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Inspiring: Kik Founder Donates $1M To Kickstart University of Waterloo Seed Fund
Mar 29, 12:43PM
The founder of messaging app Kik, 23-year-old entrepreneur Ted Livingston, has donated $1 million to The University of Waterloo's VeloCity Residence, a residence-based mobile and digital startups incubator (dormcubator?) where his own startup ambitions were sparked. The University of Waterloo says it will use the money to establish a seed fund for student startups and intends to provide "at least 30 student ventures" with $25,000 as well as four months of office space, incorporation services and mentoring over the next few years.
These Robot Quadrocopter Jugglers Perform For Your Amusement… For Now
Mar 29, 12:35PM
If you've watched some of our previous robotic quadrocopter coverage you'll have seen these little choppers fly through hoops and interact with humans in fairly mundane ways. Now I'd like you to watch this video of two quadrocopters sharing a nice game of catch. They target the ball and throw it back to the thrower and once you have two in the same pen they start throwing the balls to each other. The result? Mirth and merriment!
Apperian Raises $9.5M For Enterprise Mobile App Deployment Platform
Mar 29, 12:24PM
Enterprise mobility company Apperian has raised $9.5 million in new funding from North Bridge Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers' iFund, CommonAngels and LaunchCapital. This brings Apperian's total funding to $11 million. As more companies turn to tablets and smartphones in enterprise communications, standard consumer apps may not fit within security requirements. Launched by former Apple employees in 2009, Apperian helps developers accelerate app creation within the enterprise. 
Cisco Buys Cloud Automation And Management Software Company newScale
Mar 29, 12:14PM
Cisco this morning announced its intent to acquire newScale, a global provider of self-service and lifecycle management software for enterprise IT and private/hybrid cloud computing. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but newScale is a company that's raised tens of millions of dollars in funding from a wide range of investors, according to CrunchBase. Based in San Mateo, California, newScale develops products and solutions that enable companies to select and deploy cloud services within their businesses, allowing them to initiate the provisioning of their own systems and infrastructure on an as-needed basis.
Glassdoor Puts Numbers on Our Schizophrenic Job Market
Mar 29, 12:00PM
Glassdooris reporting an Employment Confidence Survey today that shows robust and increasing confidence in the job market-- never mind most of the nation remains gripped in 9% unemployment with only a little hope of things getting better. 40% of respondents expect their company's outlook to improve in the next six months and just 17% are concerned about a possible layoff, down from 26% in the first quarter of 2009. And there's decent optimism that should they lose their jobs, 40% of them say it is "likely" they would find a new job matching their experience and pay within six months-- the highest that number has been in six quarters. Glassdoor notes that "only" 35% of respondents expected to get a raise within the next 12 months, but given the top line economic data for the country, that still seems pretty healthy to me. While unemployment is getting better, the numbers say as much about who uses Glassdoor as anything else. 
Limos.com Scores $10 Million For Online Limo And Car Services Marketplace
Mar 29, 11:57AM
Founded by former employees of travel booking site Hotwire.com, Limos.com, an online marketplace for limo and car services, this morning announced that they've secured $10 million in financing from Austin Ventures. The new Austin Ventures investment adds to the company's original funding of $5 million from Canal Partners. Coinciding with the funding announcement, the company has released a new corporate travel management product, Limos.com for Business.
Cheapflights Invests In Travel Meta-Search Site Momondo
Mar 29, 11:42AM
Cheapflights Media has made a strategic investment in travel meta-search site Momondo.com and its parent company Skygate International, the company announced this morning. Both Skygate and Momondo will continue to operate from Copenhagen as independent brands, led by their existing founding management. Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
GE Buys Electrical Engineering Company Converteam For Up To $3.7 Billion
Mar 29, 11:17AM
GE Energy this morning announced that it has acquired a stake of approximately 90 percent of Converteam, a France-based provider of electrification and automation equipment and systems, for approximately $3.2 billion. Converteam's senior management will retain the remaining stake in the company, but GE has agreed to purchase their shares over the next two to five years for a price that it expects not to exceed $480 million. Converteam was previously owned by a shareholder group that includes the company's management, Barclays Private Equity and LBO France. To learn more about the company's history, check out its Wikipedia profile.
Will Amazon Drive Music Lockers Like MP3Tunes And mSpot Beyond Oblivion?
Mar 29, 10:22AM
Make no mistake about it: the digital music space will be turned upside down this year, courtesy of giants like Apple, Google, HP, Sony and now, Amazon. Earlier today, the latter announced that it was entering the world of digital music locker services with a bang, introducing services dubbed Cloud Drive and Cloud Player that basically let you store your digital music - and more - in the cloud and stream it from browsers on any computer as well as from Android phones.
Mark Cuban And Kevin O'Leary Invest In Online Toy Rental Service Toygaroo
Mar 29, 10:14AM
Just in case you missed it: Mark Cuban's most recent investment took place in what is a fairly unusual setting for early-stage startup seed funding -- a shark tank. That's right, the controversial billionaire and media mogul was a recent guest shark on ABC reality show "Shark Tank", in which 5 business moguls listen to entrepreneurs pitch their companies and decide whether or not to devour them like so many sardines. Great premise. (I'm also pretty sure ABC lifted the show's name from Ron Conway's boardroom, but I haven't confirmed that yet.) In the most recent Shark Tank-isode, co-founder and chief executive of Toygaroo, Nikki Pope, pitched her startup to the panel of honchos, hoping for big-time investment. Toygaroo, the self-labeled "Netflix for toys", is an online toy rental service in which parents can sign up for and choose a "wish list" of toys that are then sent to their home, played with by their kids, before being returned to Toygaroo via a FedEx box. Before you start shuddering, the toys are, of course, cleaned and sanitized before being shipped.
StockTwits Continues To Expand, Steals VP David Putnam From Yahoo Finance
Mar 29, 8:12AM
StockTwits, a realtime platform for stock traders to share information, has been undergoing a rapid growth spurt of late. According to Quantcast, 465,000 people are now visiting the site per month, which means the company has more than doubled its visitors since early December, when less than 200,000 were checking in to share and trade. This seems largely due to the service's continuing evolution beyond its TweetDeck roots and creation of its own true investor ecosystem chalk full of video, news and charts -- all enabled by an AIR app. What's more, the company announced in December that Yahoo would begin pulling data from the StockTwits API and adding it to individual stock pages, complementing the similar deals it had already forged with CNN, MarketWatch, and Bloomberg. And now it seems that, while Yahoo is pulling data from its API, StockTwits has been busy pulling senior executives from Yahoo's staff. (I guess turnabout is fair play?) In yet another victory for a company not named Yahoo, David Putnam, who for the past five years has been responsible for global product strategy and management at Yahoo, announced on his blog today that he will be joining StockTwits on April 1 as VP of Product. 
Acer Releases Dual-Screen Iconia "Touchbook"
Mar 29, 7:22AM
It is rare to find a device that is both baffling and compelling. We've been talking about the Acer Iconia for a while now and this dual-screened tablet or "Touchbook" is now available and shipping in the US next month. It runs a Core i5 chip, Windows 7, and has two 14-inch screens made of high-strength Gorilla Glass that allow for typing, multi-touch, and gestures.
Is This The Greatest VC Pitch Prank Ever Pulled?
Mar 29, 6:59AM
ust like that fake Color.xxx slide deck, this fake VC pitch video has been making the rounds across Silicon Valley lately, portraying the saga of a probably fake Rachel Sequoia (heh) and her fake startup "Share The Air." As I just finished doing an Ignite talk, the whole bullshit for five minutes thing really hits home with me, but especially the part where the actress playing Sequoia asks an audience presumably filled with VCs for 500K to support her service, which includes an ancillary app where you can use Google Maps to check into places where you've breathed. Yes, breathed.
Amazon Cloud Player Doesn't Work On iOS — But It's Not A Flash Issue
Mar 29, 5:36AM
As you may have read by now, earlier tonight, Amazon dropped a bomb on their rivals in the online music space: a fully working cloud storage and playback system. And it's not just working on desktop web browsers, it works on Android devices too. One important place it doesn't work though: iPhones, iPads, iPod touches — no iOS devices. At first, you might think this is a Flash issue (Apple's devices famously do not support Flash). But it's not. I don't have Flash installed on my MacBook Air and the Cloud Player works fine (as does it when you disable Flash in Chrome). Flash is needed to upload files to Cloud Drive, but not for playback. So that's not the issue.
Amazon Beats Apple And Google To Cloud-Based Music Storage/Streaming
Mar 29, 4:37AM
Well, the rumors were true. Not only is Amazon entering the "music locker" space, they're doing it before both Google and Apple — as their "Cloud Drive" and "Cloud Player" have just gone live on their site tonight. Cloud Drive is the name Amazon is giving to its media storage space on their servers. They give you 5 GB of storage for free and allow you to access the media from any computer. Cloud Player is the name of yes, the actual player. And it comes in two flavors: a player for the web, and one for Android devices. You'll note an absence of an iOS player...
PrepMe's Coursification Offers A Personalized Online Learning Platform
Mar 29, 3:30AM
Online test prep company PrepMe is taking on the likes of online course platform Blackboard with the launch of Coursification, a web-based application for personalized online learning courses. What differentiates Coursification from other course management and online learning platforms is that it helps teachers offer a tailored, personalized curriculum to each student based on their performance and learning schedule. Each online course begins with a diagnostic assessment that identifies student learning gaps (specialized to the subject). After the diagnostic test, each student receives a personalized study schedule, which the teacher can simply import into the platform. The schedule is customized based on student proficiencies and the duration of the course. 
"Crazy Bob" Gets A Big Promotion: Square's First CTO
Mar 29, 2:26AM
It was just about a year ago that we wrote about Square nabbing engineer Bob Lee. As we noted at the time, the man affectionately known on Twitter and elsewhere as "Crazy Bob" was quite the catch — he had been leading the core library development of Android while at Google. But he clearly saw an even bigger opportunity with the mobile payment startup. And on Friday that vision was repaid as Lee was promoted to be the company's first Chief Technology Officer. Lee was originally brought on board to lead the development of the at the time still-in-the-works Android app. That app came in May of last year, alongside the iPhone version going live in the App Store. Communications Director Kay Luo also tells us that he's been helping a lot with recruitment, hiring, server and API design, product design, security, business relations, and marketing. Now Lee will oversee all the technology that the company is working on.
TC Cribs: From Frenchmen To Randy Raccoons, An Inside Look At Seesmic
Mar 29, 2:01AM
We're back with a new episode of TC Cribs, the show that takes you inside the hopping offices of tech startups. This week we check out Seesmic, the multi-protocol client that lets you monitor your Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and many other accounts from one place (they offer a nice web app and native mobile apps as well). And they have a thing for raccoons, as you'll see in the video above. Tune in for our full walkthrough of the office, led by Seesmic CEO Loic Le Meur. Oh, and if you want to watch Loic's full description of Seesmic (which ran a bit long), you can watch it right here. As usual, credit to Ashley Pagán and John Murillo for the camera work, and to Mr. Murillo for the great editing. Here are the past episodes of TC Cribs:
Minno Hopes There's A Place In This World For A Small, Simple E-Wallet
Mar 29, 1:43AM
We're entering another round of testing in the paywall/microtransactions world, but it doesn't look to be turning out any better than the last one. I argued that until payment methods are improved, everyone is just whistling in the dark, but that hasn't stopped the NY Times from taking another shot at it, and The Daily from trying a whole new format. The necessary precursor to any of these schemes, however, is a simple, easy, and generally agreed-upon payment system — an e-wallet. Minno seems to feel this is true as well, and are hard at work making a payment tool they feel is as simple and powerful as cash, without the political and regulatory trappings of bank-related NFC schemes or credit card tie-ins. It's simple, all right, but is it powerful enough?
Stealth Payment Startup Stripe Backed By PayPal Founders
Mar 29, 1:08AM
There isn't much information out there about Stripe, a new payments startup cofounded by brothers Patrick Collison and John Collison (last seen selling their startup Auctomatic to Live Current Media for $5 million). It's an online business to business and business to consumer payments provider, we've confirmed. "How is it different than PayPal or Google Checkout?" I asked someone who's seen the product. Their answer - "It doesn't suck." 
WITN: Jakarta? No, She Came Back Of Her Own Accord [TCTV]
Mar 29, 12:57AM
Hurrah! After a short hiatus while Sarah travelled around Indonesia at the behest of the State Department, Why Is This News is back! And what better way to mark our triumphant return to your screens than with a whole show dedicated to Indonesia, and specifically the curious lack of a brain drain from the country to the US. Apparently Indonesian students are so keen to return home after studying in the US that they're one of the few nationalities to which the government is glad to issue visas. "They just never overstay," one US official told Sarah. So is Indonesians' loyalty to home a good or bad thing for the country? Video below...
Passion Capital Emerges In London With $60 million To Seed Startups
Mar 28, 10:29PM
A new early stage investment firm is de-cloaking in London today. Three prominent Angel investors on the tech scene in London - Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero - have been operating out of their White Bear Yard base in Clerkenwell for just under a year. Rumours circulated that they were looking to raise a real fund to continue their work, and now the news is about to break (ok, now it's broken). Passion Capital (@passioncapital)is a brand new fund aimed squarely at early stage tech startups and has closed its first investment at £37.5 million ($60 million). They anticipate making about 50 investments, where the average investment size is likely to be £150k-£200k at a time. But they say they will go as small as £15k-£50k and also "most certainly higher" than £200k depending on the situation. They are being pretty open. Here's their investment strategy and they've even published their term sheet. This first fund for Passion comprises significant funding from the private sector, family funds and high net-worth individuals. In addition the UK Government has also invested £25 million via the the tenth Enterprise Capital Fund (ECF).
Video Advertising Company Adap.tv Raises $20 Million
Mar 28, 10:18PM
Video advertising company Adap.tv has raised $20 million in funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with Gemini Israel Funds, Redpoint Ventures and Spark Capital also participating in the round. This brings Adap.tv's total funding to $43 million. Adapt.tv's ad platform allows advertisers to buy and manage online video ad inventory from a single interface and enables publishers to monetize their online video content. Advertisers can run campaigns across all publishers, ad networks and the Adap.tv Marketplace. The Adap.tv Marketplace connects publishers and brand name advertisers, with over 4,200 sites selling inventory and hundreds of campaigns running daily. 
SimpleGeo Launching 'Storage': A Distributed Hosted Database For Location Data
Mar 28, 10:00PM
The story of SimpleGeo is a familiar one: two founders — Matt Galligan and Joe Stump — set off to create location-based games, only to find that the tools they wanted to use to build their apps didn't exist yet. So they switched gears and decided to build what they wished they had: a suite of tools optimized for the creation of location-based services (which was probably a good call given the explosion of location-aware mobile devices). The startup launched almost exactly one year ago, and now offers products including 'Places' (a database of POIs) and 'Context', which lets developers query for data relevant to a given location, like the local weather. And now, they're ready for what Galligan calls the company's "grand unveiling", explaining that it's what they've been focused on for the last year: SimpleGeo Storage, which will be going live tomorrow.
Twitter Piggybacks On Lady Gaga's Birthday To Announce 24 New Hires
Mar 28, 9:37PM
Jack Dorsey isn't the only one announcing a new role at Twitter ... Twitter HR Manager Cheryl Palarca tweeted that the company has hired another batch of people today, "in honor of Lady Gaga's birthday." For those of you that got excited (myself included), that Gaga thing is a joke, even though the popstar did recently visit the company and today is indeed her 25th birthday. The actual number of hires is also 24 not 25, which bumps the total Twitter staff up to 450 people, Twitter PR rep Carolyn Penner tells me. So Twitter basically just hired 5% of the company. 
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