Category: Tech news

Lenovo’s new ThinkPad X230 is a thin and light laptop with an Ivy Bridge processor.
Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

A little over a year ago, just before ultrabook mania got its start, we crowned Lenovo’s ThinkPad X220 a near-masterpiece of ultralight laptop design. The 12.1-inch, 3.3-pound laptop had power to spare, nearly five hours of battery life with the stock 6-cell unit, and a solid array of ports.

Now, Lenovo is back with an update, the ThinkPad X230, which aims to make you forget all about its big brother.

If you aren’t paying attention, you might not notice many of the upgrades. For starters, the 12.1-inch screen has grown to 12.5 inches, though resolution at 1366 x 768 pixels remains unchanged. The CPU is now an Ivy Bridge model (2.6GHz Core i5), and two of the three USB ports have been upgraded to USB 3.0.

Otherwise, you still get integrated graphics, 4GB of RAM, and even the same size hard drive (320GB). For some unknown reason, Lenovo has even left the enormous ExpressCard slot intact (remember those?), alongside an SD card slot, VGA, and a DisplayPort output. The unit weighs in just a shade over its predecessor, at 3.4 pounds. The price: 50 bones less than the X220, at $1250 (as configured).

At Lenovo, black is the new brushed aluminum. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Performance figures are a bit muddy at this point. I haven’t seen enough Ivy Bridge machines to know how benchmarks will compare, but the X230 is at least a bit faster than the pokey IdeaPad Y480 I reviewed last month, despite having a lower-class Core i5 instead of an i7. The graphics benchmarks are hardly inspiring, but it’s impressive that many of the tests would run at all considering the unit has no discrete graphics card.

At barely 4 hours of video playback time, battery life has taken a hit from the nearly 5 hours the X220 offered, but the larger screen may be the culprit there. (Brightness is about identical this time out.)

And then there’s the keyboard. With its Ivy Bridge units, Lenovo is migrating all its laptops to island-style keyboards. And if you’re familiar with the IdeaPad keyboard, you know what to expect. Like many, I’m already nostalgic for the old design. Lenovo’s chicklets are better than most vendors’ renditions, but I continue to make more mistakes typing on them than on the rightfully lauded old keyboard. The backlash, I’m sure, is going to be palpable.

Like the X220, Lenovo also saddles the X230 with another iffy clickpad that is incredibly small and still a bit buggy (though nowhere near the nightmare of the X220′s). It doesn’t miss clicks like last year’s model, but it just doesn’t track perfectly. Fortunately, the pointing stick remains as an option for red nubbin devotees.

None of this niggling is likely to matter much, as the X230 now finds itself in a difficult position where an ultrabook like the MacBook Air is more powerful, lighter, and packs in a bigger screen — all for just $50 more. Even Lenovo has its own ultra-sexy, ultra-slim X1 Carbon getting ready to reinvent this category this summer. On its merits, the X230 is far from a bad machine. It is, however, a laptop that suddenly finds itself without much of a market anymore.

So, who’s ready to drop four figures on one?

WIRED Configuration covers all the bases, particularly for business users clinging to legacy peripherals. Street cred in the boardroom.

TIRED Suddenly thick and heavy in an ultrabook world. Disappointing battery life vs. its predecessor. Acceptable but uninspiring performance. Keyboard switcharoo will cause pitchforks to be branded.

Indiegogo, the website that allows people to contribute money to the causes, artistic projects, and small companies they support, has attracted a good amount of success in the four years since it was founded in early 2008: 100,000 projects have been funded in more than 196 countries through the site. In the process, it’s even helped to put the concept of “crowdfunding” well into the mainstream. But Indiegogo is officially making it clear that it’s aiming to make an even bigger impact — and the company has closed on $15 million in brand new funding to do so.

Indiegogo’s new $15 million round, which serves as the company’s Series A, was led by Insight Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with the participation of existing Indiegogo investors Metamorphic Ventures, MHS Capital, ffVenture Capital, and Steve Schoettler. According to the company, this is the largest funding round of a crowdfunding platform to date. Prior to this, Indiegogo’s only outside funding was a $1.5 million seed round it raised about one year ago.

We talked to Indiegogo’s co-founder and CEO Slava Rubin to hear about the new funding from the horse’s mouth, and you can watch our interview with him in the TechCrunch TV video embedded above. Indiegogo is based in San Francisco, but Rubin was doing some business in New York this week, so we were happy to have him join us via Skype.

Making a wide scope wider

In many ways Indiegogo’s most well-known and visible competitor is Kickstarter, but the company is keen to point out what sets it apart from other players in the space. For one thing, Indiegogo is active globally in 196 countries and accepts all types of projects, whereas Kickstarter is focused only in the United States and aims to keep its project limited to the creative space. “We’re completely open to any idea, any campaign, and any idea in the world without any judgement,” Rubin said. With the new funding, it will just work on expanding that reach further.

Equity-based crowdfunding is a definite option

Another option for expansion is the equity-based crowdfunding that will soon be made possible by the JOBS Act signed into law by President Obama this past spring, which makes it possible for non-accredited investors to receive equity for investing money into private companies.

Up until now, only accredited investors have been able to receive financial stakes in companies that they funded — so today sites like Indiegogo only allow for non-equity based funding. Once the crowdfunding portion of the JOBS Act is approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is expected to occur in late 2012 or early 2013, equity-based funding will be legal for all investors. According to Rubin, Indiegogo could very well opt to open itself up to those kinds of transactions when the time comes.

Growing in numbers, too

The new funding will be put toward general growth initiatives, too. Right now Indiegogo has about 20 employees — up from 5 people just a year ago — and it expects that headcount to grow in the weeks and months ahead, Rubin said. The company has been generating revenue from day one, so that stands to grow in the future as well; so it will be exciting to see what it does with this new, big influx of outside capital.

Two years ago, HBO introduced HBO Go, giving fans a way to access all of their favorite programming online, on tablets and mobile devices, and increasingly on connected TV platforms. For those of us who have had a chance to use it, HBO Go is nothing short of a revelation, as viewers can watch pretty much every episode of every HBO original series ever made, as well as a pretty good selection of new release movies.

The problem is that access to the services is limited to those who have HBO as part of their pay TV subscription: There’s currently no way to purchase the HBO Go component without spending upwards of $100 on cable or satellite. That’s led many to argue that HBO is leaving money on the table, by not trying to appeal to some of the cord cutter set. Worse, lack of access is driving some of its biggest fans to piracy, with Game of Thrones far and away the most pirated TV show this season.

But how much would people actually pay for HBO Go, if it were an option? Earlier this evening, web designer Jake Caputo tried to find out, by creating a website called takemymoneyhbo.com. The site implored users to tell it just how much they would pay for a standalone subscription to HBO Go, tweeting out whatever dollar value you said that you’d pay.

(For what it’s worth, I said that I’d pay $19.95 a month for a standalone subscription, even though I currently borrow access on my family’s cable account.)

Caputo’s site received more than 12,000 visits in just the first two hours, and it set off a string of tweets declaring just how much users would pay for a standalone HBO Go subscription. But there was just one problem — while Caputo’s site was built to attract the attention of HBO execs watching Twitter, he wasn’t actually capturing any of the data associated with what people said they’d pay.

Thankfully, someone else figured out a way to do so: Coder Dominic Balasuriya created a script to capture and analyze the amounts being tweeted out by users.

Using the Twitter API, his script grabbed the most recent 1,500 tweets that mentioned the #takemymoneyhbo hashtag. It ignored retweets, and grabbed the dollar amount given. Any tweets that said they’d pay more than $50 were also ignored, since some were obviously intentionally high to skew the results.

What’d he find? The script was run twice, fifteen minutes apart, and the results were remarkably similar:

• Wednesday 5:10AM GMT/UTC +0:00 – $12.06, from 1063 data points.
• Wednesday 5:24AM GMT/UTC +0:00 – $12.30, from 1071 data points.

The average person would pay $12 a month, or about $145 a year, for online-only access to HBO content. But is that something HBO would be interested in? And is it really leaving money on the table?

HBO currently has about 29 million subscribers, and reportedly receives around $7 or $8 per subscriber per month. So HBO could, theoretically, get more per subscriber than it’s currently making. But that doesn’t include the cost of infrastructure needed to support delivery of all those streams, including all the CDN delivery and other costs that would come with rolling out a broader online-only service.

More importantly, it wouldn’t include the cost of sales, marketing, and support — and this is where HBO would really get screwed. Going direct to online customers by pitching HBO Go over-the-top would mean losing the support of its cable, satellite, and IPTV distributors. And since the Comcasts and the Time Warner Cables of the world are the top marketing channel for premium networks like HBO, it would be nearly impossible for HBO to making up for the loss of the cable provider’s marketing team or promotions.

Think about it: Every time someone signs up for cable or satellite service, one of the inevitable perks is a free six- or 12-month subscription to HBO. And those free subscriptions are rarely, if ever, cancelled once the trial period ends.

What would happen if HBO no longer had the pay TV industry’s marketing team propping it up all the time? The results would be disastrous, and there’s no way that HBO could make up in online volume the number of subscribers it would lose from cable. Which is why, even though some users would actually pay more for access to HBO Go without all the other cable channels, you won’t see it show up as a standalone service anytime soon.

MOG, the popular streaming music service, today announced that it is partnering with Ford to bring its service to the car manufacturer’s SYNC AppLink platform. This will allow Ford drivers with compatible cars, including the 2012 Fiesta, Fusion, F-150, Super Duty, E-Series, Mustang and Expedition, to use their voice and in-dash controls to control the MOG app on their USB-connected smartphones.

Through AppLink, drivers will be able to access MOG’s on-demand radio features, program radio station presets based on artists they like, select playlists and play songs from Billboard’s Top 50 by using voice commands like “similar artists,” “list playlists” and “top songs.”

Despite rumors earlier this year that MOG was getting acquired by HTC, this acquisition hasn’t materialized yet. The service currently offer users access to about 15 million songs on its iOS and Android app. The arrival of Spotify has obviously put some pressure on MOG, but the service, which was founded in 2005, continues to hum along nicely. To use MOG’s mobile apps, users have to subscribe to the service’s $9.99/month plan.

Other music-related apps currently supported by AppLink include Pandora, iHeartRadio, Stitcher SmartRadio, Slacker and NPR. Twitter fans who can’t bear drive without knowing that you are still connected to their favorite social network can also use OpenBeak to have AppLink read incoming tweets to you. I had a chance to test Pandora and AppLink in a 2012 Mustang earlier this year and it worked surprisingly well. It takes a moment to learn the voice commands, but once you have those down, the voice recognition system tends to work very well.

While Ford makes a developer kit for AppLink available to developers, though, the program is still invite-only and the company is only working with a few select developers right now. Eventually, though, the company hopes to expand this program significantly.

Earlier this week, by the way, Ford also announced that it is bringing AppLink to markets across Asia Pacific and Africa. SYNC, Ford also announced, is coming to Taiwan soon.

Before Brightcove, Ooyala, or KIT Digital, there was thePlatform: The online video platform was founded in 2000, long before online video was a thing. Since then, thePlatform has been mainly focused on the upper end of the market, helping cable companies, television networks, and other large media players to get their content online and on a number of connected devices.

To do that, thePlatform has built out its mpx platform, which is basically a content management system for video distribution. It provides more or less everything a client might need, including video ingest, transcoding, storage, authentication, and monetization capabilities. The idea is that publishers can upload their video assets once and have them sent all over the place, based on the platforms, devices, and apps that a content owner might own, or syndication partners that they might have. Now thePlatform is looking to make many features of that platform available to those on smaller budgets, and hopefully to steal some share from competitors Brightcove and Ooyala.

Starting at $499 a month, thePlatform’s mpx Essentials offering gives enterprise customers all they need to get up and running and serving video without uploading those videos online. It’s actually rolling out two new products for mid-market customers: The $499 plan includes 500 videos and 500 GB of storage, 4,200 GB of streaming bandwidth per year, and features that include auto-transcoding, video clipping and scheduling, geo-restriction, delivery via Akamai, social sharing and YouTube integration.

Those who need a more robust product can pay $1,500 a month for 2,000 videos (2,000 GB) of storage, 18,000 GB of data transferred per years, and all the same features as the starter package. They also receive custom media panels, a player development kit, ad policy support, and more advanced access restrictions, among other features.

So this is a bit of a departure for thePlatform. It’s been an independent subsidiary of Comcast since 2006, but most of its clients read like an A-List of the digital media elite: It counts its own parent company, as well as Time Warner Cable, Cox, Cablevision, Liberty Global, Rogers, NBC Local Media, A&E Networks, PBS, Travel Channel, and E!, as customers.

But at the same time, it’s not clear exactly how big the middle market is, in terms of revenue. Brightcove, for instance, had more than 4,200 customers at the end of the first quarter, but less than $20 million in sales during those three months. And Brightcove’s “Express” product — aimed at the small- and medium-sized business market — starts at just $99 a month.

In the grand scheme of things, and in the short term, it’s not a huge market. But thePlatform sees a huge opportunity as online video becomes even more ubiquitous than it already is. And it’s betting that there are a ton of big brands, media agencies, and the like who want to control distribution of their videos beyond just uploading them to YouTube.

Intrigued upon hearing about these StartupWeekend vets, I managed to track down Cannon.fm founders Ryan Cox and Mat Marcum in order to get a little more info about their interesting and imminently launching streaming music startup.

Cannon.fm is like a lot of other streaming music services out there — Pandora and Spotify come to mind — however this lean team of eight or so have an interesting spin on the concept: the content is comprised completely of local music. Nary a Lady Gaga, Jay-Z nor Walkmen tune in the lot. All local music.

Brilliant, I say!

But will it work? I mean, building the streaming app and the service is probably the easy part and according to the team, it’s right on schedule to launch at the end of June during (or slightly before) Columbus OH’s epic, annual Bacchanal/Local Music Extravaganza known as Comfest.

The hard part will be signing up enough local contant to fill the airwaves with music. But these guys are hard at work. Indeed, right after we spoke, they hit the pavement and showed up at a local rock show and signed up 100 interested fans and 10 bands. Not bad for a couple of guys walking into a bar with a box of T-Shirts.

We covered some interesting ground in the video interview below like: how they are funded, whether or not they could end up becoming a record label, how will the service monetize, and what will they do with their analytics. And their demo (video below) shows some interesting advantages the service will have over rivals with national content (like a replay button).

I’ve seen some other music sites built around promoting unknown bands come and go. This one feels different to me though because network enabled mobile devices have finally become entrenched and, more importantly, because this concept is built around locale not only around style or influence. People love and take pride in their local music scenes and this could be the much needed apparatus to share that experience.

However, I do wonder about long term content curation. As much as I like to take pride in my local music scene, I’ll be the first to admit that not every band in that scene should be in it. Some of them suck. Will there be an initial deletion of simply awful music or will every single submission be allowed and merely eliminated in a Darwinian cycle?

In any event, they plan to eventually scale the service outside of their launch market in Columbus and bring it to cities all over. If it works out, fans of local music out there (like me) could be in for a great summer.

I’ve got my eye on this. We’ll see what happens.

This morning Zynga announced that it’s expanding its FarmVille franchise into an exciting new territory: Orientalism!

Yes, there’s a new FarmVille add-on called — wait for it — Jade Falls. Now, fantasy stories set in exaggerated “Asian” locales are a familiar part of popular culture. But at least Disney (Mulan), DreamWorks (Kung Fu Panda), and BioWare (Jade Empire) offered some creativity, humor, and nuance. Jade Falls is … something else.

If you read the company’s announcement, it’s like Zynga literally wrote it based on a checklist of tired Asian stereotypes. Dragons? Check. Pandas? Yup. Rice paddies? Naturally. And how about “exotic“?  Let’s go ahead and use it twice!

Yes, friends: Well-intentioned or not, this is racist.

For starters, the “Far East” is an antiquated European term from the 19th century. Last we checked, it’s 2012.

More broadly, Zynga is drumming up stereotypes that simply don’t apply in this day and age. As Asian Americans who grew up in or near white suburbia, this is the exact type of mass media that made us feel like we didn’t belong. (On the bright side, at least there weren’t any math jokes!)

For its part, Zynga says the game “underscores the team’s focus on listening to players and delivering new and meaningful experiences to the FarmVille franchise.” Because, of course, FarmVille players have been begging to farm on rice paddies — which “NEVER wither”, just like in real life.

We started to highlight all the “ZOMG, are you serious?” parts, but then realized we’d italicized the whole thing, so just read the rest:

Travel from your home farm to the mystical falls with an invitation from May – a local dweller who helps players uncover the secrets of the area. This exotic locale has new quests, rules and characters where players can earn “ZP” by planting, plowing and harvesting new plants including wasabi, rice and green tea. Players can decorate a new game board with amazing, new Asian-inspired buildings including palaces and floating castles. There are also a host of new animals to play with.

Ever wrestle a dragon or frolick with a panda bear? Yes? Wait.

Next time, just go ahead and call it General Tso’s Chicken.

Ellen Pao, the partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers who is suing the legendary venture capital firm for alleged gender discrimination and acts of retaliation she claims to have experienced during her seven year career there, has refused to speak to the press since news of the lawsuit first broke last month. But she broke her public silence Monday in a decidedly web-savvy way: She answered a question about her case on online Q&A site Quora.

In response to an anonymous Quora user who asked, “Did Ellen Pao quit KPCB after the lawsuit?” Pao wrote a simple response posted Monday afternoon: “No, and I don’t plan to quit.”

Not surprisingly, her answer has received a fair amount of attention — one of the comments is from well-known venture capitalist Dave McClure of 500 Startups, who wrote, “hang in there ellen .”

It appears that it was indeed Pao who wrote the response on Quora — she has been posting answers from the same account since mid-2010, mostly regarding venture capital and startups. When reached via email Pao declined to comment further, as she is still not speaking to the press.

In recent days, Kleiner Perkins has also spoken out publicly with their side of the case. In a message posted on the firm’s official website last week, longtime partner John Doerr wrote that while legal constraints prevent Kleiner from fully responding to the suit, the firm maintains that Pao’s claims are without merit. “We will vigorously defend our reputation and are confident we will prevail,” he wrote. He also pointed to Kleiner Perkins’ history as a pioneer of diversity and gender equality in the VC space. Kleiner Perkins just added another female partner last week, with the hiring of former Square executive Megan Quinn.

As of today’s launch Airtime is a one-on-one video chat network, but what about tomorrow? Co-founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning tell us “it’d be pretty cool” if Airtime became an app platform. The former Napster founders wouldn’t rule out the possibility of photo-sharing on Airtime either.

During the star-studded launch party we also got the stunning Olivia Munn, former host of Attack Of The Show, talking about whether Airtime’s just for geeks, or if your grandma’s going to get onboard.

Munn, who’s featured in Aaron Sorkin’s new HBO drama The Newsroom, said she sees Airtime having serious mainstream appeal. Her mom doesn’t quite get Skype, but Airtime is easier since there’s nothing to download. I think I made her a little uncomfortable asking about whether people would have fully-consenting cybersex on Airtime, but she did describe the founders as loving guys.

One thing Parker and Fanning don’t have love for is retreading old problems. While they hinted that any type of stored content might one day be sharable on Airtime, we shouldn’t expect it to become some ‘real-time Instagram’. Parker concluded:

“It seems like the right thing to do is tackle problems other people aren’t working on. Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you’re going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren’t quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.”

For more on Airtime, check out our coverage:

Face To Face: How Airtime Will Re-Humanize The Internet
Airtime Launches A Video Chat Network That’s The New Place To Hangout Online
Startup Launch As Celebrity Bonanza: Airtime’s Ritzy, Glitzy, Glitchy Debut

and for an idea of how epic the Airtime launch party was, here’s a picture of Parker and Fanning on stage with Olivia Munn, Joel McHale, Jim Carrey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Ed Helms:

Seattle-based Madrona Venture Group just announced that it has raised a $300 million fifth fund.

This is the firm’s fifth fund, and its largest yet. The firm says it had planned to raise $250 million, but the fund was oversubscribed, with most of the money coming from existing investors.

The new fund will follow Madrona’s existing strategy of early-stage (seed and Series A) investing, with a focus on companies in the Northwest. In the press release, managing director Matt McIlwain argues that “early-stage venture capital is a local business.”

Madrona had planned to announce the funding Thursday, but Bloomberg got the news first.

The firm says it has nearly than $1 billion under management and that it has had 33 positive exits, including Amazon.com, aQuantive, Classmates.com, Farecast.com. More recent investments include dogsitting marketplace Rover.com and location analytics company Placed.

I’ll update this post after I speak to McIlwain this evening.

Editor’s note: Steve Case is chairman and CEO of Revolution, as well as co-founder of AOL. Follow him on Twitter @stevecase.

For investors, Washington policymakers, casual observers of the stock market, and members of the media, the big story for entrepreneurs over the last few weeks has been the highly anticipated initial public offering of Facebook. While the largest tech IPO in history won the news cycle, there was an equally important, if not overlooked story for entrepreneurs brewing over on Capitol Hill.

A bipartisan group of senators joined together to unveil a bill called the Startup Act 2.0. Democrats Mark Warner and Chris Coons, and Republicans Marco Rubio and Jerry Moran, failed to read the memo stating that Washington can’t come together and pass meaningful legislation in an election year.  Startup Act 2.0 builds on the JOBS Act passed a few months ago, to improve the environment for entrepreneurs to create new businesses, expand existing companies, and create jobs across the country. The House of Representatives is taking up the legislation this week.

More than 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. were founded by immigrants or their children, and these firms alone employ over 10 million individuals. Some of our country’s most iconic brands – including IBM, Google, and Apple – were founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. And nearly half of the top 50 venture-backed companies in the U.S. had at least one immigrant founder. Yet, existing and arbitrary caps are forcing almost 20,000 American-educated degree holders to leave the U.S. every year, and in turn, join or set up competitor businesses in competitor countries. Imagine if we trained men and women at our Air Force and Naval Academies, equipped them with the tools they need to lead and succeed in battle, and then kicked them out of our country to join other militaries? In effect, that is what we are doing when we train the world’s most talented immigrants to innovate and start businesses at our great universities, then send them off to start companies in China, India, and South Korea.

The Startup Act 2.0 reforms high-skilled immigration law in three sensible ways. First, the Act creates a new STEM visa so that U.S.-educated students who graduate with a masters or PhD in science, technology, engineering or math can receive a green card to stay in country. Second, the Act creates an entrepreneur’s visa for legal immigrants to stay in the United States so long as they start a business that employs American workers. And third, the Act eliminates the per-country cap for employment-based immigrant visas which currently prevents American CEOs from having the flexibility to recruit the most talented workers.

Beyond addressing high-skilled immigration reform, Startup Act 2.0 provides incentives for investors to put capital into startups on the verge of growing and hiring. Instead of tax policy rewarding flash trades on Wall Street, the Act encourages investors to make a five year or longer financial commitment to a startup by lowering the investors’ effective tax rate. From a policy standpoint, this will allow our nation’s entrepreneurs to have more resources to innovate, expand, and hire.  Finally, the Act offers a research and development credit to offset some early taxes for entrepreneurs, helps universities transfer cutting-edge ideas from campus to the marketplace, and makes other sensible policy reforms.

Believe it or not, Washington is listening these days. When Senators Warner and Moran joined together last year to introduce the original Startup Act to help entrepreneurs, and when Senators Coons and Rubio joined together a few weeks earlier to introduce the AGREE Act to support new business formation, most political observers assumed the bipartisan duos were making a thoughtful gesture heading into a presidential election cycle, not offering legislation that had a chance.

Yet many of the proposals in the original Startup and AGREE Acts, along with additional recommendations by President Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, helped pave the way for the bipartisan JOBS Act. And in early April of this year, despite partisan gridlock, Majority Leader Eric Cantor stood with President Obama in the Rose Garden of the White House as the JOBS Act – which increases access to capital and removes costly regulatory barriers for startups at every stage of their growth – was signed into law. It was a rare bipartisan victory in Washington and an even bigger victory for entrepreneurs across the country.

The strong headwinds of a high-stakes election season will not make passing the Startup Act 2.0 easy, but its introduction of in the Senate, and now the House, suggests positive momentum on the issue. That’s a good sign, because in the last three decades, new businesses less than five years old created nearly forty million American jobs – all the net new-jobs created during that time period. Big corporations and small businesses on main street support current levels of employment and contribute to the dynamism of the U.S. economy, but new job creation is driven primarily by new businesses starting up. And in recent years, the trends are alarming: startups are down almost a quarter since 2007 and new startups are adding fewer jobs on average than ever before. Initial public offerings for small and middle-sized firms are down considerably, and other countries are rapidly improving their entrepreneurial ecosystems adding fresh competition to our firms. Simply put, the window to act is closing.

Let’s urge our leaders in Washington to defy the odds once again in 2012 so that our entrepreneurs can usher in a new wave of iconic, American companies.

Online food marketplace and subscription tasting box service Foodzie has been acquired by video eCommerce service Joyus, in a combination cash and stock deal.

“It was clear to me that video was the key to telling stories about food,” Foodzie co-founder Emily Olson wrote in an email to users, “The people, the place, and the craft behind the food. Video brings all of this to life.” Foodzie will eventually become “Joyus Food,” joining Apparel, Home, Beauty, and Lifestyle as a branded category. The company will continue to offer its signature tasting boxes on a one-off basis, but will discontinue its subscription service after July.

The seven person Foodzie team will all join Joyus, which uses online video to help customers discover things they’d like to buy across multiple verticals — sort like the Home Shopping Network, but on the Internet. Joyus, which has raised $7.9 million from Accel Partners, presents short video vignettes like “World’s Best Makeup Setting Spray” and “Essential Eats For The Backyard BBQ” in order to entice users to buy a collection of products. Foodzie raised a modest $1.02 million from Jeff Clavier and others prior to its acquisition.

Those with a keen eye might notice that the “Essential Eats For The Backyard BBQ” vignette actually stars Olson, who will be moving onto a video host role inside Joyus, becoming the chief curator of Joyus Food. Co-founder and husband Rob LaFave will take on a business development type position.

Olson also tells me that aside from a content standpoint, the company decided that Joyus would be the best fit based on the background of its founder and Chairman Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Former Googler Cassidy has been named one of the Most Powerful Women in Business by Fortune and has spent time at Amazon and as CEO of Polyvore for two years.

So she knows her eCommerce shiz I’m assuming.

Olson asserts that her vision for a successful eCommerce company is one that includes all verticals, and she feels like the Foodzie ethos has much more of a chance for success within a larger company. “There will be some new big players emerging. I think the big e-commerce businesses that will be built will involve multiple categories where you can leverage resources across categories,” Olson said, “but will take a different approach on discovery whether that’s video, flash sale, personalization or subscription.”

She’s super-positive about not just an end, but a new beginning for Foodzie after a four year-long journey.

“Four years ago, Rob and I lived in North Carolina far away from any entrepreneurial community,” Olson told me, about the rewards of getting Foodzie off of the ground and what she learned about creating a startup, “Through building this company we are now in the center of both a food and entrepreneurial community in San Francisco. Four years later, I see a huge amount of interest and demand for the good food we wanted to share with the world (that continues to grow) and that feels pretty awesome. Oh and did I mention I created a job where I eat good food for a living? Chocolate is the ultimate reward. “

The time has finally come.

After a brief stay in U.S. customs, HTC’s shining star — the One X — will be back on AT&T store shelves. The device was originally launched back on May 6, but a pesky ITC exclusion order meant additional shipments of the handsome handsets were kept from reaching their final destinations.

That means you can go ahead and order the device now, by clicking here, or stroll on into an AT&T store come June 10 with $200 in your wallet (or bank account).

If for some reason you’ve let the One X slip out of your consciousness, here’s a quick specs refresh:

• 4.7-inch 720p LCD2 display
• Android 4.0/Sense 4
• 1.5GHz dual-core processor
• 8-megapixel rear camera (1080p)
• 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera (720p)
• 32GB of internal storage; 1GB of RAM
• LTE a la AT&T
• 1,800 mAh battery

We’ll be hitting you up with a full review of this phone as soon as possible, if you happen to be on the fence. To all the rest of you– when you know, you know. Go forth and buy.

“Josh paid Aaron $391 for best Coachella weekend ever”. Peer-to-peer payments app Venmo thinks that when you pay someone back for drinks, dinner, or concert tickets, you’re really sharing memories, and your friends will want to see. So today it relaunches its iOS, Android, and BlackBerry apps with a news feed of payments now featured on the homescreen. [Update 6:00 EST: Venmo just published a blog post with some product change specifics.]

The redesign follows interface trends from Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram so Venmo is more familiar for first-timers, and puts the “Pay” button in the navigation bar so you can quickly settle your debts. It has also notified users via email that payments now default to publicly visible to other Venmo’ers. 42% of payments on Venmo were already being shared, even though its news feed was buried deep in the app.

Will the redesign be enough to fend off PayPal and help Venmo go mainstream?

Co-founder Andrew Kortina tells me Venmo will succeed where apps like Blippy that automatically shared your credit card charges failed. That’s because the average credit card purchase to a merchant is boring, but Venmo payments to friends “naturally involve a social experience. They’re all the fun things you’re going to talk about with friends later, so they make pretty good content.” Depending on how creative your friends are, Kortina could be right

Most people I know stick funny notes about those experiences in their Venmo payment descriptions. When we split a cab ride it’s “$10 for the party express”, getting reimbursed for a vacation house is “$200 for infinite memories”, or when one person pays for a group dinner and we all Venmo them it’s “$25 for food coma”.

But that’s an emergent behavior we learned from other early adopters that Venmo hopes will be transmitted through the news feed. A list of payments for “cab”, “condo”, and “dinner” isn’t going to challenge Facebook or Twitter as what you read in bed or on the bus.

Venmo should make sure to use its power to control what public updates appear in everyone’s feeds to highlight the most interesting payments so new users learn the style.

Some other changes in the new Venmo include user profiles where you can see your payment history with a friend and “trust” them to instantly charge you money, a better find friends feature including the ability to find other Venmo users you aren’t socially connected to, easier payment composing, and a faster overall feel.

While payments default to public now, you can easily switch them private in the settings or each time you pay. Some people might be uneasy about sharing Venmo payments, even though the apps give strong, persistent and ever-present controls. Scaring away some users is just the price Venmo will have to pay. Personally I liked Venmo as a utility first rather than a source of content, but the startup needs traction and the news feed could make it more viral.

The PayPal For Real Pals

Kortina says “PayPal was definitely an inspiration for Venmo, but we realized it got really popular because of eBay with payments between two people who didn’t trust each other. It wasn’t optimized for paying friends.” So Venmo is focused on getting social payments right where PayPal gets it wrong, and the news feed is a big bid for differentiation.

Kortina also thinks Venmo will beat payment apps from banks like Chase by being bank-agnostic. And the startup has little interest in being acquired as some financial institution’s “social / mobile play” because the team wants to keep innovating. The company is staying extra lean working out of “cosy” New York office to make sure it doesn’t burn through its undisclosed volume August 2011 Series A from Accel, RRE Ventures, Greycroft Partners, Lerer Ventures, as well as past funding from angels like Dave Morin and Dustin Moskovitz.

Eventually, though, Kortina foresees a business plan centered around users paying merchants like restaurants, and Venmo charging those merchants a small amount. Even grander, Kortina imagines that one day users could hook up their bank account to Venmo, and the app could then earn money for handling payments to other online marketplaces and saving them from credit card processing fees. That could turn Venmo into a payment layer for both virtual and physical purchases from Apple, Amazon, and more.

For now, though, paying from a bank account will stay free, and the 3% charge on credit card-funded payments is just to cover the fees Venmo pays. While the news feed is amusing, the core value of Venmo is that it just works. I can often pay a friend for half a cab ride faster than he can even finish paying the driver.

Near field communication and waving your phone around might be the future of payments, but for now, nothing lets me ditch cash and pay friends for anything better than Venmo.

You can download the redesigned Venmo app here for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry.

So this thing called the Internet makes it easy for pretty much anyone to have a voice and get messages across. The problem is that building beautiful, intuitive websites typically requires some knowledge of code. New York City-based Scroll Kit is trying to change that, with an intuitive web app that allows anyone to build compelling experiences with no background knowledge necessary.

Scroll Kit provides users with what’s basically an empty canvas on which they can place anything — text, pictures, whatever — and with one click publish it to the web. The product goes beyond most WYSIWYG web editors, allowing users to control pretty much every pixel of a page and rearrange page elements at will. While the tool proves that you don’t need to know how to code to build something beautiful, the real point is to show that even if you do know how to code, that doesn’t mean you will be able to build a great website.

Up until now, Scroll Kit has been operating pretty quietly, letting early users create sites and rolling out features to support the product. The two-person team, made up of Cody Brown and Kate Ray, basically issued a manifesto today on how the future of the web should be accessible to anyone. The three key tenets: providing an open canvas for development, letting users get feedback from people they know, and allowing people to “play” — that is, making website building actually fun.

So far, Scroll Kit users have primarily used the site to build personal websites and web-based birthday or holiday cards to share with friends and family. Everything that gets published is hosted by Scroll Kit, and the team continues to add new features. Those include custom domains — so that users can host their creations on their own URLs — as well as embeddable videos, and the ability for users to draw their own images. The service is essentially free, but Scroll Kit plans to make money by charging for additional features.

Scroll Kit is currently just the two founders, but it’s been funded and is looking to bring on more designers and engineers to further extend its capabilities. The startup raised just short of $225,000 in seed funding to do so.