On the heels of announcing a payments partnership with Facebook, PlaySpan is making another announcement regarding the startup’s UltimatePay payments product. PlaySpan is launching UltimatePay Mobile, a virtual currency and micropayments monetization widget for smartphone platforms. The initial private beta launch will support Android phones and Nokia phones with WebRuntime installed.

UltimatePay is a ‘Monetization as a Service’ platform for apps, games, videos and digital goods. Based on the user’s location, the payments platform draws from over 85 different payment options. Because of its vast variety of payment options (which include PayPal, pre-paid cards, and a number of credit cards), UltimatePay is designed for a global audience.

UltimatePay Mobile gives smartphone developers a way to deliver a one-click payment experience to mobile gamers, and provide a comprehensive payments offering. The platform allows players to view their balance and transaction history, while allowing them to purchase items in-app without ever having to leave the game.

Of course, PlaySpan isn’t the first startup or company to bring in-app payments to Android phones; PayPal, Boku and Zong all offer in-app payments libraries to developers.

PlaySpan, which recently raised $18 million in new funding, already has a number of partnerships with a number of gaming and media companies, including Ubisoft, Sanrio and others. Perhaps the company can leverage some of these relationships to offer UltimatePay in publisher’s mobile games.

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PlaySpan’s Ultimate Pay Brings In-App Mobile Payments To Android…

While social commerce network Lockerz has been flying under the radar, the startup has quietly been able to raise an impressive amount of funding and accumulated nearly 18 million members after being open to the public for under two years. Lockerz has raised a total of $30 million, most recently nabbing $18 million from Kleiner Perkins newly launched sFund. Both John Doerr and Bing Gordon sit on Lockerz board of directors.

The Lockerz social commerce platform revolves around the idea that influencers within a social network can become brand and content advocates and affect the behavior of their friends. Lockerz is primarily targeted towards men and women ages 13 to 30, attempting to build a community of trendsetters and tastemakers who love to shop, play and connect on the Web.

Lockerz provides incentives like the ability to earn discounts on brands to encourage users to share content on the site. Members earn “Pointz” by watching videos, listening to music and inviting friends; pointz can then be used lower the prices of merchandise on the site. Users can also earn “Decalz” for sharing (similar to badges). New boutiques launch every Tuesday and feature brands such as 7 for All Mankind, Alex & Ani, Splendid, Rock & Republic, Matt Bernson, Quiksilver, Nintendo, and Xbox 360.

Founded by Kathy Savitt, a former Amazon and American Eagle Outfitters exec; Lockerz eventually wants to be the go-to commerce homepage for teens and young adults. One interesting part of the startup’s social growth is that it has no connection to Facebook. Savitt says that they are looking into connecting with Facebook, perhaps through a Facebook app, but that growth seems to be doing just fine with out the social network.

Lockerz started with 50 college kids that were friends and family of Savitt and her two daughters, and grew to 17.5 million users in less than one year. The site gets a little under 1 million unique visits per month (according to Google Analytics).

Social commerce is certainly hot these days, with social networks and commerce sites all throwing their hat in the ring with various products and acquisitions. But Lockerz has been able to gain a viral following from a subset of users, which is impressive. It should be interesting to see if the startup can continue its ascent.

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sFund-Backed Lockerz Wants To Be A Social Commerce Destination For…

About a month ago, we noted that LeWeb would be getting a bit more TechCrunch flavor this year. For the seventh iteration of the popular tech conference based in Paris, France, organizers Geraldine and Loic Le Meur decided to make their startup competition a bit more like a mini-TechCrunch Disrupt. That is, of the 16 startups launching, 3 will get time on the big stage to present in front of everyone and a winner will be chosen. And that won’t be the only TechCrunch influence felt.

As you can see on the just-released program for LeWeb ’10, TechCrunch names are all over the agenda. A group of us are slated to interview some of the big names in tech on stage during the two-day conference, which takes place on December 8 and 9 this year. And there seem to be a range of other interesting talks and panels as well.

A taste of the highlights:

• Leaders from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Mozilla, Foursquare, WordPress, EA, MySpace, UStream, Evernote, Microsoft, PayPal, Nokia, RIM, and more on stage.
• You can learn about how to get your company acquired (with people from Microsoft and Twitter).
• You can learn about how to create a top mobile game (with the CEO behind the company responsible for Angry Birds).
• You can hear about innovation in other parts of the world, such as Japan (with the CEO of DeNA).
• You can hear about where the media is heading (with people from CNN and Techmeme).
• A partner at DST will talk about investing hundreds of millions in Zynga and Facebook.
• You can learn about the building of a solar pane plane.
• Howard Lindzon, Gary Vaynerchuk, Leo Laporte, Dave McClure, Yossi Vardi, Dave Morin, and more will all be on hand for talks.

And, of course, the Disrupt-like startup competition finals with be hosted by our own Michael Arrington and August Capital partner David Hornik.

For a longer intro, be sure to check out Loic and Geraldine’s full rundown in the video below. And if you’re interested in attending, use this link for a 200 euro discount for TechCrunch readers. Hopefully we’ll see some of you in Paris in a few weeks.

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LeWeb ’10 Program Revealed — With A Whole Lot Of TechCrunch

In conjunction with the company’s developer conference, PayPal announced a slew of news and product releases this week, including a new micropayments product and an apps platform for businesses. But tucked away in a release was another piece of news from PayPal that could be huge. PayPal just released a new version of its popular iPhone app that allows users to find businesses near their immediate location that accept PayPal as a form of payment. Launching in San Francisco initially, the feature encourages merchants to attract nearby customers to their stores by posting deals and promotions to the app as an incentive for customers to visit their businesses.

Customers can search by category and location, and find and select stores, services, or special offers. Users can pick up the goods or services in person, but pay the merchant using their PayPal app. Users can also use tags from Bling Nation, a startup that has partnered with PayPal to use the startup’s mobile payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

One of the big selling points around using PayPal for merchants is the ability to offer deals as an incentive to drive buyers to a store or restaurant. Whether it be Groupon-like daily deals or just ordinary coupons, there’s no doubt that deals do help drive online to offline sales.

PayPal President Scott Thompson tells TechCrunch (see video below) that eventually this local feature will have “ubiquity,” meaning you’ll be able to access these merchant listings and pay with PayPal wherever you are in the world. Local is one of the key parts of PayPal’s future strategy, says Thompson. He’s confident that has the world becomes more connected, eventually all local merchants will accept PayPal as a payments option for in-store purchases.

For PayPal, local payments certainly makes sense. Online to offline sales is a big part of local commerce, and if PayPal can become a payments mechanism in the local market, it could be pay off in revenue for the company.

One competitor worth noting in the local payments space is Google Checkout. While Google Checkout doesn’t have as extensive of a reach as PayPal, Google Checkout has an ace in the hole when it comes to Google Places. Google Places allows local businesses to claim and edit a page, post realtime updates (eg, “happy hour tonight”), post reviews, create a custom QR code, and even offer coupons. And Google indexes and highlights these pages in search results, most recently launching a more integrated placement of Places page within Google search.

Google could easily turn on a transaction (such as a daily deal) for these merchants, and use Google
Checkout as the payments mechanism. The same experience could extend to mobile phones.

The advantage Google has over PayPal is that with Places, these relationships with local merchants are already built into the search giants business. At last count a few months ago, Google had Places pages in place for over 4 million businesses but I’m sure this number is higher. PayPal on the other hand will have to forge new relationships with all these local businesses to get them on board with their payments platform. Not only do they have to find the businesses, but PayPal has to teach them how to use their mobile apps as a payment mechanism. Scaling PayPal’s local feature will be a huge endeavor for the company, which is why PayPal is testing the feature out in a limited market in the San Francisco.

This why it makes sense for PayPal to form partnerships on its local endeavor. Google is an unlikely partner considering that the company already has its own payments platform. Facebook Places could be a potential partner (PayPal is already a micropayments partner for the social network’s virtual currency platform Credits). Facebook is rumored to be turning on a deals feature for Places and PayPal could be a way to process these payments. And Groupon is rumored to be brokering a payments deal with PayPal as well.

So while Google Checkout still doesn’t have the sort of users numbers that PayPal does in the payments area, Google has much more in the war chest in terms of local. With local up for grabs, the battle between the two payments platform just got a whole lot more interesting.

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PayPal Beats Google Checkout To The Local Payments Market But Will It…

Causes, the startup that helps users leverage Facebook and other social sites to raise money for charity, has closed a $9 million Series C funding round led by NEA with participation from Founders Fund, Marc Benioff, Dustin Moskovitz, Ron Conway, Keith Rabois, and Karl Jacob. Scott Sandell of NEA will join as an observer on the Causes board. Causes CEO Joe Green says that the company will be using the money to build out its team, including some senior hires (the company is currently seventeen people). Causes will also be moving from Berkeley, CA to San Francisco.

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice.  Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

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Causes Raises Another $9 Million To Help Spread Philanthropy Online

We’ve all had a pretty long week dealing with all this, for lack of a better term, AngelGate stuff. For the people involved, me included, it hasn’t been much fun.

Mostly because angel investors as a group do so much for our community. They are the the grease that let so many young startups go from being an idea to something more. The fact that some of them may or may not have had discussions that may or may not have been inappropriate is, in the end, a sidenote. In fact, the only reason the discussion is interesting is because of how important angel investors have become to the startup ecosystem.

I’ve listened to impassioned pleas from both sides of the argument. I’ve also listened to a few rants that were less than pleasant to listen to. The story is probably not over and there are more private emails that some are lobbying to get posted.

But one thing I’m not going to let happen is this – AngelGate won’t take over the TechCrunch Disrupt agenda. Yes there is a panel on Monday morning that includes two of the major figures in the story – Ron Conway and Dave McClure.

I’m reaching out to both Conway and McClure and asking that the discussion stay on the rails and I’m pretty sure they’ll both think that’s just fine.

We may touch on the issue but for the most part the half hour conversation will be about much more interesting issues. I had a chance, for example, to talk with Sequoia’s Roelof Botha today about the panel and what he thinks we should discuss. He wants to talk about how venture capitalists and angel investors can help entrepreneurs succeed. And I think that’s a grande idea.

In the end TechCrunch disrupt begins and ends with the entrepreneur. We have twenty five absolutely amazing startups launching at the event, and announcements from tons more. You can even meet the guys that turned an idea at the HackDay at the New York Disrupt into a full fledged, funded startup.

Now that sounds like fun to me.

See you all on Monday.

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TechCrunch Disrupt Will Not Be About AngelGate

Online learning site Grockit is scaling up its leadership team after raising $7 million last May. Today it is announcing that it is hiring Roy Gilbert as CEO. Gilbert is Google’s director of user operations and policy, in charge of many non-advertising operations. He helped set up Google’s India operations and grew it from 20 people to 1,000, and was the first business manager for Gmail.

Founder Farb Nivi recruited Gilbert, who will also be taking a board seat. Nivi will be president, chief product officer, and chairman. “I kind of look at him as our Eric Schmidt,” says Nivi, who came back getting hit by a minivan last year to keep his startup going and growing.

Gilbert served in the military driving nuclear submarines, and yes, he was a boy scout. But he also comes from a family of teachers, and he and his wife started a school in Hyderabad while he was in India for underprivileged children called the Rainbow Primary School. So he has education chops as well. “I pretty much can’t believe we landed him,” says Nivi.

Nivi also recently hired a chief marketing officer, Chris Strausser, who created the Jamba Juice brand, and previously worked at PepsiCo and Kaplan. Knewton, another online education startup, also recently made a top executive hire. The whole education space is definitely heating up.

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Grockit Hires A Badass Boy Scout From Google As CEO

Finding parking in near concerts or sports events can be an incredibly frustrating task. Because of the event, the cost to park in lots near the stadium or venue can be exorbitant. Plus, lots can fill up fast. Enter ParkWhiz, a Chicago-based startup that allows customers to reserve parking on the fly.

Via a web app and a newly launched mobile HTML5 website, ParkWhiz allows you to reserve parking near concert and event venues in the U.S. ParkWhiz partners with parking lot owners, which range from people who own a single space to large parking management companies, across the country to list their inventory on ParkWhiz.

So far, ParkWhiz has partnered with 300 participating parking locations in over 25 cities in the U.S. Currently, ParkWhiz currently offers parking reservations near Fenway Park, Wrigley Field, AT&T Park, Cowboys Stadium, Madison Square Garden, Busch Stadium, US Cellular Field, Orpheum Theatre, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Beacon Theater, plus 17 airports around the country.

For example, ParkWhiz just helped park over 400 cars (who paid on average of $40 per parking spot) for the Paul McCartney concert at AT&T Park last week in San Francisco. ParkWhiz’s CEO and co-founder Aashish Dalal says the startup has also started to serve coupons for restaurants and bars (in neighborhoods nearby the event space) with parking reservations.

In terms of pricing, there is no fee to list a parking space on the site; ParkWhiz collects a fee only if a reservation is made and handles payment processing for the parking vendors. Generally, the user has to pay 10 percent customer convenience fee to ParkWhiz in addition to parking price, and ParkWhiz will also take a 15 percent cut from the base rate from the parking vendors. In a year, the site has already taken 50,000 reservations, with the goal of hittig 100,000 resetvations by the end of the year.

Of course, ParkWhiz isn’t the first company to use technology to try to solve the problem of finding parking. Car Harbor allows you to rent your parking space, and there are a number of iPhone apps to aim to solve the same problem including Spotswitch and Primospot. Even Google is getting into the parking game, recently launching Open Spot, an Android app that shows you a map with nearby open parking spots marked with colored dots.

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ParkWhiz Is The OpenTable For Parking Spots

Delivering news digitally in a personalized manner is a nut many a startup – as well as many established Internet companies and publishers – are desperately trying to crack.

A newly-founded Palo Alto startup called Hawthorne Labs is one of them.

Today, the company released their first application, dubbed APOLLO, for the iPad (iTunes link – screenshots and video below). Their lofty ambition is to become the number one daily destination of top personalized news content from around the Web, build a genuine Newspaper of the Future™, and thus “deliver the final blow to the newspaper industry”.

Apollo is quite similar to Pandora in that it uses an algorithm (using factors such as time spent on articles, sources favorited, articles liked/not-liked as well as social elements like Twitter and Facebook mentions and similar peoples’ tastes etc.) to help users discover the best content for them in a variety of categories (Top News, Business, Tech, Sports and so on).

The app crawls thousands of the top blogs and news sources on the Web within said categories, ranks them, and clusters related articles together.

The user interface reminds me a lot of Pulse, another great news consumption app for the iPad. Hawthorne Labs plans to expand Apollo to the iPhone, the Android platform and in the form of a general Web application at a later stage.

The iPad app is priced $4.99, but will be $2.99 until Monday July 19. The first 100 TechCrunch readers to retweet this article and add the hashtag #freeapollo (ha ha, retweet bots!) are getting a promotion code for the app on iTunes.

World domination plans aside, the startup does seem to have a great team with relevant experience on their hands.

The three Hawthorne Labs co-founders are Evan Reas, a self-declared ‘Stanford MBA turned Bizhacker’ and former Google News and Bing engineers Shubham Mittal (the top ranked student at IIT-Delhi and a Gold Medalist at the International Physics Olympiad) and Prasanna Sankaranarayanan (who was a Google World Code Jam finalist, twice, and has far too many ‘a’s in his name to be healthy).

Fun factoid: these guys built the app before the iPad was even released, and as soon the tablet computer hit the market they tried to provision iPads in stores to test the early versions, only to get yelled at a lot. How’s that for some bootstrappin’ persistence?

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Ex-Google News, Bing Engineers Set Out To Build ‘Newspaper Of The…

Mobile applications discovery and sharing service provider Appsfire has just launched a new product called AppTrends, which essentially delivers near real-time rankings of iPhone apps based on the chatter on Twitter.

Rankings – currently limited to the top 20 apps on the website – are based on what Appsfire determines are noteworthy items in the App Store virtually in real-time. Appsfire crawls Twitter for links to iPhone apps, regardless of whether the iTunes URLs are shortened or not, and determines which apps are hot and which are not based on their popularity on the micro-sharing service.

To do so, Appsfire looks at the number of mentions of applications, all while filtering out bots, repeat tweets from the same users, updates from seemingly fake accounts and activity tweets such as leaderboard or points sharing. In addition, the startup looks at the influence of users talking about certain iPhone apps (based on Klout) to keep its rankings as relevant, clean and trustworthy as possible.

The company tells us it’s capable of also determining sentiment through automated analysis, but intentionally does not use that data for the rankings because it claims the large majority of tweets about apps are positive of tone, according to one month’s worth of research.

AppTrends gets updated on an hourly basis, and you can view evolution for the apps in the top list for the past hour, 12 hours or full day.

All in all, for power users this could be very useful, given how the rankings coming from Apple are relatively similar from day to day – with AppTrends users can spot up and coming apps more rapidly and this stay ahead of the curve when it comes to downloading and testing new apps. For non-power users, the added value is less clear.

If you’re an app developer or publisher, you can also use the service to track what’s being said on Twitter about your app – provided you made the top 20 list – in real-time via a sidebar.

Appsfire intends to go from a top 20 to a top 100 list in the near future, and also offer localized rankings per country/store. Also in the works: lists per vertical, access to rankings from the past and notification services for developers.

Coinciding with the launch of the new service, Appsfire has announced that a new investor joined the group of angels backing the company and brought an extension to its seed funding round. The new investor’s name is Lerer Ventures, the New York-based investment firm that has backed startups like (Twitter shareholder) Betaworks, GDGT and just recently, Seeing Interactive.

The icing on the cake: Appsfire has persuaded Jyri Engeström (formerly at Google after selling his startup Jaiku to the Internet giant) to join its board of advisors.

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Appsfire Introduces Live Rankings For iPhone Apps, Scores More Cash

Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account.

Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips.

The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions.

With the deal with PayPal, anyone will be use Bling Nation to link a PayPal account and receive tags that they can then stick to their cell phones. You may also be able to enroll during the checkout process as well. And Bling Nation in turn will equip merchants in given areas with payment devices that work with the chip.

This is a big win for Bling Nation’s system, which originally had ambitions of solely focusing on hyperlocal banks in small communities. The PayPal integration is currently being tested in Palo Alto and is steadily being rolled out nationally. Most of the work involves distributing the payments devices to local merchants.

Enrollment is limited for now, says co-founder Meyer Malka. Consumers can sign up for the service at participating merchants and eventually through the web. The deal also represents a way for consumers to start paying for physical goods, not just online purchases, with their PayPal accounts.

Bling Nation recently raised a whopping $20 million in funding to scale its system. Armed with a deal with PayPal, the startup is well on its way to making it into stores nationwide.

And PayPal is one step closer to fulfilling its futuristic vision for the payments platform, as shown in this video.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Bling Nation Adds A Paypal Option To Cell Phone Payments

Yoono, a nifty browser plug-in and desktop application that serves as both a social network aggregator and media hub, is upgrading its offering today with YouTube integration, additional language support, and further Twitter functionality. Yoono aggregates and centralizes your online profiles, including IM tools like Windows Live Messenger, Google Talk and AIM as well as a wide variety of social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, and more. The app also includes real-time search capabilities powered by OneRiot.

The new YouTube integration allows you to see all of your YouTube updates (new videos, comments) in your stream; access your Channels (subscriptions, playlists, favorites, uploads); search YouTube videos; playlists and channels directly from Yoono; and share, favorite, comment on and even download videos directly from either the plugin or desktop application. And Yoono now allows you to favorite tweets and reply all from the application.

Via a crowdsourced translation project, Yoono now has versions in Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish and Polish in addition to English and French. Yoono says that 22 additional languages are actively being worked on by the community.

Yoono, which has seen 4.5 million downloads, has also launched an alpha version of Yoono for Google Chrome, and is expecting the beta version of the browser plugin to hit the Chrome extensions gallery very soon. Given the popularity of Yoono on Firefox (the plugin is the most downloaded social networking add-on for Firefox), the extension should be popular among Chrome users. Yoono says that the next step is entering the mobile market with iPhone, iPad and Android apps in the works. And the startup plans to add more services to its hub, including Google Buzz, Foursquare, and Yammer.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Yoono Nows Plays Nice With YouTube, Chrome Extension On The Way

It’s no secret that mobile, hyperlocal advertising is poised to grow into a massive market in the next few years, spurred by the proliferation of GPS-equipped smartphones. Earlier this week we saw the launch of another competitor called BeThere Deals that’s hoping to crack the nut. The service offers a self-serve platform for local businesses, who can quickly deploy time sensitive deals that are limited in quantity.

While it’s focused primarily on time sensitive, local deals, BeThere Deals isn’t really in the same vein as GroupOn and LivingSocial — it doesn’t have a ‘group buying’ mechanic, and it features many deals in an area, rather than one or two. Instead, it’s more competitive with apps like Yowza!!, Mobile Coupons, and Mobiqpons.

The service is pretty straightforward: you download the free iPhone app, then open it up when you’re in a supported city to find some regional deals. At this point the service is only available in San Francisco, but it will be expanding to Los Angeles and New York City in the near future.

So how is BeThere going to survive when there are already some bigger players in this space? The company says it has a few key differentiators. First, it says that it’s primarily targeting local, independent businesses, rather than chains (they say that one goal is to make the application useful for discovering interesting new mom-and-pop stores and restaurants). Second, the application is exclusively for time-specific deals that are deployed in real-time by merchants — BeThere could be used by a local bakery, for example, that’s looking to sell excess pastries at a discount before the end of the day. The service will make money by charging merchants on a per-conversion basis.

The app still has a ways to go. For one, it badly needs push notifications — right now users have to manually open the app to see new deals, which isn’t much help when some of the deals are only available for a few hours (the startup says the feature is on the way). And the service obviously needs to get traction with users before it will be very appealing to many businesses (it’s the classic chicken-and-egg problem). The app is also going to see plenty of competition. Aside from the services mentioned above, location-based services like Foursquare have already started to enter this space.

One thing to note — the iPhone application currently has a pretty low average rating (though most of the written reviews are positive). The company says this is because users outside of San Francisco are downloading it, only to find that they can’t access any deals.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

BeThere Deals Brings (More) Time-Sensitive, Local Deals To SF

The waiting – as they say – is almost over.

In a few short hours the starting gun will be fired for the very first TechCrunch Disrupt conference. Over 1500 attendees have registered to join us in New York for a three day program of keynotes and panels featuring some of the most disruptive names in technology, plus the startup battlefield where 22 would-be disruptive companies will compete head to head for the Disrupt Cup (and $50k in cash). The buzz on Twitter speaks for itself – #tcdisrupt is the conference that everyone is talking about.

But if you can’t make it to NYC, we have some great news: we’ll be live streaming the entire event right here, beginning at 8:30am Eastern (5:30am Pacific).

But at Disrupt, ‘live streaming’ doesn’t mean we’re just pointing a camera at the stage. Oh no. For a start, there will be three cameras broadcasting all the action from the main stage. But also, during the gaps between sessions, and over the lunch and coffee breaks, our own Evelyn Rusli will be hosting a series of exclusive backstage interviews with judges, speakers, panelists and contest participants. We’ll also be covering all the action from start-up alley and the conference hallways, plus highlights of the after-parties and a few extra surprises that are too awesome to spoil here in advance. Joining Evelyn, expect to see a star-studded line-up of TC writers and editors on screen throughout the day(s).

All in all, that’s nine hours of live and uninterrupted Disruption each day, for three days.

In fact we’re expecting the live stream to be so great that even those lucky enough to be at the conference will still want to watch the coverage back when they get home. Which luckily they will be able to do as every single panel, keynote, start-up battlefield session, backstage interview and awesome surprise will be available to watch again on demand, minutes after each one ends. AND for those of you who aren’t on Eastern Time, we’ll be re-running the best of the conference overnight too.

Of course, all of this impressive programming requires some equally impressive technology. And for that we’re eternally grateful for the support of our broadcast partner, Livestream. Livestream has sent a full crew – plus a ton of technology – to Disrupt to ensure that you don’t miss a moment of the action. We couldn’t have done any of this without them, particularly CEO Max Haot and Head of Production, Otto Cedeno.

Speaking of people we couldn’t have done this without – this seems like a perfect time to give credit to producer Sophia Kittler who will be coordinating over 27 hours of video over the next three days, and also to Evelyn Rusli who will be in the studio for most of that time. Sophia and Evelyn have been working their assess off these past days and weeks, in addition to their day jobs preparing for the imminent launch of TechCrunch TV. I’m nominally the ‘creative director’ – whatever that means – of the on-screen programming, but really it’s Sophia and Evelyn who have done all of the hard work – both creatively and logistically. Kudos to them both.

One final thing: you too can be part of the Disrupt TV action simply by ensuring that you use the hashtage #tcdisrupt when you tweet about the event. We’ll be picking our favourite tweets and scrolling them across the bottom of the screen throughout the conference. We’ll do our best to read some of them out on air too.

Ok – that’s all until 8:30am. Stay tuned!

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

TechCrunch Disrupt: The Whole Event (And More) Streaming Live On TC

Online video streaming is great. But when it comes to zoning out in front of a flashing screen to kill a few hours, TV has it beat by a long shot — building an interesting playlist of YouTube videos simply requires too much effort. Nowmov, a Y Combinator startup that’s launching today, is looking to change that: visit the site, and you’ll find an endless stream of (hopefully) compelling YouTube clips — no brainpower required. The site has already built up an impressive roster of angel investors, including Jeff Clavier, Paul Buchheit, Shervin Pishevar, Ron Conway, Charles River Ventures, and Ashton Kutcher.

Nowmov’s site is very, very simple, at least from the user’s perspective. As soon as you browse to Nowmov.com, the site will begin playing a YouTube video. Move your mouse and you’ll see a basic set of controls that let you pause the video, jump to the next clip, and share the video you’re watching with friends (the site supports keyboard commands, so you can just tap your arrow keys to jump between clips). But for the most part, you shouldn’t really need these controls — the whole point of Nowmov is that you can lay back as if you were watching TV, without having to figure out what you want to watch next. Nowmov uses some trickery on the frontend to reduce loading times, so even when you do decide to skip to the next clip there isn’t a jarring pause.

Nowmov decides which videos to play by analyzing the Twitter public timeline and looking for commonly shared YouTube links (in the future, the site plans to use other sources to gauge popularity, and will also draw video from sites other than YouTube). For now the site isn’t doing any personalized recommendations — it constantly updates its playlist and uses cookies to ensure that you don’t see the same clip twice, but there isn’t an algorithm that learns which videos you like. That will change in a future version, when the site plans to produce personalized channels of content (think of it as a Pandora for videos).

The team has quite a bit of experience with video.  Two of the company’s co-founders  — Thomas Pun and James Black — were longtime Apple engineers working on video encoding and processing; the third, David Kelso, was a technical founder at two startups before this.

There’s definitely a need for this, but Nowmov isn’t the first startup that’s trying to solve it. ffwd has also tried to turn Internet video into a channel-surfing experience, and Magma is focused on video curation, though it isn’t really a  ’lean-back’ site. And YouTube is always trying to bolster its own recommendation algorithms to keep people watching.

Interesting sidenote: Ashton Kutcher is actually directly responsible for this site existing; the Nowmov guys were considering working on another idea until Kutcher told Y Combinator founders Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston that he wanted something like this. Kutcher decided to invest in and advise the startup, and Nowmov became a reality.

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YC-Funded Nowmov: Sit Back, Relax, And Watch An Endless Stream Of…

Popular podcasting site BlogTalkRadio has raised $1.9 million according to an SEC filing. We’ve confirmed the funding with the startup. BlogTalkRadio, which was founded in 2006 and allows anyone can set up a podcast or “radio talkshow” over the web using phone calls, had previously raised $4.6 million in Series A funding in 2008 led by the Kraft Group.

BlogTalkRadio’s unique platform allows individuals and companies to use a phone to conduct a live broadcast via the web. Participants dial a phone number, enter the broadcast and then the entire conversation is streamed on air live through the BlogTalkRadio Web site. The site also archives all radio shows as podcasts, so they can easily be uploaded to iTunes and then shared on other blogs, sites etc. BlogTalkRadio’s founder and CEO, Alan Levy says the site’s shows see an average of 4.5 million listens/downloads per month.

BlogTalkRadio also has content partnerships with PBS, Women’s Day Magazine, Wal-Mart, Harper Collins, and Sun Microsystems

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BlogTalkRadio Raises $1.9 Million

Under the radar startup NorthScale is publicly launching today with a new data management technology to help web-based companies, particularly startups that deal with large amounts of transactional data. For example, social gaming giant Zynga has been using NorthScale since December.

Founded by leaders of the memcached open source project, NorthScale is like Cloudera for Hadoop or Red Hat for Linux; the startup is commercializing the open source technology. As web applications generate vast volumes of data, there is a need for a data management technology that caters towards transactional software systems. NorthScale’s elastic data infrastructure software promises to cache frequently used data while also offering performance and scalability.

The NorthScale Memcached Server is the also includes the ability to securely support multiple applications on a shared cluster, and allows a memcached cluster to dynamically change with automatic client updates. The NorthScale Membase Server is a high‐performance, distributed key‐value database which builds on the NorthScale Memcached Server foundation and is directly compatible with memcached APIs and client libraries.

Currently Zynga and NHN are using NorthScale as a foundations for shared data management infrastructure. Founded in 2009, the startup has raised $5 million in Series A funding from Accel Partners and North Bridge Venture Partners.

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NorthScale’s Data Management Technology Attracts Zynga And Others

Aurora Feint started out as a puzzle game developer for the iPhone platform but has since evolved into the maker of a comprehensive social gaming platform dubbed OpenFeint that continues to attract independent iPhone game developers to join its rapidly growing community. Today, the startup is launching the private beta of OpenFeint X, which offers indie developers the ability to create Zynga-like free-to-play games including microtransactions and virtual goods.

With the success of Zynga and PlayFish on Facebook, Aurora Feint wants to help create more of these types of free-to-play games on the iPhone. Launched with Japanese investment partner and mobile gaming company DeNa Group, OpenFeint X will be rolled out to the general public in phases over the next few months. With the international investment in the project, we can assume that OpenFeint X is designed to develop games that appeal to global markets as well.

Using the new platform, developers can create games with a chat wall where players can interact with each other, a newsfeed showing recent in-game activity, and game nudges. And OpenFeint X’s premium services allows developers to use a cloud-based infrastructure to build and run a full virtual goods store, access detailed analytics, and include game-specific currency wallet.

The existing OpenFeint platform is quite popular amongst developers and already powers social gaming services for 12 million users and is growing at a monthly pace of 25 percent. The strategy of trying to develop Facebook-like free-to-play games through Open Feint isn’t surprising. Peter Relan, executive chairman of Aurora Feint, also happens to be the executive chairman of CrowdStar, a social game developer on Facebook, which makes develops Happy Aquarium, Happy Island and Happy Pets.

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OpenFeint X Debuts To Help Developers Create The Next FarmVille For…

Kiva is p2p-lending site that facilitates loans between lenders in wealthy countries and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Now a new startup aims to bring a simialr model to startups in the developed world but with an investment focus. The idea here is to fix the current inefficiencies of private seed funding for web and mobile companies, especially in markets outside of the hothouse that is Silicon Valley (i.e. Europe and Asia).

Grow VC is a new community funding model for technology startups. Here’s how it works: Grow VC will pool 75 per cent of membership fees into a community fund that gets invested back into ‘promising startups’ which are members of the platform. The fund is managed by Grow VC but all the investment decisions are left to members who determine how to invest their portion of the fund into other startup companies that they feel have the most potential. The most successful decision makers get financially rewarded when the community fund begins earning a return on investment. So, if you promote the best companies you make moola.

Joining Grow VC, and the basic features such as building a person profile, are free. Premium features come with subscriptions ranging from $20 to $140 per month, depending on how much money the startup company is seeking or how much the investor is looking to invest. For unlimited service investments, the monthly subscription fee is $90 per month. The fund is aimed at startups that need $10,000 to $1 million USD.

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Grow VC Aims To Be The Kiva For Tech Startups

Yammer, the San Francisco startup that offers a solid enterprise-grade microsharing and realtime communications service, is expanding its executive team after successfully closing a Series B funding round to the tune of $10 million earlier this month.

The company made one internal promotion, appointing co-founder and VP of Technology Adam Pisoni to CTO. In addition, Yammer recruited David Satterwhite to lead its sales efforts, while Steve Apfelberg was brought in as VP of Marketing.

Before working at Yammer, Adam Pisoni served in senior engineering roles at Geni and Shopzilla and co-founded and was CTO at Cnation. The company says Pisoni played an instrumental role in building Yammer’s communication platform from the ground up, adding that is now in use by over 60,000 companies and organizations (including TechCrunch).

David Satterwhite, who recently joined as executive vice president of sales, began his career in sales at Oracle and then held multiple roles at Clarify. Satterwhite went on to lead worldwide sales at NightFire Software, @Road, and newScale, before making the jump to Yammer earlier this year.

Finally, Steve Apfelberg served as the senior vice president of marketing and business development at Callidus Software before joining Yammer as VP of Marketing in October 2009. Prior to Callidus, he held senior roles at Siebel, Remedy, and Oracle. He’ll be working with Jon Grall, who recently joined Yammer as Senior Manager of Product Marketing after a brief stint as Product Lead at Dropbox.

Yammer has seen solid growth since winning the 2008 edition of our TechCrunch50 Conference, and with close to $15 million in venture capital and a slew seasoned SaaS executives at the helm, the startup is well-positioned to sign up more customers and grow to profitability in the next year or two. We’ll be monitoring them closely along the way, and not just when they go down.

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Flush With $10 Million In Fresh Cash, Yammer Strengthens Executive…

Ah, the college library photo. Look through any school’s brochure, and there’s a good chance you’ll see photos of an ethnically diverse group of students pouring over the same math problem together, all of of them inexplicably grinning ear to ear. It’s a nice thought, but unfortunately it doesn’t happen all that often — instead, many students wind up studying alone, and when they can’t figure something out, they’re out of luck. Now, entrepreneur Pooja Nath is looking to turn this kind of group learning into a reality for more students (at least online) with her startup Piazzza.

Piazzza is still in a private beta and has quite a ways to go before public launch, but we got a sneak peek at its current progress. The site is designed to help classmates share their questions and answers in a format that’s a bit like a mixture between a wiki and a forum. Each class gets its own hub for Q&A, and students can bookmark any questions if they’re also eager to find out the answer. Multiple students can contribute to each answer in a wiki style but there’s a version history that shows what each student wrote.

Students are free to independently create Piazzza hubs for their classes, but I suspect the site will get more traction if it gets professors to sign up. When a professor joins Piazzza, their answers are separated from the students’ to make them easier to find. And professors can also look to see which questions have been bookmarked by the most students to gauge which topics they should explain better in class. So far Piazzza has opened to around 600 students across 9 classes, and plans to open to around 50 classes in a few months. Initial response from professors has been quite positive. And I liked what I saw from the service, though I think it needs to build out some technology that would make it harder to reproduce. I also think that Piazzza will really need to get a large number of professors using the service, which will be difficult.

Nath says that Piazzza was inspired by her own personal experience. As a student studying computer science at India’s prestigious IIT Kanpur, she found herself to be one of only three female students in a class of fifty. She says she was a bit shy and never really got to know many of her classmates, so when it came time to study, she didn’t get to bounce ideas off her peers. After working at Oracle, Kosmix, and Facebook, she’s now a Stanford MBA student.

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Piazzza Gives Classmates An Online Forum To Trade Their Knowledge

Last fall, TechCrunch50 startup ClientShow presented its innovative application to help creative, advertising and marketing professionals show, pitch, share and sell their work to clients more effectively through real-time collaboration and communication. Similar to a WebEx for creative professionals, ClientShow allows users to essentially create a “virtual agency” to collaborate and share ideas with clients. This week, the startup is debuting its platform in private beta. We have 1000 invites for Techcrunch readers here.

The application, which is built on Adobe Air, includes a dashboard which lets the agency view client lists, projects and pitch sessions at a single glance. The dashboard acts as an organizational launching pad, where you can see attached notes and images about upcoming pitches and a schedule of sessions. The second feature is a “work” section which actually lets you set up and prepare for the sessions. You can drag and drop your files into the application, where you can view the projects.

To engage in a virtual “pitch,”clients are given a link that lets them view the session in their browser. While the users who are pitching the idea are using an Adobe Air application, the client will see the actual pitch within their browser. Here’s where ClientShow brings in the collaboration angle: as you are pitching an idea, decision makers on a client team can approve (or dismiss) different ideas and files and give feedback automatically by adding notes and comments to the pitch that are updated in realtime.

After a pitch has ended, users will want to look back on clients’ comments and feedback, which is where the fourth part of ClientShow’s software comes in. The “vault” captures and stores all interactive feedback from sessions. You can also see session reports”in the vault that shows you every file that was documented in the presentation in the order they were presented.

The entire application is free, but ClientShow will be monetizing by offering a paid version that includes additional premium features. The startup has raised $750,000 in funding so far from undisclosed angel investors and will be launching the application to the public in the next two months.

Of course, my one complaint about the application is that it is built off of Adobe Air which is buggy and has other problematic issues. However, the realtime collaboration functionality of the application is compelling. The ability to create threaded discussions around a pitch and collaborate easily is sure to be useful to the creative industries.

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ClientShow Debuts Realtime Collaboration App For Creative Pitches

Beyond the Rack, a private sample sale site, has raised $2 million in funding from Oleg Tscheltzoff and Oliver Jung, and Montreal Start Up. This brings the startup’s total funding to $4.5 million.

Similar to Gilt, HauteLook and Ideeli, Beyond the Rack is a members-only shopping site that offers steeply discounted (from 50 to 70 percent) on designer brand clothes, accessories and other goods. The site says that it is seeing 4 million monthly unique visitors, with revenue has growing over 50 percent per month. And Beyond the Rack has 600,000 members after only 9 months of operation.

The site launches up to eight new sales events every day, with each event only lasting a few days. The model has done fairly well in the space, with similar sites seeing rapid growth. There’s the rumored acquisition of European sample sale site Vente-Privee by Amazon for an estimated $3.01 billion. And sample sale site Ideeli recently raised $20 million in funding.

Gilt Groupe also raised an estimated $40 million in funding in July, which valued the company at $400 million. VC firm Kleiner Perkins recently invested in One Kings Lane, an online sample sale site for home decor and accessories, which we wrote about here. The concept has even attracted retail giants like Saks and Neiman Marcus, which are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer their own private sales.

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Private Sample Sale Site Beyond The Rack Raises $2 Million

At last year’s TechCrunch50 conference, Socialwok made a big splash, winning the award for best demopit startup and launching its enterprise-friendly, FriendFeed-like layer for Google Apps. The web-based application was praised for launching a social network that wrapped around the very unsocial Google Apps. Today, the startup is launching a gadget to allow users access all the features of Socialwok without leaving Gmail.

Previously, you could access Gmail, YouTube, Google Calendar and even conversations in Wave from Socialwok’s Friendfeed-like interface. You can even sign in with your Google Docs credentials. But with the new gadget, Socialwok’s interface will appear within Gmail’s main canvas. Users can view, post and comment on updates; access feeds, files and Google Docs and search for posts, people, feeds, and files.

Socialwok, which employs a freemium model, has steadily been adding features and improvements to its application, including releasing a new version of its HTML 5 mobile version for Android and iPhone browsers. And the startup has managed caught Google’s eye. Socialwok was chosen as one of the showcase companies for AppEngine technology at this year’s Google IO Developer Sandbox (Socialwok is powered by Google App Engine). And the startup wroteGoogle Docs killer which was acquired by the search giant last year.

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Adding A Social Layer To Gmail Just Became A SocialWok In The Park

As the way consumers read books evolves, there is an opportunity for mobile technologies to connect consumers with their favorite reads. Mobile Roadie, a startup that helps develops iPhone apps, is collaborating with one of the most foremost publishers, Random House, to launch iPhone apps for authors.

The Random House group will launch free individual iPhone applications, powered by Mobile Roadie, for three of its bestselling authors—Steve Berry, Sophie Kinsella, and Karen Marie Monin. With this new application, fans will be able to preview books, access bonus content, interact with other fans, check upcoming author appearances, listen to audiobook clips, watch author videos and book trailers, and more.

Mobile Roadie also developed the official iPhone app for LeWeb, the foremost European technology conference organized by French entrepreneur and Seesmic founder, Loic Le Meur and his wife, Geraldine. The app was a huge hit at the conference.

Mobile Roadie only offers iPhone apps but will soon offer the ability to develop apps for the Andoid in January. The beauty of Mobile Roadie’s platform is that it offers a dead simple mostly-automated system to build apps and have them posted to Apple’s App Store in as little as a week. Launched earlier this year, the startup develops mobile apps for other conferences, events, and venues, as well as musicians, athletes, politicians, and other celebrities.

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Mobile Roadie And Random House Partner To Launch iPhone Apps For…

There’s been a bit of controversy around Ad.ly, which aims link up high-profile advertisers with celebrities on Twitter and then distribute links to marketing campaigns through the Twitter user’s tweet streams with full disclosure. Launched this fall, the startup has created an interesting way to use the viral nature of Twitter and celebrity reach to develop an advertising model.

Today, Ad.ly has launched analytics for its platform, letting marketers and Twitterati measure the impact of their advertisements and Tweets. Some of the analytics that Ad.ly can now provide to advertisers include user engagement, male and female segmentation, location, and sentiment analysis. Ad.ly has partnered with PeopleBrowsr, a startup that data mines Twitter, to provide the data to users. Ad.ly’s founder Sean Rad says the reasoning behind the new feature “provide Twitter users the data they need to become more prolific content creators.”

Here’s how Ad.ly works: Ad.ly’s platform is self-serve for both the Twitter users and the advertisers. So for example, an advertiser for Dell could choose which Twitter power-user to pitch their ad too and then submit a bid to a particular user. The celeb (or publisher) then approves or denies the request. Once the publisher approves the Tweet, the message is sent out via their account by Ad.ly. Each campaign requires the celeb to send out four Tweets over the course of a week. It’s important to note that each Tweet identifies Ad.ly and links to an online interactive campaign for a brand. Celebs are paid handsomely and advertisers get their reach.

Many have doubted Ad.ly’s model because advertisements within a stream could distort a celeb’s authority. The idea that celebs (and advertisers) would be monetizing their followers is questionable and has raised some interesting discussions.

Of course, Ad.ly is just one of several ways that Twitter can be used for advertising. Robert Scoble presented us with a compelling model for advertising on Twitter, called a Super Tweet. We know Twitter is going to be incorporating advertising of its own soon, but we don’t know what this will look like yet.

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Ad.ly Launches Analytics For Sponsored Tweets

About 24 hours ago news broke that Microsoft China appeared to rip off both the look and feel as well as much of the code of a microblogging service called Plurk. Last night they issued a statement saying they took the Juku site down, and suggested an outside contractor was to blame.

Today they issued a final statement on the matter. This boils down to “it wasn’t us, it was our vendor.” But they do take responsibility, and apologize to Plurk. The apology is nice but largely unnecessary. As we said yesterday, this is the best thing to ever happen to the startup.

Microsoft’s statement:

On Monday, December 14, questions arose over a beta application called Juku developed by a Chinese vendor for our MSN China joint venture. We immediately worked with our MSN China joint venture to investigate the situation.

The vendor has now acknowledged that a portion of the code they provided was indeed copied. This was in clear violation of the vendor’s contract with the MSN China joint venture, and equally inconsistent with Microsoft’s policies respecting intellectual property.

When we hire an outside company to do development work, our practice is to include strong language in our contract that clearly states the company must provide work that does not infringe the intellectual property rights of others. We are a company that respects intellectual property and it was never our intent to have a site that was not respectful of the work that others in the industry have done.

We will be suspending access to the Juku beta indefinitely.

We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

In the wake of this incident, Microsoft and our MSN China joint venture will be taking a look at our practices around applications code provided by third-party vendors.

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Microsoft Gives Final Answer On Plurk Disaster: It Wasn’t Us

Nine months ago we wrote about Taxi Magic, a nifty service that hooks directly into local dispatch systems to let you book cabs from your smart phone. Since then the startup has been doing quite well — it now supports the iPhone, Blackberry, and SMS booking. It’s also grown from supporting 25 fully supported cities to 40. And tonight it’s launching a new feature that exposes it to an even broader audience: a web portal at TaxiMagic.com

The site features a directory for each of the service’s supported taxi providers, with some cities (like San Francisco and Washington, DC) offering multiple options. Once you’ve picked a taxi service, you enter an address and pickup time. At this point you can’t pay for the taxi online, but you can pay from your smartphone or via SMS using through TaxiMagic if you’d rather not deal with cash or hand over your credit card (the service charges a $1.50 fee for this).

Aside from the new website, TaxiMagic has made quite a few changes since we last covered them. As mentioned above, you can now pay for taxis using your TaxiMagic account that’s been linked to a credit card (before you could only book cabs and would have to pay the old fashioned way). And the service now offers support for SMS, which means you can shoot a text from bascially any phone to TaxiMagic with your current address to request a pickup. TaxiMagic will respond with a text message indicating the cab drive’s name and distance.

Finally, the service’s iPhone application has seen quite a few upgrades, including the ability to actually see where your cab currently is as it drives to pick you up.

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TaxiMagic Launches Web Portal For Online Taxi Booking

Europe has no real equivalent to the big hothouse that is Silicon Valley, but it does have lots of tech clusters and networks. As recent research from the startup Seedcamp startup programme has shown, clusters of innovation are spread far and wide across Europe. One place everyone agrees is a key cluster is London. It now hosts offices belonging to all the top-tier pan-European VCs, several new Seed funds, has an active Angel investor market and hosts many major tech events. However, largely because of its cost – everything is still expensive here – London remains hard for European startups to access and get into, even in a recession. And although European and US entrepreneurs often need to take meetings and work in London, who wants to sign a huge office lease?

TechHub (@TechHub on Twitter) is new project put together by long-time London tech scene person Elizabeth Varley which will address just this issue. It will be a new, physical space for tech people, providing the things they really like: Super-fast Wifi, power for laptops, coffee and flexible, plentiful desk space. What’s really game-changing though is that – as I understand it – it will very, very affordable, which is exactly the problem that needs to be solved in London if the rest of Europe is to benefit.

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There’s No Silicon Valley In Europe — But TechHub Might Help

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg. It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business. The timing is perfect, there is more than a little overlap with Vivek Wadhwa’s guest post on venture capital earlier today. We’ll update this post with links to his further installments.

I was one of those kids who just couldn’t stop trying to start a company. I think I just really feared working for the Man. Problem was, I seemed to suck at the whole startup thing. Multiple attempts followed by multiple failures. At some point I just said, “screw it, I’ll get a high paying job.” Problem was, I couldn’t stop thinking of the next great thing that got me ridiculously excited. Turns out, it wasn’t so much that I was the problem. Rather, I didn’t have anyone around me familiar enough with startups to tell me that I was doing it all wrong.

This is the first post in what’s going to be a series of blogs on how to go from nothing – no connections, no team, no money and no knowledge of how the startup industry really works – to operating a growing business. I mentioned to Mike that I was going to kick this series off over on the Meebo Blog, but he suggested I start it here. Gladly! So for this first post, here’s the best advice I can give you: join an awesome founding team and get your product out the door ASAP. Then, forget everything else, VCs included, and just build.

One of the things I do as a founder of a later stage startup is to meet with early stage entrepreneurs to help them get their companies going. Nine times out of ten, the meeting ends with them asking me for introductions to VCs. Little do they know that, even if they could raise VC, it’d start them down the wrong path. So, this is what I tell them:

At the exact moment you had your idea, ten other people had the exact same idea. There was just something in the environment that made it the right time for folks to think that one up. The race has already begun! Who’s going to execute first? Who’s going to execute best? If you want to waste nine months trying to raise VC money for that idea, great. But six months in, you’re gonna cry when you see someone else put out that same product you’re pitching me right now. Like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. Now.

Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I don’t know any developers. I need money for the servers. I want to get that last promotion at my current company first!

Here’s the rub: in consumer internet (and often enterprise), if your founding team doesn’t have the chops to get a prototype of your product out and in the hands of a blogger to test and write about, you might as well save yourself a lot of pain – you’re not going anywhere. Need proof? Just look at some of the most successful tech companies in the last decade: eBay, YouTube, Sun, Oracle, Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Google. All of them share a couple common traits: they launched before taking outside investment, and they were able to do it because they had a set of founders with the skills to build the initial version of the product themselves. Only eBay was founded by a single individual – the rest were team efforts.

With that background, let’s get to the three most important things you can do to go from nothing to a kicking startup.

First and foremost, find a great founding team. One person is almost never enough. You just can’t do it all. Rather, team up with one or two other people who have skills synergistic – not overlapping – with your own, but with similar goals and passions. I can’t tell you how frequently teams of three business school students tell me they’re going to start the next great consumer Internet company. When I point out that they’re all business people, and wonder who’s going to build the product, they almost always fall back on “we’ll get a couple of undergrads to do it,” or, “we’ll outsource it.” If I hear either one of those, I know the startup’s already dead. Sorry, folks. Harsh, but probably true.

The best composition is probably one engineer whose passion lies in the pixels on the screen and another engineer whose passion is making bits fly really fast through servers. In Meebo’s case, for example, I was lucky enough to partner up with Elaine and Sandy. Elaine is a JavaScript wizard who has a great visual eye and makes sure every pixel is in its place. Sandy is a straight C nerd and is all about efficiency. Together, they built the first versions of Meebo from scratch. Now, if you have a business guy along for the ride, that works too. But let me tell you, the sum total of my contribution to Meebo prior to our launch was getting us incorporated (read: easy) and suggesting that “the button might look better over there” (read: not much). Post launch, if you gain traction, is where the business person will help take the load off of the technical folks. The business person can take all the meetings while the technical folks work on making the product better.

Second, like I said, forget everything else and just get your product out the door. No office. No phone system. No hiring. No press. No legal muck. No raising money. No looking for partnerships (who’s going to partner with you anyway?). The success or failure of the adoption of your product is what will create 99% of the initial value of your company. If no one ever uses your product, you have no value. Oh, and for the record, raising VC does not help get traction – in another blog post, I’ll argue that if anything, it hurts. So just forget everything else and focus on what matters – getting an alpha of your product out the door and into the hands of your friends and family. Use some URL like www.mygreatstartup.com/shhh.html. Then, once you’ve fixed the initial bugs and incorporated a feature or two that everyone requested, go live. Remember: keep it simple. The initial product you build is for you – you don’t know what features everyone else wants. Launch fast and light, and listen to your users for feedback. In the product, always have a way to ask for user feedback. Remember, once TechCrunch or GigaOm writes about you, you’ll most likely get crushed with a single surge of traffic (we fondly call it the “blog spike”), only to watch almost all of it flitter away. Take advantage of that surge to learn and iterate.

Finally, get good mentors. If someone had been there and just told me “join a great founding team, focus on the product, and forget everything else,” I would have saved a lot of time and heartache. A good mentor is someone who has been part of the startup community themselves – someone who has a realistic understanding of some of the basic dos and don’ts of starting up. You don’t need many – one or two to begin. In Meebo’s case, two of our friends, Todd and Cam, gave us a ton of pre-launch advice. Every time we started straying down a wrong path, like flirting with just talking to that one VC or even thinking about approaching a company about a partnership, they’d always come out with something like, “is that going to get the product out faster?” Trust me, once you’ve launched and achieved traction, you’ll have your pick of mentors, VCs, partners and all the legal expenses you need.

I hope that some of this hit home for those of you who’ve been working on your own startups. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like. You can follow them over on the Meebo Blog, so bookmark this post and Mike tells me they’ll link to subsequent posts. Alternatively, follow me on Twitter (@sethjs) where I’ll mention when I put up a new post.

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From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.