Category: Tech news

This is a guest post from Shaherose Charania, founder and chief executive of Women 2.0, a social venture that aims to increase the number of female founders of technology startups. Ms. Charania previously served as the director of product management at bothJAJAH (acquired by Telefonica/O2) and Talenthouse, and as a managing partner at Opinno.

Women 2.0 is not an organization just for women— we created the name when some colleagues and I went to the Web 2.0 Expo conference in 2006 and asked, “Where are the women in the web 2.0 movement?” We didn’t see them represented there. Women 2.0 is more about diversity, inclusion, technology and startups that are likely to create jobs and wealth, and otherwise improve our lives and work. We have a clear goal of advancing high-growth businesses and innovation in technology.

Last night, as part of our Women 2.0 Startup Competition Pitch 2010, we heard pitches from an eclectic group of tech startups with female founders. Women were definitely represented. The event— which was organized end to end by my co-founder Angie Chang— took place at Twilio’s headquarters in San Francisco. Finalists demoed everything from mobile payments, language learning and expense tracking apps, to a tween social network and waste to industrial products technology.

Teams that qualify for our competition include at least one female co-founder. She doesn’t have to be the chief executive, but that is what we saw in more than 80% of the teams this year. Competitors must also be in a beta stage with their technology. We excluded startups that had already obtained more than $2 million in funding.

The competition drew 130 qualified applicants this year. Business ideas poured in from around the world. We had applicants from New Zealand, Turkey, Korea, Germany, Canada, Russia, Israel, Brazil, the U.K. and of course the U.S. Given the volume of strong applications we received, we decided to give out three industry awards for web, mobile, and cleantech pitches.

Our judges were investor and tech all-stars: Cindi Choi (SunPower), Cynthia Ringo (DBL Investors), David Weekly (PB Works), Gautam Gupta (General Catalyst Partners), Janice Roberts (Mayfield Fund), Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Maria Kermath (AT&T Interactive), Naval Ravikant (Angelist) and Rachel Pike (Draper Fisher Jurvetson).

The cleantech category winners (photo, left) won a meeting with angel investor and social innovator, Esther Dyson. Judges picked Biolumber. Cofounder Kristin Kaune explained that her company takes plastic headed for the landfills and makes it into “lumber” that is as light as wood, and as strong as steel. Biolumber could reduce landfill waste significantly, I think.

Our web prize went to a company called Apply In The Sky, co-founded by Emily Chiu and Chiara Piccinotti (photo, below right). They are trying to make the process of applying for business school easier on the applicants, they said. The team earned a meeting with Mike Maples Floodgate co-founder, serial entrepreneur and investor.

I think Apply In The Sky is in a space that needs serious help. No company that I’ve seen is tackling the application process for b-schools, specifically. They’ve designed a nice, lightweight application for a very intense process. I think they’ll succeed with strong outreach to future MBA students.

PrePay Nation took our mobile industry prize. The company provides a payment service for users of basic feature phones. They take advantage of existing transaction technology that works to track minutes or allow you to buy more on these phones. Rather than reinventing the wheel, they’re using a top up approach that helps people transfer money to each other, or deliver micro-payments without the expenses and complexities of a wire transfer or money order.

Women 2.0′s Pitch director Aihui Ong told me she thinks PrePay Nation has a huge market opportunity with American immigrants who are predominantly users of basic feature phones. An investor who judged the mobile track, Gautam Gupta from General Catalyst Partners, told me Prepay Nation seemed promising to him because the company leverages several trends in the mobile ecosystem to provide their unique remittance service.

The company’s cofounder Jessica Bishop (in photo below) says PrePay Nation in 2011 should grow its business in North America, while expanding into the Middle East, Europe and Australia, and developing further integrations with mobile operators.

I was personally excited to see Women 2.0 teams thinking in a geographically broad way about their market opportunities, and including team members from other parts of the world. Many teams had intergenerational founders, with men and women alike. You would not expect that from reading the constant press on the collegiate genesis of Facebook. But there is another technology startup reality. Women 2.0 startups are not like Facebook, but I mean that in a good way.

Women from all over the world, and all ages are starting tech companies, and they don’t exclude men. It’s not just consumer web or healthcare, but every industry— we are thrilled to be among the first to see and review their technologies, and generally support their growth.

In the past three years of Women 2.0 Pitch Nights, we had to go home after celebrating to prepare meeting agendas or product requirements for our “day jobs” at Silicon Valley startups. This year was a different experience for me and my co-founders. Today, we’re happy to announce that The Kauffman Foundation is giving Women 2.0 a $50,000 sponsorship for our next six months of programs and events. The foundation normally funds non-profits, but we operate as a for-profit, for-good entity which makes us especially grateful for their support.

With the funding, we’re getting ready for our 2010 Founder Labs. It’s Women 2.0′s pre-incubator program for aspiring entrepreneurs who aren’t ready to quit their day jobs. Once they’ve created a minimum viable product over five weeks at Founder Labs, we hope they will, however, strike out on their own.

Shaherose Charania portrait via Pokin Yeung

Winning teams at Women 2.0 images via Julie Blaustein

Google is working with Samsung on a new Android phone that will have a “clean install” of Android, and the release was at least initially planned to coincide with the launch of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The fact that the device will have a clean version of Android is why people are excited, and calling it the “Nexus Two.” The Nexus One was a clean install Android device that Google sold directly to customers. The additional layers of software carriers and handset manufacturers put on their phones are generally a mess, in our opinion, and detract from the user experience.

One thing that we’re certain about is that the Samsung press event on Monday, November 8 isn’t (and never was) a launch of the Nexus Two, despite rumors that it was. Those rumors weren’t all that ridiculous, though. Samsung will be unveiling a new Android phone on Monday, it’s just not this phone.

The phone was set to be launched imminently, perhaps on November 11. But we’ve heard that during dogfooding a serious hardware issue was discovered and that the phone will be delayed while that issue is fixed. We don’t know how serious the issue is, or how long it might take to remedy.

The phone, though, is a beauty, we’ve heard, as is Gingerbread.

Another major magazine will stop printing its editions and move completely online. U.S. News & World Report, the USA Today of weekly news magazines, will no longer be found on subscriber’s mailboxes after its December issue. According to an employee memo obtained by Poynter Online’s Romeneso blog, subscribers will no longer get print issues.

Instead, U.S. News & World Report will focus all of its efforts on its Website, and on occasional print issues sold at newsstands for its annual lists and guides, including Best Colleges. Those tend to sell well. But the main thrust going forward will be on the Web and digital products. From the memo:

All of us at U.S. News Media Group have been aggressively responding to the changing habits in the media marketplace, and these latest moves will accelerate our ability to grow our online businesses and position ourselves to take advantage of the emerging platforms for distributing information such as the iPad and Android tablets.

U.S. News joins hundreds of other magazines in the magazine deadpool.

Wrightspeed, a maker of fuel efficient, electric drive systems, has raised a $5 million Series A round from an unnamed private investor. According to the company’s press release, co-founder and EVP of Infinera, David Welch, will also join the company’s board.

The company’s founder and CEO is Ian Wright, one of the co-founders of Tesla. Although Wright was an important figure in Tesla’s early days, he left long before the IPO to found Wrightspeed. Wrightspeed doesn’t want to be the next electric automaker, instead, the company wants to build the best hybrid electric drive systems for high-performance cars and medium to large-sized trucks.

In other words, the company has no use for the minivan market— at least not today— its equipment is designed for extreme race cars or hefty, long haul trucks, racking up hundreds of miles per day. The goal, according to Wright, is to sell “technology [that] will displace at least 3,000 gallons of fuel per year per high usage vehicle.”

The San Jose-based company’s marquee product is the Wrightspeed Digital DriveSystem (DDS). The platform, according to the company’s website, includes “the battery system, electric motors and drive electronics, generator control system, vehicle dynamics control, user interface and the software control plane.” The DDS’s electric motors can reach 250 hp and are  built to be lightweight at roughly 40 pounds. In order to enhance flexibility, the system also uses motors modularly, so it can conform to what a vehicle needs.

About one month into his role as RecycleBank’s new CEO, Jonathan Hsu is rattling off some ambitious numbers: An IPO by 2013, plans to grow his staff from 150 to over a thousand by 2012, and to reach nine-figures in annual revenues in that same year. That’s a herculean task for any company but especially one that plays in the labor and capital intensive world of recycling.

And yet, sitting in his new office in New York’s West Village, Hsu seems utterly confident, framing each prediction with a when-not-if mentality.

The well-funded RecycleBank— which has raised more than $70 million from VC firms like Kleiner Perkins, RRE Ventures and Sigma Partners— is a recycling rewards program that works with municipalities and large corporate sponsors, like P&G and Kashi, to install local programs in US and UK cities.

Under RecycleBank’s program, a household signs up for an account online and receives a special bin or “smart cart” for their recyclable waste that is equipped with a unique RFID-tag. When the hauler arrives to remove the waste, the cart is weighed and the household’s account is credited with points based on that weight. Those points can be redeemed online for rewards or savings with more than 1,000 local and national businesses.

Since its inception in 2005, RecycleBank has installed itself in more than 300 cities in the US and UK, with 3 million-plus households under contract. According to Hsu, revenues have been tripling every year, for the last two years, and the company is very close to profitability.

Hsu, who was formerly the CEO of 24/7 Real Media (an online marketing firm firm acquired by WPP for $649 million in 2007), was brought on to get the firm solidly in the black and to use his marketing background to help the company achieve tremendous— some might say unrealistic— growth offline and online.

“One of the things I will bring to bear in this company is the ability to grow to a mass market scale so that RecycleBank can be the first green mass market brand,” Hsu says. “This company will IPO in the next several years.”

So what is Hsu’s battle plan to get RecycleBank ready for a 2013 IPO— an IPO that he says will value the company in the multi-billion dollar range?

Hsu has three priorities: a new revamped online portal that leverages social tools, increased corporate sponsorships and a major push to get RecycleBank in new cities.

According to the CEO, he wants to work with municipalities to create hundreds of hyperlocal online destinations, to connect the users within RecycleBank communities. These new sites will feature social chat, gaming, a bulletin board for neighborhood announcements and a schedule of local activities. Calling it “Facebook with a purpose,” he says he doesn’t “want to reinvent the wheel of how people communicate but we want to leverage those tools successfully.”

Currently, RecycleBank makes the bulk of its revenues from its deals with municipalities— local governments pay the company a fee for diverting waste from landfills. The company also gets money through corporate sponsorships, but it only has a few dozen of these partnerships today. Over the next few years, RecycleBank plans to dramatically expand its portfolio of lucrative sponsorships, and Hsu predicts, eventually the amount of dollars coming in via sponsorships will significantly outweigh the amount from municipalities.

However, if RecycleBank wants to become a truly, global green, mass market brand, it will need to find a way to crack the markets outside of the US and UK. For example, given China’s rapid urban development and 1.3 billion strong population, it is a rising power player that is creating significant economic growth— and by extension, mountains of waste. It may be relatively easy to deploy millions of “smart cans” to households in highly developed countries, but it will be interesting to see how the RecycleBank program fares in the world’s major developing regions.

Hsu says he wants to tackle the larger international picture but it will be a challenge to do it directly (at least in the near term), because of their ambitions at home and in the UK. At least for the next few years, he wants to stay focused on expansion in these markets, and perhaps, link up with international partners to address other regions. The arms-length approach will likely blunt RecycleBank’s effectiveness in new markets, but it’s a start.

Hsu has a long way to go before he proves himself to his staff and RecycleBank’s investors— and he’s giving himself a short runway to do so— but he says he’s happy to have at least impressed one very important critic: his three-year old daughter.

“I really cherished my time at 24/7 Media…but it was hard for me to describe to my daughters what exactly I did. So I would show them a website, like Weather.com and show them the banner ads that they see on the top and sides and say to them abstractly, “Daddy’s company helps show those ads.” And they would nod to me, and they loved me because they’re my daughters but at the end of the day they didn’t really understand. Today when I tell my daugther…I show her the recycling bin and the trashbag and she can see how my company can move from the waste bucket to the sustainability bucket, she understands. She understands that daddy helps put less garbage on the street.”

See our video with Hsu above.

I had the rare pleasure of driving a brand new Chevy Volt up the Eastern seaboard yesterday, a four hour trip from DC to New York in the driving rain of a dying nor’easter. Organized by beleaguered carmaker GM, the drive was an attempt to reach out to tech geeks and bloggers to drive what amounts to the most high-tech car I’ve ever driven. According to a GM spokesperson, the car’s programming alone is more complex than the code in a F16 fighter jet.

How was the ride? Well, first let’s talk a little about the car.

The Chevy Volt is an all-electric vehicle with an M. Night Shyamalan twist. The car contains a huge, T-shaped battery that recharges in 10-12 hours, depending on the voltage, and a small 1.4L 80hp internal combustion engine – sorry, generator – that powers the car and charges the battery when you deplete the original charge. The wheels are powered by a high-torque electric motor that is alternatively power either from the battery or the generator. If you drive, say, 30 miles a day there is a very good chance your engine will never kick on, thereby saving you a tankful of gas. If you need to go far you can use the gas generator to push you another 300 miles or so. In this way it is an EV without the problems in range.

Read more…

Despite the United States’ position as an Internet powerhouse, the state of broadband in this country compared to some other places around the world is pretty pitiful — both in speed and reach. Google is trying to do their part to fix the speed issue with their 1 Gbps fiber optic network tests. And Verizon is on the case as well — with a 10 Gbps network.

Now, to be clear, the video above is just a test. We’re unlikely to see these kinds of speeds in our homes any time soon. But this is a field test, not a test done in some lab.

And it’s awesome. 10 Gbps both is both the download and upload speed. Watch towards the end of the video when a 2.3 gigabyte movie is transfered in 4 seconds.

This is too funny not to post. The screen grab above comes from Qwiki, the visual search engine which came away with the top prize at our last TechCrunch Disrupt. Qwiki is still in private alpha , but it essentially assembles a visual narrative for millions of topics by pulling together images and text, which is read out loud by a friendly, female robo-voice.

When you search for “AOL” in Qwiki, it prominently features the slide above showing AOL’s precipitous decline in subscribers from 2001 to 2009. It is amazing how a picture can say it all, even if it is outdated. That slide pretty much sums up the perception of many people out there when you mention AOL. And algorithms too—Qwiki relies completely on its algorithms to select images.

Of course, AOL is trying to shake that past and move boldly into the future. Hell, it bought us, didn’t it? And, I must say, we are very happy with our new corporate overlords. In the past 30 days alone, referring traffic from AOL is up 7,948,666.67% (that is the actual number). May we have another?

Truth be told, the Qwiki entry on AOL could use some better images. Here is a better one to start with:

i/o Ventures backed Skyara launches today as a marketplace for exciting things to do. Founded by Jonathan Wu, Dennis Liu and Steven Ou, the site provides people who can offer new experiences like a culinary tour, personalized yoga or a beer tasting with a platform to do so, hooking them up AirBnB-style with people who seek new experiences like foodies or yoga fanatics.

Key Skyara features include packaging, scheduling, booking and payments services and well as a Digg-like voting features and Skyara Requests, i.e. if a specific experience isn’t available on Skyara, consumers can request it and see if any vendor can customize their offerings.

The founders say that they’re trying to create a new experience market similar to how Etsy created a new market for DIY craft fans, targeting people who ask, “What is there to do?” during the weekends The site currently has between 50-100 experiences available in the Bay Area and plans to monetize by charging experience vendors a 12% transaction fee.

Future plans include expansion into other markets like New York and Hawaii. Says Wu, “Our goal is to get all of the screen tanned entrepreneurs and business folks out of the house and trying exciting new things. We want Skyara experiences to become a part of everyone’s weekend schedule.”

Skyara is also offering a $5 off promotional code to the first 100 TechCrunch readers to sign up with the referral code TECHCRUNCH. And for those interested, AirBnb co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk has offered lunch as a Skyara experience (starting at $10) in solidarity.

While doing the post about WordPress implementing Twitter’s Blackbird Pie tool, I noticed something interesting. The tool brings back something Twitter had long since left for dead: the old school Retweet!

When you insert a Tweet URL into a WordPress.com blog post now, it will automatically generate a nice-looking Tweet in that post, complete with working links. But it also adds a “Retweet” link below the Tweet. Clicking this takes you to Twitter.com where a tweet is automatically populated for you along the lines of: “RT @USERNAME TWEET HERE”.

The Retweet is a feature that was created by users of Twitter back in the old days of the service. It is basically just a way to quote a Tweet, but using the syntax “RT” to let others know that it’s a Tweet from someone else. Twitter eventually realized that with so many people using it, they’d have to create some way to make it easier for all users (mainly new ones) to use. So they created the new Retweet, which doesn’t use the “RT” syntax, but instead takes the actual Tweet and places it back in the timeline of users who follow the person doing the Retweeting.

A lot of users didn’t like this new-style Retweet at first, and bitched up a storm about it. The main issue was that the new way doesn’t allow you to add an commentary to the Tweet you’re Retweeting. Twitter more or less said “too bad” and moved on. Now the new way is pretty much the accepted norm, but a number of third-party services still allow you to use the old way.

And now Twitter is sort of bringing it back themselves with this tool (update below). And it seems like they have to — that’s pretty much the only way to do it without getting sites to install some sort of plugin that would allow for the new-style Retweet on Twitter.com.

Welcome back, old school Retweet!

@parislemon
MG Siegler

WordPress Enables Blackbird Pie. Just Grab A Tweet URL And It Appears In Your Content http://t.co/mN1zPKW

about 3 hours ago via Tweet Button Retweet

Update: Twitter has reached out to say that WordPress is responsible for the Retweet implementation, so they’re not officially bringing back the old school Retweet. Still, if this feature takes off, it could be back on Twitter in a major way.

@parislemon
MG Siegler

Hot El. @ Civic Center Muni Metro Station http://instagr.am/p/J5UN/

about 15 hours ago via Instagram Retweet

Back in May, Twitter unveiled a small tool called Blackbird Pie. Essentially, it was a way to the process of using a Tweet in a blog post easier. Rather than having to take a screenshot of the Tweet, you could just copy the URL into Blackbird Pie and out would pop some dynamically generated code for embedding the Tweet in your post, complete with working links. It was an interesting idea, sadly, no one uses it. But a key WordPress integration today should change that.

As they note on their own blog, WordPress has just enabled Blackbird Pie for all WordPress.com blogs. It works in posts and in comments too. All you have to do to bing a Tweet in is copy the URL for it and put it somewhere in your post on its own line. Says the company:

To embed a tweet in your blog, all you need to do is visit the tweet on Twitter.com that you would like to use, copy the URL from the address bar, and paste it into your post on a line by itself. WordPress.com will do the rest and your link will be converted to a full tweet once we pull the relevant data (there may be a short delay).

That should be a very useful new feature. And self-hosted WordPress blogs can use the Blackbird Pie plugin to enable the same thing.

What’s sort of interesting about this feature is the Twitter policy which states you’re not allowed to use other peoples’ Tweets without their permission. The company has said that’s meant to stop advertisers from pulling Tweets and using them for their own means, but the wording still clearly says that you can’t do it. This tool not only enables that, it encourages it.

An example Tweet of mine is above. As you can see, all the links work, which is awesome. And it even pulls my actual Twitter background! Compare it to the screenshot version below.

More: Twitter Brings Back The Old School Retweet With The Blackbird Pie Tool!

We’re big fans of Mixpanel, an analytics-focused startup whose backers include Y Combinator, Michael Birch, and Max Levchin. The startup, which tracks over 1 billion actions per month, allows developers to track a variety of user actions, including the number of pages a user has viewed, iPhone app analytics, interactions on Facebook apps and email analytics. Today, the startup is allowing developers and businesses to offer MixPanel’s analytics to their customers.

The MixPanel Platform essentially gives websites a plug and play analytics offering for their users. Developers insert a few lines of code, and then users can access MixPanel’s variety of realtime analytics for their services. The platform offers the ability to track how many comments, subscribers, likes, shares, and page views users are getting. MixPanel will place all of this data on a dashboard for a business’ users to check and monitor.

For example, Yammer, which recently extended its own platform to developers, has been using MixPanel help its developers gain insight into how their applications are doing. For example, Yammer wanted to show its developers how their applications are gaining adoption amongst the Yammer community, and used the platform to show how many page views and downloads apps were receiving.

Currently the platform is being used by Yammer, Olark and BitTorrent to offer analytics to users. Another potential distributor could be Posterous (who already uses MixPanel internally); the blogging platform could offer the analytics to users.

All of us at CrunchGear love you. Yes, you.

We seriously dig our readers — unfortunately, we rarely get the opportunity to talk to you guys. We’re usually too mobbed blasting out news about whatever electro-doodad the kids are talking about to sit down and chat with you — and that’s something that bums us out.

In hopes of addressing this, we’re going to try a bit of an experiment: each Friday, we’re going to have one of our writers take over the @CrunchGear twitter account. It’s up to them to decide what to Tweet (though we’ll still be tweeting our stories, of course). Maybe it’ll be about gadgets. Maybe it’ll be about Justin Bieber. Maybe we’ll just up and decide to give some stuff away. You’ll never know!

Read More

Back in September we wrote about Memolane, a semi-stealthy startup that had raised $2 million to help “rediscover your social life on the Internet”, but wouldn’t give us much details as to what they were actually up to. Today, the company is ready for its public debut.

Right now, your online presence is scattered across a lot of sites. This has been true for years, and it’s a problem that’s also spawned plenty of startups, including Friendfeed. Memolane is the latest from this breed of startups, but it’s taking an approach that’s a bit different from most social aggregators: it’s all about telling stories. The site will display your online history in an interactive timeline, and it will also let you collaborate with friends to tell a story using your tweets, photos, videos, music, and more. The best way to really experience the site is to browse a timeline: check this one out.

Unfortunately the site is still in an invite-only beta, so you won’t be able to sign up just yet.  When you do though, getting set up on Memolane is pretty straightforward — after creating an account, you’ll be prompted to connect to various services across the web, including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo. These services are all accessed via OAuth, so Memolane isn’t holding on to your passwords.

Once you’ve hooked up your accounts, Memolane will pull in all of your content and generate a comprehensive (and very slick-looking) timeline. Content that was submitted on the same day is displayed vertically, and you can skim through time by scrolling horizontally. There’s also a timeline at the very bottom of the page that will let you jump months or years back in time (it reminds me a bit of Apple’s Time Machine interface). Memolane builds this timeline instantly, and most of the time it won’t store your personal data on its server (it does store tweets, but everything else is fetched via the appropriate service’s API).

But Memolane isn’t just about looking at your own content. The site also lets you create stories by hand-picking certain pieces of content from multiple accounts and piecing them together. Say, for example, you went to Yosemite with a handful of friends. Memolane would let you invite each of these friends to a shared story timeline; once they’ve been invited, they can add tweets, music they’ve listened to, video recordings, and other content  related to the trip from their personal Memolane timelines. Then you can send these stories to family and friends, who don’t need to have an account to view them.

Memolane is hardly the first startup that can visualize your shared content on a timeline – also see Dipity, iStreamer, and others. But founder Eric Lagier says that it has some key differences — namely the fact that Memolane is based on HTML5, while the biggest competitor, Dipity, is Flash. And he stresses that the site is all about keeping things simple.

Memolane first originated as part of a Startup Weekend event in April, where Eric Lagier conceived of the idea and rounded up a team of other attendees to build a prototype. From there, things picked up fast — Lagier quit his job and sought funding. The company’s investors represent a Skype reunion of sorts: they include Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, as well as August Capital’s Howard Hartenbaum (who was the first investor in Skype). And Memolane founder Eric Lagier ran Skype’s mobile products during the company’s early days.

Just watch this video, and beware that it’s slightly NSFW, depending on where you W.

Huge kudos to James Yu for making this video using xtranormal and sharing it with us.

Our favorite lines:

Guy: Are you a f*cking idiot? What is your strategy for marketing your website?

Woman: I will send a link to TechCrunch. Then, they will pick it up. After that, I will roll in money.

Guy: Oh my God. You just made my brain hemorrhage. I feel myself dying. Are you happy now? Getting featured on TechCrunch does not equal product success. Getting sustainable traffic and revenues is.

Funny because it’s true. But please don’t stop starting Web startups and sending us links.

We can’t guarantee that you’ll roll in money afterwards, but if your Web startup is viral and game-changing enough, we just might do a post about it.