customer demand for a platform that would allow developers to code apps once and have them work on IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome right away. Nathoo tells us that things were much simpler for app developers a couple of years ago when all people had to worry about was Firefox and the iPhone. Now there are multiple browsers and mobile platforms and a developer needs to tweak his code multiple times in order to port an app, unless he or she has a platform like WebMynd's or Particle's to do the dirty work. Nathoo says "The issue for app developers now is how am I going to support all these platforms, and that's a real pain …Our mission is to get all the great apps that developers are making to be available everywhere." While WebMynd is entering the space with a focus on amazing browser addons like this one, Nathoo's future plans include adding mobile app support for iOS, Android and Chrome OS. He plans on monetizing with a freemium business model, charging a subscription rate per platform and allowing developers to use the Chrome extension framework for free to develop, and then charging them to port. WebMynd is offering the first 20 TechCrunch readers who sign up their first port for free. You can check out the service here.
       
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Launching today from the YCombinator Class of 2011, Tutorspree is a online marketplace for K-12 tutors along the lines of accommodations network Airbnb, but specific to tutoring (yes I've made this comparison before). Founded by Aaron Harris, Josh Abrams and Ryan Bednar, the startup is disruptive in the sense that the tutoring space up until now has been monopolized by agencies like Sylvan and Huntington Learning Center or risky alternative Craigslist. Tutoring is a business that is aching for change: Agency strongholds make tutor comparison difficult and Craigslist is a whole 'nother can of worms trustwise. So Tutorspree tries to combine the easy accessibility of the Internet with the quality vetting of an agency, at reduced cost. All you need to do as a parent to find a tutor is type in your location into the Tutorspree search box, and you'll get a listing replete with photos, credentials and price. Prospective tutors can sign up with the "sign up as a tutor" link at the top of the site. Harris tells us that the quality control at an affordable price is Tutorspree's competitive advantage, and the screening process favors people who have experience teaching kids in front of a classroom. Currently there are about 160 tutors signed up, with another 100 or so that haven't yet passed muster. Tutorspree also takes less of a cut from each lesson (50% initially and then less at each subsequent lesson) than traditional tutoring operations, so it is able to retain top talent. "We're hoping to make a system where everybody wins," Harris says. Currently you can find Tutorspree in four cities, San Francisco, Washington, New York and Los Angeles and integrated with one highschool, (Harris wouldn't tell us which one). Harris says the company is planning on expanding to more cities, ramping up the tutorbase and integrating with more schools in the near future. The first hundred of you interested in trying it out can get a 25% discount on your first lesson by signing up through this link.
       
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The efforts of media companies to quash online piracy are a bit like someone trying to put out a forest fire with a wet noodle. The latest pathetic flail comes in the form of coercing Google into censoring its results for some search terms. A number of words will no longer be autocompleted or trigger an instant search, among them the interesting and perfectly legal "bittorrent."
It's a new high for antipiracy theater, because you can of course still search for the terms by hitting enter, and get the same results as before, including direct links to torrent files hosted on well-known indexers. The move will accomplish two things, though: first, it will damage consumer trust of a company whose services are ostensibly objective, and second, it confirms for the hundredth time how quixotic and misguided the efforts of the MPAA et al. are in every action they take. The actual censorship (I use the word lightly) is a joke. A leakier sieve than this was never wrought. While "Bittorrent" is blocked, "torrent" is not, and while some popular cyber lockers are on the blacklist (Rapidshare, Megaupload), others aren't (Drop.io, Hotfile). As far as preventing piracy, the policy is worthless — incompetent. I have no doubt that this list was put together by the media companies, because Google would have done a far better job of doing it. The team responsible for executing this probably lost more time to derisive laughter than long lunches. As for the damage it does to Google's reputation, it's really nothing that wary web users weren't already aware of. The algorithm and Google's results have always been at best pseudo-objective, and Google has made these kinds of gun-jumping censorship mistakes before. But when word gets out to the millions of people who don't care about DMCA requests and cyber lockers that Google is allowing music industry officials in between them and their search results, there may be… well, let's be honest, there will be a small ripple of outrage, then people will forget. But a reputation as a search-broker for big business isn't what Google wants. Blocking a few dirty (yet very common) words is tolerated as it protects our sensitive children, who know nothing of such things, but this? Not so much. Of course, the practical effects of this move will be utterly nil. The companies and websites being soft-blocked are livid, but the media industry wants nothing to do with them anyway, and Google holds all the cards, so there's not much the offended parties can do. Will Google expand the blacklist? Will the terms ever be hard-blocked? I'm guessing that the media companies expended a lot of time and capital just getting this non-result, so I doubt future changes will be soon or serious. Google can plausibly demur on broader censorship, calling this little blacklist a gesture of good will and referring the MPAA and RIAA to the allegedly infringing sites themselves. More analysis and comments from the affected companies can be found at TorrentFreak.
       
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| | | | |  A month ago, Polaris Ventures principal Ryan Spoon wrote up a quick blog post looking for a developer with Chrome extension/app experience. He had a pretty simple idea for something to help him with his job. Matt Basta saw the post and created the extension Spoon was looking for almost instantly. Now they're opening it up for all to use and calling it Polaris Insights.
The straightforward app is very, very slick. You simply visit the website of a company you're interested in, hit the extension button, and you get an overlay of the CrunchBase, LinkedIn, and Quora data for the company. The CrunchBase column shows you the funding information, the LinkedIn column shows you your connections within the company, and the Quora column shows you some of the Q&A conversations going on about about company. Yep. Awesome. Mainly because of the CrunchBase usage, obviously. But okay, the other two are pretty cool as well. "I imagine bloggers, VCs, business development and sales folks will find this super useful," Spoon says. Indeed. This is my new best friend already. We have previously written about a Quora extension, but that only shows you notifications. This gives you actual data — and it does so in an interesting way. Rather than using a Quora API (which is still in its infancy), the extension uses Chrome's ability to pull data in the background from Quora.com and auto-complete the extension with it. And it's all cached, so Basta jokes that it won't turn Quora into Tumblr — that is, it shouldn't cripple the service. Polaris Insights is Chrome-only for now, but Spoon says that if it's popular enough, they'll gladly do a Firefox version. 
       
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| | | | |  Last August our own Michael Arrington wrote a post addressing a topic that's as important as it is sensitive: the lack of women who are running startups. In short, his point was that there simply aren't enough women who are setting out to become entrepreneurs — and it's not because the issue is being swept under the rug or because the industry is heavily weighted against them.
Now Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston has written an insightful article discussing her own experience with this. Livingston is as qualified as anyone to analyze the problem — she wrote Founders at Work and has also interviewed hundreds (perhaps thousands) of founders for Y Combinator. And her conclusion is similar to Michael's: So why don't women want to start startups? I wonder if it's not that not enough women want to start startups, but that not enough women even consider it as an option.
Livingston's post is well worth reading in its entirety. She chronicles the things that were on her mind during her mid 20′s (entrepreneurship wasn't among them, because she wasn't exposed to it) and discusses the advice she would have given herself at that age had she wanted to start her own company. Here's one of her tips, on what is one of the most difficult challenges: finding a cofounder. Finding a technical cofounder would have been difficult for me. I was an English major and didn't know any computer programmers. The best advice here is to get out and network. If someone in your IT department is actually good, befriend them. Ask friends of friends if they know talented programmers. Read Hacker News. Go to meetups or other similar events. This may feel uncomfortable but it won't be the first uncomfortable thing you have to do if you want to start a startup. Finding a programmer to work with if you don't already know one will be a challenge. Merely judging if a programmer is exceptional vs. competent will be very hard if you are not one yourself. When you do find someone, work together informally for a while to test your compatibility. Cofounders will endure so much together that their relationship is often compared to a marriage.
And while Livingston says that there is probably some degree of discrimination against women from investors (which I suspect is true, even if it isn't deliberate on their part), she believes the bigger problem is that not enough women are involved with these companies in the first place. Fortunately Livingston isn't just talking about the issue — she's taking some steps to address it. Next month she will be working with Grubwithus (a YC company) to organize a series of dinners where women thinking of starting a company, or curious about the process, can interact with herself and YC alumni. If you're interested (and female) you can sign up for the dinners right here.
       
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In perhaps one of the most like-minded and forward-thinking acquisitions I've ever seen, career-driven social network LinkedIn has bought CardMunch, a Shoeboxed-like startup that scans your business cards and accurately converts them into phone contacts using Mechanical Turk. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. From the CardMunch blog: "Our long-term vision for CardMunch has been to help manage business contacts and help you to leverage your contacts and connections for doing business. With that in mind, we are thrilled to announce today that CardMunch is now a part of LinkedIn! LinkedIn is the world's largest professional network and as such, provides the perfect platform for us to execute the CardMunch vision. That's not all; we have even more good news! Starting today, the current version of the CardMunch app will be completely free! Yes, you heard right, the current version of the CardMunch app is now a free service, which means that you can capture and transcribe as many business cards as you like, free of charge."
The best part of this deal is that the CardMunch business card scanning services, which used to cost $2.99 for the app and .25 cents per card after the first 10 cards, will now be offered for free with a refund given to people with pre-existing credits. Seeing as though getting a leg up in the social game is all about the social graph a.k.a your contacts list, this could prove to be a very wise move for LinkedIn as people are now incentivized to upload their business contacts for utilitarian purposes. The use of CardMunch is effectively social networking lead generation, when viewed from LinkedIn's standpoint. As of today LinkedIn's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy will apply to the data users upload to CardMunch. The company also says that it will be adding new features in the coming months and may require users to "use their LinkedIn accounts to access CardMunch." Exactly. You can download the application gratis here.
       
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| | | | |  Now this is nice. If you're a heavy Gmail user you've probably installed some kind of desktop notification system — be it a browser extension, a separate Gmail app like Mailplane and/or Growl. But now, hot on the heels of launching a dynamic unread count in browser tabs, Gmail is launching something that doesn't require any downloads: built-in desktop notifications.
A small banner on Gmail just prompted me to enable the feature, which works for both inbound chat and email messages (you can opt to receive notifications for all new emails, or just 'Important' ones as deemed by your Priority Inbox). Google is probably rolling this out gradually (there's no blog post yet), but I'm seeing it in both of my accounts. The 'Help' page for the feature is blank (despite the fact that the banner links to it) so details are still pretty scant. This is presumably using HTML5 browser notifications, and is apparently only working in Chrome — I tried testing it in Safari and received this message: 
In practice it seems to work fairly well, though I think I'll be sticking with Growl for now. I'm noticing that the notifications don't have a minimum time that they'll apear on screen — if a friend of mine sends multiple IMs in succession, the newest will immediately pop up over the older ones. Even worse, it looks like there's no timeout for the notification — a friend just IMed me, and her notification has been hanging out in the corner of my screen for a full minute now.
       
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| | | | |  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced today that Hovensa LLC — a joint venture between Hess Corporation and Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. — will pay a civil penalty of more than $5.3 million, and spend more than $700 million in new pollution controls as part of a settlement resulting from a complaint about Clean Air Act violations by the company at its St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands refinery.
According to the government-filed complaint, Hovensa made changes to its petroleum refinery that increased its emissions, after having failed to obtain pre-construction permits, and failing to install required pollution control equipment there. The proposed settlement requires the company to spend $700 million on upgrading its refinery business with: new and upgraded pollution controls, more stringent emission limits, and aggressive monitoring, leak-detection and repair practices to reduce emissions from refinery equipment and process units. The settlement is subject to a 30-day public comment period and court approval. Once fully implemented, the EPA statement says: "Pollution controls required by the settlement are estimated to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides (NOx) by more than 5,000 tons per year and sulfur dioxide (SO2) by nearly 3,500 tons per year. The settlement will also result in additional reductions of volatile organic compounds, particulate matter, carbon monoxide and other pollutants that affect air quality. Additional pollution-reducing projects at the refinery's coking unit under the settlement will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over 6,100 tons per year. High concentrations of SO2 and NOx, two key pollutants emitted from refineries, can have adverse impacts on human health, and are significant contributors to acid rain, smog, and haze."
The government's settlement with Hovensa is the 28th under an EPA initiative to improve compliance among petroleum refiners, and reduce significant amounts of air pollution from refineries in the U.S. that has been ongoing since 2000, and has impacted 105 refineries operating in 32 states and territories – more than 90 percent of the total refining capacity in the United States. As a result of the total of settlement agreements in the past eleven years, the EPA reports, refiners have agreed to invest about $6 billion in new pollution controls designed to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants by over 360,000 tons per year. According to a report earlier this month in the Virgin Islands Daily News, Hovensa raised its wholesale gasoline prices (or "rack rate") across the board for the fourth month in a row in January, bringing wholesale rates to their highest level since October 2008, leading to a spike in retail prices for gasoline across the territory, and beyond. U.S. retail gasoline prices have been climbing steadily since September 2010, according to data compiled by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. How much do you think the cost of compliance contributes to those rates?
       
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| | | | |  "We need to make a tablet version of Facebook. It's something we're working on right now."
That was Facebook CTO Bret Taylor speaking to me yesterday in a sit down following his one-on-one interview on stage at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco. Now, before you get all excited, note that Taylor is not specifically saying that the social giant will make a native iPad app. Instead, he's saying that there's needs to be a better version of the service for tablets in general. Having said that, he didn't exactly rule out a native iPad app either in our chat. "Long term we think a lot of apps will be written in HTML5," Taylor said, echoing some of the thoughts he shared on stage. He also talked about making sure that all of the various channels for Facebook data and interaction that exist today on the web transfer over to all the various platforms that Facebook is on. Again, this is in-line with his statements about focusing on streamlining the product line in 2011. In terms of tablets specifically, Taylor noted that "we've been a little cautious about it" saying that the team who work on projects like that have remained relatively small and somewhat fragmented as they're working on all different kinds of device experiences (though CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't consider the iPad to be a mobile device). "The iPad was a casualty of that internally," Taylor continued sounding as if he's well aware of the intense desire for a native iPad experience. But in the coming year, resources will be shifting around and more focus will be put on mobile and tablets, Taylor said. "We just want it to be great," he said of the tablet experience. When I suggested that the Facebook site itself already runs pretty well on the iPad through Safari, he agreed but added, "We could do more with click-targets. Certain elements are very small." And that's one thing that Facebook is working on internally at the moment. And I suspect we may see the result of that work relatively soon.
       
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Google is a behemoth. They're a behemoth with a massive amount of APIs that millions of developers use around the world to build millions of apps and services. There's simply no good way to keep track of them all. But Google comes close with a pretty nifty way: a periodic table. As you can see on this page, Google has a full periodic table built out showcasing their APIs and developer products as of January 2011. Along the top are various categories that the APIs or products fall under. Included are: Mobile, Search, Gadgets, Data APIs, Social, Misc, Ads, Geo, Tools, and Chrome. Hovering over any of these will highlight the corresponding "elements" on the table below it. You can then click on any of the elements, and it will take you to the page dedicated to that API or product. Again, nifty. And useful.
       
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The recent victory of IBM's Watson computer against human competitors in an exhibition round of Jeopardy got computer scientist Stephen Wolfram thinking about how regular search engines might fare in such a match-up. So he took 200,000 known Jeapardy clues and ran them through six search engines (Google, Bing, Ask, Blekko, Wikipedia Search, and Yandex). He excluded known Jeopardy sites from the results, and didn't test his own Wolfram Alpha because it is not designed for those kinds of queries. What he found is that the search engines did fairly well, depending on how you measure success. Google did slightly better than the rest, but Bing and Ask were close behind. On average, Google got the correct answer somewhere on its first results page 69 percent of the time, versus 68 percent for Ask and 63 percent for Bing. Google got the right answer somewhere in the title or snippet of text of the very top result 66 percent of the time, versus 65 percent for Bing (and Ask dropped to 51 percent). In comparison, most humans answer 60 percent of Jeopardy clues correctly, while the top player of all time, Ken Jennings, answered 79 percent correctly. So it is conceivable that a system could be created using regular search engines that could beat most humans. But Wolfram cautions: Of course, the approach here isn't really solving the complete Jeopardy problem: it's only giving pages on which the answer should appear, not giving specific actual answers. One can try various simple strategies for going further. Like getting the answer from the title of the first hit—which with the top search engines actually does succeed about 20% of the time.
Answering Jeopardy clues correctly and consistently is a hard problem for computers to solve because of all the variations and nuances of human language. Yet "just using a plain old search engine gets surprisingly far," concludes Wolfram.
       
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| | | | |  No doubt, the International category at the Crunchies usually gets the most head-scratching here in the TechCrunch offices and in the auditorium. And truth be told, if we're picking the best candidates it probably should. The most transformational International companies aren't building things for the US market that we might have heard of; they're building things that are transforming their own home markets. And in countries like China, India, Indonesia, Russia and Brazil– those domestic markets are huge.
One of my favorite nominees this year is called Crivo, and it's revolutionizing the credit markets in Brazil, opening up opportunities for car loans and house loans for the growing middle class for the first time. Because positive credit incidents– i.e. paying your credit card on time every month for ten years or buying a $1 million house– are considered private information that can't be legally shared, banks are incredibly conservative when it comes to lending money. Crivo scours digital databases for anything else that could tell them whether you are a good credit risk– even whether you lied about your phone number. The results are returned within three seconds, giving lenders more information then they've ever had before. It's taken a long time to build this companies, but today most of the banks and insurance companies in Brazil use it. Crivo has been in talks with several Valley venture firms about raising some money to expand globally. Crivo's co-founder Daniel Turini came to San Francisco to attend the Crunchies, so we asked him to stop by the studio and tell us a bit more about this unknown company that's making a huge difference in the lives of everyday Brazilians. And since it was his first trip to the United States, we asked him what he enjoyed most. (The answer may get him mocked back home.)
       
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| | | | |  We've learned exclusively that BlueKai, an online auction-based data exchange, has bought TrackSimple, an analytics company that provides reporting, analysis and prediction services to media companies. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but we've heard the deal is an all-stock transaction. This SEC filing indicates that the stock sold to TrackSimple is worth $6.8 million.
TrackSimple, which only launched in 2009, was founded by former Amazon employees Jon Ingalls and Ajit Banerjee. The startup, which raised $2.5 million in funding, provides data analytics and optimization services for media buyers and advertisers to bring all of their media and commerce data (online & offiline) into one place. TrackSimple's product, InsightService, will not only aggregate all this data, but will also make recommendations and serve insights on data based on performance. BlueKai aggregates data from shopping and research activities across the Internet and provides this data on-demand for marketers, ad networks or publishers to boost the quality and scale of their ad targeting initiatives. Data buyers include many of the top ten US online ad networks. BlueKai will integrate TrackSimple into its own platform, offering advertisers an all-in-one offering that includes data analytics, performance and data buying recommendations. The Bellevue-based company has raised $35 million in venture funding.
       
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| | | | |  Android's answer to the iPad — a software release called Honeycomb — is coming soon. Multiple tablet devices like the Motorola Xoom are on the way, and we're probably going to see dozens of them by the end of the year. But while the OS is nearly done and Google's apps are looking great, third party developers still have to optimize their applications for these much bigger screens. Today, Google is allowing developers to do just that: it's released the preview version of the Android 3.0 SDK. This is going to give us our closest look at Android 3.0, which has been demoed before, but never very throughly. Many of the new features are spelled out on the Platform Highlights page, which we're still combing through. Here are some of the main highlights:
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| | | | |  Twitter has collapsed its "Followed By" and "You Both Follow" features into one area called "Connections" which allows you to see what users you have in common with other Twitter users. While you still can't see the number of users you have in common, the individual features are now expandable and you can see complete lists of mutual follows and people you are both followed by for any given user, when you click "more."
Even though they have experimented with the feature before, the change is a permanent step towards developing a more useful Twitter social graph. Says Twitter's Carolyn Penner, "By exposing accounts that you and another user have in common, you will now know how those accounts are connected to other accounts you already follow. As a result, you'll be able to make more informed decisions about which accounts to follow." Facebook and Foursquare have had "friends in common" social graph features for awhile, but Twitter has taken some time working out the kinks on this because the concept of "friend" v.s. "follower" (not to mention "followed") is more difficult to apply to the microblogging network. Even though Twitter's infinite chains of possible one way connections are sometimes hard to um, follow, they give the company the leeway to launch many more features based on this complex social graph. Twitter has no plans for new 'Connections' features at this time. Thanks: Vikas SN
       
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| | | | |  Yesterday brought bad news for Elevation with a report that superstar partner Marc Bodnick was leaving the firm. The story seems to have gotten a lot more interesting today. We're hearing reports that Bodnick isn't simply heading for a new sexier venture firm– he's heading to Quora to become the company's CFO. This certainly adds some credence to those who believe Quora is more than just the next generation of Yahoo Answers. It's no secret that Bodnick has been deeply impressed by the company and spending a good deal of time on the site.
As this story has unfolded this morning, there's been some debate over exactly what title Bodnick will have, and we've continued to update this story based on what sources close to the players are telling us. His background is in finance, so he'll no doubt help out with CFO-duties, but it's not clear why Quora needs such a polished full-time CFO at this point in its development. He will likely wind up serving as the requisite "grown up" more than anything else, helping Quora scale, build a real business and giving the company a polished spokesperson. It's a role Bodnick would be familiar with– after all his sister-in-law is Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg's no. 2 at Facebook. We've reached out to Quora for confirmation and will add more news when we know it. At this stage in Quora's development, the title isn't that relevant anyway– any C-level officer will wind up wearing a million organizational hats. What is important is that the news is a clear sign that Quora isn't planning on selling anytime soon and is already laying the foundation to build a larger company. And, apparently, we're not the only ones hearing it. Elevation declined comment, and Bodnick hasn't responded to our email. A side note for Elevation: This could be less a sign that Bodnick viewed the firm's chances of raising a second fund doomed as was speculated yesterday, and more about him wanting to jump on board with one of the Valley's hottest startups. While it's a blow for Elevation– no doubt– we understand that financially the fund is in great shape, thanks mostly to the soaring valuation of Facebook. While Bodnick has been credited with bringing that deal in, the relationship actually goes back to the earliest days of Facebook when Roger McNamee and Bono were both angel investors and McNamee was an informal adviser to Zuckerberg.
       
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| | | | |  The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Skype's IPO is being pushed back to the second half of 2011. Last August, Skype filed for an IPO registration statement with the SEC, with the maximum proposed offering amount listed as $100 million (that is a placeholder amount.) It was thought that the IPO would take place early this year, but apparently the company's newly appointed CEO Tony Bates is looking for more time to get Skype "in better shape."
From the Wall Street Journal report: "Tony needs to get his feet underneath him and understand the business and the voice of the company," another person familiar with the matter said. "The intention is to go when Tony is ready and when the macroeconomic climate allows the company to go." The additional time may help Mr. Bates to get Skype in better shape and increase its value ahead of an offering. But there is also the risk the IPO market weakens, hurting Skype's chance to go public or depressing the value of the company. For Skype, the problem isn't gaining users, it's building lasting revenue and profit as Google and other competitors enter the space. In its initial IPO filing, the VoiP company made it clear that it was searching for ways to bring in more revenue. Skype has been building out additional enterprise products as well as introduce additional consumer-facing products that require payments. Skype is on track to pass $1 billion in revenues this year (its revenue run-rate for 2010 is $800 million). As of last year, Skype was averaging 124 million active users a month, but only 8.1 million of them were paying. While Skype seems focused on an IPO, the WSJ's sources say that Skype's owners could be open to a sale at $5 billion to $6 billion. And who has that sort of money handy? Google or Apple.
       
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| | | | |  If you've ever shared a link on Facebook, you're probably familiar with the nifty preview image and text that it pulls in from the linked site automatically (it doesn't always show exactly what you wanted, but it's usually better than nothing). Most people never think twice about the feature, but when you encounter a similar sharing widget that doesn't do the same thing, it feels a bit archaic — but it isn't trivial for developers to build, either. Now Embedly, the startup that specializes in (as you might guess) embedding content, has a solution.
It's called Embedly Pro, and it went live this morning. The gist of it: Embedly has always offered an API that lets developers easily embed content from some 180 services, like Twitter, YouTube, and Posterous. But that API only works for those services — if you wanted to embed an excerpt from TechCrunch, for example, it wouldn't be able to do it. That's changing with Embedly Pro, which promises that let developers generate embeds for nearly any site. Throw in a link for TechCrunch and Embedly Pro will grab a story excerpt, title, photo, and associated meta data automatically, even though Embedly hasn't hardcoded support for TechCrunch.com. The same is true for many other sites on the web). Embedly Pro also includes better analytics for developers, and it can detect when a link is malicious. The premium service has already been implemented by some major online services, including bit.ly, Yammer, and Tweetdeck. In fact, it also powers Embedly's very cool Parrotfish Chrome Extension, which adds far more embedded content to 'New Twitter'. Embedly Pro begins at $20 a month for 50,000 URLs (i.e. it will fetch content from 50,000 links), and scales up from there based on usage. Embedly was part of Y Combinator's Winter 2010 class, and has also received funding from Betaworks, SV Angel, and Lowercase Capital. 
       
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| | | | |  A couple of timely education items hit my inbox this morning. First, a report suggests that U.S. students suck at science. From the report,"less than one-half of students are demonstrating solid academic performance and competency over challenging subject matter." Granted, 'science' is an extremely broad term and encompasses many different disciplines, but the gist of that report is pretty troubling. This might be a good time to remind readers of Scitable, Nature Publishing Group's free online science library. Although limited in scope to genetics, cell biology and ecology, they've been growing since last we covered them, with many new articles as well as a new guide to life science careers and English Communication for Scientists. The latter, alone, should be worth your time today.
Also word comes today that McGraw Hill is jumping into the mobile education market with their upcoming mConnect platform: "an open-standard mobile learning platform designed to bridge the skills gap in emerging markets." mConnect will initially roll out in India, and will, much like Scitable, have a strong focus on cellphone-as-learning-device. Specific details are lacking right now, but mConnect looks to be a more general education initiative. Read more…
       
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| | | | |  Content farm Demand Media's stock officially debuted on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "DMD" after its IPO, in which it raised $151.3 million and was valued at just under $1.5 billion.
And on its first day as a public company, Demand Media's stock is performing well. The stock is up 36 percent from an initial pricing of $17 to $23. Demand Media has been pursuing a content and media strategy of creating search-friendly articles and videos for its network of sites including eHow and many niche sites. It should be interesting to see if taking the company public will help increase its profile and give it currency to expand via acquisitions. In 2009, Demand Media reported $22 million in losses on $198 million in revenues. In the first nine months of 2010, ithe company reported a net loss of $3 million, on revenues of $179 million. It's important to note that Google is changing how it ranks certain websites, including Demand's network of content. Demand is highly dependent on Google search traffic and no doubt a change in ranking could negatively effect the content farm's business. .
       
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| | | | |  A Cambridge, Mass. biosciences company that makes plastics, chemicals and energy from renewable crops rather than petroleum, Metabolix, Inc. (NASDAQ: MBLX) today announced that its subsidiary, Metabolix Oilseeds, obtained a $203,000 grant from the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture (or USD $203,614.92) to test a crop called Camelina Sativa, or false flax, as a possible petroleum replacement.
Camelina contains oil, fiber and protein with potential uses in nutrition for people and animals, and industrial applications including in biofuels. In 2009, Metabolix, Inc. won a $15 million grant from the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES) to make bioplastics that could replace HDPE, a petroleum-based variety used in bottles and containers, made on commercial scale equipment and at rapid manufacturing speeds. According to the company's website, Mirel resin is biodegradable in soil and water, and in home and industrial composting facilities but not in a conventional landfill, and is used in lieu of traditional plastics to make consumer goods, compost bags, business equipment and packaging. It's also FDA-approved for use in microwaveable, freez-able, and food, medical and cosmetic packaging. While Metabolix is viewed as an industry leader, competition for a piece of the sustainable packaging market is growing with companies like Biopack Environmental Solutions, Crown Holdings, EnviroPAK, NatureWorks, Pactiv, and many other stalwarts strongly in the game, and startups like EcoSpan and MicroGreen growing quickly. The global market for sustainable packaging (not just bioplastics) is projected to reach $142.42 billion by 2015, according to projections by Global Industry Analysts (GIA). Metabolix is also developing technology to make plastics, chemicals and energy, from crops such as switchgrass, oilseeds and sugarcane on the same equipment, or in the same facilities.
       
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How big a business are mobile apps? In a new report, market research firm Gartner forecasts that global mobile app store revenues will triple from $5.2 billion last year to $15 billion in 2011, and keep growing to an astounding $58 billion by 2014. As with any forecast of a hypergrowth market, you can be sure this one will change in six months, and the further out you go the more guesswork involved. But here is one prediction you can count on: you will be hearing these numbers thrown around a lot all year long until a better forecast comes along. Gartner breaks down the forecast into advertising revenues and paid downloads (including in-app purchases), as you can see from the chart above. Paid downloads and other direct purchases make up the majority of the expected revenues, but mobile advertising is expected to grow nicely over time into a multi-billion dollar market. The forecast includes all mobile app stores, not just Apple's (such as the Android Market, Nokia's Ovi Store, Research In Motion's App World, Microsoft Marketplace and Samsung Apps). However, Gartner estimates that Apple's app store accounted for 90 percent of the 8.2 billion total estimated downloads last year (both free and paid), and will continue to dominate. In 2011, Gartner estimates total app store downloads will reach 17.7 billion, with 81 percent of those being free. The revenue forecasts include the portion kept by Apple and the other app stores.
       
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It looks like Yahoo has been looking for a home for Delicious for some time now. On his Diggnation web show this week, Digg founder Kevin Rose said that Yahoo contacted Digg to see if the company would be interested in taking over Delicious prior to when an internal slide leaked indicating Yahoo wanted to get rid if it and before the December layoffs (which would put the time period at early December/late November). In the video, Rose addresses this around the 36 minute mark. Rose said that at first he thought that Yahoo was trying to sell Delicious off (which is what we assumed as well), but then realized that Yahoo was simply trying to find a home for the bookmarking service. Rose confirmed that Yahoo and Digg had preliminary talks simply about how much it would cost for the upkeep of Delicious. Shortly after these early conversations, Rose said the news broke that Yahoo was planning to "sunset" Delicious and a number of other services in the Yahoo product family. Which is when he Tweeted that he would "really like to buy del.icio.us and make a seriously rad social bookmarking site, screenshot archives of bookmarks/audio annotations etc." Rose has a few compelling ideas to breathe new life into Delicious, including the ability to take static snapshots of a webpage at a given moment so users always have access to what a site looked like when they initially bookmarked it. Another possible feature, says Rose, could be an audio recording feature that would allow users to add audio annotations to bookmarks to add additional context to bookmark sharing. He'd also add pro accounts, and try to make a profit from the service. Rose says he would definitely take over Delicious but didn't offer any updates on whether this would actually happen. He added that he contacted Delicious' original founder Joshua Schachter to see if he would want to back the project but as we know Schacter is pursuing other projects. Rose says that he's hoping it finds a good home and he'd 'love to do something cool with it' but doesn't know if Yahoo would give Delicious to him. Thanks to @UniPaul for the tip.
       
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| | | | |  The power of the crowd has proven to be particularly useful when it comes to fundraising online. Founder Institute startup CauseVox is launching a SaaS platform that allows non-profits to crowdsource fundraising.
A white-label platform, CauseVox allows organizations to launch a customized, charity-branded site on their own domain and begin accepting donations. Tools include a simple editor to create fundraising destinations, the ability to create fundraising pages for supporters, socialize fundraising efforts, and more. While non-profits have a 30 day free trial to use the software, CauseVox will charge a small subscription fee and will take 7.5 percent of all donations. We have an exclusive offer for TC readers to use Causevox for free for six months. You can use the promo code "techcrunch" to get 6 more months free during billing. In its beta period, CauseVox already helped non-profits, including Change For Kids and RestoreNYC, raise over $400,000 in donations. CauseVox isn't the first startup to launch a crowd-funding platform for organizations; the startup faces competition from Facebook app Causes, Nadanu, and GoFundMe.
       
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It looks like Mangrove Capital Partners believes in the business opportunity held in helping small businesses, do more, well, business. The Luxembourg-based venture capital firm has invested $1.75M in SohoOS to further propel the company's small business management suite. Michael Jackson, previously COO of Skype, will take a board seat. The concept behind SohoOS's offering is to put business utilities that are common for medium to large businesses with resources, in the hands of both online and offline small and micro businesses. Think designers, programmers, plumbers, yoga instructors, small PR firms, consultants, the list can go on and on. Since debuting on TechCrunch nearly a year ago, 20,000 businesses have become active accounts on SohoOS's platform, making use of features such as invoicing and billing (without the need to open a merchant account), CRM, email and SMS broadcast, a sales flow manager, as well as document and project management. The company has chosen to forgo early revenue for the sake of distribution. As such, the service is being offered completely free-of-charge. Certain premium services, however, such as bulk-SMS packages and VoiP services are offered at additional costs. These though are priced on a pay-as-you-go basis, and most companies can probably live without them and use SohoOS without spending a penny. Ron Daniel, CEO, gave me a glimpse of a soon-to-be-realsed iPhone app for business management on the go. The app, along with a localized version of the service in several languages, will both be rolled out in the coming months. The investment from Mangrove will be used to scale the team as well to maintain the free version of the service. We'll continue to keep tabs on the company and see whether Mangrove's investment was money well spent. 
       
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| | | | |  In October, Amazon announced its "Kindle Singles," product, which introduced short stories and digital pamphlets to the e-book reader's store. In the company's words, Kindle Singles are "twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book" and generally 5,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages). Today, Amazon is debuting Kindle Singes, its collection of short works.
Kindle Singles are available to both Kindle device and app users, and priced between $0.99 and $4.99. Amazon says the first set of published Singles include original reporting, essays, memoirs and fiction. While the company says that "the response to our announcement of Singles has been great," it's unclear how many Singles have been added to the Kindle bookstore. Kindle Singles are important because the new format gives bloggers and writers out there who may not have the time to write a long-form book, the opportunity to publish a pamphlet or shorter work. And it seems fairly easy for writer to publish these works, especially since Amazon is looking to build up its collection of content in this genre. For an example of a Kindle Single, checkout ZDNet editor Larry Dignan's The Business Of Media: A Survival Guide. It's unclear how well this format will perform in terms of downloads, but Amazon has certainly been able to collect short works from a number of well-known authors, including Jodi Picoult, Evan Ratliff and Nic Marks (A TED book).
       
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Do you like fun? Do you like chess? Do you like being alone? Well, ThinkFun has the chess game for you. Called Solitaire Chess, the game is a cross between a puzzle and standard chess. How it Works
• Each game begins with the pieces set on the board in specific positions. Challenges range from Easy to Expert levels.
• Pieces move as in regular Chess.
• Every move must be a capture.
• When there's only one piece left, YOU WIN!
Now, go ahead and click through to actually play the game and find out how you can win one of three iPhone/iPad apps or one of three actual board games. Read more…
       
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According to a number of tips we've received in the past few minutes, the chatter on Twitter and several local reports (mostly in Arabic), it appears Egyptian authorities have moved to block Facebook. Inspired by the recent Tunisian demonstrations against corruption, protesters are filling the streets of Cairo to demonstrate against government corruption and policies. Similar to the protests in Tunisia, the Egyptian demonstrations were partly organized on Facebook and Twitter. And yesterday, Twitter was blocked in Egypt. If Facebook has in fact been blocked, this isn't particularly surprising. Facebook itself has also been actively used to organize the demonstrations in Egypt. For instance, one Facebook Group called We Are All Khaled Said, features up-to-the-minute updates on the protests and photos from the scene. Khaled Said was "a young man brutally tortured and killed by police in Alexandria," explains Blake Hounshell on the Foreign Policy blog, and his death has become a rallying point for the demonstrations which fall on "Police Day," a national holiday in Egypt. And many of those who have been blocked on Twitter have now resorted to Facebook for activism. We've contacted Facebook to confirm if the social network has been blocked and will update when we hear back. 
       
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Global information and measurement company The Nielsen Company this morning announced that it has priced its IPO of 71,428,572 shares of its common stock at $23 per share (precisely as The New York Times called it yesterday). The company will receive net proceeds of approximately $1,560 million from the initial public offering of its common stock, and approximately $240 million from a bond offering after payment of commissions and estimated expenses. Total: $1.8 billion. Nielsen says it intends to use the net proceeds to repay a portion of its outstanding debt and to pay a agreement termination fee to its current owners (Blackstone Group, Carlyle Group, KKR & Co. and Thomas H. Lee Partners). The Nielsen Company's shares of common stock are expected to begin trading today, January 26, on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol "NLSN." The IPO's underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to 10,714,286 of additional shares of common stock from The Nielsen Company at the IPO price less the underwriting discount. In the bond offering, The Nielsen Company will sell an aggregate principal amount of $250 million of bonds, and the underwriters have a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional $37.5 million in aggregate principal amount of bonds from The Nielsen Company. J.P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank Securities, Goldman, Sachs & Co. and Citi are serving as joint book-running managers for both offerings.
       
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| | | | | I've been to a lot of tech and media conference in my day, but this week marked the first time I attended the annual Digital – Life – Design (DLD) Conference in Munich, Germany. Not only was it a great opportunity to listen to, meet with, and hijack the Twitter and Facebook accounts of many a tech luminary, but it was also outright fun to be there. I realize full well lip dubbing was probably last considered cool around the tail end of 2006, but that didn't stop many of DLD's attendees from participating in a well-organized lip-dub video recording, to the tunes of Kenny Loggins' Footloose. A few faces you might recognize: Robin Wauters (ha!), famous angel investors Esther Dyson and Yossi Vardi, Googlers Marissa Mayer, Anil Hansjee and Lior Ron, Scobleizer, physician and writer Deepak Chopra, rock star venture capitalist Howard Morgan from First Round Capital, digital technology historian George Dyson, and last but not least TechCrunch Europe editor Mike Butcher. Can you name more people in the video (which you may have to watch on YouTube)? The video was directed by the charismatic Yosi Taguri. 
Credits:
Director: Yosi Taguri
Camera: Tassilo Letzel
Props + art work: Rina Donnersmarck
Organisation: Anna Henckel-Donnersmarck
Assistant: Nora Abousteit
Gali Ross
Alexander Henckel-Donnersmarck
Pierre Ostrowski
Technical support: Melanie Landa
Organisation support: Sabine Schmid
Producer: Franziska Deecke
Inspiration: Steffi Czerny + Marcel Reichart of DLD
       
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ignitAd is today introducing an ad optimization solution for publishers that includes 'Bid Optimization Management' technology developed in-house, which enables publishers to generate more revenue through predictive analysis and advanced bidding technology. Coinciding with the product release, the startup has announced that it has completed a $2 million seed funding round led by DFJ Tamir Fishman Ventures and JVP Media Labs. ignitAd's ad optimization solution auctions any publisher's available display ad inventory across ad exchanges, networks and other demand-side partners. Based on proprietary predictive analysis and bidding algorithms, ignitAd is able to forecast demand patterns at various price points and thus proactively predict the highest paying advertising source for each impression.
       
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Babylon, the publicly listed provider of translation and dictionary software and language solutions, has been around since 1997. Today, the company is launching version 9 of its flagship translation product in an effort to turn it into a veritable 'Quora for linguistics' (their words), referencing the Q&A startup that was launched in June 2009. Babylon says it can leverage some 72 million members to morph its revamped product into a live Q&A linguistics community, allowing users to help one another with any translations, linguistic advice or tips about local culture. In addition, Babylon has teamed up with a company called Ginger Software, which provides a contextual spell and grammar checker. The goal of that partnership is to be able to offer its millions of users a – and I quote – 'proofreading, context-understanding digital writing aid capable of shaping any document into a flawlessly written tour de force'. Babylon is available for Windows, Mac, iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices. The company claims it processes roughly 90 million translation requests on a daily basis, and that its software is downloaded over 100,000 times ever day. Its database contains some 18 million definition terms, and the website is visited by 3.5 million people on a daily basis. Aside from the social aspect, new in Version 9 of its translation software is the ability to let your computer read to you in English, German, French and more. Babylon's so-called human voice engine provides pronunciations in over 18 languages. 
       
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| | | | |  Crowd Factory, a startup that creates white-label social marketing applications, has raised $6.5 million in funding led by Storm Ventures with Hummer Winblad, Peninsula Ventures and several angel investors participating in the round.
Crowd Factory's social marketing applications allows marketers to amplify and optimize campaigns, and view social-analytics and interactions. For example, Crowd Factory will take a contest held by a brand and socialize the campaign, increasing interactions and responses. The company's social offers applications lets marketers build group buying and social gaming elements into their promotions. And marketers can then track and optimize engagement from a single dashboard. Since launching the suite in June of last year, the company says it has more than tripled its customer base, working with companies such as HBO, Sony, Speck and Universal McCann.
       
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As we've seen from the recent Quora wars, the Q&A space has come into its own in the last couple of months and this week we're seeing reports of crazy growth in yet another contender, Q&A site Stack Overflow. A blog post called the "State of the Stack 2010 (a message from your CEO)" reveals that the StackOverflow.com site has grown 131% this year from 7 million to 16.6 million monthly unique visitors. Stack Overflow has also grown 129% in terms of page views from 31.8 million views per month to 72.8 million per month, according to Google Analytics.
Last time we checked in with Stack Overflow it had just crossed the 10 million mark on Quantcast back in November. But co-founder Joel Spolsky is skeptical of "notoriously inaccurate" traffic gaging systems like Quancast, Google Analytics and the terminally unreliable Compete and holds some other more tangible success metrics close to his heart. Says Spolsky, "The true measure of success for any Internet company is how often people come up to me in swank hotel lobbies and offer to buy me meals, let me use their corporate jet, etc. But since there is a great deal of disagreement as to how to measure that, we track a reasonable proxy called "eyeballs," on the theory that if a site is useful, people will load it up in their browsers and eyeball it."
Spolsky is right, there is a direct correlation between the amount of random people who approach you in hotels asking for stuff and how confident you should be about your success during family holidays, especially if you've already got a flattering "Forget Quora!" profile in the New York Observer under your belt. As proof of Stack Overflow's coolness, Spolsky writes that he's pretty sure "ALL the programmers in the world use Stack Overflow" (source: completely made up). But aside from traffic and $6 million in funding and sycophants and the fact that if it grows as projected the company will be "bigger than Facebook in 15 months," Spolsky has yet another metric for success, and this one (he swears) is the most important, he swears. Percentage of questions answered is the holy grail of Stack Overflow, and as of right now three of the sites (Cooking, Photography, and English) have a 100% answer rate, which means at least one user thought the question was respectable enough to pass muster and garner an upvote. Indeed Spolsky and his co-founder Jeff Atwood are committed to answer excellence and recently started a program to send their power users to industry conferences as a way to gain knowledge and further evangelize the sites. Stack Overflow and the StackExchange network don't tolerate subjective or conversational questions either, which is a boon for people who want to browse the Apple topic with out having to read anything inquiring about Steve Jobs' health, myself included. Hallelujah. "Essentially, we've already learned how to deal with 'big city problems,'" says Spolsky, referring to the network's overall 90% answer rate. "We think of Stack Exchange as being more like the reference section of the library where you go when you really need a specific answer and you have to talk to experts; all the other Q&A sites are structured more like social hangouts where you shout out your question in a crowded bar and hope there's one person who hears it and knows the answer." And on that note, the Q&A showdown continue. Image: 3-Fach
       
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Well, so far the authoritarian regime in Egypt has taken steps to crack down on the uprising of its population by shutting down 
Cloud-based video monitoring platform 
This is interesting. Verizon has just announced that it is 
