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Big Buy: IAC's Match.com Wants To Acquire European Online Dating Site Meetic
May 30, 3:29PM
IAC-owned Match.com has set its sights on Europe's largest dating site, Meetic.com. Match Match.com has put in a public tender offer to acquire all of the outstanding shares of Meetic for €15.00 per outstanding share in cash (that's $21.42 in U.S. dollars). That's a 11.6 percent increase in value from the closing price of Meetic shares on May 27, 2011 (€13.44) and values the company at nearly $500 million. Match.com actually already owns approximately 27% of the outstanding shares of Meetic, which it obtained when it combined its European businesses with Meetic in 2009. Back then, IAC sold 100 percent of the stock of Match Europe – the entity that houses Match.com's European operations – for an approximate 27 percent stake in Meetic, plus a 5 million euro note. 
The Unconquered Nation, Crippled By Bureaucrats
May 30, 2:51PM
Seems like it's Sub-Saharan Month around here: first Sarah Lacy went to Nigeria, and now here I am in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital and Africa's fourth-largest city. It feels like a boomtown. There are cranes and construction sites everywhere, throwing up gleaming new glass-and-steel buildings full of shops selling computers and mobile phones. The major thoroughfares throng with people making, trading, repairing, unloading, selling, and generally hustling. Don't get me wrong: this is still a poor country. Electrical outages are regular occurrences, the taxis that patrol the city's broad avenues are rusting Ladas, and the side streets are harrowed dirt strewn with garbage, lined with tin shacks, and patrolled by beggars and feral dogs. But I've only seen occasional pockets of the poisonous stagnation I've found so often elsewhere south of the Sahara. This feels like a place where things happen. It's a city and culture that could be on the cusp of a genuine transformation, catalyzed by technology—were it not for a single, gigantic roadblock: its own government.
My Job As A Pre-Launch Startup CEO Was To Buy Sandwiches
May 30, 1:57PM
Seth Sternberg is the CEO and Co-founder of Meebo. He previously worked in M&A at IBM. I love talking to aspiring entrepreneurs—I do it once a week at minimum. I often get asked "what's the role of a startup CEO?" Sometimes people are curious about the pre-launch "CEO" and ask if a startup really needs one. If that CEO isn't an engineer, what do they do anyhow? Other times people wonder what I do today as CEO of a 180 person company. In this post I'll cover the pre-launch role, and in a follow-up, I'll get into the role post-launch. So what does the CEO, who at the beginning is really the general business person, do at a pre-launch startup? Let's go back to the beginning of Meebo, circa April, 2005.
Breakfast with Butcher in Berlin – Come meet TechCrunch Europe
May 30, 9:57AM
Ever since my first TechCrunch meetup in Berlin in 2008 and 2009 I've been keeping a watchful eye on this city as I travelled around Europe covering startups and explaining the scene to anyone who would listen. But since then it's quite clear that a couple of things have happened. The whole European scene has improved massively. There are now startup events, activity and fundraising across Europe in an ongoing manner. Sure, it's not Silicon Valley (I'm sorry, but who cares?) - in fact we should really be comparing ourselves to our own progress, not to other places. And the news is good. The 'Valley Virus' has spread, and Europe is now starting to boast some amazing startups. 
The Roundabout Tapes – Frameblast aims to be the Google for TV and video archives (TCTV)
May 30, 9:17AM
Continuing our series of interviews with companies in the "Silicon Roundabout" area of London (we're calling this The Roundabout Tapes), we interviewed Clearer Partners. Clearer is a specialised tech/media consulting company but is also doing a startup. The soon to launch Frameblast is aimed at SOHO companies who want to handle video in a smarter way along the lines of Media Silo. Companies can upload their archives into the cloud and use it like a Google search engine for their archive, with tags galore. 
Rosebud
May 30, 2:22AM
The other day we were in Las Vegas, in a hotel that like all of Vegas stank of cigarettes and losers, which by definition included us for being there. We sat at a sushi restaurant, or what started with sushi and ended with samba — three kitchens with little crossover from latin to salmon. And so we sailed across the generations, talking music and the history of salesforce, and arriving at the movies. And in particular Citizen Kane. Orson Welles' defining moment, the intersection of melodrama and politics, of the end of the age of controlled media and the dawn of what we now call social media. The story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for Hearst who started wars when there was a dearth of headlines. We saw him in a fake newsreel standing on a balcony with Hitler, saw the arc of his life at the center of the Golden Age where Washington and Hollywood were two sides of the same coin. And as we were swept along in the daring pop media that the film invented, we became a generation of one. 
Users Say They're More Likely To Buy If A Business Answers Their Question On Twitter
May 29, 10:45PM
Currently I am not in Cancun. The reason I am not in Cancun is out of my control (an over three hour Virgin delay on the tarmac at JFK caused me to miss my connecting USAirways flight at SFO). I spent a good part of those three plus plane-trapped hours bitching on Twitter, asking both the @VirginAmerica and @USAirways Twitter accounts for guidance, because calling their respective 800 numbers either put me on hold or wouldn't go through.
Flashback: Two Years Ago, Twitter Killed A Feature — The One They Just Added Back
May 29, 9:38PM
This past Thursday, Twitter rolled out a new small feature that garnered quite a bit of positive buzz. Essentially, they now allow you to see what other users see when they look at Twitter. In other words, if you click on the "Following" area in my profile, you can see the main tweet stream that I see with all the (public) tweets from people I follow. Very cool. But it's actually not new at all. In fact, Twitter had this feature in place two years ago. We mentioned this in passing in the post, but then I was directed to the blog post explaining why they removed it in June of 2009. It's pretty interesting. From the post on June 4, 2009 on their Twitter Status blog:
Netflix For Pandas
May 29, 9:17PM
This guest post was written by Ethan Kurzweil. Kurzweil is a Vice President with Bessemer Venture Partners in Menlo Park, California. He works with Internet companies of all types, including Playdom, Zoosk, Crowdflower, Twilio, adap.tv, Reputation.com, Skybox Imaging, and OpenCandy. You can find him on twitter at @ethankurz. The views expressed in this post are his own, and do not represent those of Bessemer. Hardly a day goes by anymore when I don't hear about a reportedly "radical, new" business concept summarized succinctly as "X" (some well-known existing business) for "Y" (some specific market segment, use case, or other qualifier). These descriptors range from the logical – "Groupons for Moms" (okay, clear enough) – to the absurd – "Pandora for Cloud" (huh?). Often, I don't even understand the analogy, as it's so obscure, or I have never even heard of the company being compared. Sure, these monikers may satisfy our need for efficiency and brevity, but I'm convinced that in the long-run, we need to expand our collective attention spans just long enough to really describe what our businesses do. Otherwise, we run the risk of setting a model for entrepreneurship that's entirely devoid of creativity and true innovation. 
(Founder Stories) Quora's Charlie Cheever On Building A Disruptive Knowledge Platform
May 29, 3:00PM
Last week at Disrupt, Chris Dixon did a version of Founder Stories onstage with Quora founder Charlie Cheever. We learned that Quora is not looking to sell, but we also learned a lot more. For instance, what convinced Cheever to quit Facebook with co-founder Adam D'Angelo was that tried to "imagine a world where I knew everything that I wanted to know, as long as someone else in the world knew it." And that's what Quora wants to build. It's a pretty outrageous goal, which is what makes the startup so interesting.
Infinity Ventures Summit In Sapporo: Demos From 14 Japanese Startups
May 29, 11:46AM
Earlier this week, I took part in Infinity Ventures Summit (IVS) Spring 2011 in Sapporo [this and many of the following links are in Japanese], a two-day, invitation-only event that takes place twice a year in Japan. IVS attracted over 400 people from the domestic and international web industry this time and is organized by VC firm Infinity Venture Partners (which just raised US$41 million for their IVP Fund II). Apart from panel discussions and presentations, some hours of the program gave a total of 14 Japanese start-ups the chance to present their services onstage. Here's a rundown of all companies that participated at the IVS launchpad this time.
Unbound Launches Its Kickstarter-Byliner Hybrid For Celebrity Authors
May 29, 10:17AM
Thanks to Kickstarter, the idea of crowd-funding a creative project is nothing new. Post- Cory Doctorow, the notion that an established author might convince his fans to pay upfront for a special edition of an as-yet unpublished book is hardly earth-shattering. And, following the launch of Byliner, even the launch of a digital-only publishing house isn't really news. And yet, by combining all of the best elements of those three examples, UK-based Unbound hopes to create something very remarkable indeed.
Greylock Partners Launches $160 Million Tech Fund For Europe And Israel
May 29, 7:14AM
Well known US VC house Greylock Partners is launching a brand new $160 million fund aimed at internet technology companies, with the fund being deployed between Europe and Israel. Greylock is best known for its stakes in Facebook, Groupon and LinkedIn and European investments including Wonga. Greylock's move will be a shot in the arm for European tech companies looking for more options when raising financing. We understand the fund will be run from London by Laurel Bowden, a Partner, and will cover investments from early stage and beyond. 
What Makes A Startup Successful? Blackbox Report Aims To Map The Startup Genome
May 29, 1:44AM
Generally speaking, the odds are stacked heavily against the average startup. The rate of failure among entrepreneurs and startups is startlingly high -- it comes with the territory. Otherwise, entrepreneurs wouldn't be pirates. But, what if there were a way to reduce that failure rate by cracking the formula of startup success? No easy feat to map the double helix of startups, but entrepreneurs are risk-takers by nature, so four of these ambitious international entrepreneurs came together to found the Startup Genome Report, a report that is part of a larger project that dives into the very anatomy of what makes Silicon Valley startups successful -- or not.
Cliqset Founder Takes On Personal Publishing And Social Conversations With Stealthy Startup Glow
May 28, 8:22PM
As we heard last fall, Cliqset, a FriendFeed like social aggregation platform, was shut down by its founders, Darren Bounds and Charlie Cauthen. Cliqset, which launched in 2009, was a high-powered social syndication and aggregation service, with the ability to post and syndicate content on Cliqset, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz and 80 other sites and networks. You can read our prior coverage of Cliqset here. As Louis Gray wrote last November, the startup was one of the first networks to implement Pubsubhubbub for real-time updates, and Salmon for cross-network comment posting. But despite these technologies, the service couldn't attract an active number of users and landed in the deadpool. It looks like Bounds is on to his next project—Glow. Bounds writes that Glow is his "personal attempt at building a social network that doesn't sacrifice simplicity, features or user-experience in an effort to promote decentralization, user privacy and data ownership." The site, which is in stealth mode for now, will combine personal publishing ans social conversation.
(Founder Stories) Gilt's Kevin Ryan—It Is All In The Presentation (TCTV)
May 28, 8:21PM
Chris Dixon wraps his Founder Stories interview with Gilt Groupe's CEO and Founder, Kevin Ryan by discussing the early sales strategy of Gilt - a strategy that was designed to build customer and brand loyalty, but not the bottom line, at least initially. Revisiting the launch period around four years ago, Ryan says, "we were going to make $4,000 for us on a sale and I spent $7,000 on the photo shoot, and you would say that is not a good business model, but what happened was the brands loved it, the customers loved it ... and so now we sell $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 .... on a sale."
Oren Jacob, CTO of Pixar, joins August Capital as EIR
May 28, 7:33PM
August Capital recently announced that Oren Jacob, CTO of Pixar has joined as their newest entrepreneur in residence. After a few weeks on the job, I got a chance to interview Oren and ask him how his new gig was going. In short, he has new-found respect for venture capitalists and button down shirts. Oren had no idea how many meetings back to back were in store for him and how hard it can be to put on a fresh face and high level of excitement for each pitch. However challenges like that - and a bad case of entrepreneurial itch - were exactly why he decided to leave Pixar. 
Disrupt NYC: The Final Battle (Video)
May 28, 6:00PM
After 30 startups launching on stage at Disrupt NYC, it all culminated in the final battle between six finalists: Getaround, BillGuard, Sonar, Do@, ccLoop, and InvoiceASAP. What made this final battle so fascinating to watch was not only the quality of the startups, but the quality of the judges: Fred Wilson, Ron Conway, Marisa Mayer, Roelof Botha, and Josh Kopelman. We put together the entire final battle in the embedded video player above. Each demo is a separate video, and you can skip around by hovering over the video and hitting the channel button once it starts to play. Individual videos for all of Disrupt can also be found here. And below are links to our original writeups for each company with videos showing their first demos that got them to the final round.
Gillmor Gang 5.28.11 (TCTV)
May 28, 5:00PM
This week's Gillmor Gang comes at the end of travel — to New York for TechCrunch Disrupt and Las Vegas for the Forrester Analyst Forum. Disrupt continues to gather a head of steam, with the social effects of an emerging app ecosystem now being built out across the media and the enterprise. Although it seems still to be at the early stages with Twitter heading off a second front from Bill Gross, outbidding UberWhatever to buy Tweetdeck serves mostly to define the shape of the acquisition market as a hedge against IPOdom. Although the noise has died down about the Microsoft/Skype deal, enterprise analysts are tripping over themselves to handicap Steve Ballmer's job tenure. George Colony produced a Wave chart with Apple all alone upend to the right, Salesforce.com owning the next space, and as one senior analyst put it, only imaginary companies on the horizon to compete with us. I say us because apparently there are still a few who don't know I work for Marc Benioff. And Microsoft was well down and to the left in the view Colony calls the AppInternet. What we talk about today on the Gang may have something to with all this.
Is There A Peak Age for Entrepreneurship?
May 28, 4:09PM
Editor's note: Adeo Ressi, is the founder of The Founder Institute and TheFunded.com In this guest post he argues against ageism when it comes to to entrepreneurs. Ressi is 39. The recent articles proclaiming that 25 is the peak age for entrepreneurship deserve a considered and factual response. The demographic and racial profiling that has plagued venture capital and tech entrepreneurship has a new friend—ageism. This has to stop.
What It Was Like To Launch At Disrupt NYC
May 28, 1:37PM
There are many local, regional and global startup competitions that startups can compete in. I'm a big believer in the value of these startup competitions for two big reasons—they are a great forcing function to ship your product and refine your ability to pitch your business. Even if you have no plans to raise money, you will have to pitch your business to achieve your goals. My startup (Avado) is a Patient Relationship Management platform for health and wellness providers such as doctors, physical therapists, nurse practitioners, health coaches, physician assistants and personal trainers. We decided to pursue the opportunity to compete in the TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition. Each startup competition has its own selection process. In the case of TechCrunch Disrupt, a triumvirate of Erick Schonfeld (Co-editor of TechCrunch), Heather Harde (CEO) and Michael Arrington (Founder) evaluates the companies after they have winnowed down the first list of companies. My understanding is that two out of the three of them need to greenlight a company to be a finalist. During the course of the TechCrunch Disrupt event, Michael referred a couple times to Erick Schonfeld veto'ing a company. It wasn't clear whether that was a joke or not, but he appeared to be serious.
DryerBro iPhone App Notifies You When Your Laundry's Done
May 28, 5:59AM
The people who have brought you It'sthisforthat have created another way to make your life just a little bit easier and funnier. Meet DryerBro, an app that uses an accelerometer to let you know when you're laundry's done. DryerBro allows you to put your iPhone or iTouch on your laundry machine and it will text you and the remaining members of your household when your laundry's done. I'm thinking this is going to be HUGE. I mean Facebook took off at colleges right? 
Facebook Still Has No iPad App But They're Building A Desktop Software Team?!
May 28, 5:25AM
Facebook has no iPad app. It's ridiculous. Their iPhone app is the most downloaded app in the history of apps. And third-party iPad apps (many of which aim to trick users) constantly dominate the top 10 lists for both free and paid apps. And yet, Facebook doesn't seem to care at all about the device. Because they're all about HTML5, right? Well, someone might want to tell the Seattle office that. On the jobs page for the relatively new Seattle Facebook office, one of the openings is for "Software Engineer, Desktop Software". Desktop software. Desktop. Before the damn iPad. Hey Facebook, 1986 called, they want their strategic vision back.
Disrupt Hack Baitr Skewers Viral Launch Pages
May 28, 3:48AM
While Baitr didn't win the TC Disrupt Hackathon, it did win the minds and hearts of those in attendance who had a tendency towards black humor. Baitr, a Launchrock-type viral launch page that does nothing but visualize your email falling into the abyss, isn't at all useful. But it is funny. Says creator Peter Watts, "Launchrock is good for entrepreneurialism but it's also bad [for users] because you sign up for these services, and then you never hear back from them." Watts hopes that his hack will encourage startups to do something more productive with their beta sign up page.
LinkedIn Halo Effect? Facebook Shares Surge To New High In SharesPost
May 28, 2:54AM
Facebook shares on private secondary markets like SecondMarket and SharesPost spiked briefly in March to $34 - an $85 billion valuation. But they settled down to around $31.50 after that and have mostly stayed around that level since then. But something caused the shares to surge past that old record to a solid $35 per share in this week's auction. Our guess is that newly public LinkedIn's somewhat impressive P/E ratio of 2,500 may have something to do with it. $35 per share values Facebook at roughly $87.5 billion. Which is a steal compared to the way the public markets are valuing LinkedIn.
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