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Village Voice Media has always been about location. Their publications (which include Villiage Voice, SF Weekly, and 12 others) are highly tailored towards specific cities. So it makes some sense that they’d get into the mobile social location space that is getting so hot right now. But you might not have thought it would be with a happy hour app.

But that’s exactly what Village Voice Media is launching tomorrow alongside app developer GoTime. Happy Hours, is an free application for the iPhone, Android, and the mobile web. With it, you get access to some 15,000 happy hours in 30 different cities around the country. You simply load the app up, tell it where you are (which it can know automatically on the iPhone and Android phones), and let it show you happy hours close by.

While happy hour apps are nothing new (here’s another one we covered not too long ago), most are small and based around one city, or a handful of cities. Happy Hours is nationwide, so it’s good for traveling. Also, thanks to the Village Voice association, it has a range of data about establishments such as atmosphere, type of food served, etc — not to mention full reviews, when available.

The app launches tomorrow for the following 30 cities: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Broward-Palm Beach, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New Orleans, New York, Orange County, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Washington DC.

Check out more in the video below.

This is an anonymous guest post from a well known startup executive:

When we split the atom, Einstein remarked that everything changed but our way of thinking. You could make the same argument about acquisitions and option pools.

As Mark Suster recently noted, employees will never see a big payday at most startups unless the company shoots for the moon. This is probably why investors’ case for a company to sell early focuses exclusively on the founder: in most early-stage acquisitions, the liquidation preferences and deal-sweeteners only work for investors and founders.

Back when some companies sold at $50 million and others went public at $250 million, we could all agree that this was just how the cookie crumbled. But now that we live in a world where early-stage acquisitions are the only outcome to which most startups aspire, we have to re-allocate this smaller cookie.

The elephant in the room is that that founders and CEOs take almost all of it for themselves. I’ve looked at three or four deals recently as an adviser; in every case, the founder or CEO was taking more than half the company for himself, and leaving 10% for everyone else. Why aren’t we surprised when three months later that company can’t hire enough engineers?

Even when the company succeeds, the big-shot with the big payday may regret it. The difference between $10 million and $20 million in practical terms — whom you can date, where you can go, what you drive — is zero. But if you give an extra $10 million to the folks who fought shoulder to shoulder with you, everyone will feel better about what you accomplished together. You want your startup to end like Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and their butler sipping drinks on the beach.

This has always been true, but now that more startups are being bought, it has become less common. Consider the proceeds of a $50-million acquisition for a 100-person company that has raised $14 million with a typical liquidation preference:

• Because of the liquidation preference, the investors get $14 million right off the top. The remaining $36 million is divided according to equity ownership.
• Investors own 50%, and get $18 million, split between two firms
• The two founders own 33%, and split $12 million
• The 3-person executive team, including a CEO if one was hired, owns 10%, and splits $3.6 million. The team gets another $3 million as a severance payment or an earn-out, to sweeten the acquisition offer.
• The remaining 95 employees split 7%, each earning $27,000. Unlike the founders, the employees have to wait until their grants vest, working at a company no longer of their choosing for two years.

Now consider what would happen if the same company raises another $10 million, expands the employee option pool to hire more executives and to support 300 people. It is worth $250 million at the time of a public offering.

• There is no liquidation preference, severance payment or earn out. Everyone is paid according to the number of shares he owns.
• Investors by now own 60%, or $167 million, split between three firms
• The two founders own 20%, and split $50 million
• The executive team still gets 10%, but now splits it among 5 people. Each executive gets $5 million.
• The remaining 290 employees own 10%, with the first 100 employees hired getting the lion’s share, of say $200,000 each.

The point is not that this is a better outcome for all. Any fool would take the higher price if he knew he could get it, but you don’t know when or whether you ever will. The point is that employees at least stand a chance at a nice gain when a company is built to last, whereas founders benefit disproportionately from a quick flip.

So in a world of more quick flips, we need to increase the size of options pools, eliminate liquidation preferences – which just get picked up in subsequent rounds of financing by new investors, who screw the old ones — and provide better acceleration for everyone.

Otherwise, nobody will want to work for a startup. But the reverse is happening. VCs want their pound of flesh, and entrepreneurs do too. In fact, the 20% of company ownership that was once considered the standard allocation for executives and other employees is now more likely to be at 10%.

If we’re all a little less greedy now, we’ll build bigger companies later and everyone will make more money, and feel better about it too.

There are plenty of collaborative document editors out there, but when it comes to getting input about a new document or PowerPoint deck, many businesses still rely on the tried-and-true method of printing them out, handing them around the office, and asking people to scribble their notes directly onto their printed copies. If that situation sounds familiar, you’ll probably want to check out Crocodoc, a Y Combinator-funded startup that’s launching today. Crocodoc makes it easy to share and mark up virtual documents the same way you would on a piece of paper, and it only takes a few seconds to start using it.

Crocodoc is an extremely straightforward service, and you don’t even need to sign up for an account to use it — just upload a document, and a second later you’ll be in the Crocodoc editor. Markup tools include Sticky Notes, a highligher, text strikeout, and the ability to leave your own comments (a ‘pen’ tool is on the way). Editing a document should be very familiar to anyone who has used Adobe Acrobat or Apple’s Preview. If you’d like to try marking up a sample document, you can use this demo.

By default, the service assigns each uploaded a document a unique, “unguessable” URL, which you can use to share the document with friends, who can mark it up and add their own comments. But there’s one catch to the free version of the service: if you lose the document URL, that marked up document is lost for good (remember, you didn’t create an account to sign up).

Fortunately Crocodoc also offers a ‘Pro’ version, which lets you create an account that includes an archive of your previously uploaded documents. It also allows you to password protect your uploaded docs (as opposed to just relying on the hard-to-guess URL for security), and to use SSL encryption. Pro Accounts cost $8/month or $36/year. And for companies that are wary of uploading sensitive files, Crocodoc offers intranet deployments, which means that these customers can run it inside their firewalls on their own servers.

My only gripe about Crocodoc is the limited number of collaboration options  — you can share your documents with as many people as you want, but everyone will be editing the same one, which seems like it would get messy fast. This will be fixed in the near future, when Crocodoc starts allowing you to review edits on a per-user basis.

Crocodoc’s still quite basic, but that might be exactly what its customers are looking for.  And they may well be willing to spend $36 a year if it means they’ll have to print out fewer stacks of paper.

Fundamentally, what I liked about FriendFeed was that it gave me a way to take all kinds of social data and create a tailored way to view it. And though the idea never took off in the mainstream before their acquisition by Facebook, the desire for a service that can do this, remains. Despite their efforts, Facebook hasn’t solved this yet. And despite all the hype, neither has the new Google Buzz. There are at least a dozen other startups working on this problem too, but no one has even come close to FriendFeed yet. But a new one, still in stealth, offers hope.

Knowmore, is a New York City-based startup founded by Julian Gutman (ex-Google) and Joseph West (ex-Akamai). They’ve already assembled a team that includes Jeremie Miller, the inventor of XMPP/Jabber, Wilson Bilkovich one of the core developers of Rubinius (a Ruby implementation), and Wes Augur, a former principal R&D engineer at Digg. It’s a wide range of talent across a bunch of different fields. The total team is already up to 20 people, according to their jobs page.

Talent aside, what sounds interesting about Knowmore is their approach to the social noise problem. Rather than focusing on complex technologies that only seems to make social data more complicated (“why is this being shown,” etc…), Knowmore is building its product around user experience and human-centric design. The person who helped steer the early design of the product itself was Chad Pugh, the visual designer of Vimeo (though he’s not full time with the team).

As you can see on their splash page, Knowmore’s slogan is the “dashboard for the social web.” As you might expect, the idea is to port in your data from a variety of social networks, and let Knowmore serve it up to you in a way that cuts through the noise. As Mike wrote earlier this month, “social today feels like search a decade ago: lots of noise and lots of spam.” That’s exactly the problem Knowmore is going after.

They believe Facebook and Twitter cannot tackle these problems because they are communication pipes at their core. Knowmore is aiming to be a consumption platform instead.

So will it work? That’s impossible to know without seeing the product in action (the tentative launch date is Q2 2010). But the pedigree of the talent behind this startup and a simple execution of the core idea certainly makes it one worth watching.

When I went into the Fisher Price area of Mattel’s large booth at the Toy Fair, I was sure I was in the wrong. Some insane screeching pierced my eardrums there, a howling so unearthly that I needed to go, to run as fast and as far as I could.

Continued here:
The Sing-A-Ma-Jigs from Fisher-Price: Hold your ears

Ooots outs outs. It’s Wednesday morning and there’s nothing you deserve more than a little soft house music and a Flip Mino HD teardown. The folks at iFixIt know you’re feeling the need so they prepared this detailed slideshow and teardown description for you and yours

Continued here:
iFixIt Tears down the Flip Mino HD

So you like the idea of the MiFi but you already have a 3G USB stick, eh? The Wi-REACH aims to give you the best of both worlds with a $99 cradle that turns your 3G USB stick into a Wi-Fi hotspot. It’s got a rechargeable battery good for 4-5 hours of use and can handle up to 10 simultaneous connections

More:
Wi-REACH: Roll your own 3G hotspot

BlackBerry users have long suffered with horrible mobile Internet browsers.

View original post here:
RIM shows off the new WebKit-powered BlackBerry browser

Sound the nerd alert: the Supine Reading Glasses from Hammacher Schlemmer let you read a book while flat on your back. That’s right, no more holding the book above your head.

Read more from the original source:
Supine Reading Glasses to spur recumbent reading movement

Acer isn’t showing any signs of slowing down at Mobile World Congress this week. Just this morning, the manufacturer announced the Liquid e and now we have the neoTouch and beTouch.

View original post here:
Acer is blowing up with neoTouch and beTouch, more Android and Windows on the way