Category: Tech news

This will be fun. Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz will be on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York next week for a one on one “fireside chat” with me. She’ll be coming to the event just after a press conference Yahoo is holding on Monday morning.

She joins AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Google’s President Worldwide sales Nikesh Arora, AOL founder Steve Case, Kleiner Perkins partner John Doerr and other amazing speakers at the event.

We’ll have lots to talk about. Yahoo’s stock price has increased since she took over the CEO role from cofounder Jerry Yang in January 2009, but the company’s valuation is still far short of the $40+ billion that Microsoft offered in early 2008.

I have been one of Bartz’s biggest critics over the last year, chronicling the executive team revolving door, Yahoo’ lack of a coherent product strategy and a few other jabs as well. It says a lot that she’s willing to appear on stage with me and talk about all these issues and more.

There are just a handful of tickets left for TechCrunch Disrupt. We’ll also be livestreaming the entire event for those who cannot attend. You can watch the live feed at disrupt.techcrunch.tv, (link not active until May 24), and get all our coverage of the event here on TechCrunch.

I’ve been to Africa three times in the last year, twice to Rwanda and last week to Cape Town. But people tell me I still haven’t seen “The Real Africa.”

Rwanda—as I’ve written—has had a major rebuild after its horrific genocide some 15 years ago, and even in the poorest parts of the country boast far better access to water, power and technology than many other emerging markets.  Cape Town was far more sanitized and modern than Rwanda. It didn’t even feel like an emerging market—a true test was my mindlessly drinking the water out of the tap in my hotel room and not getting sick.

Lest I be too fooled the entire continent is so, well, Western, Herman Heunis pulls me right back down to earth. He just came back from a trip photographing wild elephants in his home country of Namibia and holds up the daily paper. The headline screams: LION KILLER TO BE CHARGED. “These are the headlines we get,” he says laughing.

And yet, Heunis’ company, MXit, is the company that Cape Town/Silicon Valley entrepreneur Vinny Lingham said is the most likely to become a billion dollar South African tech company. It is the company that Naspers— the South African media and investment firm famous for making the most profitable Chinese Internet investment in Tencent and one of the most prolific investors in Internet companies in the emerging world—said I absolutely, without-a-doubt had to meet while I was in Cape Town. And it just so happens to be smack in the middle of my somewhat obsessive view that the basic mobile Web in the emerging world is a far bigger business opportunity than every smart phone app in the Valley combined.

MXit is a download for feature phones that allows people—mostly teens in South Africa—to IM in groups or individually without paying data charges and download things like wallpaper, ringtones and games. It has 20 million users and has revenues in the high single-digit millions. That may not sound like much, but remember South Africa only has 50 million people. For comparison sake, India’s well-funded mobile messaging/social network SMS GupShup claimed 26 million users in January– more but not that much more considering how much bigger India is than South Africa. The day before I spoke with Heunis, MXit added some 24,000 new users. He looks disappointed when he looks that number up and adds, “We added 32,000 one day last week.”

In terms of home market penetration, MXit looks a lot like the pre-Facebook MySpace, and that’s not the only similarity. MXit has had a hard time shaking reports that it’s the trolling ground for pedophiles. Slightly-less-concerned parents simply don’t like it because kids spend too much time typing with friends, not enough time on homework. Mention MXit South Africa among kids, and many tell you they can’t live without it. Mention it to adults, and many tell you they hate it. MXit is like MySpace in the mid-2000s—with many of the good and the bad connotations that label implies.

Heunis used to write infrastructure software for mobile operators and every expert told him his idea wouldn’t work. That the non-techy mass market would not know how to download a Web app on a basic phone, especially back in 2005. And the first iteration—a subscription version—indeed failed. But when it came to the free version the company retooled five months later? Yeah, those so-called experts were flat wrong. He compares it to Linux—a kid may spend four days figuring it out but he’s happy to brag and be the one to show all his other friends how to download it. And like any messaging platform, the network effect is huge in this business, especially when you are sending group messages. It’s social media 101: You want to be where your friends are.

Remember the scandal where “MySpace Tom” lied about his age to sound hip? Heunis is older, but he doesn’t have to try so hard. He looks a bit like a younger member of the Rolling Stones, with mad gray hair, a cool brown leather jacket, a white leather studded belt and jeans. (He describes his hair as “like Einstein.” Nah, I vote gracefully aging British rocker.) He’s also a coder through-and-through, which made him unique among companies I met with on my (albeit limited) trip to Cape Town.

Many South African entrepreneurs impressed me with well-thought-out, strategic acumen on things like marketing and strategy, but I met fewer sheer lovers of programming like Heunis. “I have been a software engineer my whole professional life,” was the first thing he told me when I sat down. “It was a traumatic shift to move to running a company. I had to make a decision to remove all the compilers off my machines; software programming is so addictive to me.”

Equally traumatic was early on when bootstrapped MXit was nearing break even, and Heunis had to buy his partner out of the business. “I can’t tell you how many times I drove down that road and said to myself, ‘Tomorrow I have to call everyone in and shut down the company,’ ” he says pointing out of his plate glass window to a beautiful highway amid Cape Town’s wine farms. But like many great startups, death was averted by a growth spurt in the business and a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Once he turned a profit in 2006, he decided to take Naspers’ money. The investors have 30% of the South African business and 50% of the international business. (They are run separately.)

He adds it was a fortuitous time to do the deal and emphasizes he appreciates Naspers non-controlling attitude. “The worst mistake a VC can make is invest and then come in and try to run the company themselves,” he says. (Hmm…I could swear I actually left Silicon Valley…)

Heunis gets that his business mix is changing in the next decade as computers, smart phones and Facebook become more prevalent in South Africa. His goal is to become less dependent on ad revenues, zealously eying a company called M-Pesa in Kenya that is part of Vodaphone and has become one of the country’s largest banks—all flowing through mobile phones. He’s also working on an iPad app– rare as iPads are in the South African market. Developing multiplayer games is a big focus too—and no doubt he leverages Naspers’ connections to Tencent, the dominant online gaming company and largest Internet company in China.

Not short on ambition, Heunis’ goal is to have 200 million users worldwide in five years. To achieve that goal, MXit and SMS GupShup may start slugging it out in the country I’m in now—Indonesia. With 240 million people, Indonesia has one of the largest populations in the world and is mostly untapped.

And Indonesians are hungry for mobile apps: in a flash, and without marketing, MXit found itself with a cool one million Indonesian users. It’s a Wild West still in terms of mobile billing and the reliability of the network. But with a comparatively untapped market that’s almost the size of the US, it’s going to be a place where Chinese, Indian and African companies increasingly slug it out. (More on Indonsian Web entrepreneurs slugging for their own market in a future post.)

Video ad network ScanScout, which provides pre-roll and overlay advertising formats to monetize online videos, is rolling out a video advertising format for HTML5-compatible devices. ScanScout joins a number of video startups who have jumped on the HTML5 bandwagon with Apple not supporting Flash on the iPad and iPhone.

ScanScout, which was the 6th most popular video ad network according to Comscore will now allow publishers like ABC and others integrate the startup’s pre-roll inventory for Apple devices that are not compatible with Adobe Flash.

ScanScout allows publishers using Ooyala, Brightcove and others to enable HTML5 pre-rollsand monetize their videos. And ScanScout aims to be a one-stop-shop to monetize videos in both Flash and HTML5 formats. Video ad networks Break Media and MeFeedia have also boarded the HTML5 train but ScanScout is the first of the purely 3rd party networks to enable HTML5 for their advertisers and publishers across the web. ScanScout just raised $8.5 million in funding last fall.

Thankfully, it seems that the days of the male-dominated tech scene are behind us. Leading ladies like Google’s Marissa Mayer, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg and even Yahoo’s Carol Bartz are a few names that often make the spotlight and somewhat balance the scorecard. And in France, the spotlight perhaps doesn’t get any brighter than that of the Minister of Digital Economy, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet. So it’s hardly surprising that numerous groups are popping up to support and encourage women in entrepreneurship, innovation and technology – including Silicon Valley-based Girls in Tech, which will make its debut in Paris at the end of the month.

You may recall Divya Narendra, who co-founded Facebook competitor ConnectU, and has been embroiled in a lawsuit against Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, and eventually settled the dispute (though according to reports this week, this may not be over). After graduating Harvard, Narendra worked as an associate at hedge fund Sowood Capital Management, where as an analyst he realized that the buy-side investment community was lacking a research-focused Wikipedia where users could share ideas and access data about hedge fund investments. Narendra teamed up with fellow Harvard alum and current hedge fund analyst Aalap Mahadevia, to fill this hole in the space. Enter SumZero, which is a community for buy-side investment professionals (which include hedge fund, private equity and mutual fund analysts) to share their research.

A buy-side analyst generally performs research and makes recommendations on how well an investment will perform and align with a fund’s strategy. Generally, these recommendations and analysis are not available to other funds or outsiders. Until now. Soft launched last year, the site has accumulated over 3,500 hedge fund, private equity, and mutual fund analysts as members, including analysts from some of the most prominent funds- SAC, Blackstone, and KKR.

A private network, SumZero allows analysts to apply to join the site, who are vetted to make sure they are legitimate professionals in the industry. Members can also invite other professionals in the industry. In order to access other buy-side investment professionals’ advice, analysts are required to submit ideas and research reports on the companies they are interested in buying or have bought stake in.

Similar to the LinkedIn model, each analyst has a profile that includes professional experience, educational information, and ideas submitted to the site. Currently, the network has accumulated over 2,000 detailed investment reports written by hedge fund, mutual fund, and private equity buyside professionals.

While these reports are private within the network, SumZero is making one investment recommendation per week from its community available to the public. While the hedge fund industry has been notoriously closed and secretive with its investments tactics, SumZero is opening this world up to any user. Anyone can sign up to receive a weekly recommendation made by these analysts. For example, last week’s recommendation was for China MediaExpress, an advertising company in China. The rec was a 1000-word, detailed report outlining why the company should perform well. Here’s an example of a SumZero report, which was published on Morningstar.

From the responses I’ve received from analysts and professionals using the site, it appears to be a hit in the buy-side investment community. SumZero member and investor Alan Axelrod finds the network as a valuable, daily resource for not only sharing investment ideas, but also to network and connect with other hedge fund and private equity analysts, sort of like a LinkedIn for the community. He also sees value in using the platform as a way to recruit other talent to his firm.

Investment professional Jay Kilroy uses the site to receive critical feedback on investment ideas he has, finding that fellow analysts are willing to point out any flaws in a strategy. “It’s a great resource for idea generation,” says Kilroy, “And the level of transparency raises credibility of the site.” He echoes Alan’s feelings that the site is one of the more addictive web resources he’s seen on the web for buy-side investment professionals.

In terms of competition, there’s the ValueInvestorsClub, which has a similar functionality. The main difference is that analysts can be anonymous and the site is much more exclusive with only 200 members. Narendra says that on the buy side, funds have never historically published their research, so the vast amount of high-quality research available on SumZero from hedge fund professionals is unprecedented in the community. Currently, Narendra says that the site is seeing five to ten investment ideas submitted per day.

While the site is still growing, the scale it has achieved in a community that has traditionally been very secretive about their analysis and research is impressive to say the least. Of course, Narendra and Mahadevia both have hedge fund backgrounds, which gives the site more legitimacy.

And there’s the question of a business model. Currently the team is evaluating what makes sense and declined to publicly state their strategy, but I can imagine there is a tremendous opportunity in terms of data availability.

TechCrunch50 startup Cocodot, which launched its online invitation site last year, has just raised $2 million in funding from Anthem Venture Partners and Rincon Venture Partners. The startup had previously raised just under $1 million in funding from Anthem and William Morris’ Mail Room Fund.

Founded by former MySpace CMO Shawn Gold, Cocodot aims to be a eco-friendly, one-stop-shop for event planning and invitations; sort of a modern, more chic Evite. You can create a high resolution, chic, stylish invitation (that can be printed as well), a vertical event pages, guest management tools, seating charts, and a directory for event planning vendors. When you create event, you can build an event homepage that aims to be a social conversation hub. Once you create an invitation, you can import your contact lists from Yahoo, Gmail, AOL and other contact managers and email services. Cocodot also lets you send links to the event homepage and invitation to Facebook and Twitter.

Cocodot is also getting into the online greeting space, letting user create a simple “happy birthday” or “Thank you” online card. Users can adjust color and text, move the graphics and text and even offers a “copy concierge” to help people think of thoughtful sayings. And Cocodot offers high-end online wedding invitations and an event management platform.

Since coming out of beta last month, Cocodot has gained considerable traction. The site has been featured on The Today Show, Vanity Fair, People Magazine and other mainstream media outlets. And Cocodot has even gained a celebrity following, including Brooke Shields and Gwenyth Paltrow.

Cocodot faces competition from Pingg, MyPunchbowl, and others.

AllFacebook boasts a nice feature where you can see what the top performing Facebook Pages are – meaning which Pages have gathered the largest following to date. The problem is that there’s apparently a significant lag, and that the data presented is therefor inaccurate (for example, it undercounts the number of fans of the popular Texas Hold’em Poker page by nearly 1.5 million).

Enter Fan Page List, which is entirely dedicated to ranking the most popular Pages on Facebook as well as rankings for various categories, such as Actors, Politicians, Movies, Games, TV Shows, News, Athletes and more, in real time.

One of the categories that is the most interesting is the list of top brands on Facebook.

Let’s have a look, shall we?

The most popular brand on Facebook is … Facebook, with just over 9 million fans. The only other Internet / technology brands in the top 25 are YouTube (#4 with 5,082,029 fans) and Google (#21 with 1,269,926 fans). Food and clothings brands seem to do much better.

In case you’re wondering why Apple is nowhere to be found in the top brands ranking: the Cupertino company doesn’t even have a proper Facebook Page to begin with (it looks like facebook.com/apple was taken by someone else). Microsoft does, but only comes in at #99 with 117,444 fans. But hey, at least they still made the top 100 list, right?

Here are the top 10 brands on Facebook (for the full list, go here):

1) Facebook (9,024,542 Fans)
2) Starbucks (7,217,370 Fans)
3) Coca-Cola (5,529,595 Fans)
4) YouTube (5,082,221 Fans)
5) Disney (3,475,487 Fans)
6) Victoria’s Secret (3,436,811 Fans)
7) Converse (2,743,227 Fans)
8) McDonald’s (2,260,698 Fans)
9) H&M (2,045,964 Fans)
10) MTV (1,871,241 Fans)

PS: you can get that T-shirt here for $19.99.

By now, I’m sure you’ll be aware that Google yesterday introduced Google TV, a platform with the potential of moving us closer to real integration between television and the Internet.

In the blog post announcing the new platform, Google mentioned that it has already started building strategic alliances with a number of TV technology companies, specifically naming Jinni and Rovi in the process.

The former is a small Israeli startup that we’ve been tracking for a while now, and with whom I’m acquainted because they were one of the 3 finalists at my Plugg startup competition event back in March 2009.

The startup, dubbed the ‘Pandora for movies’ by observers, bills its service as an intelligent ‘taste engine’ for movies and TV shows.

Its guide helps users choose what to watch next amid the abundance of available content (live TV channels, VOD, DVR, and Internet services like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu). Based on semantic technology, Jinni essentially aims to filter the universe of content through the lens of the user’s personal moods and tastes. It operates a fairly popular destination website in addition to API-based solutions for Internet content providers and TV operators.

The company, which has raised just over $3 million in venture capital to date, is now working with the Mountain View Internet giant to provide semantic search, personalized recommendations and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content that will be available to the user.

Perhaps if Jinni plays its cards right, Google might be interested in buying them out somewhere down the line, provided the startup can prove its technology’s worth and wow Google TV users with its search features and personalized recommendations.

Either way, here are some preliminary screenshots of the service we’ve scored, although we should warn that the application is still very much under development at this point.

Seesmic, Twitter and the iPhone have all been around for a couple of years, but for whatever reason it took a while for French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur‘s latest venture to come out with a proper iPhone / iPod touch application.

As of this morning, it’s here, and it’s … great.

The application, which you can download from iTunes via this link, lets users manage their Twitter and Facebook accounts and update other social networks through Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired the company behind that service earlier this year).

I’ll let you read the blog post and watch the video embedded below for more details about the Seesmic for iPhone app, but I think people will be interested to see how it stacks up against Twitter for iPhone (which was also released this week and is the latest iteration of Atebits’ Tweetie app) and TweetDeck.

The short version: if you’re a fan of the latter clients, there’s a good chance you will not be compelled to make the switch. If you’re not and you find yourself constantly wondering which is the best between those two, Seesmic for iPhone is simply a really great third alternative.

And if you haven’t tried any of them, I’d recommend you start out with Seesmic.

Seesmic for iPhone is free, fast, smooth, and complete. The built-in Twitter client is well-designed and has all the functionality you’ve come to expect (timeline, replies, direct messages, geolocation support for new tweets, the ability to add photos, retweets, multiple accounts support, search, trending topics, lists, favorites, URL shortening and so on). But so do TweetDeck and Twitter for iPhone, of course.

But Twitter for iPhone only supports the ‘new’ type of retweeting, and doesn’t give you an easy shortcut for old-school retweeting, aka ‘quoting’ (you can, but it’s cumbersome). And Twitter for iPhone obviously doesn’t have built-in support for Facebook. TweetDeck does, but neither support the many other social networks users can easily update with Seesmic for iPhone (again, thanks to Ping.fm integration).

Granted, you can use dedicated apps for Facebook, Tumblr, LinkedIn, MySpace, etc., but for basic usage it’s simply a huge time-saver to be able to do all that from a single app.

Seesmic for iPhone also lets you save important messages and updates by storing them to Evernote in one tap, which is a very nice added bonus.

All this basically means Seesmic for iPhone is a worthy competitor to all the other apps when it comes to managing and updating your Twitter account, but definitely outshines both in terms of support for multiple social networking and other services – which makes Seesmic for iPhone stand on its own two feet as a very potent social hub rather than a mere ‘Twitter client’.

Give it a whirl and let us know what you think.

So since TrustedPlaces announced its acquisition by Yell we’ve been digging around to try and find out the purchase price. Understandably, we respect the fact that co-founder Sokratis Papafloratos doesn’t want to say, and Yell certainly won’t. But this information would be very useful to startups out there wondering what the purchase price is these days for a company like this. And the fact it exited to a potential acquirer of Qype, effectively Europe’s Yelp, is an issue … for Qype.

Earlier today, Yahoo sent out an email to the press notifying us about a special event on Monday with CEO Carol Bartz. The event happens to be in New York City which is interesting for two reasons. 1) Foursquare, the subject of many Yahoo aqusition rumors, is based in NY. 2) Most of TechCrunch will be in New York for our TechCrunch Disrupt conference. So what is Yahoo up to? AllThingsD found out this evening. It’s definitely not about Foursquare. It’s about Nokia.

According to Kara Swisher’s sources, Yahoo will be announcing a deal with Nokia that will build Yahoo email, search, and other applications into their devices. At first glance, this is a very big deal. Nokia, after all, is still by far the largest mobile phone maker in the world. Recent reports give Nokia a 37.4% share of the global market (in Q1 2010). That’s far ahead of number 2, Samsung, which has about 20%. Where’s the much-talked-about Apple on that list? Number six, with 3%.

So this is huge right? Well, maybe short-term. But long-term this is Yahoo betting on the past, rather than on the future.

Simply put: the future is smartphones. Nokia, while it may dominate the overall market, is a smaller player in smartphones. Instead, they dominate in feature phones — you know the phones that people still mainly use to do things like make phones calls and send text messages. For now, thanks to the evolving markets in third-world countries, this remains a strong segment. But there’s indications that this could change sooner than some expect.

At Google I/O today, a number of questions at the press event following the keynote asked about Android phone reach in various countries. GigaOm’s Om Malik asked Andy Rubin why Android wasn’t focusing on emerging markets such as India, where feature phones rule? Rubin’s response was that they made a firm decision to bet on smartphones.

“Today’s smartphone is tomorrow’s feature phone,” Rubin said. He said that Moore’s Law dictates that all phones will evolve quickly, and within the next 12 months, smartphones will be the devices making waves in the developing world. He went further. He said that those with “legacy positions” (a thinly-veiled reference to companies like Nokia) see it differently, but that the tide will shift — with or without them.

This project between Yahoo and Nokia has apparently been called “Project Nike” — after the Greek goddess of victory. In terms of nicknames, it’s hard to think of one more presumptuous than that. Swisher also notes that at one point, Nokia and Yahoo were talking about a co-branded phone, but that’s apparently now off the table. That’s probably a good thing, as that wouldn’t have worked either and would have just cost both sides more money and time.

The point is, without a major shift in Nokia’s strategy, this is a short-term grab by Yahoo. It’s seems like a smart play for now, but in a year or two years, this may look like yet another failed idea. Mobile, at times, has been one of Yahoo’s few bright spots in the past several years. But again, a deal like this is not about the future, it’s about the present. Meanwhile, Yahoo’s rivals, are thinking the opposite way. It’s hard to come up with anything shown at Google I/O today that wasn’t about the future.

The future is what sells. It wins every time.

A report in the Wall Street Journal this evening reveals that Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and a number of other popular social sites are passing along data that advertisers could potentially use to identify users who click their ads. The article is focused on Facebook in particular, which appears to have been passing along the most data of the aforementioned sites and has also been embroiled in a major privacy controversy.

The Journal article doesn’t get into too much technical detail, but it sounds like Facebook and the others are failing to scrub ‘referring’ URLs that are always passed along whenever a user clicks a link. This is actually normal behavior — typically when you click a link on a website, the site you’re being directed to will get to see where you came from. The issue is that these social sites include some identifying information as part of their URLs; when you visit a friend’s Facebook profile, the resulting URL might include both your friend’s username and your Facebook ID, which could be used to associate you with the ads you’re clicking on.

Update: Jessica Vascellaro, one of the writers on the WSJ article, has sent ReadWriteWeb more technical details on what Facebook was doing. Her explanation, in part (you can see the full thing here):

Facebook was making it possible for advertisers to see ids for users who clicked (not just the profile url). This was happening through a ref equals profile code getting passed through after a user clicked on their profile and then an ad. Facebook acknowledged that this could be used to identify users who clicked, not just the profile of the user on whose page an ad appeared.

That said, the Journal reports that the ad companies it contacted had not used the data:

Several large advertising companies identified by the Journal as receiving the data, including Google Inc.’s DoubleClick and Yahoo Inc.’s Right Media, said they were unaware of the data being sent to them from the social-networking sites, and said they haven’t made use of it.

However, the article doesn’t say that all ad networks that placed ads on Facebook were ignoring the data. We’ve reached out to Facebook to ask if it’s possible that smaller networks could have leveraged it.

The WSJ article notes that the discovery was pointed out back in August by researchers from AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, but that the issue has persisted until this morning (Facebook and MySpace have now “rewritten some of the offending computer code”).

Update: The Twitter issue mentioned in the WSJ seems to be much less of an problem (it doesn’t even have ads yet).

Image via alancleaver

At Thursday’s Google I/O keynote, VP of engineering Vic Gundotra repeatedly ripped into Apple, and he did it right off the bat. The video above, which just came out, shows the first ten minutes of his keynote where he discusses why the world needs Android. But that is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is where he goes after Apple in a not too subtle way. He extols the virtues of an open platform and contrasts it with a “Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.” Then he shows a poster of 1984, with the title, “Not The Future We Want.” The reference is to Apple and the iPhone. Gundotra uses Apple’s own iconic 1984 imagery against it to great effect right at about 3 minutes into the video clip.

I can’t wait for Gundotra to appear next week at TechCrunch Disrupt, where we can ask him why he thinks Android will prevail, not only phones but also now in TVs.

eVenues, a service to book meeting rooms online, has won the top spot at won the Founder Showcase, which is a quarterly open start-up pitch competition and networking event held by TheFunded.

eVenues aggregates, searches, and rents meeting event space by the hour or day. It’s sort of like Expedia but for meeting spaces. The service is designed to also help small businesses and organizations like art galleries, city and county governments, and non-profits rent their distressed space for consumers and professionals looking for affordable space. SnapShop, an augmented reality shopping app that places furniture from catalogs in your home, was the official Runner-Up in the showcase.

David Jennings, Co-Founder of eVenues, won a cash prize, Startup Alley tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt, and free legal advice from Cooley by gathering the most votes from the crowd and judge panel, which included George Zachary, Rebecca Lynn, Jeff Clavier, Phil Libin and Facebook’s Bubba Murarka.

The Funded’s Founder Institute just announced the graduation of 25 companies from the incubator’s East Coast outposts and launched in Boston. Announced in March 2009, the Founder Institute offers entrepreneurs and very early stage startups an environment designed to help foster their growth and education. The program, which is now active in ten cities worldwide, holds two four-month long sessions annually in each location, which include mentorship sessions from experienced tech entrepreneurs.

One could be forgiven for writing off Google TV. After all, there are precedents for web TV failures (Apple TV) and precedents for ostentatious Google windmill-tilting (Wave, Buzz, a dozen others), so I don’t blame the doubters. I’d be one but for the fact that this is too big to be an experiment; it’s a declaration of war. The question is: against whom?

Against Apple? Yes, to some extent. Against set-top boxes? In a way. But primarily, I think it’s against the TV providers. Not in a direct way: as many have noted, Google TV, being a delivery system, relies entirely on others for its content. No, Google is leaning on Comcast and DirecTV and all them indirectly. Like the music industry and Napster, or the mobile phone industry and the iPhone, it’s less a direct assault and more an ultimatum: “Change or die.”

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