Category: Tech news

David Byttow, the former technical lead for Square Wallet, and Chrys Bader-Wechseler, a former Google product manager at Google+, Photovine and YouTube, are raising $1.2 million for a new stealth startup called Secret.

“Nothing is a secret these days,” Bader-Wechseler said, declining to comment on his startup or the round.

Byttow designed the infrastructure for Square’s partnership with Starbucks, and was a previous technical lead at Google+. Bader-Wechseler was brought into Google after creating a photo app called Treehouse and a video service laced around Twitter called Vidly.

He released Google’s competitive entrant into the photo-sharing space called Photovine, before it got folded and he joined the Google+ effort.

We hear the seed round includes investors like Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Google Ventures and KPCB, but Bader-Wechseler declined to comment or confirm any of that.

Startup founders, especially those up to their necks in product development, don’t always have the head for building the kinds of customer bases required to keep their business afloat.

That’s where Y Combinator alum MobileWorks comes in. It first raised funding for its approach to building a virtual, on-demand workforce, and now it’s trying to bring that distributed team to bear on another weighty problem: building up a user base. Long story short, MobileWorks CEO Anand Kulkarni is trying to offer user acquisition as a service with a feature called LeadGenius (though I think we can all agree that UAaaS doesn’t have a great ring to it).

If you’re a company looking to drum up some new users, the process seems simple enough — you shell out your monthly fee depending on the level of support you need and let the LeadGenius team do its thing. That “thing” naturally involves plenty of conversations.

“They’ll come to us and talk about where they found their first users and what they look like,” Kulkarni explained. “From there we discuss where to find reproducible sources of users.” Once that team has dug into the meat of a business, they’ll start trawling sources like LinkedIn, Kickstarter, and even CrunchBase in search of leads that could stand to benefit from a client’s offerings. Of course, much of that legwork can be invisible to the company that requested it — LeadGenius handles some of the initial outreach and qualification so in the end that client company gets leads to try to seal the deal with.

Kulkarni says a “good number” of LeadGenius customers are startups like Firebase and Zenefits; considering MobileWorks’ background, it comes as little surprise that many of its users are fellow Y Combinator companies. There are some key larger clients in the mix too, though thanks to some pesky NDAs I can’t name names — one is a notable player in payments and the other is a prominent e-commerce entity.

But there’s a fine line between reaching out to a third party for assistance and dumping the job on them entirely, and MobileWorks isn’t ready to cross into that new frontier just yet. For now, the onus of actually making those crucial sales still falls on the client. “We’re one step short of sales as service,” Kulkarni noted.

He added that a more sales-centric push may not be completely out of the question, but at this point it’s more a question of feasibility than ambition. After all, how much work does it take to make a virtual salesperson as fluent and engaging as an in-house one? Too much to make it worth MobileWorks’ time right now, but there are other startups trying to bridge that very gap. The folks at SwipeGood took a stab at baking small, frictionless donations to charity into every credit card transaction before pivoting last year to offer tools and on-demand sales teams to young companies.

Happy Friday, lovers.

Gift Guide season is upon us, which is why we spend a good chunk of this podcast discussing smart gifts to buy your friends and loved ones. But that didn’t stop us from chatting up the Cyber Monday drama over at Motorola during the Moto X promotion, or the SkyJack drone hack that turns one drone into the leader of an aerial army.

Listen in to all this and more on this week’s episode of the TC Gadgets Podcast, featuring John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook, and Darrell Etherington.

Enjoy!

We invite you to enjoy our weekly podcasts every Friday at 3 p.m. Eastern and noon Pacific. And feel free to check out the TechCrunch Gadgets Flipboard magazine right here.

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

YouTube may be a popular destination for kids, but parents know that it’s not a kid-friendly one. One innocent video of Elmo singing leads to others of him cursing and slinging racial slurs. That’s why two Nickelodeon vets have created batteryPOP – an online and mobile destination where children ages six to eleven can safely browse through cartoons, comedy, music videos and more, sending their favorites to the top of the heap by “popping” them – a mechanism which could one day pave the way to make batteryPOP a farm league for the major networks, like Nick or the Cartoon Channel, for example.

The idea for batteryPOP comes from Greg Alkalay and Taso Mastorakis, who spent years at Nickelodeon on a variety of projects, including writing on-air promos, handling creative advertising, and working with content creators, among other things. The two met several years ago, when they were both tasked with “Nick Extras,” a team that worked to fill breaks in between shows with “bumpers” – original content like animations or other low-budget videos with real kids, or kids and graphics combined.

“What we were seeing is that there was a lot of interest from viewers to watch these little bumpers. They were getting a lot of buzz on messages boards. We were seeing retention over commercial breaks go up,” says Alkalay. “Our taste for short-form content started there, and when Nickelodeon stopped doing them, we wanted to do more.”

The two discussed the idea for some time, earnestly beginning in 2011. By the next year, Alkalay was ready to take the leap. The two had gotten to the point where there were so many ideas, so many content creators struggling to find traction on YouTube, and so many who were stuck in the development process with networks, that it made sense to help them by building a service that could connect an audience of children with that unseen content. An audience which they understand very well, in fact. Alkalay spent 12 years at Nick, and Mastorakis was at Nick owner Viacom for seven.

On batteryPOP’s website, which launched a little over a month ago, kids are the arbiters of what’s good, says Alkalay. As they browse through the various channels and shows – most content is short-form, under five minutes – they have the ability to “pop” the videos they like, which is the equivalent of a “thumbs up” recommendation. These “pops” show on a kid’s profile page, where their friends can see them, too.

There are currently around 30 creators on batteryPOP, and 50 or 60 hours’ worth of content.

Kids can also “charge” a video which will allow them to follow that show, in order to receive updates on their profile, and even interact with the show’s creators, in terms of giving feedback.

On mobile, the company has partnered with Weeblets on a pair of mobile apps for iOS and Android, but these, the founders explain, don’t offer the full experience of the batteryPOP website. They do, however, plan to release their own mobile and tablet apps in early 2014, built in-house.

Unlike some other “curated” video collections aimed at children, like Happly or Totlol, only around half of batteryPOP’s content is sourced from sites like YouTube or VEVO. The other half is original content batteryPOP hosts itself, and sourced through the founders’ long-established industry connections.

“Through popping – sharing [videos] on their personal page – we hope to help creators build an audience around their content, so we can kind of act like a minor league for the networks,” explains Alkalay. “You saw it happen with that web series Fred that got popular on YouTube, and then Nickelodeon picked it up. I think that’s really just the beginning of what’s going to start happening,” he says.

Longer-term, batteryPOP would like to take a small percentage of any deals they help establish between TV networks and videos that “pop” on its network. But in the immediate future, the company is working on production projects for brands to generate revenue. These videos will also be added to batteryPOP’s site, and marked as sponsored. They may also later activate advertising, after reaching a certain level of users.

BatteryPOP won’t be the only online network of sorts competing for projects that aren’t making it to TV for whatever reason, though. Other “networks” like Netflix and Amazon’s Prime Instant Video are also moving into original programming, some of it aimed at children – like Netflix with its new Marvel superhero deal, or Amazon with its own kids’ pilots, greenlit by viewers. But batteryPOP’s advantage is not only its singular focus and content pipeline – it’s also free.

New York-based BatteryPOP is currently bootstrapped, with some friends and family funding in tow. Next year, the company may raise a round of outside funding.

Google is launching an initiative to let organizations share their map data with the public, via Google’s Maps product and cloud-based infrastructure, and today partner National Geographic announced their participation in the project and shared some info via the official Google Maps blog. The partnership will mean that more than 500 reference and historic maps will now be available to browse as an additional layer on Google’s digital Maps engine.

This will let National Geographic explore interactive models complete with annotations that should help the archives come to life more effectively, and really animate issues of environmental change or provide education on important events throughout history. At a very basic level, this also makes available to many what was once hidden away in archival storage, visible only to those few historians who sought it out.

It’s not just about making things available free, however: National Geographic’s Frank Biasi, Director of Digital Development for NatGeo’s Maps, says there’s an added opportunity in that they can license or sell high-res and print editions of any map they make available through Google’s public data initiative, driving revenue back to the organization to support their nonprofit efforts.

Cartography may seem like fairly well-covered territory at this point, but combining the old and the new like this could be generative of very interesting comparative studies. Plus, putting them in front of more eyeballs means more potential for discovery by a wider pool of researchers, amateur and pro alike. After all, it never hurts to double check.

Years ago, Y Combinator helped popularize the convertible note as a way for startups that go through its accelerator to easily raise seed money. That gave companies the flexibility to get cash quickly without having to worry about hiring lawyers and pricing early funding rounds. Now the accelerator is moving to a new convertible equity model with an investment instrument that it’s calling “Safe,” which stands for “simple agreement for future equity.”

The headline, of course, is that Y Combinator is moving off convertible notes, but the truth is a little more nuanced than that. Yes, Safe does away with some of the hassles that come with using debt as an investment instrument.* But at the end of the day, “Safe” investments operate in basically the same way that convertible notes do.

That’s actually by design. From an investment perspective, not much has changed, according to Y Combinator partner (and lawyer) Carolynn Levy. The accelerator wanted to provide all of the upside that convertible notes offer — mostly the ability to raise money quickly without having to hire a lawyer and spend weeks negotiating terms — but while steering clear of the less attractive issues associated with them.

“People are slow to adopt change, and you don’t want to throw something too crazy at them,” Levy said. “Once they get past the name, they’ll see the same thing is going to happen with convertible notes.”

The two main problems that Safe seeks to solve are the issues of dealing with accrued interest and maturity dates. On the latter end, maturity dates on convertible notes tend to be one year, since they’re issued as short-term debt. But a year comes up fast, and that can be a distraction and a hassle for startups.

The other issue Safe seeks to do away with is accrued interest on the convertible debt they issue. While it’s mostly just a hassle for startups to figure out how much interest they have due upon conversion, Levy says occasionally there are investors who ask for a high interest rate. Instead of treating their investment like a short-term loan, moving to Safe will ensure that all investors are really in it for the equity upon conversion.

“In the securities world, there’s debt and there’s equity,” Y Combinator partner Carolynn Levy told me. “But if everyone wants to own equity in a company, why would you use debt as an investment instrument?”

While Levy joined Y Combinator about a year and a half ago, she was part of the team at Wilson Sonsini that helped draft Y Combinator’s standard series AA equity financing documents back in 2008, and also helped with the standard convertible note documents that the company offered to its startups three years ago.

Now, the folks at Y Combinator are hoping to offer Safe in the same way, with a set of standard, open source documents that anyone can use.

Y Combinator isn’t the first group to suggest a new convertible equity as an alternative to convertible debt. Adeo Ressi’s TheFunded and Founders Institute, in conjunction with Wilson Sonsini, issued a group of standard convertible equity documents back in the summer of 2012.

But having the backing of Y Combinator might help popularize the investment instrument, in part because all companies that go through the accelerator will begin using Safe, starting with the upcoming Winter 2014 class.

==
* For those who want to geek out, you can find a more thorough discussion of the pros and cons of convertible notes here and here.

The concavity of the glass panel is the most noteworthy thing about the LG G Flex. The only other thing you must know is that you should not consider buying it.

Global seed-stage fund SparkLabs Global Ventures, which launched in October, has closed the first two investments. The $30 million fund seeks to identify and support promising startups around the world, with a focus on emerging marketplaces. It invested $400,000 in legal services platform LawPal, and $500,000 in Memebox, South Korea’s first beauty product subscription service. The firm also announced that it has added Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Project, and General Catalyst managing director Jonathan Teo as advisors.

LawPal wants to make it easier for attorneys and clients to work together by providing a transaction platform with tools to collaborate, track the progress of each project and securely store and sign documents. The company is also developing a directory of lawyers who serve startups. Memebox launched last year in Seoul as South Korea’s first beauty subscription e-commerce company and has now expanded overseas so customers in the U.S. can purchase best-selling Korean products. The startup was a member of the first group to take part in SparkLabs’ Korean accelerator program.

New advisor Behlendorf is a managing director at Mithril Capital Management, while Teo, is a managing director at General Catalyst Partners, where his investments include Snapchat and Chloe + Isabel. Before joining General Catalyst, Teo was a principal at Benchmark Capital, where he originated the firm’s investments in Twitter and Instagram.

In a statement, SparkLabs Global Ventures’ co-founder and general partner Frank Meehan said “It’s really a privilege to have Brian and Jonathan as advisors not only because of their incredible accomplishments, but how they reflect the vision of our fund. Brian serving as CTO of the World Economic Forum, being co-creator of Apache Server Software that the majority of the world’s websites run on, and a pioneer in the open source movement matches our global footprint and desire to help entrepreneurs all over the world. Same with Jonathan and his ability to identify billion dollar companies (Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat), so early in their lifecycles.”

Microsoft’s public relations department was on encrypted cloud nine yesterday, riding a wave of high-five press reports for their swift action to protect consumers from National Security Agency surveillance.

“We are taking steps to ensure governments use legal process rather than technological brute force to access customer data,” raged Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith, writing about revelations that U.S. and British spy agencies are secretly tapping the data flows of top tech firms.

Following Yahoo and Google, Microsoft will begin encrypting data in 2014, including services like Outlook, Office, SkyDrive and their signature operating system, Windows.

Noticeably absent from their victory lap was any mention of Skype, the wildly popular communication service that has been a favorite target for surveillance.

“I agree that Skype’s absence here is extremely interesting and concerning,” wrote the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Kurt Opsahl to us in an email. “Microsoft, as the owner of Skype, has totally failed to be transparent about this and it’s not surprising that users and security experts come to believe that it has something to hide.”

A spokesman for Microsoft says that the announcement does “not exclude” Skype; it just wasn’t mentioned because they didn’t feel the need to mention all products. That’s an odd excuse, given that the communication has been headline news for many NSA stories.

The Center for Democracy and Technology’s Joe Hall explained to me in an email that real transparency from Microsoft means “demonstrating that independent review from folks respected by the security community have examined Skype’s cryptographic methods and implementation, and said good things about it.”

So far, that hasn’t happened. A Microsoft spokesperson declined to address these concerns.

“I think Microsoft must be very transparent to make encryption in Skype meaningful,” Hall told me. “That means detailing the way Skype works technically, and demonstrating that independent review from folks respected by the security community have examined Skype’s cryptographic methods and implementation and said good things about it. Hopefully then anointing it as robustly ‘end-to-end.’ (Meaning only the parties at the ends of the conversation have access to the communication).”

The real reason Skype likely won’t offer spy-resistant (end-to-end) encryption is because digital communications carry delicious amounts of user data. The who, what, where, and when of our phone calls helps Skype target feature upgrades and advertising opportunities.

Lucrative user data is partly why Skype is more than happy to give its service away for free, while competitors, such as Silent Circle, charge users who are willing to pay for end-to-end encrypted communications. Skype doesn’t even give users the option to pay for such personal security.

Quite reasonably, Microsoft’s choice to encrypt some data is a business calculation to appease customers. Evidently, there has not been enough #outrage to tip the cost-benefit analysis to extend this encryption to Skype. The cheerleading yesterday isn’t helping that fact.

Because I’ll install almost any app on my iPhone just to take a look, I’ve got a jam-packed folder called “messaging apps” that’s now five pages deep. It includes only the big names, regional giants, and those newer arrivals buzzy enough to secure coverage on TechCrunch or other tech blogs. You know, recently.

The situation is getting out of hand.

There’s no doubt that the mobile messaging phenomenon is blowing up, and everyone wants a piece of that. Analysts at Ovum last month estimated that the number of messages sent on these types of apps will grow from 27.5 trillion this year to 71.5 trillion by the end of 2014. Said the report, social messaging is “not just a fad,” but a service that will “be around in the long-term.”

“Developers,” they may have well said, “start your engines.”

Elsewhere, there are reports of messaging clients like Whatsapp overtaking Facebook Messenger, as Facebook admits to declining teen usage. There are rumors of Snapchat turning down a $3 billion acquisition offer (Maybe).

But even if mobile messaging itself is not a fad, a lot of the current products being released into the App Store today are.

Too many otherwise talented people are building messaging apps or Snapchat alternatives with only slightly improved or differentiated feature sets. Worse, they’re building messaging app gimmicks. An app for winking selfies? It’s enough to genuinely fear for future generations.

Nearly every day, PR staff hastily hired by developers capable of throwing together a little iOS code send out pitch after pitch about the latest and greatest messaging service – a deluge, where the words begin to blur together and descriptions almost sound copied and pasted from the app that came before it…as in, last week.

Did you see?, they write. [Redacted] is the most secure private texting app available. [Redacted] lets you safely and easily share private messages, make calls, share photos and videos! Everything is private! 

Hmm, that sounds familiar.

Some try to zero in on a small feature Snapchat lacks, and make that the basis for their existence. Others pick a single function, turn that into an entire app, hoping to be the next new gimmick, a la FrontBack’s dual-photos. This one does GIFs! This one sends songs! This one too! This one has games! This one lets you post selfies! (Oh, wait. They all do that.)

Dozens of little offshoots of the messaging app Vine have sprung up, slapping on a few extra features and crossing fingers. Let them come, plead app creators post-crapshoot. Let the users come.

What Johnny-come-lately doesn’t understand is that mobile messaging is not an overnight sensation, and true viral success is rare. The landscape has been dotted with messaging players for years, and only now as smartphones are hitting critical mass in key, mature markets while emerging markets like China and India adopt mobile in large numbers, are we seeing the result of what having that previously established footprint looks like.

Whatsapp, for instance, was founded in 2009 and steadily grew its user base by targeting the top charts on the App Store repeatedly by periodically dropping from a paid app to a free one, allowing it to benefit from the rush of new users snagging it on sale as it hit the top free apps list. This year, it finally felt well enough established as one of the top contenders to go free, and currently it sits in spot #28 on the U.S. App Store eating up more downloads.

Meanwhile, many of the larger messaging apps touting their incredible numbers have benefited from a regional focus, like KakaoTalk, LINE, WeChat and others. They later expanded worldwide through users’ personal networks of family and friends.

And as for popular, newer arrivals, there’s a bit of good timing and luck involved. Snapchat, for instance, grew virally in L.A. high schools – luckily for the company, which was before struggling to attract users. They almost accidentally stumbled into an addressable and underserved market than only a few years ago wouldn’t have existed: young teens with expensive smartphones, trying to avoid their parents ‘likes’ on Facebook.

The app is clever, sure, but disappearing messages was not a new idea when it arrived (which is kind of funny, given the legal fight over who came up with the idea for Snapchat). For example, in early 2010, an iPhone app called TigerText claimed it would disappear texts from users’ phones. Before that, a number of online sites let users send private texts from web to phone. Snapchat, as it turned out, was actually a repurposed idea that hit the right group of students at the right time and then took off.

But to optimistic (or perhaps naive) app publishers, the Snapchat story looks like a formula for their own viral success. Build an app for the kids, pitch its private nature…profit. It’s not that simple, of course.

And as more developers release half-baked attempts to ride the coattails of the larger messaging wave, the today still-positive vibe for newer mobile messaging experiences could turn into frustrations. These apps don’t talk to each other, after all, and each one wants you to re-create your social graph upon first sign up. Some even go so far as to hack your address book to do so. How many times can users be burned? How many times do we have to invite friends to join? How many times can we try every silly little goof, before saying “forget this, I’m going back to iMessage/Kik/Snapchat/Whatsapp/etc.” for good?

And really, how many mobile messaging apps does one person need? One? A half-dozen? More?

If mobile messaging is becoming the social networking of the 2010s, then it looks like we’re about to find out.

Twitter has been putting a lot of effort into its advertising business, which today is the newly public company’s primary strategy for generating revenue. But it turns out that one of its earliest, lean-back efforts has not proven to be its most fruitful: Promoted Trends generated less than 10 percent of the company’s revenue in the three months ended June 30, 2013.

The detail comes by way of correspondence between Twitter and the SEC, made in the weeks leading up to its first public S-1 report on October 3 ahead of its November IPO. The social networking startup had initially made a private filing with the SEC, courtesy of the JOBS Act, which lets companies with revenues of less than $1 billion file without immediately exposing details of its finances. (Twitter says in its S-1 that revenues for the first nine months in 2013 were $422.2 million.)

Specifically, the SEC requested Twitter to modify its revenue graphs to include “number of ad engagements per 1,000 timeline views” and “revenue per ad engagement” notations, and to additionally specify any other revenue sources that do not require user engagement.

In its response, Twitter notes the following in correspondence from September 6:

The Company respectfully advises the Staff that, in the three months ended June 30, 2013, less than 10% of its revenue was generated from its Promoted Trends product, which is the only Promoted Product for which revenue is recognized on a fixed-fee basis and does not require any user engagement. The Company does not believe that Promoted Trends will have a material impact on the metrics disclosed in the Registration Statement in the future.

Promoted Trends, first revealed in 2010, were a follow-on from the Promoted Tweets that appeared in users’ Timelines. Promoted Trends were one of the company’s first attempts at using an area outside of the Timeline to drive revenues. In February, the price for Promoted Trends was around the $200,000 mark, AllThingsD reported at the time.

In September of this year, Twitter gave Promoted Trends a little promotion of their own, with fuzzy metrics touting how they “produced 22% more conversations about an advertiser,” gave a 30% lift in brand mentions, and a 32% lift in retweets of brand mentions in the first two weeks of exposure.

But, it seems that even with all that, off-piste has remained a marginal product, the runt of the litter to Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts. That may also partly explain why Twitter has instead opted to focus on ways of delivering promotions within users’ Timeline streams instead, and continues ramping up with new products, such as the retargeting product announced this week.

The letters between Twitter and the SEC, now listed in Twitter’s public filings, for the most part contain questions about certain details in Twitter’s S-1, with Twitter’s subsequent edits. (“The Company respectfully advises the Staff that it has revised the disclosure on page XX to address the Staff’s comment” appears a lot.) But there are also a few other interesting details in the notes that never seem to have made their way into the S-1 filing.

Another one that caught my eye was about Sina Weibo. In an August letter, the SEC asks Twitter to explain better why Sina Weibo is considered a competitor. This longer explanation, which details Twitter’s concern with Sina Weibo’s international ambitions, also hasn’t quite made it into the S-1 filing we see today (bolding mine):

“The Company respectfully advises the Staff that there are a number of reasons it considers Sina Weibo a competitor even though the Company is not permitted to operate in China,” Twitter writes. “Sina Weibo attempts to offer products and services that are somewhat similar to those offered by the Company, and Sina Weibo has started to offer its products and services outside of China and may continue such expansion outside of China. As such, outside of China, the Company has started to compete directly with Sina Weibo, and expects this competition to continue to grow in the future.

“In addition, Sina Weibo has grown rapidly in China, and has a significant user base and a substantial amount of content on its platform. The Company operates a global platform, and if content is available on Sina Weibo and it cannot be accessed on the Company’s platform, it may reduce the Company’s ability to attract users to its platform.

“Further, the Company may eventually be permitted to operate in China. If the Company were ultimately able to operate in China, it would face significant challenges in gaining users in China because Sina Weibo would already be an established and entrenched competitor.

“As such, the Company believes it is appropriate to list Sina Weibo as a competitor in the Registration Statement.”

What’s also interesting here is that neither the SEC nor Twitter mention Line and Kakao, two other social networking products popular in Asia that do find their way into the S-1. Whether those were later additions, or whether the SEC simply didn’t choose to pinpoint them in its question, is not clear. Although the S-1 only notes the challenges to entering a market like China, Twitter takes a slightly more frank and less guarded tone when communicating directly with the SEC.

(h/t to Zach Seward for first noticing the filings)

As 3D modeling enters the mainstream, it helps to have a place to put them. That’s where Sketchfab comes in. Designed as an embeddable 3D object browser, the company allows designers and tinkerers to upload and share their 3D scans.

The service raised $2 million from Balderton, Partech and angel David Cohen. They’re seeing an average of 300 object files uploaded per day for a total of 70,000 3D files so far. They have a running tally of the number of triangles and vertices processed here.

Services like Sketchfab are something new in the web app realm. Not unlike YouTube for video or Flickr for photos, this service lets designers showcase their wares and offers an easy way to share 3D renders and fan art. You can follow and contact 3D artists and request copies of models and you can also hire 3D modellers from the site.

“We only do one thing, to display 3D files in the browser, but we do it well and fast,” said CEO Alban Denoyel. Based on our own Steve Long’s smile, below, they may be right.

Steve from johnbiggs on Sketchfab.

Positioned somewhere between between the Z and the Z Tab, the new Xperia Z Ultra is Sony’s latest flagship phone. Actually, calling this thing a phone (or even a phablet) is a bit of a stretch, given its whopping 6.44-inch display. It is, after all, only slightly smaller than tablets like the Nexus 7 and iPad mini.

Connect this 2 TB hard drive to your network, and you can create your own personal cloud in your home — not on some server in San Jose.

Ask a VC is back this week after a brief hiatus–and our guest this week is DFJ managing director Josh Stein. As you may remember, you can submit questions for our guests either in the comments or here and we’ll ask them during the show.

Stein currently has backed and serves on the boards of Box, Chartbeat, LendKey, Selligy, SugarCRM, and Swell. He is also actively involved with DFJ’s investments in AngelList, Glam Media, Opscode, Path, Redfin, Tremor Video, and Twilio. His previous investments include GoodGuide (acquired by UL), iList (acquired by IGN/News Corp), Polaris Wireless (strategic recapitalization), Yammer (acquired by Microsoft), and Yardbarker (acquired by Fox Sports Interactive).

Prior to joining DFJ, Stein was a Vice President at Telephia, and was a co-founder, Director and the Chief Strategy Officer for ViaFone. He also held positions in product management at Microsoft and NetObjects, and was a management consultant in the San Francisco office of The Boston Consulting Group.

Stein has made some early investments in clear winners in enterprise and beyond, including leading Box’s first round of institutional investment back in 2006. We’re curious to hear what patterns he’s observed in finding and backing successful entrepreneurs and companies.

Please send us your questions for Stein here or put them in the comments below!