Category: Tech news

Editor’s note: Scott Weiss is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and the former co-founder and CEO of IronPort Systems, which was acquired by Cisco in 2007. He blogs at http://scott.a16z.com and you can follow him on Twitter @W_ScottWeiss.

My father, Alfred “Bud” Weiss, owned a car dealership — “Bud’s Cadillacs” of Miami, Florida. When I’d drop by the office, he would usually pepper me with bits of business wisdom, but as a kid, I wasn’t very receptive. My head was usually buried in a comic book, only half listening. However, there was one story that stuck with me and I have struggled to make sense out of it throughout my business career:

“Son, you never, ever promote your best salesperson to be the sales manager. This is a classic mistake that other car dealers make. A bunch of my top producers came from their failed attempts as sales managers at other places. You commit two wrongs with these promotions: First, you take your top producer — someone raking in two to five times the average salesperson — off the sales floor. Second, you put them in a new job that they are totally unqualified to do successfully. This usually ends in disaster for everyone involved.”

His advice seemed to make sense until later in my career when I was actually faced with the problem. Some of our best salespeople and engineers at IronPort wanted to move into management and if we didn’t give them the opportunity, then it was clear they would go elsewhere. Of course, there’s not much of a dilemma when the high performer is a natural leader and people-person. Promoting great people from within is preferable on so many dimensions: There’s context, history, relationships and it all leads to a much better chance of success than hiring from the outside. The difficult corner case is the high-performing individual contributor that you can tell will likely fail in a leadership position. I’m talking about the sharp-elbowed, passive aggressive salesperson with little self-awareness. Or the my-way-or-the-highway, smartest-guy-in-the-room, workaholic engineer with horrific personal hygiene. How do you deal with that?

If they were really that good and were hell-bent on being a manager, then I came to believe that you had to give them a shot. That said, in my own experience, only about 25% of these experiments succeed in leadership. However, if managed carefully, the majority of the failures can ultimately be coached back into individual contributor roles, which is still a win. The key to all of it is making sure that there’s a sponsoring executive that is willing to spend a boatload of time coaching the budding leader. Here are some specific suggestions:

• It all starts out with hard, raw conversation about the shortcomings you’ve observed and how they need to be grinded off for them to be a successful manager. E.g. “You can’t keep answering all the questions; leading is getting others to contribute.”
• The coach needs to meet weekly and do frequent check-ins with peers and subordinates in almost a constant 360 degree-feedback loop. Even if it isn’t working out, the constant coaching and feedback will ensure a soft landing back into their old role.
• It helps to have some great leadership training. In my experience, most leadership training courses suck. You get two hours of useful information spread out over two weeks of mind-numbing presentations. We put together a rapid fire, two-day course and had our leadership team teach it. Interviewing, performance reviews, 1:1s, career planning, holding staff meetings, etc. We all got together and boiled down the best practices for all the important areas into short, punchy presentations/role plays. Every new manager went through it to give them some tools that were culturally consistent with what we were doing.
• Develop a legit dual-career track. Bestowing a new title like Principal Engineer or Fellow along with a commensurate bump in salary and equity can help take the sting out of being removed from a leadership role.

I know this all sounds like a ton of work but some people are just that special and totally worth it. Some of our best managers came out on the other side of these experiments and we had at least a handful of failures that we were able to retain as employees. My father built his business with castoffs from these experiments gone wrong at competitors. Perhaps because they had already failed elsewhere, his top performers didn’t aspire to try management again. Only in this context can I make sense of his guidance, as my experience has been quite the opposite.

Sprint plans to offer unlimited data on the next iPhone even if it’s LTE. This would make the carrier the only one in the U.S. with the pairing. Verizon and AT&T went away from unlimited plans before the iPhone 4S launched in 2011 leaving just Sprint with both unlimited data and the iPhone.

Unlimited data plans used to be the norm. Now, in the age of the ubiquitous smartphone, most carriers have moved away from that model as their networks strain under the load of Netflix, Facebook and Spotify. But not Sprint. The third most popular carrier in the U.S. just confirmed that it will still offer unlimited data for the next iPhone.

This comes from a CNET interview where Sprint CEO Dan Hesse said, “I’m not anticipating the unlimited plan would change by that point.” He added, “That’s our distinctive differentiator. Frankly, [the iPhone and unlimited data] a marriage made in heaven.” Hesse is right. The two go together like John Biggs and pie.

The iPhone is a huge seller for Sprint and accounted for 44% of its new activations during its last quarter. The carrier reportedly spent big bucks getting the rights to the iPhone and it seems to be paying off. But it still needs to offer something different from the market leaders of AT&T and Verizon, and that’s unlimited data.

In the grand tradition of industry barons — but not so much venture capitalists — the six general partners at Andreessen Horowitz are donating at least half of the income from their investing activities to philanthropy. The firm has already been turning heads up and down Sand Hill Road, but this move might cause some whiplash.

Sure, American capitalists have been donating large portions of their wealth since the 19th century. And sure, the newest generation of tech titans, like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, are following in their footsteps. But VCs have not traditionally done so, at least at the firm level; major philanthropy in the industry has mostly come from individuals, like John Doerr and Michael Moritz.

And some investors may be more philosophically opposed. There’s a school of thought in Silicon Valley that goes something like this: the products built by companies are what make the biggest impact, and nonprofits are less efficient. So invest back into companies and you’ll help the world more than anything else you could try.

I talked to Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz today about the announcement, to hear why they believe charity is the best way for them to contribute to the world more than they already have.

“We didn’t have any exotic hobbies like polo or something or when we started the firm,” Horowitz explained, so instead, they’d both already gotten involved in giving, having come off a huge $1.6 billion exit with Opsware among others (check out this New York Times article from last year for more on Andreessen’s efforts).

It was more recently that one of the partners, Scott Weiss, brought up the giving-half idea — something that Gates, Warren Buffett and others have been promoting in recent years. The firm, whose partners are all very successful entrepreneurs, got on board. And not just because of the direct impact. “It was about the culture we wanted to create here,” Andreessen added,” something that anyone who aspires to the same goals can see.”

We’ll see which other firms also make this move.

I brought up the for-profit school of thought. ”It’s true that there’s a lot of value created for society by these companies,” Horowitz responded, “but people outside of high tech make huge contributions to it — teachers at local schools, police… it’s broad. But the way money works it that most of it goes to people like us. We think by giving back, we keep the ecosystem going in a positive way.”

Andreessen seconded the role of philanthropy in capitalism. “It’s a great American tradition. We’re one of the most capitalist of the advanced countries, with job creation and destruction at four times the rate of most European countries. And for the last 150 to 200 years, a lot of the most successful people in capitalism have giving back. Even some of the limited partners in our fund are philanthropic organizations created 100 years ago by entrepreneurs who were extremely successful –and sometimes ruthless. Silicon Valley itself was based on Stanford, a university created by a ‘robber baron.’”

The first parcel of money will go towards six local charities below:

* Ben and Felicia Horowitz: Via Rehabilitation
* Jeff and Karen Jordan: Ecumenical Hunger Program
* John O’Farrell and Gloria Principe: Second Harvest Food Bank
* Marc and Laura Andreessen: Fresh Lifelines for Youth
* Peter and Martha Levine: Canopy
* Scott and Pamela Weiss: The Shelter Network

[Image of Andreessen and Horowitz via Forbes.]

At the end of Dropbox’s “Hey, we have a huge new office!” event today in San Francisco, some reporters cornered CEO Drew Houston and asked him about the big cloud news of the week — the launch of Dropbox competitor Google Drive.

Initially, Houston said he didn’t have time to really comment, because he had to catch a flight (which almost sounds like an excuse to duck the question, but the Dropbox folks had actually mentioned the flight earlier). When pressed, he pointed out that there have been rumors about Google Drive since the beginning of time: “It’s been on the horizon since we founded the company.”

Okay, but what did he think of the product itself? Did it measure up to his expectations? Houston replied that it was “kind of hard to know what to expect from them.” The bottom line however, is, “I still feel really good about the stuff we’re building.”

So, nothing too surprising. Frederic Lardinois actually offered his own take on what this means for Dropbox, though really, my favorite comment on the matter came earlier from Houston on Twitter: “In other news, @Dropbox is launching a search engine. “

Utah-based genealogy site Ancestry.com just announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Silicon Valley-based startup Inflection to acquire its competitor Archives.com for $100 million in cash and assumed liabilities. Inflection’s other products, people search site PeopleSmart and Identity.com, are not part of this acquisition. A number of Archive.com’s employees, including some of its key product and engineering executives, will join the Ancestry.com team after the acquisition closes.

Similar to Ancestry.com, Archives.com focuses on helping its users discover their family history. The service’s archive of 2.1 billion historical records includes photos, newspapers and vital records. Just recently, Archives.com made news when it partnered with the U.S. National Archives to make the complete 1940 U.S. census available online. The service currently has about 380,000 paying subscribers who pay $39.95 a year for access to the site.

According to Ancestry.com’s CEO Tim Sullivan, “Archives.com’s focus is consistent with our mission to help everyone discover, preserve and share their family history, which will help continue our efforts in delivering amazing discoveries to an even broader audience.”

Ancestry.com, which also operates a wide variety of secondary sites like Genealogy.com, Fold3.com Rootsweb.com and Footnote.com, is a publicly traded company and had just under $400 million in revenue in 2011. Ancestry.com also just released its earnings for the first quarter of 2012 today. The company had an operating income of $20.1 million and $108.5 million in revenue. Ancestry.com had 1.87 million subscribers at the end of March.

Rosetta Stone, for those unfamiliar, are the makers of the oft-advertised language learning software of the same name. The 20-year-old Virginia-based company went public in 2009, and today makes learning software for over 30 languages that is used in over 150 countries. Its software aims to assist people of all ages in learning new languages based on its “Dynamic Immersion method,” which teaches various vocabulary and grammatical functions intuitively, rather than by drills or translation. Yet, over the last few years, a number of translation and language learning startups have popped up, and Rosetta Stone, in turn, has been increasingly looking to boost its digital offerings for a younger audience.

That’s why today it is announcing that it has completed the acquisition of Los Angeles-based language learning startup, GoGo Lingo. Founded back in 2008 by Afsoun Yazdian, who developed GoGoLingo’s proprietary “Playful Immersion” method while at Stanford, a language learning method designed to help kids ages 3 to 7 learn Spanish through implicit absorption. And that’s why this acquisition makes so much sense for Rosetta Stone, as both companies have been focused on this implicit absorption model — although they use slightly different names for it — or teaching language adoption with the aid of pictures and sounds, and through immersive exposure, rather than giving people simple one-to-one translations.

Using its marketing dollars to gain a wide reach — you may have seen its ads on TV, or at kiosks in airports and malls — Rosetta Stone has become one of the giants of language learning software. But new players have been threatening the company over the last few years by going after the digital distribution angle, which in turn hasn’t been kind to Rosetta Stone’s market valuation. As a result, Rosetta Stone has been on a mission to become more competitive in digital distribution, seeking new growth opportunities, and its acquisition of GoGo Lingo is likely just the beginning.

Rosetta Stone’s acquisition of GoGo Lingo gives it access to the startup’s characters, games, activities, and its digital infrastructure, which the company plans to incorporate into the assets of its future language learning solutions, according to its statement. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

While kids already use Rosetta Stone to learn new languages, GoGo Lingo’s model was explicitly kid-focused, developing its Playful Immersion techniques with kids in mind by using games, music and humor to allow them to engage them within a context that is tailored to their learning style. As Rosetta Stone says that it is accelerating its research into kid-specific learning solutions, and is looking for online communities and distribution media to do this, GoGo Lingo was an obvious fit.

GoGo Lingo came out of the research founder and CEO Afsoun Yazdian was doing at Stanford, and she was later joined by co-founders Jason Leon and Dylan Squires, who themselves had been developing web properties tailored towards a younger generation. Over time, the team attracted a bunch of language learning experts, who helped the founders develop the solution.

Going forward, Yazdian said in a message to her community, GoGo Lingo’s platform is no longer available, and its website has for all intents and purposes been wiped clean. The founders have all joined Rosetta Stone and will be helping the language learning company integrate its technology into upcoming products.

For more, check out Rosetta Stone at home here, and the joint announcement on GoGo Lingo’s homepage here.

“The series A is essentially dying. If I can get an amazing valuation at a seed round, not give up a board seat, and keep complete control of the company, why not?” This is Ark co-founder Patrick Riley’s reasoning for why instead of raising a Series A round, his people search engine just locked down a jaw-droppingly massive $4.2 million seed round. Ark will use the money from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, SV Angel and more to build out its mobile and search teams, and do a big marketing push when it opens to the public.

Riley believes more founders will try to avoid early Series A rounds that often come with an investor board member attached. This will help them stay more agile and avoid having to approve pivots or other big changes through outsiders. Riley tells me, “I think the future is larger seed rounds.”

It seems much of Silicon Valley sees a big opportunity for Ark to capitalize on the people search shortcomings of Facebook and Google. So big that even with less control, Charles River Ventures, Intel Capital, Atlas Venture, Crosslink Capital, Expansion Venture Capital, Felicis Ventures, Lightbank, Transmedia Capital, Salesforce, Tencent, and several angels are also in on the round according to AllThingsD‘s Liz Gannes. The round ranks amongst the largest publicly disclosed seed rounds in Y Combinator history.

I was the first to write about Ark’s beta last month, where I detailed how the product lets you layer filters to find out which of your friends are single, who are in your current city and is fluent in a language you want to learn, or who lives somewhere you’re visiting and Likes a band performing there so you could go to the concert together. This is all data scattered across Google+, Twitter, and particularly Facebook. Ark’s search pulls in info from all these sources plus profiles on LinkedIn, Foursquare, Myspace, Orkut, Meetup, Vkontakte, and Ren Ren. It’s got a special arrangement brokered through Facebook’s CTO Bret Taylor that allows Ark to hammer Facebook’s Graph API for profile information.

By pulling data from across platforms, there’s less chance for Facebook or the others to steamroll Ark. Beyond helping you find people, Ark wants to surface contact info and other important characteristics about your friends without you having to know which network that data’s hosted on. “We’re essentially trying to do the other side of search — the personal search, what Greplin attempted to do to a limited extent.” Mobile apps for tracking down this info are coming this summer.

And while there are plenty of startups offering some of what Ark does, none I’ve seen are as clean and straightforward. For example, people set up whole accounts on Classmates.com or schoolFeed just to reconnect with who they went to high school with because Facebook buries that capability so deep within its Find Friends feature. Ark makes it as simple as layering your high school’s name and your graduation year.

Raising the seed round was simple too, as Ark used AngelList. “It’s almost like an API for funding. It accelerates the process”, Riley tells me.  As for why so many dollars? “It’s a really big space, our competition is pretty well funded, and we have larger ambitions. To market something like this you need substantial funds.”

TCTV’s Colleen Taylor sat down today for an interview with Riley:

YouTube is the largest source of mobile video traffic, according to a new report from Sandvine, and now accounts for as much as 25% of network data, and no less than 12% at any given time. The report examined traffic across a selection of Sandvine’s 200+ customers in North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific.

Combined with other services like Pandora and Netflix, audio and video streaming make up more than half of mobile data traffic in North America, and it’s on track to reach 60% by 2014, the company says.

Other regions aren’t far behind. In Latin America, for example, “real-time entertainment” (streaming audio/video, that is) accounts for 40% of network data. In Europe, it’s 40% and in the Asia-Pacific region, it’s at 39%. In those same regions, it’s YouTube that’s eating up most of the data, at 27%, 24%, 17% and 14% of peak downstream traffic, respectively.

What’s maybe more telling than these usage numbers, is the growth. In North America, real-time entertainment, as noted above, is 50% of downstream mobile data traffic today. That’s up from 34% just 6 months ago. YouTube is 27% of that figure, Netflix is 2%, and Pandora is around 6%.

Behind audio and video, browsing the web and social networking services are the only other two categories of usage that account for a significant amount of mobile data. In North America, web surfing is accounts for 21% of mobile data usage, social networking accounts for 10%, and everything else combined reaches 19%.

Although unrelated to streaming data figures, the new report also looked into the popularity of messaging applications like WhatsApp, to determine how they’re impacting mobile operators.  In one example, on an Asian mobile network of 1 million users, WhatsApp accounted for 7.6 million messages sent per day, and with 7% of subscribers per hour sending an average of 12 messages per hour. In other words, a lot of SMS revenue lost for the operator in question.

Although YouTube and other audio and video traffic is leading mobile data usage now, Sandvine says that the continuous cloud/client connection will lead to other increases in data in the future, specifically for things like smartphone photo back-up and synchronization.

Payments platform Square has released a number of new stats today, as well as good news for merchants using its mobile payments app to accept credit cards. According to a Bloomberg report, Square is now processing $5 billion in annual payments (or around $416 million in payments per month), which is up from $4 billion in annual payments in March. And payment volume is up 25 percent over the past month.

Square also says that it will be making funds available in merchants’ bank accounts the next business morning (for any sales made before 5 pm), while other merchant processors can take 2 to 5 business days to get merchants their money. This is a big win for merchants, who now have access to their sales revenue immediately.

And last week we heard that Square is looking to raise around $250 million funding at a $4 billion. Square’s CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey and COO Keith Rabois just wrapped up the 10-day trip to the East Coast to meet with institutional investors, including Fidelity and Legg Mason.

Do you hate how things ended between you and your ex and are you still trying to get him/her back? Google apparently knows what that feels like and wants you to use Chrome to set things right. Or at least, that’s what it looks like judging from Google’s latest TV commercial for Chrome, which debuted last night.

In this latest ad, Mark ([email protected]) is trying hard to get his ex Jen to go out for coffee with him because he still hates “how things ended” (why they broke up, the ad sadly never tells us). To woo his ex back (or at least convince her to go out for coffee with him), Mark then uses a steady stream of Google Docs spreadsheets, Picasa photos and YouTube videos to make his point.

Google has also released a steady stream of ads for Chrome, Google+ and its other products over the last year or so. Some of them try hard to tug on people’s heartstrings while others feature celebrities like Lady Gaga. Just last December, Google also launched two commercials for Google+ with the Muppets.

What most of these ads have in common, though, is that they don’t focus on technology so much, but what that technology can do for its users. No doubt, that’s a pretty effective advertising technique. Whether Chrome and Google can help you get your ex back, though, is a different question. The ad sadly doesn’t tell us Jen’s response.

Much has been said about the role social media has come to play in the global landscape over the last few years. Whether one sees it as the tool of revolutions or not, there is no denying its utility as a means of realtime communication — as a medium to connect, share, and disseminate news and information across borders. Facebook, Twitter, and other media played an integral role in organizing the socio-political upheavals in Egypt, Libya, and across the Middle East and North Africa, allowing those oppressed and marginalized by despotic regimes to communicate and organize, and to expose human rights violations.

Of course, social and other forms of digital media have just as much potential for ill as they do for use among democracy advocates — something that has not gone unnoticed in the White House. According to the Washington Post, President Obama will today issue an executive order that gives U.S. officials the ability to impose sanctions on foreign bodies that use these “new technologies” to carry out human rights violations.

The report cites cellphone tracking and Internet monitoring as chief among those abuses, reflecting the recent actions of authoritarian regimes that have used kill switches, illegal wire-tapping, etc. to stem and/or monitor web-based communication among those in opposition — abuses perpetrated not only by governments in Libya and Egypt, but more recently in Iran and Syria as well.

The report, which cites senior administration officials, holds that President Obama will issue the executive order on Monday during a speech at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, using the opportunity to acknowledge that U.S. national security must be updated to reflect a world that is being rapidly transformed by the application of new technologies. The order is also said to be a direct response to to criticism over the country’s (and the administration’s) inaction in the face of the Syrian government’s bloody crackdown, which has led to the death of thousands of civilians.

Syrian forces have reportedly been using technology to track their opposition, and “Syrian officials may also have tracked satellite phones and computer addresses to locate a group of foreign journalists in February who were covering the siege of the city of Homs,” according to the Washington Post. During the attacks in February, two journalists seeking refuge were killed, one of them an American working for the Sunday Times of London.

The executive order, on which the Washington Post alone was briefed, reportedly states that “the same GPS, satellite communications, mobile phone, and Internet technology employed by democracy activists across the Middle East and North Africa is being used against them by the regimes in Syria and Iran … and the new steps are designed primarily to target companies explicitly aiding authoritarian governments with new technology that assists in civilian repression.”

But what is perhaps most relevant to the tech industry is that the Executive Order contains provisions that aim to target companies that design or provide aid authoritarian governments with technology that helps them repress or monitor their civilians. As reports have surfaced that American technology is being used by the Syrian government to monitor and censor its citizens, senior administrations reportedly said that “the measures should prompt all companies to think harder about how the technology they are providing to other countries might be employed and to take steps to ensure that it is not used in harmful ways.”

While it is easy to welcome sanctions against those clearly and transparently using technology to assist in human rights violations and to oppress large groups of people, beyond the extremes, this kind of stuff can quickly get into thorny territory. It is not always so easy to divorce those using “new technology” to impose restrictions on access or monitor others — from the opposite. The Executive Order comes close on the heels of the disruption and reported cyberattack on an American website that has been covering “China’s biggest political scandal in decades.” It is not certain whether the attack came from the Chinese government itself, or some third-party trying to make it look like the government was responsible.

Obama’s Order is specifically geared towards the situations in Iran and Syria, but opens the doors to sanctions on other foreign bodies in the future. It will reportedly be used only in extreme circumstances, and likely on a case-by-case basis.

On a bright note for American tech companies, the Obama Administration will also be looking to them to develop more effective ways to help those afflicted in human rights abuses communicate and organize, according to the report:

The president will also announce a set of U.S. development “challenge” grants designed to encourage technology companies to develop new ways to help residents in countries vulnerable to mass killings better detect and quickly alert others to impending dangers.

For more, check out the Washington Post’s report here, and you can check into the webcast of Obama’s speech at the Holocaust Museum on Monday here.

Ad-tech may not be the most obvious face of digital advertising, but in a world in which the role of big data is getting ever more essential to how things work, it is taking up an increasingly important role. One sign of that comes from the funding that ad-tech players are getting in this space: today, ad-tech startup Moat announced that it has picked up a $12 million investment led by the Mayfield Fund and including existing investors.

The Series B investment takes the total amount invested in the company to $16.5 million with past investors including Ron Conway’s SV Angel, Founders Fund, Vast Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Founder Collective, and First Round Capital; as well as the WGI Group, an investment vehicle from Moat’s founders, Right Media ex-CEO Mike Walrath and brothers Jonah and Noah Goodhart.

As a result of the deal, Mayfield partner Tim Chang will join the board of Moat.

Unlike other ad-tech companies that also run ad networks, Moat has focused only on analytics that seek to take advertisers and publishers beyond the traditional metric of “clicks” as a way of gauging the effectiveness of a digital media campaign, which it offers in a software-as-a-service model.

Jonah Goodhart, who is also CEO of Moat, says that it is doing this in response to what he sees as possibly the biggest issue in digital advertising today — and you could argue the biggest gating factor restricting more growth. “What is clear to us is that there is a critical need to address how brand advertising is measured online,” he told me. “We hear that from advertisers, publishers, creative agencies, and ad exchanges. It is the topic of conversation at most advertising conferences and it is what everyone is talking about in the industry.” Even Google, he points out, has started to release its own non-click metrics, “which is
pretty remarkable given that the vast majority of Google’s revenue is based on ad clicks.”

Its Moat Intelligence product is now being used by 15,000 businesses including companies like Forbes and AOL (which owns TechCrunch). The newest product, a patent-pending analytics platform called Moat Analytics, follows campaigns in real-time and is based on engagement rather than simple clicks. So far it has measured billions of impressions on behalf of advertising and publishing clients. Moat says that today’s investment will be used to further expand that portfolio of products: the next will be a Premium Intelligence Platform due out later this year.

Goodhart says Moat it is not providing visibility on revenues at the moment, but that it is experiencing “very strong demand” for its SaaS business model, based on subscriptions rather than percentage of media spend. “I think clients are finding it refreshing to have a flat monthly price.”

What might be the next area to disrupt?

I asked Goodhart about where he sees mobile today, an area that many thing has a bright future in digital advertising but has so far only represented a small fraction of overall media spend.

“It’s important from my perspective that we be able to measure apples-to-apples across different mediums as best we can. Each screen or platform has some unique features that are different but we should still be able to compare, for example, whether the ads were viewable by the user and for how long,” he said. He points out that its Intelligence and Analytics products already support mobile and tablet devices but “this is just in its infancy in terms of actual media spend today.”

[Image: Jim Mead, Flickr]

A sign of more big money being poured into the tech sector, by way of a new development for the Chernin Group, the digital media company founded by ex-News Corp. executive Peter Chernin: it has sold a minority stake to a group of investors led by Providence Equity Partners, reportedly for $200 million.

The Chernin Group, which has invested in a number of hot online properties including Tumblr and Flipboard, says that the deal gives it the financial muscle to go after “any deal of any size” anywhere in the world, according to a report in the FT. The deals will focus on digital media assets, and will span the range from incubator investments through to later-stage funding rounds. The first investments will be announced “within weeks.”

A $200 million investment from the Providence group would value the Chernin Group at around $400 million, a source told the newspaper.

The Chernin Group has used some of its funds to date to invest in U.S.-based properties like Tumblr, Flipboard and Pandora, and it has also produced films and TV shows with primary distribution in the U.S. market (eg Fox’s Terra Nova and Rise of the Planet of the Apes).

However, it looks like this new injection of cash will be used to help it also focus on investments in emerging markets like India and China. This is an region where the company has already been active, with a majority stake in CA Media, which Chernin had founded with another ex-News Corp. executive, Paul Aiello.

The deal also marks another step into VC activity for the Providence Group, which has made most of its investments on the side of private equity but is clearly interested in also making sure that it is riding the wave of “high-growth” tech investing as well — exemplified not just by Facebook’s purchase of Instagram for $1 billion, but the many other companies that are now being touted at similar valuations. Those are investments that the big media players are also missing out on, says Jonathan Nelson, chief executive of Providence. “It’s very hard for incumbents to pursue those opportunities [because] they are threatening to incumbents,” he told the FT. As part of the deal, Chernin will become an advisor to Providence, and Providence people will join the Chernin Group’s board.

And it’s as interesting to look at what the Chernin Group pursues as what it will not: apparently it had teamed up with Providence a year ago to look at buying Yahoo, but decided against it after it “didn’t feel like it made sense,” Chernin told the FT.

The new Estonian accelerator program Startup Wise Guys, backed by the Estonian government-owned Estonian Development Fund and some former engineers from Skype, has just announced the seven teams it will be working with. Two of them from Estonia and one from Croatia, Ukraine, Germany, The Netherlands and UK.

Wise Guys received over 200 applications, and will provide the shortlisted projects with an extensive startup developing program. The projects will be supported by a squad of international mentors. The program starts on April 23 and includes three steps: shaping (3 weeks), building (4 weeks) and selling (3 weeks), supported by Wise Guys mentors. There will be an Investor Day in Tallinn on June 30th, followed by one in London on July 6th.

Startup Wise Guys, launched few months ago, is a joint effort of the players in Estonian startup ecosystem to bring international mentors to Estonia and attract talent across Eastern Europe and CIS countries.

The first members of the new Startup Wise Guys family are:

Monolith (Croatia)

This is a machine powered by an Augmented Reality Engine that turns regular commercials into movie-like experiences. There are many possible use for Monolith, for example: in a clothing store you can try on a new collection in front of the Monolith, even without going to the fitting room; or, you could have a movie-like experience of your favorite story, movie or game just in front of the Monolith. Monolith is the first fully integrated augmented reality advertising device combining a hardware solution based on Kinect and a proprietary software platform for creating, distributing and measuring AR ads. Their first customers are a local Croatian soft drink company and will work for the Lenovo store in Zagreb.

Moojoo (Germany)

Mojoo let´s people discover, organize & share local events, based on their interests and curated by their friends and tastemakers. It is a social discovery site for local events and things to do, curated by your friends and people who share your interests and your lifestyle, by leveraging word-of-mouth conversations on the social web. Think Pinterest-meets-Twitter for your local life, creating exciting and memorable moments every day. This could be a powerful formula: the hand-curated quality of a visual event & lifestyle magazine plus the speed of a blog plus the personal relevance of a social and local network. Thats moojoo! While people spend about 90 % of their time and money offline, the social and mobile market size is about to rise to $30 Billion by 2015. There is a huge potential for the next stage of the web aiming to connect people online in order to organize their life offline. 75 % of people already use the internet to organize things offline. People have about 6 h daily leisure time in average, which we want to help them to fill best possible.

Like A Local Guide (Estonia)

This is like a local guide travel site where reviews are written by locals and creating your personal city guide takes only a minute. It helps people to create high-quality personal city guides that compile tips from locals into personalized travel guides that can be created quickly. Instead of browsing through hundreds of listings they have to look through only those places which fit their interest and budget. Their goal is to create an active community of local editors all around the world and offer local activists and travel bloggers a new medium to share their favorite places in their hometown. The market is the whole independent travel sector, who travel longer and spend more money in destinations. They are offering businesses that have been selected by editors an opportunity to highlight their listing with different features, like allowing direct booking of accommodation or tours, adding more photos, advertising their events (parties, live music, concerts etc), answering to customers more personally and letting people know about their specials (discounts, happy hours etc).

Wellbeing In the City (UK)

Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle through intimate communities & Wellbeing marketplace.

Wellbeing In the City is a social platform that offers simple & practical ways to achieve a balanced lifestyle. People are not living balanced lifestyles – Lacking time, energy, confidence and freedom – Forced to choose between competing needs of work, family, friends & self – 80% of people feel stress at work, but can’t find help in learning how to manage – Need to be inspired and supported by people they can relate to. Their solution is a social place that balances lifestyles. They are trying to get people to become addicted to positive, engaging and healthy living.

Monday52 (Ukraine)

Monday52 helps people to have a better career by sharing their work experience and comparing it to others. Employees can rate their employers and get personalized job recommendations. Monday52 wants to prove the idea on a few pilot markets before expanding further. These markets are tech companies in Estonia and Ukraine. The business model is not yet clear, two big ideas so far are HR analytics and lead gen for recruiters. Their direct competitor is Glassdoor.com in US. Monday52 thinks that their edge is that they think you can’t get trustworthy reviews and ratings with real people (e.g. anonymous) and that’s what we’re going to do. In terms of a biusiness model, there are lots of “workplace rankings” from Hewitt to BBB and regional bodies. Unlike those folks, on Monday52 employees will get actual value out of participating in a survey.

WappZapp (The Netherlands)

They bring your daily dose of video on the web. By turning your device into your social remote, you can zap videos to any webTV.

Your personal TV portal. Flipboard meets spotify for video. With WappZapp you zap your way through the best internet video, track your favorite shows and share cool stuff with friends. Best of all, you can turn your iPad or iPhone in to the remote to zap any video to your internet TV.

WeatherMe (Estonia)

WeatherMe aims to boost farming production by combining farming science and weather data in a simple way.

Farmers today are not benefitting from farming science because it’s complicated. For example only 4% of farmers use some kind of an information system to determine what pesticide to use. They use guesstimates and research has shown that these decisions are not always optimal. The product: They will create field and crops management system that is simple to use because it has most of the data, like weather inside already. The farmers will have to input less data manually and therefore are more likely to start using an electronic system for field management. With that, farmers will get a greater yield from their fields because they actually use the farming methods modern science provides through the system.

1Knows (Estonia)

1Knows is your personal eLearning manager which guides you on your life-long learning path.

They aim to enhance your professional self via gamification. Based on your interests, 1Knows combines free as well as paid-for training, lessons and milestones to end up with a better and smarter you.

Q&A platform Answers.com is announcing a ‘significant’ minority investment from private equity firm TA Associates. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

Answers operates a community-generated Q&A site at Answers.com, and was acquired by AFCV Holdings, a portfolio company of Summit Partners, for $127 million in cash last year. AFCV then delisted Answers, which was a public company, from the NASDAQ and took the company private. Shareholders were very unhappy with the terms of the deal, claiming it tremendously undervalued Answers.com, and tried to block the sale. Answers was also hit with a round of layoffs in June 2011.

On Answers.com, consumers can ask questions, provide answers to existing questions, and search for Q&A topics that fellow community members have created. Answers says the new investment will be used to ramp up personalization, social and other features on the Q&A community. The company says it has more than 150 million users who have generated more than 15 billion answers.