Category: Tech news

If you’ve ever opened the pixellated hell that is the Facebook iPhone app on the iPad, you’ll realize that something must be done to improve our species ability to connect with friends and relations. That thing is Friended by Napkin Studio, a native iPad Facebook app designed from the ground up to be far superior to Facebook’s own offering.

The app costs 99 cents for a non-ad-besmirched version and is actually quite excellent. All of the major functionality is there including message viewing, image browsing, and status updates. On the whole it is no better or worse than Facebook’s web interface but it does support notifications and chat in a hi-res interface.

Sure, you could keep using the free Facebook app, but given that it is rarely updated and slightly buggy, the folks at Napkin Studios have decided to offer a superior quality app for Facebook interaction at a fair price. Sure it just aggregates functionality that already exists, but it does it in a fairly usable and actually quite beautiful way.

So if you need your Facebook fix and don’t want to suffer from the embarrassment of iPad pixelation, Friended is your app.

Here we go: speculation and alarums! AllThingsD has news of the latest Apple Media event and, although there is no time or location set, expect this event to be the unveiling of the iPad 2 or, if Gruber is to be believed, something that will be more like the iPad 3GS than a full overhaul – something akin to the difference between the iPhone 3G and the iPhone 4.

Read more…

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur who has gone to the Dark Side of VC. He started his first company in 1999 and was headquartered in London, leaving in 2005 and selling to a publicly traded French services company. He founded his second company in Palo Alto in 2005 and sold this company to Salesforce.com, becoming VP of Product Management. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner focusing on early-stage technology companies. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable and on Twitter at @msuster.

Lately I have seen a number of deals announced on TechCrunch in which five or more different VCs were participating in the deal.

This always makes me chuckle because in my first company we had five investors in our first round and we picked up five more before we finally sold the company. In my second company I had only five investors.

While there is no right or wrong answer, having seen the extremes I’d like to offer you a framework for considering the right answer for yourselves.

The Perils of Many

I understand the appeal of having many VC firms on your cap table. You may feel as I did in 1999 that the more smart people around the table the more intros you’ll have, the more sage advice you’ll receive and the more impressive you’ll seem to outsiders. Plus, if you need more money it’s far less for each to dip into their respective pockets to fund you.

While all of this is true, it’s also true that nothing so perfect ever comes without a cost. Here’s the problem:

Let’s say you have five VCs (plus angels but let’s ignore that for now) and each one owns 5% so you took 25% dilution to get the round done. By definition each of those VCs (unless they are a micro VC – and one who doesn’t mind 5% ownership) will view you as a sort of “option” where they might get to fund the next round if you do well. Either that or there is something other than a financial motivator involved – NO VC is looking to build a business off of 5% ownership in startups. You simply can’t drive good returns that way.

So why else would they invest if not as an option to re-up in the next round? Maybe they wanted the branding associated with a hot company, maybe they wanted to work with the other investors around the table or maybe they thought it was a cheap way to get educated on your market – it’s always easier to learn an industry when you’re on the inside.

These are all dumb reason to invest – of course. But it happens.

So let’s consider a bad (but likely) scenario where either you don’t hit your targets, the market sours or competition is kicking your butt making it hard to fund raise. Most companies hit a bump in the road at some point. None of those five investors is sufficiently motivated to help you in tough times.

Firstly, they haven’t really signaled that it’s “their deal” in the way that leading a deal does. They can plausibly tell others, “yeah, we were a really small shareholder there – we had nothing really to do with the problems.”

Secondly, in tough times they’re also thinking about all of their other investments. Let’s say each of those five partners has at least seven other investments each. In tough times I promise you their time and energy will be allocated more heavily toward deals where they have more money invested and/or where they have a larger ownership position to protect.

Sure, if you become Zynga everyone of those five investors will be helping you. In fact, it will probably show up on their Twitter bio & on their website. But how many of you are likely to become the next Zynga (and without hitting a few bumps in the road first).

Now let’s consider the upside situation where you happen to be in a super hot space. Now you have five investors of which at least a few will be vying to take a larger stake in your next round. By definition you can’t have three investors each wanting to increase from 5% to 20% ownership or you’re fawked anyways. So it will be an internal fight over allocations. This is not to mention the fight you’ll see if you want to bring in a new investor to lead the next round to set an objective price.

“Many” has benefits but it also has drawbacks. If you plan to do it I highly recommend that most of the VCs be smaller funds and ones who are generally not looking to invest much more after your first round of capital. There are firms with this stated objective – seek them out if you want to load the VC roster on your deal.

Note that I am talking specifically about five VCs splitting one round. It might be that over a period of five years you’ve done three rounds of investment and ended up with four VCs. That’s a different story. Each VC came on with different information, at a different price and with a different risk appetite. Hopefully each lead or co-lead their round so there is more harmony in the configuration.

The Pitfall of One

It is very common for funding rounds to have just one VC doing the investment. This is largely true because most VCs have a 20% minimum threshold in order to invest so bringing in multiple VCs can be very expensive in terms of dilution. So obviously before agreeing to work with this VC you better make sure you know them really well. And I always encourage entrepreneurs to do reference checking. Here’s my guide to how to do that.

There is an obvious pitfall to working with just one VC – if you fall out of love you’re screwed. There are reasons why VCs sometimes don’t support deals once they’ve invested.

The most common case is that the partner who did the deal left the firm. You are then a “stranded” portfolio company. You know the drill – the new guy says he’ll support you, but it was never really his deal. If you have any hair on you he can always distance himself and deny any involvement.

You might have a VC who is at the end of their fund and doesn’t have deep enough pockets to fund you if you hit bumps in the road. The VC might have lost confidence in you. You might just have differences of opinion on the direction / strategy of the company or how to handle situations in difficult times.

I have personally seen some VCs who decide not to support certain industries they once had backed. I know that a lot of VCs had roadkill in the Internet Video 1.0 world and many pared back investments. Whatever the reason, when you’re stranded and you have one investor the only way out is to find new outside investors.

And this is doubly hard when your existing investor isn’t supportive. The standard line the new investor wants to hear from your previous VC is, “we’re behind this company 100%. We’re willing to do our full pro-rata & might even like to do a bit extra.” If your VC had stranded you, you won’t hear this – believe me.

Still, most deals involve one VC – just to be clear.

The Squeeze of the “Two Handed Deal”

The most tempting thing to do in a financing is to find two investors to split a deal. In my mind that’s the perfect scenario. You get all the benefits of the “many” deal without the drawbacks. If you can pull it off, I love the “two-handed” deal. If you’re doing well but need a little more gas to prove yourself, it’s so much easier for VCs to split an inside round. It’s both a smaller check and it’s external validation that somebody else was willing to fund.

The biggest problem in two is the “squeeze.” All VCs want to own between 25-33% of your company. That’s the number they feel comfortable owning in exchange for their time & resources over what will likely be a 7-10 year endeavor (if you’re successful). They internally almost all have their secret minimum threshold, which is 20%. There – the secret is out.

So in order to get a two-handed deal you need to dilute by 40% which is an awful lot at the start of your company. When you consider that they’ll also want a 15-20% option pool in the company you’re talking about founders owning as little as 40% after just one round. That wouldn’t be bad if you had just one founder, but if you have 4 you’re already at 10% each and you have 7-10 years more work left (not to mention 3 more funding rounds!).

There are a bunch of VCs out there who don’t cling to the old “20% or the highway” mentality on every single deal and I suggest you seek them out. They are the ones who will often partner better with other VCs. There are ones I’ve worked with like True Ventures, First Round Capital, Greycroft, Rincon Ventures …. just to name a few. And of course most of the micro VCs (fka super angels) also don’t hold to this minimum bar.

The easiest configurations to push for are either one lead VC who takes 20-25% and one smaller VC who takes 7.5-15% or two leads who take 15-17% each.

Rules of the Road

1. Always Have a Lead

No matter which option you choose always have a lead. If you want the “many” deal then give half the round to one VC and let the other 4 split the second 50%. No lead = no one on the hook in tough times = no one to corral other investors to take action = nobody with enough skin in the game to give a damn. Always, always have a lead. Not just to get through tough times, but for conflict resolution in general.

2. Make Sure You’re Stage Appropriate

If you select a lead VC make sure they’re stage appropriate. If you’re raising $2 million on an A round and it’s a $1 billion fund make sure they have a track record of backing and being active with early stage deals. If you’re raising a $10 million B round and a $100 million fund ponies up $8 million you better have a firm grasp of how much of their fund is allocated, how much they have reserved for you and how they plan to support you in tough times.

3. Make Sure They Have Enough Gas in the Tank

In any scenario it’s a good idea to understand where the VC is at in their fund. You can’t ask this kind of stuff on the first date, but ultimately you politely want to get out of them: when their fund was raised, how much capital did they raise, how much is allocated, when they’re raising their next fund and what their “reserve” strategy is. Best if you get much of this from due diligence of calling other portfolio companies and then use this information to confirm with the VC.

4. Make Sure They Play Nicely in the Sandbox

I often see VCs getting sharp elbows out at the time of a fund raising. They start muscling for ownership percentages and start angling to kick out certain investors or angels. I find this behavior strange but now a bit predictable.

I usually counsel entrepreneurs with the following advice, “if your VC can’t play nicely on the way in when they love you the most and are on their best behavior, imagine how they’re going to be in difficult times or when the final pie is getting split!”

Seriously, man. Assholes in good times are insufferable in bad times. If you experience this behavior run. Didn’t you get enough of this crap in high school to want to revisit it again?

5. Always Pitch Outsiders for Follow Ons

I have staked my strategy as a VC as being both stage agnostic and willing to follow great deals by leading another round and increasing my percentage ownership. So it seems strange advice for me to recommend that you pitch outside investors first for follow on investments.

Here’s why – even for a VC you really like and who you might like to lead your next round. You know the old saying, “great fences make great neighbors?” My corollary for VC is “pitch outsiders and you’ll have great insiders.” It just keeps us a bit honest. I think if your inside VC wants to lead a round and is giving you a “fair” price it’s reasonable to not “over shop” the deal and try to drive the highest price possible. Get a fair price from outsiders or at least market test the interest level.

6. Always Make Room for Value-Added Angels

Finally, I believe in making room for value-added angels on every round and in every deal. Yes, I include many micro VCs in this category. If there are 4-5 investors who each want to kick in $50-75k – why would I want to turn away smart people from working with the company? These aren’t people who are going to compete for increasing pro rata in the future. They aren’t people who are going to demand minimum ownership %’s.

They’re all dopeness, no wackness (presuming they are great angels and not PITAs).

If your new prospective VC is opposed to a great angel or a small investment from Founder Collective, Felicis Ventures, SV Angel or similar – please re-read number 4 above.

Image: Cassius Marcellus Coolidge

Mobile payments company Square has made an interesting move today, which should put competitors Verifone and Intuit on notice. The startup is dropping the per transaction charge for any business using its mobile payments device and service. Square previously charged 2.75% of each transaction amount plus a flat $0.15 per transaction fee. Today, Square is completely dropping the per transaction charge.

So why is the mobile payments company dropping the transaction fee? Square’s General Manager Keith Rabois says that along with simplifying the payments experience for businesses, it is also taking on the hidden fees and teaser rate structure that have plagued the credit card industry. “The vision of Square is to simplify create zero friction and complexity around payments, which is difficult to do in financial services,” he explains. Rabois says that the per transaction fees on top of a variable rate charge can be misleading for businesses because the hidden costs add up especially if a business processes a large amount of transactions. Now, Square will simply charge a flat 2.75% of all transactions, regardless of size. “In the end accepting payments should be as easy as using a microwave,” says Rabois.

Fresh off a $27.5 million funding round, Square is gaining a lot of a lot of buzz and just debuted a new billboard in Times Square. Jack Dorsey’s startup is expected to process $40 million in transactions in Q1 of 2011 and is currently signing up 100,000 merchants per month. That’s compared to 30,000 monthly signups last Fall.

Currently the majority of Square’s users are small businesses, so no transaction charge will surely be a big draw for users who aren’t raking in millions in revenue. And there is no cost for the actual Square device. Intuit, which just extended the offer of a free version of its Square competitor GoPayment indefinitely, still charges $0.15 per transaction. And VeriFone’s offering still charges $0.17 per transaction.

Rabois says that Square wants to be as transparent as possible with users, adding that the fee elimination won’t be last thing that is simplified with the service. Check out the video below, in which Square randomly interviewed a number of San Francisco business owners to determine if they knew how much they were paying in credit card payments fees.

Back in the day, before the iPhone, before Android, before Webkit, before Skyfire, when we suffered through mobile web experiences using Pocket IE or worse yet maybe a preinstalled Motorola WAP 2.0 browser (dark times my friends), there was a bright and shining star that would aid those in need. That star was Opera. Its two flagship mobile browsers—Opera Mobile and Opera Mini—were a delight to proto-smartphone owners and T9‘ers alike. A premium, relatively elegant web experience on just about any little phone and mostly for free. I think I paid 5 bucks for Opera Mobile on my old BlackJack II and it was well worth it.

Click through to see the interview.

Read more…

It’s a common criticism of popular Web services that don’t yet make a lot of money: Where’s the business model? That criticism has certainly been lobbed at Tumblr, the short-burst publishing platform all the kids are flocking to these days. Tumblr generates billions of pageviews across its networks and is growing at more than 250 million pageviews per week. “Making money off of Tumblr would be incredibly easy,” CEO David Karp tells Chris Dixon in the Founder Stories video above. A cheap AdSense ad on every member’s dashboard would make Tumblr “wildly profitable.”

So why doesn’t he do that? As he goes onto explain, he’d rather find ways to make money that also “enhance the experience for our users.” Tumblr does charge for things like being featured in its directory or $9 themes users can buy to spruce up their Tumblog. Karp notes that some theme designers are making tens of thousands of dollars month. Still, these seem more like ancillary revenue streams than what will end up being Tumbr’s main revenue source down the line. Fortunately for Karp, he has patient investors and just raised $30 million to keep scaling the service and figure out a more natural business model.

The challenges of scaling and keeping up with growth “has absolutely slowed down the product roadmap,” he admits. But his team is working hard to get back on track with both keeping the service up and rolling out new features.

Karp also talks about building a startup in New York City in the shadow of giant media conglomerates and how that gives him a different perspective than if Tumblr were based in Silicon Valley. (You can also watch Part I of the interview here, in which Karp talks about why traditional blogs aren’t for everyone).

The early successes of revolutionaries in Egypt seems to be touching off a number of other movements in the area, from Libya to Bahrain, and will likely spread further, as the fervor seems not to be damped by establishment brutality. With luck and perseverance by the people on the ground, serious change may be effected and the “iron veil” with which mideast leadership has sealed off their people will be, if not rent, at least hemmed a bit.

That will have its repercussions in every industry, and the worlds of tech and the web are no exception. Not only will a market on the order of a hundred million people be opened up, but a generation of minds panting for expression will hit the rest of the world like a freight train. Whether looking for people to work with, ideas to invest in, or news to cover, we’d all do well to cast our eyes towards Mecca.

The younger generation’s employment (and deployment) of social networking tactics has been remarked — perhaps too much so, as I argued last week, but that doesn’t diminish the implications. However much social networks are to be commended for their role in the movements, they point towards something simpler and more important: this is a generation ready to embrace the new order, including the internet and all it brings — a very different outlook from that of the hereditary and military leaders being toppled, whose only concerns were increasing their wealth and maintaining the status quo.

And while the process of post-revolutionary cooldown will take years as new constitutions, regulations, and coalitions are created, the populace will also be busy exercising their new freedoms. What will be the first fruits of this rich new soil?

I think that at first, there will have to be baby steps. The next Google isn’t going to come from the Mideast — at least, not yet. The first wave will be services and tools aimed at making the Mideast/Arab populations accessible, and this will have the air of deliberate separation, even isolationism. The truth is that there is going to be some of that. It’s difficult to overstate the cultural differences between the Western world and the Arab one, many of which will remain for decades after this revolutionary period, if indeed they are ever reconciled.

To descend to particulars would be tedious and presumptuous on my part, being an ignorant Westerner myself. But suffice it to say that there will be disagreements. We shouldn’t let this get in the way of the rest of the online world’s assimilating, and being assimilated by, the new modern middle east.

One thing I do feel confident in predicting is a new Arab-oriented social network. It sounds dubious at first — why not use Facebook, as many obviously are already? Don’t forget that the post-revolution period will comprise a major expansion of internet availability, and the numbers of online people in the region will swell. Most of these new users will be a totally different demographic from the Blackberry-toting, Twitter-using youth who, while influential, are less than perfectly representative of the rest of their country. The older and less savvy will welcome openness but continue to embrace their traditions and religion. Islam and Arab culture will inform the new network’s philosophy, look, and rules.

Patents may be an issue. I don’t expect the Mideast to become a haven for duplication and copyright issues like China; on the contrary, I suspect that original IP in these new areas will be at risk of being cloned elsewhere. As the US is the primary (though by no means only) competitor for web-based properties, young Arab companies will likely be in need of American coadjutors to preempt patent trolls and idea bandits. Money and clout, on the other hand, will need to be managed locally, and new power brokers will emerge, hoping to get a hand on the reins.

It should be acknowledged that the Middle East is not quite so desolate of minds and ideas as I seem to make it out. But the fact is that there are many cultural differences that amount to a suppression of intellectual liberty, and the modern institutes of learning there, like KAUST, are more finishing schools for intellectual nobility than places designed to improve the academic fundamentals of learning of a needy populace. With luck, the new powers will call for better, more modern, and more equal education.

The motive for revolution was, and is, a lack of civil liberties and domestic rights. But the result will be, hopefully, much more than that, as those who have held despotic sway for decades are suffered to disperse. With the lessening of basic cares comes a desire for greater freedoms and learning, both of which are likely to be found with an open web at their disposal. Welcoming hundreds of millions to the online world is a joyous occasion, and an historic opportunity, but also means years of confusion and hard work. Nobody said it was going to be easy.

A fairly unnoticed story percolated through the interwebs this weekend about Alibaba’s CEO and hundreds of employees being implicated in what amounts to a payola scandal. Alibaba is a site that allows you to buy the worst junk imaginable. They represent over 500,000 factories in China. It is a sourcing site full of fake laptops, poorly made clothing, and potentially life-threatening auto parts. And, best of all, it was acting as a middleman to actual criminals.

I’m reporting this as a warning. CE makers have drilled it into our heads that you can make low-priced, high quality electronics. You cannot. It is, on the aggregate, impossible. That $500 laptop bears an unseen price.

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New York City’s Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today announced the use of Quick Response or QR codes (which are something like a smartphone-readable barcode) on building permits, to provide New Yorkers with easy access to information related to buildings and construction sites throughout the city.

Smartphone users who scan a QR code on a construction permit in New York, according to a press release from the mayor’s office, will get “details about the ongoing project – including the approved scope of work, identities of the property owner and job applicant, other approved projects associated with the permit, [and] complaints and violations related to the location.”

The QR codes will link users to a mobile version of the Department of Buildings Information System, and will give them the option to click a link that will initiate a phone call to the city’s 311 phone service, where they can register a complaint about noise, safety or other concerns.

As permits at 975,000 building and construction sites that already have them are replaced, they will have QR codes added; all New York City permits are expected to have QR codes by roughly 2013.

We created subscriptions for publishing apps, not SaaS apps.

—email attributed to Steve Jobs

There’s been so much confusion in the wake of Apple’s new subscription billing policy for apps that Steve Jobs felt the need to issue the proclamation above via his preferred method, a personal email. (It’s his version of the burning bush). While Apple’s new policy clearly states that all subscriptions for purchasing “content, functionality, or services in an app” must go through Apple, Jobs suggests that Apple will make a distinction between “publishing apps” and “SaaS apps” (software as a service). Apps like Salesforce or Evernote, for example, operate under an SaaS subscription, and are available to the same subscribers on the Web and other devices besides the iPhone.

Apple appears to be backtracking here. As I suggested on Friday in a Fly or Die video with Rhapsody’s president Jon irwin (who offers a music streaming subscription app on the iPhone), Apple’s initial broad-stroke rule may very well have been a trial balloon. The subscription billing system was obviously designed with media apps in mind, particularly publications. Maybe Apple won’t apply it to other types of subscription apps. Indeed, this latest email from Jobs appears to signal that Apple is adjusting to the market reaction.

The stakes here are very high. Apple cannot afford to alienate the mass of developers with existing or future subscription apps. As Instapaper founder Marco Arment writes:

A broad, vague, inconsistently applied, greedy, and unjustifiable rule doesn’t make developers want to embrace the platform.

The line now seems to be drawn between publishing apps and other kinds of subscription apps that are more like software. For the most part, that does make things clearer. Salesforce probably doesn’t have to worry about pulling its app from the iPhone.

But the next question is: What exactly isa publishing app? Obviously, apps that look like traditional print publications like The Daily, magazine apps, or the New York Times app once it goes to a subscription model all fall under the new rule. So too do apps like the recently-rejected Readability, which serves up repurposed content from across the Web without ads for a subscription. By that logic, any news reader apps that charge a subscription would fall under that rule as well.

But what is a news publishing app? They are clearly news-reading software. And what if Twitter or a Twitter client started charging subscriptions? Are those publishing apps or a communications apps? Just think about Flipboard or Pulse, which transform Twitter and other feeds into a dynamic, realtime, personalized publication. If those apps started charging subscriptions (both are currently free), I bet they would have to go through Apple’s subscription system just like Readability.

Okay, so any app that involves reading the news is a publishing app. Maybe. What about other media apps like music (Rhapsody, Rdio, MOG) or movies (Netflix) which require a subscription? Rhapsody doesn’t “publish” music, it just streams it. Netflix doesn’t make movies, it just delivers them. Apple still hasn’t clarified how it will treat these types of media subscription apps. But in my mind those are not publishing apps and thus should not be subject to the new rules.

Finally, what about personal publishing apps delivered as a service? One example of a popular app that offers both free and subscription versions is Evernote, which could be considered a form of personal publishing. Evernote lets you publish photos, notes, Web clips and other digital detritus to your own personal stream, which can remain private or be shared. It charges a subscription for extra features such as supporting larger uploads, more file types, and better collaboration tools. Those are all software features, but the end result is a personal publication of sorts. The difference is that Evernote isn’t charging for the content, it is charging for the software features.

And maybe that is the line Jobs is drawing, but it is a line that won’t last long. The most successful publishing apps will look increasingly like other apps, with software features that take them beyond glorified PDF readers. Smart publishers might even start charging subscription fees to unlock those extra features—3D photos, social news filters, augmented reality layers—instead of for the content itself.

Oh, happy day! Angry Birds is now available for the PC. “But wait,” you say. “There’s no app store on Windows. How will I download it?” Don’t worry: Intel has you covered.

The game, which costs $4.99, is available on the Intel AppUp store. The Intel AppUp store—silly name aside—is just that: an “app store” for Windows PCs.

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The recent sale of sex.com, brokered by domain marketplace operator Sedo, has resulted in a Guinness World Record for “most expensive internet address domain name”.

Sex.com was sold for $13 million by Escom to Clover Holdings on 17 November 2010.

To put this in some context: in its 10 years of existence, Sedo says it has brokered about $400 million worth of domain names, including a number of other seven-figure transactions for premium domains such as Vodka.com, Pizza.com and Russia.com.

Needless to say, the Guinness World Record will only further strengthen the notion of sex.com being the most valuable domain name on the Internet, although we should note that there’s always a slight chance a higher price for another domain name was paid at some point, in a private transaction.

Also see: So You Just Bought Sex.com For $13 Million – Now What?

Paydiant, a new Boston-based mobile payments startup, this morning announced that it closed a $7.6 million Series A round of funding led by North Bridge Venture Partners and General Catalyst Partners.

The company plans to formally launch later this year.

Paydiant was co-founded by Chris Gardner, Kevin Laracey and Joe Paratore, three serial entrepreneurs.

Laracey was formerly venture partner at Sigma Partners and co-founder and CEO of edocs, the online billing and payments company that was acquired by Siebel Systems (now part of Oracle) in 2005. Gardner also worked at edocs, where he served as VP of products and marketing, and went on to join premium SMS mobile payments provider m-Qube (acquired by Verisign in 2006) in the same capacity.

Most recently, Gardner was CMO at ExtendMedia, a digital media content delivery and commerce platform software company that was acquired by Cisco in 2010.

Joe Paratore was edocs’ VP of engineering and technical services – he also joined m-Qube and subsequently Verisign after its acquisition.

As mentioned, the startup plans to launch its mobile payments solution later this year, so we’ll have to wait until they do to see if and how they plan to bring something disruptive to the table.

Paydiant co-founder Chris Gardner in a statement said:

“Enabling consumers to use their phones to make everyday purchases is a huge market opportunity. We have assembled a team who understand both the business and technology issues that must be addressed to create new mobile payments offerings for broad adoption.”

We’ll be keeping our good eye on this one.

There a few platforms that aim to connect investors and startups on the web, including AngelList, but for the most part investment transactions and venture funding is done face-to-face, many times with a hand shake involved. A new startup, called CapLinked, is hoping to change this by offering a collaborative platform for entrepreneurs, private investors and advisors to find each other, build relationships, and transact business on the site. CapLinked, which was co-founded by PayPal marketing exec Eric Jackson, is announcing a $900,000 round of funding from group of former PayPal execs (a.k.a the PayPal Mafia), including Peter Thiel, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups, Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir Technologies); Aman Verjee (CFO of Sonos); and David Anderson. In total, CapLinked has raised over $900,000 in angel funding.

Using CapLinked is fairly simple for entrepreneurs. They can use the platform to raise capital and sell or buy assets, manage and contact investor prospects, centralize document flow on a secure platform and connect with new investors, advisors and companies.

Users can create a pitch, and invite others via email to check out the idea on the site. Entrepreneurs can upload documents, multimedia and other presentations to make a case for their idea and put all confidential company or deal related information behind a secure “walled garden” platform. Once an entrepreneur has an idea he or she wants to share, he can send a link to the platform to potential investors. And CapLinked has provided startups with basic form documents and contracts for investments.

CapLinked provides investors (the site is exclusively for accredited investors) with a Fidelity-like platform to track their portfolio of private companies in one location and encourages investors to build a public profile featuring their portfolio investments, clients, or companies they manage.

The startup, which launched in October of 2010, already has more than 2,100 companies and 1,000 investors on the platform, and $800 million in potential deals. Jackson, who likens the platform to a LinkedIn-meets-Salesforce for private investing, tells us that the platform isn’t just for tech startups—he has hopes of CapLinked being used to fund movies, commercial real estate deals or other professional products. “We want CapLinked to be the go-to platform for anyone who wants to raise capital for a company or project,” he explains.

Thiel says of CapLinked, “Start-ups are tremendous drivers of economic growth, yet the basic mechanics of investing in new companies can be difficult and inefficient, especially for first-time entrepreneurs or people outside venture capital center…CapLinked is providing—for the first time—an efficient online platform that connects entrepreneurs and investors, helps them build relationships, and streamlines the investment process.”

The startup’s founders certainly have experience in both tech startups and the investment world. Jackson, who authored The PayPal Wars, was PayPal’s first Senior Director of U.S. Marketing and served as interim VP of Marketing after acquisition by eBay in 2002. Fellow co-founder Christopher Grey was a managing partner and co-founder of private equity firms Crestridge
Investments and Third Wave Partners as well as a managing director for Emigrant Bank.

Jackson says that he believes CapLinked can succeed because it provides a comprehensive platform for both investors and entrepreneurs. He may be on to something, considering the recent success of AngelList.

The rumor mill got one right. Amazon just launched the instant streaming service for Prime subs. The service opens up “5,000 movies and TV show at no additional cost” to those who pay for the Amazon Prime membership. Yep, if you happen to have a free or even trial account, the content isn’t available for you. Sorry, fellow freeloaders, it’s time for us to pony up the $79.99 a year for access to the shows and 2-day shipping on your Amazon orders.

The service rolled out this morning and seems to work as advertised. Click the button and it starts playing. However, I can’t seem to dig up if the new Prime free streaming content is available on 3rd party boxes. It doesn’t show up on my TiVo or Roku yet. Chances are though these devices haven’t got the memo yet and an update will open the gate to the free garden.

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