The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘competition’

God of War III comes out today (YES!), and with all the hoopla surrounding it, I thought this would actually be a good time to recommend/pay tribute to the other God of War games.

Go here to read the rest: 
A tale of God of War

Between the geolocation wars of Facebook and Twitter and the flux of geolocation-based social networks and mobile apps that have been hitting the market recently, the competition is tough. Today, mobile networking startup NearVerse, is launching a free iPhone app, called LoKast, which allows people to share media between iPhones at super-fast speeds. The kicker: the app connects people in its network based on proximity.

LoKast, which is actually short for “local-casting,” allows you to set up a profile that will list all of your photos, selected contacts, videos, web links and music on your mobile phone. You can select which content you’d like to include to the public and which content you’d like to keep private. When a LoKast user is in proximity (300 feet) of other LoKast users, the app will automatically discover other users nearby and allow the user to view and download their content. For example, you can see the iTunes library of any user who is in close proximity to you. You can choose to download a 30-second clip of any song to your own profile and can also follow the link to the iTunes store to purchase the music (LoKast collects an affiliate fee for this, of course). Similarly, you can download photos, videos and even contacts from other users into your profile. You’ll also soon be able to share apps on your phone with other users.

The beauty of Lokast is that it has its own internal network; eliminating the need for 3G connectivity to run the app, as LoKast works in subways, underground and heavily congested areas such as stadiums, where 3G connectivity is unreliable. The startup’s app is effectively all network based and currently has five patents for its proprietary technology.

LoKast is also partnering with bands to help market their content to users. LoKast has struck deals with music distribution companies including The Orchard, IODA and Monalis 360 to provide users with exclusive content within the LoKast app. And production companies, such as Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures, are also using the service to promote their new films.

LoKast will soon be launching an Android app, and plans to launch integration with Facebook Connect. The app itself is incredibly simple to use and seems like it has potential to be a great way to share content on your mobile phone. Of course, some people may not feel comfortable sharing their personal content to complete strangers, so that may be a barrier for certain users.

This time last week, prompted by Luke Wroblewski’s research, I asked you to suggest Mad Lib style sign-up text for your favourite websites. By way of encouragement, I promised to dig around my hotel room and find some kind of prizes; a signed copy of my eBay-auction-winning book, a TechCrunch tshirt, a little bottle of shampoo – stuff like that.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the quality of the prizes on offer, the competition was flooded with entries. Over 30 of them in fact, almost all of which were from people who had actually understood the entry requirements. Some had even got within a mile of being funny. Well done, them.

And so to the winners, in reverse order of funniness…

For effort alone, third prize goes to Tommy Vallier for this suggestion for LinkedIn:

Hello! My name is ____ and I’d like to join LinkedIn. My email address is ____, my website is ____, I have an RSS feed at ____ and I am on twitter as @____. I’m interested in ____, ____, ____ and expertise requests.

I am currently employed as ____ at ____ and as ____ at ____. Before that I was employed as a ____ at ____ and prior to that I did ____ for ____.

I went to school at ____ where I received a ____ in ____ and also at ____ where I received a ____.

Because I worked with ____, ____, ____ and ____ at various points in my life, I’d like to be connected to them – even though I hardly speak with them anymore. Oh, and connect me with ____, too, as they’re my current boss and I don’t want to look unprofessional.

In the last short while I’ve worked with ____ and ____, so please send them a message telling them I’ve signed up and ask them to give me recommendations for the ____ I did for them. I’d like give my own to ____ for ____.

I want to join a group devoted to ____ – because that’s what I currently do, and ____ because that’s what everyone thinks I should be doing. Have me join a ____ group too, because everyone else is doing it.

I think that’s everything about me. Please let me know when you’ve found me a new career.

Thanks.

Second prize, largely thanks to the dig at Yahoo!, goes to ‘Laura’ for her Flickr sign-up suggestion…

I feel dark inside, like this photo of a ______ with an emphasis on the shadow(s).  This is the only reason I would conceivably have a Yahoo ID, and it is __________.  Please make my password an anagram of Ansel Adams or ________.

And last, but the exact opposite of least, the winner. An entry that understood the spirit of the competition, right down to the use of punctuation as comedy timing. For that, and for masterful use of tautology, take a bow Matt Shaw. You win first prize for your proposed sign-up text for DeviantArt…

My name is __________. I feel the dark powers compel me to join this site, to post my angstily-drawn pictures of half-naked ________s and faeries, all of which are elaborate metaphors for the constant state of _________ in which I perpetually, endlessly, forever find myself. I don’t expect you to understand; no one understands. Please make my password “unicorns”.

Kudos Matt, Laura and Tommy. Assuming the email addresses you used when you commented are genuine, you’ll be genning an email from me in the next day or two to make prize arrangements.

Short version: A competent, but unremarkable keyboard. If you like Microsoft keyboards, spend the extra cash for the fancier and cooler X6. Features: Anti-ghosting (press as many keys at one time as you like) Six programmable macro keys with switchable profiles Backlit keys Media controls Calculator button! Pros: Big and solid Anti-ghosting is good to have, even if you don’t notice it Cons: Media keys launch Windows Media Player Only one color of backlight and two brightness settings No USB ports Full review: What we have here is… well, a normal keyboard, basically, with some macro and media keys.

The rest is here: 
Review: Microsoft Sidewinder X4 keyboard

Last week, Microsoft invited seven BizSpark startups from around the world to a special event called the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest. Each company was invited to spend the week working in close collaboration with Microsoft SharePoint team members, as they tried to take their existing products and see how they could be used to leverage SharePoint. The event culminated in a demo day on Friday, when each startup showed off what they’d managed to put together in the preceding four days and a panel of judges chose the best one.

Here’s a video with Lynda Ting, Microsoft’s Director of Business Development, Emerging Business Team, explaining the goals of the program:

Cortex Intelligence
Cortex began as a text mining company, and spent the last five years perfecting its ability to automatically identify places, entities, companies, and other important pieces of text, making it easy to sift through large volumes of data. The company has also built sentiment analysis into its technology. For this competition, Cortex built tools that would allow a SharePoint user to automatically import tweets, blog posts, etc. based on their search criteria. For example, I could use the tool to run a persistent search on my company’s name and pull those results into SharePoint.

Calinda Software
Calinda looks to help companies more efficiently communicate by changing the way they use Email, looking to do away with the endless replies, CCs, and confusing chains of messages. To help, Calinda allows you to generate a map of these messages, allowing you to see at a glance who is sending what, and to whom. The company’s SharePoint integration allows you to pull these maps into your SharePoint hub. You don’t need to install any software to get this working with your email client.

Confer
Confer is a communications platform for companies that includes features like microblogging, status updates, and real time chat (some of this functionality can be seen in software like Campfire and Yammer). The company offers a click-to-call service, including audio recording of conversations and transcriptions, much as you’d find with Google Voice. For the SocialFest, Confer integrated much of this functionality into SharePoint.

Huddle
Huddle, which took the top prize at the competition, is designed to help companies collaborate with their partners — its mission is to be the “world’s best online B2B collaboration platform”. The service, which launched in 2007, allows companies to share files, organize meetings, and collaborate even when they are not operating within the same firewall. For its SharePoint integration, the company allows separate SharePoints to link together, bridging corporate firewalls while still maintaining the permissions and other rules that have been established by each company.

Leverage Software
Leverage Software builds social networks for the enterprise. This week, one of its goals was to build something to help companies collaborate, without forcing them to expend extra energy to use their collaboration platform. The product is called DesignSpaces, and it analyzes your Emails and extracts relevant data, like attachments and events, which it then organizes for you. In the future, coworkers can look through the workspace to find older attachments, message threads, and so on. The company has a number of Fortune 500 companies as customers, and around 1 million people using the platform.

Liaise
Liaise, which we’ve covered before, is a service that allows you to automatically extract meeting information, to-dos, events, and other key data from Emails with a minimal amount of effort on the user’s part. With its SharePoint integration, Liaise can feed this information into your SharePoint site so you don’t have to manually enter dates, commitments, and other information.

Loqu8
Loqu8 allows you to integrate immediate data lookup into your computing experience (it’s a bit like those integrated dictionary browser extensions). But it allows companies to build their own lexicons as reference, which makes it easier for employees to understand company-specific buzzwords and acronyms.  Using SharePoint, the service can pull in supporting data from databases, Excel spreadsheets, and other files.

Yuri Milner, the CEO of Russian investment and operating company Digital Sky Technologies, had quite a 2009. I had a chance to sit down with Milner today at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland for a short video interview.

The company now holds substantial equity in two of the hottest pre-IPO startups, Facebook and Zynga. And their innovative way of structuring deals, where they buy both preferred stock from the company and common stock from employees, is becoming the hot new way to invest in startups. In fact, people are now referring to “DST-style deals,” even where DST isn’t one of the investors. See Yelp, for example:

The size of the rounds is in the $50 million range, but includes both a primary investment component as well as a secondary offering for long time employees. These deals are now being referred to as “DST deals,” since DST first invested in Facebook in May 2009 at a $10 billion valuation and later funded employee buyouts at a $6.5 billion valuation. They did a similar deal with Zynga.

I first met Milner the day he announced his investment in Facebook, where he and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained the details and rationale for their investment in an exclusive TechCrunch video interview.

The price he paid for his Facebook stock – a $10 billion valuation – was scoffed at in May. Today, it’s clear he got a great deal as Facebook common stock is trading at $14 billion and above. The Facebook common stock purchased by DST last summer cost Milner just a $6.5 billion valuation.

It was just a few months later that Milner was in the news again, beating out the competition to become the lead investor in a huge venture round for Zynga.

We’ve had our fun with Milner and DST, watching as the Russian firm stepped in and paid higher prices for hot startups than local VCs would even consider.

But the reality is that DST’s investment decisions look pretty damned smart with the benefit of hindsight. And the entity isn’t really “Russian” anymore – Milner is making almost all of his investments outside of Russia, and most of the new investors he’s bringing in to fund all this activity are non-Russian.

More and more, Milner is just looking like a really smart and really aggressive investor.

The Receivables Exchange, an online marketplace for real-time trading of accounts receivable, this morning announced that it has closed $17 million in Series C financing led by Boston, MA-based Bain Capital Ventures, with prior investors Redpoint Ventures and Prism Ventureworks participating.

This third round of financing brings the total invested into the company to just south of $30 million.

The Receivables Exchange started its online receivables financing marketplace in 2008 with the launch of its proprietary receivables trading platform.

The platform essentially enables businesses to sell their accounts receivable to a global network of accredited institutional investors that compete in real-time to purchase them. That way, companies are able to reduce their cash conversion cycles and gain access to capital that can be reinvested into growing their core business operations.

According to the company, the majority of companies have more than 60% of their working capital tied up in accounts receivable, limiting their ability to fund their own growth and contribute to that of the U.S. economy.

The Receivables Exchange says it will use the funding to scale its operations and sales activities and to expand its marketing, business development and corporate partnership efforts.

According to statistics released today by Dow Jones VentureSource, the fourth quarter of 2009 was a strong one in light of an overall bad year for venture deal activity in the United States.

In Q4 2009, investors put $6.3 billion to work in 743 deals, up slightly from the $6.1 billion invested in 619 deals during the same period in 2008. In total, last year saw 2,489 deals completed and $21.4 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. companies, a 31% drop from 2008 when $31 billion was invested in 2,817 deals.

We also remarked earlier that we’d seen an uptick of venture funding deals in the fourth quarter of 2009, based on analysis of data available in our own CrunchBase.

Scott Austin, editor of Dow Jones VentureWire said: “While venture capitalists as a group loosened their purse strings toward the end of 2009, some start-ups, especially those seeking first or second rounds, may be in for a rude awakening in 2010. A large share of companies are due for capital this year and the competition will be fierce.”

“Venture capitalists are still treading lightly when making investments,” added Jessica Canning, global research director for Dow Jones VentureSource. “In the fourth quarter, venture deal activity returned to levels seen before the collapse of the financial markets, but capital invested continued to lag as investors gave companies just what they need to reach the next milestone.”

According to Dow Jones VentureSource, the healthcare industry collected more VC dollars than the IT industry last year ($7.7 billion compared to $6.1 billion, respectively), which would make 2009 the first year on record that this has occurred.

Within IT, software companies continued to take the largest chunk of investment as they have done since 2001. Investors put $2.9 billion into 487 software deals in 2009, a 43% drop from the previous year. The Communications and Networking segment ended the year with $1.5 billion invested in 123 deals, off 11% from the previous year.

Overall, the median round size in 2009 was $4.7 million, down from $6 million seen in 2008, according to VentureSource. Later-stage deals accounted for the largest chunk of deal activity with 944 deals, or roughly 39% of the total U.S. deal count for the year, attracting $11.4 billion in investment. Meanwhile, seed- and first-rounds accounted for 803 deals and raised $3.7 billion.

For other statistic material on the VC industry, check out the MoneyTree Report by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association, analyzed here by GigaOM and Venturebeat, among others.

Dow Jones LP Source also recently released figures that showed U.S. private equity firms raised less than $100 billion in funds in 2009, down 68% compared to the year before.

Apple this morning announced that more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded from its App Store by iPhone and iPod touch users worldwide. This comes nearly 9 months after it first hit 1 billion downloads served, and just over 3 months since it reached the 2 billion downloads mark.

No doubt, the holiday season helped increase the number of downloads so rapidly. But still: 1 billion additional downloads in 3 months and one week is just incredible.

When the 2 billion mark was reached, Apple also said 85,000 apps were available in the App Store at the time, but the company chose to stick to download numbers only for this announcement, although they said 100,000 apps were published to the store separately at the beginning of November 2009.

Steve Jobs in a statement, said:

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months–this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

Nice jab there, Steve, and excellent timing with the official announcement of Google’s Nexus One phone just around the corner.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

We recently wrote about Zyxio, a startup that has developed a proprietary technology called SensaWaft that lets people control computers via air flow. Basically Zyxio’s technology enables anyone to control a mechanical device, or a mouse pointer on a screen, or whatever, by blowing. How hard you blow, as well as minute differences in direction, are converted to commands.

The variety of products that could use the technology are endless. With that in mind, the startup launched a contest, BeAMindBlower, to crowdsource new product ideas and is going to fund development of the most innovative product ideas that are submitted. Today, Zyxio is entering the second phase of the competition by announcing the top 25 most popular ideas. The startup is inviting everyone to vote on their favorite products; Zyxio will announce the top 5 winners at the end of the competition on December 18.

Current ideas to leverage SensaWaft’s technology range from blowing passwords into your computer, flicking through digital pages, enhancing immersion in virtual worlds to using the technology to power a communication device for disabled patients.

The five “Mind Blowers” who receive the most votes will sit on the Mind Blowing Advisory Board for a six- month period and assist with the development of the new products inspired by their ideas. They will also receive $6,000 and an all-expense-paid trip to Las Vegas. And if you vote for an idea, you’ll be eligible to win a Samsung netbook or an Android phone.

Judging from the list of the final 25 ideas, there are some fascinating ideas that could come out of this contest. Be sure to check the site out and vote for your favorite “Mind Blower”!

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.