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Jobfox Rolls Out Social Private Networks For Online Recruiting
Mar 15, 4:00AM
Former CareerBuilder founder and CEO Rob McGovern launched Jobfox in 2004 as a job profile site in which individuals could search through job openings displayed on the site's boards. But the site was tough for recruiters to actively use because they had to comb through profiles of potential applicants. Today, Jobfox is unveiling a new version of the site that hopes to solve this problem. Essentially Jobfox allows corporate recruiters and headhunters to create private hiring networks. Job seekers can create a profile on the site and join corporate networks for companies they are interested in working for. Jobfox says that the virtue of using its network vs LinkedIn for job seeking is that it is completely focused on job seekers and recruiters as opposed to socializing or sharing content. Because to connections made between job seekers and recruiters are confidential and not published on the network, it also ensures user privacy. 
DRAMA IN TWITTERLAND: Featuring Kleiner Perkins, John Doerr And A Dentist
Mar 15, 3:13AM
"Kleiner Perkins Already Selling Its Twitter Stock" reads one headline on SAI from Friday, alleging that venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers has been selling Twitter stock that they bought only a couple of months ago. "A DISASTER IN THE MAKING" says another lengthy diatribe on SAI. The allegation? That Kleiner invested in Twitter at a $3.7 billion valuation in December, then turned around and sold some of that stock for a profit just a month or two later, at a $7 billion valuation. Some people may say, so what? People invest with a profit motive. But Kleiner got into Twitter at a sweetheart deal - paying a valuation hundreds of millions of dollars less than rival firms DST and Providence were rumored to have bid. When you take an investor like Kleiner Perkins, you're doing it because of their name, and because you expect them not to just flip the stock and bring in random new shareholders. Flipping stock just isn't done by top tier venture funds. So the allegation is serious, and reputation damaging. Other startups may think twice before taking Kleiner's money when they don't know if Kleiner will stick around or just sell the stock at the first opportunity. The problem is, the accusations in the articles aren't true, say multiple sources close to Twitter's management and investors.
Flickr Burning As Yahoo Fiddles: Head Of Service Walks Away
Mar 14, 11:28PM
When you ask Yahoo who is in charge of Flickr, they always point to one man: Matthew Rothenberg. Well, technically, there are people at Yahoo above him in charge of the group of products that Flickr is in (Applications Division). But it's Rothenberg, as head of product, who they'll tell you is leading the day to day. Not anymore. Rothenberg is out as head of product for Flickr. He tweeted the news himself earlier today. He had been on the team for five years, dating back to when original co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake were still running the ship. They left long ago, but Rothenberg stuck around. And for the past two years, he's been the guy in charge.
Former Myspacers Build Link Curator 'Tagging Robot'
Mar 14, 10:15PM
Former VP of Product at Myspace Todd Leeloy and Myspace Product Manager Joe Munoz have launched a semantic tagging network and link curation service today called Tagging Robot. Tagging Robot currently crawls your Facebook newsfeed and separates your links based on topics, as well as giving you relevant topics data for each link. Tagging Robot uses NLP and Machine Learning to build users a topic centered profile, and uses your Facebook Interests and Social Graph to populate the page. What you immediately see on your profile is a list of recommended links (based on followed topics), a list of all links shared recently by your network and your favorites (which you track by clicking the <3 symbol next to each link).
Zynga Gamers Raise $1 Million For Tsunami Relief
Mar 14, 10:02PM
On Friday, social gaming giant Zynga joined tsunami relief efforts by enabling in-game donations through virtual goods in Zynga games like FrontierVille, FarmVille and CityVille. Today, the company announced that -- in just 36 hours -- Zynga gamers donated more than $1 million to relief efforts. Zynga partnered with the Save the Children to raise money for its Japan Earthquake Tsunami Children Emergency Fund.
R.I.P. Microsoft Zune, 2006-2011
Mar 14, 9:41PM
Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has finally decided to put an official end to its Zune media player line. "A person familiar with the decision" has informed them that Microsoft will not be putting out any new hardware in the line, and will be henceforward focusing on integrating Zune functionality with the Windows Phone 7 platform. Not exactly unexpected; the Zune hardware hasn't changed since mid-2009's release of the Zune HD, although it has received several significant software upgrades. The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but whether Microsoft would double down (again) or cut their losses was far from clear. Let's take a quick trip down memory lane.
UpNext Scores $500,000 From Chris Sacca And Others For 3D Mobile Mapping
Mar 14, 9:10PM
Mapping is a big boy's game, with Google Maps, Bing Maps, and MapQuest dominating maps on both the Web and mobile. But sometimes it takes a startup to push things forward. 3D mobile mapping startup UpNext is hoping to get on the map, so to speak, with its detailed 3D maps of cities and venues like the Super Bowl stadium. The New York city startup, which has been around since 2007, just raised a $557,000 series A round of preferred shares, according to an SEC filing. That amount includes $57,000 that converted from a previously-undisclosed friends-and-family round in 2009. The new round is $500,000 and investors include Chris Sacca's Lowercase Capital, David Cohen of TechStars (who invested individually), David Tisch and Oleg Tscheltzoff Co-founder Danny Moon says the company will use the funds to expand its platform from its own mobile and iPad apps to become an underpinning technology for "travel guides, resorts, event planners, amusement parks, to name a few," which can incorporate UpNext's 3D maps into their own apps. 
RewardVille Lets You Earn Points Across Zynga's Social Games
Mar 14, 9:01PM
Zynga is debuting its previously announced points program, RewardVille, today which adds a rewards layer across all of the social gaming giant's games. Now, Zynga's 250 million players can earn "zCoins" when they are playing Zynga's games on Facebook and other platforms. As you play more of Zynga's games, you earn zPoints and zCoins which can then be used towards purchasing exclusive virtual goods on RewardVille. The new program is essentially tying rewards between all of Zynga's games, including CityVille, FrontierVille, FarmVille, Mafia Wars, Zynga Poker, Café World, Treasure Isle, YoVille, PetVille, and Vampire Wars.
Charlie Sheen Tweets Generated Over 1M Uniques For Internships.com
Mar 14, 8:16PM
The dust has finally settled on the Sheen media hurricane from the past couple of weeks and bloggers have pretty much moved on in expectation of the next easy content fustercluck. Internships.com however, who paid at least 100K for the Ad.ly campaign (in the guise of a social media intern job post), is reaping the benefits of the two Sheen tweets, and have revealed their related traffic totals to TechCrunch in the wake of the blitz.
Finally, a Startup Visa That Works
Mar 14, 7:45PM
In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry–Lugar legislation. That's because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money—even in Silicon Valley. I couldn't foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen jobs. Yet our political leaders would have claimed "Mission Accomplished", and we would have lost a valuable opportunity to stem the brain drain. I was delighted to receive an e-mail, last week, from Garrett Johnson, who works for Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.). Garrett said that the Senator had read my articles and asked his staff to consider my comments. After consulting with Bob Litan, of Kauffman Foundation; Brad Feld, of Foundry Group; Eric Ries, of the lean-startup movement; and other champions of the visa, Garrett had revised the legislation. He sent me a draft of the bill that was introduced today. This new legislation is even better than I had hoped for. If it gets through both houses—and doesn't have bureaucratic constraints—I expect it to unleash a flood of entrepreneurship.
Video Demo Of Spin Play, The Magazine App That Comes With Music
Mar 14, 7:31PM
Now that iTunes allows for subscriptions, more and more magazines are putting out iPad apps. The best ones offer new experiences beyond what amounts to turning the iPad into a fancy PDF viewer. This week, Spin magazine is releasing its very first iPad app (iTunes link) which production director Dylan Boelte recently demoed for me (see video). It's a magazine app in that includes a digital version of the current issue (which you can buy for $1.99 per issue or $7.99 for a year's subscription), and it includes other bells and whistles such as recent top stories from the Website and exclusive behind the scenes videos from Spin's rockstar photo shoots. But it's also a music app. Each issue comes with a playlist of about 60 songs hand-selected by Spin's music editors. The songs can be fully streamed in the app. You can listen to them while you are flipping through the magazine or send them to your speakers with Airplay. You can also pay extra to download them.
New Twitter Stats: 140M Tweets Sent Per Day, 460K Accounts Created Per Day
Mar 14, 7:01PM
Twitter is celebrating its fifth birthday and to commemorate the occasion, is revealing a number of stats showing its growth over the past five years. It took 3 years, 2 months and 1 day from the first Tweet to get to the billionth Tweet. In a given week, users send a billion Tweets. Users are now sending 140 million Tweets, on average, per day, up from 50 million Tweets sent per day, a year ago. The all-time high in terms of Tweets sent per day was 177 million sent on March 11, 2011. 
TechCrunch Interview: Senator Al Franken Talks Net Neutrality (And His Morning Workout Routine)
Mar 14, 6:58PM
If you care about the well-being of the Internet, you care about net neutrality. You just might not realize it yet. This morning, Senator Al Franken took to the stage at SXSW Interactive to talk about the issue in front of a crowd of tech-savvy entrepreneurs and creatives, where he urged them to reach out to their representatives in Congress and let them know just how important net neutrality is to keeping the web healthy. Franken has previously described it as the most important free speech issue of our time, and he's worried that the equality we've come to expect on the web may soon be undermined by major corporations. Just before he gave his speech, we had the chance to sit down with Senator Franken to discuss the current status of the ongoing debate around net neutrality, and why it's important that the public becomes involved in the campaign. We also touched on Franken's recent letter to Facebook over the social network's plans to grant third parties access to user phone numbers and addresses. And yes, we even got to know a little bit about his morning workout routine — which sounds rigorous. Tune in to the video above to learn more.
The Demand Media of Search Engine Marketing, BoostCTR, Raises $1.6 Million
Mar 14, 6:48PM
San Francisco-based ad platform, BoostCTR, announced today that it has closed a $1.64 million seed funding round led by a group of institutional investors and angels, including Javelin Venture Partners, Metamorphic Ventures, Founder Collective, WGI Group, and 500 Startups. Managing Director of Javelin Ventures Jed Katz and Metamorphic Ventures Partner David Hirsch will be joining the company's board of directors. BoostCTR is a text-ad optimization tool designed to help advertisers boost their click-through and conversion rates by crowdsourcing ad content to a stable of expert copywriters. It works like this: Advertisers sign in to BoostCTR's dashboard and authorize it to connect with their AdWords account. They then choose the ads that you want to optimize and create contests based on your selections, in which BoostCTR's bullpen of copywriters compete to write targeted text for those ads.
Wikio Groupe Closing Huge Round To Become The Long-Awaited European Internet Star
Mar 14, 6:26PM
Yeah, this round of funding is huger than huge. Well, at least for Europe. And while it may be nowhere near Groupon's, like, billion-dollar-round, it is definitely amongst the bigger deals on this side of the Atlantic. Multiple sources have confirmed that they are currently in discussion with Luxemburg-based Wikio Groupe, who is in the process of securing a very large round of funding. While no official information has been released, the 8-figure number could easily hit 9-figures in USD given the current exchange rate. That would make it one of the biggest rounds of funding to take place in Europe this year.
Gillmor Gang 3.14.11 (TCTV)
Mar 14, 6:24PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor — spent a rare Sunday session raking Twitter over the coals. Well, some of the Gang, that is. Scoble and Marks chimed in from Austin, while the others stayed behind in SIlicon Valley. But the split divided differently over Twitter's move to lock down client development. Marks and Taschek thought Twitter's move was heavy-handed and a mistake, while Scoble agreed with me that Twitter was in the driver's seat. South By Southwest seems to continue to grow in attendance and startup launches, with less impact due to the fragmentation of competitors bunched up in group chatting and other location-based features. Meanwhile, the rich get richer if we measure by adoption and extensions of metadata models in search of monetization opportunities. The age-old discussion of open v. closed may still capture its share of blogosphere attention, but behind the scenes the move from consumer cloud to the enterprise is changing the metrics to those of trust and stability. Video ahead.
SXSW: Keen On… Press, Pause, Play (TCTV)
Mar 14, 6:04PM
One of the most eagerly awaited movies debuting at SXSW this year is the Swedish production Press, Pause, Play. It's an examination of both the benefits and the downside of the democratizing power of the Internet, featuring interviews with Seth Godin, Scott Belsky, Sean Parker, Moby and (blush) myself. Press, Pause, Play got its world premiere on Friday night in Austin and yesterday I had the opportunity to sit down in the AOL studio with its two Swedish co-directors, David Dworsky and Victor Köhler. Both guys seemed liked they hadn't had any sleep for about six months; both, I suspect, had been enjoying the delights of SXSW rather too much. Video ahead.
Apples To Apples: Apple Inc. Files For Apple Corps' Old Apple Logo Trademark
Mar 14, 5:47PM
The legal dispute between Apple Corps and Apple Inc. for the rights to the Apple logo are far reaching. Since the first case back in 1978, Apple Inc. has slowly whittled away at Apple Corp's initial legal settlement banning Apple Inc. from entering the music industry. It wasn't until a 2007 settlement when most of Apple Corps' trademarks were given to Apple Inc. thereby paving the way to the November 2010 release of the Beatles catalog on iTunes. There was, however, one piece of trademark that Apple Inc. never got, until now: Apple Corps' Apple logo.
LivingSocial Gains Wealth Of Ruby on Rails Expertise With InfoEther Acquisition
Mar 14, 5:41PM
In what appears to be mostly about the talent of its founding team, LivingSocial has moved to acquire Ruby on Rails consultancy outfit InfoEther. The social ecommerce giant, which has raised $232 million in venture capital to date and has been getting nearly as acquisitive as its rival Groupon lately, says InfoEther's agility and expertise will enhance its ability to innovate more effectively. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Digg Hires Vast And Coremetrics Alum Ben Folk-Williams As New VP Of Engineering
Mar 14, 5:29PM
As we wrote in late November, Digg's longtime VP of Engineering John Quinn joined flash sales giant Gilt Groupe. Today, Digg is announcing his replacement—Ben Folk-Williams. Folk-Williams was previously VP of Engineering at search and listings company Vast.com, and prior to that, led engineering at analytics startup Coremetrics, which was acquired by IBM last June. 
Facebook Hires Amin Zoufonoun, Google's No. 2 Corp Dev Exec
Mar 14, 5:13PM
Facebook has hired Google Corporate Development exec Amin Zoufonoun, we've heard from multiple sources. Zoufonoun has been with Google since 2003 and is the second most senior corp dev exec after David Lawee. Zoufonoun will report to Vaughan Smith, Facebook's director of corp dev. 
In The Midst Of A Massively Successful SXSW, Foursquare Tackles Venue Harmonization
Mar 14, 5:08PM
In the location space, there's something that has long been the missing link: a unified places database. The problem, of course, is that all the major players, Foursquare, Facebook, Google, Gowalla, Loopt, etc, have their own databases. But today Foursquare is taking the first steps towards unification — well, if the others play along. Foursquare is launching an initiative that they're calling the "Venues Project" or "venue harmonization coordination". Their aim is to create the "social places database," as co-founder Dennis Crowley calls it. "Some folks have taken a stab at this, but we think we can do it the right way," he says.
Video: Another Group Messaging App At SXSW 2011 – Grouped{in}
Mar 14, 4:59PM
Group Text/Messaging is all the rage at SXSW 2011. One app in the genre that's making its debut this week is Appconomy's Grouped{in}. Just getting its app store approval on Friday, it surfaces with many of the features of similar apps like Beluga and GroupMe (group messaging, conference call, etc), however according to Appconomy President Brian Magierski, it has at least one unique differentiator that you can see near the end of the video below called Featured Groups. I ran into Brian at the conference and he gave me a quick demo of Grouped{in} which has been designed to help "organize & simplify private group communication across multiple channels".
Half A Billion Blog Posts Later, Google To Give Blogger A Revamp
Mar 14, 4:46PM
Google's blogging service Blogger has been used for over half a billion blog posts (with over half a trillion words in total) to date, writes product manager Chang Kim on the Blogger Buzz blog. Those blog posts have been read by 400 million readers across the globe, Kim adds. And according to the video below, 75 percent of traffic comes from outside the United States (the service is available in 50 languages). Now the product is getting an overhaul, the biggest change being a more modern user interface for both the editor and the dashboard (fi-na-lly), built with Google Web Toolkit.
Following AT&T, Verizon Makes Japan Calls Free Until April
Mar 14, 3:37PM
We heard earlier that AT&T was making calls to Japan free until between March 11 and March 31, in the wake of the devasting earthquake and tsunami in the region. Verizon is also joining in this effort and will be making calls to Japan free for most wireless and residential customers through April 10. According to the release, all Verizon Wireless post-paid customers will receive free calling to Japan from March 11 through April 10 and will receive free text and multimedia messaging to Japan for the same time period. And Verizon Prepaid Phone Card charges for all long-distance calls placed to Japan from the United States will also be waived from March 11 until April 10. Verizon will also be providing FiOS TV customers who are not subscribed to the channel free access to TV Japan through March 17. 
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