The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘silicon-valley’

Jack Dorsey’s Square was unveiled last December as an innovative way to let people quickly and easily accept physical credit card payments from their mobile phone.

Since then, Square, which has been in limited beta, has been used in a variety of use cases. E.g. philanthopic organization charity:water recently used Square at the SXSW festival to collect donations.

A local flower cart in San Francisco is using Square to take payments from customers. Denim, a jeans store in New York is using Square to take payments from shoppers. We even used Square at this year’s Crunchies to raise money for the UCSF Foundation.

Here’s how Square works: A small device attaches to the phone via the headset/microphone jack. The device gets the power it needs to send data to the phone from the swipe of the card, and sends the information over the microphone connection. The device is compatible with both the iPhone and Android. It’s similar in some ways to PayPal, but anyone can now accept physical credit card payments, too. With no contracts or monthly fees. People are sent receipts by text and email. If you haven’t seen Square in action, check out this video.

And now, a new use case has popped up for Square: political fundraising.

Square is currently being used in two campaigns. Silicon Valley VC Josh Becker, who is running for state assembly in California’s 21st district, has been using Square at fundraising events. And lawyer Reshma Saujani, who is running for Congress in New York’s 14th district, is using Square at campaign fundraising events, including at an event in San Francisco on Friday.

Square is ideal for taking money at political fundraisers for several reasons.

Currently, if you want to donate money at a fundraising event, you often have to fill out a form and hand over a check or cash at the event. If you don’t have your checkbook or cash handy (which, many of us don’t), credit cards are the only option. You can write down your credit card number and info for fundraisers to charge at a later date, but you have to trust that the fundraiser keeps track of that information and paper.

With Square, there is both a convenience added for both the payee and fundraiser. The donation is instantly processed, and Square will send the receipt via SMS or email to the payee. Of course, political contributions and donations are a little more complicated because of the reporting requirements associated with donations.

For many types of donations, you need to take the donator’s name, occupation, address, and other information. Currently Square doesn’t allow users to input all of this information but Dorsey says that they are releasing Square’s API to allow fundraisers to build additional applications on top of Square, where they could input all of the necessary data. Once this is enabled, Square will allows fundraisers to eliminate paper collection and payments all together.

Dorsey says he’s already getting significant interest from politicians and political candidates across the country, but because Square is in limited beta, is being selective about how the service is distributed. Dorsey expects Square to be open to the public sometime in the next few months.

Valued at $40 million even before launch, Square is off to an impressive start. And technology’s most notable investors and leaders seem to think so as well.

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, investor Ron Conway, Google’s Marissa Mayer, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley, Digg creator Kevin Rose, investor Esther Dyson and a host of others have invested in Square. The company also raised funding from Khosla Ventures.

I’ll let the video after the jump do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry.

The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us.

Lots of scuttlebutt around Silicon Valley that new investment bank CODE Advisors is out pitching a MySpace spinoff to potential buyers and investors. Sources include people who’ve actually been pitched.

CODE Advisor partner Quincy Smith says “We have not been engaged by News Corp. or MySpace on a sale of the company.” MySpace also contacted us to deny the rumor – “The story is false.” – although we hadn’t actually gotten around to asking them yet. Word travels fast, it seems.

MySpace does confirm that they have an ongoing relationship with CODE Advisors to look for companies that they may want to buy, particularly in the music space (they’ve bought two music startups, iMeem and iLike, in the last year). CODE Advisors partner Fred Davis is leading that effort.

But any effort to spin off MySpace from News Corp. – something we’ve argued must be done for the company to have any chance to thrive – is being done unofficially. And perhaps without the knowledge of News Corp. execs.

Are MySpace execs testing the waters to see if there’s a way to spin themselves off of the politics-driven News Corp.? That’s being flatly denied. But it sure would makes a lot of sense. And, like we said, the pitches are happening, whether everyone denies it or not.

Today, during his keynote address at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek had a big revelation: “On certain days, we’re consuming more Internet capacity than Sweden has as a country.”

Ek made the statement when asked why Spotify chose to use a P2P model, rather than centrally store all of its music in one place and stream it from there. Ek noted that if they were to stream from one UK datacenter, they’d consume all the bandwidth. So instead, they leverage the power of the Internet to get their users to help them stream to other users.

Ek also said this was primarily the reason that Spotify is a native application, rather than a web app. P2P streaming is a bit more complicated than streaming from one source on the backend of things, obviously.

When asked why Apple (which of course, runs the largest music store in the world, iTunes) doesn’t use the P2P method, Ek said that was the “million dollar question.” He then speculated that they will move more towards Spotify in terms of being in the cloud, and having a subscription model.

Ek noted that Spotify is now in six countries and has over 320,000 paid subscribers. That’s up from 260,000 the last time they mentioned it. Overall, they have some 7 million users now. And yes, that’s largely without the U.S. where the service only exists in a very limited closed beta as the company negotiates with the labels for music rights.

In its relentless push to turn YouTube into a profit center, Google is trying anything it can to pump more advertising into the billions of videos people watch on the site. Now it is automating the way that Flash overlay ads can be created and displayed on YouTube videos. Through the self-serve Display Ad Builder in Google AdWords, mom-and-pop businesses can now create Flash overlay ads as easily as they can create display banner ads and place them in YouTube videos.

Overlay ads have been around for a long time on YouTube and other video networks. YouTube constantly refines the types of overlay ads it shows, but many of the small businesses which typically advertise on Google AdWords don’t have the tools to create Flash overlay ads. Now Google is providing them with templates, much like it does already for banner ads.

As of last October, YouTube was showing ads on more than one billion videos a week, which was roughly one in seven videos. YouTube wants to open up all of its video inventory to advertisers large and small. Today’s release is the latest move in that direction.

At what point will there be too many ads and will consumers ever backlash? Already I find those persistent pop-ups and overlays to get in the way of the videos I am trying to watch, and I don’t find them particularly relevant. Flooding YouTube with even more of these ads may be good for its bottom line, but viewers are not going to like them.

Dan Lyons, the Newsweek writer, book author and creator of the Fake Steve Jobs persona, is currently writing a pilot script for a comedy series on Silicon Valley for entertainment channel and movie streaming network EPIX.

Larry Charles of Seinfeld, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame will be directing the pilot and overseeing the script development. The show is going to be called “iCON” and will be a half-hour, single-camera style satire.

EPIX, a service from Viacom, its Paramount Pictures unit Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and Lionsgate, is working with Media Rights Capital to develop the series, which it promises it will “pull out all stops” for and aims it to be a “riotous satire of Silicon Valley and its most powerful figures”. EPIX recently landed its fourth major cable deal by signing up Charter Communications, after sealing deals with Cox, Mediacon and Verizon FIOS.

Deadline has more on the subject of the series:

The show’s lead charcter (SIC), Tom Rhodes, is a composite of that Silicon Valley titan, and the comedy is described as a savage satire, a study of ego, power and greed.

We. Cannot. Wait.

File syncing and storage startup Zumodrive is expanding its mobile offerings today with free applications for Android and Palm phones. While there are a plethora of syncing and storage services available to users, ZumoDrive, which spawned from Y Combinator startup Zecter, has a different take on file syncing. Similar to other services, Zumodrive creates a drive on your device that is synced to the cloud. But service includes a slightly different twist-ZumoDrive tricks the file system into thinking those cloud-stored files are local, and streams them from the cloud when you open or access them.

The startup launched an iPhone app last year, which let users sync their content to their phone without having to deal with local storage capacity issues. The Android and Palm apps include much of the same functionality. The apps allows users to sync their entire iTunes library on their phones even though the songs are not locally saved. Plus, ZumoDrive allows you to import your files. photos albums and videos onto your Android and Palm phones.

Additional features include video streaming from ZumoDrive directly to devices in MP4, H.264 format, music organized by artist, albums, and even playlists created on other devices, the ability to stream music in the background and listen to music over both 3G or EDGE networks.
Additionally you can access and view Microsoft Office documents and PDF files.

ZumoDrive has been gaining traction over the past year. Fresh off of a $1.5 million funding round, the startup scored a deal with HP in January to to power the backend of the technology giant’s CloudDrive on all HP Mini netbooks.

Last year, ZumoDrive released a new version of its system that wirelessly syncs playlists between devices, auto-detects content, and lets users link file folders on their devices to ZumoDrive only once so that changes in that folder will always be linked to ZumoDrive. The service was also upgraded to integrate well with media applications, like iTunes, so users can play entire music libraries saved in ZumoDrive on multiple devices without manually syncing content. We initially reviewed Zumodrive here.

Zecter previously launched a product called Versionate, an office-wiki product, that we first covered in July 2007. We wrote about them again a year ago. ZumoDrive faces competition from Dropbox, SugarSync, and Box.net.

My dialogue with those at the forefront of mobile, location based social networking continues here at SXSW Interactive 2010. Brightkite founders Brady Becker and Martin May were kind enough to take a moment and talk with me about some current and unreleased features of their service/software called Brightkite. They also showed me an unreleased demo of their new multi check-in web app. Stay tuned for some follow-up conversations soon.

At the most recent Mobile World Congress, Google CEO Eric Schmidt revealed that the company’s partners are now selling over 60,000 Android handsets on a daily basis. With that kind of growth rate, it’s no wonder that the size of the Android Market is increasing in its slipstream.

While Google doesn’t publicly show how many apps there are in Android Market, a Google rep this morning informed me that the store now serves approx. 30,000 apps in total.

It’s a rare day that I find the opportunity to write about entrepreneurism and Canada in a single post. It’s rarer still that I’m able to do it twice in one day. But apparently today is that day. Earlier today I wrote about changes to Canadian tax law that makes outside investments to Canadian startups less onerous. And now I have the honor of introducing you to The C100, a new Silicon Valley based mentoring and networking organization for Canadian entrepreneurs.

The C100 is the brainchild of Anthony Lee (Altos Ventures) and Chris Albinson (Panorama Capital). There are 250,000 Canadians living in Northern California, Albinson told me earlier today, many of whom are in tech (he and Lee are among them). And they need an organization like TiE, which was originally founded for south Asians, to help them help each other.

The organization will also help Canadian startups and entrepreneurs get a foot in the door in Silicon Valley. Canadian incubators Bootup Labs, FounderFuel and Xtreme Labs are all sponsors of The C100 and will bring Canadians down to Silicon Valley for various networking events.

The C100 has successful charter members who pay $800 to be part of the organization. But general members who are the type of people who will want to get to know the charter members, can join for free, here.