Category: Tech news

Companies like LegalZoom try to replace the basic services offered by attorneys, but sometimes you still need to talk to a real, live lawyer. So a startup called Lawdingo makes it easier to find one.

When you visit the Lawdingo site, you search the site based on your legal situation and your location. Then you get a list of applicable lawyers, along with their Yelp ratings (Lawdingo is also building a review system of its own) and their rates. You can schedule an appointment to talk to a lawyer directly from Lawdingo, either through video (using TokBox) or voice chat (using Twilio). If they’re online, you can even hit a “talk now” button.

The main selling point of Lawdingo seems to be convenience — you don’t have to track down an attorney, schedule an appointment, then drive across town to meet them. But even though the company allows lawyers to set their own rates, founder and CEO Nikhil Nirmel said it can still save users money. For one thing, lawyers are encouraged to offer free consultations for a duration of their choosing (the average is 20 minutes). For another, users can consult with lawyers even if they aren’t nearby, giving them a broader selection and potentially connecting them with lawyers who charge less because they live in lower-cost cities.

Lawdingo makes money by charging lawyers a flat monthly fee. Nirmel said that if he charged a transaction fee, then lawyers would have a financial incentive to move the relationship off Lawdingo and onto phone or email as soon as possible. He also offers a moneyback guarantee for the first month, and he said no one’s asked for a refund yet.

There are currently 205 attorneys located in 36 states using the platform, Nirmel said. Five hundred live legal consultations have been initiated on the site, 180 appointments have been scheduled, and 1,550 inquires have been submitted. The most common type of inquiry? Family and divorce.

Lawdingo has raised about $100,000 in seed funding from Yodle founder Nathaniel Stevens, Safe Sheperd founder Robert Leshner, Rohan Srinivasan of Google Finance, Causes engineer Adam Derewecki, and others.

According to multiple reports, China recently started blocking numerous Google services, including Gmail, Google Maps and others that usually pass through the country’s so-called Great Firewall. Google’s Transparency Report shows a significant drop in traffic from China that started around 12:30am GMT last night. According to a statement from Google, the company has checked and “there’s nothing wrong on our end.”

It’s common for China to sporadically block some of Google’s services. According to watchdog site Greatfire.org, today’s disruption is affecting more users than ever, as the Firewall now also stops traffic to Gmail, a move that is relatively unusual.

This time around, most observers assume that the reason for the disruption is the Chinese Communist Party’s 18th Party Congress, which began on November 8.

Looking at the Transparency Report, it looks like traffic is currently at normal levels compared to other days, but it still looks as if most Google services continue to be unreachable from China. For now, it’s unclear whether this is a temporary move, or if the Great Firewall will continue to block access to Google’s web services once the Party Congress is over.

Despite all of the animosity between Google and China, which broke out in full force after Google stopped self-censoring its search results, the company has a number of offices in the country and continues to expand its operations there. Despite its efforts, though, most of its services continue to lose market share due to the increasing local competition.

We will continue to watch this story and update it once we learn more.

Zynga announced this morning that it has acquired game developer November Software for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition apparently occurred back in the spring, but Zynga is only announcing it now, in part so that it can drop a few hints about the game that the November team is working on. Back in September, the company had already signaled its intention to move into mid-core gaming (which has a smaller but potentially more lucrative audience) with the acquisition of A Bit Lucky.

In a post on the Zynga blog, co-founder Szymon Swistun says his team formed November “to bring console gaming experiences to mobile by using our expertise from working at LucasArts on games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 1 and 2.” As for why he joined Zynga, Swistun writes:

Speaking with the folks at Zynga, we were immediately blown away with the conviction and energy they had about making kick-ass mobile games that leave a strong, memorable impression on players. We realized we could accelerate game development by combining our team’s expertise building blockbuster console games and Zynga’s strength in building social games on a massive scale.

Zynga still isn’t sharing too many details about the game, but Swistun did say that he’s been working with “the original team from Mafia Wars” and he revealed the name: Battlestone.

Just like every year, there will surely be long lines in front of your local Walmart, Best Buy and Macy’s on Black Friday in two weeks (assuming you live in the U.S.). With the shopping season about to start in full force, Google is launching an update to its Google Shopper mobile app for iOS and Android to help consumers find that one cashmere sweater they’ve always wanted to give to their loved ones.

According to Google, four out of five smartphone and tablet owners plan “to use their device for holiday shopping – for comparing prices, locating nearby stores, and searching for coupons.” Those shoppers will now be able to use the redesigned Google Shopper app to find what they are looking for. The app’s new home screen now features a larger search box for easier navigation and larger photos to “let you view product designs in more detail.”

If you’re looking for a good deal on that moving alarm clock from Brookstone, Google Shopper now also makes it easier to find sales thanks to the introduction of the aptly named ‘Sales’ page. This page will show you deals from nearby stores’ weekly circulars and show you store promotions like 30 percent off deals and free shipping offers.

With this update, Google is also integrating ratings from GoodGuide, so if you are not sure how healthy, safe and environmentally friendly a given product is, Google Shopper can now help you put your mind at ease by showing you GoodGuide’s scores.

We had a blast, Detroit. Thanks for having us.

On a brisk November night the city of Detroit — no, the entire Detroit region — turned out for our first Meetup in the Motor City. We took over all four floors of Hockeytown Cafe. The crowd was as eclectic as the area: app builders, makers, curious onlookers, seasoned entrepreneurs, and a surprising amount of venture capitalists, who are seemingly hungry to find (and fund) Detroit’s savior.

We spent just two days in Michigan. We meet with close to 50 companies/entrepreneurs at office hours held in Detroit and Ann Arbor. It’s very clear that there’s something special happening in the area. Compared to other cities, the VC money seems to flow a bit easier with better terms and the talent pool is incredible. Plus, you can essentially buy a skyscraper with lunch money.

The area’s goal seems to be retention. Michigan’s universities churn out hardworking talent at a rapid pace — and then people leave the state. University of Michigan is right down the road from Detroit; Michigan State is a bit farther to the north. There’s Wayne State, Eastern Michigan, Central Michigan, Western Michigan, and the amazing Kettering University in Flint, MI. Just holding onto 5% of this talent base would do wonders for Detroit and Michigan as a whole.

This meetup was personal for me. I live in Michigan. Born, raised, and still residing just outside the city Flint, MI, I understand the pains of Michigan. But I also understand its many strengths. It was important to me to bring the scattered, often-beaten tech community under one roof, even if just for one night.

That’s the goal of all of our meetups from the tiny (but awesome) Greenville, SC meetup to the 1,200 people who turned out for Atlanta. There isn’t another tech event like a TechCrunch Meetup and Detroit made me proud to be a Michigander.

We’re wrapping our Northern tour tonight in Chicago. Come on out, talk startups, and have a great time.

How does Facebook know what features are good enough for its main smartphone apps? It tests them on the power users of its standalone apps Camera and Messenger. If the guinea pigs dig a new gesture or option, it gets called up to the big leagues — the 100 million+ user Facebook for iOS and Android apps.

Facebook explained in a blog post on mobile app design:

“Apps like Messenger and Camera let us push the envelope with specific features and allow us to get feedback from specific audiences like photo experts and hard core messaging users. The highly engaged users of these apps are a great proving ground for next-generation features that are refined and tweaked in the standalone apps before potentially making a debut in the core app.”

The latest features to get bumped up to the main stage were photo filters and multi-shot uploads from Facebook Camera, and swipe left to the see the buddy list from Facebook Messenger. Those both got added to the main Facebook for iOS app this week and are already in the Android version.

Some standalone app features would conflict with the primary app navigation schemes, though. So swipe down to reveal previously shot photos is staying in Facebook Camera, otherwise it would override the swipe down to refresh news feed gesture in the core apps.

Facebook also used the “Under the Hood: Integrating standalone mobile app features into Facebook for iOS” post to try to stress how it’s becoming a mobile-focused company. Rather than having a “mobile” team port desktop features to the small screen, each product team is now responsible for writing their own mobile code. In fact, if they don’t spec out mobile first in their product review sessions, they’ll get sent back to the drawing board, as Facebook VP Vaughn Smith stressed in his talk at the Global Mobile Internet Conference.

That’s going to be crucial going forward, because desktop products might be getting a lot less use in a few years. If features are designed to work on desktop and get shoehorned into mobile, they’ll need to be completely redesigned soon.

And just because Facebook doesn’t have standalone desktop apps where it can experiment with new features, it has something better. At any time, Facebook is using a system called Gatekeeper to serve dozens or hundreds of different versions of the site to different users at the same time. That means it could “battle-test” a new design to people spending over an hour a day, roll it out to everyone if the testers love it, or banish it to Facebook’s massive graveyard of failed features.

On that note, if you ever see some strange new Facebook feature or design, take a screenshot and send it to [email protected]. We’ll add a link to a website of your choice if we use your tip. You are my eyes and ears, people.

Facebook hasn’t exactly had smooth relations with Europe. In September it had to turn off facial recognition in the EU, and then there’s the whole Europe vs Facebook transparency project kicked off by an Austrian law student who asked Zuck and co to send him everything they had on him — inspiring fellow users to flood Facebook with demands for their data. But operating conditions for Facebook in Europe look set to get a whole lot tougher if the European Commission’s proposals for comprehensive reform of EU Data Protection law come into full effect in the next few years.

The proposals were unveiled back in January by EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding. A large plank of the strategy is aimed at harmonizing data protection rules across the EU — which arguably will be a boon to businesses, certainly to startups, who are unlikely to have the resources to comply with multiple legal regimes across all the different EU Member States. But the EC also wants to give EU citizens’ more control over their data, including granting people the right to have data that companies and organisations hold on them deleted on request  (a so called ‘right to be forgotten’), and a right to have their data ported to another service. Data holders must also notify service users of serious data breaches — “if feasible within 24 hours”.

The new rules will apply to any companies and organisations processing EU citizens’ data, even if they are entirely based outside the EU. To enforce the new rules, the EC is proposing to strengthen independent national data protection authorities — including giving them the ability to fine companies up to €1 million ($1.27 million) or up to 2 percent of their global annual turnover for violating the EU data protection rules.

Little wonder Facebook is lobbying the Commission hard on key portions of the proposals. Facebook has a team of lobbyists based in Brussels which it confirmed to TechCrunch are talking to the EC about the proposed Data Protection Directive. The right to be forgotten is an obvious sticking point for the social network, which has built a billion dollar business by encouraging people to share their personal data with others.

Speaking yesterday at a conference on digital privacy taking place in London, Facebook’s Simon Milner, director of public policy in the UK and Ireland, said: “The right to delete your online data is an important one, the right to erasure is a key principle. However, the right to be forgotten… raises many concerns with regard to the right of others to remember and to freedom of expression. It is important this can be implemented in practice, but as drafted the current proposal risks introducing measures which are both unreasonable and unrealistic.

“In terms of the deletion of data that has been copied onto another service, we think this obligation would be unreasonable, and simply not feasible for services like Facebook and others… it would fundamentally change how the Internet works. We’ve urged policy makers to consider fully the implications on… freedom of expression and finding the right balance on different uses of the Internet.”

Facebook also provided TechCrunch with the following statement

The revision of Europe’s Data Protection framework is an important opportunity to develop regulation that both protects privacy and supports the creation and growth of modern services over the global Internet. We welcome the move towards more harmonization of Data Protection laws in the EU which will help create legal certainty and confidence for companies to operate.

At Facebook  privacy is at the core of everything that we do. Throughout the process of developing our products, we have dedicated privacy experts working with our engineers to ensure that the products are built taking into account any privacy implications and we recently established a dedicated data protection team in Ireland. We will continue to work closely with politicians and regulators in the EU in order to share our experience and expertise to contribute to achieving sound privacy regulation and a thriving digital sector.

Giving a speech late last month, Commissioner Reding hinted at some of the corporate kick-back the proposals are receiving — but also signalled she is unlikely to be swayed by the Facebook (and doubtless Google) lobby

… on the question of the possible administrative burden for companies: I have made concrete proposals to reduce this further. One of our main objectives with the Regulation is to greatly simplify the legal environment for EU business and lead to potential savings of around 2.3 billion EUR per year. A single set of rules is good for competitiveness, good for big business, good for SMEs. Our goal is certainly not to impose a bigger burden, and that is why SMEs are already exempt from some requirements, like having a Data Protection Officer. It has never been the Commission’s intention to apply the same rules to the small hairdresser as to a multinational;

I have today told Member States that the Commission is prepared to look at whether this SME exemption could be broadened to other areas and that we can also look to add further flexibility through an approach that takes into account the amount and sensitivity of the data processed. But let’s be frank: we should not fall into the trap of some lobbyists expressing concerns for SMEs but in fact referring to provisions relevant for large multinational firms.

An EC spokeswoman told TechCrunch that discussions in the European Parliament and the Council on the directive are “progressing well”, adding:  ”The European Parliament will publish its report early next year and the Irish EU presidency aims to achieve political agreement by the end of its presidency (summer 2013).”

It would take a further two years after the proposals had been adopted for the directive to take effect.

I attended a demo night in San Francisco for Acceleprise, the enterprise startup accelerator from Washington, D.C. I listened to the presentations from a group of enterprise startup execs about the usual fare: tackling healthcare issues, disparate data sources and the need for better IT services.

Pretty much from the beginning, I had to suppress my groans. This was dry stuff. But I knew that the companies represented a changing dynamic. All of the startups that presented are showing success, with either customers, revenues or seed funding. It comes down to this: While the enterprise can be as boring as hell, the whole goddamn thing is paved with gold.

I am hearing more often that investors are seeking companies that put more emphasis on revenues. Recurring revenue is the sign of success. And that recurring revenue is easier achieved with a good business that disrupts traditional IT.

Here is a list of the presenters:

• ExecOnline offers online training that is conducted in partnership with top 10 business schools. The company has $800K in seed funding from the Washington Post.
• Cor is a gamifcation service for helping companies motivate their employees to get healthy. They have several customers including a healthcare provider and a mortgage company. Revenues are pouring in.
• Conjure makes business publishers’ works available to enterprise through an app that uses DRM to track the content. The company has $250K in seed funding.
• SIGKAT offers an API to guarantee someone’s credentials. There are lots of associations that have tens of thousands of members. Verifying their credentials helps cut down on fraud and increases the value of the overall organization. The goal is to make it fast for the creation and exchange of credentials in a transparent manner.
• Conference Edge helps organizers get more out of their events. It’s an end-to-end system with registration, feedback management, social media marketing, etc. They have a number of customers.
• Mercury Continuity makes sure an enterprise keeps connected in the face of a catastrophe or IT disruption. It also has several deals in the works.

The enterprise market comes down to this: Millions of people work. They need to get their work done. And it has to get done fast. That means companies will pretty much have to do an overhaul of IT from the top of the stack to the underlying infrastructure. It’s not exactly glamorous but it sure is lucrative.

What a change a year makes.

SecondMarket, which helps arrange sales for stock of privately-held companies, said three-fourths of its transactions in the last quarter were for consumer electronics companies. E-commerce made up 19.4 percent of transactions, followed by financial services, which made up 3.6 percent.

Consumer web and social media, which made up the bulk of SecondMarket’s deals before Facebook’s IPO this year, is down to 1.2 percent. At the same time last year, consumer web and social media made up 62 percent of transactions. This is partly because of recent IPOs, and partly because companies have been arranging their own private liquidity programs, SecondMarket says. SecondMarket couldn’t say which companies were involved in these transactions, however, because of client confidentiality.

Despite losing Facebook this year because of its IPO, SecondMarket said its year-to-date transaction volume is just about where it was a year ago at $418 million for the first three quarters. That’s a 3 percent decrease from the same period a year ago.

Mirroring this trend, buyside demand has also shifted away from consumer web and social media. The most popular industry that investors submitted IOIs, or indications of interest, to was actually biotech and pharmaceuticals with $77.2 million of interest. That was followed by consumer web, then software, then other, then financial services and payments.

The average company on SecondMarket had a valuation of $538 million, with about $145.7 million raised.

Interestingly enough, as you can see in the buyer and seller charts below, the companies themselves are actually buying back stock from employees. Issuers, or the companies themselves, made up nearly 80 percent of the buyers as they use secondary market liquidity programs to motivate and compensate employees. This also has the added benefit of ensuring that sensitive financial information about the company doesn’t end up in front of more distant, less trustworthy shareholders. It can also help the company from bumping up against rules that limit the number of shareholders they can have before they have to release financial reports as if they were a public company. This upper limit used to be 500 last year, but it was bumped up when the JOBS Act was passed last year.

As for the earlier-stage companies on the SecondMarket platform, Meraki, the network infrastructure company, saw the biggest increase in investor interest with a 309 percent increase in watchers. Codecademy, a New York-based company that offers online programming education, took the second spot, with a 242 percent increase in watchers. Mobile advertising company Kiip, which gives gamers rewards when they level up or win, saw a 104 percent increase in interest. In fourth and fifth place were Good Technology, which focuses on mobile device management and security, and then Sonos, the Santa Barbara-based speaker company.

The five newest companies that saw the most investor interest were online education startup Coursera, finance startup Addepar, New York-based digital advertising startup Rocket Fuel,  the style hub, Fancy, and Coupa Software, which provides cloud spend management solutions.

 

 

Three weeks ago, Microsoft announced that it would hold a free global hackathon in over 100 cities around the globe. Today is the first day of this “Wowzapp 2012” event, and Microsoft just announced that it has managed to attract over 17,000 developers – many of them students – who are currently working on their Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Azure apps with the help of mentors from Microsoft. The event is scheduled to run until November 11.

Wowzapp is mostly geared toward students, but it’s open to all developers who are interested in building for the company’s new platforms. Microsoft will provide all participants with the necessary tools to build their apps, including a free Windows Store registration code (this one is only available to students, though) so they can easily submit their projects to the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 store (but the code still has to go through Microsoft’s regular approval process).

“With more than 16,000 students registered to participate, Wowzapp 2012 will be the largest simultaneous hackathon of student developers ever, acting as a catalyst to bring a wealth of new, exciting and quality apps to the Windows Store,” says Moorthy Uppaluri, the general manager of Worldwide Academic Programs at Microsoft. “Microsoft is committed to empowering students with the tools and resources they need to showcase their creativity and make money through app development.” The project, Microsoft says, “is a chance for students to explore a different professional path.”

Microsoft, of course, runs a number of events focused on college students, including, for example, the Imagine Cup (and it’s worth noting that Uppaluri is also one of the driving forces behind Imagine Cup). Besides the academic ambitions here, though, Microsoft is obviously also interested in getting more apps into its stores.

When Windows 8 launched, Microsoft was regularly criticized for not having enough good apps in its store. Events like this, the company surely also hopes, will help accelerate the growth of the Windows 8 ecosystem.

Today, the New York City-based don’t-call-me-an-incubator incubator known as betaworks is launching its latest startup following its acquisition of Digg this past summer. Betaworks is primarily focused on media startups, especially those playing at the intersection between social media and publishing. Digg would be one, Branch being another, Rap Genius, which recently raised $15 million being a third.

And now today we have the launch of Swirl, an app that creates photo albums from social networks. Not sure that betaworks got the memo that the group photo-sharing market is a little over-saturated, but then again, they did just buy Digg.

What exactly does Swirl do? It essentially indexes every person (and cat) you follow on Twitter and Instagram, placing their tagged photos into sets, appropriately called Swirls. Users create a photo set on Swirl every time they use the same hashtag on Twitter or Instagram with their friends. The startup’s website is currently showing public photos (here are photos from #Sandy, for example) but obviously once you sign into the app, it takes it to the next level and begins filtering from your friends’ swirls.

Swirl advisor and former Aviary COO Paul Murphy tells us that there are multiple group photo sharing apps out there, each taking a slightly different approach to the problem. One app may require users to create a set and invite friends to join, while others algorithmically guess how photos are related and auto-create sets of photos for you. Swirl, on the other hand, creates a photo set from a shared hashtag among your friends.

Murphy says that Swirl has seen some intriguing photo sets created in beta thanks to Sandy and the presidential election. But beta users are also using it to tag everyday events, with Swirl creating a group album from those events, so that you can see all the hilarities from my daily life as a blogger in #ripsaysthingsontheinternet, for example.

But the reason that social software developer and Swirl founder Summer Bedard thinks the app has potential? Because, as it stands, there’s no frictionless way to view and share a collection of social photos without asking users to change some part of their everyday behavior, like posting the photo in the app instead of using Twitter or Instagram. With Swirl, the idea is that you can just keep doing what you do, using the categories you’ve already established to tag tweets and instagrams that actually mean something.

Right now, Swirl is iPhone-only, but web and Android versions are on the way.

Find Swirl on the App Store here.

A video conferencing startup called Personify, Inc. (formerly Nuvixa) is launching its first product next week, which will allow users to take advantage of the motion sensing technology in Microsoft Kinect and other depth cameras in order to overlay video of themselves on top of their presentations in real-time. Using the Personify Live software, users can present on top of their content, gesturing to it as they go along. This content can include a slideshow, computer desktop screen, streaming video, or anything else you can run on your computer.

Personify co-founder Sanjay Patel, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has been involved in the startup industry for years. Most notably, he was CTO at Ageia Technologies, makers of the PhysX physics engine used in game development, acquired by Nvidia in 2008. Following the sale of the company, a colleague of his introduced him to the depth cameras, which he had been researching since 2004.

“They were these big, ‘research-y,’ industrial-looking machines,” says Patel. “But they eventually became the technology that’s inside Kinect.”

Upon seeing these cameras, Patel began to think about their potential use cases. “If we could get these to be cheaper somehow, and smaller, and integrated into a PC environment,” he thought to himself, “we could really improve the way people communicate with video. That was really what the passion of our founding team was,” he adds. After putting together the initial team in 2009, Personify, then Nuvixa, began to develop software to use depth cameras with video conferencing. Microsoft Kinect, of course, was known as Project Natal at the time Personify got off the ground, as Kinect’s technology wasn’t put on the market until November 2010.

The first beta test began in October of last year, offering access to a limited number of pilot users, which include SAP, McKinsey & Company, and LinkedIn, to name a few. Then a freemium product, the company had around 2,000 sign-ups for its tests, and it’s now in the process of converting those users to paying customers. Pricing starts at $20/user. Another package being offered includes 3 months of Personify’s service for free and Asus’ Xtion Pro Live depth camera for $199.

Unlike online meetings and web conferencing today, where video tends to not be as heavily used, sticking the presenter off to the side in a small box, Personify Live is designed to allow its users to better communicate with gestures, eye contact and other human-to-human interactions – more like how the presentation would appear in real world, face-to-face meetings.

Pilot testers have adopted the technology for inside sales, webinars, web app and online demos, training, education (both K-12 and higher ed) and more. However, Personify’s primary focus is on enterprise sales, where the technology works alongside the current in-house solutions including WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Microsoft Lync. It can also work with Join.me, but only if using Personify’s screenshare, not Join.me’s. “Most companies already have a web conferencing suite they use,” says Patel. “We don’t want them to stop using those things. Our product layers on top of those products,” he explains.

Now at team of around 20, split evenly between Illinois and Vietnam, Personify’s other co-founders include Dennis Lin, Minh Do, and Quang Nguyen. The company is also backed by $3.5 million in Series A funding from AMD Ventures, Liberty Global Ventures, Illinois Ventures, and Serra Ventures.

An interesting note about Liberty – they’re the world’s second largest cable operator, based in Europe. The company sees a potential for Personify in the living room, where users could one day video call each other over their TV’s. Instead of Skype or some other web chatting product (like what’s built into Kinect today), Personify could enable the overlay of just the person calling on top of the live TV show or movie being watched. That future isn’t as far off as you may think. Patel says that they should have demos of this by the end of next year, and possibly deployments by 2014.

In addition, he sees this as possibility on mobile by that time, too. Depth cameras on mobile?, we asked. Do you have direct knowledge of that?, we wanted to know.

“I can’t  really start talking about this stuff now,” says Patel. “But it’s happening. That’s all I can say.”

A hackathon this Veterans Day weekend in San Francisco is looking for a few good men and women. It’s sponsored by VetsinTech, a group working to connect veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with the Silicon Valley tech ecosystem.

VetsinTech says these veterans share many entrepreneurial skills valued by tech startups, including a dogged determination, a high degree of discipline, the ability to work in teams or autonomously, and a strong work ethic.

The event starts tonight with a “basic training” course, Introduction to iOS Programming. On Saturday, a 48-hour hackathon gets underway with small teams of veterans and programmers working to take ideas from concept to company. According to organizers, “the vets can have the idea, help with the business plan, marketing or just sit in to audit/participate for educational purposes – coding skills are NOT required.” San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee will speak to the hackers Saturday Sunday morning.

The winning team gets a mentoring session with Startup America CEO Scott Case, free co-working space, classes and more. TechCrunch TV is planning to interview the winner next Monday.

VetsinTech says over the next five years, 1 million service members will be leaving active duty according to government estimates. While the national unemployment rate is 7.9 percent, it’s 10 percent for post 9/11 vets.

Afghan veteran and Ustream SVP of Content, Strategy, and Operations Craig Mullaney is a member of VetsinTech’s advisory board. His company, Ustream, was founded by and is run by many veterans. In fact, the idea for Ustream started as a way for the founders’ Army friends deployed in Iraq to be able to communicate with their families.

Craig and Ustream co-founder John Ham were roommates at West Point. When Craig was making his transition from public service to the private sector, John reached out to him and said “you don’t know much about technology but I could use some help. I can’t find people with your skill set out in the Valley. I know you will do well out here and I’m willing to take a chance on you.”

The reason Craig says he got involved in VetsinTech is he doesn’t think that pathway should be restricted to those who happen to know the CEO of a tech company.

Craig made this powerful point about his fellow veterans:

“Generally, the American population is very very supportive of veterans, more supportive than any previous conflict. But I think as a society we tend to put this new generation of veterans on a pedestal, where they can be admired at a distance. But, they need jobs. They don’t want a handout, but they may need some assistance in making that transition from serving their country in one capacity to serving in another capacity.

I’m personally committed to making sure that we are the next greatest generation and that the real impact of Iraq and Afganistan veterans is not what they have left behind in Iraq and Afghanistan, but what they are going to do in America coming home.”

VetsinTech is helping vets make this transition with programs in education, entrepreneurship and employment. VetsinTech was founded this past July by Katherine Webster. While not a vet herself, she comes from a military family. She’s also the founder of online directory TechCentralSF. VetsinTech founding sponsors include Andreessen Horowitz, Cisco, Intuit, Hewlett-Packard and Salesforce.com.

You can get more information about the hackathon here and still register for the event here.

I love my iPhone. I also love tight jeans, not needing a wallet, and being able to fend off a gang of attackers with chemical weapons. Thanks to a new iPhone case with a sleek compartment for pepper spray, I can walk securely down dark alleys in style. Users snap a pepper spray canister to the back of the iPhone case, release a safety clip, hold the phone horizontally, and press a button on the side of the phone — just like taking a picture.

The Spraytech is available for the iPhone 4 models, costs $40 and, (of course) is available in pastel pink and blue. The case also includes a tester cartridge of habanero pepper spray so that users can prepare to use the device without releasing chemicals weapons into the air. Replacement cartridges go for $18, but most importantly, can be matched to the color of the case.

Profig, the Y Combinator-backed virtual phone system startup that launched out of the accelerator program’s summer class this August, has shut its doors after fewer than three months on the market. Its homepage is now a (pretty) 404 page and there is no way to sign up for the service anymore.

Profig was founded by two brothers, Anantha and Vamsi Katragadda. The original concept for Profig was to offer a professional and affordable virtual phone system for small and medium businesses. For just $30 per month, Profig promised to take the hassle out of using legacy hardware and software solutions. The old systems, Anantha Katragadda told me when the company launched, were too expensive and didn’t offer the advanced features that a modern virtual phone system could offer.

Of Pivots And (Missing) Passion

When Profig launched, Anantha Katragadda told me that the idea for the service was very different from the concept the brothers had originally pitched to get into Y Combinator’s program. The idea for what would become Profig was hatched during a number of office hours with Y Combinator founder Paul Graham.

This may also have been Profig’s downfall. As Katragadda told me earlier this week, Profig “was a pivot from our original idea and ultimately we weren’t passionate enough about it. Startups are a marathon and we figured if we’re gonna spend the next few years of our life on something, it should be something we’re passionate about.” Indeed, Profig was actually the name of the brothers’ original idea.

We often talk about how you have to be very passionate about your idea if you want your startup to succeed. Something we don’t talk about much is what to do when that original idea doesn’t quite work out and you need to pivot in order to keep your investors and others involved in the project happy. For Profig, sadly, this pivot was obviously not the right choice, but at least the team decided to shut it down quickly and move on.

Profig was an interesting product, so it’ll be interesting to see what the founders come up with next, but it doesn’t look like they are planning to pivot Profig itself again.