Hop up out the bed…turn my tablet on?

Rapper Soulja Boy has released a branded tablet with Tokova called the “Tiger Shark Soulja Boy Edition.” The tablet has a 7 inch screen, runs on Android and the speakers go hammer.

Pause for a second and ask yourself: would I rather have a tablet designed by Soulja Boy or Steve Jobs? Tough choice.

Luckily, the Soulja Boy Edition is on sale for the very affordable price of $599, which just so happens to be the price of a 32GB WiFi iPad.

I would love to know what goes through people’s heads when they buy something like this (if anyone has? Ever?).

Like, what idea lost to this one in a Tokova strategy meeting? A Nicki Minaj smartphone that screeched “Beez in the Trap” at you every time you got a text?

TechCrunch is currently missing <%=Fucks%>, according to Forbes’ Brian Caulfield. We expect to add more <%=Fucks%> into our posts in <%=deadline%>.

Responds our more serious than me co-editor Eric Eldon, ”Our disappointing F-Bomb second quarter 2012 financial results and outlook for the third quarter 2012 illustrates that our F-Bomb business continues to be in the midst of transition. Within our F-Bomb business unit, we have established early momentum with F-Bomb+, and we are increasing our investments in F-Bomb+ to achieve market success.”

I have no idea what the fuck that means because there are numbers in there. Even if I did understand what that meant, I probably wouldn’t give a fuck anyways.

Also, TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Also also, TechCrunch CrunchUp/August Capital Party. 

TechCrunch, fuck yeah.

Editor’s Note: Rob Saurini is a hard working developer at TechCrunch, except for today. Today, he just wants to watch the Olympics, like a true patriot.

So I’ve been sitting here for the past couple of hours searching for a way to watch the Olympics Opening Ceremonies when I should probably be doing actual work.

Nada. Zilch. Zip. The best I could do was a live blog here or there. Well, that and the spammed links in Google as well as questionable sites that try to manipulate you into downloading a shitty plugin or answer a bogus survey.

NBC, in its infinite wisdom, has chosen to air the coverage at 7:30pm EST in the US. I think this sends a clear message to the rest of the world. “You can wait while we get as many advertisements as we can with what amounts to the largest pre-game show in the history of ever. Also, fuck you.”

Don’t worry, you can still watch the events live, right? Not a fucking chance. You need to have a subscription to a cable or satellite TV service. If you have one of those you can watch at the official NBC Olympics website as well as on your smartphone or tablet.

Since I only have Netflix, I guess I’ll just have to continue my X-Files marathon and absorb the Olympics in text form later. Or you know, do some work.

If you were paying attention to Twitter today, you were probably met with two conflicting sides of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. On the one hand, you had those who were on the ground (or who had access to the live stream somehow — more on that later), and those who were bitching about not being able to watch the ceremony live.

While most of the rest of the world — or at least Europe — was watching the ceremony live, U.S. audiences were held hostage by NBC, which holds the rights to the games here. Rather than broadcasting the biggest event of the Games live as it happened, NBC decided it would air the ceremony on a tape delay, to capture a larger overall audience.

Now, tape delays are nothing new, but they do seem archaic at a time when online video and social media bring an air of immediacy to live events. The existence of the NBC Olympics Twitter account is evidence of this, but the account seems totally misused in this case: NBC live tweeted the whole ceremony, with no apparent sense of irony around the fact that its target audience couldn’t actually watch the events it was describing. Instead of building excitement around the ceremony, and engaging with its viewers, all NBC ended up doing was frustrating its audience — the people who care most about watching the thing.

So really, how bad was NBC’s strategy around the U.S. broadcast of the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony in London? So bad that Mark Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com, and someone who should really fucking know better, tweeted out a link to a pirated live stream of the ceremony taking place in London. (Ironically enough, he was tweeting about the appearance of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, that magical thing which made the pirate stream available to the rest of us.)

Think about that for a second — you’ve got a titan of industry telling viewers to ignore the local broadcast rights and pay attention to an illegal copy of the event instead. Telling viewers not to worry about waiting for the taped broadcast, that this is something you should be watching right fucking now, and damn NBC if they’re not making the stream available and someone else is. The big lesson here is that if people care enough about finding a certain piece of content and watching it — live or otherwise — they probably will.

The sad thing is that NBC probably could have had things both ways — it could have live streamed and broadcast for the work-time crowd and those kicking it at home, and still had people show up for a re-broadcast after work, if they couldn’t watch live. This is a lesson that we thought NBC had learned from the 2008 Olympic games, when it held back live streams of the games for events that would be later broadcast on tape delay. To its credit, NBC is live streaming most competitions, even when the broadcast of those events will happen later. But for whatever reason, that lesson wasn’t applied to the opening ceremony.

No doubt NBC made the decision not to broadcast the ceremony live because it was worried it would lose some of the primetime audience — after all, people are more likely to show up and watch something at 8:00 PM than mid-day on a Friday. It had advertisers who paid big money to show up against the event, and it didn’t want to piss them off by running the ceremony early, when people were at work and would only be half-paying attention. Maybe it thought that if it broadcast the ceremony live there wouldn’t be a primetime audience.

So here’s an idea for NBC in the future, especially when it tackles the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia: Forget about the tape delay. Or sure, show the ceremony in primetime, but also show it live while it’s happening. Those who care enough to get up and watch the thing at 6:00 am will do so — and the rest of the audience will show up in the primetime hours, just as they always have. And then your twitter stream won’t look so stupid and embarrassing and frustrating for those who actually want to see what you’re tweeting about.

Oh yeah – the bear is in the house.  The Bear revolt won. OpenStack’s next release will go by the name “Grizzly.”

I love this story. OpenStack is the open cloud effort for organizations to build their own clouds. The fast growing organization has since its start had a policy for naming protocols. It stated that the name had to be for a county or municipality where the OpenStack Summit would take place. The nane could only be eight characters. Releases have been done in alphabetic order as follows:

But some in the OpenStack community had other thoughts.  A subversive movement emerged to amend the rules. The community revolt spread and so Thierry Carrez, the release manager for OpenStack called for a vote:

Is Grizzly better than anything else?

 We should no longer limit ourselves to cities and counties near the next Design Summit ! Grizzly sounds so great that we should extend the rules to include either first names of a combined city name (“Grizzly Flats” being a city in California), or official symbols of the territory in question (the Grizzly bear being depicted on the California state flag).

Of course, Grizzly won.

And so OpenStack did two polls.

The regular poll selected “Gazelle.” It had 35 votes. Gilroy came in second with 27 votes.

But the revolt poll had different results. It showed overwhelming support for the “Grizzly” name with 88 votess. Instead of going with the regular poll, Grizzly was named victor.

And so now, OpenStack has a new naming method. It’s called The Waldorf exception that accepts elements of the state or country flag in addition to city or county names.

Bring out the Grizzly, baby!

Although the company behind Meteor, a framework for building real-time JavaScript applications in vein of Google Docs, just announced a nice big $11.2 million round of funding, it’s not the only game in town. In my story earlier this week I mentioned Mojito, a framework developed by Yahoo. But there’s still another framework that has escaped my attention, even though it’s around longer than Meteor: Derby.

Much like Meteor and Mojito, Derby is a client and server side JavaScript framework for building real-time applications. Its synchronization engine Racer can be used independent of Derby.

Nate Smith (an ex-Googler) and Brian Noguchi are the core developers of the framework, and the founders of the stealth startup Lever. “We have a stable financial base,” Smith wrote on the project’s Google Group. “We have a very different business model than Meteor, and we are creating a product-focused company that will continue to support the framework.” Meteor, on the other hand, is being developed as the primary product of the Meteor Development Group.

From a technical standpoint, one major difference is the way the projects handle server side JavaScript. Both projects use Node.js on the server side, but Meteor uses a library called Fibers that fundamentally changes the way Node.js applications are written. By default, Node.js uses callbacks, an approach to coding that’s well explained for non-programmers here. Fibers abstract callbacks away so that developers can use a more traditional style of programming. Fibers vs. callbacks has become a contentious argument in the Node.js community. Proponents of using Fibers instead of callbacks claim it’s much easier to code in Node.js using Fibers. The core Node.js team claims that only a vocal minority of the community prefer Fibers. Even if that’s the case, it could be that developers who don’t like callbacks are simply being scared away from Node. On the other hand, I’m told that the fact that the callback model was essential to Node.js’ success. There have been many attempts to run JavaScript on servers since the languages introduction in 1995, but Node.js is the first one to really take off. Many of the failed server side JavaScript projects tried to shoehorn JavaScript into more traditional programming approaches, but Node.js embraced the asynchronous nature of JavaScript.

It could be that there’s room for both approaches. Tim Caswell, the resident Node.js mentor at Cloud9 IDE, concluded “Instead of teaching newcomers to never use these tools, I simply advise them to learn the basics first and then once they are comfortable with that feel free to experiment with these alternative tools.”

Anyway, it’s not a zero sum game, but one thing that will determine the success of these projects is community adoption. As Matt Asay points out, you can’t buy a community with VC cash. It’s early days for both communities. Meteor has a few more contributors than Derby but both projects have attracted a few contributors from outside the sponsor companies. Both have small but active mailing lists.

We’ve seen an increasing number of fashion startups lately and the newest one is Hello La Mode, a New York-based startup that just launched its marketplace for luxury fashion resale last week. The company just announced that it has raised a $500,000 seed round from three undisclosed angel investors. That’s not quite on the same level as some other fashion-focused companies like JustFab, which raised $76 million this week, but Hello La Mode has an interesting business model that sets it apart from other fashion startups.

Until now, Hello La Mode co-founder Eric Gagnaire tells us, people were often hesitant to buy secondhand apparel online because of potential issues with quality and conformity. His company, however, makes sure that every item that is put up for sale goes through a “manual check by fashion experts.”

The company plans to use this funding round to build its mobile and tablet apps, as well as to hire more of experts to scale its operations.

Hello La Mode currently operates in the U.S. and Canada. Users who want to sell their clothes can just list them on the site for free. Once a sale is made, the seller receives a free UPS shipping label to send it to Hello La Mode and it’s only send to the buyer after it passes the company’s quality tests. Transactions between the seller and buy are held in escrow until the purchase is certified and shipped. Sellers pay a transaction fee ($25+) that depends on the price of the item they are selling.

The company believes that having a trusted third party will give buyers more confidence to shop for used cloths online. The team also notes that it will “feature only the most luxurious fashion items for sale as chosen by our editors and celebrity tastemakers.”

Because we’re in need of some brighter NFC-related news today, Flomio, a TechStars-backed startup, and makers a platform for building NFC and RFID enabled applications, has closed a seed round of $525,000. The round was led by RMR Capital, and included participation from TechStars, the Cloud Power Fund, Matthew Lally (Augme, Pickflair), and Clint Watson (FASO).

Based in Miami, Florida (“Silicon Beach!”), Flomio has a different approach to NFC, which will be reflected in a website redesign going out next week. In short, it wants to humanize the technology. Originally a side project from founder Richard Grundy, Flomio was recently accepted into TechStars Cloud, the cloud computing-focused incubator which held its first demo day in April.

If you had checked out the Flomio website in the recent past, you may remember that it was touting how its technology could be used to build NFC applications, and it offered a store where you can buy NFC tags and readers. While it will continue to sell tags, stickers and hardware devices, the company’s focus going forward will be on targeting consumers and specific vertical markets (e.g., art) in order to make NFC technology seem more accessible to normal folks…and even fun.

Flomio competes with another NFC startup we’ve previously covered called Tagstand, but has a different point of view about the space, according to company founder Grundy, whose background includes 12 years at Motorola. “We have a different approach,” says Grundy. “We’ve done events, just like they have. We’ve done outdoor deployments just like they have, but what we focus on the most is on this instrumented space model which is all about using peer-to-peer to allow people to engage physical spaces.”

Grundy explains that NFC had been traditionally modeled around passive tags – that is, a combination of a reader and a tag that responds when excited, e.g. by waving your device over the tag or tapping it. But what really inspired him about NFC’s potential was the newer “peer-to-peer” technology, which was introduced in 2009. This allows two readers to talk to each other. The newer technology could enable wild, sci-fi stuff. For example: “if you want your cell phone to talk to your microwave, and download a recipe about how to bake a potato and it just programs the microwave for you,” explains Grundy, “that sort of use case can only be enabled through a peer-to-peer solution. We were enabling developers to put that to action,” he says.

Unfortunately, though, developers weren’t biting. “That’s so far ahead of what people are doing today, we found difficulty gaining traction,” Grundy admits. So now the company is dialing things back a bit…for now. Instead of targeting developers, they’re going to focus on popularizing NFC with users, in a number of different ways. Some of these details are still under wraps for a few more weeks, but the long and short of it is that they’re going to help make NFC fun, not scary, not confusing, and not geeky.

As CXO (that’s “Chief Experience Officer”) Timo Ronan explained to me, “we understand the human side of life, we’re not just engineers.”

“We figure if Touch is the next wave, it conceptually needs to permeate our brand. We want to be real people to real people. We just happen to be pretty smart and stuff,” Ronan says.

OK, then.

Here’s a sneak peek at the new website, to give you an idea:

;

And here’s a concept video of a tag they’re working on (note: there’s no deal with Starbucks, it’s just an idea. BACK OFF LAWYERS):

And just for the heck of it, here’s a video, entirely unrelated to product, of something awesome they filmed the other day:

App store analytics firm App Annie released a report on mobile gaming this week, which focused on the earnings potential of what it defined as “long-term” versus “short-term” games. That is to say, it found that mobile app superstars with media buzz were not necessarily outperforming the slow and steady games that flew under the radar  – meaning, those that never cracked the top 25 grossing ranking, for example. Long-term games earned an average of $920,000 versus $549,000 for short-term games, App Annie says. And the top-earning long-term game earned $3.9 million versus $1.4 million for short-term.

For starters, App Annie classified a “long-term” game as one in the U.S. Apple App Store that spent 12 months or more in the Top 26-125 Grossing ranking by revenue. A “short-term” game, meanwhile is one that spent three months or less in the Top 25 Grossing ranking.

But this study doesn’t quite work for me. And here’s why: to begin with, the sample size was amazingly small. 14 of highest-grossing apps were analyzed under both long and short-term. So 28, altogether. Some examples of long-term games included “Cartoon Wars 2 Heroes,” “The Sims 3,” “Cut the Rope,” “Gun Bros.,” and some of the short-term games were “Global War,” “Need for Speed Hot Pursuit,” “Spider-Man Total Mayhem,” and “Stick Stunt Biker.” To be fair, App Annie contents that, at face value, 28 apps out of 125 doesn’t seem to imply a comprehensive sample, but the qualifiers regarding time spent in both the second tier and first tier (without any crossover) eliminates a good portion of the eligible apps for analysis. So App Annie says the sample is “representative,” if not comprehensive.

In this study, 8 of the 14 games in each category were free. Long-term games had an average selling price of $3.99 and short-term games had an average price of $4.08. The most expensive long-term game was $9.99 versus $6.99 for short-term. The long-term category was also dominated by strategy games, while action dominated the short-term game category. Simulation games were popular in both categories.

App Annie then concludes there’s a viable success strategy in creating a solid game that people play over and over, and that remains popular for a long period of time, even if lower in the charts. This, as opposed to being briefly popular and going out in a flash. Citing data from mobiThinking, App Annie noted that 1 in 4 mobile apps are downloaded, used once, and then deleted. Mobile games, like apps, often get played with, then removed when the fun and/or buzz wears off.

Frankly, though, the conclusion regarding financial success is a bit obvious. If you take a game that’s been #50 for a year, compare it with a game that’s been #10 for 3 months, for example, YEAH, IT CAN EARN MORE. But maybe some people need charts and graphs to get that?

Ouriel Ohayon of Appsfire notes that short-term hits are often due to big marketing pushes that didn’t translate into stickiness and revenues. However, he adds, some hits are meant to be short-term hits. They are designed with a short-term life cycle in mind – like a seasonal version of Angry Birds, for example. This study doesn’t seem to consider that, he says after taking a look. That’s the same sort of feedback we heard all around from others, too.

Another problem with study’s conclusion, is that it’s not as simple as saying that action games are good for a quick buck. There may just be specific mobile game genres where the industry has figured out the game mechanics of engagement better than others.

There’s more that can be analyzed here, in terms of what works, but this particular study falls a bit short. App Annie has a ton of great data at its fingertips, but it would have been nice to see a deeper study, large sample size, and more analysis about not what types of games fell into each category, but rather what strategies made the long-lasting, slow burning games successful. After all, what developers really want to know is how to keep their app from getting “X”ed.

Ok guys, admit it: You hate shopping, but you know what you really hate? Shopping for underwear.

Well there’s a new brand of men’s apparel, called Mack Weldon, that is designed not just to provide a better fit for men’s underthings, but also to provide a better customer experience online. With its recent launch, Mack Weldon offers a choice of underwear between trunks and boxer briefs, as well as undershirts and t-shirts, both available in crew- and v-neck options. It specializes in basic, classic colors, and a unique fit that’s meant to ensure maximum comfort.

When I first heard about the startup, I thought it was an interesting business, sort of along the lines of Bonobos or Warby Parker or other apparel brands that have cropped up online. But the thing that really got my attention is founder and CEO Brian Berger, who previously worked at Comcast as part of its Silicon Valley-based CIM product group, as well as stints at Excite and WebMD. So what’s a Silicon Valley product guy doing peddling T-shirts and underthings for men?

When thinking about what he wanted to do next, Berger thought to himself, “What is a product I’m constantly unsatisfied with? What is an experience I’m constantly unsatisfied with?” And, well, underwear was that thing. Berger said he saw an opportunity to innovate on the product, while also creating a better customer experience. So he teamed up with co-founder Michael Isaacman, who previously worked for apparel brands like Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, and Rocawear. And they began looking to source high-quality materials and find the best factories and fulfillment centers to create and ship its product.

So there are a few things that make Mack Weldon different, according to Berger. The founding team worked with a couple of apparel consultants who were former Nike and Adidas executives to determine the best type of fit and prototype new products. And what it came up with is actually pretty good. To start, Mack Weldon clothes are made with a signature blend of cotton, Lycra, and Lenzing Modal fabric, a super-soft, anti-microbial fabric.

It’s also put a lot of effort into ensuring the right fit and comfort for its apparel. Mack Weldon underwear is designed with waistbands and elastic in the legs that are made to be comfortable while also staying put. It’s also designed with “mesh cool zones” to breathe in places where dudes tend to sweat. (No more swamp butt!) T-shirts have rotated seams — so that they’re not cut under the arm — and undershirts are cut long and run thinner, so that they stay tucked in your pants and don’t bunch up under your clothes.

On the customer service side, Mack Weldon has a few things going for it that differentiate it’s buying experience from other brands. While its shirts and underwear might be a tad more expensive than your run-of-the-mill underthings — though maybe not from a designer perspective — the brand gives discounts for bulk purchasing. Users get 15 percent off when they spend $100, 20 percent off when they spend $150, and 25 percent off when they spend $200 or more.

It also has an auto-replenish feature that will let users sign up to have more product automatically sent when they need it. But it’s not about tricking users into signing up for a subscription service for a product they don’t know they like yet — it’s about getting people who like the product to decide they want more of it. “Our philosophy around auto-replenishment is that we want to make things easier for guys,” Berger told me. “We want to earn customer loyalty.”

So I’ve tried out some of its products and have to say that from a quality perspective, I really like what Mack Weldon has done. Shirts and underwear are extra-comfortable, although I personally found sizing in shirts to run slightly big (it suggests you go up a size if you’re unsure). The good news is that after running through the laundry, shirts and underwear didn’t shrink much, although it’s too early for me to tell how they’ll hold up over time. The other good news — if you’re not satisfied or something doesn’t fit, Mack Weldon will issue a full refund for clothes returned within 30 days.

Gillmor Gang – Robert Scoble, John Taschek, Dan Farber, Kevin Marks, and Steve Gillmor. Recording has concluded for today.

Location-based note-sharing app Pinwheel has changed its name to Findery, after the U.S. District Court of New York granted Pinweel, a photo-sharing app, a preliminary injunction over the similar names.

In February, Caterina Fake (yep, last name Fake involved in a naming-rights lawsuit…I can’t make this stuff up) launched Pinwheel. The older Pinweel demanded that Pinwheel change its name, and eventually they wound up in court.

Yesterday, our own Anthony Ha–or “Anthony Ha of the TechCrunch blog,” as Nick Bilton (of the Bits blog of The New York Times newspaper) calls him–reported that Fake had redirected pinwheel.com to 2bkco.com, presuming it to be a placeholder for a name change.  Now we know that it’s changing to Findery, but the new site isn’t up yet.

BRB, changing our site to a new and improved, court-mandated name!

Fake tells me she can’t comment because of the continuing legal activity around the trademark, but wrote a blog post explaining the change to Findery. You have to wonder if Fake does manage to have the injunction overturned in court, if she would change back to Pinwheel. Pinwheel was only in beta testing, so a name change shouldn’t hurt it much. An ongoing legal battle and a second name change could do more damage than good for Pinwheel Findery.

Play us out, ironically named Pinwheel Crunchbase entry.

It looks like Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake may have to find a new name for her new product Pinwheel. A New York court has granted a preliminary injunction against Fake’s startup 2bkco, as requested by a similarly named startup Pinweel.

The injunction was posted on Scribd by lawyer and blogger Venkat Balasubramani, and I’ve embedded it below. Fake sent me an email confirming its accuracy, though she declined to say what the company’s response will be, because “we can’t comment on pending legal matters.” The Pinweel team sent a similarly terse statement, saying, “We can confirm that the federal court has issued a preliminary injunction that requires that Caterina Fake’s company immediately cease their use of the Pinwheel name.”

Of the two companies, Pinwheel is almost certainly the better-known, thanks to Fake’s background and the fact that the company raised funding from True Ventures, Founder Collective, SV Angel, Redpoint, Betaworks, Obvious Corp., and others. Its app is still in private beta, but it sounds like a way to annotate real-world locations with notes, tips, and photos for friends and other users. Pinweel, meanwhile, is a self-funded photo-sharing app — when I covered Pinweel in February, the company told me that it considered Fake’s use of “Pinwheel” to be trademark infringement and said it would be taking legal action.

There’s a long discussion in the injunction covering a number of legal points — part of Pinwheel’s argument in its defense seems to be that users aren’t likely to confuse the two products. As background, the court notes that Pinweel was distributing promotional material with its name and testing the app with a limited audience back in 2011, while Pinwheel made its “public announcement” in February of this year. The court says “several instances of confusion between the parties’ products followed the launch of Pinwheel,” including users who “became confused, and in some cases angry, when their Pinwheel login information did not work with Plaintiffs’ Pinweel app.”

As for next steps, the court says the two companies need to file a “proposed case management plan” by August 6.

Pinweel v. Pinwheel (S.D.N.Y.) (Order Granting Request for Prelim. Injunction)

What would you do if you weren’t afraid?

That’s the question Facebook designers Ben Barry and Rasmus Andersson are asking on a poster-creation site that went live today. They are encouraging people to go on the site, create a digital poster and “tell the world.”

Users responses range from nerdy to inspired to goofy, as evidenced below.

Barry comes from Facebook’s Analog Research Laboratory, where he and Everett Katigbak design and print inspirational signs and posters for Facebook’s offices worldwide. Some of their more famous posters include “Likers Gonna Like” and “Stay Focused And Keep Shipping.” Now, he’s working to share posters outside Facebook’s offices.

The site says it is a collaboration between the Analog Research Laboratory and Project M, a non-profit program for collaboration on ideas and projects “to contribute to the greater good.”

Well, the agenda for TechCrunch Disrupt SF is shaping up nicely, really nicely. And today we’ve got another two Valley thought leaders we’d like to announce: Path’s Dave Morin and Benchmark Capital’s Matt Cohler will be taking the stage in September to impart their perspectives on the state of the tech now.

Morin and Cohler will join our all-star speaker list which now includes: TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Disrupt veteran Ron Conway, CEO of salesforce.com Marc Benioff, Ben Horowitz, founder of Khosla Ventures Vinod Khosla, Joel Klein, San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, and The Honest Company’s Jessica Alba and Brian Lee.

I know we say this every post, but this year’s SF Disrupt will be our biggest and boldest yet: We’ve received Startup Battlefield applications in record numbers and we still have many more surprises coming at you. So act fast and get your tickets now homeslices.

As CEO of Path, Morin is best known for successfully turning around the mobile startup, which started as a beleaguered photosharing app in a saturated market and is now experiencing a renaissance. Before Path, Morin worked at Facebook where he contributed to Facebook Platform and led the Facebook Connect project.

Matt Cohler is a General Partner at VC firm Benchmark Capital, which is responsible for early investments in some of today’s hottest companies including Instagram, Asana and Cohler. Cohler was also the 7th employee at Facebook where he later went on to become the VP of Product Management, helming the company through its critical growth phase. We can’t wait to have both with us at Disrupt SF.

So much excitement! What else are we excited about? In a reprise of his famous Yahoo CEO interview, Michael Arrington will do a one on one with Marissa Mayer where quite honestly anything can happen, Vinod Khosla will speak about investing outside the box and maybe John Biggs will drive around Startup Alley again like this.

It could happen. Get your tickets now.

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, opportunities can be found here.

Dave Morin
Co-founder & CEO, Path

Dave is an entrepreneur. Today, he is the Co-Founder and CEO of Path, the modern journal that helps you stay connected with family & close friends. Previously, he was an early member of the Facebook team where he spent several years working to make the Internet more social by contributing to Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. Prior to Facebook, he spent several years learning design thinking and marketing while working at Apple.

Dave received a degree in Economics and Business from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Dave has been a featured speaker at universities, conferences, and panels worldwide including South by Southwest, Future of Web Apps, Web 2.0 Summit, Fast Company Innovation Uncensored, Le Web, Stanford, MIT, and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Matt Cohler
General Partner, Benchmark Capital

Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He’s responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Internet-related services, in addition to working closely with companies across the firm’s portfolio.

Previously he served as the VP of Product Management at Facebook, where he led the development of new strategic initiatives for the company. As the seventh employee at Facebook, Matt has worked with the team during many critical growth phases. Previously Matt was Vice President and General Manager at LinkedIn, where he was a member of the founding team. Prior to LinkedIn, Matt was a consultant in McKinsey & Company’s Silicon Valley office and worked in Beijing for AsiaInfo, the Chinese startup that built the infrastructure for the Internet in mainland China. Matt’s writings on the startup economy have been published in Harvard Business Review. He holds a bachelor’s degree with honors and distinction from Yale University.