Category: Tech news

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

When the Vaio Z was first released in 2011, it became clear that Sony was capable of besting Apple in the premium notebook realm, at least when it came to pure performance and exotic builds. The sub-three-pound notebook — a mix of carbon fiber, aluminum, and magnesium alloy — was one of the lightest and fastest machines available upon its arrival. It was also one of the most expensive, around $2,500 once you optioned it up.

This year’s refreshed Vaio Z still has the same striking design, and it’s still very impressive on specs. It’s also several hundred dollars cheaper, making it a much more sensible purchase. But the 2012 Vaio Z suffers from some weird design quirks, and even with a lowered price tag, it doesn’t do enough to truly outshine its competitors in today’s ultrabook-saturated laptop market.

Sony has upped the Vaio Z’s power and speed to keep it in step with the advances that have occurred since the original’s arrival. This means it now has the latest, third-generation Intel Core chips. The Z sits at the pointy end of Sony’s Vaio line, and even the most basic model has a dual-core 2.5 GHz Core i5 chip. You can upgrade to a quad-core 2.1 GHz Core i7 chip (like the one in the “Enhanced” model we tested). The 13.1-inch LED display has a higher, full HD resolution, at 1920 x 1080 pixels — noticeably better than the MacBook Air’s 1440 x 900 pixel screen.

All of this is housed in a sleek, 2.58-pound, 0.66-inch thin package made of the same unique blend of aluminum and magnesium alloy with a carbon-fiber-accented exterior. It’s definitely an incredibly light and portable notebook, even if it doesn’t technically qualify for Intel’s “ultrabook” label. The choice of materials offers slightly more flex than pure aluminum, and the carbon fiber feels similar to plastic. This gives the notebook a cheaper appearance overall, even though the material is sturdy.

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Unfortunately, almost nothing about the physical appearance has changed since the Z’s previous incarnation, and that’s not a good thing. The trackpad is still frustrating to use, and its inelegant, carbon-y textured surface doesn’t help. It also remains awkwardly off to the right of the keyboard’s space bar, and is incredibly small compared to other ultrabook track pads. Even more clumsy, a significant portion of the bottom section (where the clicking mechanism lives) is not touch-sensitive.

The keyboard could also benefit from some refining. The chiclet keyboard is not as responsive as Apple’s, and when typing very quickly, it led to a noticeable increase in typos. Another odd design choice is found in the hinge, which strangely lifts the back of computer by a few millimeters when you open the lid. I didn’t mind it too much, but I also didn’t understand the purpose of having such a quirky feature.

Unlike last year’s Vaio Z, the 2012 model does not come with a docking system, which means the Blu-ray drive and extra ports won’t be included. But that also means Sony was able to slash the price by several hundred dollars, making the most basic model of the Vaio Z $1,600. You get 128GB of SSD (upgradeable up to 512 GB) and the necessary ports, including one USB 2.0, one USB 3.0, HDMI output, VGA output, Ethernet, and a headphone jack.

Still, the Vaio Z isn’t easy on the wallet. And if you choose to upgrade just a few features — hard drives or processor or memory — you’ll quickly edge over the $2,000 mark. With more and more high-end ultrabooks entering the market at around two-thirds that cost, it’s hard to justify such a steep outlay, even with impressive specs.

WIRED Sharp and gorgeous matte display that has little to no glare problems. Top-of-the-line specs and upgradeable features. Good battery life, up to around 6.5 hours.

TIRED Strange and impractical trackpad. Klutzy keyboard. Carbon fiber elements give it a cheap, plasticky vibe. Expensive.

Yes, that’s a VGA port. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

The rest of the ports are shown here, including a flip-down Ethernet connector. Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

Photo by Peter McCollough/Wired

It’s been about two years since FutureAdvisor launched to provide advice for people to manage their 401(k)s and other retirement accounts. In that time, it’s grown dramatically, now with $4 billion in retirement funds being analyzed by the startup. With that in mind, the startup has raised a $5 million Series A round from Sequoia Capital to accelerate its growth, and it’s also rolling out a new tool to help users save on fees in their 401(k) portfolio.

FutureAdvisor co-founder Bo Lu told me that only the very rich can afford to hire professional investment advisors. But here’s the catch: Humans are notoriously bad at beating the market. Not only do they pick stocks poorly, Lu said, but they “charge you for the privilege of bad advice.” FutureAdvisor believes that it can do better, and has built a platform to help users make better investment decisions.

While it’s been around for about two years, FutureAdvisor only launched publicly about four months ago. Even so, it’s gotten some serious traction, as it now makes recommendations for more than 11 million Americans’ 401(k) accounts. That’s $4 billion in assets, and in aggregate, it expects to save those users up to $50 million projected over their lifetimes. It does that by suggesting better-performing investments for its users to move their money into.

With growth like that, it’s no wonder Sequoia, after leading FutureAdvisor’s seed round, has put additional money into the startup. This round adds $5 million more to the startup’s coffers. Other investors include Square COO Keith Rabois and Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman.

In addition to the funding, FutureAdvisor announced a new feature that could help users save even more money, by showing them how much they’re losing in fees. Thanks to new disclosure regulations requiring companies to tell investors about fees associated with their offerings, FutureAdvisor has introduced a new 401(k) fee analyzer. It visualizes the amount of money paid out to mutual fund providers who manage various funds, and makes suggestions for other, similar investments that don’t carry the same fees. The new tool is available at www.futureadvisor.com/401k.

CouchSurfing announced today that it has raised a $15 million Series B Round from General Catalyst Partners, Menlo Ventures, Benchmark Capital and Omidyar Network.

The new funding brings the social travel network’s total funds raised in the past year to $22.6 million. CEO Tony Espinoza tells me the company now has nearly 5 million users in more than 93,000 cities after a very successful summer.

Along with its first-impression use of hosting travelers, CouchSurfing boasts over 40,000 interest groups that host activities. The company claims its users have had over 10 million face-to-face experiences in the past year.

“We were not ‘in need of money,’” Espinoza says, explaining that the company was looking to raise in the next few years and the timing ended up working out now. He adds that the company now has the support to stay independent for the long term.

Espinoza joined the company 5 months ago and has focused on “building an amazing toolkit for travelers.” He says CouchSurfing has “quite a bit” of infastrucutral work to complete to support the next wave of growth.

“The growth will come, as it always has, by word of mouth,” he says, noting that it will remain “a grassroots movement” with the capital and technology to support growth.

“The future of CouchSurfing is in this community,” Managing Director of Menlo Ventures Shervin Pishevar tells me. “I think that’s going to be quite a competitive advantage when you compare it to Airbnb. CouchSurfing turns Airbnb into a hotel chain, to me. Because they don’t have that community.”

Espinoza says the company will be rolling out new mobile and website features, including a new code base to increase speed and reliability and deliver more customized search results, starting in September.

Following in the footsteps of Apple getting ready to launch its QR Code-based Passbook service, it looks ike Microsoft is also giving some attention to QR Codes, the mobile barcodes that, when scanned, trigger actions like visiting websites or opening other content: NeoMedia, one of the early movers in this field, announced that Redmond has signed a worldwide licensing deal for all 74 of NeoMedia’s registered and pending QR code patents, covering ”many mobile barcode implementations used widely across the industry.” Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The move could suggest a possible new chapter for QR Codes. Critics have highlighted QR Codes for being ridiculous and never used – but they will be central to Apple’s Passbook ticket/coupon proto-wallet service that will be released in iOS6 later this year, and that could lead to more usage elsewhere, too.

But if that’s the case, it’s not clear how and if the Microsoft deal will be a part of that.

Microsoft could be licensing these patents because it wants to use the technology further in upcoming applications. But it could equally be because NeoMedia has approached the company over potential patent violations in existing services.

Microsoft has been pushing its own, competing Tag mobile barcode service, although late last year it announced that its Tag reader would become interoperable with QR Codes, as well as NFC.

NeoMedia is not a stranger to enforcing its patents. In April it filed a suit against mobile marketing company SpyderLynk for QR Code patent infringement: SpyderLynk actually uses pictures rather than scrambled codes that users can use to access further information, products — and potentially more.

The company behind that suit, as well as the Microsoft deal, is Global IP Law, which inked a deal last year with NeoMedia to help monetize its patent portfolio.

In the short announcement of the deal, NeoMedia did not disclose how these patents would be used — just how important IP is right now.

“The agreement between NeoMedia and Microsoft underscores the importance of intellectual property to our growing industry,” said Laura Marriott, CEO of NeoMedia, in a statement. “As mobile barcodes become a key fixture in the mobile marketing mix, it is important for stakeholders across the industry to ensure the solutions they employ leverage the relevant intellectual property in a responsible manner.”

The focus on patents comes as NeoMedia faces some issues monetizing its technology in other ways. According to its quarterly results for the period that ended June 30, NeoMedia had 25 million installs of its QR Code-reading app across iOS, BlackBerry, Android and Nokia devices — but revenues were down to $461,000 for the last quarter, from $767,000 a year ago.

NeoMedia says its current customers include handset manufacturers, platform providers, brands and agencies.

Companies like Apple and NeoMedia are pushing against very low market take-up. This year, research indicates that only about 11% of mobile-using adults will scan a QR Code, and among those only 60% will scan one more than once. Apple could also be looking at ways of making mobile barcodes more engaging, recently winning a patent that links the scanning directly with a “shopping list” purchasing action.

Nutanix has raised $33 million in a Series C funding round. The investment comes from investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures along with new investors Battery Ventures and Goldman Sachs.

The round gives Nutanix a total of $71 million in funding and positions the company for a potential IPO.

Nutanix plays in the software defined storage space — a relatively new category that reflects the considerable disruption in the overall storage market. Virtualization is so predominant that new forms of storage are required that can store the data from virtual machines.

Enterprise customers have long kept storage separate from the servers – faceless in many respects, administered by different teams that allocate storage as needed. Nutanix takes a different approach. It wraps that storage into commodity x86 servers, helping reduce the space needed for big box storage attached networks (SAN) and networked attached storage (NAS) environments.

Nutanix is riding a wave in convergence that comes as companies seek to consolidate their data centers while also increasing the speed and efficiency needed as data volumes increase in deeply virtualized environments.

The compute, the networking and the storage will increasingly be integrated right into the box itself. The new workloads demand it. Data increasingly moves from virtual machine to virtual machine as loads are directed across vast networks.

SAN and NAS systems from companies like NetApp and EMC have their strident followers but the new requirements of virtualized environments leave an open market for providers like Nutanix.

CEO Dheeraj Pandey said in an interview yesterday the company had a choice to package its technology itself as Apple does or make it available through orignal equipment manufacturer’s (OEM). They chose to take the Apple route. That has meant building out their own sales network. According to Pandey, the strategy has made it the fastest growing infrastructure startup of the past decade with 150 systems sold and 600 servers deployed with more than 3.3 petabytes of storage.

That growth is in part due to the relationship that Nutanix has with Fusion-io, the wildly popular server attached flash storage provider that is integrated into Nutanix systems.

Fusion-io had its IPO last year. Pandey said you can read between the lines about an IPO for Nutanix. Hiring Goldman Sachs says it all.

Nutanix still faces a steep battle. It will use the $33 million in funding to build a sales and marketing channel network. The company will need it. Nutanix will compete with multi-billion dollar companies such as IBM and EMC. These are companies which have their own plans for the new storage market and the channels to bring those products to market.

Opera Software, the Norway-based internet browser company, today reported Q2 2012 earnings that solidified the company’s strength in mobile, and ongoing weakness in desktop usage in the face of competition from Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browsers: revenues were $52.1 million, up 32% on Q1 2011 and just about beating analyst expectations of $51.5 million. Within that, revenue from mobile consumers was up 168%, while desktop consumers were flat. Net income has dropped to $4.1 million from $5.1 million a year ago.

And while we still are hearing no more news on this rumored deal with Facebook, Opera had other (less exciting) news about another partnership with a Silicon Valley giant: it has extended its partnership with Google for it to continue being the default search option on both Opera’s mobile and desktop browsers.

Opera says it now has 200 million people using its mobile browser, a rise of 47% compared to Q2 a year ago. The company, which has in the past boasted about being the most popular mobile browser, has more recently seen competition from both Android and Apple’s iOS Safari browser. Among smartphones, is now in third position at 19% of the market, says StatCounter.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Opera wants to build on its mobile position through partnerships with the likes of mobile carriers. That initiative is seeing mixed results. Opera says users of its white-label carrier browser, plus those who co-brand with Opera Mini, now number at 39.8 million, growth of 145%, but revenues in that business were actually down by 24% to $10.4 million, with carrier licensing revenues up by only 3% to $9.2 million.

Opera has been signing deals with operators in less developed markets — deals with VimpleCom (Russia), America Movil (Latin America) and Airtel (India) together open Opera’s market potential to another 600 million users — so the idea perhaps is that even if Opera is making less money on these deals in the short term, they will benefit in the long run. In any case, operator deals is an area that Opera says it will continue to pursue.

In desktop, subscriber takeup remained flat. It stands at 55 million at the moment. Interestingly, Opera seems to be monetizing them slightly better (largely through advertising): sales were at $15.7 million, up 22% over last year. The company is not at all giving up on this space, it says: the emphasis looking ahead will be trying to build up browser usage in Russia/CIS, where it happens to already have some traction with consumers as an  alternative browser to Chrome and IE. At the moment, worldwide, Opera has less than 2% of desktop browser share.

Advertising — where Opera has made a number of acquisitions such as Mobile Theory and 4th Screen (Feb 2012) and AdMarvel (Jan 2010) — is proving to be an increasingly significant part of Opera’s business mix. Revenues in this area were up by 450% to $13.5 million, partly as a result of this inorganic growth. Impressions on its advertising network are not growing proportionately. They were up 92% on last year to 102 billion. That implies Opera is doing a better job monetizing that ad growth.

“Opera expects to generate meaningfully more revenue from this business in 2012 compared to 2011, as Opera ramps up revenue directly from advertisers and ad agencies via its mobile advertising network subsidiaries, Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, and capitalizes on AdMarvel’s strong position with premium USA publishers,” the company noted today.

Google default search deal. This is not a new partnership, but rather an extension, to 2014, of a relationship that has been in place since 2009, the company noted in a statement. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will remain in place as the default search option across all of Opera’s products globally — Opera Desktop, Opera Mobile and Opera Mini.

Financial terms of the agreement were not disclosed but Opera notes that it also includes “promotion of various Google products and services.” That looks like it may already be kicking off: in its quarterly results statement, Opera points out that one of its chief aims in the quarters ahead is to push its position as a browser on Android devices. If successful, that may impact Google’s browser share in the emerging markets where Opera does best — but that might be a tradeoff worth making: Google could still end up picking up more Android users, who would still be bringing in search traffic through the Opera browser partnership.

Dropbox appears to be having significant issues as users have experienced slow speeds and/or inability to access their files for at least 9 hours. Some users claim the site has been slow since Monday morning.

This morning, Dropbox co-founder and CTO Arash Ferdowsi posted in the Dropbox forum,

“hi all,

we’re experiencing heavy load which is resulting in intermittent slowness/downtime. in some cases there’ll be a delay when syncing files through the desktop client but the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two. we had a similar issue yesterday and the team is hard at work on a solution.

we’re very sorry for the inconvenience and will provide updates as we learn more”

The team also tweeted about the issue:

hi all, we’re having intermittent downtime and working hard on fixing things up. sorry for the inconvenience forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=6…

— Dropbox (@DropboxOps) August 21, 2012

Users have been posting in significant numbers about the issues they’ve been seeing, some saying they cannot access their accounts at all and countering Dropbox’s time frames:

“the delay shouldn’t last more than a minute or two” um, no. The delays have been much much longer than a minute or two, 10-15min to upload a single 0k text file. I currently have 2 tiny files that have been “stuck” for well over 30 minutes. –member Clint W.

I can understand network problems, everybody faces it someday, and work hard to solve it. What I can NOT understand is lack of communication. I checked your twitter users @dropbox and @dropboxops, and thought the problem was on my side. I lost many hours checking configurations. Then I remembered the forum and came here for help. Big surprise, was not my problem, but everybody’s problem. One tweet when the problem begun, and I could had spent those hours playing with my son. Come on, guys, we know you could have problems, but TELL US quickly! I’m a paying customer who now wonders if should set a Google Drive account as a contingency. We both lose. –pro user Alex P.

Seriously guys, you can’t expect everything to always be working even if you paid for it. Its not like Dropbox is down for a week, so take it easy. They are human and they are doing there best to bring everything back up. –pro user Faisal A.

Being in the business I can tell you this is no small glich. You dont go into the storage business let alone a cloud storage business without a serious architecture. Massive redundancy across the board; storage, circuits, etc. No one should try to down play and state “You cant expect is to work all the time” thats just B.S. with the amount of redundance involved and DR that should be tested on a on going bases…–member u70143446

Users have seen different responses from Dropbox about the issue:

Two different explanations from Dropbox. The one Andy posted saying the desktop clients are being throttled due to maintenance, and the one I got 23 minutes before that saying they are looking into the cause of the problem:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Teams Support <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 12:33 PM PDT
Subject: RE: Dropbox for Teams Syncing is Slow

Hi Kip,

We are seeing some slowness across our network at the moment. Our engineers are looking in to the cause of the issue but it sounds like they will get ti resolved this afternoon.

Sorry for the delays in your syncs. –member Kip

And this response:

I’ve reached out to Dropbox for comment and I’ll keep you posted.

Thanks to the tipster who pointed out that we cover Twitter and similar outages within minutes, but were very slow to this one. You’re right. But better late than never, which I’m guessing is the Dropbox motto right now.

Update: Dropboxer Joe G. posted on the forum:

Hi all,

Update on the slowness/syncing issues from the last few days.

We’ve been having some performance issues with our backend databases. In order to keep everything running we had to throttle syncing during our peak usage hours. This caused long delays in client syncing and intermittent web issues.

We understand this makes for a terrible user experience and we deeply regret the impact it’s caused.

We’ve removed the throttle and at this time everything should be running at full speed.

Tonight we’re making some changes to improve the backend and expect it to alleviate the issues.

From the posts in the forum, comments below and Twitter, it looks like Dropbox is back up to running at full speed for many users.

75 startups pitched their hearts out today at Y Combinator’s 15th Demo Day. We saw surefire small businesses to risky big bets but after collecting opinions from their YCS12 classmates and top VCs, these are TechCrunch’s top 10 picks.

[Chosen and compiled in random order by TechCrunch writers Josh Constine, Anthony Ha, Colleen Taylor, and Kim-Mai Cutler. There were many other great presentations, so choose your own favorites from our full coverage of all 64 startups that pitched on the record: Batch 1, Batch 2, Batch 3, Batch 4]

Vastrm – The Warby Parker for shirts

Why? It’s ridiculous that our clothes don’t fit.

Vastrm has a very simple goal: to get you the perfect fitting shirt. Founder Jonathan Tang (who, it should be mentioned, can convincingly rock a pair of pink pants while giving an investor presentation) has quite the pedigree: His family has been in the fabric business for years, and he says they now make one out of every six t-shirts worn in the U.S. today. According to Tang, the holy grail of the garment industry is getting the right fit.

Vastrm aims to solve that problem by providing a unique suite of t-shirt sizes, and let customers find exactly the size for them by trying several on at home until they find one that’s just right. Vastrm also has hook-ups with the whole garment industry supply chain, which will be helpful for the company’s margins. The potential market here is bigger than Warby Parker, Tang says, because “not everyone wears glasses, but everyone wears a shirt.” Read more about Vastrm.

Double Robotics — A teleconferencing robot with an iPad for a face

Why? Let Apple build your cyborg’s brain.

“Forget everything you know about telepresence robots.” Double Robotics has created a machine called The Double, which is essentially a drivable robot stand for an iPad — you just install an iPad app to start teleconferencing. With this approach, Double Robotics can offer a much more affordable telepresence robots, charging $1,999 per Double.

Beta testers included companies like Johnson & Johnson and Coca Cola. The first shipment of The Double should go out later this year, though the website says that first batch is already sold out. Double Robotics says it has already seen more than $500,000 in preorders, with orders coming from seven Fortune 500 companies. Read more about Double Robotics.

Zapier: Cross-API Connector For Web Apps

Why? It’s a jungle of APIs out there.

This startup makes it easy for businesses to automate common tasks on the web and sync data between different web apps. It recently announced the launch of its third-party developer platform. The company says the mass migration toward cloud-based services and a wealth of new web APIs have made it harder for services to connect with other applications. Zapier says its service acts as a hub and spoke for all of these different pieces.

FundersClub – The next NASDAQ

Why? Because everyone can’t be a Silicon Valley insider.

More than 90% of startup value creation happens within private markets which means lots of investors have been sidelined. Serious investors, especially those outside of Silicon Valley, can lack access to startups they believe in. So FundersClub has created a private marketplace where accredited investors with as little as $1,000 can fund private companies and startups, all through an online platform.

LendingClub and Kickstarter have shown it’s possible to pool capital in support of innovation. FundersClub has found traction too, raising over $520,000 for itself when it initially aimed for $250,000, and seeing $1.3 million flood in through the system in less than a month since launch. FundersClub could augment the best VCs and angels by giving founders access to crowd dollars that will let them fill out their rounds without adding noisy big-name investors who might not add value beyond their money. Read more about FundersClub.

Light Table: A New Programming Environment

Why? Watch your product evolve as fast as you can code.

Light Table creator Chris Granger says developers are currently working “in the dark, like being a painter with a blindfold on.” That’s why Granger is building a new software development environment with features like easily accessible documentation, instant feedback, and a drafting table-inspired visual design. He raised $316,000 from more than 7,000 backers on Kickstarter and has just launched an initial version of the Light Table playground.

Sponsorified: A Marketplace for Sponsorships

Why? They’re the right party-hardy team for the job.

A majority of the very largest companies have sponsored trade shows or conferences. Microsoft, for example, spent $30 million on conference sponsorships this year while Pepsico spent more. Sponsorfied says the problem is this market is stuck in the 1990s. It’s fragmented, offline and extremely hard to manage. Sponsorfied says it will centralize the market onto its network for sponsors and do for sponsorship what Google did for advertising. They’ve already done 200 deals with $400,000 in sponsorships and are working with brands like PBR, Popchips, and Red Bull. Two weeks ago, they signed an exclusive deal with a major sports team that sells over $100 million in sponsorships every year.

Filepicker.io: Filepicker as a Service

Why? Rampant cloud storage fragmentation.

Filepicker says that web and mobile apps can only work with content on users’ hard drives and can’t access web-based files. Say, if a user wants to edit a photo on Facebook, it has to go back and forth with other applications. But if Facebook and a web app could speak to each other directly, it could be easier. Filepicker provides a single uniform API for developers, so that when they want to upload a file, they can pull them all directly from Facebook, Google Drive, Instagram, Box, and all the other places they have content stored online by just implementing a simple line of code. The startup says that developers love it, because it makes their applications better. The company has seen 20 percent week-over-week growth for last 12 weeks. The platform has 134 apps total, including Scribd, SurveyMonkey and Alfresco, and will be profitable next month.

BufferBox – The future of how you’ll receive packages.

Why? It will make next-day and same-day shipping work.

BufferBox is building a network of big green lock boxes scattered across cities and transportation networks like train lines where you can get packages securely delivered. That means you don’t have to sit at home weighting for your shipments, and shipping companies don’t waste money on multiple delivery attempt or end of with dissatisfied customers.

BufferBox is based out of Waterloo so its first rolling out in Toronto’s Union Station. It plans to have BufferBoxes in 100 locations by the end of the year. Today the startup announced that Google has signed up, in addition to Walmart, to allow ecommerce customers to give packages delivered to the boxes. Read more about BufferBox.

Vayable: A Marketplace For Unique Travel Experiences

Why? They’re on the same trajectory as Airbnb, and we’re moving from a material to an experience culture.

Vayable offers travelers the opportunity to buy experiences in locations around the world — it’s sort of like an Airbnb for experiences. How unique are these experiences? One of the early ones sold on the site was a fishing trip with a Fijian king. The founders say that “artists, bloggers, kings and mayors and even a homeless man in Tenderloin” have started building small businesses on the site. And it’s already profitable.

9gag – A one-stop-shop for funny memes on the web

Why? That’s a hell of a lot of users.

9gag aggregates memes and jokes from around the web — much like Reddit, but with a pure focus on funny stuff (gags, get it?) The site is already crazy popular: Its founders say that in July, 9gag had more than 65 million unique visitors, compared to Reddit’s 39.7 million (that second figure was provided by 9gag, so grain of salt, etc.) Its other metrics are similarly jaw-dropping: 3.8 million fans on Facebook, 920,000 followers on Twitter, and users on average spend more than 17 minutes on the site during each visit. The company launched its first mobile app three weeks ago, and it already has 750,000 downloads.

User-generated content is always a hit-and-miss game, but the 9gag people say that on the whole, the site can churn out a lot of great stuff because of the immediacy of the Internet. “No studio in LA can be as timely… with creating this kind of funny content,” one of 9gag’s founders said in the company’s demo.

A big congrats to all the startups on stage today. The pitches were remarkably polished, and despite the massive class size it’s clear the quality of YC startups has not been diluted.

Other startups we think have especially big potential include HD Trade Services, Scoutzie, Tastemaker, and BigCalc. Check out our reviews of them and pick your own favorites from  our full coverage of the four batches that presented today:

• First Batch: BufferBox, Kippt, Airbrite, Amicus MicroEval, Vastrm, VoiceGem, 9gag, HubChilla, FundersClub, SpinPunch, Everyday.me, Double Robotics, SmartAsset, Submittable, Plivo Imgfave, Amicus
• Second Batch: Flightfox, Mth Sense, Scoutzie, Instacart, Profig, Zapier, Coco Controller, Collections, Keychain Logistics, Parallel Universe, Survata, Sponsorfied, Filepicker.io, Referly, Rentio
• Third Batch: GetGoing, Canopy Labs, Dreamforge, BigCalc, Easel, Kamcord, ReelSurfer, LeanMarket, TomoGuides, DataNitro, Eligible, Grid, HD Trade Services, TapIn, Tracks.by
• Fourth Batch: Study Edge, Statwing, Hiptype, RegistryLove, Virool, Circular, Viacycle, QuicklyChat, Knowmia, Coinbase, Markupwand, Healthy Labs, Vayable, Tastemaker, Light Table, Clever

Warning: Clicking through to see the top 20 most watched TEDTalks is akin to finding a new show on Netflix. It will kill your day. If you must (and you really do) see the top 20 talks in TED six-year history, clear your calendar, shut off your email, go to the bathroom and open your mind. You’re about to learn something.

TED tabulated data from its top sources including TED.com, YouTube, Hulu, iTunes, and several others. Sir Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk about how schools kill creativity tops the list with 13,409,417 views. It’s followed by brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor’s epic story about suffering a stroke — and documenting her body shutting down. Next is Pranav Mistry, David Gallo and then again by Pranav Mistry and Pattie Maes with an astounding demo of SixthSense, a wearable projection computer. Further down the list is Tony Robbins, Steve Jobs, Stephen Hawking, and Mary Roach’s talk on 10 things you didn’t know about an orgasm. It’s an impressive collection of fascinating lectures.

1. Sir Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity(2006): 13,409,417 views
2. Jill Bolte Taylor‘s stroke of insight(2008): 10,409,851
3. Pranav Mistry on the thrilling potential of SixthSense(2009): 9,223,263
4. David Gallo‘s underwater astonishments(2007): 7,879,541
5. Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense(2009): 7,467,580
6. Tony Robbins asks Why we do what we do(2006): 6,879,488
7. Simon Sinek on how great leaders inspire action(2010): 6,050,294
8. Steve Jobs on how to live before you die(2005): 5,444,022
9. Hans Rosling shows the best stats you’ve ever seen(2006): 4,966,643
10. Brene Brown talks about the power of vulnerability(2010): 4,763,038
11. Daniel Pink on the surprising science of motivation(2009): 4,706,241
12. Arthur Benjamin does mathemagic(2005): 4,658,425
13. Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing your genius(2009): 4,538,037
14. Dan Gilbert asks: Why are we happy?(2004): 4,269,082
15. Stephen Hawking asks big questions about the universe(2008): 4,153,105
16. Jeff Han demos his breakthrough multi-touchscreen(2006): 3,891,251
17. Johnny Lee shows Wii Remote hacks for educators(2008): 3,869,417
18. Keith Barry does brain magic(2004): 3,847,893
19. Mary Roach 10 things you didn’t know about orgasm(2009): 3,810,630
20. Vijay Kumar demos robots that fly like birds (2012): 3,535,340

The TED blog links to the top 20 list published last year. It’s very similar, in fact, with the notable addition of Steve Jobs’ genuine 2005 talk on how to live before you die.

Tuition.io, a company out of Launchpad.la accelerator, is now accounting for over $60 million in aggregate user debt on its platform.

Essentially the Mint.com for students in debt, aTuition.io lets kids fresh out of college get a better handle on their finances. And according to the company, 37 million Americans have student loan debt, 38 percent of whom are not making any progress paying it off.

So, if anything, Tuition.io is right on time if not already late. The founder himself, Brendon McQueen, graduated from Columbia with 12 student loans and over $120,000 in debt, so he is certainly solving a pain point he understands.

The service works by bringing together all of a student’s loans into a single interface. The user can visualize the debt in various charts and graphs, or see a comprehensive calendar of which loan payments are due during different parts of the month. Tuition.io even does all the math concerning the best way to payoff debt based on your own unique budget and lifestyle. Users can then reduce monthly payments as needed.

The company plans on continuing to build out user-friendly features in the future. For now, however, the service is invite-only.

Click to view slideshow.

Today, famed Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator held its 15th ever Demo Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It was the largest YC Demo Day ever, with 75 companies comprised of some 180 founders presenting the apps they had spent the past several months perfecting.

Amid all this hustle and bustle, there was one notable absence, something that had definitely been a big part of Demo Days past: The funding slide.

Typically in these kind of on-stage pitches to rooms of investors, there is a portion of the slide presentation that shows off how much money the startup is looking to raise. Often it also reveals how much of that funding goal has already been met. A startup founder will close out his or her pitch by saying something like this:

“We’re raising a $1.2 million seed round, and 80 percent of that has already been committed — so if you want to be part of our disruptive vision, make sure to find us after this presentation. We’re the ones in the pink shirts.”

But at this YC Demo Day, none of the startups’ pitches mentioned funding status at all. Not a single funding slide to be found.

According to Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham, that was not a coincidence. The funding slide was deliberately banned from YC’s Summer 2012 startup pitch decks, he told me in a brief interview on the sidelines of Demo Day. The reason, he said, was to bring Demo Day back to basics.

“The point of Demo Day has always been to kick off the funding cycle for startups,” Graham said. But in recent years, the Y Combinator partners started to notice that startups were focusing more and more on having a good amount of money raised by Demo Day — to be able to say they’d raised X amount of money already. Y Combinator startup founders are by nature a competitive bunch, so the funding metric became a point of obsession over time.

Stopping the “race to the bottom”

Money is not exactly a bad thing for startups, but the problem was, the increased focus on raising money during the Y Combinator incubator period distracted from the real purpose of the YC program: For tech entrepreneurs to spend all their time and energy on building the best apps possible.

It all started to become in many ways “a race to the bottom,” Graham said. So for this batch of companies, the YC founders ruled out the funding slide altogether.

The result has been that the Summer 2012 startups have raised a bit less money by the time Demo Day rolled around — which means that today is really the big kick-off for funding for a good number of YC startups.

So is it good or bad?

As a reporter, it’s a bit of a bummer — I always like to get the nitty-gritty metrics on just how much seed funding a startup has raised. But it’s also nice for the overall vibe of the Demo Day event. Back in March during YC’s Winter 2012 Demo Day, I heard many investors say that the presentations were mostly for show, since lots of the startups had already closed their seed rounds by the time they stepped onstage. Talk about a buzzkill for those of us just encountering them for the first time.

Today was more of a genuine coming out party for the latest YC startups to start talks with investors, which added more electricity to the air. It will be interesting to see if other startup accelerators and incubators follow suit and ban the funding slide.

More YC coverage

Now, you can also check out TechCrunch’s Top Ten Picks From YC Demo Day. You can also read our full coverage of the four batches that presented today:

• First Batch: BufferBox, Kippt, Airbrite, Amicus MicroEval, Vastrm, VoiceGem, 9gag, HubChilla, FundersClub, SpinPunch, Everyday.me, Double Robotics, SmartAsset, Submittable, Plivo Imgfave, Amicus
• Second Batch: Flightfox, Mth Sense, Scoutzie, Instacart, Profig, Zapier, Coco Controller, Collections, Keychain Logistics, Parallel Universe, Survata, Sponsorfied, Filepicker.io, Referly, Rentio
• Third Batch: GetGoing, Canopy Labs, Dreamforge, BigCalc, Easel, Kamcord, ReelSurfer, LeanMarket, TomoGuides, DataNitro, Eligible, Grid, HD Trade Services, TapIn, Tracks.by
• Fourth Batch: Study Edge, Statwing, Hiptype, RegistryLove, Virool, Circular, Viacycle, QuicklyChat, Knowmia, Coinbase, Markupwand, Healthy Labs, Vayable, Tastemaker, Light Table, Clever

Feature image from Zazzle

We just wrapped up the fourth session at Y Combinator Demo Day. This will be the last batch of startups we can cover today, because the final group is all off-the-record (i.e., they haven’t launched yet).

You can read our coverage of the previous sessions here, here, and here.

At this point in the day, I think everyone’s turning slightly glassy-eyed because they’ve already watched dozens of startup demos but hey, there are still plenty of good companies, so here we go:

StudyEdge: College tutoring goes viral

StudyEdge’s founders admit that launching another college tutoring service doesn’t sound exciting, but they say they’ve been able to build a platform that has Facebook-like network effects. The company creates content including chapter review videos, concept videos, and practice problems, then delivers it through Facebook and mobile apps. Students can also help each other, with interactive class walls where users can post and answer questions — if you answer a question correctly, you get Karma POints that you can exchange for cash or prizes.

The company says it currently has 10,000 paid users in three schools, and it’s expanding to 100 colleges this fall. It also says it has made $1.4 million in revenue since launching last year.

Statwing: Easy to use data analysis

Most existing data analysis tools (in particular SPSS) are built for statisticians. Statwing has created tools that make it easier for marketers and analysts to interact with data without dealing with arcane technical terminology. Those users only need a few core functions, Statwing says, so that’s what the company provides. With just a few clicks, users can get the graphs that they want. And the data is summarized in a single sentence of conversational English.

Read more about Statwing.

Hiptype: Google Analytics for e-books

Hiptype helps e-book publishers understand who their readers are and how those readers are interacting with their content. The company provides data such as the age, income, and geographic location of readers, as well as a book’s “funnel” from reading a sample to purchasing to reading to finishing. There’s also a heatmap showing where readers engaged with a book.

Now Hiptype says hundreds of publishers like Pearson Education, Kaplan, and DK are paying up to $99 per title per month to use its analytics. The company also plans to use its data to power in-book advertising.

Read more about Hiptype.

RegistryLove: A universal bridal registry

RegistryLove is a single wedding registry that works across multiple stores — after all, no single store is likely to have everything you want. The registries can be imported from other sites or created from scratch in consultation with a wedding concierge. The company sources the goods from either merchants or wholesalers, and makes money from affiliate revenue. RegistryLove says it has seen 42 percent weekly user growth since the launch of its private beta.

Read more about RegistryLove.

Virool: AdWords for videos

Virool is a viral video ad network, helping porducers promote their content by advertising on mobile, social networks, and blogs. The company is targeting videos that are longer than one minute in length, and advertisers only have to pay when viewers watch at least 45 seconds.

The company says it’s working with more than 7,000 advertisers, including large brands like Colgate, and that revenue is doubling every month, with $246,000 in July.

Read more about Virool.

Circular: Infinitely scrolling, personalized news

Circular’s founders describe the challenge thusly: “Editors don’t scale, algorithms don’t work, the future of news will not look like the present.” To address that challenge, the company offers an infinitely scrolling feed of content based on people you follow and topics that you’re interested in. Users are already reading 3 million stories per month.

viaCycle: Zipcar for bikes

ViaCycle wants to create infrastructure for bicycle sharing similar to what Zipcar has created for carsharing. The company has created special hardware that locks and unlocks bikes through phone calls, text messages, or the viaCycle mobile app. (You can see the devices at the top of the post.) To start out, viaCycle is holding a 40-bike pilot on the Georgia Tech campus in Atlanta. It’s also launching pilots at George Mason University and with Google’s bike fleet.

Read more about viaCycle.

QuicklyChat: “Push To Talk” Video For Collaborative Teams

QuicklyChat wants to help small, remote teams collaborate through ad-hoc video chats. Users install the desktop software, and it then tracks your activity and whether or not you’re available to talk. It provides a red, yellow, or green light to show your coworkers how available you are in — in other words, it’s an automatically updated version of the status display in IM services like Skype. That, in turn, should make team members feel more comfortable calling you up whenever they need to reach you for an impromptu video chat.

The service is being used in more than 200 companies and this month the number of chats is growing 10 percent each day. Read more about QuicklyChat.

Knowmia: Crowdsourced video learning

Knowmia is a new educational platform from the co-founder of Flip Video. Teachers use the site to both find and post video lessons. The software curates video lessons from around the world, and the company also plans to launch “mini courses” of videos curated by teachers. It currently has 7,000 lessons from 900 teachers. It’s also seeing 36 percent growth in traffic, week-over-week.

Read more about Knowmia.

Coinbase: Your Easy Bitcoin Wallet

Coinbase pitches itself as the “easiest way to get started with Bitcoin.” The problem, the founders say, is that Internet-only currency is still too difficult for many to use, and that it’s largely desktop-based. The wallet allows users to pay with Bitcoin and receive payments, as long as they have an email address, and they can also pay from the phone. Online merchants can integrate their Coinbase wallet with their shopping carts.

Markupwand: Translating Photoshop into code

Markupwand hopes to reduce the time and money needed when trying to turn a designer’s Photoshop file into reality. Rather than trying to code something yourself, or just outsource the work, you’re supposed to be able to upload Photoshop files and automatically receive well-written, cross-platform code in minutes. The ultimate goal, the founders say, is “revolutionizing how user interfaces are made.”

Read more about Markupwand.

Healthy Labs: The Startup For People Living With Chronic Illness

Healthy Labs wants to build social networks where patients with chronic illness can find advice and support. It started with Crohnology, a site for people dealing with Crohn’s disease and Colitis. To join Crohnology and future Healthy Labs networks, you need to have a verified diagnosis.

Crohnology started out with an alpha test of 100 users, who were then allowed to invite others. The network now has more than 1,400 patients. Read more about Healthy Labs.

Vayable: A Marketplace For Unique Travel Experiences

Vayable offers travelers the opportunity to buy experiences in locations around the world — it’s sort of like an Airbnb for experiences. How unique are these experiences? One of the early ones sold on the site was a fishing trip with a Fijian king. The founders say that “artists, bloggers, kings and mayors and even a homeless man in Tenderloin” have started building small businesses on the site. And it’s already profitable.

Read more about Vayable here.

Tastemaker: Making Interior Design Accessible

Tastemaker offers a marketplace for professional home design. Users can submit a “request for proposal” answering questions about their taste, budget, and logistics. Then designers bid for the job with ideas and a flat fee. What you actually get for that fee is a Tastemaker design box with drawings, paint swatches, floor plans, and shopping lists.

In the nine weeks since its launch, Tastemaker says users have submitted 16 design proposals, and that 50 percent of those users have converted into paying customers — that may not seem like much, but it adds up to $10,000 in design fees. Tastemaker is also talking to companies about making the service an employee benefit.

Read more about Tastemaker.

Light Table: A New Programming Environment

Light Table creator Chris Granger says developers are currently working “in the dark, like being a painter with a blindfold on.” That’s why Granger is building a new software development environment with features like easily accessible documentation, instant feedback, and a drafting table-inspired visual design. He raised $316,000 from more than 7,000 backers on Kickstarter and has just launched an initial version of the Light Table playground.

Clever: Twilio For Educational Data

Clever is trying to bring the Twilio approach to improving education. It extracts data from proprietary school databases and translates it into a standard API that’s accessible to educational app developers, such as math learning platform DreamBox. When Clever launched, YC’s Paul Graham challenged the team to get into 40 schools by Demo Day. In fact, it made it into 65 schools in the first month, and it’s now installed in 1,000 schools.

Read more about Clever.

Additional reporting by Josh Constine and Kim-Mai Cutler.

Now check out TechCrunch’s Top Ten Picks From YC Demo Day, and choose your own favorites from the other batches:

• First Batch: BufferBox, Kippt, Airbrite, Amicus MicroEval, Vastrm, VoiceGem, 9gag, HubChilla, FundersClub, SpinPunch, Everyday.me, Double Robotics, SmartAsset, Submittable, Plivo Imgfave, Amicus
• Second Batch: Flightfox, Mth Sense, Scoutzie, Instacart, Profig, Zapier, Coco Controller, Collections, Keychain Logistics, Parallel Universe, Survata, Sponsorfied, Filepicker.io, Referly, Rentio
• Third Batch: GetGoing, Canopy Labs, Dreamforge, BigCalc, Easel, Kamcord, ReelSurfer, LeanMarket, TomoGuides, DataNitro, Eligible, Grid, HD Trade Services, TapIn, Tracks.by

For most geeks, uttering the word “Firedock” conjures up images of this Kindle Fire-friendly speaker dock that was announced back in March.

But something interesting happened last month — Grace Digital released that very same Kindle Fire speaker dock under a different name on July 17. That by itself isn’t much to write home about, but The Digital Reader points out that Amazon now owns the FireDock trademark. A little digging reveals that Grace Digital transferred the trademark to Amazon Technologies (an Amazon.com subsidiary based in Nevada) just a few days earlier, on July 11.

So what gives? What is the Firedock? Looking at the goods and services that the trademark encompasses doesn’t provide too many concrete hints just because there are so damned many of them, but they do seem to point to an actual, physical product rather than a service. Still, it seems unlikely that Amazon would take control of the Firedock trademark just to push out something like a run-of-the-mill speaker dock (sorry Grace Digital, I’m sure your Matchstick is a real sweetheart).

Given some of the rumors about swirling around the new Kindle Fire (which may or may not have just passed through the FCC) and the stiff competition in the low-end tablet space, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Firedock turned out to be an accessory to bolster Amazon’s play for the living room. You pop the new Kindle Fire into a Firedock (naturally), run it into a television and maybe a sound system, and voila — you’ve got a tablet that doubles as a video and music hub.

Hear me out on this one. It’s no secret that the low-cost Kindle Fire is something of a Trojan horse for all of Amazon’s media services — that’s music, television shows, and movies in addition to just books. Users get a free month of Amazon Prime and its related video service when you buy a Kindle Fire (a promotion that I doubt is going anywhere), and Amazon still hopes that the trial is enough to entice people into ponying up the annual fee. What’s more, recent rumors have pegged the forthcoming Kindle Fire 2 with an HDMI-out port, which would finally allow Kindle users to display all that content on a bigger screen.

Sure, there’s no shortage of televisions and discrete video boxes that could deliver Amazon’s Prime content to a television — there’s the Boxee, Roku’s line of cute black boxes, etc. — but that requires a commitment to the concept of streaming video. Not everyone is going to have that particular impulse, but for new Kindle Fire owners (who, don’t forget, have access to plenty of free premium content for a while), the ability to pick up an accessory that extends the use of a gadget they already want doesn’t seem like much of a leap. Once those components are in place and the setup’s value is seen, it may become even more difficult not to pay the $79 for continued Prime service. That’s what Amazon is really after.

Beyond the revenues generated from new Prime subscriptions, a move like that could help poke at Amazon’s search-focused rival. Google’s own low-cost tablet may well exceed the company’s sales expectations, but their living room-oriented media streamer wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Still, the company is clearly making what plays it can, and Amazon may be able to throw a wrench into things. If we take the new Kindle Fire to be Amazon’s Trojan horse, and the living room to be Troy, then the Firedock may well be the guy who knocked on the gates.

About a week after posting a call for donations to fund a Tesla Museum on Long Island, the goal has been surpassed by $20,000. Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal announced the plan last week in a post entitled “Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum” and it looks like his dream – and ours – will come true.

More than 20,000 funders donated to the cause and it is now rising past $850,000 with 40 days left on the funding deadline. According to Matthew Inman’s Twitter, an anonymous donor pitched in $33,000. “Wow, someone just donated $33,000 at the last minute and put us over our goal! $873,169 REACHED!” he wrote.

Clearly there’s something to this whole Internet giving thing and it’s clear that Inman has tapped into a rare vein of philanthropy through his work as a cartoonist and troll-victim.

“With the matching grant from NY State, this puts us at $1.7 million raised in 6 days to try and buy the property. FAN-GODDAMN-TASTIC,” he wrote. Fan-goddamn-tastic indeed.

Dell had a tough second quarter with revenues down 8% as “deterioration,” proved worse than expected. Revenues were $14.5 billion compared to $15.7 billion in the same quarter last year. Third quarter revenues are expected to be down an additional 2 to 5%.

Dell’s poor results show how quickly the market is shifting to a post-PC economy. Reflecting that was the contrasting increase in the company’s server business. Dell reported that its enterprise solutions and services revenue grew 6% to $4.9 billion, and this revenue made up 34% of Dell’s consolidated revenue and more than 50% of its margin. Dell said that business is approaching a $20 billion annual run rate. Server and networking revenue grew 14 percent.

In the conference call, Dell executives were clearly unhappy about what they called “revenue deterioration” in the desktop and “mobility” markets. Deterioration was worse than expected and the company said the second half of the year will show much of the same strain on the overall business.

However, CEO Michael Dell said that enterprise demand is solid. Its line of Power Edge servers had continued strong sales. He said the company is starting to do complete data center sales as a focal part of its strategy.

In terms of mergers and acquisitions, Dell will close the Quest acquisition in the third quarter. Despite the poor results, Dell executives said there would be no change in strategy. Dell expects revenues to stabilize as there will be a higher-value mix of solutions with more predictable revenue and margin streams.