The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital
- New York Hardware Buffs Weigh In On China, Embracing Niches, And How To Start Making Things
- Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service
- WhosHere Launches Anonymous Video Chat
- Retro Beer Company Churchkey, A New Tech Investor Darling, Will Expand To San Francisco Next Month
- Rovio’s FB App, Angry Birds Friends, Flies Out Of Beta With Tournament Mode, New Levels & More
- U.S. Launches Digital Roadmap To Open Up Government Data And Court Developers
- Qwiki Launches A Publishing Platform For ABC News And Others
- Mint.com App Update: Now Split Transactions
- ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi’s Advice To Startups: Stay Lean, Don’t Listen To The Nay-Sayers & Hire The Right People
- Startup Alley Is Doin’ It, And Doin’ It, And Doin’ It Well
- Rubicon Project Acquires Mobsmith To Expand Into Mobile Ads
- Target Rolls Out Shopkick Integration Nationwide
- McAfee: Mobile Malware Explodes, Increases 1,200% In Q1 2012
- Welcome To Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC!
- Today’s Google Doodle Is An Awesome, Playable Moog Synthesizer
- Former Twitter CTO Greg Pass Becomes Founding Entrepreneurial Officer For Cornell’s NYC Tech Campus
- Social Media Marketer Vitrue Has Been Bought By Oracle For $300 Million
- BodyMedia Raises $12 Million Funding Round Led By Comcast Ventures
- TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day Three! #TCDisrupt
| YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital Posted: 23 May 2012 09:12 AM PDT  Online video advertising startup YuMe has picked up another $10 million in financing from China-based investment firm WestSummit Capital, closing out a $22 million strategic round that was first announced last November. The round was led by Samsung Ventures and also included Translink Capital. YuMe founder Jayant Kadambi confirmed the raise, and told me by email that the funding will be used primarily to expand into more connected devices. YuMe provides a platform for delivering ads against online videos, but has recently been adding support for connected TVs. “[W]e are using to expand our Connected TV business across OEMs and publishers globally. We are continuing to expand our business out of our Chennai development labs, as we see tremendous media business growth opportunities across all of Asia,” Kadambi wrote. That’s the primary reason for Samsung’s interest in YuMe, as well as a previous strategic investment from Intel. Other YuMe investors include Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital, and DAG Ventures. Altogether, YuMe has raised nearly $75 million since being founded in 2007.
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| New York Hardware Buffs Weigh In On China, Embracing Niches, And How To Start Making Things Posted: 23 May 2012 08:58 AM PDT  Earlier this morning, our own John Biggs was joined on stage by a handful of New York-based makers who have made a name for themselves by building physical things (or in one case, building something that builds other things). Biggs kicked off the panel with a simple question: — can we bring manufacturing back? Bre Pettis, CEO of Makerbot Industries, has two shifts of workers putting together all of his Makerbots in Brooklyn, and had a bit of advice for hardware creators looking to shift production to China. He recommended that until makers need to produce runs of 50,000-100,000 units, they're much better off keeping the production process in the United States. It helps to keep makers intimate with their tech, not to mention makes it easier for them to handle any unexpected issues faster. The process of launching a product was tackled too — interestingly enough, Amol Sarva of Peek fame revealed that if he had to take his email gadget to market now instead of a few years ago, he would've gone a completely different route. Instead of going big and pushing to get his devices on store shelves around the country, he instead would have gone with the grassroots approach — making a few devices and trying to build buzz around them. Another recurring theme of the panel was the notion that makers should embrace niches. "There may not be mass market ideas, and that's OK," said Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs. He noted that people can put hardware and devices together that aren't meant to reach millions and millions of people (they could even use a Makerbot if the production run size was modest enough), and these small markets were still worth going after. Plus, you can never really tell just how niche some niches are. Duncan Frazier of Bit Banger Labs knows that all too well — he and his team developed a sleep mask that aims to help its users lucid dream, and put together a Kickstarter campaign for it. They expected they would have to make a few hundred units at most, but the niche was much bigger than they thought. By the time their campaign was over, they had exceeded their $35,000 funding request by orders of magnitude. The discussion then turned to the question of whether or not we could build something akin to a sprawling Foxconn campus in somewhere like Iowa. "Here in the U.S., as a culture, we're not really focused on [manufacturing]," Pettis noted. "Our children are the only priority lower than manufacturing." There was little question that using Chinese facilities for manufacturing has its advantages — namely sheer output — but some were curious as to how long that would remain the case. Pettis pointed out that wages in China have doubled over the last year, a trend that (if continued) may eventually lead to a shift away from relying on China. The panel ended on a slightly more inspirational note, with each of makers chiming in with advice for young upstarts who want to start making things. On this, everyone seemed to agree — the best approach is to just go out there and start going it. Ayah Bdeir, CEO of littleBits, specifically pointed out that a young person who had $50 and an Internet connection had no shortage of places to turn for inspiration — Instructables and Hack A Day, for instance. "You learn by making," she said. Pettis recommended that wannabe makers should just “jump in” to the process, and if they eventually decide to go the Kickstarter route, Frazier emphasized the importance of a solid video because that's the only place the product exists as far as the users are concerned.
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| Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service Posted: 23 May 2012 08:35 AM PDT  Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery, which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless, to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.” With the new deal in place, Amazon Instant Video now offers over 17,000 movies and TV episodes for unlimited streaming by Amazon Prime customers who can watch online or on their Amazon Kindle Fire. For what it’s worth, “17,000+” is the same number that Amazon was touting earlier this year, so the increase via the Paramount deal didn’t include enough of a selection to warrant a new “milestone” announcement on the company’s part. Prior to the Discovery deal, Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom in February, which then brought the number of titles up to 15,000. And in December, the count was 13,000. So yes, the service is growing, and relatively quickly. Other popular movies you’ll know from Paramount which are now online include Star Trek, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Top Gun, The Italian Job, and The Truman Show. In total, the service offers 120,000 titles which Amazon Prime customers can either rent or buy. The videos will be available at no extra charge to Amazon Prime customers who pay the $79/year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.
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| WhosHere Launches Anonymous Video Chat Posted: 23 May 2012 08:30 AM PDT  As evidenced by the success of Chatroulette, people get a kick out of seeing each other (anonymously) on video. Taking that to heart, WhosHere – an app that has allowed countless people to meet and greet each other in meatspace – has launched a video chat service that lets folks connect when and where they want. The update embeds video chat into the standard text and voice chat already available through the app. Rather than allowing random video and photo encounters immediately, however, the system turns off most media sharing by default. From the PR: "Although many use WhosHere to meet new people, it is so much more than just a dating app," said Stephen Smith, co-founder and COO. "We've found that our users have made connections for many different aspects of life – love, friendship, keeping in touch with family, travel advice and more. The use of WhosHere is truly limitless." Although it will never replace seeing a nearly naked man staring at you out of murky darkness on Omegle, it’s definitely a step forward for mobile dating and chat apps.
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| Retro Beer Company Churchkey, A New Tech Investor Darling, Will Expand To San Francisco Next Month Posted: 23 May 2012 08:29 AM PDT  Beer may or may not be the first thing that comes to your mind when you think about TechCrunch Disrupt, but today, CrunchFund’s MG Siegler took the stage at our New York conference to talk to Churchkey‘s founders: Adrian Grenier, who is well-known for his role in the TV series Entourage, Justin Hawkins and Ryan Sowards. Churchkey, which was founded in 2010 and is based in the Pacific Northwest with offices in the beer-loving cities of Seattle, Wash. and Portland, Ore., recently attracted a number of tech investors, including CrunchFund. The company, which quickly made a name for itself thanks to its retro can with its flat top design, is currently only available in the Pacific Northwest, but the company has plans to quickly expand to new markets, including San Francisco, which as the founders announced today, will get its first taste of Churchkey on June 5. After a short beer tasting hosted by CrunchFund founder and former TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, the obvious first question asked by Siegler, who is also an investor in the company through CrunchFund, was about why there is a beer company at Disrupt and why tech investors are interested in investing in a beer company. Churchkey, Siegler noted, had one of the best pitch decks he had ever seen. Investing in Churchkey, he said, was an easy choice because it has the potential to disrupt the beer industry with its new design. As for the founders’ reasons for starting a beer company, Grenier noted that beer is a cultural thing and that the old-style beer, and with it, the beer cans from 50 years ago, had just disappeared. Over dinner with Ryan Soward, the two spontaneously decided that they were the right people to bring it back and disrupt the beer business. Talking about the design, which is obviously one of the most remarkable aspects of the product, the founders noted that its obvious heritage allows it to be distinct and still easily recognizable enough on a store shelf. The steel can, the founders also noted, doesn’t just give it a distinctive feel, but is also environmentally friendly because it includes recycled material and because it’s easy to pick out of waste stream. The company is expanding quickly and besides an forthcoming San Francisco launch, it is also planning to expand to Austin, Los Angeles and New York as soon as possible. As Adrian Grenier notes, “a lot of tech is online, it’s not in the real world,” but the human experience in the digital world is being minimized. With beer, he said, you can pause and take time with other humans.
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| Rovio’s FB App, Angry Birds Friends, Flies Out Of Beta With Tournament Mode, New Levels & More Posted: 23 May 2012 08:11 AM PDT  Well, well, well. As if you couldn’t get your fix of sling-shotting irascible fowl on every other mobile and social platform known to man, Rovio announced this morning that Angry Birds for Facebook (officially known as Angry Birds Friends) has finally done flown the coop and left the warm nest of its beta. Avian double-speak aside, what does that mean exactly? It means that, having gone through the requisite user testing, tweaking, and multi-billion-dollar IPO-ing, Rovio’s Facebook app — with a handful of new features in tow — is finally ready for public consumption. As to those features, Angry Birds Friends brings a number of trendy social gaming features to Angry Birds, including tournament mode, new weekly levels, new ways to earn power-ups, rewards, and, of course, tons of social integration. As Angry Birds fanatics are well aware, Rovio launched Angry Birds Friends in beta earlier this year. On top of those things I mentioned earlier, the beta version of Angry Birds Friends has also been a testing ground for Rovio to test out new business models, like offering $1 power-ups beyond pay-to-download options or the infamous Mighty Eagle. The game’s port to Facebook likely had the social network excited, considering that Angry Birds has been a presence on Google+ and other Goog products for awhile now — not to mention the fact that massively popular games like Angry Birds could mean good things for Facebook’s revenue. But, as to Angry Birds Friends’ (what an awkward and clunky name to say aloud, by the way) new features, they’re pretty much self-explanatory, but its new tournaments feature allows user to compete with their friends on four different levels — from Monday to Sunday. The pig-popping user with the highest overall score earns a gold trophy, with silver going to second, etc, etc. And, thankfully, unlike crowns, users get to keep their trophies for ever. For. Ever. The “New Weekly Levels” refer, specifically, to those four new levels being offered in tournament mode, although Rovio hinted that it will be launching further levels every week. Third of all, there are those power-ups, which, on top of the daily rewards users can already collect, users can now earn power-ups in tournament mode. Earn three power-up bundles and you’ll receive a shiny gold trophy. As for context, in case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, Angry Birds is popular. More than five people use it. In fact, earlier this month Rovio announced that its coven of Angry Birds apps had amassed 1 billion downloads. To date, Rovio has released the original, Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, newer arrival Angry Birds Space, and now, what one might consider its newest arrival, Angry Birds Friends. If you’d asked me two years ago if Angry Birds merchandising would be extremely popular, and that an Angry Birds movie would be in the works, I would have laughed at you. But, considering I’m wearing an Angry Birds t-shirt right now, eating Angry Birds cereal, and that Rovio’s 2011 earnings were about 10-times its estimated revenues from the year prior, with 30 percent coming from merchandising, well clearly I didn’t get the last laugh. More on Angry Birds Friends in Rovio’s blog post here. Updating in realtime
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| U.S. Launches Digital Roadmap To Open Up Government Data And Court Developers Posted: 23 May 2012 08:07 AM PDT  There’s all sorts of data that the government has, but very little of it is actually accessible by developers. But the U.S. Government is trying to change that: Wednesday at TechCrunch Disrupt, U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park and Chief Information Officer Steven VanRoekel announced a new initiative within the government to open up data that was previously locked up in government documents and arcane backend systems. That will allow developers to create new applications and services based on that data. The digital road map is based on the following five ideas:
With the launch of the new digital roadmap, the U.S. government is hoping to increase the way that users can access data in many different ways. It’s also designed to decrease inefficiency in government and to allow developers to build applications that the government would never have dreamed up. It’s also built around the idea that government data has to become less sprawling. As a result, it is going to stop building new .gov websites, and ensure that all agencies which already have a website need to have a /DEVELOPERS page. The government has also been pushing innovation by sponsoring meetups, hackathons, and “datapaloozas” through which developers can show off new apps that they’ve built. And here are the first five projects that Park and VanRoekel announced as part of the initiative:
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| Qwiki Launches A Publishing Platform For ABC News And Others Posted: 23 May 2012 08:05 AM PDT  Qwiki, the startup that won Disrupt in 2010, is announcing a new platform today for bloggers and other online publishers. The company’s initial product basically assembled a multimedia “story” around Wikipedia articles, with images, videos, maps, and more. But the vision was bigger — to present a new kind of information experience. Now Qwiki is pitching its platform as a way for publishers to quickly and easily create short, interactive stories, which can be embedded on the publisher site and also featured in a “channel” on Qwiki. Initial partners include ABC News, which is embedding Qwikis throughout its website, and fashion publisher Stylecaster. You can watch some of the sample ABC News Qwikis here. In some ways, they look like regular news broadcasts, but presumably assembled with much less time and effort thanks to Qwiki’s technology, and with a layer of light interactivity (allowing viewers to drill down on individual topics). “What interested us in being the first media organization to use Qwiki's innovative new video format is the ease with which reporters and producers can create informative and creative video content in almost no time,” says Maya Baratz, senior product manager at ABC News. “We plan to use Qwikis regularly on ABCNews.com and Goodmorningamerica.com on Yahoo!” Qwiki seemed to have a bumpy 2011. It raised $9 million from big-name investors including Lightbank (the investment fund of Groupon co-founders Brad Keywell and Eric Lefkofsky) and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin, then released an impressive iPad app that took off quickly. However, it also lost its famous co-founder Louis Monier (who founded search engine AltaVista) and other technical executives. This might look like a new direction, but a Qwiki spokesperson tells me, “This isn’t a pivot.” He says the startup will continue working on its consumer products, while also making this platform available to consumers soon. Qwiki will be demonstrating the platform at Disrupt this afternoon.
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| Mint.com App Update: Now Split Transactions Posted: 23 May 2012 07:59 AM PDT  Mint.com iOS users now have the ability to create and (more importantly) edit budgets directly on their iPad/iPhone. Previously, editing functionality was only available at the main Mint website. Additionally, users can also split transactions, giving them a better more granular look at their financial picture. The main thrust of this update includes:
I’m sort of a fan of the later update enabling the splitting and categorization of purchases. I’m somewhat concrete in how I manage my finances, and can really appreciate being able to categorize individual purchases from the same merchant. I would find great utility in that functionality. More info at Mint.com
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| Posted: 23 May 2012 07:58 AM PDT  This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, Chris Dixon, co-founder and partner at Founder's Collective (and co-founder of SiteAdvisor and Hunch, acquired by McAfee and eBay, respectively), sat down with ZocDoc CEO Cyrus Massoumi to talk about ZocDoc’s road to success. The company, for those unfamiliar, is a professional booking platform for doctors. Users go online to search, find and book a doctor, dentist or other health care professional, and can even make same-day appointments thanks to ZocDoc’s real-time access to doctors’ schedules. Although ZocDoc has now raised $95 million in funding to date, it didn’t necessarily have many early believers. For a reminder of the kind of nay-saying that ZocDoc faced back in the beginning, this video from TechCrunch 40 several years ago should strike a chord with any entrepreneur who’s had their vision dismissed outright from industry notables. “Honestly, it would just never occur to me to go to any site to pick a doctor,” proclaimed Guy Kawasaki at the time. (Oops.) ZocDoc didn’t win the TechCrunch competition – that was the year that Mint.com won, and perhaps deservedly so. But ZocDoc is proof that not winning doesn’t translate into failure by any means. And neither does bad press, as it turns out. Massoumi noted that while there were many great articles about ZocDoc post-launch, there were some negative ones, too. He recalled in particular when press called out ZocDoc for not getting a doctor search quite right. Why is it showing me doctors on the lower east side of New York, when I did a search on the upper east side?, people said. Meanwhile, recalls Massoumi, others said ZocDoc was ”overly ambitious to think it could change the way people access healthcare in America.” (Ouch). But the company kept their heads down, he says, and kept being persistent. Trying to grow their business during a poor economic environment also forced them to stay very lean. They raised a little money from another startup competition which helped them to finally launch in their first markets outside of New York (D.C. and San Francisco), thereby proving wrong those who said that ZocDoc wouldn’t really work outside of the city. Massoumi also shared some tips he learned over the years in terms of growing the business. For starters, he said that it really helps to have people in the city they’re rolling out to. While not all startups have a large enough staff to do that, doing so cut the time to market in half, he said. Getting the right people in place to manage the roll-outs was very important, too. In fact, he advised startup founders to be especially conscious of the first twenty people they hire, as they set the tone for the business. ZocDoc, now 260 people, up from 100 a year ago, puts an incredible emphasis on the hiring process. The entire management team spends half their time interviewing, said Massoumi, and he admitted he probably even spends more than that himself. And those hires have come from some surprising places, he added, recalling how ZocDoc has hired people they met on the plane while travelling and once, they even found an incredible waitress in Chicago and moved her out to New York. ZocDoc employees are also encouraged to refer people to the company and are rewarded with a new iPad if those people are hired. Another focus for this morning’s chat had to do with why there aren’t many startups working in the healthcare space. “Most people don’t realize that healthcare is a $2.7 trillion dollar industry in the U.S.,” said Massoumi, but it’s been under-represented by startups. This is probably because many people have been burned in the past – likely due to a greater emphasis in solving problems for the patients instead of the doctors, he said. Having grown up around doctors, he remembers dinner conversations about the problems doctors faced in trying to deliver great care while also running an efficient business. It’s increasingly difficult for doctors to have a profitable business, he said. Finally, Massoumi advised startups to work as leanly as possible. “Don’t have a crazy burn rate,” he said, be able to “afford to fail and iterate.” As for ZocDoc itself, this advice has translated into the company’s continued growth. Earlier this month, ZocDoc rolled out to an 18th market in the U.S. (Tampa Bay). And just yesterday, it launched in its 19th market (Denver). With the coming changes to health care under the Obama administration, some 30 million new patients will be coming into the system, which will greatly impact the growing shortage of physicians in the U.S. “Access to healthcare is one of the greatest challenges to our generation,” said Massoumi. It’s a statement which other entrepreneurs could take as a call-to-action to help solve some of the problems in the industry. After all, we have enough photo-sharing apps for the time being.
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| Startup Alley Is Doin’ It, And Doin’ It, And Doin’ It Well Posted: 23 May 2012 07:34 AM PDT  Every time I think TC Disrupt’s Startup Alley can’t get any better, it does. TC Europe Editor Mike Butcher and I ventured into the chaos, accosted at every turn by startups from across the world. We even had a startup, iLiftOff, fly all the way in from Mumbai on a 21-hour flight. It’s almost a shame that we can’t have all the Startup Alley companies in the Battlefield, but at the same time, the beauty of the alley is that we can talk to them for far longer than six minutes. And we often do. In this particular video, we checked out LocalBonus, LiveAll, Jaxx, ScreachTV, iLiftOff, ColourDNA, Snoozy, and Speaktoit. You can view all of our Startup Alley companies right here.
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| Rubicon Project Acquires Mobsmith To Expand Into Mobile Ads Posted: 23 May 2012 07:04 AM PDT  Online advertising company Rubicon Project just announced that it’s getting into the mobile market by acquiring a startup called Mobsmith. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed in the announcement, but AllThingsD is hearing that the price was $10 million. Rubicon does say that it will be combining Mobsmith’s technology with its own to create “a single platform and marketplace for buying and selling of both display and mobile ad inventory.” Rubicon Project founder and CEO Frank Addante describes Mobsmith as “the best product we have seen on the market” with “the strongest product and engineering team.” The 10-person Mobsmith team will remain in San Francisco, becoming Los Angeles-headquartered Rubicon’s SF office. Formerly known as NearbyAd, Mobsmith launched last April with a platform to create and target rich media ads for mobile websites and apps. It raised $575,000 from Blumberg Capital, XG Ventures, and various angels. Rubicon, meanwhile, claims to be the advertising platform with the largest installed base among comScore 500 publishers, with a reach of 650 million unique users. It says this is its fourth ad tech acquisition in three years.
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| Target Rolls Out Shopkick Integration Nationwide Posted: 23 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT  shopkick, the location-based shopping app backed by Greylock and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is having its biggest rollout yet — Target says it’s making the service available in its stores nationwide. Target was already announced as a shopkick partner, but until now, it was limited to testing integration in seven cities. Now, thanks to what the company says were “rave reviews,” it’s expanding its shopkick integration to all of its 1,764 stores in the United States, making it the largest shopkick retailer. shopkick uses smartphones to give stores and brands a new way to interact with shoppers. By entering partner stores and scanning specific products, users earn “kicks” which can be redeemed for gift cards, deals, and other rewards. The company says its other large retail partners include American Eagle Outfitters, Best Buy, Crate and Barrel, Macy's, Old Navy, Simon Property Group, The Sports Authority, Toys"R"Us, west elm, The Wet Seal, and ExxonMobil. It claims to have driven $110 million in revenue for brands and retailers last year.
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| McAfee: Mobile Malware Explodes, Increases 1,200% In Q1 2012 Posted: 23 May 2012 06:50 AM PDT  Security and anti-spam firm McAfee today reported that it saw a massive uptick in mobile malware last quarter. Mobile malware has “exploded,” the company said (PDF), “with a significant increase on Android devices. In addition, McAfee also found a slight increase in malware targeting the Mac, but the report notes that this trend was not “extreme.” Despite the increase in mobile and Mac malware, as well as password-stealing Trojans, the good news in today’s report is that global spam level dropped quite a bit during the last quarter, though we are still talking about a trillion messages per month. This quarter’s increase in mobile malware is partly due to the fact that McAfee improved its ability to find these threats, but it still represents a massive increase. The company collected about 8,000 mobile malware samples last month. These threats, as usual, mostly target Android. While Google and other major store have made great strides in keeping malware out of their stores, third-party stores and forums remain a problem. Among the areas of mobile malware that saw major increases in threats was mobile backdoor malware and the always popular premium-rate SMS-sending malware. The report also noted that the company found one of the first destructive Android Trojans this quarter. This piece of malware doesn’t damage apps or executables, but instead targets a user’s photos and then adds an image of the Ayatollah Khomeini to each picture. Here are a few additional interesting data points from the report:
You can find the full report here (PDF).
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| Welcome To Hardware Alley At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC! Posted: 23 May 2012 06:44 AM PDT  For the past two days, web companies and mobile apps have peppered our Startup Alley here at Disrupt NYC, but today we’re doing something a little different. Those startups have cleared out for Disrupt’s first ever Hardware Alley, where we turn the spotlight onto some wonderful hardware projects. There’s plenty of great stuff on display here today, and all these devices run the gamut — the folks from MakerBot Industries have set up shop here, as well as the makers of the MicroStylus. Oh, but that’s just the beginning. Also floating around the alley are the people from uBeam, a company hard at work on a wireless power transmission system, and the smart watch fanatics from WIMM Labs. Heck, even the Incantor team showed up with their slightly morbid Bluetooth magic wands in tow, so attendees can hurl spells at each other when they need to blow off a little steam. There are plenty more where that came from, and you can find the full list of Hardware Alley participants here. Oh, and in case you’re not here to have a look for yourself, keep your eyes peeled on our live stream — East Coast Editor John Biggs is a moderating a Brooklyn Makers panel shortly that should help sate your appetite for gear. In short, think of Hardware Alley as a slightly smaller Stark Expo, but with Biggs riding a motorized beer cooler instead of a suave Iron Man diving from the clouds.
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| Today’s Google Doodle Is An Awesome, Playable Moog Synthesizer Posted: 23 May 2012 06:20 AM PDT  While we don’t make a habit out of covering every iteration of the Google Doodle, today’s version is especially awesome. The doodle is celebrating the birth date of Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The what?, you may ask. The synthesizer was an instrument Moog created in the mid-1960′s, which took the music world by storm, and was picked up by artists like The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk, and others. It transformed how people thought about electronic music. Instead of producing a “synthetic” sound, as previous synthesizers did, the Moog version created a richer, organic sound. Today, some 50 years later, musicians still hold the Moog Synthesizer in high regard. And, if you’re curious to see what all the fuss is about, you can try out the Moog yourself now on the Google homepage via a working, playable version of the instrument. The Moog is a favorite among tech folks because it relied on the invention of the transistor. Because of the technological innovation of the transistor, researchers like Moog were able build electronic music systems that were smaller, cheaper and more reliable than earlier vacuum tube-based systems. Now on Google.com, using your mouse or keyboard, you can interact with the playable Google logo, turning the dials, mashing the keys, and making sweet, sweet music. There’s even a built-in 4-track tape recorder which you can use to record, play back and share your amazing Moog creations. (Share on Google+!, says Google.) Also, like many Google doodles, the Moog doodle features a lot of different examples of web technologies in action (which work best in Google Chrome, of course.) For example, the Moog’s sound is generated using the Web Audio API, which Google has never used before in their doodles. As for other browsers, sorry – you have to use Flash instead. Also in use in the doodle: JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3, Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener, and App Engine. (Whew!) Our only request: while creating your amazing musical creations this morning, consider using your headphones.
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| Former Twitter CTO Greg Pass Becomes Founding Entrepreneurial Officer For Cornell’s NYC Tech Campus Posted: 23 May 2012 06:19 AM PDT  In its latest move to get top technical students to New York and started on new projects, the city’s Cornell campus has named a top technologist to a new position. Greg Pass, the former CTO of Twitter and previously the co-founder of search startup Summize, is now its Founding Entrepreneurial Officer. I’ll be getting the details on what the hire means when I talk with Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell’s dean for the new campus, later today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City. But I caught up with Pass last weekend, and got some more about what he’s going to be doing. Since the new campus is going to take years to build, he said he’ll be on the ground floor of the organization, among the first handful of people to help plan how it is going to grow. The program has said it’s aiming to get off to a fast start by moving some Cornell students down to the city as soon as this fall. Another announcement this week made it clear how that is going to happen. Google has agreed to rent the university 22,000 square feet of space out of its offices for the next five and a half years. In this early stage, Pass will be one of the main public faces, helping to shape the academic program to match what startups need in real life. He’ll also be working with students and faculty to create more ways to reach the larger New York tech community, through things like workshops and hackathons. Here’s some more about what Pass has done, via this post by top New York investor Fred Wilson: And the Summize engineering team had a lot to do with that. Greg Pass who was Summize’s co-founder and VP Engineering became Twitter’s engineering leader in the summer of 2008 and has built the team from roughly a dozen to somewhere around ten times that number. In my view, Greg is one of the unsung heroes of the Twitter success story. He brought a calm, steady hand to a ship that was caught in a storm. He got it going in the right direction and headed for calmer waters. I remember asking Greg during the Summize due diligence what his plan was for stabilizing Twitter. He answered that there was no magic bullet. He said they weren’t going to do one big thing, they were going to do lots of small things. The first thing they did was instrument the hell out of the system, they started measuring everything and finding the bottlenecks, and then they started knocking them down one by one. Twitter has an entirely new architecture now. But they did not rebuild Twitter, they just replaced one thing at at time and evolved it. They went from a monolithic beast where everything was connected to a distributed set of services that work together but are separate from each other. And that is Greg’s legacy.
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| Social Media Marketer Vitrue Has Been Bought By Oracle For $300 Million Posted: 23 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT  TechCrunch has discovered and confirmed that software giant Oracle has bought social marketing platform Vitrue for $300 million. [Update: A press release has confirmed the buy at an undisclosed price, though we know it to be $300 million.] As if Oracle didn’t offer enough products and services already, the acquisition will give it a strong Facebook marketing platform to offer its enterprise clients. Vitrue had taken $33 million in funding over the years and grown to become one of the most popular solutions for big companies trying to win Facebook fans and push out marketing messages to the news feed. Vitrue, according to a source, was on course for revenues of just under $100 million this year, although we have other sources disputing it may have been that high. TC understands there were a lot of potential acquirers interested. Several bidders approached the company but Oracle was the most aggressive. Oracle is no stranger to massive acquisitions. It bought talent management solution Taleo in February for $1.9 billion. Beyond Facebook, Vitrue helps marketers manage their presences on Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and other platforms. One of the hallmarks of Vitrue has been it’s ability to rapidly integrate with new partners like Klout to give it talking points for dissuading clients from going to competitors. Vitrue is “nearly profitable” and was projected to reach profitability in this fiscal year, said our source. TechCrunch understands that Reggie Bradford, the CEO, will “very much remain part of the equation” when Vitrue becomes part of Oracle. His exact title is to come. The purchase continues the trend of large, old-world Internet marketing companies buying their way into social after being slow to adopt. Adobe bought social advertising provider Efficient Frontier for $400 million in November 2011, just a few months after Efficient Frontier had bought Facebook marketer and application developer Context Optional for a reported $50 million. With time, social has proven too important to ignore. Rather than scrambling to build something and trying to pull brands away from established social marketers, Oracle will instantly gain a massive list of notable clients along with Vitrue. Oracle will also inherit Vitrue’s ongoing battle with competitors like Buddy Media, Wildfire, Involver, ThisMoment, and more for social marketing supremacy.
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| BodyMedia Raises $12 Million Funding Round Led By Comcast Ventures Posted: 23 May 2012 06:00 AM PDT  BodyMedia, one of the growing number of companies that offers wearable body sensors, just announced that it has raised a $12 million funding round led by Comcast Ventures. The company’s products, including its BodyMedia FIT on-body monitoring system, currently focuses on tracking users’ activity level, but the company plans to use the money raised in this round to focus on products related to chronic diseases like diabetes, as well as remote elder care and sleep disorders. BodyMedia is a new investment for Comcast Ventures. Other investors in this round include Draper Fisher Jurvetson ePlanet, Draper Triangle Ventures, Ascension Health Ventures and InCube Ventures. BodyMedia launched all the way back in 1999. Prior to this round, BodyMedia had raised $37 million. Including this round, the company has now raised $49 million. This new funding round includes $2.7 million the company announced mid-round earlier this year. It’s worth noting that BodyMedia also previously received federal funding for its work on a diabetes prevention and management solution. Its current line of armband systems tracks and analyzes users’ activity and also measures their sleep patterns. Now, however, as the company’s CEO Christine Robins notes, “the emerging convergence of healthcare, technology and consumerism provides an ideal launching pad for us to build on that heritage by introducing new body monitoring solutions tailored to managing a much broader range of health issues.” BodyMedia sits at an interesting intersection between the growing health technology space and the self-tracking trend that’s been emerging over the last few years. By pushing deeper in the health space, the company should be able to differentiate itself from others in the self-tracking space like Fitbit and Zeo. Comcast Venture’s portfolio, it’s worth noting, includes a wide range of companies, including Flipboard, SB Nation and JiWire.
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| TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day Three! #TCDisrupt Posted: 23 May 2012 05:55 AM PDT  Hundreds have entered. But only one will walk away with the coveted Disrupt Cup. Who will it be? Stick around to find out but in the meantime we’ve got a rockstar lineup on our final day, including a sit down with a handful of local maker types, Chi-Hua Chien and a Hollywood star. If you’re just joining us be sure to check out previous coverage of the show here. Here’s what’s on tap for today: Wednesday, May 23rd 9:00am – 9:10am 9:10am – 9:40am 9:40am – 10:00am 10:00am – 10:25am 10:25am – 10:35am 10:35am – 11:00am 11:00am – 11:20am 11:20am – 11:40am 11:40am – 12:00pm 12:00pm – 12:30pm 12:30pm – 1:45pm 12:30pm – 1:30pm 1:45pm – 2:05pm 2:05pm – 2:15pm 2:15pm – 2:30pm 2:30pm – 2:55pm 2:55pm – 3:15pm 3:15pm – 3:30pm 3:30pm – 5:30pm 5:30pm – 7:00pm 7:00pm – 7:30pm
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