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KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

admin — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:51:01 +0000

Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web startups. And according to Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers partner Chi-Hua Chien , the next space ripe for a big tech-powered wave of democratization is commerce. In an on-stage conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the TechCrunch NYC Disrupt conference Wednesday afternoon, Chien explained how tech has helped flatten a number of previously stratified spaces. The mid- to late-90′s saw the democratization of information — companies such as Google made data available to everyone, no matter where or who they were. After that came the democratization of distribution, with services such as Twitter and Facebook allowing anyone to broadcast their content and potentially attract an audience. The democratization of computing has occurred as well, with billions of people in the world now having access to computers because of the availability of low-cost mobile devices. Up next? The world of shopping and selling. “We’re now entering an era around the democratization of commerce,” Chien said. The past, he said, has been about “mass aggregation,” with companies such as Safeway and Wal-Mart rising to the top of the commerce space by simply being the best at aggregating a suite of products into one space. These big companies also built up their own brand names to make shoppers feel secure in buying things from them. Today, though, we are starting to “see an unwinding of aggregation of commerce as technology starts to disrupt” the industry, Chien said. “If you think about what a Wal-Mart does, it aggregates credibility and inventory,” Chien said. Credibility is the Wal-Mart brand name, and the inventory is simply products and storage. Today, credibility can be established by smaller players via social media, and real estate and inventory can be outsourced much easier. Chien pointed to two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies to illustrate this movement: Square , which he said is democratizing becoming a merchant, and Zaarly for democratizing the ability to do a particular job. In a short conversation off-stage, he told me that Gumroad is also one of the Kleiner-backed startups that is leading the way toward big commerce disruption. Looking at Kleiner Perkins itself, Chien not surprisingly declined from discussing the lawsuit filed by investment partner Ellen Pao (the news of which TechCrunch was the first to break yesterday) during his fireside chat. But, he did shed some light on the firm’s larger strategy, in particular its increasing focus on making digital investments, after a few years of being more well-known for making moves in the green tech space. “In the last five years, [Kleiner has] added four investing partners focusing on consumer digital,” Chien said.

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KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

Memes Of TechCrunch Disrupt New York

jos — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:34:41 +0000

When you’re stuck for three days in a big warehouse with the same group of smart people talking about the future of tech innovation over and over and over again ( +beer ), you start getting really silly. And some of the unique circumstances of year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York have given us plenty to be silly about. For instance, there are birds, live birds (!) in the conference hall, and in fact I can hear them right now chirping LOUDLY while one of the demo companies presents onstage. The birds are so prevalent that they’ve spawned jokes from some of the speakers, like, “It’s so hip of you guys to hold a conference in a bird sanctuary” in addition to a fake Twitter account, @TechCrunchBird , which tweets stuff like, “*Frightened fluttering from music,* “”Disappointed chirp.,” “*quiet listening*,” and my personal favorite, 啁啾 ‪ (‘Chirp’ in Chinese). Along with the CrunchBird, we’ve got the “Josh Constine Asking The Hard Hitting Questions” meme, inspired by the fact that Constine , one of our newest writers, GRILLED CEO Tim Armstrong hard on his fumbled moves with TechCrunch and Aol’s other content properties. Because the image of floppy-haired Josh taking down the high-powered Aol exec was so hilarious, we thought about some other situations in history where Josh’s mad interviewing skills and unerring, bloodthirsty quest for the truth could have come in handy. The sight of TechCrunch editor John Biggs riding around Startup Alley on a motorized beer cooler was so ridiculous that we turned into an equally ridiculous gif. And yes, you could pretty much watch this forever and never be sick of it. You know what else we will probably never be sick of? Putting MC Hammer on stage, and this year we got him up there twice as a Startup Battlefield judge (because of confusion he showed up late), resulting in a slew of “Judge Hammer Presides” jokes. The Hammer caption contest winner? Well “You have to ask yourself — how legit am I, in regard to my not quitting?” definitely has my vote. And speaking of hammered, here’s a random picture of our head developer Vineet Thanedar getting drunk on Churchkey beer at 10am. See you at Disrupt SF!

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Memes Of TechCrunch Disrupt New York

The Facebook Effect Author David Kirkpatrick Talks Facebook’s Ad Network Potential, Future Acquisition Targets

vertical8 — Thu, 24 May 2012 01:02:35 +0000

This afternoon at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, our own Josh Constine sat down with David Kirkpatrick , author of “The Facebook Effect,” to discuss what they thought about the future of the newly IPO’ed social network. Specifically, the two focused on the potential for Facebook’s advertising platform, its competitive advantages over incumbents and competitors, and its potential acquisition targets which could help its platform expand. What’s Facebook’s Post-IPO Strategy? Josh started off by asking Kirkpatrick what he thought was the most important thing Facebook should do going forward. David responded that Facebook shouldn’t do anything differently, even going so far as to say that doing so would be the “most perilous mistake they could make.” However, in terms of how the IPO could potentially affect the company’s focus, and specifically CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on product, was the fact that Zuckerberg now has to “sell a lot of ads.” As a public company, analysts will be making quarterly earnings projections, and Zuckerberg will have to waste a lot of time thinking about that, said Kirkpatrick. Whether Zuckerberg likes it or not, he will have to think about money now, Kirkpatrick lamented, a role that the CEO had historically dedicated to COO Sheryl Sandberg . However, Josh pointed out that shift may not be a bad thing — Zuckerberg hasn’t “applied his big brain to monetization yet,” he noted. Facebook’s Uber-Precise Ad Targeting The two then moved onto sharing their thoughts about the Facebook advertising platform, which had Josh asking what Kirkpatrick thought Facebook had done that was really special in ads. Responded the author, “to create an environment which can be so accurately targeted for advertising is an innovation in itself.” He added that it’s also effectively an unmonetized innovation at this time, and he’s confident that there’s a lot of revenue opportunity there in the future, too. Kirkpatrick said that he felt that even something as simple as putting an ad in your News Feed was an innovation. How Facebook Will Get To Be Worth More Than $100B In discussing new monetization streams for the network, the potential for an offsite ad network that could one day rival Google’s AdSense was huge. There are already 9 million businesses and advertisers on the Facebook ad platform today, said Kirkpatrick. But highly targeted ads – the kind you would see on Facebook itself – could potentially freak people out when they showed up on the wider Internet, Josh pointed out. Kirkpatrick agreed to a point, but said that most people, including the average Facebook user, don’t seem to really care. There’s a tidal wave of “anti-targeting mindset,” especially in Europe, said Kirkpatrick, but it seemed to be mostly among the press, the government, and the “influentials” (which he dubbed the “punditocracy”). “A lot don’t understand Facebook or advertising that well,” he said of this group, painting them with a rather large brush. Kirkpatrick also said that not only does the average Facebook user not care about ads, in some of Facebook’s largest markets, it’s not a concern at all. Indonesia, for example – Facebook’s fourth largest country – has no issue with Facebook’s advertising. Who Should Facebook Buy Finally, in terms of what companies Facebook should acquire next, both agreed that moving into physical payments would make sense for the company. As for the recent Instagram and Karma acquisitions, Kirkpatrick called them “unexpected and surprising,” saying that they’re really app related, which he thought was odd. “What’s really important for Facebook is being a platform,” he said. He thought the biggest investments would be to “augment their platform capabilities, not their app capabilities.” But he concluded that some things, like photos, may be so important to the platform that they felt they needed to spend a billion dollars on it. “Tumblr is an interesting company for Facebook to think about,” Kirkpatrick stated. He also thought that Facebook couldn’t help but be obsessing over Pinterest right now, but Josh vehemently disagreed. Instead, Josh’s picks were some sort of peer-to-peer payments company like Venmo, and an offsite ad network technology that would give Facebook the ability to scrape data from websites outside its walled garden to let Facebook serve relevant ads to visitors who aren’t logged in.

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The Facebook Effect Author David Kirkpatrick Talks Facebook’s Ad Network Potential, Future Acquisition Targets

Google’s David Lawee: One-Third Of Google’s Acquisitions Are Failures (And Slide Is “Definitely” One Of Them)

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 23 May 2012 22:13:22 +0000

David Lawee , Google’s VP of Corporate Development, sat down for an informative chat with MG Siegler at Disrupt NYC this morning, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Google’s track record with mergers and acquisitions. “We’ve done 120 acquisitions since 2003, maybe one in 2002,” Lawee said. “And two-thirds of them have been successful.” Doing the math, that works out to roughly 40 deals that didn’t quite pan out the way the folks in Mountain View had hoped. Of course, some them are more pronounced than others. When asked about Slide — the social gaming company that Google picked up for a cool $228 million only to shutter their services a year later — Lawee noted that Slide was “definitely” in that bottom third. But what does it actually mean for an acquisition to fail (or succeed) for Google? When pressed on the issue, Lawee pointed out that each deal has its own particular metrics that Google weighed before they chalked it up as a success or failure. Widevine, the streaming video DRM solution that Google acquired in late 2010 is measured for instance in how many devices it’s reached (and Lawee noted that number has doubled in a year, firmly ensconcing it that top tier of wins for them). The teams attached to these acquisitions moved on to different roles within Google (and often very fruitful ones), but they ultimately didn’t meet the “four or five” key goals that Google had in mind when they inked their deal. Aardvark was a prominent example — Lawee mentioned that M&A team felt very strongly about the role social Q&A would play in search, but Google’s search organization felt differently. Though the Aardvark team (including co-founder Max Ventilla) found a new home working on Google’s Knowledge Graph , the acquisition is still considered a failure because those original goals were never met. The pair also tackled Google’s recently-completed Motorola Mobility acquisition, and Lawee was quick to shoot down the notion that it was a spur of the moment deal. He was, though, a bit more hesitant to tackle the notion that the Motorola deal was put together because of their bid to nab Nortel’s patents. “It’s a complicated area, and it’s not an area that one can just dabble in.” Lawee said. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, he says Google still doesn’t want to buy Twitter.

Google Redesigns Its iPhone Search App To Be Faster And Prettier

admin — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:25:10 +0000

Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone . Google completely overhauled the design of the app , which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches. In line with last year’s iPad update, the new app now features the ability to easily swipe back and forth between your search results and the pages you clicked on. It’s also become significantly easier to switch between Google’s various search features like images, places, shopping and videos. Whenever you swipe up to the top of the search results page now, a new menu opens up at the bottom of the screen that lets you switch between the different search features. The app, of course, also still support voice search and gives users access to all of Google’s other services like Google Goggles, Gmail and Google+. One interesting feature is its ability to detect which other Google apps you have installed on your phone and then allows you to switch to them instead of using the company’s HTML5 apps. Overall, the app is a nice improvement over the previous version. It builds upon a trend we’ve seen lately from Google toward better mobile apps, including the recent Google+ for iPhone redesign. For the most part, though, most users will likely continue to do most of their searches from their favorite mobile browser.

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Google Redesigns Its iPhone Search App To Be Faster And Prettier

YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital

A D M I N — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:12:07 +0000

Online video advertising startup YuMe has picked up another $10 million in financing from China-based investment firm WestSummit Capital , closing out a $22 million strategic round that was first announced last November. The round was led by Samsung Ventures and also included Translink Capital. YuMe founder Jayant Kadambi confirmed the raise, and told me by email that the funding will be used primarily to expand into more connected devices. YuMe provides a platform for delivering ads against online videos, but has recently been adding support for connected TVs. “[W]e are using to expand our Connected TV business across OEMs and publishers globally. We are continuing to expand our business out of our Chennai development labs, as we see tremendous media business growth opportunities across all of Asia,” Kadambi wrote. That’s the primary reason for Samsung’s interest in YuMe, as well as a previous strategic investment from Intel . Other YuMe investors include Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, Khosla Ventures, BV Capital, and DAG Ventures. Altogether, YuMe has raised nearly $75 million since being founded in 2007.

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YuMe Adds Another $10 Million From WestSummit Capital

Hmmm Is A Split-Personality Social Network For Sharing Different Yous To Different Facebook Friends

Administrator — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:43:06 +0000

You’re crazy with your friends, serious with your co-workers, and sweet with your parents. Now you can share those distinct personalities with their matching audiences thanks to Hmmm , a mobile app launching today that aims to let you be yourself online, whoever that is. Facebook friend lists and Google Circles have proven too clumsy for selective sharing. They’ve led to the rise of Path, which eliminates the decision making by creating a social micronetwork of your closest friends, but all your favorite people aren’t there, and not every post is appropriate for everyone you love. Hmmm lets you create separate avatars for each of your identities, and publish to pre-made sets of Hmmm and Facebook friends. Plus, Hmmm will soon be able to notify a friend that says they’re bored when you post that you want to see a movie. Sol Studios just launched Hmmm at TechCrunch Disrupt New York, with an iOS app available now and an Android version coming in two weeks. Hmmm’s co-founder Archana Patchirajan tells me “I’m a daughter, I’m a student, I’m a co-founder. We all have nicknames and social groups. It’s unrealistic to have one profile. We wanted to give users a flexible platform to express themselves the way the do in real life.” Hmmm doesn’t just structure who you share to, but what you share as well. There’s categories like activities, emotions, places, music, and photos, but also tags like “happy” or “inspired” for emotions, or “working” or “celebrating” for activities. The next version of Hmmm will include its “inference engine” that can match people with complementary posts. Like two people who are shopping nearby each other, or someone doing something exciting with someone bored. You can also use Hmmm as a layer on top of Facebook. The app creates feeds of posts by Facebook and Hmmm friends of your avatars. You can like and comment from within Hmmm and that feedback will appear back on Facebook. The bootstrapped Sol Studios plans to monetize Hmmm with Sponsored Stories-style social ads, where small businesses, record companies, and consumer packaged goods companies pay to increase the presence of posts that mention them. It originally considered sponsored gamification, but I persuaded the team that would clutter the app and make it confusing, so they stripped it out. In the Disrupt Battlefield Q&A, Patchirajan explained that Hmmm won’t limit the number of connections you can have, the way Path caps you at 150. She said Hmmm would succeed because competitors’ approaches to micro-sharing are “very unnatural. Finally, she explained the confusing name of her product as…the sound you make when you’re confused who to say something with. Hmmm’s biggest challenge will be convincing users to endure the friction of choosing an audience, content type, and sub-tags just to publish something to friends. Path’s near decision-less publishing is a pleasure and I fear Hmmm could be a pain. But those who want to share their split-personality but are serious about privacy should give Hmmm some thought.

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Hmmm Is A Split-Personality Social Network For Sharing Different Yous To Different Facebook Friends

Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers

Budowniczy425 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:15 +0000

For SaaS companies, whose customers are usually signed up on recurring monthly billing cycles, the art of retaining customers is just as important as winning them over in the first place. In fact, it’s probably more important, since customers aren’t tied in to long-term deals. It’s also a lot cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. So they need to better understand them and work harder to keep them coming back, which is where Apptegic comes in. The startup, which is being launched as part of TechCrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield, uses big data to provide detailed analytics that companies can use to better engage with their customers. To do so, Apptegic is introducing what it calls a “customer guidance system” (CGS) to identify trends among customer usage and to give them tools to message users in real time and suggest new features that they can use. Founders Karl Wirth and Greg Hinkle worked together at Red Hat, where they built operations management tools for SaaS companies. What they found was that there weren’t a lot of tools out there to help those businesses understand their customers and retain them. So they set out to build those tools. Apptegic provides a cloud-based platform that essentially uses big data to analyze behavioral click-through data from customer interactions, then scores the engagement so that businesses can know which features customers find important, and which aren’t. What’s sticky, and what keeps customers coming back. Once a business recognizes that, it can build tools to improve the way that it interacts with those customers. They can customize those reports based on the data that they find important. Apptegic customers can also use the platform to set rules around certain types of customer usage and message their users in real time. That can help guide them to features that they might not be aware of, or to help upsell them on features they haven’t yet bought. Currently Apptegic is focused on web applications, but Wirth told me that it’s looking to extend onto other platforms, and could optimize for mobile applications. It’s currently working with 30 beta customers, but will be launching the cloud-based service this week to add more trial users. Apptegic has five employees now, and has raised $2 million from Point Judith Capital, Advanced Technology Ventures, Jit Saxena, and other angel investors. Disrupt Q&A Q: What do you include that current systems don’t? A: We combine real-time click-stream data and real-time messaging. Q: What was the Ah-ha moment that told you the world needs this? A: We were working with a lot of customers and realized that there were a lot of people building this themselves. Q: How is this more than Google Analytics? A: This gives you information down to the user and offer the opportunity to reach them in real-time. Q: Where are you in terms of launching, and what’s the revenue model? A: We’re launching today and starting to charge today. We charged based on the number of end users that our customers reach.

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Apptegic Uses Big Data Analysis To Help Companies Retain And Upsell Their Customers

From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 02:00:03 +0000

The winner of the Audience Choice Award during TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco , CardFlick launched with an application for building digital business cards on your mobile device and sharing them with new contacts. Rather than bumping to share those cards, users “flick” them to other users who have downloaded the app. After that, the next step was refining things. To do that, CardFlick has joined the most recent 500 Startups Accelerator class and is working on the next big transition in its evolution. To start, it’s adding more features and functionality around its core card product. While CardFlick initially launched with a limited number of themes, it has been working on providing more customization for its users. The startup is currently doing that through its Instacards site. The next version of the CardFlick app — which will be released over the next few weeks — will bring similar customization features available to the app itself. But CardFlick founder Ketan Anjaria sees an even bigger opportunity ahead. The team brought on Jared Kopf, cofounder and CEO of deals company HomeRun ( acquired by Rearden Commerce last September), as an adviser. And as part of its 500 Startups experience, it’s begun working on expanding beyond just business cards and the way people present themselves to others. It’s all part of a pivot toward the introduction of a new product that will be introduced at 500 Startups Accelerator demo days on July 17-18 in Mountain View and July 23 in New York City.

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From SF Disrupt To 500 Startups, CardFlick’s Next Trick Is Managing Your Personal Connections

Talkdesk Puts Your Company Call Center In The Cloud

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 01:45:18 +0000

Most businesses need to be able keep in touch with their customers and provide customer service over the phone, but rolling out a call center can be expensive. Not just that, but most call center software today isn’t very good at keeping tabs on customers and presenting all the information that businesses need to serve them better. That’s why Talkdesk is launching its cloud-based call center software Tuesday as part of the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. The startup enables call agents to know everything about customers when they call, based on reverse lookup of the customer’s phone number, without having to ask for their information. It also integrates with the existing CRM systems that companies use, such as SalesForce, as well as helpdesk software like ZenDesk and Desk.com. But it also hooks into Twitter and Facebook to find public information about customers from social networks. Not only does Talkdesk handle CRM and help desk features, but it also allows agents to make, receive, record and transcribe calls. It gives a history of the customers’ previous interactions, including items purchased and searched, the amount of money spent, and previous calls made. Since the service operates in the cloud, all of this information is available in the agent’s web browser when a customer calls. Talkdesk is based on Twilio technology, and was founded as part of the Twilio Fund contest last year. Launching today, Talkdesk is making its cloud-based call center software generally available to anyone who wants to sign up. Because of its cloud-based infrastructure, businesses can sign up in less than five minutes. Talkdesk was part of last summer’s 500 Startups Accelerator class, and has raised $450,000 to date. It has three employees, based in Mountain View, Calif. Disrupt Q&A Q: What are the things that company buying your product gets ROI? A: When you use Talkdesk, you have all the information about the customer, and you can quickly answer problems and make suggestions. Q: Do people replace existing software, or layering on top? A: Customers we have now don’t have call center software. Q: Regulatory issues from recording phone conversations? A: You have to tell the person, but you can add information before someone answers the call. Q: Pick one customer and explain the use case? A: Chevy, for example, using for support and one for sales. They have two numbers, and can see all information about the customer. Q: What would a customer use instead? A: In the example of Chevy, they have big call centers, but nothing for this type of solution. Out goal is to eventually to go big in the enterprise. Q: Price points? A: First agent is free always. So customer tries one agent, and then expand. We charge $49 per month per agent. Q: A lot of your focus is on the telephony side of things and that’s important, but a lot is moving to social media. A: For now, we are only voice, but integrate with email systems like ZenDesk. But the phone is still the main avenue of conversation for all businesses.

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Talkdesk Puts Your Company Call Center In The Cloud