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Posts Tagged ‘virginia’

Reddit founders Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have just announced that they’ll be leaving the company come October 31, when their contracts expire. The news doesn’t come as a huge surprise — it will have been three years to the day that Condé Nast acquired Reddit, and the founders likely had a three year contract as part of the deal. Reddit’s post notes that while co-founder Chris Slowe’s contract also expired he’ll be staying on board.

Reddit was funded by Y Combinator and launched back in 2005, emerging as the most popular alternative to Digg. As with Digg, stories are presented based on how many people have up and down voted them, but the two sites have distinctly different communities. Reddit was acquired on October 31, 2006 by Conde Nast, and has since made some major changes like releasing the site’s software as an open source project.

So what’s next for the founders? Huffman writes that he’ll be heading out to Virginia to spend time with his new wife (always a good plan) and Ohanian will be working on his ‘uncorporation’ breadpig, and will also be doing a three month stint in Armenia as a Kiva Fellow.

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Are you stoked about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 ?

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These Best Buy stores will be open until midnight for Modern Warfare 2

An interesting tidbit has emerged from America Online’s lawsuit against Advertise.com over the latter’s alleged trademark infringement and unfair competition with regards to AOL-owned Advertising.com.  (One is Advertise.com, the other is Advertising.com.  Yeah, I was confused too).

Well, a preliminary ruling came out last week when the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the startup’s motion to transfer the case over to California, where Advertise.com is headquartered and where AOL boasts multiple offices.

We got our hands on the court documents (embedded below), which conveniently reveal some previously undisclosed numbers about Advertise.com’s current and projected revenues.

The transcripts of both motion hearings are interesting, because part of them reveal how much money Advertise.com – which is what ABCSearch rebranded itself to back in April 2009 – is making with its digital marketing platform / online ad network.

At one point during the first hearing on September 18, the transcript shows the court asked Advertise.com’s counsel about the size of his client’s business:

The Court: I don’t know much about your client. How big is your client?

MR. SELESNICK: Your Honor, they’re expected to — this year I think their projected revenue is about $25 million.

THE COURT: Well, compared to AOL then, I mean, it’s a little bit of a David and Goliath, although again, it’s not a mom-and-pop shop, either.

MR. SELESNICK: Correct.

During the other motion hearing on October 9, it was also revealed that Advertise.com made a grand total of $44,000 from its activities in the Commonwealth of Virginia during 19 months of operations.

This may look like a minor victory for Advertise.com from the outside, but when you consider the few resources the startup has compared to AOL, they must have been pleased not to have to litigate on the other side of the country if just for the extra travel costs and other inconveniences. The reason America Online wanted to have the lawsuit in the state of Virginia in the first place was because it’s a so-called rocket docket, a district that has an accelerated timetable and that strictly adheres to deadlines, resulting in speedier disposition of cases than most other districts.

We should note that when we contacted Advertise.com to double-check the $25 million projected revenue figure, its outside PR representative Ann Shannon of Pan Communications asserted “that figure is inaccurate,” but wouldn’t comment any further.  So either Advertise.com’s lawyer didn’t know what he was talking about and misled the court in a material fact which resulted in the lawsuit being moved to a more favorable venue, or Advertise.com’s PR person doesn’t know what she is talking about.  We’re going with the lawyer.

DOCSEN-_185807-v1-Transcript_of_9_18_Motion_to_Enjoin_hearing –

2009-10-09 Transcript re Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss or Transfer Venue –

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Howard Lerman can be a little intense. After the CEO of Yext finished his demo at this year’s Techcrunch50 (embedded below) he left one judge “speechless,” and during rehearsals Michael took him aside and asked him, “Are you on drugs?” He wasn’t. Lerman just has the heightened dopamine levels of an entrepreneur. And he hadn’t slept for 45 days because he was pushing his New York City startup to relaunch on an entirely new technology platform for TechCrunch50

Over the past three years, Lerman and his co-founders (who all went to the same high school together in Virginia), have built a local advertising business under everyone’s nose that is on track to generate $20 million in revenues this year.Yext is going after the huge, entrenched Yellow Pages business with online ads for local businesses that result in phone calls instead of clicks.

At TechCrunch50, which was the company’s public debut, Yext relaunched with a whole new product, going from plain vanilla pay-per-call ads to pay-per-action ads where the action is a relevant call that actually drives new business. Each ad has a unique trackable number that goes through Yext’s system, where it is recorded, transcribed, and analyzed. Yext customers get their own inbox for calls which is like a Google Voice for businesses. There is a transcript for each call, the phone number of the person who called, and a full audio file that can be played back. When a business signs up, Yext places ads for them across the Web in local directories such as Yellowpages.com, SuperPages.com, Local.com, 1-800-Free-411, 4Info, Topix, RepairPal, and more. It turns those ads into phone calls.

Yext uses speech-to-text recognition licensed from IBM and fine-tuned with its own algorithms for each business category it targets. Co-founder Brent Metz used to be an engineer in IBM’s speech science labs, and his name appears on many IBM patents. Only when certain key words related to the actual services offered by the business are mentioned in a call (”spinal decompression,” “oil change,” “install countertops”) does Yext charge for it. Wrong numbers, marketing calls, or calls from beyond a pre-determined geographic area are put in a junk folder and Yext doesn’t charge for those.

This means Yext needs to be really good at both driving relevant calls to local businesses and identifying them. “You’ve got to be transparent,” says Lerman. “We take all the risk, then we pull our pants down and show them what they get.” Lerman is so confident of his technology that at TechCrunch50, he switched all 20,000 local businesses already using Yext over to the pay-per-action system. It is a big, gutsy bet.

The minute he stepped off the stage, Lerman was inundated with emails and business cards from seemingly every venture capitalist and M&A officer in the room. He tried to ignore them and soak in the rest of the conference, but some of them were from people any startup CEO would be foolish to ignore. He took a few meetings with the most serious VCs, and ended up closing a $25 million B round, led by Institutional Venture Partners (which is also an investor in Twitter). The money just hit Yext’s bank account a few hours ago. “Anyone who doesn’t launch at TechCrunch50 is crazy,” says Lerman.

IVP partner Dennis Phelps will be joining Yext’s board. Sutter Hill Ventures, which had put in $3.5 million in an A round in June, 2008, also participated in this latest funding.

Yext is currently only in 12 local categories, including auto repair, chiropractors, gyms, vets, and yoga. There are 2,300 Yellow Pages categories. Lerman is going to take the $25 million and aggressively expand into those categories, hiring sales people to go after each one. He already has 75 employees.

Lerman is also extremely excited about getting Yext numbers into mobile apps. He thinks he can build an AdSense for mobile phones. “What do you think is the perfect action for mobile?”he asks. “It is a phone call, not a click.” App developers who sign up here can freely import Yext numbers into their apps by business type and category. So a travel app could bring up nearby auto garages or window repair shops for stranded travelers and get a cut of any call revenue they generate. Lerman has a lot of ideas like that.

Here is the demo from TC50 that got him $25 million:

Photo credit: TechCrunch/Chanaye Thomas.

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It looked as if Twitter may have dropped a bomb on a number of Twitter-centric third-party apps yesterday by announcing its new Lists feature. It’s a feature that Twitter really should have implemented a while ago for better filtering if nothing else, but they didn’t, and that gave rise to services like TweepML and Wefollow. So are those guys now mad about Twitter’s latest move? No. Instead, they see it as an opportunity to make their services even more popular by hooking up with the feature through its API.

Brizzly, a web-based Twitter client from Thing Labs, was the first to come out and share its enthusiasm for Twitter’s new feature. One of Brizzly’s key selling points is that you can filter the people you follow on Twitter into groups. As the Brizzly official account tweeted out yesterday, the plan is to now support Twitter Lists. They’ll apparently offer the ability to convert your Brizzly groups into these lists, which is nice.

Meanwhile, Digg founder Kevin Rose’s latest project had been Wefollow, a Twitter directory for popular people to follow in various fields. So is he annoyed by Twitter lists, which will allow users to group people in a similar way? Nope. He tweeted out a link to Twitter’s blog post about Lists a few hours ago with the note, “playing w/twitter lists feature, this is going to be cool ”

The most interesting would-be competitor for Lists however is TweepML. The service, which we covered here, allows you to create your own lists of Twitter users to follow to send and share with others. On the surface, that sounds very similar to what Twitter Lists is, but founder Marcelo Calbucci has already gotten a chance to play with Lists and says that he too looks forward to integrating TweepML with Twitter Lists.

He also notes what he sees as 10 key differences, which we’re reposting here with permission:

• #1 You can’t create a list with yourself: A Twitter list is a subset of your followers. You cannot follow yourself, and you cannot add yourself to a list you create. If I create “Entrepreneurs in Seattle” list, I cannot be on it.
• #2 You can only add people you follow: That’s the same issue as above, but what if I want to create a list that doesn’t have everyone that I follow. For example, I might not want to follow all the 300+ Entrepreneurs in Seattle.
• #3 It’s hard to add people to your list: To add someone to your Twitter list you go to your Friends page and select one-by-one who you want on your list.
• #4 No way to go from list subscriber to tweep subscriber: Imagine you are following a list of 25 photographers. You get upset because the list owner keeps adding irrelevant people, or removing cool people. You decide you just want to follow them directly. There is no UI to do that now.
• #5 No way for people to know you are following them: If you follow a list, the people on that list won’t be notified you are following them. You lose the opportunity of them following you back.
• #6 No way to “follow-the-list-except-that-guy-who-tweets-too-much”: If you follow a list is all or nothing. You can’t exclude that guy that can’t stop tweeting.
• #7 You can’t import/export lists: They don’t support the TweepML format, but they’ve promised a server-to-server API, which doesn’t matter for end users. If you have a list with 25 accounts, there is no way to easily import a list. There is no way to export that list either, like into a spreadsheet or a text document.
• #8 What if you block someone: Blocking on Twitter is somewhat weak already, because the person can continue to follow your tweets by just going to your page (if your account is public like most people). Now, if someone creates a list that you are part of it, anyone that you blocked can follow your tweets again by following the list.
• #9 No stats or analytics: Right now Twitter does not tell you anything about your list. I believe in the future they will tell you how many people are following that list, but that’s it. No way to know how people found the list, how many people came and went, etc. This is probably not important to your average user, but for power users and business, this is critical.
• #10 No dynamic lists: Finally, Twitter doesn’t allow you to have dynamic lists. For example, if you go to TweepSearch and you want to follow everyone who’s a Security Consultant in Seattle you have to be manually updating that list.

Some very interesting points from someone who has used the feature already.

Overall, it looks like Twitter did a smart thing by allowing these competitors to check out Lists from the get-go. Rather than seeing this as a hugely threatening gesture by the service, these competitors all are welcoming it to varying degrees. Twitter also did a smart thing by making sure Lists launched with an API, so third-parties can build things that will do many of the 10 things listed above.

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Geek Weekend is a continuing travel series about geeky things to do in cities around the world. Want your city featured? Write us at tips@crunchgear.com .

Originally posted here: 
Geek Weekend: Roanoke, VA

Amazon’s third incarnation of the Kindle is here, folks. All 9.7-inches of it

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Amazon Kindle DX: 9.7-inch screen and $489

UPDATE - There is a Live Kyte stream of the proceedings . Thrilling

Here is the original post: 
The Amazon DX Liveblog

The mystery behind what Amazon will announce on Wednesday has taken another twist. The WSJ is reporting that Amazon will, indeed, announce a University textbook specific model with a larger screen at the press conference later this week

Original post: 
WSJ confirms University specific Kindle

Some sexy person has decided to leak out some pictures to Engadget of the Kindle that’s coming later this week . It’s reportedly going to be called the Kindle DX, and it’s got a 9.7-inch screen.

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New Kindle DX to sport 9.7-inch screen, weird proportions