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More on that Void Between Super Angels and VCs (TCTV)
Jan 12, 6:53AM
Earlier we did a post about a new venture firm called Bullpen Capital that seeks to fill the void between super angels, who invest up to $1 million, and VCs who want to invest $5 million or more. Since the firm's deal flow will come mostly from super angels, it'll likely be investing in categories where lean startup rules apply. But that's more than just consumer Internet and iPhone apps. In this segment of our interview with the Bullpen Capital partners, Paul Martino, Duncan Davidson, and Richard Melmon, talk about the sectors in which they're the most interested. Video below.
Why Bullpen Capital Thinks We Need Another Venture Fund (TCTV)
Jan 12, 5:13AM
The decade-long glut of funding in the venture business is finally getting unwound as LPs get choosier and choosier about which venture funds to keep backing. Meanwhile, venture capitalists slogging it out with the new breed of super angels, striving to get in the hottest deals at remotely reasonable prices would probably argue there's little room in the market for a new firm either. So it's not exactly the easiest time to raise a new fund. Enter Bullpen Capital: A new firm that the super angel elite are welcoming with open arms. Why? It aims fill the hole in the market between angels and VCs. 
Formspring Closes $11.5 Million Round, Launches 'Respond' Button
Jan 12, 5:01AM
One of the biggest phenomena of last year was Formspring, a social site that lets you invite your friends to "Ask you anything". The site launched in November 2009 and rose from obscurity to some 40 million monthly uniques at its peak (it's currently at around 22.2 million monthly uniques according to Quantcast). Today, the company is announcing a $11.5 million funding round led by Redpoint Ventures (Geoff Yang) with participation from Baseline Ventures (Steve Anderson). This confirms a report from November when GigaOm reported that the site had raised $10 million (obviously they added a bit more to the round since then). In addition to today's funding, Formspring is also announcing a new feature: the 'Respond Button'. 
Silicon Valley Migrates! Accel Partners Opens Up A New York Office
Jan 12, 4:59AM
In what is the first but certainly not the last time we'll hear of Silicon Valley venture capitalists opening up an office in New York, storied venture firm and Facebook/Groupon backer Accel Partners has opened a New York outpost at 11th and Broadway. This will be the second US location for Accel, which has offices in Bangalore, Beijing, London, New Delhi and Shanghai. East Coast vs. West Coast has been a universal theme ever since Biggie and Tupac and now it's extending itself to the world of startups and venture capital. Accel Partners is justifying the move by saying that it's made over 15 investments in the New York Area in the past three years and that it does not plan on stopping.
Is Naming Your Startup "Hipster" Genius Or Terrible?
Jan 12, 1:54AM
Is it just me or is everyone and their skinny jeans wearing, MGMT-listening mothers a hipster nowadays? Nowhere is this more evident than in tech (thanks Twitter). And behold, the latest sign of the tech hipster-ocalypse, a startup actually called Hipster. The company is in "stealth" mode and asking people not to say what they do publicly. But they're pimping themselves hard on Hacker News, offering "earlier access" if you invite 3 friends. Of course.
OMG/JK: The Verizon iPhone And The End Of An Era
Jan 12, 1:32AM
We're approaching an end of an era. A time when MG Siegler, my cohost on OMG/JK, will no longer be forced to struggle with AT&T on a daily basis. Soon, he will be equipped with a phone that will actually be able to make phone calls. And Seth the Blogger Guy will be able to breathe a little easier. Because soon, MG — and millions of other people — will have the Verizon iPhone. In case you missed this morning's press blitz, today Verizon and Apple teamed to announce the impending launch of the iPhone on the US's largest wireless network. Finally, after years of waiting (and countless press reports), it's official. It's big, so we did a special edition of OMG/JK to mark the occasion.
GameCrush's Crush-O-Matic Blends Chatroulette With Online Gaming
Jan 12, 1:00AM
TechCrunch Disrupt finalist GameCrush is launching its own take on the Chatroulette-like experience today with Crush-O-Matic. The new service is a random game generator where users simply click "Go!" and automatically get matched up with another user in a two-way cam-enabled game session. As we we wrote in our initial review of GameCrush, the startup aims to help the millions of male gamers out on the web hook up online with a gaming buddy of the opposite sex for a fee. On GameCrush, gamers can browse the profiles of "PlayDates", which is the term used to refer to the women on the site. 
M9 Defense Raises $1.4 Million For Advanced Hydroforming Technology
Jan 12, 1:00AM
A Seattle-area materials science company, M9 Defense, raised $1.4 million in a series A round, a new SEC filing revealed. According to the company's website: its core product, Boroclave presses, use hydroforming technology to mass-produce ballistic and non-ballistic composites. The company claims the composites it uses have the highest strength to weight ratios available in today's market, and can be formed into products at speeds comparable to that of sheet metal processing.
Our Take: Favorites From CES 2011
Jan 12, 12:30AM
The supreme madness of the CES season has passed on once more, leaving our team with sore feet and a tech hangover. If you were watching our live video stream, you know what sort of a show it was — pretty much CES 2010: The Next Generation, what with all the 3D TVs and tablets. But that doesn't mean there was nothing worth seeing. Far from it, in fact; the show floor was packed with interesting devices, they just weren't at the big players' booths. Here are our favorites from CES and impressions of the show in general.
So Google, You'll Be Dropping Support For Flash Next, Right?
Jan 12, 12:28AM
Do you smell that? Just wait a second. You will. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.The bolding is mine, but that's Google's actual statement as to why they're dropping support for the H.264 video codec from the Chromium open source browser (from which Chrome is built). Erick wrote up the main story earlier today, but in my opinion, he didn't go far enough in calling bullshit on this maneuver. Namely, how on Earth can Google get away with dropping support for one popular codec under the guise of "open" when baked into their browser is Flash, the decidedly un-open plug-in?
Bitterness, Anger And Betrayal At MySpace
Jan 11, 11:55PM
An email from a reader claiming to be a MySpace employee about the layoffs today that left half of the company out of work. These things are part of life, but the bitterness, anger and feeling of betrayal are striking. The email is below.
Viridity Energy Raises $14 Million To Turn Power Consumers Into Producers
Jan 11, 11:45PM
The Future Version Of Android Isn't Called Ice Cream. It's Ice Cream SANDWICH.
Jan 11, 11:26PM
It's tough being a tech journalist. Countless phone calls, mountains of email, endless warring with legions of trolls. Really, you've got to be pretty hardcore to do this job. It's a wonder we ever get any posts up. Which is my half-hearted explanation as to why it's taken me this long to reveal the truth about something that I'm sure all of you find extremely important. So, without any further ado, here it is: the version of Android that comes after Honeycomb (in other words, the one after next), is not going to be called Ice Cream, which seems to be the general consensus among tech bloggers. It's going to be called Ice Cream Sandwich.
Last Week, IE Was The Top Browser On TechCrunch. Wait, What?
Jan 11, 11:11PM
In late November of last year, we noted a changing of the guard: Chrome had become the most-used browser amongst TechCrunch readers, ending the four year reign of Firefox in the pole position. And since then, Chrome has actually widened its lead. In the past 30 days, it's a full 2 percentage points ahead of Firefox now. And that lead continues to grow. But something really odd happened last week. Chrome wasn't number one. And neither was Firefox. Instead, it was Internet Explorer. Yes, IE took the crown last week. You might not think that's a big deal considering that IE is still by a fairly large margin the most-used browser overall. But as long as we've been keeping track of stats for TechCrunch, it has never been the top browser here. In fact, it has been number four for quite some time. And it's normally about five percentage points behind number three: Safari. So for it to surge to number one is a real oddity.
Why We Invested In Groupon: The Power of Data
Jan 11, 10:39PM
Editor's note: The following is a guest post by Greylock Partners VCs Reid Hoffman and James Slavet. Reid Hoffman is Co-Founder and Chairman at LinkedIn and a partner at Greylock. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/reidhoffman. James Slavet is a partner at Greylock. His complete profile can be found at www.linkedin.com/in/jamesslavet.
Jack Dorsey On Charlie Rose: "It's Really Complex To Make Something Simple."
Jan 11, 10:34PM
Twitter Chairman and Square founder Jack Dorsey sat down with Charlie Rose last night to talk about Dorsey's unique position of being responsible for two technology startups based on the idea of simplicity: Twitter and Square. Watching this interview you realize that Dorsey's accomplishments have little to do with luck, and more with his focus on creating the purest products by throwing away any unnecessary flourishes. "It's really complex to make something simple," he tells Rose. Dorsey describes himself as an "editor" who edits technology and teams "so that we have one cohesive product that we tell the world." In the clip above (provided by the Charlie Rose Show), Dorsey talks about how he got the idea for Square and how hard it is to make mobile payments no more complicated than swiping a credit card. 
The Gloves Are Off: Google Chrome Browser Will Drop Support For H.264 Video Codec
Jan 11, 9:34PM
In the world of online video, there is a battle brewing over the next dominant standard for online video, especially on HTML5 Web pages. Today, Google took the gloves off and declared that it will soon stop supporting the H.264 video codec in its Chrome browser. Instead, it will only support open-source technologies such as its own WebM initiative (with its VP8 codec) and the open-source Theora video codec, which is used by Firefox. You could see this a mile away. Google announced the WebM project last May, along with other partners Mozilla and Opera (Apple, which relies on H.264 in its mission to squash Flash, was conspicuously absent). The H.264 codec is owned by the MPEG-LA consortium, and may in the future require a license. Although the consortium was pressured into promising that H.264 streaming would be free forever that is only for non-commercial Internet video.
Pose: A Photo Sharing App For Fashion And Shopping That Just Raised $1.6 Million
Jan 11, 9:29PM
Photo sharing applications are clearly all the rage right now, with newcomers seemingly popping up every week. Between Instagram, picplz, Path and others, people already have a lot of ways to share their mobile snapshots with friends. But now they've got one more, and it's focused on a different use-case: shopping and fashion. Meet Pose, a new startup launching today in beta, that wants to help you share what you're buying (or thinking of buying) with your friends. Today the company is announcing that it's raised $1.6 million from True Ventures, GRP, and Founder Collective, with angel investors including Dave Morin and Shawn Fanning. Jon Callaghan (True Ventures) and Mark Suster (GRP) will be joining the board as part of the deal. You can grab the free iPhone app here.
Real Blogs Don't Buy Ads On Google
Jan 11, 9:05PM
Blogs, even big blogs, are supposed to be a little different than old media sites. We write faster and update often. The writing is less processed. We break more real news and we don't hesitate to opine. We tend to get in fights with readers in the comments. And we aim to gain more of those readers, even the annoying ones, organically by attending events, spreading the word on Twitter and Facebook, and generally being part of the community. One thing big blogs don't do is buy traffic to juice up the Comscore numbers. It's an unspoken rule. It's cheating, and it brings in bad traffic that doesn't stick around or come back for the most part (or so we assume). So we're sad to see our sister blog Engadget doing just that - buying ads to pump up their Comscore rankings. We've seen a ridiculous number of ads on Google over the last month or two saying things like "Keep Up With What's Going On In The Tech World With News From Engadget." 
Keen On… Evgeny Morozov: Why America Didn't Win the Cold War and Other Net Delusions (TCTV)
Jan 11, 8:32PM
What should be the role of the Internet in US foreign policy? Should we be encouraging Twitter and Facebook to overthrow the governments in Iran, China and Russia? Is the Internet the United States' best weapon against authoritarianism? According to Stanford University visiting fellow Evgeny Morozov, the United States government is suffering from what he calls the "net delusion" of allowing the Internet to determine its foreign policy. In The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, Morozov argues that the Internet isn't encouraging democracy overseas and thus the State Department is mistaken to promote what Hilary Clinton has called her "Internet Freedom Policy." Video ahead.
How Google Speeds Up The Chrome Release Cycle (Slideshow)
Jan 11, 7:24PM
Google's approach to developing its Chrome browser is to release updates early and often. Its goal is to put out a new release every six weeks or so. Updates have become so routine that Google barely even mentions them anymore. Anthony LaForge, the technical program manager at Google overseeing Chrome development, created the presentation below (and posted it on Google Docs) to explain how Chrome's development cycles work. Instead of a traditional software development cycle where features are crammed into each release or delay the release, Chrome puts out a new release no matter what every six weeks. If new features aren't ready, they wait for the next release, just like waiting for the next scheduled train at Grand Central.
Facebook Paid Farm Bureau $8.5 Million To Acquire Fb.com
Jan 11, 7:09PM
On November 15th, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that Facebook had acquired Fb.com from The American Farm Bureau Federation to use as the domain for internal emails now that the Facebook Messages were parked on Facebook.com. But what he didn't reveal at the time? The acquisition price. Today Reuters is reporting that the Fb.com domain acquisition, which moved the 6 Million member Farm Bureau over to Fb.org, cost Facebook $8.5 million. "At their annual meeting in Atlanta, Farm Bureau officials on Tuesday said the organization earned $8.5 million by selling a couple of domain names but is barred from identifying the buyer."
How Personal Hotspot Works On The Verizon iPhone (Pictures)
Jan 11, 5:53PM
There's actually only one key difference between the Verizon iPhone 4 and the AT&T iPhone 4 (well, besides the network, obviously). But it's a big one: Personal Hotspots. Yes, the Verizon iPhone will come with this killer feature that will allow it to become an internet hub for up to 5 WiFi devices to connect to. And while there is no word on pricing yet (neither Apple nor Verizon would budge or slip-up when asked repeatedly — but note the "Additional usage charges may apply."), we were able to see it in action in the demo room following today's event. As you might expect from Apple, it's super simple to set up and use.
One More Thing: The Verizon iPhone Runs iOS 4.2.5
Jan 11, 5:33PM
In the demo area which Verizon and Apple opened up after their Verizon iPhone 4 unveiling today, we got some hands-on time with the actual device. As we were told during the event, the device is largely the same as the iPhone 4 on AT&T's network, with some slight changes to the antenna on the side. And there's one more thing: the Verizon iPhone is running an unreleased version of iOS. Verzion 4.2.5 (8E128), to be exact. Not that this should be surprising. The Verizon iPhone comes with one very key and very killer difference than the AT&T iPhone: Personal Hotspots. In order to use this new feature, clearly there's a need for modified software. And that software, iOS 4.2.5, will presumably launch alongside the Verizon iPhone on February 3.
Bottom Line: Should You Buy The Verizon iPhone?
Jan 11, 5:22PM
Well, it's happened. All of our ViPhone dreams have come true and the phone will be available in stores in February. But should you buy it? I'm of two minds. As a long-suffering AT&T customer completely understand the rage some feel at the failings of that network. The Verizon iPhone hit 1500kbps while the AT&T model hit about 100kbps during a good minute. My reception in Manhattan is abysmal as is yours if you live in San Francisco or other highly populated areas. But leave the iPhone cluster and it's a different story. I've never had a call drop at home in Brooklyn, for example, and that's right across the river. The Verizon iPhone is a nice addition to the Verizon catalog. It is immensely popular, well-supported, and there is already a fervent fan base. But this model has a fatal flaw: CDMA. CDMA is an interstitial technology right now as carriers roll out LTE and I suspect we have at least another year before the ViPhone will come in an LTE model. Apple is still supporting GSM/3G, as well, so this won't be a matter of the ViPhone leapfrogging AT&T. It just won't happen.
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