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Groupon Said To Be Valued At, Like, $15 Billion
Jan 14, 4:22AM
Ready for more "Groupon is worth what?!" kind of reactions? The New York Times is reporting that the daily deals site has been seriously discussing going public with Wall Streeters this week, with a rumored IPO time sometime in Spring. The report also amps Groupon's valuation at more than double the $6 billion Google had rumored to be offering for the company just months ago, at about $15 billion "or more."
News Corp's The Daily iPad Newspaper Delayed By "Weeks, Not Months"
Jan 14, 2:46AM
While we may all have our own opinions on whether News Corp's iPad-bound newspaper, The Daily, is a boondoggle or simply before its time, I think we were all at least looking forward to seeing what it was like. People were curious about Virgin's Project (though I haven't heard a word about it since), and naturally want to know what it is that Rupert Murdoch has spent so much money on. We heard a few days back that it would be making its debut on the 19th (with Steve Jobs rumored to be in attendance), but it seems that wasn't in the cards. All Things D has learned (from a slip-up at an internal News Corp meeting, no doubt) that The Daily will not, in fact, be launching next week, but has been put off to an unspecified date, probably some time in February. And they blame Apple! The nerve.
Hybrid Streetlights: Good Or Bad News For Utilities?
Jan 14, 2:30AM
Urban Green Energy — a New York City startup that designs and manufactures small wind turbines — has released and installed the first of its new, "hybrid" or wind- and solar-powered streetlights. Designed for primary use in parking lots or over highways, UGE's Sanya streetlights include a standard setup of the company's 600 W Eddy wind turbines, along with a steel tower or pole, solar panels, lead acid batteries of the variety used in many cars, controls and light emitting diodes (LEDs) made by suppliers from Asia and the U.S. They can store up to 5 days of power, and can be customized to cast a particular color of light...
If this Conference Room Table Could Talk… (TCTV)
Jan 14, 2:25AM
Earlier this week, we did a post on a new venture firm called Bullpen Capital, and if you checked out the CrunchBase profiles of the three founders you saw a pretty wide depth of experience. Paul Martino has started four companies, most recently Aggregate Knowledge, and he was one of the first investors in Zynga. Duncan Davidson was most recently managing partner for the Leviathan-like VantagePoint Venture Partners, and founded several companies including Covad Communications-- a DSL pioneer that went public and was valued as high as $9 billion. And Richard Melmon's roots go back to the early Intuit days, through the legendary Regis McKenna, onto VisiCalc and eventually co-founding Electronic Arts. In a relatively young industry, those are some deep venture roots. Apparently, their conference room table has seen about as much action. In a fun final segment we reminisce with the Bullpen guys. Enjoy! 
My Contribution To AOL's Q1 Targets. (You're Welcome, Tim)
Jan 14, 2:16AM
Erick's post listing AOL's targets for Q1 made fascinating reading, even for a non-employee like me. Just in case you missed it, between now and March, TechCrunch's parent company will be concentrating on the following areas... - Grow ad sales revenue 20%
- Double homepage traffic
- 99.9% reliability for mail
- Double Patch Engagement
- Ads/Content Platform + Devil everywhere
- Recruit top talent
- Customize office around towns
ShareSquare Gets 150K To Build Out Its QR Code Platform [Invites]
Jan 14, 2:11AM
Mobile QR platform ShareSquare launches their beta today with the announcement that they've already got 150K out of a 500K seed round under their belt, from angels Paige Craig, John Frankel of ff Assett Management, Jeff Miller and Roy Rodenstein of Hacker angels. In the same space as Likify and Mofuse, ShareSquare is a QR Code creation platform specifically for music and entertainment brands. With ShareSquare's CMS, artists and promoters can deck out branded merchandise like posters, promos, flyers and even bumper stickers with QR codes corresponding to a custom HTML5 web app (see a mockup one for Justin Bieber, to the left). 
Ship or Get Off the Pot
Jan 14, 2:06AM
On Tuesday Steve Ballmer fired Bob Muglia, and Google fired H.264 from Chrome. The tubes are heated up with analysis of these two seemingly unassociated events, and I figure I'll mash them together into a counter-intuitive scenario. The unifying driver: Tuesday's new iPhone 4 announcement from Verizon. We hear lots about Android these days as a million tablets bloom at CES. But the world we're hearing about is the one where Apple lives in a one-carrier model. It's a Model T world where you can have any color as long as it's AT&T. Every day people walk into any other carrier store and walk out with Android, because they don't know the difference. Contrary to the pr, the Android sell to the broad market is not about Open v. Closed, or store v. market, or any of the direct feature comparisons. 
AOL's Q1 Winter Luge Goals Revealed
Jan 14, 1:27AM
Around here at AOL/TechCrunch, they tend to keep us out of the loop on corporate strategy because they know we'll post any old memo we find. So imagine my surprise to find a box with AOL snow globes and first quarter stretch targets sent to my office in New York City (which is not at AOL's headquarters, by the way, but the same office I've always had because, well, they don't really want me in their building—despite being an AOL employee, I can't even get an AOL ID to enter unannounced). This box has been sitting around since the holidays, and inside is a little motivational package with five AOL Winter Luge 2011 snow globes and bookmarks/postcards (see photo above). On the back of the postcards are the company's goals for the first quarter dubbed "Q1 Winter Luge." Some of these have been reported before, like doubling homepage traffic, which in and of itself would be huge. But there are others too, including growing ad sales revenue by 20 percent, doubling engagement on the local Patch sites, organizing around "towns" (we are in Tech Town!), recruiting top talent, and expanding the Project Devil ads, which replace clutter on the page with one big ad incorporating different interactive elements like video or maps. 
Cubeduel: Hot Or Not Meets LinkedIn. Your Darker Side Will Love It.
Jan 14, 12:38AM
People sure do love judging their coworkers. And now it's easier and more addictive than ever. Meet Cubeduel, a site that launched two days ago and is quickly making the rounds on Twitter. After landing on the site, you'll be asked to connect with LinkedIn via OAuth. Next, you'll be presented with photos of two of your former or current coworkers, prompting you to choose who you'd prefer to work with. Click one, and the site will show you another pair. Then another. Vote 20 times and you unlock access to see how other people have ranked you. Yeah, you're already hooked. But that's not all. The site records the votes (which are all anonymous) and tallies them, allowing you to browse individual companies like Google or TechCrunch, to see which employees have won the most 'duels' based on votes aggregated from all users. In other words, it gives you a nice, easy to read ranking of the 'best' people in each company (more on that later). 
HP Also Holding A Second webOS Event On February 9 To Woo Developers
Jan 14, 12:34AM
A week and a half ago, we were invited to join HP on the morning of February 9 for an "exciting announcement". But it appears that they're now also reaching out to others about another event later that day. This new invite reads: "HP webOS. The future revealed." Below that, it lists the same February 9 date, but lists the time as being from 7 PM to 9:30 PM. And it will be in the same venues: Fort Mason Center, Herbst Pavillion in San Francisco.
Justin Bieber URL Shortener Bieber.ly Shuts Down After Cease And Desist
Jan 13, 11:33PM
Earlier today we wrote about the Justin Bieber URL shortener Bieber.ly, which had the dubious distinction of shortening URLs to the catchy Bieber.ly. About 22 hours after the site went up developer Elliott Kember emails us to say he received a "Cease and Desist" letter, apparently from lawyers representing "His Bieberness." The site now reads "Aww, we got lawyered. Ah well, it was fun while it lasted! Unfortunately we've been asked to take this site down." Says Kember, "This was pretty much the fastest C&D letter I've seen - it only took about 22 hours from launch to email."
Groupon China Giving, Like, a Billion Reasons It'll Beat the Clones
Jan 13, 10:51PM
As we noted yesterday and discussed with Groupon COO Rob Solomon months ago, Groupon has been a bit flummoxed over how to enter the difficult but insanely lucrative Chinese market. If you thought the recent acquisitions of sites in Taiwan and Hong Kong were the answer, think again. Apparently Groupon's Berlin team-- which has been leading much of its international efforts with varying degrees of success-- has hired its own team and sent them to China to build something new on the mainland from scratch. (I'd guess a future acquisition might still be in the offing once it gets its China sea legs.) Now, a source tells us that Groupon China is using "large parts" of that $950 million to aggressively hire for all positions. 
VBS.TV And Reddit Are Leading Us Into The Golden Era Of Information Discovery
Jan 13, 10:25PM
Something just happened online that is highly indicative of where we're headed in terms of new media. Look at these two stories on VBS.TV and Reddit. They are totally independent from each other and nine months apart, but the two sites are presenting readers with unparalleled access to a fascinating story: how an Oklahoman was inspired by a '60s-era underwater adventure show, went on to work at NASA to develop self-sustaining habitats, and is now developing an undersea colony off the Florida coast. One did the video and the other is hosting a nearly-live conversation with the NASA engineer right now. It's stories like this - stories that would once rate a few feature pages in Discover magazine or Omni (remember Omni?) - that are now percolating through the Internet, to our benefit and to the detriment of old media who can't keep up. Now we get the real story sans any nonsense graphics, anticlimactic taglines or fluff. It's the future, everyone.
Call Of Duty Invades The Mac App Store; How It Does Should Be Telling
Jan 13, 10:18PM
It has now been a week since the launch of the Mac App Store. So far, the reviews have seemed fairly mixed. While nearly everyone praises the simplicity of the store, and Apple touted 1 million app downloads in the first 24 hours, most also seem to agree that there's still a lack of killer content. And exactly that's what it's going to take for the store to be successful longterm: killer content. And one new app may be a good gauge for such content: Call of Duty. Specifically, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has just hit the Mac App Store. Apple wasted little time in featuring it in a main store banner today. To be clear, the game is not new: it was first released in 2007 and then for the Mac in 2008, but the series is hugely popular amongst gamers. And this version of the game alone has sold over 13 million copies. 
PicPlz Adds Speed, Polish As The Mobile Photo Wars Rage On
Jan 13, 10:00PM
As many of you are well aware, I write about a photo sharing service, Instagram, quite a bit. In my opinion, they've hit the right combination of speed, utility, and fun within a mobile photo app. And while they're growing fast, they're hardly the only player in the space. In fact, there are dozens of rivals in Apple's App Store alone. Of those, arguably the most direct rival right now is PicPlz. And today, they're pushing back at their rival with added speed and a revamped user interface. The latest version of PicPlz, 1.4, which has just hit the App Store brings a UI that has been totally reworked so as to be more obvious to the end user. "The main goal of this release was to listen to and address the user feedback we have gotten over the past few months. The major themes in that feedback were: speed/responsiveness and usability," co-founder Dalton Caldwell tells us.
Groupon: We've Now Saved Users Over $1 Billion (Sort Of)
Jan 13, 9:59PM
Groupon, the incredibly popular deal-sharing site that recently raised a whopping $950 million funding round, has just announced a pretty impressive milestone: users have 'saved' over $1 billion through the site's sales. Groupon's daily deals often come with steep discounts of 50% or more — Groupon is presumably totaling all of these discounts to reach its $1 billion stat. Of course, the site isn't exactly saving you money, because its hot deals often lead people to purchase things they wouldn't buy otherwise (I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with my $50 voucher for art supplies). In any case, that's a lot of sales. 
AOL Outsources Sports, Health, and Real Estate
Jan 13, 9:54PM
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong today announced three new content partnerships which effectively will hand over coverage for sports, health and real estate. The partners are Sporting News, Everyday Health, and Move.com for real estate. These will replace AOL's own properties Fanhouse and AOL Health, whereas AOL Real Estate will remain. (Disclosure: AOL owns TechCrunch). Armstrong suggested on a conference call that these are not areas that are core to AOL. "The reason we did these deals is because we believe the partners we are working with will be better at doing their core business than we are." AOL isn't getting completely out of sports, health, and real estate content. Especially when it comes to local (through Patch) or video, AOL will continue to create videos and articles covering these topics, some of which will appear on the partner sites and some of which will appear in AOL properties. 
More Evidence That Facebook Is Nearing 600 Million Users
Jan 13, 9:08PM
Recently, there have been a lot of questions as to whether Facebook has crossed the 600 million user mark. Goldman Sachs is reportedly telling potential Facebook investors that the social network currently has 600 million monthly active users. But Facebook statistics portal Socialbakers (formerly known as Facebakers until Facebook strongly urged the startup to change its name) pegs Facebook's user base at 596,372,520 members. So how did Socialbakers arrive at this number? Co-founder Jan Rezab says that the startup aggregates information from Facebook's advertising tool. If you try to create an ad via Facebook Advertising, you can choose to target users by location. Facebook will show you how many of its members are in that location. Using that method, the U.S. has 146,591,880 million members according to Socialbakers. Socialbakers then aggregates that data for every country that Facebook is available in each day and adds the user numbers together. 
Twitter Considers Moving Its Headquarters. To Brisbane, CA?
Jan 13, 8:56PM
The San Francisco Business Times is reporting that San Francisco-based microblogging darling Twitter is looking into a real estate purchase in Brisbane California, specifically the 200,000 square foot current home of Walmart.com at the Sierra Point Towers. While reports hold that Twitter is also considering the Centennial Towers in South San Francisco, Brisbane City Manager Clay Holstine confirmed the Brisbane inquiry to the Mercury News saying, "I don't know where they are in the process."
My Nomination For The Worst/Best Official URL Ever: "RIM.jobs"
Jan 13, 8:28PM
If you don't know what the term "rimjob" means, I wouldn't recommend Googling it. Mainly because if I did recommend it, I'd get fired. Lets just say this: it has absolutely nothing to do with cars. Or basketball. If you do know what the term means, you'll probably find it a bit entertaining that the URL Rim.jobs is being used in a perfectly safe-for-work way. More accurately, it's being used in a perfectly safe-for-getting-work way.
Beyond The Filters: Brands Begin To Pour Into Instagram
Jan 13, 8:06PM
What do NPR, NBC News, Playboy, Pepsi, CNN, Starbucks, Grammys, and David Blaine all have in common? They've all recently signed up for Instagram. Yes, the mobile photo sharing service. And there's apparently a plan beyond simply sharing filtered pictures with fans. For now, that plan appears to be engagement. For example, when Starbucks unveiled their new logo a few weeks ago, they immediately shared it on Instagram to get feedback. Meanwhile, NPR has been using the service to share photos from stories such as this one, a Phillippine politician's assassination. "NPR has amazing comment threads on their stories. It's really inspiring to see," Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom says.
AT&T Customer Service Rep Tells Us How She Really Feels: "This Is Bullsh*t"
Jan 13, 6:57PM
This Verizon iPhone clearly has AT&T all hot and bothered. And the company that used to be too terrified to say anything about the iPhone is now taking their battle to places like Twitter. That includes people pretty high up the food chain, and now even customer service reps. One such worker took to Twitter this morning to tell us how she really feels about our opinion of her company. "This is bullshit," Rachael Pracht says in a tweet directed at us. Specifically, she's responding to my post last night on my long, arduous journey from AT&T to Verizon. "I am an AT&T customer care rep & if I credit every crazy person who called in I'd get fired," she continues.
GE To Buy Lineage Power, Makers Of Green Data Center Equipment, For $520 Million
Jan 13, 5:56PM
Consumer and business uptake of cloud computing, mobile internet voice, video and real-time data are increasing energy demand dramatically among data centers, telecom and IT service providers. Anticipating the trend will continue for quite some time, General Electric (GE) today announced its plan to acquire Lineage Power Holdings from Los Angeles private equity firm, Gores Group, for $520 million. Lineage Power, formerly Tyco Electronics Power Systems, designs, manufactures and sells what it calls "high-efficiency power conversion infrastructure technology." Its used to convert alternating to direct currents or vice versa in a wide variety of contexts. The equipment is installed in systems that run small to large power plants, data centers, networks, even airplanes (namely in navigation tools in the cockpit, or in-flight entertainment systems).
Fast Society: Not Your Mother's Group Messaging App (TCTV)
Jan 13, 4:59PM
When a good idea comes along, often what you see are multiple startups pop up who were all working on it independently but launch around the same time. Look at Foursquare and Gowalla in geo-location apps or Instagram, PicPlz, and Path in geo-photo apps. Right now, a lot of the action seems to be in group messaging, with Groupme, Beluga, and Fast Society all vying for mobile group supremacy. Groupme, which came out of one of our TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathons, recently raised $10.6 million (sending all those text messages is expensive); Beluga was started by a few ex-Googlers, and Fast Society is still bootstrapping but blew people away at Chris Sacca's Tahoe conference. I recently caught up with Fast Society CEO and co-founder Matthew Rosenberg in New York City to understand why everyone is going gaga over group messaging. After all, it's nothing new—one of the original use cases for Twitter was as a group messaging platform. In the video above, Rosenberg explains what he is trying to do with Fast Society. It is targeted specifically at 13 to 30 year-olds, young people going out in groups. Fast Society's tagline is "Built to Party."
Apple Obtains Patent For Solar-Powered Devices
Jan 13, 4:56PM
Are we going to be seeing solar-charged iPhone and iPads in the near future? This could become a reality if Apple executes on a recently awarded patent that describes solutions for charging a variety of devices (including laptops, tablet devices or mobile phones) via solar power. >From the general description of the actual patent: Portable devices having multiple power interfaces are described herein. According to one embodiment of the invention, a portable electronic device includes, but is not limited to, a processor, a memory coupled to the processor for storing instructions, when executed from the memory, cause the processor to perform one or more functions, a battery coupled to provide power to the processor and the memory, and a battery charging manager coupled to charge the battery using power derived from a plurality of power sources including a solar power source. Other methods and apparatuses are also described.
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