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Apr 04, 12:56PM
Insight Venture Partners, the NYC-based investment firm that has backed companies like
Twitter,
Chegg,
Flipboard and
HauteLook, this morning announced the closing of two new funds with a combined
$2 billion in commitments. One fund, Insight Venture Partners VII, has received approximately $1.5 billion of institutional commitments and roughly $70 million of additional affiliate and friend commitments. Insight Venture Partners Coinvestment Fund II, which the firm explains was established for co-investments in larger deals, received $450 million in commitments.
Apr 04, 12:22PM
Business software maker
Epicor this morning
announced that it has agreed to be acquired by private equity firm
Apax Partners. The transaction is valued at approximately $976 million. In a separate announcement, Apax said it will also
acquire Activant Solutions, a provider of business management software solutions that was controlled by investment funds affiliated with Hellman & Friedman, Thoma Bravo and JMI Equity. The combined transaction is valued at approximately
$2 billion.
Apr 04, 11:28AM
Visible Measures, the third-party media measurement firm for online video advertisers and publishers, today
debuted a new video ad network dubbed
Viewable Media, and separately announced that it has hired video advertising industry veteran Steven T.A. Carter to become general manager of the new business unit. Viewable Media enables advertisers to purchase user-initiated views in social video, which Visible Measures says makes it the only video ad network with the capability to both drive and measure such views and
'Earned Media'. The idea is to let advertisers target audiences that actually choose to watch and share their video ads, as opposed to delivering pre-roll advertising units and whatnot.
Apr 04, 10:09AM
U.S. President's Barack Obama's
re-election campaign just been
kicked off, and it -
again - makes clever use of
Facebook as a tool for spreading the word and amass supporters. When you connect to your Facebook account on the campaign website, an interactive banner will appear on the top of the website that shows you which of your friends aren't "in" yet, profile pictures included. You're invited to put post a message to your friends' walls to prompt them to join the
'Are You In?' application.
Apr 04, 9:53AM
Online pawn broker
Borro has raised £7.5m in a round led by
Augmentum Capital, the growth capital fund launched by Tim Levene and Richard Mathews. Existing investors
Eden Ventures and Rockridge Investments have also participated, while the new investment will be used by Borro to "aggressively drive new customer acquisition" and raise awareness of the company's offering. The company is also backed by The European Founders Fund.
Apr 04, 3:20AM
(Editor's note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go
here and
here.) On May 26, 2009 Mike
sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company at about $10 billion. The camera-work is Blair-Witch-Project-like at best. You can barely hear the audio, and Zuckerberg can't for the life of him figure out whether to look at the camera or Mike. It doesn't really matter because, just after he asks, Mike proceeds to cut off half his face anyway. But shoddy production aside, this may have been one of the most pivotal moments TechCrunch has ever captured on camera. We didn't know it at the time, but this was something more than an unexpected investment by an unheard of investor in a seemingly overhyped social network. It was a moment we'd been waiting for for more than a decade. Something we'd been obsessing about. It was the moment when a Web startup fundamentally broke all the normal rules of gravity that govern all Web startups. It was the moment that would eventually spawn a new, unchartered frenzy of late stage dealmaking. In my opinion, it was nothing short of the Web 2.0 generation's answer to "the Netscape moment."
Apr 04, 3:01AM
"Tish Whitcraft recently joined MySpace as SVP of Customer Care responsible for delivering a world-class user experience to the 250 million + MySpace users," the
company said in mid 2008 when
Whitcraft, a seasoned big company executive, joined the team. Now, three years later Whitcraft joins countless other MySpace execs, and about
190 million of those 250 million users, and leaves. She's joining
Tagged, a social network that has somehow survived, and
even thrived, in a Facebook world. Her first day at Tagged as Chief Customer Officer is on Monday morning. Part of her job will be what CEO
Greg Tseng is calling "onshoring" of a bunch of customer service jobs. Fifty customer service reps working with Tagged in India as contractors will be let go, and the company will be replacing them with new full time employee hires in San Francisco.
Apr 03, 7:30PM
Last week, Amazon
launched its Cloud Drive, with an emphasis on music storage. While there have been a number of "jukebox" services these last 10 years (Napster 2.0, MusicNow, Virgin Digital, Yahoo Music Unlimited, MTV Urge, MOG, Spotify, Thumbplay, Rdio), relatively few "locker" offerings have emerged—although rumors of new locker services from Apple and Google sound promising. Last week, Amazon leapt ahead of both rivals in launching
Cloud Drive, a service that allows you to stream, for free, any songs purchased from Amazon. For Amazon, it makes sense to pursue a locker service: they've perfected cloud-based content storage and delivery for thousands of web-based startups with Amazon Web Services (AWS). Amazon Web Services (AWS) already provides hosting and data transfer. What's interesting, however, is that the consumer-facing Cloud Drive is actually
cheaper than its existing business-facing offering.
Apr 03, 6:53PM
In case you haven't already received the ominous sounding email, data held by email marketing firm Epsilon was compromised earlier this week -- the hack apparently executed by one person. The breach, which keeps broadening in scope as more companies inform their customers, has thus far
affected these top brands: TiVo, Walgreens, US Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, Disney, Citi, Home Shopping Network, McKinsey & Company, Ritz-Carlton Rewards, Marriott Rewards, New York & Company, Brookstone, and The College Board. The notification emails each brand has been sending their customers is some version of the below.
We have been informed by Epsilon, the vendor that sends email to you on our behalf, that your e-mail address may have been exposed by unauthorized entry into their system. 
Apr 03, 6:30PM
So AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile and some are screaming it will reduce competition and hurt the consumer. Sprint is now going to court to try and stop the merger. I am in the mobile communications industry and, to be honest, I couldn't care less. This isn't going to affect the companies pushing the real growth and innovation and it's not going to affect the consumer. The consumer has plenty of options that have nothing to do with carriers and that list is growing daily. For the legal fees it will take for these two giants to merge, ten new startups could be funded. The companies creating new business models for mobile communications are iterating out of sight of the big carriers, away from calling plans, contracts and traditional views of how people communicate. The Internet and the emergence of a robust mobile application layer have changed things forever. 
Apr 03, 5:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — plus an active set of realtime commenters on Building 43's realtime Friendfeed chat, added up to an interesting tour of the emerging AirPlay platform. The Apple TV-delivered streaming service hooks content from iTunes and iOS devices up to the big HDTV screen. According to @Scobleizer AirPlay support is growing from other similar services including Hulu et al via something called Sqrrl. With Google TV ineffectual in delivering content from major studios so far, Apple TV's low price keeps getting lower as new services are integrated. In cartel news, Time Warner continues to put pressure on the studios to treat the tablet as a first class citizen. The cable company did pull back from a few networks, most notably Comedy Central and DIscovery. Apparently the Viacom suit still has some teeth left in it with YouTube, as @kevinmarks mentions, encouraging transformers like the cable companies to be careful how they approach the home set. The studios have one more shot with those of us who've finally finished the MadMen season 4; creator Matthew Weiner has finally signed a deal to produce at least two and preferably 3 final seasons. Season 5 will return in March, 2012, leaving a whole year to get bored with and abandon network fare. There's a new sheriff in town as the disruption known as the iPad continues to move through the media.
Apr 03, 4:30PM
It's been a month since we introduced Facebook Comments round these parts, time enough to have given it some serious consideration. And my conclusions are as follows: ...are you kidding me? This is the best a $75 billion company could come up with? Isn't Facebook supposed to be the new home of software's best and brightest? Is this some kind of elaborate practical joke? The whole point of a comment is to make new information or a new opinion available. Good luck with that. As far as I can tell you cannot deep link to Facebook comments, and searching through them is at best a pain and can verge on outright impossible. A memorable comment on my last post included the phrase "I've been inside the sarcophagus at Chernobyl": when I mentioned this on my Twitter feed, I was deluged by "couldn't-find-it" replies, because it takes three clicks to find that sentence… and there is no way to make that comment more visible.
Apr 03, 2:00PM
Over the last five years, I have taught more than 300 really smart students. One of the smartest, at the Masters of Engineering Management at Duke University, was Viva Leigh Miller, a black woman. She had the ambition of moving to Silicon Valley after she graduated last year. I expected she would become a hotshot CEO. But Viva couldn't get a job in the Valley—despite introductions that I gave her to leading venture capitalists. I have never understood why. During my tech days, I would have hired Viva in a heartbeat. She had the determination, drive, and education that all tech companies look for. It raised a red flag in my mind. You can't take one anecdote and extrapolate from that. It could just be that Viva didn't connect with the right companies at the right time. But the harsh reality is that there is a dearth of women in tech. Just look around Silicon Valley—you don't see many blacks there, or Hispanics either. Until recently, I didn't know of even one black woman CEO (though I had heard a rumor that one or two existed). Yes, I know that few women and members of ethnic minorities study engineering; that some women can't deal with the stress and just want to raise children; and that this is not Mike Arrington's fault. It is noteworthy that blacks and Hispanics constitute only 1.5% and 4.7% respectively of the Valley's tech population—well below national tech-population averages of 7.1% and 5.3%.
Apr 03, 1:15AM
The lads here, mostly Devin and Matt, were talking about Everyday Carry, a website dedicated to the things we carry in our bags, pockets, and purses. Most of the EDC gear looks pretty heavy-duty - many EDCs include guns and long stickin' knives for, you know, those times when you need to stick stuff (Merlin Mann's is particularly interesting, for example) - and from the looks of the site it seems lots of people have totemic items, items of power that they carry to get things done. You've got Leathermen and diving watches. Little Moleskine notebooks. Pocket cameras and Space Pens. 
Apr 02, 10:44PM
Exclusive - No, Conduit was not acquired for a billion dollars or more by Google or Microsoft ... yet (although one executive suggested to me in a phone call this week that the company should, in fact, be worth about half of Facebook's valuation on the private market - meaning about $35 billion at present day - because they reach about half of the social network's audience). We'll see about that. Either way, what's really happening, according to solid sources close to the company, Conduit is in fact acquiring another Israeli startup in the Web app publishing and distribution space, namely Wibiya, and they added that the deal could close as early as next Monday or Tuesday. 
Apr 02, 10:03PM
Somewhere between yesterday afternoon and last night, Instagram hit 3 million users after only six months of existence. To put that into perspective, that's like 1% of the population of the US using a service that currently only fully exists on a iPhone. Instagram's explosive growth has made them the current go-to success story for pivoting and unleashed a torrent of buzz around the white hot photo-sharing space. But founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger don't think of the service as just a simple way to share images, but as more of mechanism for users to tell stories and discover the world around them, a "new entertainment platform" the co-founders told me in an interview for TCTV yesterday.
Apr 02, 9:49PM
Well, maybe not "save" WrestleMania, but help ensure it does better than last year's edition, WrestleMania 26, which, at well under one million pay-per-view buys worldwide, was considered a bit of a disappointment. What's different this year is WWE's use of social media—that is to say they're actually using it this time around. But even if this year's edition, WrestleMania 27, which airs from Atlanta tomorrow on pay-per-view, does better than last year's, how much of that can be attributed to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and how much of that can be attributed to the return of The Rock? Serious business, etc.
Apr 02, 7:48PM
When Christopher Poole (aka Moot) was 15 years old, he founded the 4chan image board on an IRC channel with 20 people. Today, the site attracts about 12 million people a month and is the font of many of the Internet's most pervasive memes, from Lolcats to Rickrolling. Moot doesn't like to do video interviews, but after much pestering, Chris Dixon got him to come on Founder Stories for a rare video appearance. We'll be running the entire conversation throughout the week, including a sneak peek at what he's doing with his latest startup, Canvas. (Disclosure: Dixon is also an investor in Canvas through Founder Collective) . In this first part, Moot explains the origins of 4Chan in the video above. Both the idea and software was borrowed from a Japanese site called Futaba channel, but 4chan took on a life of its own—a completely anonymous site where community members felt free to express themselves in all sorts of ways. One of the unique characteristics of the site is that there are no archives. The most popular images, gifs, and comments bubble up to the top, and cascade through the site like a waterfall. Every so often, a meme will develop on the site and be picked up elsewhere. In the video below, Moot talks about the evolution of memes, how they start as one thing and change over time. 
Apr 02, 5:33PM
This weekend we have a jam for the ladies (and the fashion forward men.) Tumi would like to offer you this handsome $445 suitcase tagged by some guy named Crash. I didn't dig too deeply into this one but I assume someone out there a) likes Tumi and b) likes stuff like this, so here you go.
Apr 02, 5:26PM
Imagine you are a pro-democracy protester on the streets of a repressive government. You've got your cellphone and you are messaging your friends. In the crowd near you, the police start making arrests. Fearing the government will confiscate your phone and investigate your contacts, you push a "panic button" on your phone. It deletes the contacts in your address book and sends out an alert. Such an app wasn't readily available so the U.S. State Department, acting as a venture capitalist, decided to build one. The State Department tells TechCrunch government funded work is underway to build an Android version of this "panic button" app. No release date has been set. Another version designed to work on low-cost Nokia phones, more common in the developing world, is being considered. No iPhone app is planned for now.
Apr 02, 2:14PM
Color Labs is assumed to be the newest combatant in the photo-sharing wars. Many people ripped its floppy launch, interface, crashes, and some are feeling creepy about the Chatroulette aspect. Then there was the backlash to the backlash, where believers applauded the vision, risk-taking, and promise of mining meta-data from phones. Even with the latest update pushed out last night to address some of the initial product's shortcomings, Color remains the most polarizing Silicon Valley startup since Quora's rise and, appropriately enough, folks at Color have been answering questions on the company's Quora topic page. The source of the furor varies from the amount of money raised ($41m) to the team size (27) to the buggy app (despite updates). A good chunk of the backlash is because users perceive it as a photo-sharing service. But, what if Color is more than a photo-sharing service? Color Labs is on the record stating they are more of a data mining company with technology that, operating in concert on the phone, can paint a detailed mosaic of our mobility. Its patent-pending technologies are said to able to place users in proximity to others based on sounds and images, can capture the angle at which we hold our phones, how fast we move them in gestures, and how bright the environment is. And when users actually have the camera open, that's when the real show begins, tagging images, setting context, and opening the type of world Christopher Nolan conceived of in The Dark Knight, when Lucius Fox and Bruce Wayne use cell phone triangulation to create a digital reflection of the real world.
Apr 02, 6:29AM
Noisetoys, the creators of music discovery and promotion app Hitmaker have come out with another hit this week. In the same app-discover space as Explor and Chomp, Apptidude is an iPhone app that shows you the iPhone apps that your friends have most likely downloaded, all based on their posts and Likes on Facebook. "Quitely" launching in the app store this week, the app recommendation app is currently number 29 in the top free apps, most likely because it incorporates social elements and Facebook Connect as a way of gaging what's actually hot in the almost anti-social Apple app store, whose Top 25 lists leave much to be desired.
Apr 02, 6:19AM
comScore's February mobile report was released today, and it looks like good news for Google. Android increased its lead as the top mobile platform, growing 7 percentage points since November, and strengthening its top position with 33 percent market share. Following behind Android is RIM, ranked second with 28.9 percent market share, and Apple with 25.2 percent. Microsoft and Palm rounded out the top five, with 7.7 percent and 2.8 percent, respectively. In the big picture, the mobile numbers continue to impress. Over the last three months, an average of 234 million Americans (13 and older) used mobile devices. That's 75 percent of the population. Nearly 67 million of those mobile users were employing smartphones, representing a 13 percent rise from November. Smartphone usage only continues to grow, as you will remember that comScore's November report showed smartphone usage growing by 10 percent since the summer of '10.
Apr 02, 12:45AM
Bye bye 69 symbol! Valley media darling/scapegoat Color has updated its iPhone App to 1.0.2 to address certain um, user interface issues. Color's launch caused a big splash in the Valley a couple weeks ago, due to what some people viewed as an unfairly allotted and foolish $41 million in funding as well as problems with the usability of the actual app -- Namely that it didn't work if other people weren't nearby. Color co-founder Peter Pham tells me the latest update was "crowd-sourced" as in Color listened to user feedback. Already it looks like the largest user complaints have been addressed, at least cursorily. 
Apr 02, 12:22AM
WWDC. It's like Christmas for OS X and iOS developers. Each year, they flock to San Francisco's Moscone Center, anxiously awaiting the pair of gifts that Apple annually bestows: the new iPhone, and a bundle of new features on which they'll build their next big thing. If whispers and hearsay hold true, this year's WWDC will only feature the latter; the iPhone 5, says the rumor mill, won't be showing its face until Fall. Instead, this show is purportedly going to be all about iOS and OS X. While Apple doesn't come right out and say it, it's pretty safe to assume that by "iOS" they mean "iOS 5". Given that we're writing about iOS on a regular basis and talking about it with readers and friends even more, we've got a pretty finely-tuned wishlist for iOS 5. We also happen to know that a heaping handful of Apple folk read TechCrunch regularly — and with the feature lock stage of iOS 5's development cycle (wherein they absolutely refuse to add anything new and just focus on what they've already started) presumably riiiight around the corner, we figured there was no better time than now to put it out there.
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