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A Closer Look At The Quality Of Angel Returns Data
Jan 26, 11:00PM
Editor's note: David Teten is a partner with ff Venture Capital and founder and chairman of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York. The good news for TechCrunch readers: Every major study conducted to date has placed angel investors' internal rate of return (IRR) between 18 and 38 percent, as summarized by my Partner John Frankel and Professor Robert Wiltbank in previous TechCrunch articles. The bad news: The data on angel returns has historically been difficult to obtain, analyze, verify and, therefore, rely upon.What Games Are: Games Need Their Nielsens
Jan 26, 10:00PM
With Facebook deciding to hide monthly and daily active users, we have lost the one game platform that could give us reasonably objective data about game performance. We are back to the Dark Ages of vanity metrics as a result. This is something that needs to change.The Silicon Valley Housing Market Is Only Going To Get Crazier
Jan 26, 8:00PM
Editor's note: Glenn Kelman is the CEO of Redfin, a technology-powered real estate broker backed by Madrona Venture Group and Greylock Partners. Silicon Valley home buyers, I wish we had better news. Prices keep rising, with no end in sight. Across the 20 markets Redfin serves, only Phoenix saw more rapid price increases than the Bay Area. Over the last 12 months, San Francisco prices rose 20 percent; San Jose prices jumped 23 percent. When the market moves this fast, the appraisals required by a lender reflect last year's prices, and sellers just take all-cash deals instead -- even when another bidder with a mortgage offers more money.Netflix's House Of Cards Could Be The Best Show You Won't See On TV
Jan 26, 7:00PM
Netflix original series House of Cards makes for really good TV, even if you'll never watch the show on any broadcast or cable network. That's because Netflix cut a reported $100 million check for exclusive rights to stream the program to its subscribers. If the first two episodes are any indication, that bet should pay off handsomely.Fly Or Die: Vine
Jan 26, 7:00PM
Twitter launched Vine, the mobile iOS app that lets users create six-second looping video and share it to various social networks, just two days ago and it's been the topic of many a media conversation since. Yesterday, Vine swung to the top of social in the App Store after being featured, and many have even called the app the Instagram of video. But does Twitter's new video-sharing venture have what it takes to maintain momentum?Gillmor Gang: The 10 Percent Solution
Jan 26, 6:00PM
The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — watched in amazement as Apple's stock price tanked due to their blowout quarter and two-thirds ownership of the U.S. smartphone revenue. @scobleizer gave it a 70% chance that he would bolt the Apple Fanboy ranks by the end of February, but only a 10% chance that an unexpected breakthrough from an unexpected source would change the world by the end of 2013.Forget Virality, Selling Enterprise Software Is Still Old School
Jan 26, 4:00PM
Editor's note: Roman Stanek is CEO and founder of GoodData. Lately, in Silicon Valley and its counterparts around the world, disappointment has ruled the halls of companies that had a huge impact with consumers, but then fizzled as investments when they went public—Facebook's and Zynga's IPOs being the most notorious examples. Attention quickly moved from the consumer to the enterprise market, where Splunk, Palo Alto Networks, Workday, and LinkedIn are all humming along just fine. Entrepreneurs seeking to sell to enterprise customers should recognize that the business-to-business (B2B) market, especially with respect to IT, plays by a different set of rules than the business-to-consumer (B2C) space.CNET Now Forbidden To Review Aereo, The TV Service In Active Litigation With CBS
Jan 26, 3:35PM
John P. Falcone over at CBS-owned CNET posted a quick piece on Aereo, the TV-over-Internet startup that is giving broadcasters fits. The story, which would have been a short piece on Aereo on a Roku device, is now awash with ridiculous disclaimers and discussions of lawsuits filed against Aereo by broadcasters.America Has Hit "Peak Jobs"
Jan 26, 2:00PM
"The middle class is being hollowed out," says James Altucher. "Economists are shifting their attention toward a [...] crisis in the United States: the significant increase in income inequality," reports the New York Times. Think all those job losses over the last five years were just caused by the recession? No: "Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market," according to an AP report on how technology is killing middle-class jobs. When I was growing up in Canada, I was taught that income distribution should and did look like a bell curve, with the middle class being the bulge in the middle. Oh, how naïve my teachers were. This is how income distribution looks in America today:Anonymous Threatens Massive WikiLeaks-Style Exposure, Announced On Hacked Gov Site
Jan 26, 11:23AM
Hacktivist organization Anonymous is threatening perhaps their biggest play ever: a massive WikiLeaks-style exposure of sensitive U.S. government secrets. As proof of their power, they announced details of the plan on hacked government website, the United States Sentencing Commission (USSG.gov). Citing the recent death of free information activist Aaron Swartz, they explain, "With Aaron's death we can wait no longer. The time has come to show the United States Department of Justice and its affiliates the true meaning of infiltration."The Weekly Good: Here's How $7 Can Help Change The World
Jan 26, 6:12AM
What if just by buying a t-shirt that spreads a message for a charitable cause, you could help fund that cause? What if there was a website that highlighted a specific cause and t-shirt every week? And what if that website donated $7 from each sale to that cause? You'd have Sevenly.org, and a pretty amazing startup with the sole purpose of helping to raise both money and awareness, all with fashion, e-commerce and you of course."We Are Supposed To Be Truth Tellers"
Jan 26, 5:41AM
A couple of weeks ago CNET was put into an absurd situation – they could not favorably cover a technology product because the company behind that product was in litigation with CNET’s parent company, CBS. I wasn’t all that interested in the story at the time. Reporters and bloggers are constantly pressured to write or not write about things by parent companies and even business executives in their own companies. CBS telling CNET what it could and could not write about wasn’t anything I haven’t seen before. I understand why CBS was trying to control messaging about a company that they were suing, although they certainly weren’t very smart about how they handled it. The Streisand Effect kicked in and not only did the product end up getting tons of extra positive press, but both CBS and CNET looked like idiots. Still, big companies do stupid things all the time. It’s a big part of why small startups are often so successful at disrupting them. What I don’t get is why CNET staffers have stuck around. They’re the ones who are supposed to be journalists and all that entails. They’re the ones I blame right now. I blame them because they’re the only reason CBS is able to get away with this. Every single journalist at CNET should have resigned by now. More than once at TechCrunch we made AOL extremely uncomfortable with things that we wrote. But they never ordered us to write or not write about something because they understood that not only would we not comply, we’d write a post about the whole thing. Our independence from AOL was so important to me that I negotiated an extremely odd provision in our purchase agreement that allowed me to disclose confidential information about AOL. It was their job never to give me that information. It was not my job to protect it in any way. If AOL had ever ordered me to remove a piece of content from the site for any reason I would have immediately written about it and disclosed the situation to our readers. And if I had ever ordered a writer to remove content I would have expected that writer to have done the same to me. In fact, one of the things I am most proud about at TechCrunch is the culture of independence in its writers. Many times I have been criticizedFacebook Is Primed To Disrupt Online Dating
Jan 26, 5:00AM
Editor's Note: Brian Bowman is founder and CEO of LikeIt.com, a fun way to discover people, places, and things. The responsibility of dating sites should be to facilitate great first dates. Unfortunately, the dating industry has chosen to protect its charge-to-communicate business model instead of give consumers access to information to make an educated decision about a potential date: Is my date a real person? Who do we know in common and what mutual interests do we share?Realtime Polling Startup GoPollGo Begins To Show Real Business Potential With "Promoted Polls"
Jan 26, 3:45AM
Back in early 2011, Ben Schaechter, Sam Grossberg and Paul Kompfner launched GoPollGo to address a perceived deficiency in analytics, geographical info and social integrations from the Web's go-to polling platforms. Six-months later, with a round of seed funding in tow, the startup decided to re-focus on Twitter -- on providing everyday users with the ability to more easily poll their users and drill down into realtime analytics, not unlike WayIn.Time Spent In Retailers' Mobile Apps Grows More Than Five-Fold In A Year, Flurry Finds
Jan 26, 2:03AM
Consumers spent six times as much time in retailer apps in December compared to a year earlier, showing that shopping and commerce is finally beginning to take off on mobile platforms. Flurry, the mobile analytics startup, looked at about 1,800 iOS and Android apps from December 2011 to December of last year. They also broke it down into five other categories including Retailer Apps, Price Comparison, Purchase Assistant, Online Marketplace and Daily Deals. Time spent in apps overall grew by 132 percent year-over-year, so as you can see above, basically every category except for daily deals outpaced growth in the rest of the ecosystem. Retailer apps like ones directly from Walmart, Target, Macy’s, Victoria’s Secret, Gap and Saks 5th Avenue, grew the most in terms of time spent. Time spent in ‘Price Comparison’ apps like eBay’s RedLaser and Grocery IQ grew by 247 percent year over year. At the same time, “Purchase Assistant” apps like ShopSavvy and ShopAdvisor saw 228 percent more time spent. Even though Daily Deals apps like Groupon, which have spent millions on user acquisition, have seen their market share fall, they still saw the time spent metric at least double. Groupon has said in the past that one-third of its revenues come from mobile purchases in North America. But you can see how market share has changed for mobile commerce apps. Daily deals apps, which were very early to mobile platforms and could spend millions upon millions to acquire users every year, were first-movers. Now the rest of the space is catching up as big box retailers figure out how to use mobile apps to promote transactions. Retailers nearly doubled their market share in the shopping category, with 27 percent of time spent up from 15 percent a year ago. Virtually every other category was either flat or down year-over-year in terms of market share. Marketplace apps like eBay and Amazon fell to 20 percent marketshare from 25 percent a year ago, while price comparison and purchase assistant apps were basically flat year-on-year.How Long Till Facebook Clones Vine? No, Facebook Should Have Invented Vine
Jan 26, 1:57AM
Facebook used to build the future, but since the mobile era began it's been chasing what's next -- Buying Instagram, reskinning acquisition Beluga as Messenger, copying Snapchat as Poke, and now getting beat to animated photos by Twitter's Vine and Cinemagram. If Facebook doesn't bust out its crystal ball, it could get picked apart by visionary competitors, or lose its reputation for innovation.Mobile Ad Platform Aarki Acquires Mobspire To Improve Rich Media Ad Creation
Jan 26, 12:56AM
Aarki, which offers a platform for creating and delivering mobile ads, just announced that it has acquired another mobile ad startup called Mobspire. The financial terms of the deal aren't being disclosed. Aarki raised a Series A (its size was also undisclosed) led by Walden Venture Capital last year, while Mobspire was entirely self-funded.Twitter Could Relieve IPO Pressure By Selling $80M Of Early Employee Stock To BlackRock At $9B Valuation
Jan 25, 11:07PM
Today The Financial Times reported in a paywalled article that Twitter is brokering a deal for investment firm BlackRock to buy up to $80 million of stock from early Twitter employees at a $9 billion valuation. By giving employees liquidity, Twitter may not need to rush to an IPO the way Facebook did to satisfy veteran talent.BlackBerry 10 To Star In RIM's First Super Bowl Commercial
Jan 25, 11:05PM
Waterloo-based RIM is gearing up to take the wraps off of BlackBerry 10 in just a few days, but a bit of showmanship in front of journalists and analysts won't be enough to convince the masses of the platform's worthiness. For that, RIM is gearing up for a big advertising push, including a 30-second spot due to run during Super Bowl XLVII.Next-Gen Video Format H.265 Is Approved, Paving The Way For High-Quality Video On Low-Bandwidth Networks
Jan 25, 11:01PM
The ITU has approved a new video format that could bring 4k video to future broadband networks, while also making streaming HD video available even on bandwidth-constrained mobile networks. The H.265 standard, also informally known as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is designed to provide high-quality streaming video, even on low-bandwidth networks.If at any time you'd like to stop receiving these messages, just send an email to feeds_feedburner_com_techcrunch+unsubscribe-hmdtechnology=gmail.com@mail.feed2email.net.
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