Category: Tech news

When Washington D.C. threatened to raise the price of an Uber cab by a few dollars, the online community staged a full-fledged panic attack. Yet it barely whispered a peep of discontent when Congress introduced a bill to alleviate the high-skilled immigrant crunch for tech companies. Yesterday’s defeat of the STEM Jobs Act, which would have added 55,000 visas for foreign-born science grads from American universities, illustrates an important lesson for those who think that netizens vote as a bloc for innovation issues: tech policy, like all policy, is local.

The technology industry, and especially Silicon Valley, is having a terrible time recruiting enough talented engineers, programmers, and mathematicians. Despite Computer Science becoming Stanford’s most popular major, American universities have not kept pace with the national need for STEM graduates. One easy (if contentious) solution widely supported by the biggest names in technology is to open the visa flood gates of eagerly patriotic young foreigners with a penchant for building technology. Yesterday, House Republicans proposed a law that would swap the 55,000 visas allotted to underrepresented nations, such as those in Africa, and reallocate them to foriegn-born students with a STEM graduate degree. Even after a full-court press by the industry’s most well-funded lobbyists, the measure was defeated by House Democrats.

While netizens were MIA for arguably the industry’s No. 1 policy priority, when Washington D.C. threatened to regulate a beloved smartphone-friendly, on-demand cab service, Uber, by raising its rates a few dollars, a line was crossed. “Wow, a business (Uber) is prevented from lowering its prices.. wait.. what? We live in America, right?” tweeted celebrity investor and Google Ventures partner, Kevin Rose, which garned 348 retweets. “Uber vs. Washington, D.C.: This Is Insane” wrote The Atlantic‘s long-time policy scholar, James Fallows. The uproar caused an immediate about-face in D.C., and the proposed law was shelved. While the Taxi Union recently tried to revive the amendment, they aren’t seeing the same kind of support from Internet-freaked state politicians.

And it’s not just Uber: All of the recent Internet uprisings would have touched people personally. The now-famous online protest over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) threatened to give the government unchecked and unspecified power to regulate websites that we all enjoy. A similar circle of online protestors also came out in force against a proposed law to allow restricted access to publicly funded research published by for-profit academic journals. Lastly, noticeable consternation over social media and tech blogs over a law to push through a tiny provision of SOPA (an international property rights task force) was defeated 24 hours after the public got wind of it.

SOPA, it should be noted, was on the Congressional books for a while until a website, “Free Justin Bieber,” helped popularize an unintended consequence of the bill, which could potentially criminalize the new national pastime of singing our favorite songs publicly on YouTube (which got an up-and-coming heartthrob, Justin Bieber, recognized by talent scouts).

To recap: Cheap cabs, free science info, and public karaoke = all hands on deck. Ending innovation-crushing employee shortages = not as important as reading the 10th article on the new iPhone 5. Of course, I’m being a bit cheeky: all of these laws had potentially dramatic legal ramifications. But, it was the personal impact that drove national protests, not the ultimate impact they would have on innovation.

Even on the global hub that is the Internet, all politics is local.

There are reports circulating related to the security of users’ Pandora passwords. It’s not a password leak or an attack, however, but there’s concern that passwords aren’t being well secured on users’ computers. Initially, word was that Pandora was storing cleartext passwords (meaning unencrypted) directly on users’ hard drives, which would have been a major concern. Specifically, those passwords are being stored in the HTML5 local storage area for the www.pandora.com website. However, it appears that the passwords aren’t being stored in cleartext, but are encrypted using a single static encryption key which is the same for all users. While that’s a step up from the earlier, more concerning situation, it’s still a risk.

Details of the issue were first posted to Google+ by Amber Yust, a software engineer at Google. It was soon after picked up by Hacker News.

A developer, Marc Bevand, then demonstrated how easy it would be steal a user’s Pandora password off their computer using a simple hack he created in response to the information.

This is not something that users should immediately freak out about, but it may be worthwhile to change your Pandora password if you access Pandora’s website on a shared computer or at an Internet cafe, especially if that password is one you use across the web for other sites of a more personal and private nature.

That being said, it is generally not considered a best practice to store a website’s password on a user’s computer, and if a website is going to do so, then the password should at least be properly encrypted. In fact, it’s not very common to save passwords in local storage at all. It’s also only possible in modern web browsers which support HTML5 (like the current versions of Chrome, IE and Safari now do).

In Pandora’s case, not only are passwords being stored locally, they’re not properly encrypted. Technical readers can follow the full thread on Hacker News, but the brief explanation is that the passwords are simply being obfuscated (meaning, hidden) using a single encryption key which is the same for everybody, according to Bevand’s tests seen here. In addition, he says the technique he created, a proof-of-concept hack to steal the Pandora passwords, can also expose users’ IDs and email addresses associated with the Pandora website.

Bevand updated the page to say that Pandora has today partially addressed the issue by removing the password from local storage, but that’s only the case when the user explicitly logs off. Users who simply close the browser or tab would still be affected.

The consequences of this security vulnerability in the wild are likely to be minimal, because a hacker would need physical access to a computer. However, this could affect users who share computers, like at libraries, institutions, at work, or at Internet cafes. More importantly, it raises the question that if Pandora isn’t using best practices in protecting passwords on users’ computers, how are they being stored on Pandora’s own servers, then? If the passwords were also not protected using decent encryption on their end, then a larger-scale hack could put users’ data at greater risk.

We’ve reached out to Pandora to confirm whether it’s aware of the problem and what the plan is to address this. We’ll update if/when we hear back. 

UPDATE andora has responded saying a fix is in the works, but downplays the vulnerability by calling it a “hypothetical” scenario. For what it’s worth, we stole a password off our own computer today using the hack but that probably doesn’t count.

The security issue reported yesterday relates to the hypothetical scenario where a hacker must first take control of a user’s personal computer and then use that access to extract that particular user’s Pandora password. Our engineering team is taking steps to address this vulnerability. At no time were passwords compromised at the Pandora server, network, or cloud level.

Editor’s note: Matt Cohler is a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He’s responsible for identifying investment opportunities in Internet-related companies in addition to working closely with companies across the firm’s portfolio. You can follow him on Twitter here. 

I wrote a Quora post the other day saying that mobile is just now becoming the most important platform and that winners and patterns are just starting to emerge.

As I mentioned recently in an interview with Michael Arrington at TechCrunch Disrupt, one of the patterns that’s emerging in mobile is this: Great mobile apps act like push-button remote controls for real life.

Check out this television remote control. Doesn’t it remind you of how a user interacts with a mobile smartphone?

Two important elements of a remote control are that the user only needs to push a button to make something happen and that the user can easily and fully use the device with just one hand.

These same two elements are present in great mobile apps. But while traditional remote controls only have the power to change the channel, mobile devices have the power to make things happen in the real world. Great mobile apps are like magical remote controls for life: push a button and something amazing happens in the user’s world.

Some great examples of this are Instagram, GrubHub, and Uber, companies in which Benchmark was an early investor. Instagram enables you to create and share a beautiful photo…just by pushing a button. GrubHub enables you to order dinner and have it show up at your door…just by pushing a button. Uber enables you to have a car come pick you up and take you anywhere you want to go…just by pushing a button.

When an app enables a user to push a button and make something amazing happen in the world, and when that app is designed well enough to let the user create that magic with just one hand, then something really interesting is going on.

A version of this post originally appeared on Quora.

One of the things that I wanted to do immediately when I joined TechCrunch was to create things that made browsing our news, Instagram photos, and tweets pretty and interactive. I personally enjoy using our website, but we have so much more going on outside of it.

We use Tumblr, Google+, Facebook, Instagram and probably 10 other things that I haven’t found out about yet, and that’s awesome. When it comes to such a great community like we have here, I want to make sure that you have the best possible experience engaging with us. You, the readers, are the most important thing to me. Period.

Having said that, I spoke to the folks at RebelMouse, which created a beautiful “river” page of content for people. It’s kind of like a start page, and kind of like a Pinterest board. I personally love it. I asked them what it would look like if TechCrunch had a page, and we’ve come up with CrunchScroll.

Have a look:

As you check out the site, you’ll notice that we’re pulling in stuff from everywhere. In fact, we’re using the #crunchphone hashtag on Twitter today, and pulling in those tweets to CrunchScroll. We’ll be switching things up there, adding some of your tweets, promoting photos and more. It’s going to be fun.

Now, this is early days, but the RebelMouse team is pretty awesome and we have some really ridiculously awesome things planned for this in the near future.

Stay tuned, and thank you for reading. I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

We’ve all been there — sometimes there’s work that needs to be done, but it’s too tedious or too time-consuming to devote your own resources to. Services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have popped up to provide an inexpensive way to get that stuff over and done with, but the team at Houdini sees a problem with this setup: how can you be sure the results are actually going to be any good?

To help address that issue, co-founder Muhammad At-Tauhidi showed off a service called Houdini at the ERA Demo Day here in New York City. His team’s goal? To fix the quality issues that can arise when entrusting in strangers for the work you need done.

What Houdini essentially does is sit between the users and the services like Mechanical Turk that promise dirty deeds done dirt cheap. Once logged in, users (be they individuals or businesses) can create specialized requests for tasks that need to be completed by pairing specified actions with data types — combining the “edit” action with the “articles” data type for instance brings up a work order geared toward cleaning up text. From there, users can describe their particular needs in greater detail, and pass that request along to Amazon’s thousands of Mechanical Turks.

But that’s only one side of the equation. Houdini’s major selling point is that it works to categorize those legions of anonymous workers. “[It] organizes anonymous workers into curated crowds of users with certain specialties for the right tasks,” At-Tauhidi stated on-stage. He (sadly) wouldn’t divulge how his secret sauce works, but he did admit that a “combination of metrics, artificial intelligence, and internal review” went into the organization process. On the off-chance that one of the workers assigned to your task wasn’t vetted properly, users also have the option of reporting them to keep the service as solid as possible.

I freely admit that Houdini’s particular approach to managing the quality of outsourced work may seem a bit niche, but it’s already managed to turn a few heads with some specialized companies and startups. As it turns out, one of them may be familiar to Disrupt attendees —Disrupt NY Battlefield competitor SnipSnap leaned pretty heavily on Houdini’s API to get all of its users’ coupons converted transcribed in a timely manner. At-Tauhidi noted that the company has completed over 8,000 hours worth of work since early 2012, and though Houdini is still in private beta (there’s something like 380 companies waiting to get in) it has generated over $55,000 in gross revenue. Not too shabby, guys.

Google just launched a new free API that will make it easier for developers to add civic information like polling places, early vote locations, candidate data and election official information to their applications. Google says it hopes this new Google Civic Information API will “unleash the creativity of the Internet and help you build innovative products that push civic information to your communities in interesting ways.” As the U.S. presidential election in November gets closer, the kind of information developers can access through the API tends to change frequently, but Google says it will make “every effort” to ensure that its data is accurate.

For now, this API only makes data about the U.S. election available to developers, but Google plans to expand it to other countries and to include other types of civic information. It’s also worth noting that Google is releasing the API today, but won’t have full live data available until the middle of October.

Google itself will use the new API to power its own election tools, including an embeddable app that anyone will be able to use on their sites.

Overall, the company has consistently been adding more election tools to its lineup over the last few years. Most of these, though, were either aimed directly at consumers, teachers or politicians. Google also recently offered dedicated sites for a number of international elections, including those in Egypt and France. In previous years, Google also offered a dedicated Election Center API, but that API has now been deprecated and Google is asking developers to use the new Civic Information API instead.

Thorsten Heins, RIM’s President and CEO, has put out a statement apologizing for the network outage that struck BlackBerry users in Europe and Africa this morning.

Heins revealed the service outage lasted up to three hours and that up to six per cent of the company’s user base were affected — meaning up to 4.7 million BlackBerry users were unable to BBM their buddies this morning.

Here’s the statement in full

“I want to apologize to those BlackBerry customers in Europe and Africa who experienced an impact in their quality of service earlier this morning. The BlackBerry service is now fully restored and I can report that no data or messages were lost. Up to 6 per cent of our user base may have been impacted. Preliminary analysis suggests that those customers may have experienced a maximum delay of 3 hours in the delivery and reception of their messages. We are conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue and will report as soon as it concludes. I again want to apologize to those customers who were impacted today.”

The service outage did not affect voice calls or text messages but took down BBM, email and internet access. Heins’ statement does not give any details on the cause of the outage — presumably because RIM is still investigating. A RIM spokeswoman told me: “We are currently conducting a full technical analysis of this quality of service issue.”

Last October the BlackBerry network suffered a major outage that took the network for almost a week. The cause was traced to a switch failure in a UK datacenter causing a cascade of failures as a backlog of undelivered messages accrued — which in turn caused the system slow-down to spread further afield than the EMEA region.

At the time RIM pledged to audit its network, and then Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis apologized to customers in a YouTube video. RIM was also criticized for failing to promptly communicate last year’s outage to BlackBerry users. New CEO Heins appears to have learnt some of the 2011 outage’s lessons by putting out a quasi-detailed statement within hours of the outage — albeit without an explanation of the cause.

The timing of the outage is doubly unfortunate — both because it’s approaching the one-year anniversary of last year’s BlackBerry outage and because today is the day Apple’s latest iPhone goes on sale.

In recent years RIM has been unable to match the growth of rival mobile OSes, iOS and Android.

In its Q1 financial report for fiscal 2013, filed back in June, RIM reported revenue of $2.8bn, down 33 per cent from the previous quarter — and down 43 per cent on its first fiscal quarter of 2012, while the total BlackBerry subscriber base was reported as over 78 million as of the end of Q1 fiscal 2013.

We’re here at the ERA Demo Day in New York City, set to bring you the latest and greatest new startups to launch out of the program. In case you’re unfamiliar, ERA stands for Entrepreneurs’ Roundtable Accelerator, and it’s a relatively new incubator compared to Y Combinator and 500 Startups.

The companies presenting are all quite different, but after meeting with a few of them and seeing them on stage, we’ve selected a few of our favorites for your reading pleasure.

Without any further ado, these are TechCrunch’s picks from the 2012 Summer ERA Demo Day:

Jetaport

Jetaport wants to make a trip with your friends less of a hassle. The main idea is that you log in, add your friends through Facebook, and begin planning your next vacation. Through a partnership with Expedia, the site lets users book their trips, which are then available for everyone in the group to see. Each user has their own itinerary, and members of the group are notified when plans change or ideas are thrown out.

The company is currently in prototype phase, as they’re working on revamping the user interface, and will launch a closed beta in the next three to four weeks. In the meantime, they’re working on raising $500,000.

Jetaport is currently taking invitation requests here.

HealthyChic

HealthyChic is to Yoga what Fab.com is to design. The service aims to be your one-stop ecommerce shop for all things Yoga. The brands are curated by 20 different Yoga ambassadors, including Master Yoga instructors and even Heidi Klum’s Yoga instructor, who help choose which products and brands might be most appealing to Yogis while shopping. Products on the site range from clothing, to nutritional supplies, to wellness accessories and inspirational braceletes, and even include various gadgets like pedometers.

The company is bootstrapped and seed funded by ERA, with over 150 vendors signed up on the platform. HealthyChic is looking to raise a $1 million round following today’s launch. You can access the site here.

MXHero

MXHero wants to fix email, specifically for the enterprise. It’s a SaaS product, that essentially infiltrates your email to let you do things you didn’t quite think were possible on such an ancient — yes, ancient — platform. You can send emails of any size to anyone, manage email signatures based on your email directory, and track attachments, allowing you see when someone’s opened up your doc or jpg.

Users can also send a reply timeout, reminding senders when emails haven’t been responded to in a certain period of time. And you can block the use of BCC, to boot. The service is live now and can be found here.

Bizodo

Bizodo is a bit like Dropbox on steroids. The service essentially lets you update any Word doc or PDF and automatically convert that document to a dynamic web document. From there, users can send it back and forth between the two of them, or forward along to a client or what have you. But that’s not the good part. The service actually lets you eSign documents and complete forms, essentially leaving what’s left of the printer age in the dust.

Bizodo raised a seed round of $475,000 before joining ERA. The site can be found here.

Google’s early stumbles with Wallet are the startup ecosystem’s gains. Chicago’s up-and-coming Braintree just poached Aunkur Arya, who headed partnerships for Google Wallet, to be its general manager for mobile. The company, backed by Accel Partners, also picked up Klas Bäck to oversee international and payment strategy.

Braintree is processing about $1 billion per year in mobile payments, for clients including Hotel Tonight, Angry Birds-maker Rovio and Zimride, which runs ride-sharing service Lyft. They, along with other competitors like PayPal and YC-backed Stripe, are trying to grab a slice of what is fast becoming the most strategically important area in e-commerce.

Braintree estimates that about 20 percent of e-commerce shopping sessions are happening on mobile devices and that raw figure is growing by two to three times every year. Companies like Groupon say that mobile platforms account for about a third of their transactions in developed markets like North America. Braintree stresses that the $1 billion in transactions it’s facilitating aren’t just peer-to-peer transfers, they’re actual purchases of goods or services directly from mobile phones.

The company, which had been bootstrapped up until last fall, took a big slug of funding from Accel with a $34 million round that the Palo Alto venture firm took whole. They then turned around and acquired New York-based mobile payments startup Venmo for $26 million. Venmo operates as a separate unit.

“Venmo gave us a very slick consumer wallet application that sits right with our our checkout process,” CEO Bill Ready tells us.

Google Wallet, meanwhile, has seen a spate of departures to Square and smaller startups after an internal clash between new leadership brought over from PayPal and early team members who backed NFC. Rob von Behren, one of the founding engineers for Wallet, went to Square, while other founding team members Jonathan Wall and Marc Freed-Finnegan have started their own company Tappmo.

Arya becomes one of the latest to leave the team. Before Wallet, he led mobile app business development at AdMob. That means he should have a wealth of relationships with top tier mobile developers, which will help Braintree quickly rack up more big name clients. Bäck, meanwhile, will lead international strategy at a key time for Braintree. The company just opened in 30 new countries.

Apple’s iPhone 5 is here, but there are still plenty of people in line. A lot of you might be asking, “Why?” Who better to answer than the people in line themselves? I interviewed some of the first people in line at Toronto’s Eaton Centre flagship Apple retail store, including one guy who has been at the front of the line for three years and counting. Check out why they lined up, what they think of iOS 6, and some candid about iOS 6 Maps from even the most faithful.

How popular is Apple’s Passbook, the new iOS 6 application that lets you store tickets, cards, and coupons in a mobile wallet-like interface? According to some early data from Branding Brand, the company that built the app for cosmetics and skin care brand Sephora, Passbook adoption is booming. In the first day following iOS 6′s availability, Sephora’s “Beauty Insider” card was added to 17,000 users’ Passbooks. Twenty-four hours later, that number reached 20,000.

What’s even more remarkable about these numbers is that the iPhone 5 wasn’t available until today, and not all users of compatible Apple mobile devices have yet to upgrade to iOS 6, the version which includes the native Passbook application. As of yesterday, iOS 6 had been adopted by 15% of eligible iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch devices, according to multiple data sources. On iPhone, it was hovering around 17% 24 hours in. Those are good numbers, and they’re aided by Apple users’ familiarity with the upgrade process and Apple’s end-to-end control over the hardware and software. (For comparison’s sake, Android’s latest, aka Jelly Bean, has a 1.2% distribution.)

For Sephora, the introduction of Passbook to its customer base started with an email blast which included a big banner prompting customers to add their “Beauty Insider” card to Passbook on iPhone and iPod Touch. Clicking the “Learn More” link redirected users to this website, which further explained general card details – like how it can be used to earn and redeem points and keep track of points balances, for example. For users in need of installation instructions, a “Have questions?” link took them to this page which explains in more detail how to download and sign into the main Sephora iOS application, then add the card to Passbook.

This call-to-action likely worked well for Sephora’s core customer base, who clicked through to set up their app to work with Passbook. However, for new or casual customers of the brand, the sign up process to become a “Beauty Insider” was still a little tedious. When I first registered last night, the form got stuck loading after submission and never went through. (Today it worked fine). It’s a web form, not one that’s designed for the native iOS interface. And it asks you for a lot of details including name, birth date/age, zip code, email, and even has you set up a security question. I realize that brands simply need to have all our personal details for their marketing efforts, but there are ways to collect that info in a more user-friendly interface. There are some missed opportunities here (see also the experience with Target’s mobile coupons yesterday) in terms of onboarding new customers more quickly in order to connect them with Passbook. Still, 20,000 Passbook users in a day is nothing to sniff at.

The iPhone 5 is now on sale in most launch markets starting today, and as daylight approaches on the U.S. west coast, the coveted device will be hitting that market as well. According to early reviews, it’s a great device, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one for everybody. Even if you’re still a potential iPhone buyer, the lineup has never looked so good. The iPhone 4 and the 4S remain on the market, and they both have a lot to offer, too, at a considerable discount.

Here’s a handy guide to what you get with each device, created by TechCrunch. We’ve tried to distill it down to the most important factors, and when you combine this with our chart detailing what each model does and doesn’t get with the iOS 6 update, you should have an easier time deciding which one to pick up.

With most of the software features and a form factor some might actually prefer, the iPhone 4S at $99 is a mighty fine-looking deal. It’ll be interesting to see, once carrier data and Apple’s own quarterly results come in, how popular that remains as a second tent pole in Apple’s overall lineup.

Of course, one other important factor to consider might be availability. The iPhone 5 will likely be scarce today, with lineups around the world sizeable at Apple Stores this morning, if you’ve got your heart set on the iPhone 5 it’s probably worth waiting for.

“This is a 20 year project” according to Seedcamp founder and chairman Saul Klein, who also just happens to be a partner in the Index Ventures VC firm. It’s five years on since Seedcamp’s launch in 2007 and Klein is as bullish and upbeat about Europe’s oldest ‘new model’ accelerator, which has been compared favourably to the likes of Y Combinator and TechStars in the US. But 5 years on where are they… now?

After five years and 200 startups, Seedcamp may be the oldest and — arguably — the biggest tech startup accelerator in Europe, but it’s quite different to other global accelerators you might have heard of. On its 5th birthday it’s released a bunch of stats around what it’s done so far. We’ll run through those but also give you a heads-up on why Seedcamp is perhaps shaping up to be the ‘anti-Y Combinator’. Not that these guys hate Paul Graham, far from it. But more that, while YC famously refuses to leave the Valley (and even shut down its Boston operation a while back), Seedcamp continues to race around Europe, is pushing out into hot developing markets, and is working with multiple partners globally. In the world of accelerators, if YC was Apple, Seedcamp would be Android (and, btw, it has a map that works outside North America…).

First the heads up. Seedcamp launched in the year Facebook opened beyond universities and Twitter debuted at SXSW. These days it shells out €50,000 per startups team (which usually attract other co-investors), puts them through a year of showcasing around Europe (and the Valley for 4 weeks) and takes around 6-12% equity. Invested teams also get a €150,000 “founders pack” of offers from the likes of 10gen, Softlayer and Yammer.

From the early days they zoomed around Western and Central/Eastern Europe taking in Croatia, Estonia, and Slovenia among others. From there they’ve gone as far as Mumbai in search of local startups underserved by rick-adverse local investors.

But what about results?

They’ve mentored nearly 200 startups from 35 countries (from over 2,000 applications across 70 different countries). According to Reshma Sohoni, co-CEO of Seedcamp, the organisation’s €5 million fund still has runway enough until “Q4 next year”. But there have been some results in the last 5 years.

A 2008 Seedcamp company Mobclix was bought by Velti in 2010 for $50m.

Crashpadder (an Airbnb clone) was bought this year by Airbnb fir an undisclosed amount.

And RentmineOnline, a 2007 vintage company, was acquired in July this year by RealPage. Although the terms were undisclosed and Seedcamp is tight-lipped about the price, the rumour is it was sold for around $14 million, enough to boost Seedcamps fund, alongside RentmineOnline’s other investors, obviously.

Some investments that stand out to date include Brainient, Erply and Uburvu – all growing well. Indeed, PayPal has partnered with Erply enabling offline payments. Erply is working with the likes of Saks 5th Avenue and Elizabeth Arden for instance.

What’s the downside? Nine of the 200 startups that have passed through Seedcamp’s system in the last 5 years have simply died or withered away. Out of 200 that’s a pretty good hit rate.

Its been hard work for the small team of four – which also includes co-CEO Carlos Eduardo Espinal – and arguably Seedcamp punches above its weight. To suck up this many companies a VC or Private Equity house would have to employ an army of investors.

So to scale, Seedcamp has built a global network of 2,000 mentors in a variety of global tech hubs such as Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York, Paris, Prague, Tallinn, Tel Aviv and Zagreb. 500 of them are classed as ‘top-ranked.’ They also bring in corporate relationships with Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, PayPal and Qualcomm in tech and AXA, Barclaycard, HSBC, Nielsen, NHS, RBS, Unilever, and Vodafone. And Yandex became an investor this year. They are also working with other accelerators such as Eastonia-based Garage48, and 500 Startups in the Valley and now GSF in India. Indeed, 500 startups has invested in nine Seedcamp companies.

Based out of Google Campus in London, in the heart of the ‘TechCity’ area Seedcamp is also a lobbyer of the UK government, and was amongst those arguing for the Founders Visa and a new 50% tax relief for angel investors in startups (the EIS scheme). Its also runs one of the first pan-European summit events for Angel investors, known as SeedSummit.

Some more stats for you: Since 2007 they have invested in 73 companies in 25 countries creating over 800 new jobs. Some 75% of those companies raised follow-on funding of more than $70m. So far in 2012 Seedcamp has made 18 new investments from 12 countries. This year they made their first investments in Hungary, Latvia, Malta, Switzerland and Ukraine and return investments in Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Israel, Spain and UK. And over 50% of Seedcamp’s 2012 class has raised further capital before Demo Day from investors like Betaworks, Lerer, 500 Startups, Index, SV Angel, Tony Hsieh and some of the 2011 class raised money from Atlas, IA Ventures, Max Levchin, Errol Damelin, David Yu and Sherry Coutu.

And Seedcamp’s “SeedHack” hackathons have led to the creation of a simple template agreement for founders of a product that emerges form a hack.

Ultimately, argues Klein, Seedcamp is not about the YC mode of being Silicon Valley Centric. “It’s about style versus substance. And we roam globally because if the mountain doesn’t come to you, you have to go to the mountain. The likes of Summit Partners, KKR or Silverlake could never cover this much territory. This is an unprecedented model.”

He thinks the ‘YC model’ is still too focused on the Valley.

Sohoni concurs: “We really believe in international global startups. Our partners are our beachheads to many other places… From accelerators to VCs, the entire ecosystem is under pressure to deliver. The industry is changing.”

But after 5 years of building up, the next five years are probably going to be the most crucial for Seedcamp, as its invested companies mature and the capital markets emerge from the global slowdown.

There are plenty more mountains to climb — but what a beginning.

The ongoing investigation into Facebook’s transparency on user data and privacy by Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner has come to a positive conclusion for the social network. The DPC, whose decisions had wider-ranging implications for all of Facebook’s business in Europe, had made several recommendations earlier in the year to bring Facebook’s policies in line with that of data protection regulations in the region. And it has now officially announced that “the great majority of the recommendations have been fully implemented to the satisfaction of this Office.” Key to Facebook’s success is that it is turning off its facial recognition features, also known as “Tag Suggest”: This feature has already been turned off for new users in the EU, the DPC notes, “and templates for existing users will be deleted by 15 October.”

The full, 74-page report is here and also embedded below.

Facebook had been the subject of a months-long investigation into its practices after complaints first raised in 2011 by a user group in Austria. The case has been handled in Ireland because this is the location of Facebook’s international headquarters, and has been through a few turns already where the DPC has laid out terms, and Facebook has responded, more than once.

The DPC says today’s report is the result of evaluations it made through the first half of 2012 and on-site at Facebook’s HQ in Dublin over the course of two days in May and four in July.

The DPC says FB has made just about all of the improvements it requested in five key areas: better transparency for the user in how their data? is handled; user control over settings; more clarity on the retention periods for the deletion of? personal data, and users getting more control over deleting things; an improvement in how users can access their personal data; and the ability of Facebook to be able to better track how they are complying with data protection requirements.

There is one area where Facebook is marked as “unchanged” in the list of items up for investigation: in the case of data collected from social plug-ins (apps) for purposes of targeted advertising. (It doesn’t do that.)  And there are a couple of other areas that Facebook says it will have modified in the next four weeks, such as its cookie policy and how it clarifies to users of its Android app that when they stop synching data it doesn’t delete data that had been synched in the past; and still others where the changes are ongoing (eg in how the company complies with new regulations).

But most of all, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, Billy Hawkes, appeared particularly satisfied with the outcome of the Suggest Tag/facial recognition feature. ”I am particularly encouraged in relation to the approach ?[Facebook] has decided to adopt on the tag suggest/facial recognition feature by in ?fact agreeing to go beyond our initial recommendations, in light of?developments since then, in order to achieve best practice,” he said in a statement.

With that feature disappearing for now, however, it will be interesting to see how and whether Facebook implements facial recognition technology in the region in the future from Face.com, the startup it acquired earlier this year, reportedly for up to $60 million.

Update: And here’s a Facebook spokesperson’s positive response to the DPC report:

“As our regulator in Europe, the Irish Office of the Data Protection Commissioner is constantly working with us to ensure that we keep improving on the high standards of control that we have built into our existing tools.

“This audit is part of an ongoing process of oversight, and we are pleased that, as the Data Protection Commissioner said, the latest announcement is confirmation that we are not only compliant with European data protection law but we have gone beyond some of their initial recommendations and are fully committed to best practice in data protection compliance.”

He also notes that FB will be revisiting facial recognition when it figures out how to square it with the regulators:

“It’s worth us reiterating that once we have a agreed an approach on the best way to notify and educate users with the DPC, we hope to bring back this useful tool.”

Chinese web and eCommerce giant Alibaba will spin off the team developing Aliyun, its first mobile OS, Reuters is reporting.

This is the OS that Google claims is an inappropriate fork of Android (a fork too far?). Mountain View’s main beef is that Aliyun is incompatible with Android but could easily be compatible, although you’re skating on pretty thin ice when you’re apparently a fully paid up member of the open source club — more on all the various ins and outs here.

News of the spin off came in an internal memo sent yesterday by Alibaba CEO Jack Ma. TechInAsia obtained the memo which follows in full.

Ma’s talk of strengthening Aliyun’s “talent base, technology, and infrastructure” is interesting in light of the Google fracas. Whether it means Aliyun will try to fork even further away from Android, or snuggle closer to ensure compatibility is unclear.

We’ve reached out to Alibaba for an official comment and will update if we hear more.

After two years of hard work mixed with trials, we have seen significant progress in the Aliyun OS business. We have built a strong team and also gained recognition from our business partners. To better safeguard the healthy growth of Aliyun OS business and further implement the [Alibaba] Group’s Aliyun wireless strategy, we need to make adjustments ?in terms of talent, organizational structure and the Group’s resource allocation.

The management is making the following decisions:

1. The Aliyun OS business will spin off from Alibaba Cloud Computing [Alicloud/Aliyun] as an independent operation.

2. Jonathan Lu [Lu Zhaoxi] will be appointed chief data officer and president of the Aliyun OS business; Wang Jian will be appointed chairman and chief technology officer of the Aliyun OS business and will continue to serve concurrently as chief technology officer of Alibaba Group.

3. The company will invest US$200 million into the Aliyun OS business, to strengthen its talent base, technology, and infrastructure.

Fellow Aliren [Alibaba employees], the company has a lot to strive for and a long way to go. Thank you to everyone that has made contributions to the development of Aliyun OS. I believe that the Aliyun OS business will be better than ever with all your support.

Update: Alibaba has confirmed the memo is genuine but is not making an official comment on the move at this time.