Comments Off on Ben Horowitz Sets The Records Straight On Instagram And PicPlz With A Few Words From Mase0LikeLike 2,779
The lyrics to Mase’s 1998 hit “Lookin At Me” graced the page of Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, personal blog on Sunday afternoon. Horowitz needed to set the record straight. There’s a lot of haters out there (I know this personally) and people were asking questions. Ridiculous questions if you ask me, but still they were asking.
Andreessen Horowitz invested $250,000 in Kevin Systrom’s first company Burbn, and with the $1 billion dollar purchase of Instagram by Facebook the venture capital firm stands to make $78,000,000 thats 78 million dollars for those of you that aren’t good with numbers. That’s a return of 312 times their money. Yet people have been asking why Andreessen Horowitz didn’t make more.
Horowitz took to his blog to explain why they didn’t make more. But first he said:
Ordinarily, when someone criticizes me for only making 312 times my money, I let the logic of their statement speak for itself. However, in this case, the narrative that some critics put forth has the nasty side effect of casting two outstanding entrepreneurs—Kevin and Dalton Caldwell—in an unfair light and glosses over an important ethical issue that we faced. As a result, I will clarify what happened and why we didn’t make even more money.
Comments Off on Startup in Space: Skybox Imaging Raises $70M to revolutionize Satellite Imagery0LikeLike 2,140
San Francisco: Skybox Imaging announced they had raised $70 million (US) in Series C financing. Led by Canaan Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, including Bessemer Venture Partners and CrunchFund. Khosla Ventures was involved in this round after financing Skybox in their Series A $3 million (US) and Series B $18 million (US) – Bessemer Venture Partners was involved in Series B as well.
What is Skybox Imaging? From their website:
Skybox Imaging is a commercial remote sensing startup seeking to revolutionize access to information that describes the daily activity on our planet. Founded in 2009, Skybox is designing, manufacturing, and operating the world’s first coordinated constellation of high-resolution microsatellites in order to deliver timely imagery and video of any spot in the world. Skybox headquarters is in Mountain View, California. For more information, please visitwww.skyboximaging.com and follow Skybox Imaging on Twitter.
Basically they seem to have come up with “micro-satellites” which they will use in an extraterrestrial network of many micro-satellites. They have found a way to cut the costs involved in satellite production and operation by very significant margin and thus have likely been able to gain a number of significant clients from Big Government, Relief Organizations, perhaps Google*. As Michael Arrington said over on his site
If a company was able to do that, and put a satellite into space at a small fraction of the current cost, they’d likely be able to lock down a number of high profile customers for a variety of previously cost-prohibitive applications. Confidentiality agreements and U.S. export regulations might prohibit that company from disclosing much, or any, of that information.
But investors would obviously have access to that information. You can draw your own conclusions as to why the company is hiring big data engineers in droves…”
Our good friends at Meshin tweeted about an event happening at PARC (Paolo Alto Research Center) on Thursday revolving around context. Something the folks at Meshin know well. If you’re not familiar with Meshin they are doing some incredible things with semantics and context and revolving it around Evernote. Their Meshin Recall app allows you to organize notes and tag them to your calendar rather than sort them out with hashtags which get easily as messy as not having tags at all.
It’s this context that Meshin uses to relate your notes to something that is fueling this panel discussion with some thought leaders in the context space. If you’re in the Paolo Alto area you may want to attend this great discussion. The event runs from 5:00pm to 6:30 with networking from 6:00-6:30 and will be moderated by social media guru Dave Peck.
Comments Off on Facebook’s Other Acquisition This Week: Tagtile0LikeLike 1,709
Now that we’ve all heard that Instagram’s $500 million valuation drove Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg into a frenzy because he had to have Instagram, it’s time to check out Facebook’s other acquisition this week. While Instagram looks like a pretty solid acquisition into the Facebook family, their other acquisition, Tagtile, may fit better with the Facebook business.
Tagtile is a company that allows you to walk into a store, and tap your phone against a special cube. When you do that, your phone shakes hands with the business. The business gives you discounts and special offers and your phone shares the information you allow it to, back to Tagtile, like your contact information, and a little more if you let it.
Business Insider suggests that the Tagtile deal was an acqui-hire. A posting on Tagtile’s website suggests that Tagtile won’t continue the way it has been once they join Facebook. This is similar to the Gowalla deal, not the Instagram deal. Zuckerberg quickly let people know that Instagram would function as is, for now. Gowalla on the other hand officially shut down during SXSW as the founders and team relocated to Palo Alto to work on Team Facebook.
Tagtile hasn’t said how many merchants they have using the Tagtile cube or how many users have downloaded the app however they did say that Tagtile will continue to work the way it has, again for now…
Comments Off on Rawporter Roadtrip: Fose 2012 Check Out What SF Based Startup Nixle Is Doing For Communities Everywhere0LikeLike 1,565
On our Rawporter Roadtrip stop at the FOSE 2012 show in Washington DC we bumped into the guys from Nixle. Nixle is a new platform that allows municipal agencies like the police, elected officials, and county governments to quickly communicate with their residents in emergency situations, for community announcements and to keep people informed.
When Nixle started in 2009 they had just one local government agency using the service today they have over 5,000 local police and other public safety services using Nixle to communicate with their residents through SMS and mobile applications.
“Nixle provides communities throughout the country with news and information that is both proximate and personally relevant. Our technology is critical in creating new communication paths that have never existed before. We’ve set out to enable highly granular, location-specific information to be immediately available to users, depending on their physical location at any given time. Nixle makes this information instantly available over, SMS, mobile application, email, and web. Nixle’s executive team has in-depth experience and a deep understanding of internal processes at local police departments, emergency service agencies, city and municipal governmental agencies and community outreach organizations. This allows Nixle’s technology to be “best of breed” for these authorized users and ensures credibility of information delivered to residents and community visitors. Given the success of Nixle’s Municipal Wire Service, Nixle is currently releasing new and exciting paid-for services into the marketplace. “
People are beginning to take notice of how fast information can spread by mobile application and text (SMS) messaging. For instance when school campuses get locked down texts go into an all time frenzy. Now with Nixle, those folks living in a city or town that is in some kind of emergency they can rest assured knowing that their police, fire department or other agency may be using the Nixle system giving them an easy way to determine the validity of a message.
Nixle can come in handy in spontaneous natural disasters like Tornados where there is often not enough lead time before the actual damage sets in. Now with a click of a few buttons municipal leaders can quickly dispatch a massive message to their residents.
Nixle was the 2011 winner of the Government Service News: Best Mass Notification System award. Other accolades include the “Outstanding Product of 2012” by Law Officer.
You can see if your city or town is covered by simply texting your cell phone number to 888777.
Two year old Founder’s Card is now 5,000 members strong. The exclusive discount card, geared towards founders and entrepreneurs was started by Eric Kuhn two years ago. Members of the card pay a $495 registration fee and a $60 start up fee to become part of an exclusive club.
While there’s no secret club house in the woods or a secret decoder ring, FoundersCard members enjoy substantial discounts at businesses they typically need like Apple, Virgin Atlantic and several 4 and 5 start hotels.
FoundersCard also gives members access to exclusive members only networking events and cardholders are a who’s who of the rich and powerful in the tech, startup and VC crowd. Having the card is definitely “in”.
Although the baseline cost to join is $495, referrals into the FoundersCard’s exclusive club are given access for just $295. While that may seem like a great deal, Inc Magazine reports that serial entrepreneur Adam Rodnitzky recently responded to a Quora thread about FoundersCard and when asked if it was worth it he replied: “Are you bootstrapping or pre-exit? Then FoundersCard is probably not worth it … yet.”
Craig Sakuma and Gregory Lok’s Dealdecor.com is a new web based start up bringing daily deals to those looking for furniture. In fact TNW’s Robin Wauter’s called Dealdecor.com “Groupon For Furniture”.
The San Francisco based startup is looking to secure $1.2 million in funding and according to a filing at the SEC they’ve already scored a cool million of that.
Dealdecor is hoping to become the go-to site for daily deals on furniture, garden products, home furnishings and other related merchandise. They are doing this by offering up to 70% off retail prices.
Both of the founders have a solid background in the home furnishings and home improvement industry. Both Sakuma and Lok had high ranking positions at the nation’s largest home improvement chain Home Depot. The service is only available in the bay area but with this new funding we are confident it will open up to more of the country.
Dealdecor has several direct fulfillment deals with Asian and other overseas manufacturers. If you’re looking to save money through Dealdecor though it’s going to cost you one thing, time. Their website suggests a 4 week turnaround on most purchases including the overseas freight.
Meshin, a Paolo Alto based s tart up and part of Xerox’s Paolo Alto Research Center, has released a valuable tool for startups, business and everyone in between. The tool called Meshin Recall, is currently available for Android smartphones and is in beta for iPhone.
Meshin Recall leverages your calendars and Evernote and ties them together to give a consistently flowing, easily indexed and accesible way to recall your notes in Evernote. By tying Evernote notes to your calendar you have an organized way of recalling the notes later, and of course that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Meshin’s founders Chris Holmes and Kristen Galliani, are doing vast amounts of research on semantics and the way people use the tools that they use everyday and making them more productive. Categorizing notes may seem like a menial task but so far it’s been the most effective. Everyone can tag notes in Evernote but the tagging system in Evernote is about as effective as hashtagging on Twitter. What do I mean by this? Well with Evernote you can tag a not any way you’d like, but once you have the freedom to so broadly tag your notes, it gets as hard to recall as the note itself.
Comments Off on Shawn Parker’s AirTime Is Ramping Up For Launch, Has 2,000 Users And They’re Hiring0LikeLike 1,417
In 2010 Napster’s co-founders Shawn Fanning and Shawn Parker quietly started making noise about a new start up. At that time it wasn’t clear if the two were reunited when Fanning received an early seed round of funding in the amount of $200,000 for a startup, at the time called SupYo, as in “What’s Up Yo”. At that time Supyo’s founders were listed as Fanning and Voxli founder Joey Liaw.
Almost a year to the day later in October 2011, Fanning and Parker had competed an $8.3 million series A round. Some of the top investor’s in Silicon Valley were involved including; Founder’s Fund, Accel Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Yuri Milner, Ron Conway, Marissa Mayer, Ashton Kutcher, Will I Am, Scott Braun and Michael Arrington. With an all star line up like that Parker and Fanning must be on to something big. All that is known so far is that it’s some kind of video chat.
Comments Off on This Week In Funding 25 March 20120LikeLike 1,991
This Week In Fundingwe have seen over $78 million dollars in investments go to Startups. They have raised it in all different ways, some going after big name Hollywood types like Ashton Kutcher. Or the more traditional rout with rounds Andreessen Horowitz leading the way. Everything from a Series A round to an E round happened. Bellow are a list of some of those that brought in investments this week.
Comments Off on Valley Based Samasource Hooks Up Women Living In Poverty With Microwork And Income0LikeLike 1,682
Samasource founder Leilah Janah works with refugees in Kenya (photo boingboing.net)
Women lead non-profit Samasource is tackling a great social issue while helping to get some of the menial grunt work of today’s biggest internet companies complete. Leilah Janah is the founder of this incredible organization.
Samasource has trained women living in third world countries with basic computer skills and outfitted centers in India, Pakistan, Haiti, Uganda, South Africa and Kenya. These centers have basic computers, internet and access to samahub which provides the trained women with microwork. Microwork can include meta tagging, light data entry and other small digital tasks that many in the big companies that utilize Samasource don’t want to do.
Some of the corporate participants include Google, Linkedin and Intuit.
“Outsourcing is a one trillion dollar industry,” Janah tells 7×7.com. “We train these women and then we bring them work. We are serving an entirely new demographic. These are people who would not get employed otherwise. They were earning less than $3 per day before Samasource. They are all from rural areas or from the slums.”
Comments Off on With Nukona Acquired by Symantec Citrix Accelerator Graduates First Class0LikeLike 1,578
Nukona, a start up focused on mobile app management, was just acquired by Symantec last week. Nukona was one of the first startups in the Citrix Startup Accelerator.
The Citrix Startup Accelerator takes early stage startups with a focus on enterprise and not necessarily integrated with the Citrix platform. In addition to monetary backing Citrix provides the accelerator companies with office space near their Santa Clara headquarters, mentorship and access to the Citrix customer base.
They also give the accelerator companies access to Citrix executives, networking opportunities and access to vendor partners like Symantec who can be instrumental in a companies next round of financing.
Comments Off on LA Entrepreneur Moves Into His Car To Build New Startup0LikeLike 1,451
LA Entrepreneur Kurt Varner is bootstrapping it from his car (photo: Kurtvarner.com)
LA entrepreneur Kurt Varner has decided to turn his marriage into a long distance relationship and move himself, in his car from LA to Silicon Valley. Once he arrives there, the creator of Vloggo who’s working on his next start up, Daily Toaster, is going to live out of his Honda Civic.
He writes on his personal blog about his adventure, that his wife is a school teacher in Los Angeles and it’s not economically feasible for them to rent two apartments. Varner also insists because of the thriving culture in Silicon Valley that’s where he needs to be to continue working on the Daily Toaster and hopefully attracting a co-founder that doesn’t mind his infrequent showering.
Varner has arranged to work out of two collaborative work spaces, the first Hacker Dojo in Mountain View. He’ll also work out of Parisoma in San Francisco. Both work spaces offer Varner a desk, internet access, a chair to sit on and a kitchenette which is a vital part to this journey.
Kyle
The lyrics to Mase’s 1998 hit “Lookin At Me” graced the page of Ben Horowitz, of Andreessen Horowitz, personal blog on Sunday afternoon. Horowitz needed to set the record straight. There’s a lot of haters out there (I know this personally) and people were asking questions. Ridiculous questions if you ask me, but still they were asking.
Cameron Wright
Nick Tippmann
