Category: Tech news

Allen & Co.’s Sun Valley retreat definitely wins the prize for “Most Ironic Conference” as it is a media conference that very vehemently shuns media. Just this morning one intrepid reporter was told to stop harassing the guests as she walked down the rainy thoroughfare with her friend who also happened to be an attendee (and, no, it wasn’t me).

My boss and guest Tim Armstrong technically isn’t allowed to talk to me about anything that isn’t smalltalk (Hi Tim!). Really.

Founded by Allen & Co. in 1983, the off-the-record CEO conference takes place 6,000 feet above sea level in Idaho, at the storied Sun Valley Resort and its iconic bar Duchin, which has the best bar name ever if you pronounce it a certain way.

Every summer bigwigs like Mark Zuckerberg and Drew Houston convene at Duchin to share high-altitude drinks (or at least a drinking space) with the likes of Harvey Weinstein, Oprah, Mayor Mike Bloomberg, Bob Iger and Tim Cook. Press are also not allowed to go into the bar at a certain time, in case that wasn’t clear.

Because all these rich people are hungry for fresh blood interested in innovation, traditionally Allen & Co. wrangles a group of humble, rising star CEOs to the Gem state, inviting three or four promising startup founders to come and give a 15 minute presentation for the olds. They call it the “New Breed Program” and it’s such a pure, brilliant form of lead generation.

Last year it was Quora, Airbnb and Dropbox. The year before that it was Square, Groupon, Pandora and The Fancy (as thingD). But once you’re in the club you’re in the club. Many of the past presenters return as legit attendees.

This year’s “New Breed” includes Uber, Evernote and more modest startups (in terms of press coverage at least) like neighborhood social network Nextdoor and Hadoop shop Cloudera. The startups will each hit the stage for their close up on Saturday morning, starting at 7:30am.

All of the companies in attendance this summer had also presented earlier this year at the bank’s private company conference in Arizona. There were eight startups in total presenting, divided into “Consumer Internet” and “Enterprise.”

According to a source, photosharing darling (who was also my pick for Allen & Co’s New Breed this year) Instagram actually joined Evernote, Uber and Nextdoor on the consumer internet track in March. According to the same source they weren’t invited to the summer conference, most likely because their acquisition put the kibosh on any further dealings with Allen & Co., who has a pretty effective system going on here you have to admit …

Get ‘em while they’re young.

Despite ominous warnings about “Facebook Depression,” an allegedly new mental illness of depression and anxiety caused by overuse of social media, a new level-headed scientific study reveals that social networks have not made 27% of teenagers chronically depressed. Researchers Lauren Jelenchick and Dr. Megan Moreno concluded that there was no association between feeling blue and Facebook use — even heavy facebook use — contradicting last year’s Academy of Pediatrics report warning parents to monitor their children’s social networking activity. “Our study is the first to present scientific evidence on the suggested link between social-media use and risk of depression,” said Jelenchick. The new findings are an important lesson to carefully review unscientific claims before freaking out.

The study randomly sent SMS survey questions to 190 University of Wisconsin students, asking them about their mental state, if they were online, and what they were doing. Even though students reported being on Facebook over half the time they spent online, depression screening results were not associated with social network use, no matter how much time they spent online. If fact, it would have been shocking had the study found any correlation, since roughly 1/3rd of teenagers check Facebook continuously throughout the day, yet there has been no epidemic of mental health issues since Facebook burst on the scene a few years ago.

Even though the implications of so-called “Facebook Depression” seemed to contradict a quick reality check, it didn’t stop the American Academy of Pediatrics from scaring news outlets into reporting its existance. “As with offline depression, preadolescents and adoles- cents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for “help” that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviors,” read the official report. Yet a quick look at the citations reveals only one actual scientific paper, which discovered an association between online chatting about relationships and anxiety.

After Larry Magid questioned the author, she admitted that Facebook depression likely only affects a small group of children already headed towards clinical depression. “Maybe we’re misnaming it,” she said.

New York City-based Aereo got a big initial win in court today, as it will e able to continue operating while also fighting a lawsuit against some major broadcasters. According to Reuters, U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan denied an injunction sought by those broadcast networks, which would have shut Aereo down while the lawsuit was underway.

Aereo provides a service that records and streams over-the-air broadcasts online, giving consumers access to them for a small monthly fee. It works by pulling signals from a number of small antennas, and then converting those broadcasts to digital streams that can be viewed on PCs, tablets, and a number of other devices.

The startup, which is backed by IAC Chairman Barry Diller, was taken to court by a group of broadcasters that includes ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox. The networks accused the startup of copyright infringement and claimed irreparable harm from the service, which re-broadcasts their signals without paying them to do so.

Aereo claimed that the lawsuits had no merit, in part because the over-the-air signals that it was were free and available to any consumer who wished to buy his own digital antenna. And since Aereo licenses one antenna per user, it operates in much the same way that a Slingbox does, when it streams a signal digitally over the Internet.

Of course, Aereo isn’t out of the woods yet. The preliminary injunction means that the startup won’t have to shut down before arguing its case, but that doesn’t mean it’s not in violation of copyright infringement. The case will likely stretch over several years before being decided. In the meantime, though, it will have the freedom to see if consumers actually use the service.

Space Monkey, the startup offering a peer-to-peer alternative to cloud storage services like Dropbox, just raised $2.25 million in a seed round of funding.

The company says that it’s combining the benefits of both local storage and the cloud. Every Space Monkey customer gets their own storage device, so they can access their files without having to worry about download times or pay the higher cost of cloud storage (which can become an issue when you’re talking about large media files like videos). Copies of those files are also distributed in chunks to other Space Monkey devices, allowing for remote access and backup.

I first wrote about the company when it won the best new startup prize at the Launch conference in March. At the time, some readers pointed out that there are some open source solutions trying to do something similar. However, there’s a big difference between an interesting open source project and a consumer-grade service and company. Product Guy Clint Gordon-Carroll (yes, that’s his real title) says that the real challenge is creating something that’s actually compelling to a large audience. For example, he notes that by introducing the Space Monkey device, users no longer need to keep their computers online at all times.

In the first week alone, Gordon-Carroll says Space Monkey saw 10,000 sign ups. The company is now planning to ship the first devices this fall.

At the conference, Space Monkey had already raised $750,000. That amount was rolled into the new seed round, which was led by by Google Ventures and Venture51. Here’s the full, incredibly long list of investors (or at least those who can be disclosed publicly):

• Polaris Venture Partners
• Morado Ventures
• Social + Capital Partnership
• Zelkova Ventures
• Data Collective (Matt Ocko)
• B-Squared Ventures
• TriplePoint
• Sky Dayton
• Benjamin Ling
• Nicolas Berggruen
• Jason Calacanis
• Bill Lee
• Steve Chen
• Ben Narasin
• Don Hutchison

APIs are marching into education, and it’s about time. Education is rife with legacy infrastructure, with one of the primary offenders being Student Information Systems (SIS). Schools use these systems to store huge amounts of sensitive student information (class lists, attendance, grades and allergies, etc.), but they differ widely from school to school, which, among other things, forces developers to manually integrate with each unique system, making it difficult for their cool educational software or apps to achieve any kind of scale.

LearnSprout, a recent graduate of the education-focused startup accelerator Imagine K12 wants to help both schools and developers unleash those opaque educational data silos with the help of a few clean, standardizing APIs. While the recently-launched startup is not alone — Y Combinator-backed Clever launched a similar platform last month — LearnSprout now has the benefit of some notable investors to help fuel its fires.

The startup is in the process of closing its first round of funding with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Formation 8 (a new VC fund headed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale), Benjamin Ling, Philip Fung and Luke Shepard — to name a few. LearnSprout is in the process of adding a few more investors and is hoping to cap the round at around $1 million.

LearnSprout is also one of eight companies (and the only education startup) to be accepted into the inaugural cohort of Code For America’s accelerator program, which provides early-stage businesses with a grant, mentoring, and introductions to tech-savvy decision makers in local and federal government in an effort to help them grow civically-minded businesses.

Founded in January this year by Franklyn Chien, Anthony Wu, and Joe Woo, veterans of Facebook, Google, and Microsoft respectively, today LearnSprout is already working with 40+ schools and another 200+ schools are in the pipeline, and it’s begun to generate revenue to boot. All in all, not bad progress for six months.

But, as it so often goes, this isn’t where the team initially planned to end up. Chien tells us that, going into Imagine K12, LearnSprout had begun to build a modern learning management system-student information system hybrid that was intended to be v2.0 of Blackboard — something not too dissimilar from Instructure’s Canvas. But, it wasn’t long before the founders came to the realization that getting schools to dump their existing systems was basically a fool’s errand.

Rather than shell out money for new systems or software, schools tend to make due with what they have, adding ad hoc fixes as they go. There are over 100 student information systems in operation today, each of them built in Frankenstein ways to save costs. Teachers end up having to manually enter data themselves, making transferring, aggregating, and gaining insight into these data silos a nightmare.

Because schools aren’t eager to budge, the best fix is to give them (and developers) one set of APIs that allows them to keep their systems in place while making their data portable and fluent in a universal language. The startup’s APIs essentially create a secure channel through which developers and schools can transfer the sensitive information from their student information systems.

LearnSprout removes the pain for developers of having to manage CSV files, exports and FTP servers, and removes manual data entry. As extra incentive for schools, LearnSprout handles all data integration with the student information systems itself, whether it’s CSV or direct database connection. The team is also providing schools with two applications that come on top of its APIs and work right out of the box — one of them being a school-wide emergency notification system, for example. The purpose of including these apps, Chien says, is to showcase the power of the platform, give schools a way to get used to the new system, while giving developers an archetype with which to work.

LearnSprout also handles data duplication, serving developers and schools with only the most up-to-date information. What’s more, for schools, it’s all free. LearnSprout offers them one-click install to get them started, charging developers either with a flat fee or offering a revenue share based on the number of integrations. If they bring a new school to LearnSprout, however, integration is free. Right now, Chien says that the startup is already working with about 70 percent of the SIS in operation in the U.S. and is hard at work on covering the remainder.

In terms of its plan going forward, the team is already thinking beyond the U.S., eyeing tons of potential abroad and plans to leverage contacts from Andreessen and Formation 8 to begin taking international steps.

You can find LearnSprout at home here, or check out their pitch at Imagine K12′s Demo Day below:

For industry people who keep up with the daily technology news cycle of incremental feature updates, startup launches, and seed funding stories, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture of how tech has changed how the world operates. So sometimes, it’s fun to just step back and realize how crazy something that’s happening today would seem to someone who time-traveled from, say, 100 years ago — or even how improbable it would seem to yourself just five years back.

To wit: People are now signing $100 million contracts not with a pen, but with a finger. And it’s not because they’re signing in blood. It’s because they’re using an iPad.

Now, digital signatures are nothing new — surely anyone who has received a UPS package or used a credit card at Walgreens in the past few years has done a similar thing. But when it comes to huge money and major contracts, it always takes a bit longer for people to adopt digital tools. But from the looks of one very large professional basketball contract made this week, it looks like when it comes to digital signatures, the tide has turned from physical to virtual even at the highest levels.

Here’s a picture of Deron Williams signing his five-year-long, $98 million contract to play with the Brooklyn Nets on an iPad using the SignNow app:

And of course, he Tweeted the moment too:

Officially a Brooklyn Net! Signed my contract on an iPad Just thank God for this wonderful Opportunity #HelloBrooklyn lockerz.com/s/223996151—
Deron Williams (@DeronWilliams) July 11, 2012

It’s funny. Just a few years ago, a good friend of mine’s father bought her an expensive Montblanc pen when she graduated from law school and landed her first job as an attorney, telling her: “You can’t be signing million-dollar contracts with a 10 cent Bic pen.” It was a really thoughtful gift, and at the time it made perfect sense. But nowadays, the rise of the iPad has made it so that pens may not be needed at all.

Changes like that are pretty cool to step back and think about — and they really make you wonder, “What’s next?”

In case you’re wondering, the title and feature image of this post is a bit of an homage to this Tumblr, which I discovered today thanks to an enthusiastic Tweet from TechCrunch’s founding father Michael Arrington.

Twitter finalized a major overhaul of its mobile site today aimed at users on feature phones and older browsers. In a blog post, the Twitter design team wrote that they built a “lighter-weight, faster client that looks and feels like twitter.com and our mobile apps.”

The new site is much cleaner and is very similar to the browser and app interfaces, allowing the company to deliver the best version of its product across more platforms. This comes on the heels of yesterday’s release of new Twitter mobile apps for iOS and Android.

The results of Twitter’s nine week project brings mobile support to thirteen different browsers for thousands of different devices. On the blog, the team writes about working to provide users with a “consistent experience on any device.” The new site can scale from screens as small as 240 x 240 pixels up to desktops. In an effort to accomodate slower networks and different browsers, the site is optimized for browsers with javascript turned off and offers page sizes that are up to 63% smaller than the old version.

Some of the devices Twitter used for testing

After studying how people were using the mobile site, from analyzing how often they Tweeted to how often they refreshed or loaded more Tweets, the designers sketched on paper and jumped into testing and tweaking versions. The team says they tested the mobile site on over 300 different devices. They noted that new features, such as JavaScript support and enhancements for widescreen, are coming soon.

Correction (3:03 PM): An earlier version of this story stated that “Twitter announced a major overhaul of its mobile site today.” Twitter actually announced this change in May; today, Twitter announced that it has been fully rolled out and released statistics and information about the new mobile site.

General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz have given $4 million in Series A to stealth startup Parlay Labs we’re hearing, with General Catalyst leading the round. Notable angels also in the round include YouTube’s Shishir Mehrotra, Drew Houston and Xobni founders Matt Brezina and Adam Smith.

The newest member of the groundswell of enterprise communication startups, which includes TCDisrupt winners Yammer and UberConference, Palo Alto based Parlay Labs wants to “reinvent the way people are communicating at work” according to its website.

While it’s difficult to parse exactly what this may mean, I’m going to make an educated guess and say they too are trying to improve the extremely broken conferencing space which, as anyone who’s ever been on a conference call can attest, is extremely broken.

Parlay Labs is the first post-acquisition project from Docverse founders Shan Sinha and Jeremy Roy. Acquired by Google in 2010, Docuverse was a digital library of documents which eventually ended up bolstering Google Cloud Connect. Sinha ran Google Enterprise Apps until he and Roy left Google a month ago to focus on Parlay.

The company has a strong engineering team, comprised of other Ex-Googlers in addition to people from Apple, Microsoft and the MIT and Stanford-educated co-founders. They’re going to need it. From what we’re hearing, the team is experiencing “aggressive growth” and is hyper-focused on refining the product before its public launch.

Defining an energy efficiency strategy can be challenging for big organizations with multiple large buildings. The Department of Veterans Affairs announced today that it has installed energy analysis SPARC520 equipment for its Washington, D.C. headquarters.

SPARC, based in Charleston, South Carolina, has a diverse portfolio of products that includes human resources tools for employee engagement and interviewing optimization, as well as an open source private app store solution. Its SPARC520 product, named after the light spectrum wavelength at which the human eye sees green, provides real-time energy usage data monitoring, analysis and forecasting. The company employs close to 200 people, most of whom are software engineers.

“Our goal as a company is to use our talents as software product developers to solve things that suck,” said CEO Eric Bowman.

At the VA’s 11-floor headquarters, SPARC520 installed 107 clamp devices that monitor the building’s electricity, water and natural gas usage. Each clamp goes over the top of a wire to measure flow-through and has 27 data collection points, providing a total of 2,889 data collection points throughout the building. This data is fed to SPARC520′s analytics platform, where real-time energy usage can be viewed on the web or on an iOS device.

In addition to real-time data, SPARC520 offers forecasting based on current and historical data, mapping out various scenarios that make it clear which adjustments will have the greatest energy-saving impact.

There’s also an element of gamification built in, allowing employees to compete against each other to reduce energy usage. When SPARC implemented this in their own building, they saw energy costs decrease by 75%, Bowman said. So far, SPARC520 said they’ve identified over $3.5 million in potential energy savings over 5 years at the VA headquarters.

The latest spat between a pay TV provider and a content company has gotten ugly, with both DirecTV and Viacom taking to the web, pointing fingers and calling each other names. That’s to be expected, in this day and age, as cable and satellite subscribers become innocent bystanders in the big fight over how much money these corporate behemoths make.

Usually, though, these fights only matter to the subscribers who pay a certain cable or satellite provider, and only really when their favorite channels go dark. In the case of DirecTV and Viacom, however, the carriage dispute has a lot more collateral damage, as it affects pretty much anyone who enjoys watching select MTV and Comedy Central shows online.

Like some other pay TV providers before it, DirecTV has taken the unusual approach of telling subscribers that they can easily access a lot of the shows that have gone dark on the web. And in a counter-move, Viacom has begun playing hardball, by taking down that very same online programming. There’s only one problem: It’s not just DirecTV subscribers who can’t watch those shows online — the takedown applies to everyone else, as well.

As spotted by BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield earlier today (free registration required), Viacom has begun blocking access to certain key shows online, including The Daily Show and Jersey Shore. (Interestingly enough, the takedown doesn’t appear to affect Viacom programming that appears on other sites — like, for instance, The Daily Show episodes on Hulu. A Hulu spokesperson declined to comment on whether its licensed programming would also be affected.)

The move is surprising, in part because Viacom — and particularly MTV Networks and Comedy Central — have been long-time proponents of putting full-length shows online. Early on, it made every episode of South Park available for viewing on the web, and also made it extremely easy for The Daily Show and Colbert Report fans to watch the shows online not long after they aired.

But it also speaks to one of the key issues that stands between programmers and distributors every time they re-up their contracts. And that is, why should a satellite provider like DirecTV pay billions more for content that is available for free (or cheap) online?

Frankly, that question isn’t getting any easier to answer, especially as Viacom has licensed programming from flagship network Nickelodeon to Netflix and Amazon. Some believe that those deals are part of the reason for a recent decline in ratings at the children’s programming network. Yet despite that decline — and despite ready availability of Viacom programming elsewhere online — DirecTV claims is being asked for a 30 percent increase in what it pays for Viacom programming.

As our content is scattered across sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, the idea of a single, standalone website is starting to feel a bit quaint. On the consumer side, we’re seeing that with products like About.me and Flavors.me, which try to unify your various social identities in one place. Now a digital agency called Sparkart is tackling the problem from the brand and business side, with a product called Storyteller.

Sparkart founder and CEO Naveen Jain says that Storyteller “is not a toy” — you need basic development skills in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to use it, because you’re building sites that have the branding and functionality that you want. Right now, he says if website developers want to integrate content from other sites, they have to either manually integrate with the API of each and every site, or wait for their content management system to add the relevant upgrade or plug-in. Then, once they’re integrated, they’d have to keep track of any changes to the API and its policies. With Storyteller, on the other hand, they can access data from other sites while the platform does all the “heavy lifting.”

This was, apparently, something that Sparkart created for itself, having built websites for 300 customers including Bon Jovi, The Killers, Slipknot, Keith Urban, Ultimate Fighting Championship, and America’s Cup. Jain says the agency will be using Storyteller for every website it creates going forward. The team gave me a quick demo of the product by building a Bon Jovi site — since I’m not a developer, the product is a bit hard to judge, but they did get a nice-looking website up with YouTube videos, Tumblr posts, and more, in just a few minutes.

Storyteller is launching today in an invite-only beta. Jain says that he eventually plans to spin the product out into a separate business, so that he can avoid the problems (as he calls it, “a Jekyll-and-Hyde effect”) that agencies face when they get into the product business.

Facebook has finally redesigned Events so you don’t miss another party, birthday, or cool get-together your friends are going to. Today the site launches the Events Calendar so you can see what coming up weeks in advance, and a List view that highlights each day’s birthdays, RSVPs, and suggested events (though these links won’t work until you get the rollout.

The redesign started as a Hackathon project a year ago and will replace the old Events for all users over the next few hours. You’ll access the new look the same as before, through the” Events” link in left-side navigation menu of your home page.

Maybe Google+ launching a high-tech Events feature lit a fire under Facebook. In any case, the new Facebook Events straight up works without getting too flashy or complicated.

Facebook Events has become the defacto way people organize parties with friends and promote shows at clubs, concert halls, and art galleries. Yet beyond a few improvements to the event wall and invites system, plus the launch of the awesome Suggested Events tab, the feature has largely looked and worked the same for years.

In fact, Facebook boosted the need for this redesign awhile back when it started only showing the current day’s birthdays on the home page, instead of those coming up over the next few days. That meant if you happened to not log on, you could forget to post well wishes on a close friend’s wall — an emergent behavior that’s become so prevalent, it’s essentially a social contract now.

Calendar View

Rather than having to scroll down through each upcoming event’s title to see ones in the future as before, Calendar View lays out all your RSVPs in front of you on a set of giant grids. Events and birthdays are listed in each day’s box, and can be hovered over or clicked through for details.

Upcoming months can be seen by endlessly scrolling down. Any pending invitations are shown at the top alongside buttons for accessing past events. In an nifty little extra, if you’re tagged in a photo or check-in at an event, those will show up in that day’s box too.

List View

Here you’ll see a day-by-day summary of birthdays, events you’ve been invited to, and Suggested Events based on what your friends are attending, what’s going on at venues you check in at, and events hosted by Pages you Like. Little calendars on the left assist with navigation. You can respond to invites and leave birthday posts on friends’ walls all in-line so there’s no need for constant jumping in and out of windows.

For those who get way too many invitations, you can now one-click an ‘x’ next to an event to delete from your list. Meanwhile a gear in the top right lets you view a dedicated list of your invites and export your events to Apple iCal, Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar.

And as a cute added bonus, Facebook now shows the actual date in the Events icon, rather than constantly showing “31″.

A deeper integration with Facebook Photos would certainly be appreciated at some point. Compared to the new Google+ Events’ “Party Mode” that lets attendees set their phone to automatically upload photos to the event page, Facebook’s feature seems low-tech. I’ve got a hunch a deep Facebook Events-Photos integration is in the works.

Overall, though, today’s update will be great for people with busy social lives and the most considerate of us who’d hate to miss even one friend’s birthday.

Facebook is often derided for alienating us by putting up digital barriers between friends. I disagree. Thanks to Facebook Events, even if you have some zany idea for a get-together or party that only 5% of your buddies would be interested, in minutes you can have a date to hangout live and in-person with dozens of friends. That’s something you couldn’t do with snail mail, telephone, or even SMS. This network truly is social.

 

FreedomPop, the ambitious startup devoted to bringing freemium internet to the masses, has been awfully busy lately. The last time they popped up on our radar the company had just put its WiMAX-capable iPhone sleeves on pre-order, but the team has been up to more than just churning out data-friendly cases.

In addition to working with Clearwire, FreedomPop announced earlier today that it has also inked a network access deal with Sprint, allowing their forthcoming devices to run on both the carrier’s 3G and LTE networks.

Before we go any further, here’s a quick recap on FreedomPop — the service will sell wireless equipment (think USB modems or the aforementioned iPhone sleeve) to users, as well as give them 500MB of free data each month. Users can choose to pay for a higher monthly data cap, but can also transfer that bandwidth allowance between each other as needed, a level of control that traditional wireless carriers have typically shied away from.

Now, Sprint’s LTE network isn’t actually live yet (there are still a few days to go until then), but the inclusion of the carrier’s sizable 3G footprint seems like a critical gain for FreedomPop. As I’ve noted before one of the potential stumbling blocks for the company is their reliance on Clear’s WiMAX network — the coverage situation isn’t exactly ideal for a service that hopes to provide “every American” with free wireless Internet access.

While Sprint’s 3G service is typically slower than WiMAX (your mileage may vary, natch), it should do a fine job in filling out the myriad gaps in Clear’s coverage footprint. Well, for now anyway. FreedomPop marketing VP Tony Miller confirmed to GigaOM earlier today that once Sprint’s LTE network begins picking up steam, the company will slowly shift their focus away from Clear’s service.

Know this before you get your hopes up though– the production process for the so-called FreedomSleeve has already been completed, so the existing version of the case won’t be able to tap into either of the newly-announced networks. That said, there’s reportedly new slew of tri-mode devices capable of running on CDMA, WiMax, and LTE in the works, though it’s currently unknown whether existing FreedomPop users would be able to return their existing device in favor of a more robust one.

UPDATE: FreedomPop’s Tony Miller confirmed to me that users will be able to swap devices “at no additional charge and at any point.”

In fairness, the prospect of bringing free-ish Internet to every person in the U.S. may seem fairly kooky, but FreedomPop has garnered its share of attention. VentureBeat revealed yesterday, for example, that the startup has just closed a $7.5 million funding round led by Mangrove and DCM.

Stay.com says it can now put a city in your pocket, and in fact, it kind of can.

The Oslo, Norway-based company is launching mobile apps so users can access its social travel guides on their phones. And you won’t have to worry about getting a huge data roaming bill or having to stand around an unfamiliar city while waiting for a map to load — before you leave for your trip, you can download the guide (including a full map) for any of the cities to your phone, then it’s stored on your phone for whenever you need it.

The idea of downloadable travel guides isn’t exactly new. For example, NileGuide’s Guide to Go app includes offline access. What’s cool, however, is that Stay.com isn’t just giving you a document, but an interactive map that’s full of recommendations. Founder and CEO Joachim Paasche says that since the Stay.com apps use vector-based maps, they don’t take up all that much space (usually less than five megabytes). You can see content from TripAdvisor and TimeOut, mark locations that are of personal interest, request suggestions from friends, and see where those friends have checked in on Facebook. If you’re using the app in offline mode then go online again (say if your hotel has WiFi), you can open the app and it will automatically update and sync your data.

The company says there are now 116 cities in the system with a total of 21,000 location descriptions.

I’ve played with the app and above all, I was impressed by the speed. It took less than a minute to download the San Francisco guide, then I could open it, zoom in on a location, and scroll around without any noticeable lag — a nice change from the constant load times of the iPhone Maps application.

You can register for Stay.com directly from the app, so Paasche is hoping it brings a whole new audience to the service. You can download the iPhone app here and download the Android app here.

Stay.com – Social City Guides, Offline Maps from Stay.com on Vimeo.

Since more and more people are watching TV with their mobile phones and tablets in hand, brands and advertisers are increasingly faced with a big problem: How do you reach audiences that are turning to these second-screen devices whenever a commercial break comes on? To solve that problem, former Demand Media CTO Sean Muller founded iSpot.tv seven months ago, hoping to provide an elegant and mobile-first solution for reaching those audiences.

The company is still in stealth mode, so without giving too much away, Muller said the company was trying to find out how to connect TV campaigns to social media. But he did say that the startup has built is a a platform for brands to engage with audiences both on the TV and on social networks.

A number of Demand Media alums have put money into the startup, including Muller and Paul Stahura, who was founder and CEO of eNom before selling to Demand Media and becoming its president and COO. Stahura, who recently raised $100 million for new gTLDs as the founder and CEO of Donuts.com, also sits on the iSpot.tv board. The round also included participation from Pagewise co-founder David Hehman, as well as Hillclimb Media founders Doug Colbeck and Bryce Stevens, who also sold their companies to Demand Media. Howard Love, founder of LoveToKnow, and Fred Hsu, founder of Oversee.net, also invested, along with a few other angels.

It’s still early days for iSpot.tv. The company has five full-time employees in Seattle, and it expects initial trials to begin within the next month or two in the local TV market. Once those trials are done, it’s planning to raise additional funding to make the technology available to marketers in other areas.