Category: Tech news

Airbnb founder Nate Blecharczyk, Brit + Co founder Brit Morin, TaskRabbit founder Leah Busque, and Lyft co-founder John Zimmer took the stage here at Disrupt SF to talk about their experiences as disruptors of already-disrupted industries, but the first audience from the question was a doozy — how did each of their respective services capture their first 10,000 users?

Lyft founder John Zimmer pegs some of the company’s early success (it’s only 11 weeks old, after all) on fostering word-of-mouth about the new social ride-sharing service. Part of that crucial equation is, interestingly enough, the iconic pink mustaches that appear on every Lyft vehicle — it’s a notably quirky addition to an otherwise normal car that was conceived as part of a driving experience that people couldn’t help but talk about.

Brit + Co’s Brit Morin’s approach to gaining traction was similarly social, but as an online content company its approach was powered in part by Facebook and its open graph actions — getting people to Like and Share content was big component of Brit + Co’s early growth. The company has recently begun to shift its attention to weddings too with its Weduary app, and the intrinsically social nature of those events has also driven plenty of invitations to Brit’s media.

Meanwhile, Leah Busque took a highly local approach when it came to growing TaskRabbit — the company focused on particular customer segments at first (groups of mothers, mostly) in certain areas first before expanding geographically.

Airbnb’s story was a bit more opportunistic — Blecharczyk and his team struck while the iron was hot during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, when there was a considerable shortage of housing available for people looking to get a glimpse at the political process.

“We rode someone else’s wave,” he admitted. “There was a lot of press coverage of that event, and we fit into the story.” The company was eventually featured on CNN, and the rest (as they say) is history.

In case you’re itching for more from this panel, the full video is available below:

Do you love your pet? Do you have a phone? Are you alone and have little else to do? Start-up Alley entrant Klooff is the way to go. The app is, as I understand it, a way for pet lovers to share their love for their pets. You take pictures of your pets, meet new friends with similar animals, and then go on walks and stuff. And then you can make products with images of your pet on them.

While this kind of sounds like satire, it isn’t. It’s actually a pretty cool, gamified app for pet lovers. While there have been multiple apps like this for years, it’s nice to see some folks really aiming at the “I love my kitty” contingent.

Pet lovers are still a huge market and everyone loves to share their animals – and, just maybe, their hearts – with each other.

Product Page

Newark Mayor Cory Booker took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 in San Francisco. We all know him as the Mayor who has taken Twitter by storm, and also the fellow who has no problem jumping into burning buildings to save people. I’m not kidding.

Our own Josh Constine spoke with Booker, and the pair discussed how much the Mayor has adopted social networks to speak with his community.

In addition, Booker is involved in a project called Waywire, that lets users create content, basically democratizing news. The cool thing about Waywire is that people can create “wires” full of news on a topic, and people can collaborate in telling the story.

Yes, this sounds a bit like CNN iReport, but this is clearly not under the monitoring or control of a larger mainstream media property.

One of the most interesting notions that Booker riffed on was “the power of the people is more important than people in power”, which is interesting coming from someone who serves in a public role.

Once you give someone the ability to amplify their voice in a social sphere, things can actually change.

I always enjoy listening to Cory Booker speak, as he takes a unique approach to government involvement, always championing those who don’t have their voice heard currently. When discussing his work with Facebook and bringing money to Newark schools, Booker called Mark Zuckberberg an “american hero” for his work in connecting the world.

Booker’s adoption of social media has been studied by politicians everywhere, simply because he is ridiculously responsive, even when people are having parking issues in Newark. He says that using the Internet has made him a better Mayor, and once you see his stream, you’ll understand why.

Upstart venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is betting that as software permeates more and more traditional industries, venture returns will break out from their stable track record.

“Historically, the tech industry has been sized at a certain level. Total returns have been very consistent over the past several years, but as software eats other industries but we think the technology opportunity is expanding itself,” said Ben Horowitz, one of the firm’s founding partners. Horowitz gave examples like Pixar eating Disney’s traditional animation business and Amazon eating retail.

Horowitz’ remarks come in spite of an ongoing debate about disappointing 10-year returns for venture as an overall asset class. CalPERS, a prominent limited partner in many funds and the nation’s biggest pension fund said last month that poor returns may compel them to cut virtually all of their venture allocation.

However, even as the amount of overall dollars dedicated to venture capital has declined from four or five years ago, there has still been plenty of room very young, nimble players like Andreessen Horowitz to barge in. Andreessen Horowitz was able to close $1.5 billion in the first quarter of this year, and Nicira’s $1 billion sale to VMWare may help return the firm’s first fund two times over.

Because venture returns are disproportionately concentrated in a few companies, access to the very best, deal flow is paramount. Andreessen Horowitz very savvily positioned itself as a firm with a lot of operational know-how that goes beyond solely providing capital to startups.

“I really felt that VC had become too abstract with respect toward what it takes to build a company,” Horowitz said. “At least when I spoke to others in industry, there was a lot of focus on business models, on market sizing and segmentation. But company building is really about a whole other set of things. It’s about the struggle, and doing something for each other even when the company’s falling apart.”

Andreessen Horowitz helps with recruiting, networking and leadership coaching. They built a talent agency that recruits recent college graduates to work in portfolio companies and they have a section of the office where portfolio companies can connect with potential Fortune 500 clients.

“When you first found a company, you don’t know 30 good executives you can hire. You don’t know 50 good engineers. You don’t know the press. You don’t know Fortune 500 CEOs you can get to buy your products,” Horowitz said. “With the organization we’ve built, as a founder you can go in and plug into a professional CEO quality network.”

Horowitz says he also coaches portfolio CEOs on developing leadership and management skills.

“It’s hard for founder to be a CEO. They’re really missing two things that professional CEOs bring to the table. They do not have the skill set. They don’t know how to do the job, so all of the general partners that we selected, we wanted them to have experience running or founding companies.”

Back in May, HP announced that it would cut 27,000 jobs in an effort to reduce costs. In an SEC filing today, the company announced that the plan will be even more important than that by bringing the job cuts to 29,000. It expects to save $3.7 billion by 2014. It might not even be enough to offset HP’s current situation.

The company employs around 350,000 people worldwide. But the layoffs represent 8.3 percent of its workforce, which is still an impressive number. The filing also indicates that HP does not plan to restructure the remaining Palm assets any further after spinning off webOS into a brand new company.

A portion of the American employees will exit the company as part of a voluntary early retirement program. The market received the news positively, as HP’s share is currently up 1.6 percent compared to yesterday.

Yet, HP reported a major $8.9 billion loss last quarter. So the plan that will take two years in the making is still not enough to compensate the major loss the company registered during only one quarter.

HP has been struggling over the past couple of years to stay relevant. After buying Palm, then abandoning webOS and changing CEOs very often, HP now has to find its next direction in order to survive in a computer landscape where ARM-based devices are becoming the dominant platform.

“We probably need to change the name of this conference,” Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey said today from the stage of TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco. As much as we love this conference, the media — and everyone else for that matter — tends to overuse the word “disrupt” when talking about the potential change inherent in technology. It tends to be used in conjunction with “fluff” rather than the revolutionary. Hard to call the rush to be the Instagram of Video, for example, a “disruptive” charge — at least in the purest sense.

In his keynote speech today, Dorsey issued a call for a change in the way we think of the technology we cover and the startups we create. “Revolution has value, revolution has purpose — a direction and leaders,” he said on stage, sounding like he was giving a sermon, rather than a keynote. “We don’t want ‘disruption,’ where we just move things around. We want a direction, we want a purpose.”

Dorsey asked founders and entrepreneurs to “pick a movement, a revolution, and join it” — as if to say that anything is worse than not being a part of something, contributing to a movement forward, rather than adding friction and moving against. But that isn’t to say that founders shouldn’t be bold, shouldn’t be causing fragmentation in the calcified ways that we think about the world, technology, and its role within it. Dorsey asked us to think of founders, instead, as leaders in a revolutionary sense.

It makes it easier to give your blood, sweat, tears and hard work, because you’re working within a revolution, working with a purpose. It was great to see Dorsey use, as he struck up his revolutionary mantras, a painting by Delacroix, called “La Liberte Guidant Le Peuple,” which means, for the non-French-speakers among us, “Freedom Leading The People.”

Becoming the closest thing the tech industry has to an entrepreneurial Confucius or Lao Tzu, Dorsey told the crowd that “life happens at intersections,” conjuring the importance of connections and crossroads, saying that “it’s important to recognize what’s happening in that intersection and determine what to do in it.” That may sound like cheap, pocket wisdom, but it also brings up the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness.” These millions, thousands or hundreds of intersections in our lives are significant, but only if we’re able to pause, appreciate what’s occurring, especially within a macro context. Being aware is something founders don’t always do well — at least not in some of the ways they should.

As Dorsey continued, “companies evolve over time and have multiple founding moments,” so make one wrong decision and your future isn’t necessarily in peril, because building a company is a lengthy process and evolution, not something that can be built (and flipped) overnight.

Thanks to Romain Dillet for contributing to this post, and pointing me towards Delacroix.

Jack Dorsey never wanted to be an entrepreneur. But you can’t predict your life, and we’ve just learned from his keynote speech that you can’t predict the path of a company either. “A founder is not a job,” he explained. “It’s a role. It’s an attitude. It’s something that can happen again and again and again.”

“A lot of people see Ev, Biz and myself (and this green deer) to be the founders of Twitter,” he said. “It’s true, but companies exist and evolve over time and have multiple founding moments.”

He explained that employees, investors, and friends have shaped the path of the company. “A lot of energy goes into that founding moment,” said Dorsey, “but the company has to adapt.”

He went through a list of non-founders, including Marissa Mayer. “Marissa isn’t a founder of Google or Yahoo!, but she has the context, drive, recognition and moral authority to change and create a founding moment within a company.”

Twitter was not started because we wanted to start a company. It started because we had a good idea that came out of a failed company.

He left us with an incredibly wise piece of advice to founders: “An idea that can change the course of the company can come from anywhere.”

Computer vision/robotics company Blue River Technology announced today that it has raised a $3.1 million Series A round of funding from Khosla Ventures. Steve Blank, Ulu Ventures and Stanford Angels and Entrepreneurs also participated.

Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad kind of weeds that farmers would otherwise use chemicals, or a legion of weed pullers, to destroy. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla claims that Blue River’s technology can reduce herbicide use in the U.S. by 250 million pounds a year.

Blue River was founded by Stanford alumni Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden. To make it work, the team has done extensive development of machine vision algorithms for recognizing different types of plants. It’s one of the most ambitious applications of machine vision I’ve seen.

Heraud and Redden met in an entrepreneurship class at Stanford lead by Blank. They both came from an automation and machine vision background and wanted to apply their knowledge to business.

“During the class we made several pivots based on customer input until we arrived at the current business idea,” Heraud says. “We found customer are desperate for a solution, specially vegetable growers that use hand labor in their process heavily and growers where weeds have developed resistance to chemicals.”

So far the company has produced a prototype for lettuce thinning that Heraud says is being tested at one of the top producers of lettuce in the U.S.

Here’s what it’s supposed to look like — you’d never know that the red things in front contain sophisticated sensors:

And here’s what the machines “see”:

Last week, we caught a blog post that Google wasn’t supposed to publish yet. In it, the company announced that it would soon bring editing features to the Google Drive app for iOS. Today, Google made these updates official and Google Drive for iPhone and iPad does now indeed allow you to edit documents, just as you can already do with the Android app. Once you install the update, you can create new documents, edit existing ones, and format text.

In addition, you can now also view Google presentations on your iOS device. As Google notes, this also means you can now view speaker notes and use full-screen mode for presentations in Google Drive for iOS. With this update, you can now also “create new folders, move files into folders, and upload stuff (like photos and videos) from your device directly in the Drive app.”

As we noted last week, the Android app also got some minor updates today. You can now, for example, add comments, reply to comments, and view tables in Google documents. Just like in the iOS app, Android users can now also view presentations and create new folders and move files around.

Coming Soon: Real-Time Collaboration For Spreadsheets

One aspect that’s still lacking in the Google Drive mobile apps is real-time collaboration in spreadsheets, which is, after all, one of the defining features of Google Docs. That’s coming soon, though. Google today announced that it has “plenty more planned for the Drive mobile apps — including native editing and real-time collaboration for Google spreadsheets.”

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt 2012 in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey took the stage to give us a 10-minute run-through of how he got to where he is today. I’m not sure that there’s enough time in the day to accurately portray the adventures Dorsey have experienced, but he certainly tried.

As you know, Jack Dorsey co-founded Twitter and also Square, the payment processing solution that you can find in Apple stores and festivals everywhere.

Dorsey discussed his history and talked a bit about the founding of companies, saying that “Companies have multiple founding moments,” and considers Dick Costolo, current CEO of Twitter, to be a founding member. Similarly, he considers Keith Rabois to be a founder of Square, as well.

His thoughts are interesting ones, and clearly come from the perspective of pushing innovation. It’s nice to know that one of the original founders of a massive network and product like Twitter is willing to open its arms to change.

For those who think that Twitter might have some differing opinions on where to move forward, it seems like Dorsey has put some of that to rest…at least from his perspective. It will be interesting to see if we can find out how Dorsey splits his time between Twitter and Square these days.

“… I wanted to be Bruce Lee. I wanted to be a sailor. I wanted to be a tailor. I wanted to craft products and share with others.”

Speaking today at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, Jack Dorsey took the audience through how he arrived at being where he is today. It’s a message about being open to future, change and evolution, and changing perceptions.

And it’s also a good sign of how we may not necessarily be able to predict what might come next from him, or the two companies that he helps oversees, the mobile payments service Square and social networking platform Twitter.

“I wanted to be an artist, specifically a surrealist. Because they open your eyes to see the world a different way,” he told the audience.

He noted that people’s idea of Twitter’s founding moment may not be the one everyone assumes: “Everyone think Ev, Biz and I were the founders of a company. But products exist over time and have many founding moments,” he said.

Dorsey, along with Noah Glass and Biz Stone, first founded Obvious Corp. in 2006, spinning off Twitter some time later. First as CEO, then as chairman, and then executive chairman of the company — as well as his other day-job as CEO of Square — Dorsey is one of the more product-focused executives in the tech industry today.

In the six years that Twitter has been around it’s gone from disruptive startup to central player in the technology industry, but it still has a long way to go still in terms of what it can do. The company has been making some significant advances on what that might mean commercially and product-wise — to some people’s dissatisfaction, given what that has meant in terms of how Twitter has limited its API access for some third-party developers – but all with a view to building a viable business and improving communication in the process.

But, to paraphrase Ben Horowitz earlier, to succeed as a leader you have to continue to innovate and not be afraid to change.

And that could also mean failure along the way: ”Twitter was not started because we had a good idea. It was started out of a failure. And that can happen today,” he noted. “Pick a movement and join it.”

Twitter is estimated to have around 500 million users — although not all of them active. Square has over 100 million active users.

Click to view slideshow.

“We’re big believers in founders,” Ben Horowitz says, explaining part of Andreessen Horowitz‘s strategy. “We really wanted to back founder CEOs and help the founder become the CEO.”

Horowitz and Bill Campbell, chairman of the board of directors of Intuit, just spoke at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco.

Horowitz discussed famous examples like Steve Jobs as he weighed the pros and cons of founder CEOs. He notes that founders miss two main things that a professional CEO has: the CEO skill set and a network, both of executives and engineers to hire and in the press. Horowitz continued that Andreessen Horowitz offers founders a “professional CEO network” to plug in to to aid them.

When Campbell steered the conversation to taking companies public, Horowitz compared his own experiences at LoudCloud to Facebook’s recent IPO, noting how he lost 95% of the company’s value before turning it around.

“We had kind of a similarity with Facebook in the sense that it wasn’t the most opportune time in the development of the company to take it public,” Horowitz explained.

He added that an IPO adds a lot of pressure that lands mainly on the employees as they go home to family and friends who are reading about the company in the media.

“It changes the nature of the company,” he said, fixating on the importance of company cohesion as the scrutiny around the company rises.

The comparison is interesting as public scrutiny over Facebook’s IPO has led many to question whether founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg should step aside and bring in a professional CEO to run Facebook.

What better way to kick off TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2012, than to bring together Silicon Valley legend “Coach” Bill Campbell, Chairman of Intuit and Apple board member, with Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz? One of the first questions Campbell brought up was this idea of “software eating the world.” What that means, said Horowitz, is that there’s increasing value as the tech industry is moving from hardware to software. We’re already seeing this in cloud computing, and notably in consumer electronics where for years, companies based in Japan and Korea led the way. Now, as the value is moving to software, companies with access to content, software and hardware – like Apple and Amazon, for example – are taking over.

Technology, and specifically software, is now in a position to “eat every industry systematically,” said Horowitz, leading him to quip (stealing a line from Marc) “dinosaurs were not in favor of being replaced by birds,” as to how the older competitors see this transition.

Speaking of Amazon’s latest announcement, Horowitz remarked that “it’s hardware, software and content – and increasingly, to play in that field, if you don’t have great access, great pricing and great availability of content, you probably can’t compete in the computer business,” he said, “which is really a new thing.”

Horowitz said that traditionally, the total return on VC investment over the years remained consistent because there’s only some much that the industry could absorb. Now software is “eating” other industries from animation (like Disney’s Pixar) to even agriculture and education. As this transition occurs, Andreessen Horowitz is open to investing in entrepreneurs who are innovating in new market segments – even if they had never before considered that segment.  We’re looking for breakthrough ideas, he said, things that had never been thought of before. What’s more important to the firm is that the entrepreneur has the courage to build a company around their idea.

Apple’s leaked UDIDs didn’t originally come from the feds, as originally reported, according to new information obtained by NBC News today. Instead, the information came from app-publishing company BlueToad, according to that company’s CEO speaking to NBC today.

The leak was discovered courtesy of independent outside researcher and mobile security consultant David Schuetz, who determined on his own that the million UDIDs leaked by hacker group Antisec likely came from BlueToad. After performing its own internal forensic audit, BlueToad confirmed with “100 percent confidence” that they were the original source of the information, BlueToad CEO Paul DeHart told NBC News.

After confirming they were the source, Blue Toad reached out to the appropriate authorities to “take responsibility,” DeHart says. In an official response made to NBC, Apple’s Trudy Miller confirmed that BlueToad would probably have access to that kind of information as a developer, but also pointed out that none of that information would be associated with information that could personally identify individual users.

Earlier, AntiSec had cited an FBI laptop as the source of the information, and DeHart couldn’t rule out that it may have made its way to such a device, but the FBI issued a statement earlier saying there was “no evidence” that was the case. Likewise, Apple also issued a statement to AllThingsD saying it hadn’t provided any UDID information to the FBI.

BlueToad says it no longer collects UDID information from its users, and Apple has discouraged the practice and plans to remove it entirely sometime “soon.” This may be as close as people get to closure on this issue, though BlueToad says it has no plans to notify individuals that are affected, so those concerned will still have to track that info down on their own using the web-based tools for doing so that are available.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, said that Jack Dorsey and his startup Square are changing the world through software, in the same way that other technology is being disrupted through software innovation. It’s part of Horowitz’s theory of how “software is eating the world.” (Dorsey, by the way, will be following Horowitz’s conversation with his own keynote in a few minutes.)

Dorsey is behind two of today’s hottest startups: He’s co-founder and Chairman of Twitter, and he serves as CEO of mobile payments startup Square. Square was founded in 2009 and has grown to be pretty huge since then. Last summer, Square raised $100 million and added Mary Meeker to its board. But it just closed its biggest deal ever last month when it partnered with Starbucks, raising $25 million from the coffee retailer and added CEO Howard Schultz to its board. That deal valued Square at $3.25 billion, but more importantly, it will put the Square Directory into Starbucks apps and in its in-store Digital Network.

Click to view slideshow.

In June, Square said it was processing $6 billion in annual sales. But it’s facing increased competition from other payment startups, as well as incumbents, such as American Express, Visa, and MasterCard. To face that competition, Square is aggressively lowering prices for small businesses that make less than $250,000 per year, allowing them to either pay the set 2.75 percent per swipe or pay one fixed price of $275 per month, with no charge per swipe.

Dorsey also founded Twitter, along with Ev Williams and Biz Stone, back in 2006. After a major management shakeup last year, he re-joined as its chairman. Since then, the company has been working on improving its mobile products and ramping up monetization. But it’s been doing so in part at the expense of its developer ecosystem, introducing changes to its API that could curtail development on its platform.