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Buffalo Technology MiniStation Stealth 1 TB USB 2.0 Portable External Hard Drive HD-PCT1TU2/BB (Black)

This morning Pinterest co-founders Ben Silberman, Paul Sciarra and Yashwanth Nelapati woke up to a barrage of tweets, “So @myspace has completely ripped off @pinterest. It really pisses me off when an old, tired hack tries to undermine hardworking inovators. [sic]” Myspace revealed its new redesign last night and Pinterest users quickly picked up on the similarities between the two site aesthetics, leading to an intense Twitter debate.

The offsite grid layout used by both Myspace and Pinterest is nothing new; Lazyfeed, http://enjoysthin.gs and countless other sites have a similar design. But the fact that former Myspace Director of Technology Dave Peck emailed Pinterest back in March asking for an advance invite is interesting, especially when you read the email.

Founder Silberman told TechCrunch, “The Myspace product team joined our site really early and so I’m sure they took inspiration from it. Our impression was that they took some information and we were touched that our users were vocal about it.”

However, Silberman who retweeted the accusations from the official Pinterest account this morning, emphasized, “I wouldn’t go as far as saying they ripped it off. They’re probably in tune with organizing friends around interests after they missed the boat on friends,” referring to how you can now use Myspace to follow Topics pages.

Pinterest is still invite only and is currently seeking funding. Despite being in stealth mode, the social cataloguing startup has 17,000 users and is about to experience it’s one millionth “pin.” Silberman plans on launching in a couple of months, encouraged by all the user support today, “It’s cool when you’re a small company and your users stick up for you.”

Myspace had 90 million users this September according to comScore, marking a 18% drop from last year. This recent design and concept overhaul was an attempt to win back some of the traffic lost to competitors like Facebook.

Myspace screencap via The Guardian

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Myspace Accused Of Ripping Off Stealth Startup Pinterest

A long time ago, I had to make a really tough choice: invest in an MBA from New York University, or make do with my bachelors. I was newly married, had a child on the way, and didn’t have much in savings. The degree would set me back tens of thousands of dollars and take years to complete—especially if I did it part time. And I couldn’t imagine doing anything but programming computers for a living.  So why learn finance, marketing, and operations management, I wondered? Well, I decided to enroll because my understanding of the business world lacked depth, and I harbored a deep-rooted desire to get the best education possible. My wife and I moved into a small one-bedroom apartment in North Bergen, NJ, and we made do with what we had.

For a couple of years after getting my degree, I wondered whether I had made the right choice. Even though I scored a great job at CS First Boston in its IT department, I was just writing code and designing systems. Yes, I started to enjoy reading BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal; but had the financial sacrifice and time away from my family been worth it? It didn’t seem to have been.

Over time, I started rising through the ranks in IT. I went from being a programmer to becoming a project leader and then a vice president. I found that I could communicate effectively with user departments and my bosses; I could deliver projects on time; I knew how to manage and motivate employees; and I had the confidence to present business proposals to managing directors and board members. I was even able to help persuade IBM to make a $20 million investment in the technology that my team had developed. We spun off a startup called Seer Technologies, and I became chief technology officer. And that’s when my education really began to pay big dividends.

In the startup world, it’s simply survival of the fittest. You have to involve yourself with almost every aspect of the business—and use all skills. I would find myself having to develop and manage budgets; help market and sell; hire; assist in setting corporate strategy; and review legal contracts. As well, I still had to develop technology and deal with all the uncertainties and failures that come with a startup.

My MBA classes seemed to fit our business needs like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Even obscure topics like corporate finance came in handy, in IPO discussions with investment bankers and later, in raising capital for my own company.

So I have no doubt that my MBA was the best investment I’ve ever made, and my education helped me achieve success.  Which leads me to the reason for this post: a Twitter debate with Guy Kawasaki, Managing Director at Garage Technology Ventures. Kawasaki argues that MBAs are not needed in the startup world; in fact these provide negative value. He insisted that I was “in denial” when I challenged a piece he had written in Forbes several years ago:

What is the value of an MBA these days for young college graduates who want to start their own company?
Probably about a negative $250,000. (I have an MBA, and I was once a young college graduate.) I don’t think an MBA matters very much for starting a company. A much better educational background is an engineering degree. You can always hire MBAs, but if you don’t have the ability to conceptualize and deliver a product, you’ve got nothing.

In email exchanges, Kawasaki explained that his issue with MBAs is that they are “taught that the hard part is the analysis and coming up with the insightful solution”. In other words: implementation is easy and analysis is hard. “But this is the opposite of what happens in startups. Implementation is everything in a startup.” Kawasaki believes that MBAs aren’t a good fit for startups, and engineering graduates are.

I agree that engineering degrees are important. They provide a level of technical depth and analytical capability that is invaluable in the tech-startup world. But not everyone needs to be an engineer. You need smart people coming up with creative marketing campaigns; managing finances; and selling your products. And the CEOs and CTOs need to master all domains.

In my experience, the most successful entrepreneurs have been those with a strong technical background who have been through some sort of “finishing school”. (I am not talking about college dropouts such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs—I consider them to be outliers). Engineering degrees can be very technical and can actually narrow one’s horizons. To innovate, you need to understand customers and markets. To build a successful product—one that actually sells and makes an impact, you need to understand distribution and finance. So even in the lower echelons of technology, a broader educational background is a plus.

Is the MBA the best degree for engineers? Maybe not. Programs such as the one I teach at Duke may be a better fit. The Duke Masters of Engineering Management program is a one-year program that teaches students marketing, finance, intellectual property and business law, and management. It’s like a mini-MBA. Engineers don’t need to learn how to price an option with the Black–Scholes Model, for example. They certainly don’t need to learn how to create new types of financial products. There are also many other degrees that can provide the needed balance to engineers. These don’t have to be tech or management oriented; even an education in diverse fields such as psychology can be a plus: anything that broadens your horizons and teaches you how to come up with “insightful solutions”. The point is that education is the best investment that one can make. Unlike stocks and bonds, education never loses value; and when you add experience, it gains even more value.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World?

When startups ask me whether they should outsource product development, I usually advise against it. If they’re desperate to save money, they should outsource some testing or ancillary-product development, not core products.  That’s because the developers of innovative technologies need to interact with each other and be close to customers and markets.  In my book, outsourcing is for corporate I.T. departments and for large companies with global operations, not for small tech companies.  I said this in my BusinessWeek column, three years ago.  I also cited research that showed that the tech industry has never constituted more than 15% of the outsourcing market (banking, finance, and insurance accounted for 40%; telecom, 17%; and manufacturing, 12%)—and this includes the product development that companies such as Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco perform in their offshore locations.

When I wrote that BusinessWeek piece, Peter Harrison, CEO of GlobalLogic—who happens to be a good friend and someone I have mentored over the years—tore into me.  He insisted that I was wrong and offered to prove it by introducing me to his customers.  I ignored him (as I often do).  But Peter is persistent.  Last week, he roped me into his customer conference to have dinner with Mike Moritz of Sequoia Capital, who is a GlobalLogic investor.  Peter also had me meet some of his customers.

I wasn’t surprised at how bullish Moritz was on GlobalLogic and outsourcing. VCs always hype their investments and are known to put pressure on their portfolio companies to reduce development costs through outsourcing.  But I was a little surprised to hear small Valley firms rave about the productivity and cost savings they were achieving by doing R&D in places like Kiev, in the Ukraine, and Bangalore, India.  And I was very surprised to learn how rapidly GlobalLogic was growing despite the dismal economy. The company employs 3000 software developers world wide and has just received a mezzanine investment from a top investment bank (which usually means that the company is one step away from an IPO).

Despite this, I remain unconvinced that outsourcing core development is a good strategy for startups.  During my tech days, I outsourced R&D to St. Petersburg and Novosibirsk, Russia.  But as you can read in this FastCompany article, my technology was conceived there, and that’s where my entire development team was located (and I was able to hire brilliant ex-KGB mathematicians who had skills I couldn’t find anywhere else). Having development teams working on a single product but being in different locations makes innovation much harder to achieve (yes, I know this is how open source works, but that’s different).  I’m going to detail my reasons and let GlobalLogic CTO, Jim Walsh, tell us all why he thinks I’m wrong.

Here are the reasons I’ve cited for outsourcing not making sense:

1) Communications and customer needs. Developing a product requires a deep understanding of customer needs, and extensive user interaction.  Locating R&D personnel away from customers limits the ability to develop innovative products that meet market needs.

2) Components must fit together. Complex software is more like a Swiss Army knife than a meat cleaver.  The blade, bottle opener, and screwdriver have to work in an elegant manner and can’t be developed independently.  In a similar way, members of a software-development team need to work closely together.

3) Management bandwidth. It is a lot more challenging to manage diverse teams at multiple locations and in different time zones than to manage them together.  Additional layers of management are often required.

4) Fewer developers can often produce more. In the tech world, scaling up development teams doesn’t always lead to greater productivity.  Small teams are often the most innovative and productive.

5) Skills scarcity. The specialized skill and mindset that tech companies look for are hard to find.  For example, India doesn’t have programmers who have grown up to understand the intricacies of computer-game development, because few can afford the high-speed Internet connections needed.  In India, the best developers gravitate to prestigious companies like Infosys and Wipro, not to small startups.

6) Intellectual-property protection. This is a particularly strong concern in China, where it is almost impossible to protect trade secrets and where piracy is rampant.  Employees often leave to start ventures that compete directly with their foreign employers, and the laws provide little protection, because they aren’t enforced.

Here is Jim Walsh’s response.  I must warn you that this may read like an ad for his company, but I need to be fair, because I’ve just trashed GlobalLogic’s entire business model.  So take this for what it’s worth:

If  by “outsource” you mean throwing stuff over the wall to a third party, then I’d never advocate this for core development. If, on the other hand, you mean collaborating with a firm that possess specialized skills that you lack, are hard to find or very expensive and aligning your goals around a common outcome, then clearly I’m a fan. Firms that fail at globalizing R&D do so because they either because they pick the wrong partner (i.e., one that lacks the R&D DNA and does not specialize in the firm’s domain) or because they throw stuff over the wall and don’t invest in the intimate collaboration and goal alignment that true R&D requires. Most IT services firms make poor product development partners because they focus on compliance and optimization, which suppresses innovation. By contrast, GlobalLogic has created a network of global innovation hubs that are made up of some of the brightest and most innovative software minds. Our software professionals are connected by a platform that supports Agile collaboration and that is designed exclusively for the purpose of accelerating breakthrough products to market. We are doing this successfully for a “who’s who” of the technology sector, from the very tiny to the very large. That said, let me respond to each of your points in turn.

1) Communication: I completely agree that building great products calls for a deep understanding of customer needs and great communication.  We believe in creating small agile teams where the product owner is an integral member.  If this team is distributed, then it’s essential that you either (a) separate the scrums and have product owners in each location or (b) have the product owner overlap with the engineering team for several hours every day to review deliverables and provide constant feedback.  Although in the old days this was hard to do, modern communication and development platforms have made collaborating across distance easier.  In some cases, they can improve the quality of communication over co-located teams.

2) Integration: While building tightly integrated products with distributed team members might have been hard in the past, modern development tools and architectures have made it increasingly straightforward for even the most complex products to be built by distributed teams.  Most open-source projects are living proof of this progression.

3) Management: Managers who have distributed teams do need to learn new skills; however, once proficient, a manager with a distributed team can often outperform a centralized one. Take for example the opportunity to follow the sun by developing during the day and testing the same code line at night (i.e., daytime in a second location).  Or consider the opportunity to leverage specialized skills that you simply don’t have in one place or to have a larger or more skilled team than one could assemble otherwise.  If you’re struggling to overlap enough hours a day, one can always leverage teams in Latin America that work in US time zones.

4) Talent: I’m well aware that one great developer can often outperform many mediocre ones. That’s why I’d never compromise on the quality of team members – particularly for new product development. However, it’s possible today to get developers in Argentina, China, Eastern Europe and India (i.e., locations where we have innovation hubs) who are just as talented—and in some cases just as experienced and innovative—as those in Silicon Valley.  The key is to set your bar high and hand-pick your team in the same way that you would if you were doing the development right here at home.

5) Skills: While there was a time when specialized skills were hard to find abroad, this is simply no longer the case.  When I started in this industry 25 years ago, the skills in the U.K. were about 10 years behind those of the U.S.  Today, there is no longer any skill lag.  Indeed, it’s possible to get skills in cities like Bangalore and Kiev that are in advance of what you can find in many U.S. cities.

6) Intellectual Property: For all but a handful of products, IP risk is a red herring thrown out by firms to defend the status quo.  In our history of building more than 1000 products for more than 200 product companies, we’ve never had an incident of IP theft.  There is simply too much at stake for our firm and our employees for this to be a meaningful risk.  Finally, many firms have concluded that the only true defense for their IP is moving faster than the competition, and we can certainly help them do that.

Lastly, we would argue that the day has come when even a startup needs to think globally (i.e., become a micro-multinational) and seize the opportunity to create products that can be used around the world.  Therefore, it’s not enough to focus only on what American consumers want.  Having a global team is a great way to ensure that you’re creating a product that can address global needs.

The last part, on globalization, is exactly what Mike Moritz said in his talk.  I agree with this.  But Jim hasn’t convinced me about the other issues.  It could be, though, that things have changed from the time when I was a CTO and CEO, and that my information is dated.  So I look forward to reading your comments on what has and what hasn’t worked for you, and what you think about this topic.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Should Tech Startups Outsource Product Development?

Thirty five years ago, give or take, I was presented with my first etch-a-sketch. And it looked a little bit like the iPad. Which makes me qualified to declare the iPad the future of media.

Or at least, that’s the logic of an article in today’s Guardian by Alan Rusbridger, who says that a block of wood that he saw sixteen years ago showed him the future. And that future was the iPad.

“My personal journey to the iPad began around 16 years ago in Aspen, Colorado,” Rusbridger begins. He saw a website showing a newspaper online and was duly impressed. “But the real excitement lay in Aspen, where the Knight Ridder newspaper chain had set up a “laboratory” to study the future of news. It was rumoured that they had built a “tablet” – a portable screen on which people could read newspapers.”

The tablet he saw was a block of wood with a printout of a newspaper glued on the front. No, I’m not kidding.

“At present it consists only of an A4 block of wood, with a ‘front page’ stuck on it: the technology for creating Fidler’s ‘Flat Pad’ is, he estimates, still a couple of years off.

And the iPad finally fulfilled that dream. “Here it was – the Aspen block of wood incarnate!” says Rusbridger when his iPad arrived.

The iPad Will Not Fix Your Newspaper

Rusbridger then goes on to talk about how perfect the iPad is to consumer the Internet (no disagreement from me on that point). And he suggests the iPad might be the knight in shining armor who rushes in to save the day for newspapers: “So is the iPad the future of newspapers after all?”

The best I can tell is that the newspaper guys envision people sitting on a train on the way to work reading their iPad. That’s similar to people sitting on a train read the newspaper. And since those two things are similar, voila!, the iPad will save newspapers.

Seriously, that’s as far as the argument goes.

But jumping back to reality…the iPad changes everything, which really means nothing has changed. All the pressures the Internet put on newspapers – crushing the business model, unlimited competition, no need for tree massacres – are just amplified by the iPad.

Now would be the time to embrace the Internet. But the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other are running in the opposite direction with apps that have no hyperlinks and/or require a fee to get access. All those people sitting on trains with their iPads are going to do the same thing that all those people sitting in their offices on their laptops did – get their news from free sources that hyperlink to other free sources.

The etch-a-sketch was very, very cool. But it didn’t give newspapers a competitive advantage and a way to stay alive a little longer. And neither does the iPad.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Just Because I Loved My Etch-A-Sketch Doesn’t Mean The iPad Will…

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.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

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

While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog.

The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

We’ve written before that this could turn 2010 into the year when approximately 2 million Flash developers could potentially start cooking up stuff for the iPhone en masse. You can now add the iPad to that, it seems.

The company notes:

We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

For that latter part, Adobe points to this article by Christian Cantrell, Product Manager and Application Developer on the AIR team. The article goes in depth about how developers can build apps using Flash with authoring with multiple screen sizes and resolutions in mind.

You won’t be able to fire up, say, Hulu through your browser on the iPhone or iPad any time soon, but Adobe appears determined to show the world that Flash has its place on Apple’s products one way or the other.

And it’s also sending a message to Flash developers that they can and should stick to the platform rather than look at other ways to join the App Store goldrush.

Post from: Technology News Videos And Resources

Adobe: Flash Apps Will Run On The iPad, Even Full Screen At Some Point

Could IBM be prepping more of its own location-aware technology and devices? According to a recent patent filing, it looks like it. On Thursday, Big Blue filed for a patent for a “method and system for location-aware authorization.” The inventors appear to be IBM engineers based in Rome, Italy.

According to the filing, the technology would provide a method and technology to control access to a device based on the location of that device. IBM gave the example of a company that only wanted employees to use a particular device in the office or their home and believe that their technology would allow the employer to control where the particular device can be accessed.

Here’s an excerpt from the filing:

The invention provides a method and system for location-aware authorization such as for electronic devices (e.g., mobile electronic devices). One embodiment involves authorizing access to a standalone system such as a mobile device, by collecting user credentials on the device for authentication, obtaining location information (e.g., geographical position) for the device from a locating module such as a satellite navigation module attached to the device, accessing profile authorization information for authenticating the user based on the user credentials and device location information (localization), authorizing access to the device by the user if the profiled authorization settings match the credentials and the position of the device.

Talk about GPS-lockdown.  In an age of mobile workers and telecommuters, such a product might be more of a hindrance than a help for most organizations.  But I could see putting something like that on servers or machines with super-sensitive data that are not supposed to leave the premises.  The big question looms: what will Big Blue, which reported strong earnings for 2009 this past week, do with this technology?

Thanks for the tip Anand S.

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Patent Watch: IBM Figures Out How To Limit Device Access By…

Yesterday, Inside Facebook reported on a nifty MySpace feature called Fan Video that allows users to pull in their Facebook profile photos using Facebook Connect — a notable move given the sites’ longtime rivalry. Some other outlets ran with the story, with CNET calling it “hard evidence that MySpace is committed to using the technology on its site.” As it turns out, that probably isn’t the case: we’re hearing that this implementation was only integrated as a one-off for Fan Video, and that it is not indicative of a MySpace move to embrace Facebook Connect on a wider scale.

In fact, we’re hearing that MySpace hasn’t even decided if they’re going to implement Facebook Connect on a wide scale at all, despite the rumors that have been circling for months.

Fan Video was built as a promotion for the UK launch of MySpace Music in December. The app is simple: it imports your profile photo using either MySpaceID or Facebook Connect, and inserts it into one of a half dozen music videos from big name artists like Alicia Keys and 50 Cent. The results are actually pretty entertaining — I now have a video of Alicia Keys singing a love song as she gazes longingly at a photo of me. But we’re hearing that the app didn’t come directly from MySpace — it was actually built by a third party under commission.

In related news, we’ve recently heard that Twitter is close to launching their answer to Facebook Connect.

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MySpace Fan Video Not Indicative Of Wider Facebook Connect Rollout

This year’s third annual Crunchies Awards have just concluded, and we’re happy to say that it was an overwhelming success. For those that weren’t watching, we’ve included the list of nominees and winners below. Our most sincere congratulations to the winners and to all of the nominees as well. It was an incredibly tight race for many of the categories, and it’s safe to say that everyone on this list is at the top of their field.

We’d like to take a moment to point out Facebook’s win for “Best Overall Startup Or Product”, which marks the third year in a row that the company has taken home the top prize. Facebook continues to innovate and deploy features at an impressive rate while still showing incredible growth. Ours hats go off to you.

If you’d like to watch the event for yourself, you can watch an archived version of the live stream here.

Best Technology Achievement:
Backblaze
Bing (Microsoft)
Chrome OS (Google) (Winner)
Google Wave
PuSH
Silverlight (Microsoft)

Best Internet Application:
Animoto
Dropbox (Winner)
Groupon
MOG All Access
Posterous
Yelp

Best Social App:
Aardvark
Brizzly
DailyBooth
Farmville(Winner)
SocialVibe
StockTwits

Best Bootstrapped StartUp:
atebits (Tweetie)
Shoes of Prey
Tinychat (Winner)
Wildfire Interactive
wizehive
Wufoo

Best Mobile Application:
foursquare (Winner)
Google Voice
Gowalla
Kindle for iPhone
Skies of Glory
Tonchidot

Best International:
Amiando
Jolicloud
Playfish
Spotify (Winner)
TweetDeck
vente-privee.com

Best Time Sink Application:
Canabalt
Civilization Revolution (iPhone)
DailyBooth (Winner)
I Am T-Pain
Pandora
Zoosk

Best Design:
Animoto (Winner)
Brizzly
Chrome (Google)
Clicker
Facebook Mobile
Threadsy

Best Enterprise:
Amazon Web Services
Atlassian
Azure (Microsoft)
Chatter (Salesforce)
Google Docs/Office (Winner)
Yext

Best CleanTech:
CalStar Products
Locust Storage
Picarro
Sappphire Energy
Sun Run (Winner)
Tendril

Best New Gadget:
Apple Magic Mouse
Barnes & Noble nook (Winner)
litl webbookMotorola Droid
Sonos S5
Zune HD

Best Tech PR:
Brew Media Relations
LaunchSquad
OutCast Communications
PerkettPR
Spark (Winner)
SutherlandGold Group

Best Angel:
Betaworks
Chris Sacca (Lowercase Capital)
Jeff Clavier (SoftTechVC)
Ron Conway (SV Angel) (Winner)
Y-Combinator
Yossi Vardi

Best VC Firm:
Accel Partners (Winner)
Charles River Ventures
Benchmark Capital
Greylock Partners
Sequoia Capital
True Ventures
Union Square Ventures

Founder Of The Year:
Aaron Patzer (Mint) (Winner)
Elon Musk (Tesla)
Jack Dorsey (Square)
Jeremy Stoppelman & Russ Simmons (Yelp)
John Borthwick (Betaworks)
Omar Hamoui (AdMob)

CEO Of The Year:
Josh Silverman (Skype)
Marc Benioff (Salesforce)
Mark Pincus (Zynga) (Winner)
Neil Young (ngmoco)
Richard Rosenblatt (Demand Media)
Tony Hsieh (Zappos)

Best New Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Aardvark
Bing (Microsoft) (Winner)
Foursquare
Hunch
Milo
Spotify

Best Overall Startup Or Product Of 2009:
Android (Google)
Facebook (Winner)
LinkedIn
ngmoco
Twitter
Zynga

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Congratulations Crunchies Winners! Facebook Takes Best Overall For The…

Cc:Betty, a free service that helps organize group email threads, has rolled out an iPhone app to help declutter your email on your mobile device. Cc:Betty’s app is a group based email application that breaks email conversations into collated, threaded discussions.

An account can be created right from the app, and new group discussions can be created, using the iPhone address book to access your contacts. Photos can be easily attached as well and new contacts can be added to discussions via your address book. Any discussions, or other content such as attachments a person has in their Cc:Betty.com account are automatically synced to their iPhone. When one of your discussions is updated, you’ll get a push-notification to your iPhone so you can access important information on the go.

Founded in 2008 by Michael Cerda, Cc:Betty began as a web application that routes, parses, and organizes email conversations in a simple at-a-glance dashboard so you never have to scour your inbox to find the bits and pieces of a long thread. If you cc “betty@ccbetty.com” on any email, “she” will create a mailspace, which is a webpage, for your entire email thread and will divide important things such as dates, times, people, places, and files and will format them all in one place. Cc:Betty will track messages with up to 100 recipients and can organize emails with up to 20 MB in size, including attachments.

Cc:Betty recently integrated with Twitter, so that users of the service can tweet in and out of a of the collaboration platform, as well as see each other’s latest tweets. The startup also upgraded its service with several new features, including the ability to see maps, images and documents as large thumbnails in email threads, and a list of people in an email conversation. You can also filter content of the thread by participant. The startup’s founder Michael Cerda tells me that the company is also rolling out a stealth SMB centric offering in the near future called Threadbox.

The startup also just raised $500,000 in funding from Western Technology Investment. The startup previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding in June led by Venrock with investors Seraph Group and Hillsven participating. The company was incubated in Venrock’s offices and officially launched at DEMO in March.

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Cc:Betty Launches iPhone App For To Make Sense Of Your Email

The one skill which entrepreneurs need is something they don’t teach in business school—selling.  Yes, I know that “selling” conjures up negative images of used-car salesmen peddling clunkers. But the ability to persuade people to believe in you is a necessity. That’s because sales is not just about selling things for money. Selling is about life. Convincing the perfect soulmate to go out on a date is a sales job. Enticing your children to eat their vegetables is a sales job. Negotiating a raise with your boss is a sales job. And, yes, selling your company to Google is definitely a sales job. A sales job in that you are listening to others, finding out what they want or need, and giving it to them in a form that they appreciate. And guess who the best salespeople in tech companies are? Your developers.

Let me explain why I believe this.

I started my career as a geek. I ended up as Chief Technology Officer of Seer Technologies, a software startup which we grew from zero to $120 million in revenue and took public in a short five years. And then I became CEO of my own very successful startup called Relativity Technologies (until I burnt myself out and needed to shift gears).  A number of skills helped me through this ascent. I learned a lot about motivating and managing people who were sometimes smarter than me, about understanding markets and communicating effectively, and also a few really boring things like accounting, finance and law. But if I had not learned how to sell then my company would never have made it past three guys in a room with a phone and some laptops.

I didn’t believe this in my youth. I thought coding was the exact opposite of selling. I always associated “sales” with hustling and sleazy ways to convince customers to spend money on things they didn’t need. And you had to work fast to get that check before the dupes backed away.

One day I was promoted to project manager. After thrashing through a few uncomfortable meetings, I quickly understood that running a good project required a form of selling to my peers and managers. I also realized that perhaps sales was not so simple. In fact, convincing my staff that the ideas I had made sense was far more difficult than writing clean code. And persuading management to supply sufficient staff and funding to implement my ideas was harder still.

Being a successful project manager meant learning to listen closely to what others thought, to make them feel included, and to give them what they wanted and needed to succeed. It meant constant communication that was honest yet finely nuanced. It was hard work but ultimately very rewarding. I could listen and focus on helping others to achieve their goals and at the same time advance myself quite easily. When I was able to focus on a global view of helping my company succeed, I found it much easier to avoid destructive departmental politics. I rose up the ranks to become a vice-president of technology at one of the world’s five largest investment banks.

Then I got the chance to become CTO of a startup which would market technology which my team had built. Selling became an even more important skill. We all were living on borrowed time and the only thing that would give us more time was sales to put money into company coffers. We had a truly amazing product, much better than that of our competitors. But the stark reality was that unless we could really sell well, our competitors had a big advantage. They were a known quantity. They were not going out of business tomorrow. They played golf, went out for beers, and had lunch with our competitors.

My guru and mentor was my boss, Gene Bedell. One of the first things Gene did when we launched our company was to put everyone through a sales training boot camp. Gene had run billion-dollar businesses and reached the executive levels in investment banking. He had even convinced IBM to seed our company, a software spinoff from Credit Suisse First Boston. At first my technology team protested at being taught to learn about qualifying prospects and closing sales rather than the latest version-tracking software tools.

Within months, we were closing multimillion dollar sales with blue-chip customers across the globe. We did this with only two experienced sales reps and part-time sales support from our development staff. That’s because developers with sales training are incredibly valuable as a part of the sales process. They have two essential ingredients that make people persuasive—credibility and trustworthiness (for the most part).  So while a prospect may not really believe a salesperson, for example, when he says a system is reliable, they’re far more likely to believe a developer they respect.  This is a very powerful ingredient in the sales process, and one we used regularly.  We would compete with some of the largest software companies in the world—and win the sale almost every time. As CTO, I also took it upon myself to sell strategic partners. My biggest catch was a deal with IBM-Japan worth $8.6 million.

With a culture that put customer support and sales above everything else, we grew  into a profitable $120-million-a-year revenue machine. Our developers formed long-term bonds and friendships with our customers. They would go to great pains to understand customer requirements and build products that would sell. More often than not, new development projects would be funded directly by customers. Whenever there was a customer-service problem, our top engineers would voluntarily work around the clock and fly all over the globe to personally provide support.

So, how do you learn sales? It’s easy. There are literally hundreds of books on selling. The methods vary, but in essence all of them teach you about the basics of understanding customer needs and honing your message. There are also hundreds of “selling seminars” conducted all over the world. Be wary of any which teach you to sell things a customer doesn’t want. It is one thing to persuade someone to buy something which they need, it is another thing to con people. My personal favorite book (and I am a little biased here) is one by Gene Bedell himself, titled Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way.

By the way, I’m not the only guy saying this kind of stuff. The high priests of the Lean Startup Methodology, like Dave McClure, Brad Feld, and Eric Ries, all advocate a “get to sales ASAP” approach. “Recovering venture capitalist” Healy Jones blogged about how he was shortchanged with his Wharton MBA. Yet a quick conversation at any networking event in the Valley yields a simple observation that most technology workers don’t think that selling is part of their job description. The smartest technology entrepreneurs realize that everyone in the company is in sales and the sooner they embrace that reality, the easier it will be for that startup to grow and prosper. Coder, biz dev, PR, QA—nope. You’re all in sales. It’s all about selling for survival.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

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It’s All About Selling for Survival

Frustrated with the fact that Pandora does not provide its streaming service in Canada, Vancouver-based Jeff Anderson set out to build a community-driven Internet radio service of his own along with other music fanatics, and dubbed the project Listen.fm.

Currently still in private beta, Listen.fm is not going to be a ‘revolutionary’ service, says Anderson, but rather just a great place to listen to and discover new music that can legally be shared with others. The site has been in the works for nearly a year and should be launching in public beta some time next year.

As you may recall, Streamzy, a media search startup that used the late Seeqpod’s database as a content source but became a shell after Seeqpod folded, was recently put up for sale on eBay.

Anderson took notice of the sale, and picked up whatever was left of the project in a rush to see if some of the technology could be used to enhance Listen.fm. Turns out there wasn’t much left at all (the Seeqpod API didn’t work anymore and the YouTube API didn’t provide much benefit to what they were building either) although Anderson says they don’t regret ‘acquiring’ the Streamzy leftovers because it allowed them to play around with the backend, Google Apps Engine, in a working context.

Not that Streamzy cost him and his team a fortune: the auction closed at $2,700.

More on Listen.fm when they are closer to launching.

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Remains Of Streamzy Picked Up, Reborn As Web Radio Service Listen.fm

This is a crazy fun demo of the new Avatar toys by Mattel. Each toy includes a little card that is scannable via webcam and creates an on-screen augmented reality robot or character. While this is old hat for most of us, Mattel is quite proud of being ahead of the curve and for good reason. You can see more demos at AvatarItag.com.

Total Immersion made the technology and even added a little “button” system to the cards. When you touch a spot on the card, the onscreen character pulls a knife, shoots a gun, or recounts part of the story. The added information and data will change over time, up to the release of the movie on December 18.

Obviously this requires a computer and a patient kid but it’s still an exciting addition to an already interesting movie.

We’ll have some of these toys in next week and we’ll stage mock battles for you all. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could put two cards on the table at once and have them fight? OMG!

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Avatar Toys Go Augmented Reality, Courtesy Of Mattel And Total…

What recession? We’ve confirmed that startup Delivery Agent has just raised $25 million in Series D funding led by new investor Focus Ventures with T-Venture, Coral Group, Ironwood Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Worldview Technology Partners and Cardinal Venture Capital participating. This brings Delivery Agent’s total funding up to $60 million.

In a nutshell, Delivery Agent helps TV networks monetize content through two distinct channels. First, the company creates online marketplaces for products and merchandise that are seen on television shows. Delivery Agent has signed on all the major networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC Universal, Twentieth Century Fox, and MTV Networks. Similar to GumGum’s ShopThisLook feature, Delivery Agent catalogues products appearing in movies and shows and then creates an e-commerce site where products can be purchases. By outsourcing all e-commerce for products seen on their networks to Delivery Agent, networks are able to monetize their content while keeping their overhead costs low.

Delivery Agent’s second service is coordinating advertising from the brands that manufacture the products that are shown on a networks’ TV shows. Delivery Agent will go through the index of products that will be airing on a show prior to when the episode airs, and then reach out to the brand and offer them the ability to buy an ad package for the show.

Mike Fitzsimmons, Delivery Agent’s founder and CEO, tells me that the new funds will be used to develop “click-to-buy” applications for online video and mobile content. In fact, Delivery Agent will soon launch a partnership with a major cable operator that will allow consumers to click and buy a product they see on TV with their remote control. Fitzsimmons also add that Delivery Agent will be using the funds to pursue international growth, and launch their content-monetization services in markets in Europe and Asia.

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Confirmed: Delivery Agent Raises $25 Million For Entertainment…

This past June I had the privilege of traveling to East Asia with a group of techies on a trip dubbed GeeksOnAPlane. The experience was a quick-and-dirty way to familiarize myself with the tech industries of Japan and China, since we were herded through back-to-back conferences and networking events meant to give us primers on a number of sectors such as web, mobile, and gaming (you can read about what I learned in each of those countries here and here).

I’m happy to say that the second GeeksOnAPlane trip will take me the other way around the world starting today. Our first stop will be in DC where we plan to meet with representatives from the White House Digital Media Group and the State Department Technology Innovation Team followed by an afternoon Startup2Startup lunch at the Washington Post. After that short layover on the east coast, we’ll jump the pond to attend Seedcamp in London and then the Picnic tech festival in Amsterdam. While I’ll be flying back home after Amsterdam, the rest of the group will continue to Berlin, Prague, Paris, and back to London for a series of other tech events such as Future of Web Apps and Ignite.

As during my trip to Asia, I’ll report back here on what I discover about tech and entrepreneurship in the nation’s capitol and abroad. For more information about the trip, visit the official GeeksOnAPlane website. And a special thanks to Founders Fund, AIM, PayPal, O’Reilly and Ignite – the trip’s main sponsors – for making this all possible.

Follow us on Twitter at @GeeksOnAPlane. We’ll be using the hashtag #goap.

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GeeksOnAPlane Jumps The Pond; But First, A Layover in DC

Editor’s Note: This guest post was written by Matt Galligan, CEO of CrashCorp, a company working on a product called SimpleGeo providing “location as a service” as well as an Augmented Reality SDK for app developers. (We covered their founding here.) As such, Galligan clearly has a stake in the AR game, but he was genuinely surprised by the revelation of the AR element to the Yelp app update yesterday. You can follow Matt on Twitter here.

Yelp has had no shortage of hullabaloo surrounding the most recent improvement to its iPhone app. Rightfully so, it added an Augmented Reality view for its restaurant reviews. Using the AR view, users of the Yelp app can pan around using their camera, and see information overlaid, presumably, on top of the restaurant of their query, garnering review information. While this functionality is certainly useful, and nothing short of excellent eye candy, could there be a thorn with this rose?

Augmented Reality has been all the rage with app developers recently, originally employing unreleased SDK features to build the technology. However, in recent months, it was discovered that the new iPhone OS 3.1 upgrade changed the camera functionality in a way that would enable app developers to build their Augmented Reality views in a more sanctioned environment. This development has been a shot in the arm for AR developers, and there seems to be many implementations being built. However, it was understood that the world would have to wait for AR on the iPhone, at least until iPhone OS 3.1 was released. That was, until, Yelp’s most recent iPhone app got approved in the store with an easter egg that, after shaking the device three times, enabled an Augmented Reality view.

Call it sneaky, call it clever, but I call it deceit. Apple has put forth specific guidelines, and “rules” around their app development, and while I don’t always agree, it’s the reality of how we must work with them for now. Yelp hid their easter egg behind shaking the device, which isn’t always the most intuitive action to take on an app that contains some maps and lists. As a result, the unsanctioned Augmented Reality view was gone from Apple’s radar. The same would seem to be true with a couple other applications that snuck in AR features as updates to their apps. As recently as last month, Apple was telling developers making AR apps that they would have to wait for iPhone 3.1. It was only after approval that Yelp announced that the functionality existed. There was palpable excitement around the Yelp’s announcement (and the other apps), having been the first AR apps to be approved, but something smelled afoul.

My concern is that Yelp has set an awful precedent by this act. Now, every app developer will likely undergo even more scrutiny. Accessing private API’s goes against the agreement every iPhone developer has to abide by when submitting applications to the App Store. By subverting this agreement through an “easter egg”, Yelp could very well cause the approval process to become more draconian. Whereas before, Apple was primarily looking for trademark violations, “correct” usage of their Human Interface Guidelines, and show-stopping bugs, they’ll now have to go over each app with fine-toothed comb to make sure no feature that is likely to be unsanctioned will be released. Now granted, this may also be seen as a big cry for openness in the App Store, but so long as the App Store approval process remains in the status quo, deceitful acts like this won’t continue to go unnoticed by them.

The implications are simple: a longer wait time for apps to be approved, longer time for bug fixes and overall, a poorer experience for developers and users both. While I hope for a less strict App Store, so long as that’s not the case, I hope more that developers stick to more of the straight and narrow (read: not so shady tactics) so they don’t ruin it for the rest of us.

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How Yelp May Have Further Harmed The App Store Approval Process With…