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Jan 30, 5:33AM

'The Social Network' star Jesse Eisenberg hosted "Saturday Night Live" tonight and opened the show talking about the movie's impressive
eight Oscar nominations. The monologue then switched to video of actual Facebook CEO
Mark Zuckerberg watching his two "Berg" doppelgangers backstage, "Why can't I go in there, I'm the real Mark Zuckerberg?

Jan 30, 1:16AM

This week's episode of
OMG/JK, the show I do on
TechCrunch TV alongside Jason Kincaid, is all Google all the time. So just to even things out a bit, we kick things off by showing off my awesome new TikTok iPod nano wristwatch. For those who don't remember, this is the result of the most
successful Kickstarter project
ever. We then dive into the Google stuff including Eric Schmidt being replaced by Larry Page as CEO, Google's index changes, Google Voice number porting, and the upcoming Android Honeycomb event. Watch it above.

Jan 29, 11:51PM
Late last night the 43 startups in the most recent Y Combinator class got quite a surprise.
Start Fund, a new fund created by DST's
Yuri Milner as an individual and
SV Angel, offered each of the companies a $150,000 investment in the form of a convertible note with no cap and no discount. Most of these companies are still in stealth mode, and Start Fund hasn't seen them. They made the offer based on the Y Combinator stamp of approval. The startups are jumping on board. 36 of the 43 startups in the class had signed the paperwork to take the loan before the event was even over last night, says
David Lee, a managing partner at SV Angel who's also managing the Start Fund.
"As of 3 pm today we've received 39 confirmed signature pages, and we believe the rest are awaiting approval from their attorneys."
Jan 29, 11:06PM

You may recall that back in the summer of 2009, there was a lot of hubbub over a Google 20 percent project with a near impossible name:
Pubsubhubbub. Creators
Brad Fitzpatrick and
Brett Slatkin actually
unveiled it at our Realtime Stream CrunchUp back then. And it garnered a lot of buzz for a good reason: it aimed to speed up traditionally slow feeds of information to realtime. Well, now the two are back at it again (with a few other contributors) with a new project:
Camlistore. First of all, aside from the fact that I keep typing "Camilstore", this name is a significant improvement over the last project. It's an acronym for "Content-Addressable Multi-Layer Indexed Storage". But more importantly, the project once again looks to be a very interesting one. Though the team is quick to note on its homepage that it's "not ready for users", the site has quite a bit of information about the general hopes for the project and how they imagine it working.

Jan 29, 10:50PM
Kevin Rose and
Tim Ferriss have made a co-investment in Facebook on the secondary market. In this
video clip posted this week, Rose announces that he and Ferris recently invested in Facebook "before the craziness." We've embedded the video below; Rose talks about the investment just after the 34 minute mark. We confirmed with Rose that he and Ferriss actually bought shares on secondary market
SecondMarket at a $45 billion valuation. We're told the deal was in the seven figures. The 'craziness' Rose is referring to is Facebook's recent
$1.5 billion funding round from Goldman Sachs and DST at a $50 billion valuation, and the
possibility of an IPO for the network by April 2012.

Jan 29, 9:26PM
Editor's note: Guest author Chris Yeh is an independent angel investor and VP of Marketing for PBworks, one of his investments. He has been involved with Internet startups since 1995. His Twitter handle is @chrisyeh. The big news this morning is
Yuri Milner's announcement that
DST and
Ron Conway will be
investing $150,000 in *every*
Y Combinator startup on a no-discount, no-cap convertible loan.

Jan 29, 8:00PM

With the eyes of the world on Egypt, the Gillmor Gang convened to discuss the impact of social media on what appears to a revolution without borders. Doc Searls, Seth Goldstein, John Taschek, and Kevin Marks put aside vendor sports and Silicon Valley to focus on a brave new world and its apparent off switch. What we came up with was the strong feeling that, whatever the tumult of the day, the genie is out of the bottle and will soon return. What started as what we were having for lunch has emerged as a worldwide message bus, whether by tweet or friend to friend, search, or gesture. And as the media tries to capture the speed of realtime, the incredible scope and power of the global network has never seemed more fragile and yet sturdy in its robust elastcity. The cloud has found its moment to change and augment history.

Jan 29, 3:01PM

Way back in the 1970s, hardware-hacker hobbyists built kit computers like the
Altair 8800 — and in doing so paved the way for the computer revolution that would reshape every facet of modern life. Today the same breed of people are
building and
selling kit flight controllers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Just sayin'. Drones are far from new: the US military has been
using them
heavily for over a decade. (What else did the US military pioneer, back in the 1970s? Oh, right.
The Internet.) UAV tech has long since metastasized around the world. India's private sector
builds UAVs for both military and scientific purposes; Lebanon's de facto government Hezbollah has used
Iranian-built drones for years; earlier this month, QinetiQ's
solar-powered Zephyr set a world record by flying for 2 weeks nonstop; and, of course, the French-built, iPhone-controlled
AR.Parrot has brought UAVs to the masses. All awesome, and all innovating fast. At this rate this may well become the Decade of Drones. Which makes me more than a little uneasy.

Jan 29, 7:27AM

Earlier tonight, Mike posted a
bombshell that must have made super angels shudder. Not content with the grenade he threw into the late-stage investing world with aggressive investments in Facebook, Groupon and Zynga, tonight Yuri Milner announced a new partnership with Ron Conway that offers similar you'd-be-crazy-not-to-take-this-deal terms for
every Y Combinator company. But you know who might be even more bummed by the news than the super angels? Sequoia Capital. The top Valley firm
led Y Combinator's last funding, less than one year ago. At $8.5 million, this was a big step up for Y Combinator, dramatically allowing it to expand how many startups it could let into its incubator. And it should have been a big advantage for Sequoia too: A way to see a crop of new deals early in an increasingly competitive investing landscape, where most VCs are being shut out of early rounds by super angels. It seems Milner stole the opportunity right out from under Sequoia.

Jan 29, 5:11AM

Everything just changed in the angel investing world. Two years ago
Yuri Milner, through his investment firm
DST, disrupted the traditional Silicon Valley venture capital model when he began investing in the hottest startups - companies like Facebook, Zynga and Groupon - at very high valuations and extremely easy deal terms. He looks brilliant in hindsight, with all of his U.S. investments at significantly higher valuations since he invested. Most top VC firms have begun emulating DST's deal structure. Now he's partnering (as an individual, not as part of DST) with
Ron Conway's angel fund,
SV Angel. And they're making a bold investment move. This evening they've just made a blanket investment offer to every
Y Combinator startup in the most recent batch. They're going to invest in all of them. Every single one. And this is the biggest Y Combinator class to date - some 40 new startups.

Jan 29, 3:52AM
Blekko, the search engine that is fighting the
good fight against web spam with human editors, is joining biggies Google and Bing in the mobile search arena today with an Android and iPhone application double whammy. Says Blekko CEO
Rich Skrenta,
"In a world where people want the most relevant answers on the go, mobile search is becoming increasingly more significant."
Jan 29, 12:54AM

Ever wish
Angry Birds had more poop in it? Well look no further than the
App Store today, as
Apps Genius has launched Angry Turds. As a monkey in Angry Turds, you get to battle evil island explorers who have stolen your monkey babies with various projectile weapons. The concept is similar to Angry Birds as your objective is to throw stuff but the stuff here goes beyond rocks to coconuts, turds, banana bombs and grand poop-bas (I am so glad I never spent any money getting a journalism degree).

Jan 29, 12:01AM

I love asking companies if the timing of events is on purpose or purely coincidental. Not only do they almost always say that it's purely coincidental, but they often try to claim that didn't even realize a rival was also doing something when they made their plans. Sure. Next week will feature another such situation. Earlier this week,
News Corp. and Apple sent out press invites for an event to unveil the new iPad-only app, The Daily. And then this evening, we've just
received an invite to a Google event to show off the latest version of Android, Honeycomb. The one meant for tablets. And guess what? They're on the same day.

Jan 28, 11:58PM

For decades, my mother and grandmother have both religiously scanned the weekly coupon books and circulars that arrive in the weekend newspaper. While clipping coupons can be tedious, grocery stores' weekly deals can often take out a significant chunk of change of the weekly food bill. Of course, as print couponing becomes obsolete, many consumers are looking to the web for deals at their local grocery stores. Today,
Y Combinator-backed
AnyLeaf is launching its intelligent grocery deal aggregator to the public. AnyLeaf scours local grocery store sites in the San Francisco Bay area and aggregates all the deals from these stores, including CVS, Lucky, Nob Hill, Raley's, Safeway, Target, and Walgreens. You simply enter your zipcode and email address, and AnyLeaf will send you a weekly email with deals from the local grocery stores near you.

Jan 28, 11:52PM

Sometimes, all it takes is a little spark to set off a major forest fire. That is what seems to have happened with my New Year's Day post on
Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google. Over the last two months, there has been an avalanche of articles echoing my post, including
New York Magazine,
Business Insider,
GigaOm,
TechCrunch,
CNN, and
The Wall Street Journal. I had a feeling that this would get Google's attention. And I had the same concern as when I challenged the Russian government, once, in a Bloomberg BusinessWeek
article about Skolkovo (a new tech park).
I feared that Google would either blacklist me or do its equivalent of putting me in a Gulag—deliver even more spam when I search websites.

Jan 28, 11:35PM
Meetup, a long time go-to place to create local online groups, has undergone a major re-launch in the past day. However, it may have missed a trick: not consulting the meetup organizers who pay through the nose for the service. There now appears to be something of a revolt going on amongst some organisers, who are vociferously protesting about the changes. The reaction of annoyed organisers and members has turned into two, count-em, Twitter hashtags:
#newmeetup and
#meetuporganizersunite. Alternatives to Meetup like
BigTent are being touted, as is
GroupSpaces – a startup which last year
raised $1.3 million from the likes of Index Ventures and Angels like Dave McClure and Chris Sacca. It is is already gunning for "FormerMeetupOrganizers" with its
own group and
a blog post on the subject.

Jan 28, 11:18PM

This week's Ask a VC has a different twist, since we had a different kind of VC on the show, John O'Farrell Andressen Horowitz's guru on business development and deal-making. The questions you asked O'Farrell are below. As usual, feel free to watch the whole show or use the links to skip ahead to your question.
"Have you ever invested in a single employee startup? Would this be a situation in which you guys would make a deal?"

Jan 28, 11:18PM

About an hour ago, Ina Fried over at Mobilized
posted that Google would be hosting an event next week to show off the latest version of Android, codenamed "Honeycomb" a bit more. Sure enough, an invite has just landed in our inbox. The invite reads:

Jan 28, 10:39PM

Probably sick of countless press emails asking for an official stance on the countless controversial hyper-mediated events like WikiLeaks and the Tunisan and Egyptian uprisings now being amplified through Twitter, co-founder Biz Stone and Twitter General Council Alexander Macgillivray have co-written the polemic "
The Tweets Must Flow" essentially arguing that freedom of expression is a human right.

Jan 28, 9:59PM

Here's more evidence that regular people have
zero time for things like
Google TV,
Boxee, and
Roku, if only because they're too complicated for their own good. Hill Holiday, a "caffeine-fueled ad agency," asked five Boston-area families to participate in a cord-cutting experiment. For one week each family was asked to forgo traditional cable TV in favor of one of the following devices:
Apple TV, Google TV, Boxee Box,
Xbox 360, and Roku. These devices, of course, are the premier devices for people looking to break free of their cable company while still being able to enjoy television. And how did it turn out for these five families?

Jan 28, 9:36PM

A Santa Cruz-based electric motorcycle manufacturer, Zero Motorcycles, raised another $2.4 million in private equity, according to a
new SEC filing. Earlier this month, California's Scotts Valley Police Department started using the company's Zero DS bikes in urban patrols. According to a company press statement, its Zero DS has a range of up to 50 miles (80 km) and is highway legal, safe for off-road bike paths, and drives quietly due to its all-electric drivetrain, making it potentially advantageous for urban law enforcement. In late 2010, Zero Motorcycles expanded sales of its all-electric bikes to Australia. The company is selling its products in
32 countries today, including...

Jan 28, 8:52PM

This is sure to cause a backlash among Indian online merchants. Due to restrictions from the Reserve Bank of India, PayPal has amended its
user agreement for Indian merchants, imposing a number of restrictions on merchants using PayPal as an online payments mechanism. Now Indian merchants will not be able to accept payments via PayPal that are above $500 per transaction. As stated in
PayPal's blog post announcing the change, "For purchases or payments above this transaction value, you will have to use an alternative payment method." The fact that Indian merchants won't be able to receive payments above $500 per transaction is a big blow to entrepreneurs in the country. As one anonymous developer tells us, "we're fucked."

Jan 28, 8:47PM

Galvanized by the unprecedented Internet shutdown in Egypt, angel investor
Shervin Pishevar has launched
OPENMESH a forum for people who want to discuss ways of preventing governments from
blocking communications networks. The site (which is admittedly sparse at the moment) was up within hours of Pishevar tweeting out his ideas, designed and built by followers
@Laksman and
@garyjaybrooks.

Jan 28, 8:42PM

Tumblr is growing like a weed, but "the last four or five months totally overshadow everything that came before it," founder David Karp tells Chris Dixon in a taping today for TCTV (watch the video above). "We are growing by a quarter billion impressions every week," he revealed. Last week
Tumblr did 1.2 billion impressions, or pageviews, and it is adding 250 million every
week. Just think about that for a second. Over the last 30 days, that came to 4.2 billion pageviews. If you are wondering why Tumblr's been having so much
downtime lately, just take a look at the comScore chart below, which shows its own estimate of 2.5 billion pageviews for the month of December, up from 335 million from the year before. All of that is coming from 19 million unique visitors per month globally, according to comScore. (Karp's numbers are based on his own internal Google Analytics and they are for a slightly different time period).

Jan 28, 7:27PM

Now that Facebook has entered the space, Google appears to be ready to
take it more seriously, and Foursquare is gaining some real traction, the other players in the location field need to start defining their roles. Of the other players,
Gowalla has been doing some interesting stuff around
check-in aggregation. But their more interesting play may be around travel. And a small change today points to that. As you can see on place pages for
various airports, Gowalla has begun connecting your travels from destination to destination. So if you check it at SFO then five hours later check in at JFK, they know that you were on a cross-country flight and create a new graphic to showcase that, complete with your miles traveled. Below that they tell your friends about your journey. And they're even able to see if you had a layover at another airport.

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