Category: Tech news

Today, Facebook app discovery too heavily favors the loudest apps with the most users, so Facebook today announces it will soon launch the App Center, a single, personalized hub for discovering the highest quality Facebook-integrated games and utilities from across the web and mobile. And for the first time, Facebook is beta testing the option for developers to sell pre-paid web and HTML5 apps. You’ll be able to access App Center via the web or mobile, and you can send apps you discover on a the web to your littler devices.

App Center could be a huge boon to app growth on Facebook, especially for those that are beloved but not inherently viral.   With any luck, App Center will usher in an age where your news feed is filled with apps you actually want use, not just the spammiest ones or those with the biggest marketing budgets.

Unlike the unpersonalized app directory Facebook shut down a year ago, App Center won’t list every available app, just the ones with the highest customer ratings, engagement, session length, and voluntary sharing. App Center dynamically shows you different apps depending on your habits. If you play games, that’s what you’ll see. If you think those are a waste of time and only use utility apps like BranchOut or Open Graph apps like Foodspotting, those will be what appear.

Here’s a few more details on the App Center:

• Facebook is finalizing the App Center’s design. However, it looks like the homepage will show apps recommended based on those you already uses; apps frequently used by friends; lists of top, trending, and highest grossing apps, big “app of the week” style features, and the ability to browse by app category.
• Unlike the Apple App Store and other marketplaces, Facebook’s App Center won’t have objective rankings. Instead, each user will see a different set of apps, so it won’t have the same “king-maker” potential. This should lead developers to focus on general quality rather than install count or other specific metrics.
• The signals the cause certain apps to appear more or less frequently in App Center to any particular user include a customer ratings, session length, return visits, frequency of user shares from the app, similarity to apps you already use, usage by friends, and spam reports as well as overall user counts.
• App Center listings will replace the auto-generate App Pages that litter Facebook now. Developers will need to submit assets to populate their listing, which is what users will land on when they find an app through search or the App Center. Apps that following the listing guidelines and that are submitted before May 18th will receive priority for appearance when the App Center eventually launches.

• Developers will gain a new category of Insights metrics measuring the quality of their apps. They can monitor these to see how changes they make impact the enjoyment and engagement of their users.

• Facebook is not trying to compete with iOS and Android, but rather helps Facebook-connected apps on those platforms grow. Native mobile app listings in App Center will lead to the Apple App Store and Google Play marketplaces.

Bottlenose is a web-based smart social media dashboard that, in many ways, directly competes with Hootsuite and Tweetdeck. Bottlenose, however, puts a stronger emphasis on filtering your streams, both by implicitly learning about your interest and by giving you a sophisticated set of tools to create your own filters. Today, the company is launching version 3 of its service. This new version introduces a new design, as well as about 30 new features, including support for multiple Twitter and Facebook accounts, Google Reader, RSS feeds, Facebook pages and groups, as well as LinkedIn accounts.

That’s not all, though, the service is also expanding the way you can browse your streams. Previously, Bottlenose’s standout feature was its sonar tool, which gives you a nice visual overview of the topics people in your streams are talking about. Today, the company is adding a newspaper-like view to this that showcases the most popular and interesting stories in any given feed, as well as a more standard “Reader” view that gives you a simplified view of your streams. Sonar, too, is getting a bit of a redesign that makes it easier to read.

These two new tools, says the Bottlenose team, are just the first two apps it is launching on top of its platform. Among other things, this platform currently features real-time semantic filtering, natural language processing that’s specifically designed for streams, social search and an architecture that can process about 3000 messages per second per browser. In the long run, the team hopes to open up this platform to developers and create an ecosystem of third-party apps around it.

This update also introduces Bottlenose’s improved semantic filters, which now allow the service to automatically recognize over 140 different kinds of messages (opinion, complaint, video, questions etc.) and gives its users the ability to filter their messages accordingly.

Bottlenose now has about 50,000 beta testers who, according to the company’s own data, spend an average of about 60 minutes per day with the application. The site is currently still in private beta, but you can use invite code getsonar to get in today. The company plans to launch its public beta later this month.

Just yesterday, I finally moved the Google+ iPhone app atrocity to the back screen of my iPhone, and then the company goes out and does this. It makes the darned thing all pretty with a fresh update. And maybe even more usable? (I can’t confirm this as the update has somehow not hit my iPhone’s “Updates” section, but early reports are saying nice things).

If you’re at all familiar with Google’s previous iOS developments, you’ll remember how the Google+ iPhone app was a dog to use. I couldn’t even scroll through long comment threads with the screen locking up. Plus, it regularly crashed. And it kept pinging me with updates every time someone “Circled” me…although, apparently, that last one was by design.

Today’s update, then, is at least promising. Everything has been overhauled, UI-wise, including fonts, photos, the homescreen, visual elements, gradients – you name it. Perusing the screenshots, I’m actually going to give this one a shot, if only to see how well the Google iOS devs and designers have been sharpening their skills.

Google even promises a more “fast and fluid” experience, with specific tweaks that see “conversations fall into view as you move forward and backward in time, optical cues (like parallax) help the mind linger on individual posts,” and “important actions like +1 now float atop the stream, making it easy to endorse all your favorites.” Um, neat – but you had me at “fast.” I mean, really, I’d like to see that.

More concerning is the Google blog post announcing the update. It seems they’ve begun spiking the G+ Kool-Aid over there something fierce. Because who can seriously write lines like this, if not just a wee bit drunk?

“Sharing is deeply sensory. From cooking a favorite meal to getting together with friends, it’s the smells and the stories and the smiles that make human connections so essential.”

Either I’m missing the part about the G+’s app’s new smell-o-vision feature, or Vic Gundotra is just getting a little crazy. (Or hired a sub-par ghost writer, I suppose?).

Another gem from the blog post?

“Full-bleed photos and videos are cool. But you know what’s really cool? Content so immersive it remakes your mobile device into a rich carousel of beloved memories and breaking news.”

You know what’s really cool? Not stealing famous lines from the Facebook movie to promote your wannabe social network. Especially when there’s another movie line that’s so much more applicable.

Something else that’s strange: Why wasn’t the Android app overhauled, too?

Samsung Electronics has acquired mobile entertainment startup mSpot, according to a release issued today. Financial terms were not disclosed, but previous reports point to an acquisition price of $8.8 million.

mSpot let users stream and watch full-length movies on their mobile phones and on the web. The company had struck deals with Sony, Disney, Paramount, NBC/Universal, Lionsgate, Warner, Image Entertainment, and Screen Media Ventures to stream full-length movie rentals to users’ PCs and cell phones, allowing you to switch between both devices as you pick up and leave off throughout a movie.

mSPot also offered a cloud-based music service, which let you upload your music to the cloud, and stream this content from a multitude of devices, ranging from PCs, Macs, to the iPhone, iPad and Android. Last year the company launched a Pandora-like radio-service for personal music collections.

It was tough for mSpot to compete with the likes of Apple, Amazon and others in the music, movie and film streaming world so the exit is probably best for the startup. mSpot raised $2.3 million in funding from Trinity Ventures.

Samsung says mSpot’s technology will be used to provide an “entertainment experience of music, video and radio services for users of Samsung devices, while extending mSpot’s cloud and streaming solutions to a broader base of global entertainment fans…mSpot’s entertainment services will be a key integrated offering on newly announced Samsung mobile devices.”

The acquisition includes technology, assets and human resources under mSpot.

The last time TechCrunch heard from the internet-for-everyone proponents at FreedomPop, they revealed to us that they were working on an iPhone 4/4S case with a built-in WiMax radio that would give their users monthly access to free mobile broadband.

Now, according to my high-level source, the company is very close to bringing these things into the real world. Ahead of their beta launch slated for the summer, the company has just quietly begun to take pre-orders for the nifty iPhone accessory, though some of their plans for the product have changed over the past few months.

For one, they’re not running with the deposit model my source previously alluded to. Instead, they’re just going to sell the case itself for $99, and users can contact the company to return the unit and get their refund at any time. It’s functionally the same experience for the user, except without the accounting headaches that come with managing scores of deposits.

Perhaps the most notable tweak is that they’ve changed how much free bandwidth each user gets right out of the gate. The original plan was to offer 1GB of WiMax data access for free to users each month, but they’ve since dropped that “guaranteed monthly minimum” to 500MB. Sort of a bummer, I agree, but I’m told that they’re trying to err on the side of caution for now.

Glass-half-full types can take solace in the fact that the company will not neuter their free plan to below 500MB per month, and that the initial level of bandwidth allocation could actually grow over time.

If you’re concerned that 500MB/month isn’t that great, I’m also told users will be able to earn more bandwidth thanks to a social layer that FreedomPop is developing as part of the service. FreedomPop users will be able to connect with each other, and doing so nets them both of them an additional (sadly unspecified) amount of usage — especially popular (or smart) users can raise their monthly data allotment as high as 1GB.

Beyond that, users will also have the ability to share their location with their so-called FreedomFriends, but perhaps more importantly, users will be able to treat the amount of bandwidth they have at their disposal as a transferable commodity. If a friend of yours is bumping up against that 500MB limit and really doesn’t want to pay that $.01/MB overage fee, you’ll be able to transfer him or her a portion of your own monthly bandwidth allotment.

That, in short, is awesome. Larger wireless carriers like Verizon and AT&T sell access to their data networks in pre-configured chunks, which often leaves their subscribers paying for more data than they actually need in a given month. The real frustration comes from the fact that the users who have paid for X amount of data access per month can’t do anything with it — the counter just resets at the end of the month at that’s that. Giving users more control over what they pay for (or don’t pay for, as the case may be) is a smart approach to working with a dumb pipe, and could help give FreedomPop users a reason to stick around.

A brief video demo of the case in action (seen above) was also passed along, and it offers up our first real look at what the darn thing looks like. Given that the case was a WiMax radio and a separate battery jammed into it, it’s understandably thick, but it doesn’t look much more offensive than some of the other hefty iPhone cases floating around out there. It doesn’t look like it would do a great job actually protecting the iPhone nestled inside it, but hey — you can’t always get what you want.

People deal with the pain of online hotel search is different ways. For many, it means spending hours and hours of research spread across dozens of browsers tabs. In my case, I usually throw up your hands and say, “Screw it, I give up, I’m just going to pick an affordable hotel that doesn’t look completely terrible.” Either way, there’s something broken here — the fact that without being there, it’s hard to tell what a hotel is really like.

That’s what a startup called SimpleHoney is trying to solve. It was co-founded by Eric Nakagawa (a software developer who created the famous Icanhascheezburger blog) and Joyce Kim (a former corporate attorney who was previously CEO of Korean pop music site Soompi.com and is probably best-known to the startup community as co-host of the GigaOm Show).

Kim, who’s the company’s CEO, walked me through the sign-up process: When you create a SimpleHoney account, you’re asked for some basic information about your travel preferences, and the site starts recommending hotels based on those preferences. You can also fill out a longer quiz, answering questions like what you prefer to do on vacations and how long your trips normally last. Then you’ll be assigned a travel personality type (if you’ve ever taken a personality quiz on a dating site, this will be kind of familiar), which is used to refine the recommendations.

In other words, you’re no longer choosing a hotel based solely on the price and a star rating, but on how it actually fits with your personality and preferences. (And since SimpleHoney stores your personality data, you won’t be starting from scratch the next time you plan a trip.) Behind the scenes, the SimpleHoney team is doing a lot of footwork to make sure the hotel recommendations are accurate, including interviewing the management and visiting the locations.

If you think of yourself as someone who doesn’t have travel preferences, well, so did I, but as I filled out the survey, it backed up what Kim was telling me: “People don’t realize they have a travel style until they go through this.” You may not care about staying in the fanciest hotels, but there’s probably something that matters to you, even if it’s having the cheapest and most convenient experience.

One thing you may have noticed was missing from the description: Any information about where you’re traveling. That’s because SimpleHoney is a bit limited right now — it’s only listing hotels in San Francisco (where the company is based) and Hawaii (where Nakagawa is from, and where the team retreated to build the first version of the product). Also, the website doesn’t support bookings yet, instead pointing you to the hotels’ websites. That’s going to change this summer, first with the launch of booking capabilities, then with expansion to new markets.

Looking further down the road, Kim says SimpleHoney can also allow hotels to target deals based on user interests. For example, she’s a big surfer, so a hotel could try to lure her by offering free surfboard rentals. Another possibility she mentioned is collaborative trip planning, where you and your travel buddies get group recommendations based on everyone’s preferences.

If you’re interested in the idea but plan to wait until there are more features, you should still sign up now — SimpleHoney says it will charge a one-time $100 membership fee (because members will have access to unique “amenities, perks, experiences and rates”), but it’s waiving the fee for early users.

The company has raised a seed round from Socialcast and About.me co-founder Tim Young, Mochi Media co-founders Jameson Hsu and Bob Ippolito, former Middleware Company CEO Ed Roman, Causecast founder Ryan Scott, and 500 Startups’ Dave McClure. Nakagawa and Kim also invested.

Google today announced its latest update for Google Maps for Android with support for Google Offers. One interesting piece of this announcement that stood out was that Google Maps for Android users now get access to free Google Offers like a free coffee or dessert. Turns out, that’s actually just a small part of a wider update to Google Offers. Merchants across the U.S. – including towns where Google’s pre-paid offers haven’t launched yet – can now use a new self-service interface to create these free offers.

We talked to Google Offers’ director of product management Eric Rosenblum about these changes earlier today. According to Rosenblum, there are three major pieces to today’s announcement: a new way for users to use Offers, a new way for merchants to use it, and expanded distribution of offers through Maps for Android.

Until now, Google and most of its competitors in this market have focused on pre-paid offers. With this new free offering, Google wants to give merchants more opportunities to get new customers to their stores. Store owners can use a new self-service interface to set specific times for when and how long an offer should be valid. This new interface also gives merchants access to stock photography and other tools to fine-tune their messages. The coupons can be for money off, a percentage discount or a free product or gift.

This is pretty similar to what Groupon is doing with Groupon Now, the difference being that this is for free coupons and not for pre-paid offers. As Rosenblum put it, this is basically a way to give shoppers “a gentle nudge” to come and try out a new store, coffee shop or restaurant.

For potential customers, this means that they can now use the Google Maps for Android app (no word on whether this feature will come to other platforms anytime soon) to find these new offers and save them. For users who opt in to this, the app will also alert them whenever there’s a nearby offer.

We’re thrilled to announce that two of President Obama’s technology gurus, Todd Park, the US Chief Technology Officer, and Steven VanRoekel, its Chief Innovation Officer, will be joining us on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC on Wednesday, May 23. Big Data has been all the rage this year, and the government is a massive stockpiler of lucrative datasets in energy, health, and range of other fields. As former Silicon Valley brethren, Park and VanRoekel want to open up the floodgates on the government’s data warehouse in a way that’s useful to savvy entrepreneurs and the nascent “civic startup” industry (think Code for America).

After a joint-announcement of their upcoming agenda, Park and VanRoekel will be joined by myself and Matt Lira, the Digital Communications Director for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Lira has been an open government tour de force in Congress, helping to open up the beleaguered branch to legislative transparency and direct democracy.

While the panel will be mostly business, we’d be remiss if we didn’t also discuss the role technology has in the actual democratic process. For instance, Park’s predecessor, Aneesh Chopra, made inroads with platforms such as We The People, a petitioning tool that gave the public the same media access that the White House Press Corpse has to get answers from the President. We’ll discuss the federal government’s role in increasing the public’s influence on and access to policy.

We hope the panel will be especially valuable for attendees, as the panel was curated so entrepreneurs interested in big data, civic startups, and egovernment could meet the speakers and find out how to advance their ideas.

See you in New York.

Simple (formerly known as BankSimple), the startup with $13.1 million in funding to build a better banking experience for customers, has today introduced its first mobile application, surprisingly ahead of its public launch. Operating in private beta/invite-only mode for now, co-founder Joshua Reich says that anyone with a Simple account can now use the app, which had been limited to TestFlight distributions since its private launch last November.

With the iPhone app, Simple says the idea is to create something that’s on par with the online banking experience, not “an afterthought.” The iOS app lets you use all the tools you could on the web, and access them in a way that’s mobile-friendly. Everything is tappable, and there’s been a focus on making it quick to see the most critical info – nothing is more than a few taps away. Plus, after signing in, you don’t have to continually enter your username and password – instead, the app is protected by your 4-digit PIN code. And another nifty feature – you can deposit checks by taking a picture of them – something you can’t do on the web.

Simple has been covered by the media quite a bit, despite the fact that the service still operates behind closed doors – a testament, perhaps, to the growing desire for, as they say “a bank that doesn’t suck.” To be clear, however, Simple is not actually a bank – it’s working with FDIC-insured financial institutions to hold customers’ money, while it operates the user-friendly front-end for money management.

Reich acknowledges the demand for the service, and tells us that there are now over 100,000 folks on the waiting list, and Simple is letting people in on a first-come, first-serve basis. He says they’re not sure when they’ll finish with the invite list and open up to the U.S. public.

Any way to jump in line, we asked? “Either become an employee or marry an employee,” Reich joked. (Well, crap).

The company was co-founded by Reich (CEO), CFO Shamir Karkal and CTO Alex Payne, the latter a notable hire following his announcement that he was leaving his role as Twitter’s API lead to join the team. And, as noted above, the company has raised a good chunk of funding, too, with a $3.1 million round in September 2010 and a $10 million round in August 2011.

As for the service itself, customers can do all the usual things – make purchases, pay bills, earn interest, set up and track savings, view transaction history and more. But the big idea here is not the what, it’s the how. Simple, as you can guess by the name, wants to make things, well…simple. Transactions appear instantly, you can see your balance and “safe to spend” amount at a glance, and you can send payments to friends, too.

Simple is also different from other banks in that it doesn’t profit from fees – there are no overdraft fees, late fees, or domestic transfer fees, for example. In-network ATMs are fee-free, and there’s no extra charge for using an out-of-network ATM (although the ATM’s bank might charge you). In the few cases where there is a fee (e.g. international transfers are around $15), Simple just passes on the cost, but doesn’t add on top of it.

Reich says the startup is targeting the U.S. market for now because banking regulations vary widely from country to country, but an international rollout is on the long-term roadmap for the company. At present, the Simple customer base tracks national demographics pretty closely, he says. “We are seeing that customers earn above average incomes,” says Reich. “The median customer is 29 years old, college educated, and fully employed.”

And with this iOS app released to the wild, what comes next? “We’re hiring Android engineers right now,” says Reich.

If you’re one of the lucky few, you can grab Simple’s iPhone app here. Everyone else, sign up and wait.

So first things first: We’re not being sold! Instead, we’ve just hired a bunch of brilliant writers and a new COO. Also, we have seen a resurgence of community support (with over a thousand people attending our NYC meetup last night, for example), are back at around 12% on the much-lauded Techmeme leaderboard and are gearing up for our NYC Disrupt conference.

Our traffic is up with regards to unique visits year over year and we are working on getting our pageviews up to pre-awful redesign levels. More importantly, we cheer stuff like “TechCrunch fuck yeah” all the time in our company Yammer, which for us is a better indicator of progress than all of the above.

Sure, being um, reporters, we heard the sale rumors too. At some point, Jason Calacanis was also supposedly somehow in, and all the other tech blogs somehow won the Mega Millions and coughed up tens of millions of dollars to buy us … We heard the rumors, but didn’t publish them. It’s actually amazing how much bullshit information/spin is out there (so be careful what you believe).

So what actually happened? Well according to our sources including Tim Armstrong himself officially, he and a gaggle of Aol folks decided it might be smart to turn TC, Engadget and some other tech properties (including some yet to be acquired) into a separate company/entity, valued at $200 million.

Because we’re in the middle of these exceptionally exuberant times, they set off to raise money from notable Valley VCs like Andreesen Horowitz and some other prominent angels, $40 million to be exact for a 20% share of whatever this ur-tech blog conglomerate would be. Aol would retain an 80% share according to what I’ve heard about the plan.

Eventually, as Armstrong alludes to in this Ad Age article, the plan was scrapped, and Aol decided it might be a better idea if it retained 100% ownership of its tech vertical as it views TechCrunch and Engadget as the “crown jewels” of its media properties. We mean, sure #humblebrag.

There’s sort of an unwritten (and eventually written) rule in blogging that you’re not supposed to attack smaller blogs, which sometimes makes it a challenge to respond when false information gets published. We figure this story got skewed because PandoDaily is going through its own troubles, and looking for a target to project its drama onto; Sometimes not wanting to seem weak makes you seem weak.

Unfortunately in this specific case the target was us. But, because it’s hard out here for a tech blog, we wish former co-worker Sarah Lacy and the rest of her talented team the best of luck.

Aside from that, as a news organization, we want to be the ones to tell you the truth, especially about our own company. You shouldn’t expect anything else, in return for your readership and trust.

Google just launched an update for Google Maps for Android that brings three interesting new features to the app: integration with Google Offers, support for Google Business Photos and indoor walking directions.

With the new Google Offers integration, Android users will now be able to see which nearby stores currently offer deals. This, says Google, includes both offers that can be purchased, as well as “free” offers that are available immediately. Users can also opt-in to receive notifications when there are offers near them. Google, it is worth noting, also offers a dedicated Google Offers app for Android as well.

The Google Maps for Android app now also lets users in the U.S. and Japan (the two countries where venue owners can already upload their own indoor maps) get indoor walking directions. This is clearly an area Google has been working on for a while. Earlier this year, the company, for example, launched an Android app that allows venue owners to help Google improve its indoor location accuracy.

The app now also features support for Google Business Photos (a.k.a. Indoor Street View). With this feature, users can get access to 360-degree panoramic images from inside local stores and restaurants. These images are now highlighted on every participating business’s Place page in Google Maps for Android.

Chicago-based Base, a company that develops a cross-platform CRM product, has raised $6.8 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with Social+Capital Partnership, OCA Ventures and the I2A fund participating. The startup previously raised $1.1 million in funding.

Founded in 2009 by Uzi Shmilovici, Base is a CRM product that is catered towards small businesses. Base wants to let businesses manage their customers and sales everywhere they are, and offers applications for the Android phone, the iPhone, Mac and Windows. The company also plans to release tablet and Windows Phone 7.5 apps soon.

You can capture, track and visualize your sales leads; manage contacts with notes, tasks and reminders and more.

Shmilovici explains that most CRM products are web-based and don’t offer mobility for users. As mobility becomes increasingly popular in the enterprise, Base wants to be the go-to CRM option for companies that need sales operations to be managed on the go.

“The cloud was only act one of the enterprise software revolution. The end game is to have your data with you on any device, at any time, anywhere you are. This kind of ubiquity, together with a focus on product design and user experience, is what makes the next generation of CRM”, said Shmilovici.

Since the beginning of the year, the company grew its user base by more than 500% and is currently being used by tens of thousands of businesses worldwide.

When we planned our mini meet-up series, we expected a few geeks in a bar somewhere drinking and swapping stories about C#. Nothing prepared us for the onslaught. At one point, 1,256 of us filled all three floors of Bar 13, a techno club near Union Square, and for most of the night I was jostled, bumped, and generally mauled by the crowd. It was, in a word, amazing.

If you missed it, shame on you. If you were there and we talked, email me. I do, however, hope you enjoyed what amounted to TechCrunch’s triumphant return to the New York start-up scene.

We’d like to thank our excellent and kind volunteers and our sponsors: Yext, Traducto, WhatRunsWhere, Parlor, MyGenie, Return on Change (RoC), PeoplePerHour, and TouchTunes Interactive Networks. We had some great karaoke courtesy of our last sponsor and we had, quite literally, hundreds of pizzas thanks to MyPizza.com.

We’re planning some upcoming events in Philadelphia, Boston, and then another run down through Charlotte, Raleigh, and Atlanta with a pop-over to Savannah as well. If you’re in those cities, contact me at [email protected].

It was great to see you guys last night. Thanks for coming out and thanks for making the meet-up a success. Hopefully we’ll see you at Disrupt in a few weeks.

Click to view slideshow.

Last month, Klout launched its iPhone app. Today, it’s announcing its first big mobile partnership, one that should make app pretty appealing to any air travelers in San Francisco.

So Klout is launching a Perk with Hong Kong-headquartered Cathay Pacific Airways. Anyone in the international terminal at San Francisco International Airport with a Klout score of 40 or higher will be allowed into the airline’s lounge, which is normally limited to Cathay’s first class and business class passengers. Just use the app to show your score to the lounge receptionist and you’ll get access to seven workstations, three showers, and a noodle bar.

The promotion, which starts today and runs through July, is another sign that whatever the haters say, companies are interested in exploring Klout as a marketing opportunity. That Cathay Pacific is willing to open its doors to Klout users seems like a real commitment, albeit one that’s limited to SFO, rather than all of its airports.

So if you’re scared of a future where people are flashing their Klout scores to get special access, well, that future is getting closer.

Ask a VC, the TCTV show where you ask the questions, is back after a long hiatus and we’re kicking things off with two partners this week from Spark Capital and Andreessen Horowitz!

If you’ve got questions about what it’s like to shift from being an entrepreneur to being a venture capitalist, both our interviewees can actually tell you.

So how does this show work? You ask questions either in the comments or at askaVC(at)TechCrunch(dot)com and we’ll put them forward to our VC guests.

So for our first taping, we have Nabeel Hyatt, who just joined Spark Capital in February after serving as a general manager at Zynga (pictured at the right). He sold his company Conduit Labs to the social gaming giant and that deal set the groundwork for Zynga’s Boston studio.

Before that, he was a vice president of product at the MIT Media Lab spinoff Ambient Devices, which embedded information from the web into everyday objects like light bulbs, mirrors, refrigerators, and umbrellas to make the physical environment an interface to digital media.

If you’ve got questions about what the “Zynga mafia” will end up being like, he’s probably the one to ask.

Then later this week we have Peter Levine, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, who is extremely seasoned at company building (pictured at the top). Not only does he teach at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and do mountain climbing, he has also served as CEO of XenSource, a provider of open source virtualization solutions that was acquired by Citrix Systems. He then became the senior vice president and general manager of Citrix’s data center and cloud division.

He’s also actually a two-time venture capitalist. Before XenSource, he was a managing director at Mayfield. And then, before that, he was at Veritas Software where he started as an engineer when the company had just a few people. By the time he left 11 years later, the company was doing $1.5 billion in revenue, had nearly 6,000 people and he was one of three executive vice presidents, responsible for sales to hardware manufacturers, marketing, mergers and acquisitions and the Veritas venture fund. Like his firm’s other partners, he also writes regularly and has some good advice on how to run board meetings and evaluate sales deals here.

Levine has recently gotten the firm into deals like Actifio, the virtualization data management software maker that raised $33.5 million in December. So if you have questions about Andreessen’s enterprise strategy or the firm’s unique approach, he’s the one to ask.