Category: Tech news

Back in March, Microsoft was over $50 billion ahead of Apple in market cap. That gap was still huge, but it was the closest the two had been in that measurement of value in decades. The trend was clear: I predicted that Apple would pass Microsoft, it was only a matter of when.

Not even I thought it would be this soon.

Today, Apple has just passed Microsoft in market cap. Now, the stocks have been fluctuating quite a bit, so this could change before the market closes. But as of right now, Apple is ahead, and has been for the past few minutes.

Some publications reported this milestone happened back in April, but that was a slightly different metric. That was the market cap on the S&P 500, which uses float-adjusted numbers. Today’s milestone is straight-up market cap: numbers of shares outstanding multiplied by share price.

Of course, just how much this number means is a matter of debate. The truth is that it really doesn’t mean that much in terms how strong or weak a company is from a financial perspective. But it is a good indicator of trends, and obviously stock performance. That trend is obviously that over the past five years or so, Apple has been destroying Microsoft is gaining stock value.

Over those past five years, Microsoft’s stock has been largely stagnant: it’s up about 4%. Apple’s stock, meanwhile, is up some 550% over that same time frame.

Regardless of how the market closes today, you can likely expect Apple market cap to surge ahead in the coming days. A week from this coming Monday is Steve Jobs’ keynote at Apple’s WWDC event. There, he’s widely expected to unveil the new iPhone — and undoubtedly some other things. The mere speculation about what he’ll unveil will fuel the price. Microsoft, meanwhile, is losing key executives.

Boom! Fanboys go wild.

Update: And as the markets near closing time, Apple is now nearly $3 billion ahead of Microsoft.

Update 2: And sure enough, Apple did close the day ahead of Microsoft: $222.07 billion vs. $219.18 billion.

When I was a kid, we used to play on the street in front of my house. Yeah, I know – seems like years ago. Nowadays, with children and families spending more time inside watching TV or playing video games; I feel like there’s nobody outside in my neighborhood anymore. In fact, most people don’t know their next-door neighbors.

DeHood, sponsors here at TechCrunch Disrupt, wants to crush that problem. Founded by Babak Hedayati, DeHood is a social network for neighborhoods. They are kind of like a one-stop local social network on iPhone (app available here). The goal is to be a one-stop shop for all the local social networking you need to do.

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox announced that the social network would be unveiling a set of “drastically simplified” privacy controls today. Facebook has scheduled a press conference call for 1:30 EST to unveil the new settings, which will be presented by multiple Facebook executives including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

This call comes after a month of serious backlash against Facebook, largely focused around its Instant Personalization feature, default ‘Everyone’ sharing, and its highly confusing privacy control panel. My live notes on the call are below.

Zuckerberg: Before we get into the changes we get into the changes we’re doing today. i want to go through how we got to where we are now. I think it’s really easy to lose track of the fact that the service we have today is different from what we had in 2004.

As we grow we’ve had to build modern privacy system that can scale. Hasn’t always been smooth. When we went from college only to open to everyone. There was no smooth way to do it. But we’ve tried hard to continually upgrade the system and build a modern system for privacy.

Over the last year, one of the big things we looked at was News Feed. In December added per-post privacy. Another thing is applications. We started with simple model for privacy around applications – it was “Allow” or cancel. We saw over time a lot of apps just used basic information about you. Most things didn’t use friends’ photos. We felt this model wasn’t granular enough.

Zuckerberg is continuing to walk through the growth of the site — basically how we got here. Issues became particularly difficult with going global, regional networks. Started evolving toward friends, friends of friends, and Everyone (removed regional settings completely).

We made a lot of changes at the same time. We didn’t communicate as well as we could have, a lot of it got lost. We really need to simplify controls.

We’ve offered granular controls, a lot of people like them. We aren’t taking them away. We holed up a couple weeks ago, got designers/engineers together and built this stuff.

Three things – One simple control for all the content you’re sharing. It applies to all content retroactively (good move, FB). Applies to new products going forward.

One misperception – when we went through in December we asked people to make everything sharing for everyone. We think that some stuff it does make sense to share with everyone, others like photos we don’t.

This is a pretty big overhaul to the system. All the granular controls are still there.

For basic directory information – There’s less information that has to be public. We’re removing nuance around connection model, just making it the same as other privacy. Before we didn’t have any privacy control to pages. We added connection model that was too complex. Now you can hide it, even on the Page itself (great news).

Setting search as everyone by default, otherwise people won’t be able to find you.

Third section is about Platform. Easy to turn off Platform completely. Easy opt out for Instant Personalization.

There’s been some concern about Instant Personalization program – it was too confusing to turn it off. Made it so there’s one check box, turn it off. None of your friends will have access to your information either when they use those sites.

We want to make sure we communicate this stuff clearly. So we’ve revamped the privacy guide (good). Changed it to update new privacy settings. one thing we’re planning on doing as we roll this out over next days/weeks. Message at top of peoples’ homepage that links to this new guide so people understand what’s going on. We’ve only ever done a few announcements at the top in the history of the company so it’s something that we take seriously.

Q: I’m having a problem with trust as FB becomes piece of key Internet infrastructure. I get sense FB changes thing without thinking about trust factor. You’re asking us to trust you in a whole new way.
A: At the beginning of my talk I talked about some of our principles. We try to give people control over their information. We try to be innovative and iterative in our development. FB today is so different. We’ve made a lot of changes over time.. the key to how we approach this is that we always listen.

Net Promoter score went down for Facebook after f8 — thought it was from privacy, but it was actually a change in News Feed. It seems a lot of people are upset with us after these changes.. I take that very seriously.

Q: Can you talk about to what extent law makers played into your decision to make these changes. What inputs did they have if at all? Also your conversation with advertisers/partners.
A: We listen to all the feedback we get. We engaged with privacy advocacy organizations. We have had conversations with different folks — senators who had feedback for us. We listened to user back mainly. I think there’s a misperception that we made these changes for advertising. We build great company by serving users first.

Misconceptions – Ideas going on that somehow if people are sharing info more openly we can use it better for ad targeting. It’s the opposite. We target ads ourselves. Because of that, it doesn’t matter who you’re sharing info with, be it you friends or everyone. There’s a concept of data portability – FB connect and Platform. People should be able to take info to other services too. That service can use that data to compete with us/ target us. So by doing what we’re doing we’re actually helping other people compete with us in advertising. We think Data portability is good in other ways. But it’s always a debate is how far we can go.

There are models/views in the world that people want info to be as private as possible. I don’t think that’s what users want. We’re sensitive about it. We really do believe in privacy, giving people control. There’s a balance, more and more people want to share information.

Q: More context on this outcry vs previous ones. Have there been sig. number of users leaving?
A: Every situation is different. We have a lot more people using service now in the past. So News Feed was probably biggest ratio.. 1/10 users back then. People protesting outside of our office. A lot more people are tracking these issues. When you have almost 500 mil using service. If only a few percent are upset that can be a large number of people. Nature ends of being different.

Q: Do you think users understand everyone=the entire Internet:
A: We’ve done a lot of studies on this to find what’s most understandable to people. The first time you post a status update, a box shows up saying share with everyone, this means everyone on the Internet, with links to change settings. Other piece of info: more than 50% of users on FB have changed one setting.

Q: Location. how are you going to prevent a backlash?
A: We’re really going to try not to have another backlash. If people say they want their stuff to be visible to friends only, it will apply to that stuff going forward. Not ready to talk about stuff around location because frankly it’s not done yet.

Q: You said that people weren’t leaving the site, but were they using it less/differently?
A: There was no significant in the way people were using the site. But we got a lot of feedback and agreed with it.




Here are the statements activist groups are sending out:
CDT:

“Facebook’s users have spoken and made it clear that they want control of their information. Despite all rumors to the contrary, privacy is not dead, it is on its way to a comeback in the form of simplified controls and better policies,” said CDT President Leslie Harris. “While more work still needs to be done, these changes are the building blocks for giving people what they want and deserve.”

ACLU of Northern California:

After months of privacy-failing moves, Facebook is finally friending privacy again. Facebook’s about-face on privacy comes as a result of mounting pressure from users and Washington, including ACLU petitions signed by more than 80,000 people demanding that Facebook live up to its principle of user control.

While it’s true that users have more control than they did yesterday, there are still important steps that must be taken. We hope that Facebook will learn from this recent round of privacy problems and going forward, will keeps its principles and not just its pocketbook in mind.

After wrapping up Tuesday’s panel on the future of mobile with Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley and Facebook’s Chris Cox, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering Vic Gundotra joined us backstage for a brief video interview. We discussed the development of location based services, the challenge of penetrating developing markets, Google TV and of course, Google’s little tiff with Apple.

I pressed him on his Apple “jabs” at this month’s Google I/O, which was well documented by this site and several others. Amusingly, he said his jokes and comments were not “necessarily jabs at Apple,” but rather a way to outline the companies’ distinctions and “done in a spirit of good fun.” It was certainly a lot of fun but come on Vic— you can call it a “jab,” a “swipe,” a “dig,” a “poke” (a delicious dessert treat?) and no matter how you dress it, Google was making clear, well articulated criticisms against Apple.

So what does he think Apple will do? I asked him whether he thinks Apple will eventually try to become more open after receiving a fair share of criticism from developers. After acknowledging that he could not predict Apple’s next move, he did say that he expects Apple to  “adjust to market dynamics.” You’ll have to watch his body language n the video below to read more into his words.

Beyond the Apple fun, Gundotra made several interesting comments that could point to Google future direction:

-location will be integrated in virtually everything that we do

-LBS market will naturally segment

-potential of a super hyper local and event driven LBS  (i.e. if you’re at an airport, your phone could tell you what gate you’re at, or if you’re at a venue, your phone will tell you about the event, nearby events)

-The challenge of serving emerging markets where the dominant computing device is the mobile phone and it is not a smartphone but a more limited device. He predicts smartphone prices could drop dramatically in the next few years.

-Google is looking closely at the tablet market, they are doing some interesting work in this space. More announcements to come.

As digital tools create communities, how will they meet society and the larger world? That’s the question that an interesting trio tried to answer at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

This is what Scott Heiferman (CEO of Meetup), Chris Hughes (co-founder of Facebook and now Executive Director at Jumo) and Reshma Saujani, Congressional Candidate for the 14th district in New York, had to say on the topic.

Erick Schonfeld: Chris, you were the developer of President Obama’s campaign website and social media campaign for the 2008 Presidential election. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Chris: It was all about creating a culture of sharing, of which social networks like Facebook were really only one piece of the puzzle. We tried to empower people to speak up using their favorite online services and build relationships on the Web and beyond. It’s also what we’re trying to do with Jumo, for non-profits specifically.

Erick: How do you use the Web to engage citizens beyond giving money?

Chris: Giving money is really what happens last – the first two pieces are helping people understand why an entity is important, and keeping up with it through email, Facebook, MySpace. You have to get in front of people as often as possible, foster relationships, build understanding. It’s not just about donation.

Erick: Reshma, what did you learn from the Obama campaign, and how are you using the Web for yours?

Reshma: First of all, Scott and Chris have really been trailblazers, they changed the process. As for me: I knew I was running against incumbents, and I realize that technology has the ability to disrupt establishment. It’s harder for an outsider like me to run against these embedded heavyweights, and digital tools helps me out a lot. We knew we needed 30k votes to win, so we had to build our own machine for that. We asked ourselves how we could get people engaged, not just through Facebook and Twitter. So we use a platform called pro.act.ly to keep track of supporters, to find out where they are, what they’re doing for us, you know, basically measure the intensity of commitment.

Erick: So it’s like a dashboard for your campaign managers?

Reshma: And other people, but yes.

Chris: In my opinion, this is what campaigning is all about.

Erick: Pro-act-ly looks a lot like marketing campaign tools used by advertisers online.

Reshma: Yes, we’re constantly engaging with and monitoring the movement.

Erick: Scott, can you talk about how you think the online and offline world are converging? How do you see that accelerating?

Scott: In my view, social change goes way beyond politics. Using the Internet to get off the Internet is a larger notion. You know, how is it that people are more powerful, beyond being consumers or a passive audience, getting involved in something?

Scott on stage also introduced Meetup Everywhere.

Scott: we have nearly 50k meetups a week, only 1% of which i tech related. Everywhere is a brand new platform, an easy way for any organization to spark meetups everywhere, about them. It’s about turning followers into a movement. Seth Godin is an early adopter.

Scott: Meetup Everywhere lets you sort meetups by number of people attending, location and date. It’s basically an easy way to connect people (and more powerful than the iPad, too). Early users are Foursquare, Groupon, fred Wilson, The Huffington Post and … TechCrunch (more about that here).

Erick: Chris, what could you have done with this?

Chris: I think it’s great. It’s the type of thing that holds more potential for smaller, more agile campaigns.

Reshma: We’re absolutely going to use this.

Chris: If I may … the big question of this panel is: how can technology accelerate and impact social change? With existing networks and startups, it’s easier to build movement, but I’m focused on how do you make sure that energy turns into practice and action. At Jumo, we’re thinking about how individuals can more easily connect to their supporters, and building the infrastructure for all types of organizations to benefit from this.

Erick: What do you think the next presidential election campaign’s going to be like?

Chris: I think we’re going to see what we saw with the Obama campaign, but amplified. You’ll see a lot more people putting budget into these tools, more data mining efforts, more attention paid to relationship-building. I’m sure Facebook Connect will play a big role there.

Erick: Reshma, what’s the most effective way to engage people online in your view?

Reshma: I talk to a lot of people who tell me: “Washington is not listening to me” – they have a sense of not being part of the government. So we’re going to change that by having things like online office hours, reach out to people proactively, crowd-source ideas, making accountability a key part of the whole thing.

Erick: Do you see online tools also being used to govern rather than get someone in office?

Chris: Well, what’s happened at the federal level recently is pretty impressive, opening the data sets, provide more oversight, etcetera. I think this would not have happened under another administration, they’re moving really fast. But I acknowledge that some people are a bit disappointed in technology’s ability to sustain movements. Technology can’t do it on its own, it’s all about creating this culture of sharing.

Scott: I think the 2012 election campaigns will look a lot more like the tea party movement (which uses Meetup). You’ll see a lot more depth at the local organization levels.

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Scott Heiferman, the CEO of Meetup showed off his newest product with potentially big real world ramifications: Meetup Everywhere.

Meetup, an online way to establish real world meetups, has seen success with its core product. There are now some 50,000 meetups a week going on almost everywhere in the world thanks to the service, Heiferman says. But Meetup Everywhere is a brand new platform — it creates an easy way for an organization, company, or movement to spark a meetup simultaneously anywhere, not just in one location.

As you might expect, TechCrunch is a launch partner for the product. And we’re using it for a good reason. On June 11, TechCrunch is celebrating its 5th birthday. We have a birthday party every year, but it’s always limited to some place in the Bay Area. Now, those people who wish to celebrate as well but can’t make it to the Bay Area, can host their own gatherings around the world. And we can track them all through Meetup Everywhere.

There are already TechCrunch birthday meetups set up in 52 cities around the world. Hopefully we can send out some stuff to help celebrate.

And there are 14 other launch partners for this platform. They include VC Fred Wilson, author Seth Godin, Foursquare, and the Huffington Post.

“This is more important than the iPad — it’s more powerful than the iPad,” Heiferman says. It’s a way to “turn your followers into a real movement.”

Today, at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington sat down to chat with Nikesh Arora, President, Global Sales Operations and Business Development, for Google. Michael started the conversation off focusing on Google’s $24 billion revenue (which flows through Arora’s office), and its considerable growth in revenue since 2004 (when it hovered around $2 billion).

Michael called upon Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s famous quote indicating that Google is a one-trick pony of sorts. She stated earlier this year search is 99 percent of Google’s business, saying that the search giant has to grow “Yahoo” per year. Arora was quick to respond that ‘if we are a one trick pony, we have a pretty good trick.’

But it’s no secret that Google is looking at other revenue streams besides search, including Android, Video (YouTube) and Google Apps. While Arora declined to state YouTube’s revenue, he did say that there is going to be a tremendous amount of innovation around video and video advertising, stating that “online video will be a big part of our lives.”

When asked if cloud based productivity suite Google Apps is the company’s “second trick,” Arora said that Google hopes for Apps to be a billion dollar revenue stream in three to four years. Google’s forecasts come as no surprise, as the company has been aggressively lobbying enterprises and small businesses to move to the cloud.

Some pretty big news on the Augmented Reality gaming space today. Ogmento Inc. has closed $3.5 million in Series A equity financing to expand its AR game platform and its operations in New York and Los Angeles. The round was led by Chart Venture Partners with participation from CNF Investments and other private investors. Perhaps the reason this is most significant is that this appears to be the first time such a company has received significant venture funding.

So far Ogmento has developed AR experiences for Penguin Publishing, SAP, Orange Telecom, Smith and Nephew, and PBS, and is doing games with CPG, and other sports enterprises.

Chart has already made investments in hardware and software areas related to AR so this closes the loop quite nicely.

Matthew McCooe of Chart Venture Partners and Joe Del Guercio of CNF join Ogmento’s board, along with founders Brad Foxhoven, Brian Selzer, and Inbar. Cole Van Nice, a partner with Chart, will also join Ogmento’s management team.

It’s the last day of the first edition of the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, and our awesome program continues to be, well, awesome.

Earlier this morning, we had Twitter inventor Jack Dorsey do a demo of Square, and we also had David S. Kidder, CEO of search advertising startup Clickable, show off a brand new product the company is cooking up.

Kidder kicked off by saying that there is tremendous potential in social advertising, which commands about 50% of ad spend in the United States today (the other half goes to search). Clickable sees friction in the marketplace, which makes things complicated for many advertisers, particularly first-timers, who don’t always know where to start spending their first dollars and what works best.

Kidder demoed an alpha version of the new product, dubbed The Master Campaign, which will basically allow advertisers to launch campaigns across a variety of search engines and social networks in one go.

Customers will be able to use the Web-based dashboard of The Master Campaign to indicate what they’re trying to achieve (branding or customer acquisition), set a monthly budget, define their target audience based on age, gender and location and enter keywords.

Clickable will then mine all that data and pre-build campaigns across Google AdWords, Microsoft adCenter, Yahoo Search Marketing and Facebook. Advertisers can tweak the settings, edit the ad copy if warranted, launch campaigns across all those platforms with a single click and get custom performance reports.

The Master Campaign will be launched in public beta in Q3 of this year.

NY-based Clickable launched at TechCrunch40 back in 2007, has since raised over $20 million in venture funding and has former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller on its board.

The startup said on stage that it now employs over 140 people full-time (and aims to grow by another 100 in the next 12 months) and has over 1,000 paying customers.

If you thought Zynga’s recent peace treaty with Facebook meant the end of its efforts to expand its reach beyond the social network, think again. Today, Zynga has announced that it has forged a deal with Yahoo to feature its games throughout Yahoo’s network — a move that will put Zynga’s games in front of Yahoo’s 600 million users.

At this point details on the deal are a bit vague — the games aren’t rolling out onto Yahoo for a couple of months, and neither company has announced which games will be integrated. That said, we can likely expect Zynga megahits like Farmville to be featured prominently, perhaps even on the Yahoo Homepage (which would be a huge win for Zynga). Yahoo also says that games and/or updates will be available through many of its properties, including the Yahoo Games portal, Yahoo Mail, and Yahoo Messenger. Games will be deployed in the US first, followed by a global rollout.

All of this comes just a week after Zynga agreed to enter into a five-year partnership with Facebook to continue its presence on the social network, after tensions between the companies almost led to war. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but we’ve heard rumors that Facebook was pushing to keep exclusivity over Zynga’s games, which obviously hasn’t happened.

This isn’t the first time Zynga has expanded beyond Facebook. Last fall it launched a Facebook Connect-enabled version of Farmville at Farmville.com, and it integrated its games into MSN Games back in February. And there’s also Zynga’s rumored independent game portal Zynga Live looming in the future.

It’s also worth pointing out that today’s announcement is coinciding with Yahoo’s Investor Day, and will probably be pitched as part of its recent drive to increase its social functionality.

Update: I spoke with Cody Simms, Yahoo’s Senior Director of Product/UED for Yahoo! Social Platforms, about the news. When I asked if Zynga games would be featured prominently on the Yahoo Homepage, Simms said that details are still being worked out, but that it would be to the benefit of both companies to have users playing Zynga games on Yahoo. In other words, don’t expect these games to be buried under a hard-to-find menu.

Simms also explained how notifications from the Zynga games will be integrated deeply into Yahoo’s suite of services, allowing users to receive updates directly from Yahoo’s web apps and Messenger client. As detailed in the Yahoo Developer Blog:

Both the Social APIs and YAP will also allow them to easily tap into Yahoo! user identities (including the aggregated identities we’re enabling across our network), share to Yahoo! Updates, and automatically leverage these new notification channels. (We’ll be providing more details on these new notification channels soon — and they, like so many of our products, will be open for all.)

With these integrations, users who enjoy Zynga games will now have the ability to use their Yahoo! ID and access Zynga’s top titles across Yahoo!’s many products — including Yahoo! Homepage, Yahoo! Toolbar, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Profiles, and Yahoo! Messenger. YDN is proud to provide the infrastructure enabling these experiences to seamlessly plug into these products.

Product: TVee Model 20 Soundbar

Manufacturer: Boston Acoustics

Wired Rating: 7

As impressive as the picture is on the latest generation of flatscreen TVs, the built-in speakers often sound like they were stripped from a clock radio.

If you don’t want to go all-out on a surround system — and its many speakers, wires and cables — then a 2.1 soundbar system like Boston Acoustics TVee Model 20 can be a nice compromise, giving you solid sound without eating up much space in your living room.

When we first hooked up the system (in a snappy five minutes), the sharpness and fullness of the sound was a major contrast to the built-in speaker on our 50-inch Sony Bravia. Watching live music performances, the TVee Model 20 showed off even more dynamic range, and brought out lots of nice detail in the music.

Despite the enhancements, background noises would sometimes overwhelm the dialogue, especially in action movies and live sports. With these programs, you need to adjust the trim setting to its lowest position to create a better balance. The soundbar doesn’t have bass and treble controls, but you can adjust the speaker-subwoofer balance using the sub’s volume knob.

The Model 20 is comprised of a 31 x 3.75 x 4-inch soundbar with dual 1.5 x 6-inch drivers; and a 6-inch, down-firing, powered subwoofer, which is about 10 inches high and a foot wide. The system uses a 2.4 GHz wireless signal to send audio to the subwoofer, which you can put anywhere in the room (though it sounds best when placed within 6 to 8 feet of the bar).

Inexplicably, there’s no remote control included with the TVee Model 20, but you can easily pair your TV or cable remote to the system. The system uses RCA stereo inputs (no digital options) and you can either output from your DVR/cable box or from an AV receiver. When you do the former, the soundbar will take over for your TV’s speaker.

This speakerbar is no substitute for the immersive sonic experience of a 5.1 surround sound system, but it is a significant upgrade from your TV’s internal speaker. You’ll most likely want to stick this system in smaller rooms where the sub can make an impact and the bar can fill the space with rich audio.

WIRED Slim profile with solid sound. Wireless sub can be covertly stashed in any room. Super simple setup and configuration.

TIRED Balance can get wonky with some shows. Only one audio input, and no digital. You guys really didn’t include a remote? What is this, 1977?

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Justin Bieber’s manager, Scooter Braun, talked about the megastar’s usage of Twitter. It was brilliant. “What other way is a teenage boy going to talk to girls?,” Braun quipped.

Bieber currently has around 2.7 million followers on Twitter, making him one of the most-followed people on the service. But more impressively, Bieber has seemed to dominate Twitter’s Trending Topics area lately. Or rather, he did. Then something happened. “Twitter, if you’re here. You changed your algorithm,” Braun half-joked.

Braun noted that for most of the tweets it is actually Bieber tweeting. In fact, Braun is the only other one with the password to the account — and those tweets are clearly not from Bieber. And of course Bieber is going to tweet for himself: “He’s talking to the 2 million girls has at his disposal,” Braun said.

More seriously, Braun said that the usage of Twitter is actually pretty important. It shows that he’s ”the same person who was talking to them before he got huge, is still talking to them now,” Braun noted.

He noted that there may be a random girl in Iowa who never thought she’d ever talk to Justin Bieber, then he responds to her on Twitter. “That’s something she’ll remember for the rest of her life.”

Bieber spends a least two hours a day on Twitter, Braun noted. “He likes doing it. That’s what kids do.”

Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, Square co-founder (and Twitter creator) Jack Dorsey took the stage to demonstrate Square working on the iPhone. He also sat down with our own Michael Arrington and Erick Schonfeld to talk a bit about his success. And Dorsey had some advice for new entrepreneurs looking to raise money.

Mike noted that Dorsey is sort of a celebrity in the tech community now so raising money for Square was pretty easy. That’s true. Dorsey said that he took two weeks and scheduled 25 meetings in Silicon Valley and New York to talk to venture capitalists about Square. This resulted in Square being valued at $40 million before it even launched.

But Dorsey said his past success (with Twitter) was also a bit of a detriment. He wasn’t sure if people were actually interested in Square, or if they were just thinking about Twitter and his past success. It was important to him and his new co-founder that Square was the focal point.

Dorsey then went into a bit of history with the Twitter funding, and had some advice for new entrepreneurs: “You wanna see that engagement.”

What he means by that is that some of the early Twitter funding meetings were “terrible” because they weren’t questioned hard. The VCs didn’t really seem interested in the product or didn’t get it — so Twitter knew they weren’t the right fit.

The one who was? Fred Wilson, Dorsey took no time saying.

“Fred was one of the only people we saw that was a user of Twitter on a daily basis. 20 times a day in some cases,” Dorsey said. Mor e importantly, Wilson asked the tough questions about the long-term goals for the company. He wanted to know the product plan, he was agressive in his questioning, but he got it.

“I want someone on the board that will push the company in ways that I’m not thinking about. They need to guide us,” Dorsey said.

Another bit of advice: “Get something you can demo.”

Dorsey said that while most people go into VC meetings with a PowerPoint presentation, that should only be a back-up to what you’re presenting. Instead, you should show the site or the product. And it has to be something you’re proud of, he noted.

He said that they had been using Square for seven months on a day-to-day basis before they hit the road for the funding. They were ready. “We could go into a meeting and take money from someone,” Dorsey half-joked.

Intel Capital is investing $10 million in TRA (which stands for ‘True ROI Accountability for Media’), a media planning, measurement and analytics software company. Funding for the investment comes from the $200 million Intel Capital Invest in America Technology Fund.

Intel’s capital injection is part of an $18.2 million Series C round, which includes participation from existing investors Arbitron and WPP.

TRA will use the funding for market expansion, data acquisition and to ramp up recruitment.

TRA provides a Web-based business intelligence platform called Media TRAnalytics, which enables advertisers, agencies and media organizations to enhance marketing accountability and measurement by matching 1.5 million households of TV data with 54 million households of purchase data for what it touts as the largest single-source database — 370,000 households.

In TV, TRA uses tuning data from set-top boxes, household purchase data from scanner cards and advertisers, and household demographic data. TRA’s ASP platform collects, measures, integrates, analyzes, and creates customized reports for each advertiser.

TRA’s database currently contains consumer packaged goods data, but the company says it will be loading additional purchase data in the future (such as pharmaceutical, automotive, consumer electronics and financial services purchase data).

The company was launched 2 years ago.

At TechCrunch Disrupt this morning Troy Carter, Founder & CEO, Coalition Media Group and worldwide Manager for pop star Lady Gaga sat down with Scooter Braun, Founder & Chair, SB Projects and worldwide Manager for fellow pop star Justin Bieber to discuss the digital era’s implications for musicians.

The hot topic of the conversation was YouTube and Twitter. Carter said openly that he and Lady Gaga “create music videos for YouTube.” Braun agreed with Carter, saying that Bieber represented a new strategy of creating a breakout teenage star. Braun said that previously teenage music stars has to have a show on Nickelodeon or Disney. But Bieber changed this; he was found on YouTube and his first videos singing Aretha Franklin’s Respect saw 55 million views by the time the artist signed a record deal with Universal Music. He ended up going Platinum shortly after.

Gaga originally broke out on YouTube and MySpace Music (which Braun was quick to say is dead), and Carter has now discovered a new star on YouTube, Grayson Chance. When asked about advertising, carter says that Lady Gaga’s videos include pre-roll and post-roll advertising (thanks to Vevo) but said that advertising isn’t a large revenue source. Record companies keep the bulk of the money made from ads and the remaining trickles down to the artists. Carter and Braun both agreed that concert tours are the main revenue stream for artists.

And what about Twitter? Both managers said that Twitter is a great way to connect with fans, especially for artists who were discovered by fans on YouTube. Twitter breaks down the layers between the artists and the fan, says Carter. Braun says that Bieber loves talking to his fans over Twitter (perhaps that’s why he’s always a trending topic!).

E: That last video was Grayson Chance,
T: We found him on YouTube
E: Is YouTube the new MTV. How do you find the new pop star?
S: You get lucky. I was managing Akon, and Justin happened to be on YouTube singing Aretha Franklin’s Respect. We thought how are we going to break him with an online strategy vs. a Nickelodeon or Disney show.
E: So how did you do this-
S: I had this gut feeling about Justin-we started strategy of creating more content online, when we talked to major labels, the thought was without a TV show you can’t break a teenage star. We wanted to be the first artist to break off of YouTube, Even when we had 55 million hits on YT, no one wanted to sign. We are signed with Universal, We went platinum, no Disney or Nickelodeon.
E: With Lady Gaga, was YouTube instrumental.
T: Actually it was MySpace. Interscope heard her on MySpace. It was always MySpace, YouTube. That was four years ago.
E: Has marketing channel shifted from MySpace to YouTube.
T: We make our music video for YouTube.
E: Would videos now made it on MTV years ago?
T: Now we know that if we make a ten min video for YouTube, people will watch it.
E: There is some product placement in LG’s video?
T: Virgin Mobile is a tour sponser,
E: Did the product placement pay for the video?
T: Sometimes it makes a profit, but most of the time it breaks even
S: No one uses MySpace anymore.
T: Everyone was sending me links to Grayson Chance, and I jumped on it.
E: Now you are just sitting on the computer to find artists on YouTube?
S: Now its about discovery-fans have been watching musicians now for years on YouTube before they become famous. People wonder how do you monetize, deal with piracy. But kids are going to buy the product if they really support the personality. When I say Justin;s name, people know his story.
E: How is it that Justin Bieber is always a trending topic on Twitter?
S: He’s a teenager so he likes Twitter, so he’s on Twitter talking to two million girls at his disposable. There are time where we go over stuff, but the only people who has his passwod are me and him. Kids like that the same person who they like is talking to them now.
E: There is a immediacy that people feel with celebrities on Twitter. Can you talk about the close relationship between the fan and the artist on social media?
T: GaGa is a digital baby-that’s how they communicate. There cant be any layers between the artists and their fans.
S: It’s a way to connect with fans, he likes doing it.
S: Music has to become a multimedia business. We are interested n what you do. We have brands that can bring people into technologies. If you have a great product-
E: The lady gaga videos-do they have prerolls, advertising?
T: It’s pree roll or post roll on Vevo. The record company makes money off of that and then it trickles down.
E: is that a significant source of money?
T: Not at all. The main money resource is concerts.