Category: Tech news

Verious, the one-stop shop for mobile app components and TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 finalist, is today emerging from its beta period with a bang. It’s announcing a partnership with online employment platform Elance, which will bring over 25,000 mobile professionals to Verious’ existing network of mobile component developers.

Through the partnership, Verious will offer two new categories within its marketplace: “Find Contract Developers” and “Find Mobile App Projects.” These sections will serve to connect product managers, brand managers and business owners with mobile developers on development projects. Developers will be able to list their capabilities, qualifications and ratings from past projects for others to see, while also bidding on the current projects posted to the site.

Also new is a suite of Small Business Solutions which Verious will offer to businesses looking to quickly launch mobile apps. Businesses will have access to pre-built “white label” apps from a range of providers starting at $399, plus access to a developer community who can help customize their app’s landing pages, splash screens, buttons or who can alternately build new apps from scratch.

Expanded license management capabilities for components and SDKs are available now, too.

Verious is entering an increasingly crowded market with its mobile component marketplace, where competitors now include Chupa, Appcelerator’s Open Mobile Marketplace and Binpress, to name just a few. Each outlet attempts to differentiate itself from the others through the platforms supported, the size of the listings on the site, their feature set, or some other factor. For Verious, it appears to be going after the “one-stop shop” label, with these recent moves which sees it not only listing mobile app components, but offering services associated with app building as well.

The company, founded in 2011, has $800,000 in seed funding and is backed investors including Charles River Ventures, X-G Ventures, plus angels Mark Britto, Iggy Fanlo, Gil Penchina, Krishna Vedati, Thomas Schulz and Zain Khan.

Medialets, which provides a rich media ad platform for mobile, has raised another $8.4 million in equity funding according to an SEC filing published this morning.

We’ve contacted the company to learn more about the investment, but it’s likely the funding was partly or entirely provided by earlier backers Foundry Group, DFJ Gotham Ventures and/or 500 Startups.

Medialets has raised a total of $18.4 million in funding to date.

Some of our earlier coverage:

Medialets Updates Universal SDK With Third-Party Rich Media Support, New Mobile Ad Formats And More

Medialets Launches Muse, A Creative Project Management Dashboard For Rich Media Mobile Ads

Adobe Just Made Medialets Its Mobile Ad Server

Back in 2006 (hell, back in 2002!), it was kinda lonely being a tech blogger in Europe.

Not that there weren’t plenty of tech sites and nascent blogs opining on ‘social media’.

Oh no, plenty of those.

But not many what I would call hard core sites, setting out to kick down the doors and make trouble.

It’s taken a long time to get to where we are.

With more than half of San Francisco precincts counted as of late Tuesday night, it seems as if tech-friendly interim Mayor Ed Lee has garnered a 31% percent vote in our fair city’s mayoral race. In SF’s convoluted as all hell system, if a majority candidate fails to receive 50% of the vote like Lee has, then the election is decided by a count of second and third place votes on the ballots of losing candidates — which means that an official win will probably be announced by the end of this week, sigh. But even with this loophole, it seems like Lee will be a likely winner …

So I caught up with Lee backstage after one of the many support/Congrats galas he attended this evening, this one attended by Ron Conway, Sean Parker, MC Hammer and our own Mike Arrington, in order to ask him about how he would support the technology industry once finally elected mayor. (Lee famously kept both Twitter and Zynga in town with his mid-market tax exemptions).

In order to keep startups thriving in San Francisco, Lee  ambitiously wants to expand the tax exemptions of building an office in the mid-market district city-wide, ““I want them [tech companies] to start here in San Francisco, and I want them to stay and to grow. And as they grow I want them to stay here and continue creating jobs. That means we have to create a different business tax system.”

In my experience with bureaucracy, we’ll know by the end of the week whether Lee is officially mayor and even later than that whether the city-wide payroll tax exemptions will work. In the meantime, here’s a Lee-themed live reenactment of the hit single “2 Legit 2 Quit.” Yeah.

A small news item straight from left field, but who knew someone would eventually cough up a six-figure sum for a ‘Libyan’ domain name (one that ends in .ly)? Well, someone did, and that someone is enterprise applications and services company Infor, which acquired the domain name local.ly for $100,000.

The previous owner of local.ly, Hadi Naser of domain name registration and professional services company Libyan Spider, apparently owns several hundred such ‘premium’ .ly domains.

Conveniently, his company also runs a domain name brokerage service at domains.ly.

Back in 2010 Libyan Spider sold dai.ly for $17,000 to DailyMotion. Other ‘big’ .ly domain name sales include song.ly, which fetched a $50,000 price, and Facebook acquired friend.ly about a month ago.

The legal and technical advisor on the seller’s side for the local.ly deal was London-based agency Brands-and-Jingles. You have to wonder how much global.ly is worth.

Expense reports are a pain in the ass, which is why David Barrett founded Expensify in May 2008. Since then, the startup has raised nearly $7 million in funding and added a number of features, like receipt automation, to its platform that allows users to collect and automatically categorize your transaction records. Users register their credit cards with Expensify, and they import eReceipts, tag expenses, and send a copy of your expenses over to your company’s bookkeeper.

Today, the service made some further announcements about the progress it’s made in taking the suck out of your expense reports. For starters, Barrett says that over 90,000 organizations and 650,000 individuals are now using the service. These organizations using Expensify run the gamut, including names like Evernote, Square and Tumblr.

Besides the company’s 10 percent month-on-month baseline growth, the Founder says, the platform has seen a sizable rise in signups thanks to its Evernote integration and its becoming an Android “Staff Pick”.

While Barrett says that its “bottom up” sales model (where users sign up for a freemium product that results in a premium upsell for their company), they’ve found that the sale requires more advanced functionality and working directly with customers. As a result, Expensify is launching a salesforce focused on companies between 100 and 1,000 employees, with a number of features for employee administration and accounting integration.

But the salesforce won’t be cold calling anybody, it only works with current freemium customers, he says, to help them “get over the hump”.

To support this mission and for overall streamlining, Expensify is splitting its “one size fits all” pricing into a few basic plans: “Personal” for those using Expensify for personal finance, “Professional” for contractors and freelancers, “Team” for small companies under 100 employees, and “Corporate” for midsize companies over 100 employees.

There are also two major changes inherent to the new plans, one of which is that every account now gets a monthly quota of 10 free receipt scans, with the option to buy more. The second major change is the introduction of domain-based admin features that allow users to “claim” their domain and get administrative control over any account with an email address ending in their domain name, as well as an advanced “GL code” integration with external accounting packages.

Though Expensify is not yet profitable, Barrett says that the company has been able to build “meaninful revenue” with steady growth and will likely not need to raise more than the $6.7 million it raised in 2009 and 2010.

The CEO said that he thinks that the company has “stubled into an incredible combination of freemium economics and viral growth in a market with thick enterprise margins”. If customers respond to the new pricing plan and salesforce with the same gusto they’ve shown for its features to date, the future may very well be bright for this San Francisco startup.

For more on the new Expensify, see the company’s blog post on the announcement here.

Epson Japan announced [JP] the so-called Moverio today, a see-through 3D head-mounted display (HMD), which is the first of its kind, according to the company. Think of it as mix between of NEC’s transparent HMD Tele Scouter and Sony’s cool 3D OLED head mounted display HMZ-T1, powered by Android OS.

The Moverio creates the experience of watching 3D (or 2D) pictures on a virtual 80-inch display that’s 5m away – while still being able to see what’s happening around you in the real world. Apart from the display itself, users get a small controller that offers 1GB of internal memory and a microSD card slot.

The Moverio supports MPEG-4/MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video files, including – side-by-side 3D images on its 0.52-inch displays with 960×540 resolution (it handles AAC and MP3 audio files, too).

Epson also squeezed Android 2.2, Wi-Fi IEEE 802.11b/g/n (direct access to YouTube and a web browser), and a microUSB into the device.

The Moverio’s headset is sized at 205×178×47mm and weighs 240g, while the controller measures 67×107×19mm and weighs 160g.

Epson expects to initially sell 10,000 units when the device hits Japanese stores on November 25 (price: US$770).

Via AV Watch [JP]

Lookout, a company that offers security services for a number of smartphone platforms, is expanding internationally with native apps in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

For background, Lookout’s web-based, cloud-connected applications for Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and most recently iOS devices help users from losing their phones and identifies and block threats on a consumer’s phone. Users simply download the software to a device, and it will act as a tracking application, data backup and a virus protector much like security software downloaded to a computer.

Lookout just raised $40 million in new funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Khosla Ventures, Accel Partners and Index Ventures and CEO John Hering told us then that the company was looking to move abroad.

As he explains, “Mobile threats don’t discriminate based on where you are. They tend to be global, affecting people around the world.” The company is partnering with Australian carrier Telstra, who will able able to download Lookout from within Telstra Aisle or by accessing the Telstra tab within the Android Market.

The Lookout Mobile Security app is powered by Lookout’s Mobile Threat Network, a cloud-based network which constantly analyzes global threat data to identify and quickly block new threats with over-the-air app updates. The Mobile Threat Network scans billions of apps a month and is the largest database of smartphone applications available

To-date, Lookout has identified and blocked more than 1,000 unique infected applications.
In the first of half of 2011, the number of unique apps with malware went from 80 to 400 In fact, in the last four months mobile malware instances have more than doubled reaching nearly 1000 infected apps – and it’s likely that some of this malware originated in Russia or China, but affected people worldwide.

Every day, Lookout blocks thousands of malicious links and has seen a doubling of malicious links blocked month over month as more people protect their phones. And Lookout’s data backup feature has backed up 6.5 million contacts, with the app’s phone finder discovering 5 phones per minute.

Here are some of yesterday’s stories on TechCrunch Gadgets:

Scanadu Raises $2M: “Check Your Body As Often As Your Email”

Nintendo May Enable Two Wii U Controllers At Once After All

Griffin’s Beacon Lets You Channel Surf From Your Android Device

Asimo: Honda Upgrades Its Awesome Humanoid (Videos)

Tinkercad Raises $1 Million, Aims To Popularize 3D Printing

Review And Giveaway: Battlefield 3

Leela, Deepak Chopra’s debut game for Xbox 360 Kinect and Wii, is part relaxation mechanism, part new-age stoner candy.

The game, which comes out next week, playfully steers you toward the gap between the conscious and the subconscious. There are different levels of gameplay — some help you tune each of your seven chakras, others guide you through meditation and relaxation exercises.

Chopra, a renowned figure in mind-body medicine, says Leela was inspired partly by his studies of spirituality, and partly by his own experimentation with psychedelics decades ago as a medical student. He teamed up with the game publisher THQ and a team of designers from Curious Pictures to create a game that offers a gateway to the mind-expanding world of hallucinogens without the use of drugs.

The group has built an unusual and immersive game, complete with vivid, day-glo visuals and an original soundtrack by various ambient electronic artists.

When I stood in front of the Xbox Kinect, Leela immediately projected my silhouette onto the screen, illuminating the location of my chakras, or energy centers. Leela comes with seven movement-based games, each of which stimulates activity at its corresponding chakra. I was feeling grounded so I jumped to level six, the third-eye chakra. That level of the game involves tilting your head in side-to-side motions as you fly through a tube of light on the screen. The object is to pick up bright little tokens of light that are the same color while avoiding the other colors. Other levels involve flying though giant lotus flowers, or blowing up comets with swipes of cosmic energy.

Leela also features guided meditations, seven of which use a breath sensor to detect movement in the lower, middle, and upper chest cavity to coach breathing techniques. It’s remarkable how sensitive the Kinect’s sensor is, though I had to tuck my shirt in to get the breath sensor to work properly (The Wii version of the game, which I didn’t test, doesn’t measure your breathing).

At its core, Leela is a biofeedback tool that spins your drishti, or “gaze,” inward through breath and chakra awareness. The central narrative of Leela is one of surrender, and the only way to get there is to relax and find your flow. In less esoteric words, this game rewards fluid movements and a detached awareness of the game’s stimuli. If nothing else, Leela will remove you from your twitchy gaming zone and take you closer to the “Om zone.” Or, as I like to call it, the “Zoooooooooone.”

Leela may not appeal to traditional gamers used to more intense action, but if you’re a gamma wave chaser or if you had a great time at Burning Man, you’ll likely appreciate Leela’s exercise in mindfulness.

WIRED Trippy visuals and soundtrack. Great use of Xbox Kinect’s motion-sensing technology. Takes gaming into the biofeedback sphere. Excellent path into the world of meditation for the curious.

TIRED Your character can die in the last level, which feels contrary to the game’s theme of self discovery. Kinect’s accuracy at measuring the movement of your chest is iffy. Wii version is dumbed down slightly.

Editor’s Note: Brenden Mulligan is an entrepreneur who created Onesheet, ArtistData, MorningPics, and PhotoPile. He’s an mentor for 500 Startups, Advise.me and several startups. You can find him on Twitter at @bmull and blogging at Starting Up.

For the past few months, my wife and I have been traveling and meeting startups around the world. We’ve met entrepreneurs in Tokyo, Thailand, India, Israel, and Istanbul. In the next week we’ll be meeting with a community leader in South Africa. It’s been fascinating.

In addition to meeting with the teams, we have been leading Q&A sessions with larger groups. The discussion always includes the group asking “how do we make our startup community as strong as Silicon Valley?”

It’s an important question, as a lot of the startups’ success in Silicon Valley can be attributed to the strong community. However, that community has been growing and maturing for over 40 years. So when people ask about how to replicate it, I try to direct the conversation back to the foundation of the community.

These are the elements I think are important to seed a startup community:

Support

There are a lot of places where starting a company isn’t seen as an exciting and inspiring pursuit. In fact, in places like Japan, we learned that becoming an entrepreneur is seen as an unwise and ill-informed decision. This kind of environment makes launching a startup, which is already an incredibly difficult task, near impossible. The founders needs to find a way to feel supported. If they don’t feel support, they won’t make it through endless 18 hour days. In places where support isn’t the norm, founders need to find ways to support each other until the rest of the community comes around.

Collaboration

One of the best things about having co-founders is it gives an entrepreneur other people to bounce ideas off of and work through problems with. But in good startup communities, this kind of collaboration isn’t limited to internal conversations. Founders of different companies should constantly get together to share their experiences and help each other. Especially in newer entrepreneurial communities, it’s incredibly important to pool knowledge, instead of everyone figuring out everything on their own. This can happen in any form, whether it’s late night hack sessions or weekly breakfasts. Figure out what works for your community and then get together and talk.

Transparency

When collaborating, transparency is a must. In many places, people are afraid to talk freely about their ideas, figuring that someone might steal what they’re working on. In more mature startup environments, we’ve learned that this shouldn’t be a concern. The risk of someone stealing your idea (which I’ve never seen happen) is almost always offset by the huge amount of value you get from sharing what you’re working on and asking for feedback. So when you get together to talk, really talk.

Embrace Failure

It’s human nature to talk about your successes and hide your failures. After all, why tell people what you’re not good at? Why admit you didn’t do something well? In startup communities, it’s one of the most valuable things you can do. Most entrepreneurs (and people in general) will tell you they’ve learned more from their failures than their successes. By keeping these failures to yourself, no one else can learn from them. In startups, people don’t see failure as a reflection of your talent, they see it as an opportunity to learn and improve. Most startups fail. So if you’re going to get into startups, embrace failure, and learn from it. Then share what you learned.

Form Startup Hubs

Getting a group of entrepreneurs talking is a great step, but finding some common places to do that makes it a lot more powerful. This be a permanent location (co-working space, incubators, technology organizations, cafes) or a scheduled event (meetups, happy hours), but it’s important to establish places where entrepreneurs can co-exist. There are probably a lot more entrepreneurs around you than you think, and getting everyone together is one way to understand the size of your community. This is one of the reasons that Startup Weekend is such a powerful organization. It brings the community together.

Invite Outsiders In

People from more established entrepreneurial cities love helping smaller communities grow. Use this to your advantage. Invite people who have been successful in established hubs to come speak at a local conference, come speak at the local hub, or just come and meet teams when they’re in town. Pay attention to people’s travel schedules (which people always post to Twitter) and if they’re in your area, invite them. Entrepreneurs love sharing knowledge with someone else, and it’s rewarding to do this with a new community. Dave McClure has formed a whole organization around this concept with Geeks On A Plane, which takes entrepreneurs to all corners of the world to teach and learn from the local startup community. Jeff Slobotski has done it for years with the enormously successful Big Omaha conference.

Send Insiders Out

You community can’t expect everyone to come to you or to figure it all out on its own. It’s important to see how people are doing it elsewhere, and there’s no better way to do that than to get knee deep in it. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken with an entrepreneur who took a trip to the bay area who left without learning something new or meeting at least one valuable connection. So use whatever connections you have and visit places with mature communities like San Francisco, New York, etc. If you can’t make it, send ambassadors for you to go learn and then come share back with the community.

Be Patient

A lot of people worry that since top tier investors aren’t interested in their community right away, their efforts aren’t paying off. But they need to be patient. Building a startup community takes a long time. Brad Feld of the Foundry Group spoke about this at last year’s Tahoe Tech Talk, saying it’s taken 15 years to build the community in Boulder, Colorado, even though many people think it’s happened just over the past few years.

Overall, just understand that the most amazing thing about Silicon Valley isn’t the huge amount of venture capital, or number potential acquirers. It’s not all the incubators or co-working spaces. Instead, it’s the collaborative, helpful, and inspiring community that’s developed around it all. It’s the 10 other entrepreneurs sitting next to you at the coffee shop willing to help you through a problem or make an introduction to someone who might be helpful. It’s the support that the entire community consistently gives each other.

A strong community won’t appear overnight, but if you start with the right foundation, the rest will come in time.

Please add anything I missed in the comments.

It’s an old dilemma. Should entrepreneurs rely on their reason or their instinct? Should they trust their gut or should they trust their mind?

The good news, at least according to the author of The Intuitive Compass, Francis Cholle, is that the best entrepreneurial decisions are actually a balance of reason and instinct. As Cholle told me when he came into our San Francisco studio, entrepreneurs need to embrace a “healthy disregard for the impossible” if they are to develop their own intuitive compass.

Don’t trust my gut (or my mind) on this one, though. You can buy Intuitive Compass, of course. Better still, however, Cholle is developing a free Intuitive Compass app that will allow you to balance your reason and your instinct wherever you are and whenever you want.

We hear a lot about gamification these days, which appears to be about providing incentives for us to contribute to social networks. The idea is that we need some additional rationale beyond the blogger’s call of being mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. This is also expressed as making a difference, or paying forward, or the myriad themes of a number of self help/business books.

Certainly a pinch of game mechanics can help, as FourSquare makes clear. Being mayor of the DMV may not make your day, but the more data FourSquare consumes, the more it has to come up with reslices of those signals to keep people engaged. That same feedback loop is what made Twitter what it is still becoming today — a living, breathing central nervous system for the mobility set aka most of us.

But as much as I hear the logic of game mechanics, there are other larger drivers of the social mobile wave. And nothing stands out more than what could be called the Appification of the computer, web, and media. You can trace this surge in reverse, starting with the predictions of the impact of iPhone/iPad’s failure to support Flash and continuing right up to today with the clock-ticking about Apple in the wake of its leader’s death.

At its simplest, the reason Flash is road kill is that Steve Jobs asked us which was more important — the coolest possible set of toys ever or a few months of consternation by the studios who had already milked as much as they could from a hemorrhaging DVD market. Even though it appeared a fair fight at the time, the reality was that the creative industries were at a low point in their history while the technology business was entering the most creative part of its cycle.

In interesting ways, this role reversal played to the power unleashed by the crescendo of realtime social technologies and the miniaturization wave triggered by the space program. The last big creative surge in movies and music was led by similar technology developments in production — small, hand held cameras and motion control devices that decoupled producers and directors from the studio system, and multitrack recording and digital sequencing that lowered the cost and brought record-making to the living room.

The ease with which blockbusters could be made and marketed also had the effect of encouraging sequels and mainstream bets, slowing the opportunity for growing new talent at the very moment the tools allowed a democratization of access to the industry. Technology became the byword of monetization, from 3D to HD and the scourge of reality gamification.

By contrast, the technology business turned creative as realtime and mobile proved an opening for Jobs and Page/Brin to do insanely great things with digital magic. Gmail proved the experts dead wrong when it offered unlimited storage, a Golden Goose that did something no one thought possible. The Cloud meant you could have your cake and eat it too; it was always true that you were defined by the data you threw off,, but now you could summon it with a magical cursor that rewound through search to the moment you recalled in your history.

The economies of scale Microsoft had achieved for itself and customers were suddenly turned on their head and delivered to the users as transformative tools. In effect, we were incentivized to create data and the traces of how we consumed such data as payment for the cloud services that resulted. This was the social contract that Twitter and Facebook parlayed into the leverage needed to first, make realtime work and second, attract the services needed to replace the atrophying media that preceded.

The iPad delivered the coup de grace — all media, games, communications, social emitter, and business disruptor — and in the process sidestepped the carriers the iPhone unhinged with the AT&T deal. Instead of a service contract, the media displayed on the device became the subsidy. The Kindle Fire is the companion instantiation of that strategy, with Amazon Prime morphing beyond free shipping to a Netflix/Spotify competitor. All very creative, while Hollywood contorts in the search for revenue replacement.

Let’s take on the notion that Apple is now reduced to playing out the clock post-Steve. As I type (iPad of course) push notification is in its middle school phase as @mentions stream in from the network next to email and news bulletins. Siri is shipping while still in Beta, a first for Apple by the way, but it’s stream-enabled to the point where it stops working when an outage occurs. The history of the cloud is benchmarked by such outages, as massive adoption pushes out the scalability and security model beyond the false cloud one it’s replacing.

In effect, Apple has done the one thing it must do to stand up to Google and the loss of Jobs: go to the Cloud. Take the Beta designation — all Google products were beta until Google Apps went after enterprise sales. With Google+ now reworking the front end of all of the products, it seems beta is back in business. For Apple, it means something different: “We’re looking for your help in creating the future.”

After all, it’s not like the iPad happened in a vacuum just last year or whatever. According to a PBS documentary on Steve Jobs, he sketched out the outlines of the device for at least one person some 30 years ago. Then there’s the way Jobs didn’t wait for the users to tell them what they wanted, but went ahead and created it for them. Well, that’s right. I didn’t want Siri for the longest time, and didn’t really even when I got the new 4S. But now my wife says I’m having an affair with the damn thing.

Here’s why. It’s because it’s Beta, not in spite of it. Because it’s hard wired to the network, I literally can’t wait to turn it on to see if it’s getting better. Same with the OS, which for the first time in iOS 5 is upgraded over the air. Take Pages, which uses the system spell correction. One of my favorite bête noires is how it handles “its”. In the previous generation it auto-corrects to “it’s” which means “it is” 100 percent of the time and which gets it wrong about 90% of the time. IOS 5 gets it wrong about 50% of the time. Beta wins 100% of the time.

The reason I think Appification wins is that other big deals like gamification and crowd sourcing and HTML 5 are rolled into the A Theme. Take push notification, please. It’s the most creative adjunct to the iPad ever, so far. As I type, the Gillmor Gang retweets roll in at the top, then a work-related email, then a time sensitive one on the management offsite next week in Vegas, and so on. I look at what I need to look at, and stage the ones I don’t want to interrupt my writing flow. When I’m ready to take a break, I already know where to go and swipe the history down from the top of the screen and go. It’s a creative tool, like the part of the movie where I rush to get the popcorn refill.

It’s not an App versus Web argument either. It’s about the creative edge where many of us like to recharge our batteries from office politics and family quibbles, that place where the frontier meets the ocean and we care more about the silence where good ideas sometimes go to be born. Don’t worry, without the Steve Jobs of the world to mix and match the right ingredients at the right time, we wouldn’t have the success that breeds the blockbusters and sequels and tips the balance away from Northern and back to Southern California.

Apps and the Web thrive off of each other. Touch + wrapper. When app gets the network it becomes the sum of all its parts, aware of its possibilities, able to provide the contours and context of what feels like a coherent entity. My mind feels comforted by the notion of the app, like hot chocolate after a day on the ski slope. Some place to go, beginning middle end. Yet I want the potential for disruption, the harnessing of those great minds out there signaling on the social stream, the drumbeat of serendipity orchestrated while I savor a good book. Discovery by design.

The current toast of the web is Pinterest, the visual pinboard for collecting and sharing content online. The “pinning” phenomena is spreading from its modest beginnings to appearing in national media outlets. There are over 2.5m monthly active Pinterest users on Facebook. A co-founder of the site has over 500,000 followers on Pinterest. Ron Conway (an investor in the site) remarked that Pinterest’s user growth rate is what Facebook’s was five years ago. Earlier in 2011, it was valued through venture financing at $40m and, most recently, just a few months later, at around $200m.

What is going on here?

Pinterest is growing for a variety of reasons. It enables users to clip things they like. It emphasize pictures over text, which are more visually appealing and easier to digest. Signing up is easy. Pinterest has crafted a fun, whimsical, artistic image. In particular, it has struck a chord with female users, an attractive demographic. Pinterest has added to the lexicon of “like” or “retweeting” or “reblogging” or “upvoting” with the ability to “pin” content and then “repin” it across the site and other networks. A leading expert on marketing to moms, Kat Gordon of Maternal Instinct, remarked that using Pinterest is a “soothing” experience for her.

Despite the hockey-stick growth, doubts exist. Where’s their revenue? It’s likely they won’t make this a focus until the product and backend systems are complete, but note that they already route affiliate links to online shops and are believed to drive incredible traffic to Etsy. Why did Pinterest raise so much money? It was a very competitive round, and the team needs much more technical talent, and in this environment, they’ll need to be aggressive about finding that talent. And, what exactly is Pinterest? It’s a site about discovery and data. On the front-end, users can discover things that they like and organize things they like. On the back-end, it’s a data company, where the company can capture rich metadata around each image.

I’ve been tracking Pinterest for a while now and, to me, the single most important aspect of the site is that it has deeply tapped into an important shift in consumer and purchasing behavior. As we make a decision to search for or buy something online, we are trained to go to Google (or Amazon), search by keyword, and sort through results to eventually make a transaction. In return for that sorting, Google charges for advertising, but in order for it to work, we users have to signal our intent: “Red Nike running sneakers.” But, how did I decide to want these red running shoes in the first place? While Google makes money at the bottom of this decision funnel, the top of the funnel is where “discovery” happens. It’s much wider at the top of the funnel, and harder to pin down where the thoughts originate (pun intended).

A site like Pinterest could help bring some of that discovery online. For the red running sneakers, instead of researching them myself, I may instead elect to browse the pinboards of Pinterest users who are dedicated runners. I could find sneakers on a friend’s board and may have reasonable confidence that this pair could suit me, too. In this manner, I may elect to buy the shoes right after seeing my friend’s board on Pinterest and get to a transaction faster.

If Pinterest can (1) get its users to take pictures of things in the real world with its mobile app and post them online with data and (2) leverage image-tagging tools such as Stipple and help bypass intent-based search on just a small fraction of online transactions, it could be a huge cultural and financial success. This is the promise of Pinterest. Of course, there’s a long way to go and there will be other opportunities to create discovery engines for different types of users, whether broad or niche.

There is too much information online, too many pages filled with stock images and no context. Search engines provide significant utility, but we still have to exert energy to find what we need after results are algorithmically surfaced. The new crop of social media companies help discovery come online and threaten traditional search. With these new tools, users are able to clip and collect the bits of the web that they are most interested in and, in the process, disregard the rest as noise.

Sites like Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, Instapaper, Snip.it, Clipboard, and Curisma, among others, all allow their users to decide what aspects of the web (text, media, etc.) are worth saving and sharing, instead of browsing the web from Google, or even Facebook for that matter. Because many of these networks have asymmetric follow/follower models, and because users can “tune” whom they are following, users’ feeds could increase in relevance as items are retweeted or repinned. These networks allow for self-expression, and in doing so, re-sort and re-shape the web we see, and that is a very big shift away from traditional search toward social discovery.

Photo Credit: Flickr/fdecomite

Editor’s note: The following guest post was written by Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, founder and CEO of WatchMojo.

When Congress updated copyright laws and passed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, it ushered an era of investment, innovation and job creation.  In the decade since, companies like Google, YouTube and Twitter have emerged thanks to the Act, but in the process, they have disrupted the business models and revenue streams of traditional media companies (TMCs).  Today, the TMCs are trying to fast-track a couple of bills in the House and Congress to reverse all of that.

Through their lobbyists in Washington, D.C., media companies are trying to rewrite the DMCA through two new bills.  The content industry’s lobbyists have forged ahead without any input from the technology industry, the one in the Senate is called Protect IP and the one in the House is called E-Parasites.  The E-Parasite law would kill the safe harbors of the DMCA and allow traditional media companies to attack emerging technology companies by cutting off their ability to transact and collect revenue, sort of what happened to Wikileaks, if you will.  This would scare VCs from investing in such tech firms, which in turn would destroy job creation.

The technology industry is understandably alarmed by its implications, which include automatic blacklists for any site issued a takedown notice by copyright holders that would extend to payment providers and even search engines.   What is going on and how exactly did we get here?

What is the DMCA and what are the Safe Harbors?

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) updated copyright laws when Congress passed it in 1998 by providing four safe harbors including legal protection from copyright-infringing “information residing on systems or networks at the direction of users.” The DMCA set up an important balance that gave online service providers freedom from liability if they pulled down content upon notification.

In doing so, the DMCA basically allowed user-generated sites to grow and prosper by sheltering them from unfair demands and excessive litigation by traditional media companies (TMCs) when a user did upload infringing content.

Why are Media Companies Unhappy with the DMCA

The DMCA put the burden of identify infringing content on the TMCs, whereby for example NBC Universal had to notify YouTube that someone had uploaded a clip of Lazy Sunday and ask them to take it down.  So long as YouTube removed the video in question then no one got hurt, though some argue that this chain of events has in fact hurt TMCs.

Why are Media Companies Going Nuclear With Pre-Emptive Strike

A cynic would argue that TMCs are essentially applying the same strategy as tech firms just through different channels.  In other words, when venture capitalists fund entrepreneurs to write code which is intended to “disrupt stodgy old industries” (to quote from Sean Parker’s LinkedIn profile), no one objects when traditional content companies are not asked for their “input.”

Obviously it’s not quite the same: the bills would affect an entire industry (if not the entire economy) for the next generation of Internet startups whereas when a VC invests in a company it is a more limited act, even if that startup has the potential to “change the world” the way Napster or YouTube did.

Furthermore, the fact that emerging companies disrupt TMCs is evolution and a manifestation of the survival of the fittest.  While some will argue that TMCs are relying on lawyers, whereas tech firms compete in the marketplace, the truth is that many tech firms buy time by hiding behind the DMCA, further frustrating the TMCs.

The other reason why TMCs are being “proactive” is that it takes a lot of resources to chase down infringers, both through takedown notices and then through subsequent litigation.  In some cases, the most brass-knuckle approach is being replaced by carrots.  But when you consider that Viacom’s lawsuit against YouTube was “too little too late”, maybe the TMCs are pursuing this kind of pre-emptive, draconian first strike strategy to make the tech firms they are targeting more willing to play ball.

Indeed, now that the TMCs are showing their willingness to go nuclear, they hope that VCs and tech firms may become more inclined to engage TMCs on their terms.

Impact of Bills on Startups, Job Creation

Investor Fred Wilson is drawing attention to the two new bills, arguing that “these bills were written by the content industry without any input from the technology industry. And they are trying to fast track them through congress and into law without any negotiation with the technology industry.”  He adds, “the last negotiation produced an excellent compromise that has stood the test of time and allowed important new services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to be created and become large companies and massive job creators.”

He’s right.  No one doubts that these bills would spell the end of the Internet as we know it.  It’s also likely that the jobs created by tech firms over the past two decades far outweigh the jobs lost at TMCs.

But it’s fair to say that had the TMCs not gone ballistic, then perhaps the tech firms and the VCs who back them would not have cared so much about renewing the dialog and listening to the TMC’s wish list.  Case in point, Mr. Wilson extends the olive branch in his post: “If another negotiation is in order to amend the DMCA, then let’s have it.”

There’s a saying that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission; that sums up some of the thinking of tech firms over the years.  It could now be argued that the TMCs are not asking for permission to try to rewrite the law and will hope that their pre-emptive strike will allow them to ask for forgiveness when the dust settles.

Both sides are driven by greed and fear, but if the TMCs get their wish and blow the DMCA away, then the uncertainty around the corner might come back and haunt them.  The technology industry will adapt if it needs to, and who knows what that will mean for the media industry.  After all, better the devil you know than the one you don’t.

Photo credit: Flickr/James Vaughan