The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- (Founder Stories) Drew Houston: “Dropbox Users Save A Billion Files Every Three Days”
- We Came, We Saw, We Hacked #TCDisruptBJ
- Siri Ported To iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G
- Introducing The First TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon Winners
- Watch TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon Live
- Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For “Yelp”
- Apple Revealed As Purchaser Of Mapping Tech Company C3
- It’s Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise
- The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs
- Keen On … It’s Official: Privacy Is Dead (TCTV)
- Late-night Scenes From The Beijing Hackathon
- (Founder Stories) Houston On Pitching Dropbox: “Tom Cruise In Minority Report Is Not Carrying Around A Thumb Drive”
- EA Wants To Take On Zynga, But Does This Just Mean ‘More Madden’?
- TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon: The Night Shift
- In The Halls Of The Hedge Fund Hackers
- How Klout Got Klout.com
| (Founder Stories) Drew Houston: “Dropbox Users Save A Billion Files Every Three Days” Posted: 30 Oct 2011 07:36 AM PDT  In episode II of Erick Schonfeld’s Founder Stories interview with Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston, Houston describes how releasing a demo video to Hacker News during Dropbox’s early days catapulted his company into elite company. “I hoped that the response would be good so that Paul [Graham] and Y Combinator would see it.” The response was better than good. Houston says the video held the top spot at “Hacker News for a couple of days” and it turns out the right people were watching. One viewer was Arash Ferdowsi, who was so impressed that he paired up with Houston as a partner. Houston also credits the video with helping him receive almost immediate and valuable feedback. Asked if he was worried about copycats stealing the concept at the time – Houston responds, “It is easy for me to explain the idea, it is actually really hard to do it.” Below, Houston takes us inside Y Combinator and describes how Paul Graham weighed in with key advice while Houston was under the Y Combinator wing. ”Our first sort of marketing attempt was like throwing spaghetti at a wall …we really struggled in terms of how to articulate this with investors because we had never really done that before, and Paul was really helpful to us in terms of distilling down the idea into a much shorter and sort of more compact presentation.” Advice in hand, the team went before a room full of investors at Demo Day, where you get “waived like a piece of steak” and hit it out of the park by walking them through an admittedly risky demo that could have wiped-out their entire PowerPoint presentation. Having survived the high-wire act, Houston says today, “Dropbox users save a billion files every three days.” Make sure to watch the entire video for additional insights and be sure to catch the first episode of Schonfeld’s interview with Houston here. Past episodes of Founder stories featuring Eric Ries, Fred Wilson and Dustin Moskovitz are here. Episode III of this interview is coming up. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a... Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with "good" ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in... Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox’s activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions. Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9. After graduating from... Paul Graham is a partner at Y Combinator. He is also the author of On Lisp (1993), ANSI Common Lisp (1995), and Hackers & Painters (2004). In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first ASP, which in 1998 became Yahoo! Store. In 2002 he discovered a simple spam filtering algorithm that inspired the current generation of filters. Graham has a B.A. from Cornell. He earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Applied Sciences (specializing in computer... After studying at MIT, Arash Ferdowsi founded Dropbox with Drew Houston. Dropbox was a TechCrunch50 finalist in 2008.
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| We Came, We Saw, We Hacked #TCDisruptBJ Posted: 30 Oct 2011 03:02 AM PDT What fuels Silicon Valley is a never-ending desire to solve problems, make things work and get things done, no matter what the obstacles. If anything is testament to the universality of this spirit, it is the emergence of a fervent strain of entrepreneurship in China — most recently evidenced by the 46 hacker teams that poured their hearts and minds into their computers at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon. While the hackathon has passed and the winners have been announced, the aftermath of those 24 hours will be felt for much longer. Click through the slideshow below and watch the interview of former Palantir employee and current Jihua founder Tian Li above for what hath TC Disrupt China wrought, already. Click to view slideshow.TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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| Siri Ported To iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:06 PM PDT In a moment as historic as Alexander Bell’s call to his assistant, an iPhone hacker wrote on Twitter that he had successfully ported Siri to the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch. He wrote “Actually, it just worked,” informing the world that he had completely ported Siri to the iPhone 4 and that more versions are on the way. The hack requires a jailbroken device. By copying the app onto the device, the iPhone 4 can call up Siri and, more important, connect to the Siri servers. You can follow these instructions to install the app yourself and it seems to currently also work with the iPod Touch 4G although those instructions are forthcoming. Mark Gurman at 9to5mac interviewed Steven Troughton-Smith, another iPod Touch/iPhone 4 hacker, answering a few questions about the feat:
We’ll give it a try this weekend and report back.
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| Introducing The First TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon Winners Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:06 PM PDT  Between bridging the translation gap, the lack of and then abundance of morning coffee, collective Internet struggles and the many many hacks using TianJi’s (“the LinkedIn of China”) API, the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon just happened, and it was nothing short of amazing. Around 300 hackers signed on to spend 24 hours together, and 100 actually braved a night full of spotty connectivity and vegetable noodles in order to present their hacks at 11:00 am Beijing time. Each team was given a minute to show their stuff in front of the multi-lingual audience and judges. The judges included TechCrunch Mobile’s Greg Kumparak, ICanHazCheeseburger’s Ben Huh, Zynga’s Andy Tain, TenCent’s Peter Zhong, Sonos’ Carter Agar, Google’s Ming Yang and DigiCha’s Bill Bishop, who parsed the 46 hacks to the best of their ability, and culled six of the best. In addition to everlasting fame and glory, winners will have the opportunity to present onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt proper. Meet first TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon winners, below (links to come when the hacks go live). Grand Prize WeDiary – A chronological visual diary for your blog. Firecracker – A mobile game that simulates playing with firecrackers. TouchMusic – A slick looking smartphone app that functions as a theramin. HackMaster – A game that teaches people how to code Javascript, with a love story. Shareware – Shareware realizes you’re browsing from China, and loads Chinese share buttons instead of Facebook and Twitter, solving a huge problem. Pomo – Mobile-based app that tracks your working time — graphs what time is productive versus not productive. TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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| Watch TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon Live Posted: 29 Oct 2011 08:25 PM PDT Ni hao! It’s now morning and all of us here at the Disrupt Beijing Hackathon are somehow awake. We’ve got 46 survivors of a grueling night spent coding about to take the stage and present the fruits of their labors, the excitement is palpable. For the many of you not in China, you can (miraculously) watch the very first ever international Disrupt hackathon on the livestream above. Good times. TechCrunch, founded on June 11, 2005 by Michael Arrington, is a network of technology-oriented blogs and other web properties.
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| Classy: Google Is Running Zagat Ads Against Mobile Searches For “Yelp” Posted: 29 Oct 2011 05:52 PM PDT  If you search for “Yelp” on Google from your mobile phone the top paid result, even above the organic result to Yelp.com, takes you to Zagat. I am only seeing this on mobile searches. While it is a common practice for companies to advertise against their competitors’ names in search advertising, in this case it is Google itself which is bidding for that search term and taking the top spot. A classy move. Google bought Zagat last September to shore up its local reviews for Google Places, which is its answer to Yelp. Google Places and Yelp have a contentious history, with Google borrowing liberally from yelp to help build up its local directory. Now with Zagat, Google finally has a large corpus if its own review, in addition to the ones people are slowly adding to Google Places. By redirecting some of the people who are looking for Yelp to Zagat, Google is keeping up its pattern of punching Yelp in the face every chance it gets. Remember, at one point Google almost bought Yelp back in 2009. But that didn’t work out, and the gloves have been off ever since. (Sound familiar, Groupon?) Google is really hitting Yelp where it hurts. During an antitrust hearing last September, Yelp revealed that 75 percent of its traffic comes from Google in one way or another. A big chunk of that is from organic search. If Yelp is not the top spot when someone searches for “Yelp” that could have some impact on Yelp’s traffic. Yelp might have to respond by bidding on its own name on AdWords. One way or another, Google’s aggressiveness in pushing Zagat is going to cost Yelp. Another company founded in 2004 by two former PayPal employees. Yelp is a local reviews website covering the United States, Canada, the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands; Yelp drew an audience of more than 50 million unique visitors in March 2011. Yelpers have written more than 18 million local reviews, making Yelp the leading local guide for real word-of-mouth on everything from boutiques and mechanics to restaurants and dentists. ZAGAT.com features over 30,000 of the best places to eat, drink, and stay worldwide. The site is published by and based on the renowned 30 years, Zagat Survey (a survey-based restaurant guide). ZAGAT.com provides access to ratings and reviews for restaurants, nightspots, hotels and attractions in hundreds of cities worldwide. It features menus, photos, virtual tours, updates on the latest openings and closings with ZAGAT BUZZ and connect with other ZAGAT.com members in our bustling Discussion Boards. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
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| Apple Revealed As Purchaser Of Mapping Tech Company C3 Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:49 PM PDT  Back in March, we posted a demo of C3 Technology’s extremely cool 3D maps. The reconstructions of landmarks and buildings are created by a technique (as I understand it) similar to the Kinect hack we posted that uses compiled depth and parallax data to continually build and refine a 3D model of whatever it’s looking at. C3′s version obviously works on a larger scale and thus has different strengths and requirements, but it’s almost completely automated as long as you can afford to send a plane or copter up with the equipment. They were bought earlier this year, but the purchaser was not known at the time. 9to5Mac has been informed that the buyer was none other than Apple. It makes sense: Apple has bought two other mapping companies, Placebase in 2009 and Poly9 in 2010. It seems beyond a doubt that they are deep into a skunk works operation to revamp their maps. The use of Google maps has always struck me as a bit incongruous with the rest of iOS — not that it doesn’t work well and look good, otherwise Apple would never have used it. But with the rivalry between Apple and Google growing more intense every year, having such a primary function of the iPhone essentially outsourced must have started to really rankle Apple. Google actually fired the first shot: the latest version of Google Maps and Google Navigation, the ones with 3D buildings and so on, was unapologetically offered only on Android devices. I speculated at the time that this was Google beginning to turn the screws on Apple and differentiate by discriminating with their essential services. Apple, of course, was already planning for this, knowing they couldn’t have as good of a product at launch but also knowing that a few years of work might produce something even better. The addition of C3′s technology puts a powerful tool in Apple’s hands, and of course takes that tool out of others’. Photorealistic 3D maps, likely with local business and deal overlays and traffic data (all areas where Apple has been buying companies, patenting ideas, or developing products), may be the major feature of the next release of iOS. “Sputnik” is the name of the new team, and is based in Sweden, as C3 was originally. The reference to the early lead the commies (as we might have said at the time) had on the US during the space race is pretty clear. The purchase amount was not revealed. The original report put the value of the company at a billion dollars, but based on Saab’s 57.8% stake being valued at $150 million, the total value of the company looks to be more like a quarter of a billion.
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| It’s Time For Google To Let Google Voice Live Up To Its Promise Posted: 29 Oct 2011 04:07 PM PDT  Last week TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington wrote a post highlighting the fact that iPhone users can get a surprisingly good experience using Google Voice if they’re willing to switch to Sprint. Google Voice on the iPhone typically has some hurdles, mostly because Apple won’t let the native Google Voice app ‘take over’ the dialer the way it can on Android (not to mention the fact that the iOS GV app is notoriously buggy). But Sprint has done some unique, deep integration at the carrier level that minimizes these issues. His post got me thinking about my experience with Google Voice since I began using it exclusively in November 2009. My conclusion: there are a lot of areas for improvement. The latency and occasional cutouts range from mildly annoying to infuriating. Text messages sometimes seem to arrive much later than they should. And MMS simply isn’t offered for most people (Sprint just launched support, but none of the other carriers do). But a few hours later, as I dealt with my carrier T-Mobile dropping two calls in succession, I realized there’s one simple feature that Google Voice could easily offer that would do a lot to make up for all of its quirks: VoIP support. Between my home network, work, and coffee shops, my phone is connected to Wifi for the majority of each day. Wifi, as it happens, is really good at transmitting VoIP calls. Oh, and Android has supported native VoIP calling since Gingerbread was released last winter. So why am I still at the mercy of my carrier’s cell towers again? It isn’t a matter of getting the feature working with Google Voice. Google Voice’s Gmail integration, which lets you make and receive calls from your computer, is done over VoIP, so the infrastructure is obviously there. In fact, Google actually had a functional Google Voice VoIP app for Android that was being tested internally by Google employees a year ago. But for some reason it never saw the light of day. That reason is pretty easy to guess: the carriers would throw a fit. Ever since Android started to take off with the Droid launch, Google has been in a balancing act between appeasing the carriers and giving users what they actually want. Case in point: Android devices support native hotspot functionality, but the carriers can disable it (unless you pay them more money). Or, a more recent example: up until now it’s been impossible to delete carriers’ pre-installed apps (also known as crapware) from your phone, which is utterly ridiculous. Beginning with Android 4.0, you’ll be able to disable them. Not delete them, mind you — they’ll still be taking up space on your phone — but the phone won’t ever let them launch. Hooray…? Update: A commenter points out that these apps are baked into the firmware (i.e. Google can’t delete them entirely, though the prevalence of these apps seems like a big compromise in the first place). Anyway, the point is that Google is treading lightly when it comes to improving Android in ways that could impact their relationship with the carriers. Google cares a lot more about getting as many Android devices as possible into users’ hands over the next few years than it does about giving them WiFi hotspots. And to boost that market share, they need the carriers on board. Which brings us back to Google Voice. If Google were to enable Google Voice calling over 3G/4G connections, users would have very little reason to purchase their ‘voice minutes’ any more. This would obviously agitate the carriers, and isn’t going to happen any time soon. But Google could make another feature compromise: let us make and receive calls over our Wifi networks with Google Voice, and still use our ‘minutes’ whenever we’re on the go. Some people may downgrade the number of minutes they buy, but they’ll still need a voice package. And the carriers will wind up with fewer infuriated customers, who’ll actually be able to make phone calls from their offices and homes without having their signal drop. Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information.... Google Voice is a free Internet service that uses VoIP technology to link phone numbers together. GrandCentral was relaunched as Google Voice on March 11, 2009 with new features, including voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing. Users of Google Voice are able to select a single U.S. phone number, from various area codes. When a Google Number is called, any or all of the user’s phones may be set to ring. Which phone(s) ring can be set based on...
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| The Most Effective Habit For Entrepreneurs Posted: 29 Oct 2011 02:22 PM PDT  Editor's note: James Altucher is an investor, programmer, author, and entrepreneur. He is Managing Director of Formula Capital and has written 6 books on investing. His latest book is I Was Blind But Now I See. You can follow him@jaltucher. There was a girl at a party, Ona, who then started telling me how she met her current boyfriend. She just simply told him she liked him. I was insanely jealous right then of this guy. Here was this beautiful, hysterically funny girl who told a guy she liked him and now he was having regular sex with her. That doesn't happen, right? It never happened to me. I sat there nodding, not being able to say anything but thinking, what if she said, "I like you" to me right then. I would've been happy. Instead, I got depressed and went to sit on the stairs. There was another girl there. She was crying.I tried to comfort her by telling her I was an artist. I then asked her why she was crying. Apparently the party was actually her birthday party! I had no idea. I didn't even know who she was. And she was crying because her boyfriend didn't show up. Within a week we were living together. Ultimately it didn't work out and I did my usual passive thing, which was to move to another city (in this case, NYC), to get out of the relationship. In Stephen Covey's Book, "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" his first habit is "Be Proactive." I haven't read the book. I saw the list on Wikipedia. I will not buy the book because at this moment it’s the #1 book on Amazon under Motivation on the Kindle and I am #2. How can he be #1 after 22 years? But it makes me think—unfortunately he's dead on. In fact, Being Proactive might be the only effective habit. I read the other six and they all seemed to be corollaries of the first one.
(Claudia looking very suspicious, minutes after we were married). Here's the proactive plan: LIST AND DO: Proactively list what you want (a spouse, a new job, a new business, a new opportunity. List what the next step is (sign up for dating services, take a yoga class, look at classifieds, spec out your business, decide how you will build your product, contact the people who will build it and get a price from them, ask people if you can work for them.) Make sure the next step is very doable. So doable that you can (and will) do it today. CUT LOSSES: Quickly determine what doesn't work. For instance, when I set up Stockpickr.com I set up 10 other websites at the same time. None of them got any traction and I stuck with the one that did. GET A JOB: If you want a new job, proactively go out and get another one. Preferably freelance : think about what you do best, and then do it for three paying customers. Contact 30 customers and ask what simple services you can do for them that they would be willing to pay for. Three of them will respond and now you can quit your job. If you want to raise money: Contact 100 VCs or angels and share with them your business. If they all say "no" then build up for six months, send them all notes on your progress every month, and go out and raise money again six months later. If you have no progress then start a new business. It didn’t work. Another example: when a book publisher once rejected me, I wrote back to her saying that I fit perfectly with her list, describing how I could publicize the book with the different branches of her own company. I would make all changes she wanted, I would work with a co-author, etc and wouldn't you know it—she published my book that she had rejected. It was an easy book to write (my co-author did a lot of the writing) and I got an advance and made money. It never would’ve happened if I hadn’t researched her and proactively chased her down. GET PUBLICITY: If you want publicity, write your own publicity. Write a guest post for a popular blog (like I am doing here). If you want to go on TV, contact the producers of shows and give them ten ideas of what you can talk about and why they should pick you to talk about them. Example: I have no credentials in politics but I wrote a post about a year or so ago for the Huffington Post on who the possible third-party candidates could be. Next thing I was on five radio shows talking about it. Suddenly I was a political expert. HEALTH If you want health, proactively get it. You know when you are putting bad stuff in your body, when you're not sleeping enough, when you're not exercising enough, when you're letting short-term pleasures get in the way of longer-term gratification . Proactively make sure that when you're 80 you're not stooped over and suffering. PROACTIVELY EXTEND YOUR RUNWAY Of course one way to make more money is to spend less. Cut out the biggest expenses in your life. Even rent or mortgage. It's no crime or shame to move someplace else. I've done it repeatedly when I've needed to. That's how you live happier and longer. PROACTIVELY ELIMINATE THE CRAPPY PEOPLE IN YOUR LIFE If someone is making you angry, how do you be proactive? That's easy. Ignore them! Don't try to fight them. You'll never win. Do you think you are going to win an argument against a someone who hates you? Of course not. Ignore them until they stop hating you. Now that entire problem is gone. HOW TO START TODAY! So today, write down the five things you want and what the absolute very next step is to getting those things (if you want to start a business, for instance, write down some ideas for businesses and how you can realistically start them within the next month). I did beat out Covey for about 15 seconds. (Click here if you want to a promotion on my book). NO EXCUSES You can come up with a lot of reasons for not proactively beginning something. Excuses are easy and I get it. But how about take a ten-day diet from excuses. You can get back to your “I cants” 10 days from now. If I said, “I can’t start Stockpickr, I’m running a fund of hedge funds,” then I never would’ve started it and sold it nine months later. If I said, “I can’t self-publish – nobody will buy it” then I never would’ve had for 15 seconds the #1 best-selling Motivational book on Amazon’s kindle store, beating out Stephen Covey’s crappy little book. After I was dating Sue for two years (the girl whose birthday party it was at the beginning of this post), I went shopping for an engagement ring. My friend, Peter, went down to the main store in Pittsburgh with me. There was an emerald ring that looked nice and it was $700. I was shaking. That was a lot of money to me at the time. There were so many pretty girls walking around the store and I fell in love with all of them. It was an honest and sincere love I felt for every woman walking around. I wanted to marry them all. Right then. Later that night I came home and told Sue I wasn't ready to get married yet. A year later we were broken up. Probably the most effective habit: Don't be proactive about the things you don't want to do.
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| Keen On … It’s Official: Privacy Is Dead (TCTV) Posted: 29 Oct 2011 12:50 PM PDT  Yes, it's really true. Nobody can hide anything anymore in our digital age of transparency. And thus, Dov Seidman, author of the re-released How and CEO of LRN, says we have entered an "era of behavior" in which we can no longer separate our private and public lives. As Seidman told me when we caught up earlier this week on Skype, the era of behavior means that our reputations now always "precede us". And this "unprecedented transparency" compounds the possibility of doing both good and evil. For Seidman, this is all excellent news. Our new transparency makes going good much more effective, he told me, citing the example of doctors in Michigan whose public apology built a new trust with their patients. But is Seidman really correct? Do we really want to live in an era in which our behavior can be scrutinized by anyone and one mistake can ruin our reputations forever? Dov Seidman is the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of LRN, a company that helps businesses develop ethical corporate cultures. Author of “HOW: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything … in Business (and in Life)
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| Late-night Scenes From The Beijing Hackathon Posted: 29 Oct 2011 12:24 PM PDT  The Disrupt Beijing Hackathon has entered the dark hours of the night. Fueled by some midnight Spaghetti, (real) coke with sugar, refreshing Yanjing beer, and Lays of the Italian Red Meat flavor variety (which strangely tastes like Barbecue), our brave hackers are cranking code at breakneck speed. It’s quiet in here but there is a palpable buzz at the tables. In spite of the occasional hacker bailing out in favor of creaturely comforts such as a full night’s sleep, many have stayed back and concentration and consciousness levels seem largely high. It hasn’t been a smooth ride today. We have had Internet and Wi-Fi connectivity issues but in true hacker fashion, the staff and support personnel have rigged together something that.just.works. You’ll see in the pictures below. Here then are a few scenes from my 3am photo run around the room. The Fuel The People We’ve got the hackers who are ready with a smile at this hour… And the ones who could perhaps use one at this hour… A crew of French hackers was engaged in a delightfully sounding technical conversation while one of them, Hermes (per his name tag), was belting awesome rap music.. Sleepy Hackers Of course, no hackathon photo set would be complete without the obligatory sleepy hacker photos. This reminds me of my grad school days. The comfort of lining up three chairs in the lab and dozzzing off… Just outside the room though, we find two hackers who seem to have just given in and gone all out! War Of The Cables Now for proof of the epic battle we had with the Wi-Fi/Internet gods. Internet connection was at best spotty all day and Wi-Fi in this large room went kaput fairly early on. At the end of a few hours, this is what we ended up with. Good enough? Sure. Fun? Not sure. A heavily wired up switch with cables running to every table… The mess of cables running all over the room… But the overall winner was this lone, sad router with two blinking lights and one antenna. He fought hard. He’s a trooper. And last, but not the least, part of the TechCrunch team, tired but all smiles. Hackathon submissions start at 8am Beijing time and demos will start at 11am. Stay tuned for we will be live streaming the event!
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| Posted: 29 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT  Dropbox co-founder, Drew Houston recently sat down with TechCrunch Editor, Erick Schonfeld to discuss the origins of Dropbox – a service that allows users to upload and access their files from virtually any device, anywhere. With $250-million in funding and 45-million users, Dropbox is shaking up the world of digital storage. The roots of Dropbox were planted when Houston was a student at MIT. “You could sit down at any of tens-of-thousands of computers on campus and not only your files but your whole environment was just in front of you and kind of followed you around.” Then graduation hit and Houston says he was thrown “back to the stone age.” He had just launched a company but didn’t feel secure carrying it around in his jeans on a thumb drive. Solving his own issue, Houston created Dropbox and pitched it to Y Combinator with the premise that “Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive.” He was accepted. Below, Houston briefly describes how he tested Dropbox – without actually releasing Dropbox. It’s a strategy Eric Ries recently wrote about on TechCrunch. Aware that releasing a flawed beta would result in customer backlash, Houston made and posted a video describing his software. “It turns out we got the same feedback from all of our prospective users that we would have gotten from putting code in their hands, except it was a ton less effort.” Speaking of feedback, when asked about the “file folder structure” of Dropbox, which was created before the iPad, Houston says Dropbox will apply a “post-PC non-file and folder centric approach to everything” it does. Make sure to check out the full video for additional insights. Past episodes of Founder Stories, featuring conversations with Eric Ries, Scott Heiferman, and Fred Wilson are here. Episode II of this interview is coming up. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi. Frustrated by working from multiple computers, Drew was inspired to create a service that would let people bring all their files anywhere, with no need to email around attachments. Drew created a demo of Dropbox and showed it to fellow MIT student Arash Ferdowsi, who dropped out with only one semester left to help make Dropbox a reality. Guiding their decisions was a relentless focus on crafting a... Y Combinator is a venture fund which focuses on seed investments to startup companies. It offers financing as well as business consulting along with other opportunities to 2-4 person companies looking to take an idea to a product. Y Combinator looks for companies with "good" ideas over companies with experience and a business model. The company made its first investments in Summer 2005. Y Combinator selects companies to finance and consult with twice a year. They are located in... Drew Houston is CEO and Co-Founder of Dropbox, and has led Dropbox’s growth from a simple idea to a service relied upon by millions around the world. Drew leads Dropbox’s activities, and is actively involved in its business and product decisions. Before founding Dropbox, Drew attended MIT where he studied computer science. He took a quick leave from school to form Accolade, an online SAT prep startup, and also worked as a software engineer for Bit9. After graduating from... Erick Schonfeld is the Editor of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington left in 2011, Schonfeld became Editor. Prior to TechCrunch,... Person: Eric Ries Website: theleanstartup.com Companies: IMVU, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Aardvark, Veri, Rock Health Eric Ries is the author of the forthcoming book, [The Lean Startup] (http://theleanstartup.com). Previously, he co-founded and served as Chief Technology Officer of IMVU. He is the co-author of several books including The Black Art of Java Game Programming (Waite Group Press, 1996). While an undergraduate at Yale Unviersity, he co-founded Catalyst Recruiting. Although Catalyst folded with the dot-com crash, Ries continued his entrepreneurial career as a Senior Software Engineer at There.com, leading efforts in agile software development and...
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| EA Wants To Take On Zynga, But Does This Just Mean ‘More Madden’? Posted: 29 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT  After churning out a parade of sequels to all of their flagship games, has EA finally learned its lesson? Last month, EA CEO John Riccitiello said that his company is taking dead aim at Zynga, implying that perhaps the company understands what’s at stake, and is determined to be just as much of a player in digital games as it has been on consoles. EA’s acquisition of PopCap Games, the makers of Plants Vs Zombies and Bejeweled, was a great way to convince investors (and fans) that it’s serious about making a play into online and social games. Granted, EA paid upwards of $1.3 billion for PopCap (with a market cap of right around $8 billion!), but it succeeded in snatching the casual game maker from the eager claws of Zynga, which made a $1 billion offer for the game developer. On EA’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Riccitiello reiterated that EA’s competitive advantage over Zynga and the other big game developers is the strength of its some dozen globally recognized brands, like Battlefield, Need for Speed, Mass Effect, FIFA and Madden, to name a few. The company has set a $3 billion target for online revenue, and is pushing its well-known titles into social and online verticals. “This is a strategy only EA can deliver on”, the CEO said yesterday. “Our competitors either have too few brands or have not demonstrated the ability to project their games on multiple platforms”. The earnings report backed up the CEO’s statement, revealing that sales of EA’s major sports titles like FIFA and Madden are up 20 percent year over year and digital sales are up 30 percent year over year. This boost was also a result of the company launching Sims Social on Facebook, which has risen to be the second most popular game on Facebook behind Zynga’s CityVille, with over 8 million daily active users and 40 million monthly users. What’s more, EA shared yesterday that it has exceeded guidance expectations of $925 to $975 million in net revenue for the second quarter, with net revenue coming in at $1.03 billion. The company also saw its digital revenue grow to $907 million on a trailing twelve months non-GAAP basis, with strong growth in smartphone games leading to a non-GAAP revenue jump of 87 percent from the same time last year. EA is still be viewed as one of the last remaining Big Kahunas of video game development and design in the U.S., and luckily for them, its console games don’t really show any signs of slowing down. The company said yesterday that it has sold nearly 8 million copies of FIFA 2012 and over 3 million copies of Madden NFL 2012 over the last quarter. What’s more, it’s already shipped more than 10 million units of Battlefield 3 and is already receiving reorders from retailers. With the holiday season approaching, the outlook for EA’s console games looks good. On the digital side, thanks to EA’s big acquisitions over the last two years of PopCap and Playfish, PopCap’s Plants Vs. Zombies is now available on EA’s Pogo game site, and the company will continue to see increases in the number of users and sales as PopCap titles are released across EA’s platforms. Furthermore, to that point, the company said yesterday that Playfish increased Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) for the sixth consecutive quarter. Yet, while EA now has a 25 percent share of the Western games market due to the strength of its sports and social games (Sims) and its pricey acquisitions, it also saw $657 million in operating expenses and a $340 million net loss for the quarter. Becoming a hybrid startup is not such an easy (or cheap) proposition. Of course, EA also slipped another interesting piece of info in its earnings report, saying that Origin, its digital distribution and DRM system that lets users purchase games online for PCs and mobile, has been downloaded by over six million consumers and has already signed big publishers like Warner Brothers Interactive, Capcom, and THQ. And today the company announced that it will be opening up Origin to third-party publishers in November, which will likely bring an array of titles from smaller publishers to the platform. For EA, this is advantageous because it allows them to avoid the expensive task of development and marketing while still managing to distribute great content from large and small publishers and make money by taking a distributor’s percentage of sales. With these further sources of revenue, the outlook for EA is becoming bright. It made some very bold moves in purchasing Playfish and PopCap for big bucks, but with those companies came top personnel talent and popular social titles. Of course, simply porting old console games onto new gaming medium and buying casual game developers doesn’t necessarily seem like an innovative $3 billion plan. Or maybe it’s that it seems too easy. The real key is to balance old titles with new titles and develop a seamless distribution medium for its online titles — this is what will keep customers happy. Hopefully in trying to ramp up Origin to become a competitor with Steam and a source of significant revenue, EA can use that future cash to direct toward developing original, new concepts and titles that are optimized for mobile. That’s where the future lies. Because, as Devin wrote in September: “Repackaging The Sims for a social setting was a cakewalk. Successfully repackaging Battlefield and their sports franchises is another task altogether”. EA is on its way, but it has still yet to prove hands-down that social, mobile, and digital games can become a significant part of its “new” DNA. And, as more and more EA execs jump ship to Zynga as it prepares for its potential $15 to $20 billion-valuation IPO, the company has to retain its top talent if it’s really going to give Zynga a run for the big digital money. Electronic Arts is an American developer and publisher of computer and video games. They own well known game studios such as Bioware, Mythic, and Maxis games and have developed titles from the Need for Speed series to Crysis. Zynga was founded in July 2007 by Mark Pincus and is named for his late American Bulldog, Zinga. Loyal and spirited, Zinga's name is a nod to a legendary African warrior queen. The early supporting founding team included Eric Schiermeyer, Michael Luxton, Justin Waldron, Kyle Stewart, Scott Dale, John Doerr, Steve Schoettler, Kevin Hagan, and Andrew Trader. Zynga’s mission is connecting the world through games. Everyday millions of people interact with their friends and express their unique personalities through our... Here at PopCap goal is to create fun games that literally everyone can enjoy. Games are easy to learn, tough to master… and utterly addictive!
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| TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon: The Night Shift Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:55 AM PDT  It’s 12:49 am at the TechCrunch Disrupt Beijing Hackathon; Unlike any other hackathon I’ve attended, the late night hacker snacks here take the prize for unique brain fuel. They include Tea Eggs, Italian Red Meat Flavor potato chips, Yanjing beer, Apples, and Pokki sticks. Other differences? Well I’m writing this through a VPN because WordPress is blocked, and I’m probably going to have to go back to the hotel room to finish because the Internet keeps crapping out half way in the middle of my post. Despite it being a hard day’s night basically, there are about 100 intrepid programmers still here at the CNCC conference center in the Olympic Village, working all through the night with the fervor of well, programmers. Despite the lack of Red Bull. And Internet. So why are they still here? I asked MadeToFitMe’s Alex Duncan, “To beat those mother*ckers,” he said, gesturing to the competition all around him. Duncan’s hack, Cityfight, allowed cities like Beijing and Shanghai to “fight” against each other with the amount of support messages they receive from constituents. “We’re here for the food,” said the team behind iTrust, an online reputation management system . “Cause it’s fun,” said startup founder — and former Palantir employee — Tian Li, “I can do this kind of stuff all night.” When asked what had changed in China’s startup scene since he left Palantir and Silicon Valley, he explained that increased media coverage and Chinese success stories had increased the amount of support in China, including but not limited to startup incubators and events: “Two years ago doing a startup wasn’t cool, it was below getting a job at Tencent.” Success stories like Zuckerberg and Ma can sometimes get one through a patch of rough Internet, or a lack of a good night’s sleep. “Whether we win or not we’re going to just go on and try to make it happen,” said Acheeveit founder Nicky Szmala. Okay, if you’ll excuse me I’m going to take a cue from that dude up there and go to bed. Click to view slideshow.
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| In The Halls Of The Hedge Fund Hackers Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:11 AM PDT  I went down to the demonstration today, to get my fair share of bemusement. Occupy Wall Street seemed drizzly, dejected, and oddly disconnected from the world around it. I approve of their goals, and I think their message is very clear indeed, but I’m not so sure their methods are effective. We’ll see. But they did spur me to go back and reread, of all things, some Mark Cuban. I don’t usually have much time for Cuban, but in a post last year he made a really interesting point: “Wall Street is a platform. It's a platform to be exploited by every technological and intellectual means possible. The best analogy for traders? They are hackers. Just as hackers search for and exploit operating system and application shortcomings, traders do the same thing.” Matt Taibbi, in a recent Rolling Stone piece, is far more adversarial — “Wall Street Isn’t Really Winning, It’s Cheating” — but he makes essentially the same point. Most of the “cheats” he cites are examples of hacking the system, rather than breaking the law. (The big exception being the now-infamous Abacus case, but intelligent people have argued otherwise.) It’s worth noting that the tech world’s attitude towards hacking the system, any system, generally ranges from “grudging respect” to “outright approval.” Steve Jobs was a phone phreak. MIT memorializes its finest hacks. Mark Zuckerberg’s famous FaceMash hack was the precursor to Facebook. I suspect a similar sensibility is behind the anti-Occupy “We Are The 53%” movement; we played the cards we could scrounge up the best we can, within the system, that’s the way it’s supposed to work! Why can’t you? But what Occupy is actually saying is that the system itself has been corrupted to benefit the hackers, in such a way that there is no longer any way for the non-hackers to effect meaningful change. That’s why they’re camping in the rain in Zuccotti Park rather than writing letters to Congress and getting out the vote for the candidate of their choice. Follow @rezendi@rezendi Jon Evans "…Americans who benefit … react with hysteria to anyone who points out just how rigged the system is." nytimes.com/2011/10/10/opi… Steve Jobs, phone phreak — that’s pretty cool. High-frequency trading; also kinda cool, despite its dubious benefits. Steve Jobs corrupting Ma Bell’s management so that he and his cronies keep siphoning a percentage of everyone else’s skyrocketing bills, with no oversight or recourse: that, I think you will agree, would decidedly not have been cool. It’s that kind of perceived corruption that Occupy is protesting. Extending the hacker analogy, the problem they see is worse than black-hats taking over Amazon, Google, and Microsoft’s server farms; it’s more like black-hats taking over Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, full stop. Will Occupy really make a difference? Do Wall Street’s system-hackers care about shame or public outcry? I have my doubts. But I do believe the damp campers in Zuccotti Park have good reason to be angry. Image: “Eye and nose of the Wall Street Bull”, by Alex E. Proimos, Flickr.
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| Posted: 29 Oct 2011 11:07 AM PDT  While everyone is making up their minds about whether Klout is an utterly meaningless service or the divine “standard for influence” the world has been clamoring for, I had an interesting chat with Klout co-founder and CEO Joe Fernandez the other day at the F.ounders conference in Dublin, Ireland. When I informed him that, if anything, I think that the name of the company was well chosen, he told me the story of how he obtained the domain name klout.com. Since I have a huge interest in that type of small behind-the-scenes story – and in domain names – I loved it and found it interesting enough to be worth sharing here. When the company started out a few years ago in New York City, Fernandez’ first and top choice for a name was Klout, so he registered klout.net and tried to get in touch with the owner of klout.com, who was based in San Francisco. Klout was still a long way of getting funded or making money, so Fernandez offered the owner $1,000 of his own money for the domain name. The owner responded by laughing at him, suggesting it was worth ‘high five figures’ and saying he had plans to build something for it. For the next year and a half, Fernandez harassed the owner every week to try and convince him to sell the domain name. Then, in August 2009, Fernandez decided to move the company from NYC to San Francisco. Around that time, Klout also raised its first round of seed funding: a check from angel investor Nova Spivack, which Fernandez cashed, keeping the cash in his apartment. Much to the dismay of his team and hosting company, he tells me. Next, Fernandez started following the owner of klout.com on Twitter, waiting for him to reveal his location. When the guy at one point tweeted that he was at a restaurant in San Francisco, Fernandez went there, threw an envelope with $5,000 in cash on the table and told him that he would stop bothering him if he finally agreed to sell the domain name in exchange for the money. The guy agreed, and Fernandez opened up his laptop and took care of the domain transfer right then and there, leaving the restaurant ten minutes later. He then tweeted this: Admittedly, some will think this was slightly creepy and obnoxious behavior. I, on the other hand, think it’s awesome. Real entrepreneurs, after all, know how to hustle. Klout measures influence across the social web. Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. Data is collected about the content users create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.
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