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Posts Tagged ‘techcrunch50’

Adeo Ressi’s Founder Institute San Diego outpost has graduated 12 startups in its inaugural program. Announced in March 2009, the Founder Institute offers entrepreneurs and very early stage startups an environment designed to help foster their growth and education. The program, which is now active in nine cities worldwide, holds two four-month long sessions annually in each location, which include mentorship sessions from experienced tech entrepreneurs. The program also has a unique structure that allocates some equity to each of the founders involved, so that they have an incentive to work together.

The Fall 2009 San Diego semester has just graduated 12 startups. Mentors for the semester included Trip Adler, CEO, Scribd; Philip Kaplan, Cofounder, Blippy; and Peter Pham, CEO, BillShrink. The new startups include:

CloudCanvas: an online image editing suite built in HTML 5 that was previewed in the TechCrunch50 Demo Pit.

Live On Campus: an interactive publishing platform for college and university students to share campus information.

XBand Technologies: a consumer electronics device for cyclists to do advanced performance, nutrition and hydration motoring.

The Institute is currently taking applications for Founders in Paris, Singapore (http://www.founderinstitute.com/apply/11), Los Angeles, and Denver.

You backup the data on your computer. Why not backup your data on the Web? That’s the basic premise of Backupify, a startup based in Louisville, Kentucky that backs up all your data on services like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Flickr, WordPress, Blogger, and YouTube.

Backupify, which was launched last June, just closed a $900,000 seed round of funding led by First Round Capital. Other investors included General Catalyst, Betaworks, as well as angel investors Chris Sacca, Jason Calacanis, Andy Swan, and Bob Saunders. (Disclosure: Calacanis is our partner in putting together TechCrunch50). Prior to this round, the company raised $125,000 in seed capital last summer from HubSpot co-founder Darmesh Shah (who is also a co-founder of Backupify) and other angels.

The service itself all runs on Amazon Web services and is free for up to one gigabyte of data. In other words, Backupify is a cloud computing service that backs up other cloud computing services. About 60,000 consumers have signed up so far through word of mouth.  Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail are the three most popular services customers choose to backup. It keeps all the raw data for you and creates a downloadable PDF with, for instance, all your Tweets, direct messages, followers, people you follow, and profile info.

CEO Rob May, who is a former blogger (he started the Business Pundit before selling it in 2008), plans to charge consumers $5/month or $50/year for up to 10 GB of data backup. He also wants to get into backups for businesses, and will charge them different rates. Corporations that need email backups for compliance reasons now also need backups of Twitter and Facebook accounts if they are used for marketing, recruiting or other business purposes. He is also going to add more business-oriented services such as online accounting apps to Backupify’s menu of options. It offers Google Docs and Gmail today.

The company probably will be moving soon from Kentucky, says May.

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

Envision a web service that lets you record and share your entire life online: That’s the lofty goal LIFEmee wants to achieve. The eponymous Tokyo-based startup behind the service (which is available in both English and Japanese) relaunched its site today with a redesigned interface and a set of new features. (LIFEmee launched back in September this year as a TechCrunch50 DemoPit company.)

To recap, LIFEmee allows you to store, manage and share all significant aspects and events of your life: Your daily health condition, relationships, jobs, schools, possessions, hobbies, family members, pictures, notes etc. etc. The main idea is to give users a platform for organizing their lives online by collecting and structuring this kind of information for lifetime use. Users can not only review all data they fed into their “lifestream” (all data aligned along a time line) in retrospect but also lay out their plans for the future. The information can be shared or kept strictly private.

LIFEmee is still loaded with too many buttons and icons, but the new site is much simpler to use than the TechCrunch50 version. The site’s co-founders say after having collected feedback from early users all around the world, they tried to make it more accessible, integrate it with existing social networks and redesign the entire layout. A Japanese version was added a few weeks after TechCrunch50, too (at the event, LIFEmee launched in English only).

In the new version, users don’t need to register on the site anymore but can log in via Facebook Connect. Status updates on LIFEmee can now be pushed to Facebook and Twitter profiles automatically. But what’s more interesting is that it’s now possible to scrape Facebook status updates and tweets and post them on LIFEmee where they will be (theoretically) stored forever and in one place.

Layout-wise, a few key elements were dropped from the splash page. You won’t find the “Last Will” button anymore, for example (early LIFEmee users deemed the option to upload a Last Will and Testament as “too dark”).

The central “MyLife” area was replaced with two distinct functions, DailyBoard and LifeBoard. Whereas DailyBoard operates similarly to Twitter (asking “How are you feeling now?”), the LifeBoard is the place to go for writing a diary, keeping track of your health condition or making future plans. For example, you can upload a picture of the dream house you plan to buy 5 years later on the LifeBoard and lay out which steps are to be made by which points in time to achieve that goal.

And LIFEmee added a number of other bells and whistles (i.e. a new search function that lets you search up comment and status update from LIFEmee, Twitter and Facebook at the same time, easier uploading of pictures and items, additional options to invite friends etc.) that make the service a bit more worthwhile. But the question is if we are already at the the stage where we are willing (and dedicated enough) to store our entire lives on the web.

LIFEmee is still in alpha, which means there are still a few kinks that need to be ironed out, but the site is ready for you to take at least a test run. LIFEmee competes with similar offerings like dandelife, thisMoment and Rseven on the mobile.

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I did interviews with most of the TechCrunch50 experts backstage and there was a common gripe about the companies launching there: Not enough passion, not enough swinging for the fences, not enough trying to change the world. There were too many people building safe businesses, too many companies just trying to make existing things slightly better, and too many people wanting to be the next Mint.com, not the next Google. Nothing against Mint, but Silicon Valley wasn’t built on $170 million exits.

Web visionaries like Reid Hoffman and Sean Parker struggled to come up with positive feedback on stage. Robert “I-get-excited-by-nearly-any-start-up” Scoble was so bored he was playing Hangman via Twitter with Paul Carr. Marc Andreessen praised Udorse—a company that he joked would make the world a worse place if it succeeded—because at least it was a new idea. Tim O’Reilly said he didn’t care whether Cocodot, one of the companies he judged, succeeded or failed because it was so meaningless in the world. And Tony Hsieh just said it blatantly: “I didn’t see anything that was trying to change the world.”

One big exception was CitySourced—a company that excited Kevin Rose precisely because it was trying to build something that doesn’t really exist today and would make a huge difference in people’s lives. It was the most excited I saw an expert about anything over the two-day event.

I don’t say this to knock the conference or the selections we made. But the truth is I heard it too consistently backstage to ignore it. To be fair, we’re at that point in the start-up cycle where this is to be expected. Web 2.0 start-ups that are going to break out mostly have and others are running out of time and money. With fatigue setting in around the Valley, most new companies are looking to play it safe. We saw the exact same thing in 2001-2002. Then and now, press outlets compliment this type of thing as “sensibility” or being smart. Jeering ledes get written with told-you-so lines like “Remember profits, Silicon Valley?”

Those people just don’t understand the Valley and what makes great start-ups great. They’re the same people who write about Facebook and Twitter once the companies have raised loads of money and gotten huge audiences. The people who extol the virtues of “sensibility” are never the people at the core of the next great companies. Whether press or VCs, they’ll be late to the next wave, just like they were too late to this one. But the experts at our conference do get it and that’s why they left mostly un-wowed.

Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.

Ten years from now I don’t want to look back on TechCrunch50 and see that our winners had a string of $100 million exits. For a conference that seeks to ferret out the most exciting startups in the world, that’s failure. I want to see huge audacious failures and huge gaudy wins. I worry if we play it too safe as a conference we’ll lose the attention of the Andreessens, the Hsiehs, the Tim O’Reillys and the Reid Hoffmans and eventually, the audience that stayed glued to their uncomfortable seats even in the event’s final hours hoping to see something that could change their lives.

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One of my favorite startups at TechCrunch50 earlier this week was ToyBots, a spinoff of the popular Facebook/iPhone game developer Social Gaming Network. ToyBots has created technology that they’ll license to toy manufacturers that will make those toys Internet connected and controllable. Our launch post on them is here.

I think ToyBots is the future, where all toys (and just about everything else) is Internet-connected. But I don’t think the company is dreaming big enough.

There are obvious similarities between ToyBots and Teddy Ruxpin, an 80’s superhit toy that moved and lip synched stories via a cassette tape player hidden in the back. 1.4 million of the toys were sold in the first year it was on the market in 1986, and it was the number one selling toy in 1985 and 1986. Worlds of Wonder Inc., the company that launched the toy, had sales of $93 million in its first fiscal year.

Now imagine Teddy Ruxpin with an Internet connection. Upload stories (even ones that you read yourself) over Wifi. Then the toy talks them back to you. There’s a website that acts as a remote control and mirrors your movements, possibly even via a webcam that detects and understands your movements. Make and share a choreographed set of movements.

Add in the huge virtual and physical merchandising opportunities as the toy gets stuff in the real and virtual worlds.

ToyBots done right is a multi-billion dollar revenue opportunity. And CEO Shervin Pishevar knows it. But there’s just one problem. “We don’t want to build the toys ourselves. We want to be the gaming cloud,” he told the judges at TechCrunch50.

…And that’s not an unreasonable business plan. There’s real technology behind ToyBots, and some of the huge toy companies may license it instead of trying to just duplicate it in house. ToyBots can make some money off those fees and revenue sharing.

But what if those big toy companies don’t license ToyBots and instead go a parallel path to develop their own technology? Or another possibility – they do license the ToyBots platform, but the toys are a dud? And even if they do create a winner, they’ll keep the lion’s share of the revenue and profits.

In my humble opinion (which was shared by one of the TechCrunch50 judges I spoke with backstage), ToyBots shouldn’t be hitting for a single or a double, they should be swinging for the fences and launching their own superhit toy. If they fail they fail. Perhaps they could still pursue their technology licensing. But if they do it right, they’d win big. And I like companies that want to win it all. Even if they fail, they know they at least gave it a shot.

In addition to developing the platform, ToyBots should be hard at work on the first toy, for a release by the 2010 holiday season. Something significantly more cuddly and less please-don’t-kill-me-while-I-sleep than the functioning prototype they showed off at TechCrunch50. It talks. It walks. It has a virtual world and website remote-control. It’s always connected and downloading commands and content. It’s the must have toy of 2010. And it’s the first TechCrunch50 company to go public.

And once that hit is in place, everyone else will beg them to license the platform, too.

The next step is to hire the best toy designer in the world. Someone hungry, with a vision. Probably hard to work with. An artiste. Marry that person to this hard core tech platform and you’ve got something quite interesting. And if it fails, you don’t have to hang your head. At least you swung the bat, instead of watching others do it.

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Nearly 130 million people use the web in Japan and Korea combined, with Japan itself boasting the world’s third biggest Internet population (94 million users). But getting exposure on an international scale is a big problem for globally positioned web startups in these (and many other Asian) markets.

TechCrunch50 has always been very welcoming towards companies from countries other than the US. Last year, for example, a total of five companies from Japan made a showing at the event (three startups presented onstage, two were in the DemoPit).

This year, Korea sent four promising companies to TechCrunch50 (finalist Sealtale, and DemoPit participants UniQube, touchring and FillThat), while Japan had two startups exhibiting in the DemoPit (LIFEmee and Spysee).

These are the four noteworthy Korean services that made it to TechCrunch50 this year:

Sealtale (TechCrunch50 finalist)
Launched by six college students, the Korean version of Sealtale, a social widget service, has attracted 200,000 users in six months (the English version launched Monday on TechCrunch50’s first day). Sealtale lets users express their interests, preferences or causes via so-called seals, which are interactive widgets. You can integrate these seals into your blog or profile page on a social network and interact with other people within the seal itself. The system works across various blog platforms and social networks. The seals can include content like text (RSS feeds, comments, posts), audio and video files.

Sealtale allows you to design and distribute your own seals, too. Companies can create branded seals and use them as viral marketing vehicles. A movie studio, for example, could create a seal for one of its movies and provide trailers and text-based information for users who choose to show that seal on their blog.

Read more about Sealtale in our previous post.

FillThat (DemoPit company)
Monetizing blogs is notoriously difficult. FillThat intends to solve this problem by creating a revenue stream for bloggers within a blog’s commenting space. The way it works is that you buy virtual currency (”Fill Dollars”) with real money and then reward insightful comments with a tip. As a result, the valuable comments will (hopefully) bubble up to the top of the comment thread, at the same time suppressing spam and useless comments. FillThat will go live next month.

Touchring (DemoPit company)
Touchring wants to bring voice communication into the social space. The Flash app makes it possible to call up friends over so-called Touchrings, cell phone-like icons that you can design yourself and integrate into your blog or profile on various social networks. Calls with other Touchring users are free, but you can also make phone calls to landlines and mobile phones (rates). Touchring launched yesterday.

UniQube (DemoPit company)
Seoul-based Solspectrum showcased UniQube in the DemoPit, an in-stream ad placement solution that’s supposed to help video portals monetize their content. The aim is to enhance brand awareness and customer engagement by integrating interactive ads into video clips or movies at the right moment in a non-intrusive way.

When an actor eats a pizza in a certain scene of a movie, for example, an overlay pizza ad could be displayed. Viewers choosing to click on it could then sign up for a competition or get discount coupons directly within the video without navigating away to another page. Snippets containing the interactive ads can be cut out and sent to friends via Twitter, Facebook and other media. UniQube users can track the distribution paths and effectiveness of their video ads in real-time. The solution is built upon Silverlight and still in development.

These are the two services from Japan that were in the TechCrunch 50 DemoPit:

LIFEmee
LIFEmee is a comprehensive life management service that allows you to store and share the significant aspects and events of your life online (from “the cradle to the crave”). Keep a diary, list up and control personal assets, upload a Last Will and Testament, lay out future plans and compare certain elements of your life, i.e. your annual income, with LIFEmee users around the world.

LIFEmee launched at TechCrunch50 (a Japanese version follows soon). Read more about this service in my previous post.

Spysee
The Japanese version of this people search engine went online last year and instantly gained impressive traction. Much like Spock, Spysee is focused on collecting information on individuals and shedding light on their relation with other people. Type in “Michael Arrington”, for example, and you’ll get a mini bio, a diagram displaying people (relatively) close to him, pictures (i.e. this one), relevant news, keywords, blog posts and video clips. Spysee went live Monday (in beta).

Photo credit: Fumi Yamazaki

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Recently, PayPal announced its flexible payments API, called Adaptive Payments (which we scooped) gives developers full access to PayPal’s features, allowing them a lot more freedom in building applications, which includes the ability to accept and distribute payments.

PayPal is timing the official availability of these APIs with its PayPal X Innovate 2009 conference in November. According to PayPal, developer attendees will receive exclusive access to the new APIs that won’t be available to non-attendees until 2010. And PayPal will be unveiling its platform roadmap for the future, which should be interesting. We already got a little sneak preview of the PayPal’s future vision a few weeks ago.

Of course, it’s always helpful to see what developers can actually do with this new API to see it’s true power and connectivity. PayPal has been beta testing the new flexible payments platform with select developers over the past few months and it just so happens that two of testers are TechCrunch50 demopit companies.
FundRazr is a Facebook app that lets any individual, organizer or volunteer collect money on behalf of a social group, sports team, school club, charity, or campaign or. The startup is using PayPal’s Adaptive Payments API to process the transactions.

Lottay, another TechCrunch50 demopit company that is building its platform off of PayPal’s new API, lets you create an online gift that people can put money towards. Users can create gift pages on Lottay with detailed descriptions and pictures of a particular goal or gift and then friends can contribute to the site via PayPal.

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MySpace may not be the leader in the social networking space anymore, but its free music streaming site, MySpace Music, has been growing fast. Which is why it’s not surprising that the social network is continuing to improve on this popular product. Today, it appears that MySpace Music has launched a new version of its homepage with UI redesign and several new features (we’ve confirmed with the company that that the redesign is new).

The new homepage is more visually appealing, with images of artists and bands front and center on the page and a sleek. modern interface. The site also features a “What’s Hot” section above the fold, which are the highest streamed arists’ and videos on the platform. Users can also create and share playlists on the homepage that are mixed in with artists’ playlists.

Another interactive section of the site is the karaoke section which lets MySpace Music users upload and share karaoke videos of their favorite artists. And MySpace is aggregating breaking music news, concert listings and new artists mentions into the homepage design.

All in all, the redesign is an improvement from the original homepage, which needed a bit of a makeover. Plus, MySpace has added a number of features that make the site more engaging to users. MySpace Music launched last fall, and has grown its traffic by 190%, according to Nielsen. New MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta expressed concern recently of whether users know that MySpace Music is a destination for music or not, and perhaps this redesign is a way to make the site standout more as a music destination. Earlier this year, MySpace unveiled a new executive team for MySpace Music (which is a joint-venture with some major music labels and thus an independent entity) and improved several of its features on the site. MySpace also recently acquired iLike, a social network based around music. In the announcement, Van Natta said there were no plans to introduce music streaming from MySpace Music into iLike, but te two businesses would work together to grow the event ticketing business.

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The conference is over, the winner has been announced (RedBeacon), and the drinking has begun. Thank you so much to all of the companies (both the finalists and in the Demopit), the sponsors, and the attendees who made this year’s TechCrunch50 possible.

We’ve put up more than a hundred posts in the past two days, covering every single launch, and then some. So there’s a lot to absorb. But for now here’s a video that captures some of the spirit of the event.

Video by Animoto. Song by Chamillionaire (who jumped in as a judge at the last minute).

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