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Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service

admin2 — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:35:37 +0000

Amazon is continuing to grow its collection of streaming video titles at Amazon Prime Instant Video, and is today announcing another new agreement with Paramount Pictures bringing “hundreds” of new movies to the service. This deal isn’t as large as March’s partnership with Discovery , which saw some 3,000 new titles added, but it does introduce what are arguably more big-name movies. Included in the deal are titles like Mission: Impossible 3, Braveheart, Forrest Gump, Mean Girls, Nacho Libre and Clueless , to name a few, and Amazon says more will be added “soon.” With the new deal in place, Amazon Instant Video now offers over 17,000 movies and TV episodes for unlimited streaming by Amazon Prime customers who can watch online or on their Amazon Kindle Fire. For what it’s worth, “17,000+” is the same number that Amazon was touting earlier this year, so the increase via the Paramount deal didn’t include enough of a selection to warrant a new “milestone” announcement on the company’s part. Prior to the Discovery deal, Amazon signed a similar deal with Viacom in February , which then brought the number of titles up to 15,000. And in December, the count was 13,000 . So yes, the service is growing, and relatively quickly. Other popular movies you’ll know from Paramount which are now online include Star Trek, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Top Gun, The Italian Job, and The Truman Show. In total, the service offers 120,000 titles which Amazon Prime customers can either rent or buy. The videos will be available at no extra charge to Amazon Prime customers who pay the $79/year for the service, which also includes free two-day shipping and access to the Kindle Lending Library.

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Amazon Partners With Paramount, Brings Hundreds More Movies To Prime Instant Video Service

Airtime Acquires Former Hulu CTO’s Startup Erly, Raises $25M Series B Funding

user — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:02:02 +0000

We’ve discovered that Airtime , the video startup founded by famed Napster alums Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, has allegedly made its first acquisition — before truly exiting stealth mode. The target? Erly , the Kleiner Perkins-backed startup aimed at letting people create social experiences around their experiences. Update: We’ve confirmed the acquisition with a source at Airtime, and have been told that it will be announced along with a new $25 million round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins, including Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures. As part of the new round of funding, Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon will be joining Airtime’s board of directors as part of the new funding. Update 2 : The news has now been added to Airtime’s company blog , but at press time their entry does not include details on the size of the funding round. It seems like an interesting fit at first, but as soon as you scratch the surface it all comes together. Erly’s founder and CEO is Eric Feng , a super sharp young industry vet who previously served as the Chief Technical Officer at Hulu. He alone clearly brings a lot of video and managerial experience to the table. What he’s built at Erly is still very early stage (ha, ha) but from what we’ve seen it’s a solid product. LinkedIn says that the company has around 10 employees. Airtime, which is set to launch on June 5th, has taken its time to work on building something big. It would make sense that they’d want to bring together a rockstar team to make the most out of that crucial post-launch period. Of course Fanning, and especially Parker, have attained rock star status of sorts in this industry and beyond — which comes with a very unique set of expectations. Bringing on the likes of Feng and his team is a savvy move, for sure.

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Airtime Acquires Former Hulu CTO’s Startup Erly, Raises $25M Series B Funding

Netflix Co-founder Joins Getable’s Board To Help It Bring The Rental Industry Online

Administrator — Wed, 23 May 2012 00:51:19 +0000

Getable , the artist formerly known as Rentcycle, started out with a mission to bring the rental industry online, offering free, realtime reservations for consumers along with business management tools for local rental shops. It’s an ambitious goal, and one that found almost immediate support from investors . However, in tackling such a big obstacle, the startup quickly learned that it would need to go deeper, so in March, it re-branded as Getable, rebuilt its website, and took a page from OpenTable’s book, launching a more robust in-store rental management solution for local shops. In so doing, Getable made its cloud-management tools available to businesses through both web and iPad apps, allowing businesses to organize inventory data, customer information, payments, view analytics, while managing in-store reservations through the same system they use for online reservations. Like Square meets OpenTable for the whole rental industry. The OpenTable influence in Getable’s solutions for the rental industry is no accident. As part of its seed funding back in August , OpenTable Founder Chuck Templeton joined the startup’s board of directors. In turn, Getable co-founder and CEO Tim Hyer also struck up a relationship with Jeff Jordan, the former chief exec at OpenTable and current partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and both Jordan and Templeton have since, to varying degrees, helped to shape the startup’s approach to the market. And, while it’s certainly a steep hill to climb, that market is a big one, as rentals collectively represent an $85 billion industry. Unsurprisingly, Templeton and Jordan are not alone in seeing both a huge market opportunity and big potential for Getable’s business model. That’s why the startup is today announcing that Marc Randolph , the co-founder and visionary behind Netflix will be joining Templeton and Collaborative Fund Founder Craig Shapiro on the startup’s board of directors. Obviously, this will not be Randolph’s first experience with online rental platforms, having been at least partially responsible for the video rental industry moving online, much to Blockbuster’s chagrin. He also currently serves on the board of BookRenter.com and has invested in P2P car rental marketplace, Getaround. “The idea of shared access is a concept I first embraced at Netflix,” Randolph said in a statement. “I’ve since had the chance to deepen this commitment through my involvement with Getaround, BookRenter, and Quintess. Getable brings the same kind of access to consumer products, everything from tuxedos and power tools to sporting goods. Moving a traditionally offline industry online is always an exciting challenge.” If payment systems are played correctly and find the right fit for the type of business they serve, they can have the potential to completely alter the customer experience at that local store, including the entire flow of business on the floor. But it’s not easy introducing small merchants, who are used to their offline systems, to a new model. It requires them having to put their entire store, including the way it operates, and flows, in the hands of a new system and technology — in this case, Getable. It’s for this reason that the startup has cleverly decided to focus on a particular geography and a particular vertical. In conjunction with Randolph joining its board, Getable is announcing its first official vertical focus: Bike rental. Like so many others, the majority of bike shops still organize their rental reservations with pencil and paper. And considering Hyer estimates that 2,500 bikes are rented per day to tourists in San Francisco, Getable is focusing its efforts at home, forging partnerships with top bike rental chains like Blazing Saddles, Bay City Bike and Big Swingin’ Cycles, all of which will be using Getable’s tech to run their store operations. Since rolling out its in-store solution last month, Getable has already received commitments from businesses representing more than 50% of all bike rental volume in San Francisco. And with some veteran leadership experience on its board, Getable will be looking to accelerate expand its reach to an even greater extent in the coming weeks. OpenTable and Netflix have both followed extremely successful trajectories in their push to digitize rental services, so you can’t ask for much more than to have their founders in your corner. For more on Getable, check ‘em out at home here.

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: “Entrepreneurs Don’t Appreciate When They’re Onto A Good Thing”

jos — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:56:19 +0000

TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington sat down with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha in another fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 this morning. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal during its sale to eBay , and today considers himself a champion of consumer web plays. He also sits on the board of hot startups like Eventbrite , Square , TokBox , Tumblr , and Jawbone , to name a few. And he’s an investor in other startups like Unity Technologies , a company helping developers build 3D games, as well as the interesting (and sci-fi-ish) Gene Security Network , which Botha describes as helping parents have healthy babies via in vitro fertilization. Of course, Arrington then asked how close we were to being able to design our own babies, and Botha, taking the question seriously, answered that it was “feasible to some extent today,” but that there’s “just an ethics question.” (Oh you think?) But the more interesting parts of the interview involved Botha’s vision for entrepreneurs building companies today, and his concerns that not enough are focused on the long road ahead. Arrington asked Botha to expand on several earlier statements he’s made, where he encouraged tech founders not to sell too early. Botha had said that “people need to be more greedy, and more patient,” for example, and noted that Sequoia “loved being in business with entrepreneurs that want to build something enduring.” He openly pondered what the tech ecosystem would be like if companies like Facebook, Apple and Microsoft had sold out early, too. Arrington also asked him to list other companies that had sold too early. Botha did say he would always wonder about what would have happened with YouTube had Google not acquired them. “Google has done a fantastic job,” said Botha, who also interestingly noted that YouTube was now profitable. “Entrepreneurs don’t appreciate when they’re onto a good thing,” said Botha, “the long run can be speculator,” he said. Companies can even see 10x returns after going public, he added, saying that it took LinkedIn eight years to build its business to the scale it is today. Taking a note from Steve Jobs, Botha then encouraged entrepreneurs to build something that “makes a dent in the universe.” One of the more controversial portions of the chat involved Botha’s discussion of Sequoia’s scout program which PandoDaily recently uncovered. Botha said that the spirit behind the program, which he described as “stealth” but not “secret,” was to give entrepreneurs the chance to make angel investments of their own before they’ve achieved liquidity. Sequoia even had internal discussions about whether or not to make a public announcement about the program, he said. The firm has “a small amount” of money invested in this program and dozens of scouts, but Botha took issue with claims that entrepreneurs didn’t know where the money was coming from. “We always wire the money,” he says, indicating that it would be hard for a startup founder to not know that Sequoia was behind the investments.

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Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: “Entrepreneurs Don’t Appreciate When They’re Onto A Good Thing”

ooVoo Rolls Out Video Chat Apps For iPad And Facebook

admin — Tue, 22 May 2012 18:00:43 +0000

Consumer video chat provider ooVoo , which has more than 46 million users worldwide, is rolling out new applications that will make its service even more attractive. And the service, which is popular among kids and young adults, will remain free on all those platforms, with monetization provided primarily through advertising served up to web users. ooVoo allows customers to create chat rooms with up to 12 participants which can be accessed through a number of different platforms and devices. The new iPad and Facebook apps come on top of apps for the iPhone, Android, Web, and PC applications that consumers can use to chat with their friends. Although up to 12 participants can join ooVoo chats, the new iPad app, available today, provides up to four simultaneous HD video chat streams to users. And with the Facebook app, the already social app will make it easier for users to find friends and to connect via video chat. In addition to sharing video chats on Facebook, ooVoo users can send invitations via email or by texting an ooVoo call link. In an ooVoo video chat through the company’s new iPad app, CEO Yuval Baharav told me that its young user base frequently uses the app for ambient communications, basically leaving their video chat windows open for hours. The average users watches about 200 minutes of video chat sessions per month. Users frequently use ooVoo as a way to remotely collaborate on music and other projects, and many record those sessions and upload them to YouTube or share them on Tumblr. As a result, ooVoo has added a free video record feature that they can use, taking the friction out of this popular usage of the app.

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ooVoo Rolls Out Video Chat Apps For iPad And Facebook

Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M

Budowniczy425 — Tue, 22 May 2012 12:01:42 +0000

Video conferencing startup Vidyo announced Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from Juniper Networks as part of the network equipment vendor’s Junos Innovation Fund. The funding comes alongside existing Vidyo investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo makes video conferencing software that allows organizations to very efficiently and effectively make and receive video calls across any number of connected devices. Its video compression technology is based on H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC), which can be used to deploy high-quality video conferencing, even on constrained mobile networks. The company sells some video conferencing equipment directly to enterprises, but it also has a large and growing OEM business, with partners such as HP, Google, Ricoh, Hitachi and others licensing the technology to put in their own products. The Juniper investment could signal either a possible acquisition at some point in the future — or at the very least a much closer partnership, which could mean integrating Vidyo’s video conferencing technology directly into its networking equipment. Juniper partnerships and strategic investments that have turned into acquisitions include Ankeena, which was also part of the Junos portfolio before the network equipment manufacturer acquired it outright in 2010. Juniper also integrated the technology of Packet Design , another company in its portfolio, into its networking equipment. And Juniper was rumored to be looking to buy portfolio company Cotendo before it was acquired by CDN competitor Akamai. Vidyo is headquartered in Hackensack, NJ, but has 12 other offices and 225 employees worldwide. While terms of the Juniper funding weren’t disclosed, they bringing total money raised to $97 million since being founded in 2005.

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Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M

Wishpond Launches Mall360 To Bring Your Local Shopping Mall Online

ACMAir — Tue, 22 May 2012 06:34:22 +0000

Like Milo before it , Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store , which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook. While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking to capitalize on the growing interest in social commerce, its solutions have really been developed as means by which to expand on its core competency: Consumer-facing product aggregation and search for retailers. And today, Wishpond is leveraging its technology for the sake of a segment underserved by eCommerce solutions: Shopping malls, launching Mall360 , a service that enables malls and shopping centers to offer their shoppers a browsable, searchable product discovery app that works across their Web, social, and mobile properties As eCommerce solutions mature, more and more consumers are doing their shopping online, from start to finish. However, while 90 percent of shopping begins online today, the majority of people still prefer to buy products live, in local stores, rather than online. For the most part, shopping malls are still in a past decade when it comes to their approach to eCommerce, even though customers continue to visit their stores when they’re ready to buy. Mall360 gives shopping malls a way to increase their visibility online in a way that lets them better understand and influence potential customers while they’re in the process of making their purchasing decisions, while they’re searching, talking about products with friends, and planning their next excursion to the mall. For outlets that may house dozens of brick and mortar retail stores, Mall360 lets visitors search and browse through all the products found at the shopping center through visiting the mall’s Facebook page and clicking on a “Shop Our Stores” button, for example. To enable this cross-platform service, Wishpond is leveraging RetailConnect, its scalable platform that imports, aggregates and processes large volumes of product data from websites, point of sales systems, and eCommerce platforms. It then uses this data, along with its search and publishing capabilities to enable malls to instantly deploy its product discovery app on their mobile and desktop websites, mobile apps, and Facebook pages. The goal is to be able to give consumers an easier way to search for and discover products at their favorite local retailers, while in turn, giving retailers the ability to boost social interaction, traffic and both website and social engagement. According to the Wishpond team, malls can choose to deploy some or all of the components of its solution, and over the next few weeks, participating outlets will begin to deploy the solution across their digital properties. For more, check out Wishpond at home here , Mall360 here , or see the video below:

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Wishpond Launches Mall360 To Bring Your Local Shopping Mall Online

Machinima Gets $35M In Funding, Led By Google

Administrator — Tue, 22 May 2012 04:16:30 +0000

After weeks of speculation , online video creator Machinima announced Monday that it has closed a $35 million funding round led by Google, which also included existing investors Redpoint Ventures and MK Capital. The new financing comes as Google’s YouTube has been investing heavily in bringing in all sorts of new original programming. The Machinima network is the largest single page view generator for YouTube, with more than 1.6 billion video views in the month of April. And YouTube is an invaluable partner for Machinima, as it is the company’s primary distribution and monetization platform. With the funding, Machinima says it will invest in content and global sales, as well as international expansion and distribution. For Google, though, it signals another move toward betting on teams that have proven their ability to grow and scale in what used to be the Wild West of online video. Last year, Google acquired Next New Networks and leveraged it to create YouTube Next, a program for helping independent content creators to improve their video production skills, as well as better leveraging social and other channels for grabbing viewers attention. It’s also betting more than $100 million in an effort to fund a whole new group of independent video channels on its platform. As I wrote this morning , the race to add interesting independent content is on for a number of streaming providers, including Netflix, Hulu, AOL, and Yahoo, all of which see an opportunity to grow an audience of young new video viewers without having to go through traditional broadcast or cable TV distribution channels.

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Machinima Gets $35M In Funding, Led By Google

Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies

bestcbstore — Tue, 22 May 2012 04:12:19 +0000

Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield. Even though we will have brand new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant companies, so be sure to check all of them out below. The Internet was buzzing with positive words about each. This is going to be a tough battle. Which company was your favorite? Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making SpokenLayer Read the web with your ears. SpokenLayer delivers the written web as audio. Instantly. Read by authors, real people and really smart robots. In your pocket, on your time. Answer Factory Cyfeon invented Answer Factory to improve how businesses made decisions and understand their data. Answer Factory immediately operationalizes any data source, regardless of its format, size or location, resulting in improved answer quality. Ark Ark is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even search your friends across multiple social networks. Koemei Koemei is a self-service cloud-platform and API for automated transcription and captioning of video content at large scale. Incident (gTar) Incodent is a consumer electronics company aiming to make creating and interacting with music as enjoyable and casual as listening to it. Session 2: Disrupting Processes UberConference UberConference is a simple, free and visual conferencing tool. BroadPeak Partners Broadpeak Partners brings you K3, an interface harness that standardizes interfaces without the complexity of EAI/ESB. CallApp CallApp was founded in 2011 by a group of passionate industry experts, well funded VCs and angels. CallApp makes each call more fun and productive. Powered by a Universal Crowdsourced Contact-Genome, CallApp provides the Ultimate Calling Experience via its Social Phone CRM & Interaction Platform. Open Garden Open Garden lets you share your mobile Internet among all your devices. KurbKarma KurbKarma delivers a social network for parking that connects people with killer parking to people seeking parking. This mobile app facilitates a peer-to-peer exchange and rewards both parties – parking karma at your fingertips. Session 3: Disrupting Media Punch! Punch’s interactive publishing platform radically reduces the cost, time and risk of creating apps for tablets by removing the need to code. It also enables Punch’s orginal entertainment iPad app, the “Punch! Culture Shelf”. StyleSaint Designer goods for under $100. An online eTailer where the community sets the trends. Stevie Stevie turns online video and social graphs into a broadcast-like TV experience, creating entertainment that is personal and social across platforms. TagBrand TagBrand is the service for people who love brands. Babelverse (Startup Alley Audience Choice Winner) Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day One! #TCDisrupt

Achilles — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:30:45 +0000

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it’s time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best one to date. Follow the team’s coverage here . If you’re unable to attend don’t worry, you can join the conversation on Twitter by following #TCDisrupt . So here’s how the day breaks down: Monday, May 21st 8:50am – 9:00am Register for TechCrunch TechRecs 9:00am – 9:10am Opening Remarks 9:10am – 9:20am Welcome 9:20am – 9:40am Fireside Chat with Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) 9:40am – 10:00am Founders Stories with Jason Goldberg (Fab) 10:00am – 10:30am Building the NY Startup Ecosystem: Brooke Hammerling (BrewPR), Josh Miller (Branch), Alexis Ohanian (Y Combinator), David Tisch (Tech Stars), Jake Schwartz (General Assembly), 10:30am – 10:35am A Special Product Announcement 10:35am – 10:50am BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 10:50am – 11:15am When Will Fashion Tech Just Be Fashion?: Neil Blumenthal (Warby Parker), Ashley Granata (Fashism), Jennifer Hyman (Rent the Runway), Alexis Maybank (Gilt Groupe) 11:15am – 11:35am Power Play with Tom Katis (Voxer) 11:35am – 11:55am Fireside Chat with David Karp (Tumblr) 11:55am – 12:15pm Fireside Chat with Brad Garlinghouse (YouSendIt) 12:15pm – 12:30pm Power Play with Andrew Keen 12:30pm – 2:00pm LUNCH and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 2:00pm – 2:25pm Engineering on the Best Coast with Harry Heyman (Foursquare), Jason Pearlman (Zynga), Serkan Piantino (Facebook) 2:25pm – 2:30pm How the Battlefield Works 2:30pm – 3:30pm Startup Battlefield: Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making Judges: Josh Kopelman David Lee David Tisch Spencer Wang 3:30pm – 3:45pm BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 3:45pm – 4:45pm Startup Battlefield: Session 2: Disrupting Processes Judges: Adrian Aoun Fritz Lanman Dave Samuel Michelle Zatlyn 4:45pm – 5:00pm BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY 5:00pm – 6:00pm Startup Battlefield: Session 3: Disrupting Media Judges: Chris Fralic Shana Fisher MC Hammer Ron Palmeri 6:00pm – 7:30pm Browse Startup Alley 9:00pm – midnight After Party hosted by Getaround Greenhouse 150 Varick Street Conference badge required for admission

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TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day One! #TCDisrupt