Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: Derek Andersen is the founder of Startup Grind, a 35-city event series hosted in 15-countries that educates, inspires, and connects entrepreneurs. He also founded Commonred (acquired by Income.com) and is ex-Electronic Arts.

There are virtually no companies in Silicon Valley that exit north of $100MM or create a billion dollar business, that don’t raise Venture Capital funding. Charles and Kai Huang, the founders of Red Octane are the exception having done both. They went on to sell more than 30MM units of Guitar Hero becoming one of the top videogame franchises of all time. Recently I sat down with Charles at Startup Grind and heard this fascinating story.

In 1999 Charles and his brother Kai founded Red Octane. Launching six months before Netflix, the goal was to be the Netflix of videogames. But six months after they launched the dot com bubble burst and so did their business. As funding completely dried up, the capital intensive rental business became unfundable. Of that time Charles said, “It looked like the whole valley was just going to die and go away. So that’s when we scrambled and looked at video game hardware, and eventually videogame software. That was the beginning of what was many lives of Red Octane.”

Startup Survival. 2 Weeks Of Cash.

They were gamers and were playing a lot of Playstation 1 games, especially the pirated stuff out of Japan. Dance Dance Revolution was just making it’s way to the States so they stated selling dance pads. “We realized the dance pads that we were buying and reselling were garbage, because they were breaking down and we thought we could make better dance pads than this,” Charles said. “I literally packed my bags, went to China, visited a few of these factories that made dance pads, figured out how they made them and took a bunch of suggestions that users had given us and incorporated them into new designs and so we started coming out with our own dance pads and believe it or not, that kept the company afloat (from 2001 to 2003).”

Everything was sold online due to lack of cash. “We had to start that way because we couldn’t afford to sell to stores due to cash flow. The way it works is you sell to Gamestop and they don’t pay you for 60 to 90 days. We didn’t have the money to do that, so we had to sell everything online because when somebody orders with a credit card, you get paid in two days.”

The company’s number one rule to survive was simple. Don’t die. “As long as your company doesn’t die, smart people will find a way to make things happen, but if you let your company die, that’s it, you’ll never have another shot.”

For two years the company ran with less than 2-weeks of cash in the bank. Seriously. Every week they hoped to make enough money to make the next payroll. One time Charles had drafted the email to lay the employees off because they didn’t have enough money to pay. They decided to wait until after Thanksgiving and when Black Friday hit, orders poured in. “It was like a gift, like money falling from the heavens,” Charles said. “Like ‘where are all of these orders coming from?’ Then that actually gave us enough money to make payroll and we made enough money over the next month to continue.”

Product Pivot, Guitar Hero Is Born

Once they realized that Konami could ruin their dance pad business if they decided to stop selling it in the US, they needed to be more in charge of their own destiny. They took a popular arcade game called “The Groove” and partnered with the developer to bring it to the console. This took their company from $1MM in revenue to $9MM and the profits allowed them to work on their second game, Guitar Hero.

They knew the music genre was working in Asia, but it hadn’t translated to the US or Europe. They took a look at music games and found Guitar Freaks. “We said, man this thing is fun, but if we could just make a few changes, we think that would be a `partnership was perfect. Red Octane made the hardware and Harmonix made the software.

“Guitar Hero was an incredible experience in that in the first day that we talked about it in February, to the day we released it in November, everything about it just seemed like this magical experience. You know, you hear musicians say how sometimes the right songs just flow from your head? It was like that, every idea just came so smoothly.” They demoed the game at E3 in true underdog fashion they weren’t even on the main show floor. They were down in the basement with the other indie games. They won Best of Show awards going up against Madden, Need for Speed, Tony Hawk, and others. The budget for the original game was $1.7MM.

But they were still fighting. Retailers didn’t want to carry the game because the large box didn’t fit on the shelves and there was no precedence for that type of game selling well despite the positive consumer buzz. GameStop was the only retailer to carry the game. “They were almost obligated to take every videogame product because GameStop was where hardcore gamers shopped, so you have to have everything.”

To pay for the inventory, Red Octane tried to raise money again. And while they had done $9MM in revenue the year before, they were unable to raise $3MM. “It wasn’t like we were a startup that was burning cash, we were already profitable. At the time, videogames were just considered an uninvestable category by VCs. So, in order to get the game out, my brother and I took out second mortgages and took on credit card debt and to buy inventory for the launch of Guitar Hero.”

The game launched in November 2005. Best Buy forecast the game would sell 30K units between November and the end of January. The day it launched they sold 3,000 units in the first two hours. Best Buy called that day and wanted 80K more units the next week. Because of the hardware the games were built and shipped from China. That shipping delay turned Guitar Hero into the hardest game to find that Christmas season. They sold $45MM worth of Guitar Hero in the first 11-months and then they were acquired by Activision for north of $100MM.

I worked at Electronic Arts at the time, and a few years later I sat in a meeting with the head analyst who had looked at the Guitar Hero acquisition opportunity. He said at the time EA didn’t want to buy Red Octane at that price because there was no past data to support that Guitar Hero would continue to produce. They were wrong.

Over the next few years Guitar Hero went on to sell more than 30MM units and gross $5B in sales. It also completely transcended pop culture and the game became the world’s opportunity to finally be a rock star.

The Next Big Thing

When I spoke with Charles we were sitting in the Santa Clara office of his new startup Green Throttle Games, which TechCrunch announced earlier this month has raised $6MM in funding. Probably a little easier for Charles and Kai to raise funding this time around. The startup is appropriately a hardware gaming company trying to mesh with mobile. Green Throttle has released a console-like controller that allows you to seemlessly play your mobile games on your TV, effectively turning your mobile games into a console experience. See more on the controller in the video below.

When I asked him about having the energy to start all over again, he quoted some advice he got from the founder of LeapFrog when he told him, “Before you start think hard about this because you’re really signing up for the second and the third startup because if the second one goes under, you’re going to have to do a third just to prove that the first one wasn’t a fluke.”

Same-day shipping became the big retailer craze this holiday season. Why? As the New York Times points out, retailers are living in fear of Amazon.com and trying to match what the online retailer offers.

The fear factor — Wal-Mart once had a trance on retail. Now it’s Amazon.com. But it’s not just retail that has begun to show deeper anxiety about Amazon. It’s the enterprise giants, too, that pay far more attention to the moves Amazon makes. Commerce came first, and now Amazon is prepping to have the same impact on big data and the software markets.

It’s why 2013 will be the big year for the retail and computing giant. It’s all coming together with its growing cloud infrastructure, voluminous data streams and content. It’s what Ray Wang of Constellation Research calls “matrix commerce.”

Wang argues that Amazon is not a commerce company at all. It’s a big data company that has developed a cloud infrastructure that is profitable and subsidizes its retail operations. It has the mobile devices and content that it can spread through a network of users who pay to get it.

Wang said this to me in an email:

It’s about dominating matrix commerce via big data. In matrix commerce, the channels from the network, the demand signals from big data, the supply chain from logistics, the payment technology from the interfaces, and the frictionless enablers from digital signatures, etc. These are the future.

Retailers face a market that once fed them high profit margins. Amazon competes on volume and low margins. That’s as true for its retail business as it is for its infrastructure offerings through Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Jeff Bezos reflected on the parallels when he took the stage at AWS re:Invent.

“Retail customers,” he said, “want cheap prices and fast delivery” and AWS customers want reliability and speed. “The effort that we put into those things will continue to pay dividends in the long term. It’s impossible to imagine that people would say: I love AWS, but I wish it were a little less reliable.”

Just like they did in 2012, Amazon will keep doing new things in 2013. This past year the company continued its reinvestment in distribution centers. It continues to build warehouses near big cities like New York and San Francisco. It even started deploying electronic lockers in retail shops where shoppers can pick up items they purchased online.

AWS introduced two new big data services in 2012 in addition to Elastic Map Reduce, an online Hadoop engine for analytics that it has offered for the past three years. DyamoDB is the company’s NoSQL offering, which the company has had in deployment internally since 2007. It powers Amazon’s consumer site. RedShift is an online data warehouse that AWS launched at the re:Invent conference. AWS ties into corporate data centers; it can run mission-critical applications. It will continue to work with companies like SAP to run business software.

Amazon also sells the Kindle hardware at practically a loss. It does this so it can sell ebooks, a market that the company dominates. It has also used these devices to push into the publishing market.

One common element ties Amazon’s online retail, cloud services and foray into the tablet market: data. For Amazon, the hardware does not matter. The goal is not to make margins on selling fancy consumer hardware and expensive equipment. Through efficiency, Amazon can experiment in retail, publishing and its enterprise service offerings.

I still have my doubts, though. AWS is not infallible. Its repeated outages have given its competition plenty of room to differentiate against AWS. And low margins do not necessarily mean success. It impacts revenues and its overall stock price — factors that can’t be ignored.

Amazon is not a commerce company. It’s a big data company. And that’s what makes the difference in its success for the past year and the year ahead.

Same-day shipping is not going to help competitors. Studying Amazon is a better tactic. A lot can be learned in how it uses its own infrastructure to offer data services and the lowest prices in the business.

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is a contributor to TechCrunch, you can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

In the few years I’ve been in Silicon Valley, if someone asked me to sum up — in one word — what defined and dominated consumer technology applications during that time, I’d have no choice but to answer: “Photos.” Now, it’s easy for others to sit back and roll their eyes at the thought of it. “Why not solve big problems?” an aggravated chorus might wail. Looking back over this time period, the big events touching on digital pictures gained outsized attention: The launch of iPhone 4, with its incredible camera; the meteoric rise and acquisition of Instagram; the technical achievement unlocked by Lytro; the influence of the Pinterest design on nearly every e-commerce site; our narcissistic addiction to Timehop or delight in depositing checks through our bank’s mobile app; today’s fascination with exploding pictures, courtesy of Snapchat; and on the horizon, one of the most anticipated interface advancements: Google Glass.

Because our digital photographs are inherently social objects, and because mobile platforms now create a massive global audience for companies to directly provide tools and software to, digital pictures have transformed into a strange, fierce battleground where bigger platform giants test the limits of privacy, throw friendly punches at their rivals, and experiment with new business models. Most coverage and analysis of this trend focuses on the end consumers, but for the purposes of this post, let’s consider digital photographs as being a byproduct of the advances in mobile camera technology, as the camera itself is perhaps the single most important sensor on our phones and tablets.

As the camera sensor improves over time, the opportunities around photosharing increase with it. Therefore, my belief is that we are still in the early innings of this digital photography craze, so if you’re tired of the meme, brace yourself because it will take years to unfold, and if you’re excited about this future, it’s a great time to get your hands dirty. First, let’s briefly consider what hardware changes we can anticipate: device battery life and processing speeds will only improve with time, perhaps opening the door for richer image capture, video capture, and so forth, and RGBd (“D” for depth) cameras will allow cameras to capture not only more of the the light field, but also the depth of objects from the sensor and in relation to each other which has big implications for the advancement of 3-D modeling. (Google Glass will eventually, we hope, have huge implications for passive image capture, both for consumers and for commercial activities.)

As the hardware advances the camera sensor capabilities, software will not be far behind. So far, consumers have glommed onto applications that filter, organize, and/or erase photographs. Lytro’s technology enables the capture of the entire light field with for post-capture focus (though I’m not sure if their technology will be incorporated or licensed in other devices). Moving forward, I’d expect more camera applications to offer more context around each photograph, such as auto-image/object detection, auto-tagging and classification (especially around location, such as Findery is working on), and auto-arrangement or organization. I’d also expect more technologies (like Stipple) to auto-fingerprint photographs to preserve their provenance as they’re shared across the web or before being screenshot and manipulated on mobile devices.

The tricky thing here is that only in hindsight do filters or boards or exploding pictures make sense. “Of course teenagers will want to make their pictures disappear like Tiger texts!” Therefore, in the future, we won’t really know what consumers will want until we see the new applications and experiments live, in the wild, and monitor their usage. What is certain, however, is that all of these advances will create opportunities for developers to build new applications and advance the collection, documentation, recognition (and more manipulation, including distortion), and sharing of digital pictures in ways that we’ve yet to imagine.

While I’m unable to articulate just what this future will look like, I do feel we will see more and more activity in this space, more experiments, more applications, and more things that perhaps start out looking like toys that may ultimately be new channels and modes of communication — as well as the societal implications we can expect when nearly everything “can” be captured. And, we don’t even know how the world will react to new image-based interfaces that will surely come to market, starting with Google Glass, perhaps a touch-enabled television with its own camera, and so much more. When it comes to images, it’s early innings, indeed.

Photo Credit: Tony Ratanen / Flickr Creative Commons

It looks like something from a sci-fi flick, or maybe a meth lab. But Le Whaf is a device for vaporizing liquids.

Crosswords work great on touchscreens. But sometimes, to really kill the time, you need something more colorful and animated.

The logical left and raging right hemispheres of the human brain don’t always meet in the middle, especially when it comes to crazy-expensive supercar sleds.

This keep-me-out-of-the-kitchen guy is here to tell you that if you hate to cook, this appliance from VitaClay is a great substitute chef.

It’s been days, possibly even weeks, since we’ve covered a wedding-focused startup. Let’s change that, shall we? OneWed, the company formerly known as Nearlyweds, is now on iPad. The new app quietly arrived just before the holidays, offering a new way for brides-to-be to browse, be inspired by, save and share wedding imagery and ideas.

The iPad launch follows the revamp of the startup’s flagship website, OneWed.com, which this fall was redesigned to better emphasize its wedding photos. Previously, OneWed had operated a fairly traditional-looking media property, admits CEO John Scrofano. The company had recruited top wedding bloggers to produce original content for the site, paying bonuses based on how well that content did.

“We built [OneWed] on the back of this blogger model and the content we had produced…but what we were hearing our customers say is ‘we really love the pictures,’” Scrofano explains. “Bloggers were writing all these articles for us,” he laughs, “but really [users] just wanted the pictures.”

The company is no stranger to adjusting its offerings in response to user feedback, though. As Nearlyweds, it had once offered wedding websites and planning tools in the hopes of later connecting brides with wedding service providers. Describing this earlier incarnation of the site, Scrofano says although women liked the product, in general, “women are not super-excited about services in the wedding business. It was a very ‘dude’-way of looking at things,” he says. “What women really want is inspiration.”

With the OneWed.com revamp, it delivered that inspiration. Like a wedding-focused Pinterest, women can browse through images, products, articles, and other content, saving their favorites, posting to social services, and clicking through to the vendor’s own website. That last bit is important, actually. Pinterest is great for inspiration, but not great for taking action. And, as Scrofano reminds us, “weddings have deadlines.”

The company monetizes through featured listings – essentially paid ad placements – where vendors can advertise products from dresses to stationary accompanied by their own imagery. Due to the nature of OneWed’s content, it’s hard to tell which items are native ads, however. Scrofano says the ads are those items listed as “Products” on the site, but I would have never guessed that. But he says they’re still working to determine if that’s the best way to differentiate the paid listings from the rest of the items. (It’s not, but I’m not sure OneWed’s target demographic cares, either.)

The model, so far, is working. The website now sees over half a million uniques per month, placing it around #8 in the wedding website industry, behind leaders like Martha Stewart Weddings or The Knot, for example. For comparison’s sake, TheKnot.com sees around 2.2 million uniques per month. OneWed is also doing over six figures in revenue and hopes to hit 7 figures “very, very soon.”

So far, the iPad app is doing well, too. Although it’s too early for download numbers or actives, since its debut last week, the app is already seeing 30 minute plus session times and multiple opens per day from most of its downloaders, as well as around 85 pageviews per session. As with the website, OneWed iPad users can also browse imagery, save and share their favorites, search by category, style, designer, color or other keywords, and buy the items in the photos.

OneWed had previously raised around $500,000 from Founder’s C0-op and other angels, and is planning to raise again. And while newness is generally what attracts investors, in the case of wedding startups, the fact that OneWed still exists after several years is actually a point in its favor. “We have 100 percent customer turnover every 18 months. Unless you have a brand that’s able to carry on, it’s so difficult,” says Scrofano. “It’s so hard to get a critical mass of brides. There’s a lot of dead bodies by the side of that road.”

You can download the new OneWed iPad application here.

Nook Media, the Barnes & Noble subsidiary that handles Nook e-readers and digital content, announced today that education publisher Pearson has invested $89.5 million, giving it a 5 percent stake in the company.

Nook Media spun out from Barnes & Noble earlier this. B&N owns 78.2 percent , while Microsoft (which made a big investment aimed at  bringing Nook content to Windows 8 devices) owns 16.8 percent, according to the press release. The deal gives the company a post-money valuation of $1.789 billion.

The companies paint the deal as a partnership allowing Nook to improve the experience it offers to students. In the release, Pearson North America CEO Will Ethridge says:

Pearson and Barnes & Noble have been valued partners for decades, and in recent years both have invested heavily and imaginatively to provide engaging and effective digital reading and learning experiences. This new agreement extends our partnership and deepens our commitment to provide better, easier experiences for our customers. With this investment we have entered into a commercial agreement with NOOK Media that will allow our two companies to work closely together in order to create a more seamless and effective experience for students. It is another example of our strategy of making our content and services broadly available to students and faculty through a wide range of distribution partners.

In the regulatory filing discussing the investment, Nook Media also says that it “expects” its holiday sales numbers, which it plans to release on January 3, will fall below the company’s previous projections.

[via PaidContent]

Buzzfeed has found a “security hole” in an app that is totally not used for sexting, Snapchat, and an app that is also totally not used for sexting, Poke. The two apps totally not used for sexting were found to have been caching videos that have nothing to do with sex as temporary files on the iPhone and other iOS devices.

You can replicate the “hack” by first of all getting someone to totally send you non-sex-related videos via either app and firing up the old iPhone file browser you totally have handy. I used iExplorer above, but Buzzfeed used iFunBox. Which doesn’t sound at all sexual.

To use this “method” to check out and save videos from Snapchat, even after you’ve viewed them, hit up the Snapchat app via the file browser and open a folder called “tmp.” If you want to check out Poke videos, first make sure not to view them, then go to the app in the file browser, then “library” then “caches” then “fbstore” then “mediacard.” See above.

While this totally not sexting related “story” is totally at the top of Techmeme right now, one day soon we’ll all forget that this was such big news. Facebook has told Slashgear that it was working on a fix for Poke, while Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel shrugged it off.

Because WHY ON EARTH WOULD ANYONE WHO ISN’T A TECH REPORTER DO THIS?

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, which is nice and all — but for businesses, flattery doesn’t exactly pay the bills. However, when said flattery comes along with massive amounts of new attention from millions of potential new users, a high-profile copycat could actually help more than it hurts.

Such may well be the case with ephemeral photo sharing app Snapchat and its newly-launched doppelgänger Facebook Poke.

Data from social media and web analytics firm Topsy indicates that mentions of Snapchat have skyrocketed since Facebook rolled out its Poke app last week. Hat-tip to Bloomberg social media director Jared Keller for who pointed out the shift in a Tweet this morning.

Here is the graph of Snapchat mentions and web searches compared to those of Facebook Poke over the past month:

This seems to indicate that awareness of Snapchat overall is now hitting that “hockey stick” phase that startups and their investors so often dream about. And the buzz is translating into downloads: Today, Snapchat holds the #4 ranking for all free apps on Apple’s iPhone app store, while Facebook Poke is way down at #70. But of course, it’s way too early to crown winners and losers here, as it’s anyone’s guess as to whether this immediate traction will translate into more actual long-term use for Snapchat and, most importantly, financial gain for the startup (Facebook has the money thing pretty well covered already, so any initial lag in user response to Facebook Poke is not exactly a huge material failure for the company.)

But right now it looks like that cheeky “welcome” message Snapchat’s co-founder issued to Facebook last week at the launch of Poke — and the startup’s reported refusal to sell to Facebook earlier this year — may turn out to make a lot of sense.

Airport Chatter, which debuted just in time to take advantage of the busy holiday travel season, is a new mobile application aiming to be the one-stop shop for everything related to air travel, from the time of departure to the time of arrival. The app includes venue profiles for the shops and services inside airports, allowing users to not only discover the hours of operations and other business info, but also post check-ins and reviews. That makes it something like a miniature version of Yelp, specifically designed for airports.

But co-founder and CEO Mark Wagner explains that the company’s goal is bigger than that – the venue listings feature is only one of many they have in store. The goal is to go beyond becoming the next “Gate Guru,” for example, in order to offer users a more complete travel platform that can help them with every aspect of their trip, including tracking flight status, booking ground transportation, tracking the progress of checked baggage, and most notably, socializing with fellow travelers.

Some of these features are further along in development than others. For example, Airport Chatter’s website speaks of a forthcoming feature called “Radar” which will allow users to meet new friends to “make trips more exciting.” Radar, however, is not yet available in the current iOS release. Wagner says the team debated about the launch timing, but decided that it would be better to launch before the holidays to gain that early boost in new users.

That bet paid off, it seems. Since its late December debut, Apple has featured Airport Chatter on two of its lists – “New & Noteworthy” travel apps, and another featured list called “Traveling Home.”

Wagner explains he came up with the idea for Airport Chatter around a year ago, having always been a big aviation geek, who loved everything about airports, airplanes and travel. “For me especially, [it was about] ‘what can technology do to help the travel experience?’ because A) there are so many travelers, and B) everyone is on smartphones,” he says. He and his friend Izzy Kirsh began working on an earlier version of what is now Airport Chatter, and launched it as a web app this April.

Not surprisingly, they soon found that the majority of the traffic hitting their website, essentially a list of airport venues, was coming from mobile. After joining forces with Sydney-based Rab Memari, who had been working on a similar concept, Wagner then tracked down developer and CTO Ygor Lemos using AngelList, to help them move to mobile.

The end result, created over six months of remote teamwork, is today’s iOS app, Airport Chatter. At launch, the app features 30 airports across the U.S. and 4,600 venue profiles offering the hours, phone numbers and other business listing details. Users can check-in and review these locations, as well as track the live feed for their airport, or the global feed for all airports within Airport Chatter.

The startup has also partnered with SITA, which provides air transport communications and info technology. This will allow Airport Chatter to integrate other flight-related information into its app in the future. For example, one of the more promising features the SITA partnership will bring is baggage tracking. “You’ll be able to enter your baggage number and we’ll provide you real-time updates throughout your trip,” says Wagner. This service is still in beta on SITA’s side, so it will be some time before it’s available in the app, however.

Airport Chatter is available for free from the iOS app store, and the startup plans to develop an Android version in the future. Eventually, the goal is to monetize by offering mobile coupons for the venues in the airports, as well as by helping users with bookings for ground transportation and hotels.

Airport Chatter is currently bootstrapping, but plans to start raising seed funding after the holidays.

Cheezburger, the internet publisher responsible for LOLcats, FAIL Blog, and other memes, has raised $5 million in funding, according to an SEC filing. A spokesperson for the company confirmed the funding, in which existing incestors Foundry Group with Madrona Venture Group, Avalon Ventures, and SoftBank Capital all participated. No new board members were added.

Founded in 2007 by former journalist Ben Huh, Cheezburger has a network of fifty-plus sites that have brought internet memes and tech culture mainstream. Huh actually acquired I Can Has Cheezburger? and the FAIL Blog, and steadily built out its network back in 2009. The company has been profitable since its inception with revenue from three sources—advertising, traditional media publishing including books, and merchandising.

Last year, the company raised $30 million in funding. This recent round brings the total to $37.5 million.

More recently, Huh and Cheezburger hasvebeen the star in a Bravo reality TV show called LOLwork.

The new funds will be used to continue to build the company’s social humor platform, says a spokesperson.

California’s experiment in fully online voter registration appears to have been a success. “Online registration contributed significantly to an increase in 2012 youth registrants and modestly to overall increases in general registration rates,” claims a University of California, Davis, study of the 2012 election, which finds that online voting boosted youth registration an entire percent (10.1 percent to 11.1 percent) in its short one-month existence prior to the election [PDF].

Researcher Mindy Romero of the Center for Regional Change tells TechCrunch that the study can’t identify for certain whether all of those extra registrants would have done so anyways in the absence of an online system, but the substantial boost is a good omen for states considering online registration in the future.

The boost in turnout might have indeed been due to the convenience of online registration, considering overall turnout actually declined from 2008 (57 percent to 50 percent), according to Pew in September of last year. Youth were by far the largest demographic of online registrants, comprising 30 percent of all those who used the system.

Also of note, most young adults declined to state a party preference (29 percent), making them the only demographic in California to fall below 40 percent. “Youth are driving the general electorate’s decline in major party registration,” explains the report. This jives with UC Irvine’s Russell Dalton’s work, The Apartisan American, which finds a growing movement of citizens who claim no party affiliation, and aren’t simply closet Democrats or Republicans who actually always vote along party lines.

It’s early days for electronic voting and registration, but it may very well cause a significant shift in political behavior.

[Image Credit: Flickr User erin leigh mcconnell]

Lyft, the local on-demand ride-sharing service operated by the startup Zimride, is apparently not letting recent regulatory hurdles cramp its style.

Lyft, which launched its service allowing individual car-owners to provide local transportation services to their peers in exchange for a suggested donation in San Francisco this past summer, is now actively recruiting staff in new cities including Seattle and Los Angeles as part of a planned geographic expansion in the new year.

We’ve been hearing buzz about the planned growth for a little while now, but it was more solidified in a year-end email the company sent to users this morning that included job listings for positions in the new cities, which read:

“It has been an incredible year. Riding together, you’ve found new friends, music, and creative collaborators while exploring every corner of this great city. Thank you for building a passionate community with us in San Francisco!

In 2013, we’re expanding our horizons, bringing the social transportation revolution to cities across the country. That’s where you (or any of your friends) come in – join our team and help us take Lyft to new heights!”

The email goes on to list the following job opening: “City General Manager (Seattle, LA and multiple other cities)”.

I reached out to Lyft co-founder and Zimride COO John Zimmer this morning, and he said that while the hiring push is beginning now, the actual product expansion will be at a slower pace. “We’re getting ready for expansion in 2013. Hiring great people takes the longest, so we’re excited to find people in all major cities, but won’t be rolling out [Lyft itself to] more than one [new city] in January.” He confirmed that Los Angeles and Seattle were both in “the top ten” cities into which Lyft is planning a near-term expansion, but declined to provide more details on the locations or schedule.

San Francisco is a famously small city in terms of square mileage, and it also has a relatively large proportion of open-minded early adopter types that often welcome things such as a new pink mustachioed mode of transportation with open arms. So it will be very interesting to see how services such as Lyft can grow beyond their hometowns and become national businesses. It now seems that we won’t have to wait too much longer to find out.