Social network paradox

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Editor’s Note: Nina Khosla is a designer and founder of Teethie, a social blogging startup focused on building interest-based communities. You can follow her @ninakix.

Over the years, there’s been a radical change in the way we interact with our networks of friends online. It used to be that we had a few of our friends (online or offline friends) on a service, allowing us to connect to friends through the Internet and see what their activities were. Where the Internet used to be a somewhat scary world full of strangers, we suddenly had friendly anchors to explore that world with. Sure, most of our friends weren’t online, or at least not using the same services, but the familiarity was comforting and the ability to see what a few of our friends were doing allowed us to find new content and new friends.

We fell in love with sites that made us feel like there are people out there who are similar to us, who we are talking to and having common experiences with. But then, some of these networks — Facebook and Twitter in particular — began to grow explosively. Facebook facilitated a cultural norm of using its service to “friend” everyone we knew. All of a sudden we had tons of our friends everywhere we went. With the experiences gained sharing online spaces with a few friends, logic would dictate that having more of our friends online would make this experience richer. But that isn’t what happened.

Instead, there is a new trend happening: We’re not really paying attention to our friends we’re connected to online. Take Twitter, for example. Twitter used to be a great place for many early adopters to talk tech. It wasn’t so long ago that there were few enough people on Twitter that you could read every single tweet in your stream.

But as the network began to become more dense, and people found more people they knew and liked on Twitter, they began following hundreds of people, and reading all those tweets became impossible. This is such a fact of life that entire companies are based on the premise that you have too many friends on Facebook and Twitter to really pay attention to what they’re saying.

For example, Flipboard, among others, highlights its abilities to share with you the best of your friends’ Twitter and Facebook posts. These companies, and even Facebook’s news feed intelligence, are helping us deal with the disconnect we have with our friends because of our connectedness—they’re sorting through the deluge of information this expanded network created for us.

Therein lies the paradox of the social network that no one wants to admit: as the size of the network increases, our ability to be social decreases.

Like anything else, networks and the information flowing through them follow the laws of supply and demand. As the number of bits, photos and links coming over these networks grew, each of those invisibly began to decrease in worth.

Perhaps that explains the excitement over new products. When a smaller crew of people are using a tool, such as Foursquare, we can keep track of our friends’ locations and whereabouts. At a smaller scale, knowing this information and being able to expect that others have also seen it let us all in on a little secret, it made early use of Twitter feel somewhat magical. But as the number of friends begins to increase—particularly over that magic Dunbar number of 150—the spell begins to wear off. At this scale, we simply can’t easily keep track of it all. When our number of connections rises above 150 everything becomes simply comments, as real conversations tax our already limited ability to interface with the network.

What used to be a small community of web explorers and renegades had turned into nothing more than a large party of somewhat meaningless Foursquare checkins and an excessive use of hashtags. That mythical thing, social connection, doesn’t flow over these networks; information flows over these networks. The only reason the network ever felt meaningful was because, at small scale, the network operated like a community. But that breaks apart at large scale.

Which leads us to communities: Communities, the kind with clearly demarcated lines of membership, have always existed within the context of larger networks, and always broke off in bits and pieces to make them feel familiar. Communities, and the spaces that are given to them to form in, are the only way we are able to work with the network of the physical world. Our soccer team, our school, our workplace, our street, our town, all have their own communities. And I suspect that these are the only things that will make the digital world similarly manageable.

Communities give us an audience and a perspective. We know who we’re talking to. This doesn’t seem like a big thing, but it’s the glue that holds our communication together. It’s the difference between shouting out into the void, and having a conversation with someone standing in front of you.

What’s the difference between live tweeting a sports game or participating in an SB Nation game thread? A tweet is not an experience, it’s the broadcasting of an individuals’ experience to a vague and undefined audience. When I think about the kinds of things I tweet, they’re things like “I just read a cool article, check it out,” or “About to get on a plane,” or “GOALLLL!” if my team (the San Jose Sharks) has just scored.

The thing about all these is that they’re not a shared experience—they are my experiences, which I am sharing with you, but you probably cannot experience with me—my thoughts or fascination with the article I just posted, the feeling of getting on that plane, or the thrill of watching the Sharks tie the game. Perhaps you can compare your notes of your own experience of these things; that’s what most Twitter conversation seems to be, to me, but the experiences are not shared.

This differs from a discussion in a community, such as the type that occurs on SB Nation game day threads. The conversation does not center around any one individual’s experience, but rather the collective condition of the community. The conversation is the experience. Each comment is driven with the purpose of evoking and expressing the emotions that the community experiences, and particularly the ones they hold in common.

This habit of evoking and expressing common emotions is what drives inside jokes and their internet incarnation, memes. Sure, there are disagreements and differences in communities, but the magic is in the similarities: Knowing that everyone on there is also a Sharks fan and just swore at the TV over that goal is emotional and valuable. That’s what expands the sense of belonging and membership that people in a  community feel, and becomes a basis for the entirety of the rest of the discussion (even, especially, differences).

SB Nation is in real-time, but it doesn’t have to be: communities have sprung up for years on traditional, slow PHP bulletin boards. Lost fans populated message boards and blogs, uniting over their common love of Lost, and the way the show antagonized them—what is in that hatch?!

If the pattern of all our networks is to grow larger, as Facebook has pushed others around it to become, consumers will hit these limits on the meaningfulness of these networks. If we are creating social products, we need to create products that do allow people to be social, really social.

We need to build products that don’t just allow users to write and publish, we need to create products that encourage discussion, experiences, and lasting, meaningful relationships. These are the things that create real benefits for users and the products that inspire them. And thus, the future of the social web is no longer on a network, it’s within communities.

Teethie is stealth startup currently building a social blogging tool focused on building communities of like-minded individuals.

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Nina Khosla is a 22-year-old designer and entrepreneur that went Stanford and learned about Product Design. She’s a high school drop out, a ski racer, and is currently working...

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Seesmic is focused on social enterprise; Android, iPad Debuts Apps for Salesforce CRM

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney advocacy and community relations in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where it was ... ? Read More

Social application developer Seesmic makes a big step in social enterprise and debuting dedicated Android app and iPad app for Salesforce CRM product (Windows phone 7 will also be added soon), called Seesmic CRM. Android app will be published tomorrow morning at Salesforce at the annual Conference, Dreamforce and Seesmic launches iPad app within a few weeks.

For the background of Seesmic, which was founded by a French entrepreneur Loic Le Meur, allows you to monitor and follow up the social web. Seesmic desktop, Internet and mobile clients integrate with Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Bonus using an application like Seesmic is the ability to combine your streams from a variety of social Web services such as YouTube, Foursquare, Techmeme, LinkedIn, and others.

But lately, Seesmic dabbling in the enterprise and launch more focused business functions. Last fall, Seesmic has deep integration with Salesforce enterprise social network chatter. And then earlier this year, Salesforce 4 million Australian dollars round in Seesmic.

Mostly Seesmic Android and iPad apps CRM lead all the functionality of Salesforce CRM for mobile phones. Users can search their Salesforce.com account from native applications; Search for leads, contacts, accounts, related activities and sets of chatter on the move; Creating and updating leads, contacts, tasks, and activities; Log calls and emails after meetings; and much more. And applications use mobile OS; to map users to their respective leads to their current location; upload photos and more. While prices had not been announced yet, Seesmic may charge a fee of $ 10 per month per user for the application.

Le Meur tells us that he does not compete with Salesforce CRM giant, because currently does not offer in-depth Android and iPad apps. In fact, Seesmic is working "hand in hand" with Salesforce mobile group to develop these native apps. And Salesforce particularly bullish on social enterprise at the end — "Welcome to the social enterprise» is the theme of the Dreamforce this year. As Le Meur said: "we are working with Salesforce, not compete with the company."

Of course it's interesting that Twitter's developer platform is shifting focus from building consumer and focusing on the enterprise. In March, Twitter basically told developers avoid compete with them on their own customers. It's not that Twitter doesn't want developers to build off their platform, they simply do not want developers to create clients that simulate Twitter's own services.

Thus Seesmic found new user base in the area of business. Le Meur explains that the use of mobile and social enterprise of the future for Seesmic. While the startup will not relinquish their Web and mobile applications (Android app company has more than one million users); all efforts of Seesmic now completely focused on attracting social for business users, "said Le million euros.

Seesmic BlackBerry app shuttered a few months ago. You can watch Le million euros in a recent conversation with TechCrunch TV Andrew Kina here.

(Disclosure: TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington was an early investor in Seesmic.)

Seesmic is a powerful set of social media and collaboration tools that provide businesses and individuals with everything they need to build and manage their brands online. WITH ...

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HealthTech FAIL: lessons for entrepreneurs from startups health gone awry

Editor's Note: this is a guest post written by Dave Chase, CEO of Avado.com patient relationship management company, which was a finalist in the TechCrunch Disrupt. He was formerly a management consultant to medical practice, Accenture consulting for 25 hospitals and founder of Microsoft health business. You can follow him on Twitter @ chasedave.

Healthtech represents the sector is constantly growing, but from a pool of $ 1 billion that VCs poured into startups in the past year, medical companies only got about 3 per cent of the total. Not so many startups healthtech were able to provide these large enterprises cartridges; However, last week, I drew the attention of one company healthtech seem to be doing it right: Zocdoc, which raised $ 50 million round from summer time earlier this month and suggested some points to consider for startups looking to draw lessons from experiences in Zocdoc (check out the post here.

As the above company numbers from Rip in the post, a lot of startups have not yet really demonstrated the wisdom shown by Zocdoc, resulting in an increasing number of failures healthtech over the past few years. A recent study, inter alia, underlined the phenomenon. After interviewing 110 digital business health RockHealth has recently released the findings of the study, showing the gap between companies that actually receive funding and the many people who have come up empty.

This trip sheds light on why so many companies could not blow healthtech or had to undergo significant changes in order to survive. Below you will find some of the best reasons for startup failure healthtech:

The lack of specific attention or acceptance of terms

Is well known that insufficient attention kills startups in healthcare or not but it is especially common in health care. Healthcare industry suffers from an abundance of pain points and is in serious need of shocks, so it's tempting for new startups to try to resolve them to make the greatest impact. However, these startups ignores the old saying about how to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. Too many startups biting off more than they can chew. It is better to choose one major pain to deal with and go with him.

Expected consumers to pay

With the exception of weight loss programs there are not many examples of consumers pay directly for health services. Over time, this may change, the greater burden of healthcare costs gets switched to consumers, as outlined in part II of a series of health disorders (see references below). Nevertheless, I would be very cautious of any business, expecting that consumers pay in the near-term.

Expected users to enter much information

Although I believe there are more reasons why Google Health is not expecting consumers to enter information is one of the major factors in why personal health records (PHR) failed to gain significant traction. Most of the PHR rely on individual data entry, and few are willing to do so.

Requires an enormous amount of money

This tends to occur during periods of bubble where there is a grand vision and frothy financial markets threw huge amounts of money. Eventually, they were not sustainable franchise.

Require multiple and complex partnership

These runs depends on too many partnerships are likely to run into problems, these partnerships often involve the established players. Unfortunately established players have significantly different sense of urgency. Many good ideas die on the vine, waiting for business development and legal departments on established players who do not share launch a sense of urgency.

There is no understanding of the dynamics of recovery

This is definitely the number one reason why healthtech startups failed. The results of the study RockHealth highlight an important aspect of this. On a positive note 77 per cent of the VCs think health IT investments will increase in the United States by the year 2011. Already 35 digital health care companies with $ 2 m + in year 2011. It is important to note that 80% of them receive funding are B2B (i.e. sale of health professionals in business, etc.), but most entrepreneurs digital health surveyed think consumers will pay for your product or service. Despite this most entrepreneurs digital health early build B2c companies.

Before it's too late, I hope these companies will find a way for anyone except consumers pay. This can be through advertising model or technology licensing for organizations. In this case, the consumer is a product, not the client. The client is an organization.

You can find a complete study of RockHealth in embedded below for your viewing pleasure:

The following is a series of health violations listed above:

Health violations: Pharma 3.0 will encourage the transition from life science investing HealthTech
Health violations: providers will use the HealthTech differentiate and produce better results (part II)
Health violations: providers do newspaper industry mistakes (part III)

Fragment image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Avado is a patient relationship management platform that enables health initiative, a partnership between the individual and their health & wellness vendors and gives individual health related records.

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Dave is CEO and co-founder of Avado. Avado is a patient relationship management platform that empowers a health partnership between individuals and their & health wellness providers during ...

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Event site transactions sells 5 million ticket Goldstar, adds function automatically place you and your friends

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Ticket sales for enterprises, nothing beats, "sold". But whether the flight is selling all their tickets or sports team fills their Stadium, the show must go on. Enterprises with perishable inventory can benefit from daily transactions model and those that you can make money on additional goods (purchase, which make up for revenues lost in offering discount) you can often break even — Take movie theaters and sports venues, for example.

This occurs when a company called Goldstar enters into the field. Gold Star-based membership site live entertainment half price tickets that allows sites to unload their additional tickets, make some extra income and generate word of mouth marketing.

GoldStar, which currently has relationships with more than 5000 place partners (from Cirque du Soleil and Ticketmaster in San Francisco) and paragraphs Matt coffin, Emmy award-winning actor Neil Patrick Harris and former Ticketmaster CEO Sean Moriarty as members of the Advisory Board wants not just become a "Groupon entertainment tickets.

To differentiate their models from the likes of Groupon and LivingSocial, Goldstar avoids revenue sharing with merchants and monetizes, instead taking a fee for each ticket ($ 4.50 in average), allowing entertainment — or show themselves — to take home the full cost of each ticket sold.

So far this model works for the ticket site entertainment as Goldstar recently announced that it sold its five millionth ticket and now has more than 2 million members in more than 20 major markets in the United States. The site currently offers 1200-1500 half price tickets every day.

Of course, as anyone who has used ticket discounts knows — so far so good, just satisfaction of scoring a deal on tickets, we want to be able to go in a movie or show and sit with our friends. Unseat. Me, for example, the attack is a friend, allowing subscription owners to offer their tickets with friends until their sale of anonymous people at StubHub.

Today, gold star announces its own solutions to ticket buyers and suppliers to address this problem with its characteristic "Sit with friends". GoldStar in new patent allows Goldstar members who purchase tickets for personal reference, then they can share with friends via email or social network of choice. Users can use this link to buy tickets in the same event and automatically get seated with their friends.

With five million tickets sold, the Goldstar has come a long way since he sold his first party tickts horse Ballet in Pasadena back in 2003 year. The company never accepted outside investment, however, managed to stay profitable — with only a dozen staff. GoldStar CEO Jim Mccarthy said that the key to the armed forces of resistance to large sales La Groupon was to cultivate its existing relationships with the places and shows instead focus on closing new merchants who can never use the site again.

From the perspective of the future road map, Mccarthy said that Goldstar is looking to expand into new cities in the United States and to improve its core technologies of construction of the new features, such as sit with friends that encourage people to get out to see live entertainment — in spite of the tough economy.

Founded by former GeoCities, Warner Bros., eToys, Overture, Morgan Stanley and Noah's bagels staff in 2002, the Golden Star is a website that is dedicated to helping its users to go to ...

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ModoPayments will finally monetize-registration?

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ModoPayments’ simple and comprehensive solution for providing mobile payments is interesting and what’s more, its offer-based approach may have finally cracked the code for monetizing check-ins. This is something that mobile location-based service providers (LBSs) like Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla and ShopKick have, no doubt, been laboring over since their inceptions. And while ModoPayments is, at present, a non-NFC mobile payments platform, they plan to integrate with NFC too, when NFC reaches retail maturity.

Based in Dallas, Texas and led by CEO Bruce Parker, ModoPayments is a startup with a goal to do exactly what their tagline says – “convert redemptions to payments and make payments mobile”. What exactly does that mean? First, know that ModoPayments definitely has a payments piece and I’ll come to that in a moment, but a supremely important part of their business plan is creating and tying value offers to the purchases they enable in order to enhance and promote their mobile payments solution. They create monetary savings that users can cash in on if they transact with ModoPayments instead of another tender.

It has often been stated that mobile payments are a solution searching for a problem. Indeed, what is the big deal about pulling a card out of your wallet vs. pulling your phone out of your pocket, to transact? Where is the value to drive the mobile payment other than convenience?

Modo thinks it has to do with offers and they have integrated a framework for redeeming merchant offers with their payments platform. This makes sense to me. If I had to choose between paying with my Visa card in my wallet or my Visa on my phone (that also happens to give me a big discount on the purchase) I think the choice is obvious. So right out of the gate, ModoPayments has tied a distinct consumer value proposition to their service in order to drive usage (they hope). Google Wallet has a similar concept. It will definitely be a motivator.

The platform makes it possible to, in the words of Bruce, “generate a mobile payment transaction at any location that accepts either Visa or MasterCard with no change to POS and no change to the phone that uses ModoPayments.” It can exist as an SMS or native app solution; customers can choose either touchpoint.

I’ve heard this one before, but their scenario is really simple and honestly sounds like it might work.

HOW DOES IT WORK?

First, a customer creates an account at the ModoPayments website and registers a credit card with that account. When it later comes time to pay for something at a participating location, the customer texts “VISIT” to the Modo short code or else they check-in with the Modo native app. (In the text scenario, Modo will try to triangulate on a customer’s network location. If they can’t locate them, ultimately they will just ask the customer via text—‘are you at X location’ and via process of elimination, locate them).

After Modo have verified that the location matches up with a supporting offer, they will create a randomized credit account number for that location which is good for one transaction only. They then load it with money that the merchant or other 3rd party has set aside for the specific offer.

Next, they will grab the difference still needed to complete the sale from the customers registered credit card. In essence, they are creating pre-paid card numbers that will only work for a limited time and that are loaded with money from both the offer provider and the customer.

Then, they send half of the account number to the merchant and half of the number to the customer. The two sides combine their numbers to create the actionable account number to complete the transaction. (The merchant half of the number may or may not be static and therefore might not even need to be sent).

Pretty tricky. So here they have tied a distinct merchant value proposition to their service—no costly POS change required plus a mobile marketing channel.

SHOW ME THE MONEY

Logistically, that is how they are enabling the mobile payment but another concept they are focused on is information sharing. Using the ModoPayments framework, users can track their entire purchase history, merchants can see anonymized purchasing trends to track/create effective offers and the location element will act as a security feature and help bolster the ability to relax chargeback percentages in order to turn those into profit.

For example, normally for “card-not-present” credit transactions (like Modo’s) an extra percentage is taken from the merchant who accepts these card-less numbers as protection against fraudulent purchases in case there is a chargeback.

Because ModoPayments has these sophisticated technologies that can prove exactly where a transaction is happening and by whom, and because they also control the randomized account numbers they can potentially minimize chargeback risk. This will allow them to work out acquirer relationships in such a way that they keep that usual 1% markup and turn it into profit. I am not sure how they are going to pull that off, but it’s a great idea.

MONETIZE CHECK-IN

I think the payments piece alone is cool and the info sharing piece is borderline scary but what I really zeroed in on is what this could mean as a payments solution that benefits the check-in concept. Customers can check-in with ModoPayments via text or native app, but Bruce said that other LBSs could also own the check-in part if they want. Modo is open to that.

So here’s the thing…if pulled off correctly, this service could finally monetize check-in in a way that hasn’t happened before. Modo could provide the framework for the offer and mechanism for transacting, while the location service could act as the visible marketing channel. That extra 1% could be sliced up a few ways so everyone could get a piece of the action. Then, it just becomes a volume game.

For example, a merchant has an offer and advertises that either directly though ModoPayments or within say, Foursquare. If the Foursquare check-in helps drive the offer redemption through ModoPayments, then they get a piece of that transaction, affiliate-style. It would therefore behoove Foursquare to help advertise it. This could be the part of their puzzle that has been missing and could be very attractive to the major LBSs while at the same time could help to drive ModoPayments adoption.

WHAT ABOUT NFC?

I’m rather pessimistic about NFC’s short term viability for completing mobile payments in the retail space. No doubt it will be a useful mechanism once the merchant value proposition is defined. As it stands, that has yet to be clarified for me, in toto.

Sure, consumers want it, but is that enough of a reason to validate merchant expense incurred purchasing and installing the hardware needed, just so a small percentage of early adopter consumers can leave their wallets at home? Consumer desire is one thing but there needs to be a clear, strategic and financial value for the merchant too, especially if they are footing the bill for NFC enablement (e.g. buying hardware).

It’s a big, credible expense and there are just too many unanswered questions in my mind to think that NFC payments are as close as the Google Wallet announcement would lead some to believe. Forrester’s Charles S. Golvin and Thomas Husson have said that

“Relying on an installed base of phones that is today indistinguishable from zero, a single payment system, a single card issuer, and a modest network of merchants capable of accepting these phone-based payments means that the near-term impact will be negligible.”

That’s why the POS-less concept ModoPayments has put together is a great interim step.

Don’t get me wrong, I think eventually NFC will embed and payments solutions will have to incorporate with it and account for it. It’s definitely one way to solve for the physical proximity needs of a mobile transaction. It’s still a couple of years away though. That’s just my opinion.

And really, I’m not sure consumers care if their mobile payments solution incorporates NFC, 2D barcodes or a freakin’ chip in their butt…they just want an easy way to purchase that matches the evolving mobile lifestyle of traveling light, planning on the fly and managing on the go. It’s just how people are staring to do things. We all know this.

Ok, they might actually care about a chip in their butt. You get my point though.

WHAT’S NEXT
ModoPayments has a few pilots scheduled to launch in Dallas in the coming weeks, so we’ll hopefully be able to get a look at how this concept is playing out in the real world. I will definitely be watching for when and how those pilots work out. They will also be presenting at Finovate 2011, in New York later in September. Until then, check out their light and clever little video at modopayments.com.

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Quixey raises US $ 3.8 million, for functional search engine for your applications

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Quixey, on the basis of the Palo Alto startup that builds functional search engine for your applications, today announced that it closed the US $ 3.8 million series a funding round. Investment venture partners led the WI Harper group and the United States, with the participation of Webb investment network, along with subsequent investments, Eric Schmidt innovation. Series round adds to Quixey $ 400 K, grew in April from innovation endeavours to attract investment to $ 4.2 million.

We've all heard (and maybe even prototyping) quip "there is an app for that." It's really excellent quality of the Mobile revolution: there really is an app for just about everything you can think of, from call taxis for managing schedule scan for cancer or heart murmors skin. But it's also overwhelming, and find the application you want is not easy. There are a lot of noise and a lot of flawed approaches to app engine.

Quixey entered the game with the intent to build a new type of search, molded specifically for the unique features of the search for these everywhere, but sometimes elusive apps. Their decision came up with "functional search", which not only scans the major App stores, but blogging crawls, review sites, forums and social media sites to create a truly comprehensive picture of what the application can be done through reviews, Word of mouth and demos.

Quixey for search engine enables the user to enter queries like "baseball report and get a list of applications that provide only that (which they can then filter by platform). And the best part search Zarins Windows and Mac apps, iGoogle, extensions, and much more. It's not just the iOS and Android.

Although the Quixey seemingly to compete with the likes of Chomp and other, startup also has added value offers in the nutritional status of the search for other App stores, search engines and Web sites — just like Google — to facilitate the diffusion of its search engine for third-party sites throughout the Internet.

So it comes as no surprise then that Eric Schmidt innovation Ventures invests in search a great application. Attraction of external information and data from blogs, review sites and beyond, really adds an additional level of depth search applications (especially in being independent of the platform), as well as nutrition search through Web sites gives Quixey the ability to scale and be mixed with the very place it scans. Startup will use its new investment to continue achieving partnership with App stores and other app a great third party resources, and teammate Quixey, there are more than 25 potential partnerships in the pipeline. More partners, the more effective it becomes search engine.

This is an interesting new approach this "functional search, and from my experience so far, works as advertised. Chimes to let us know what you think. More about Quixey here.

Quixey is a functional search engine for your applications. Use the applications in your daily life. You are using Google apps on your phone, in your browser, social networking and ...

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Killer startups? BlackBox releases report/application to help avoid Deadpool founders

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

It's not just green — or entrepreneur. The inherent risk of becoming an entrepreneur or startup founders is high. Sleepless nights, sweat equity, bribing new users come to your product — it's all part of the nerves, spinning and teeth grinding process. That's why these thugs mainly pirates in nature. But it's true that question several startups to ever make it far enough to find a buried treasure or piggyback on Facebook before fame; in fact, cold, hard reality is that more than 90 per cent of all startups fail.

This is why four young international entrepreneurs (Ziba Herrmann, Max Marmer, Fadi Bishara, Alexander Markov) created a so-called report launch genome because they wanted a deep dive into what makes a successful launch — and that causes so many to drink from a cup of FAIL.

67-page report, created in collaboration with scientists from Stanford and Berkeley, collects data from 3200 startups to date in order to work towards the creation of foundations for a new foundation for a more effective assessment of startups — by measuring thresholds and main stages of development, navigate through the early stages of a Web company. (Read our initial coverage of the launch of the genome report here.)

The report, which has a comprehensive and scientific approach to the analysis of trends launch was a success; has been downloaded 15000 times and in more than 150 publications in 20 different languages. But perhaps more importantly, the report (and subsequent data, add new companies and entrepreneurs) has already begun to show some interesting results — this can actually benefit those very people analyze. Namely, co-founder of Ziba Lasse Herrmann tells me the number one cause of the startup failure: premature scaling.

Herrmann said that group study found that 90 per cent of the startups that are 70 percent scaled prematurely, which sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic impact on the success (or lack thereof) of their business. Self-destructing and not competition is the bane of most startups, it seems.

Thus the team behind the report, which also created the business Accelerator, called Blackbox (designed for the use of data collected from their R&D projects), wants to move beyond static reports and a tool for startups that will help them to deal with this widespread problem of premature scaling.

Today team Blackbox produces start compass, a tool built to be a recipe for premature scaling by comparing the progress of the company "5 main interdependent aspects", according to Herman: customers, products, teams, business model and finance. Compass provides entrepreneurs with the dashboard for monitoring progress on these parameters, helping them better priorities on a monthly basis, as well as help them find any inconsistencies in these measurements.

According to Herrmann many startups have problems whose solution priorities follow, not to mention measuring their effectiveness once they do, "almost always land in the proverbial grey zone". He gave these issues as classic examples of start of uncertainty: "good 5 per cent, increase retention? I have enough users to announce product market fit? Currently, step on the gas pedal and scale? "

Compass, then, is a simple benchmarking tool to reduce this grey zone by evaluating the startup type and stage of development and then compare the data of other startups of the same type and the stage — on 25 core indicators, to help them better understand their current location (and the efficiency of their direction).

For those who wish to check the Compass beta you can find it here. BlackBox is looking for feedback from entrepreneurs and founders, too, as she wants tools that actually benefit those who are there in the wild and woolly world accent — not only to researchers. This joint project, Herman said, and one that can have real consequences more data it collects.

Readers who want to check the Blackbox mini genome report report Launch: additional premature scaling-up can be found here.

BlackBox set out to find a scalable way for faster startup. As part of our opening we started genome project start to uncover mechanics as startups ...

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Cisco acquires collaboration software Maker Versly

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Cisco today announced that it has acquired San Francisco launch Versly, a privately held company that develops collaboration tools that integrate with Microsoft Office applications.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but all the Versly staff will be integrated into the Cisco collaboration software group (CSG) to the end of the purchase.

Versly builds plug-ins that allow groups of people to collaborate around content within Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and e-mail.

From the looks of it service remains private beta, so this is a quick way to Versly.

Here's how Murali Sitaram, Vice President and General Manager, Cisco's CSG buy resin:

"Cooperation is the main priority in Cisco. With this acquisition we are strengthening our offers of cooperation and improving the user experience by integrating social technologies in business individuals and group applications at work. "

Versly and software will be integrated into the victim as Cisco Quad, Jabber and WebEx.

According to the characteristics of their CrunchBase Versly was supported by seed funding from Accel Partners, increased, core enterprises, 500 startups and a pair of Angel investors, including Scott Dietzen, Kenny Van Zant, Jonathan Katzman and Rasool RAYANI.

The company was started by former BEA and Sun exec Benjamin Renault and former Yahoo-er Erik Eccles. The rest of the team here in detail.

Versly integrates with Word, Excel, and Powerpoint, making it easy for groups to stay organized and on track is always and everywhere.

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Cisco develops and sells equipment maintenance, software, networks and communications. Products are divided into five brands: Linksys, Cisco, WebEx, IronPort and Scientific Atlanta. Cisco was founded in. ..

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Venturocket launches AdWords inspired work market kill summary

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He may not get quite a lot of media coverage as the VMAs at the moment, but we are all aware of the fact that the economy remains in a toilet. Unemployment is still more than 9 per cent, and articles like this in detail, just how long it takes for the average American to find a job, job-seekers and giving up the search after only 5 months.

Of course part of the problem is simply not enough jobs are created, but it is also true that the current state of the workplace and markets today leaves much to be desired. Venturocket, job, service based out of San Francisco, today launches a new spin on the old model, which he hoped would prove more efficient way to match job seekers to employers. With a nod to AdWords to boot.

To start Venturocket founder and CEO Mark Hoag said he wants his service to dismantle old standards search work and rebuild the model from the ground up. For the Hoag, this means no more than a summary not more cover letters and classified ads. With the old, in with new. Venturocket also does away with the charges and fees for job seekers and employers, starting instead only charge a small fee to actual connection, i.e. the applicant gets called interview actual.

As an alternative to the CV and applications, services, requires potential workers to remit their skills and knowledge in these skills is by selecting them from a common pool of choice removing interference duplication and picky search filters.

But that's where the model Venturocket sets her apart from other job seekers: actually bid on keywords that describe their level of knowledge in specific work or qualifications, so you in very real terms, put your money where your mouth is. You are a developer of experts? Well then you can say that you are worth $ 20 and prospective employers to pay that price to talk with you, and you pay the price in return.

In fact Venturocket brings the same model used Google AdWords to determine the fee structure for your ad on the job search process. It is different (and possibly a bit above method) for determining the value of individual connections, but Hoag said he thinks that, having providers and seekers pay a nominal fee, however, he would ensure that both sides are really interested in each other, and that establish a connection. Quality of communication.

Otherwise, the service opened for jobs in each sector and freely join, find and use for the vacancy. Professional skills, it is easy to sort and separate serving results commonly used listings and related fields. Venturocket wants to abandon the need to spam hundreds of job sites and employers with your resume and hastily written cover letter, allowing employers to choose only from among the candidates with the best matches of the skill, leaving job seekers relax in knowing that they will automatically get in touch with the companies that they don't have to spend time compiling saccharin cover letter or prepare a professional headshot.

Now some may put off the fact that you have to spend money to bid for popular keywords, but as Hoag said usually there is a misconception that it is wrong or it is not possible to spend the money as part of the job search. Actually, people spend a lot of money, job seekers and Venturocket in the model, you pay only for those skills that best describe your level of knowledge — and if the employer pays the same way to get in touch with you. Hoag said he understood the model can be attractive for the top 2.5% of job seekers, but the other 97.5% of people are the ones who really need help.

Now of course, to the Adwords keyword price model passes range from $ 1 to $ 100, and for the sake of Venturocket, the price of keywords will be determined on the basis of competition. So there's a chance some titles are up, but Hoag said that, for example, Adwords, he expects the average price is significantly lower — $ 2.

You can also suggest that this model would find people adding hundreds of keywords to describe their level of knowledge, but Hoag said he wants to limit them to manageable numbers incentivize completion, so employees can enter up to 30 words, while employers can add up to 15.

Venturocket testing interesting solution with its new service, and it will be very interesting to see if the Adwords model tests well in the labour market. The idea has some real action on it, but people can really become comfortable with a service that bypasses traditional work assets like resumes and cover letters and replaces them with keyword bidding?

Chime in and let us know what you think. Learn more about Venturocket check 'em out here.

Venturocket is a space where job seekers rely on their skills by employers for Cherry picking and the best talent. Bid price reflects job seekers ...

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NFC mobile advertising startup Tapit raises seed funding

Tapit is a new mobile advertising startup, founded in March 2011, that facilitates the sharing and delivery offer NFC-enabled phone by simply clicking anywhere Tapit, you can find the logo.

The company is currently raises seed round of financing from Sydney angels in record time – just 22 days from the field until the round was signed to. This is the quickest investment to date for Angels, Sydney, not-for-profit membership Organization for Angels, which usually invests in Sydney-based startups.

NFC (near field communication), short-range wireless technology, is often associated with mobile payments and mobile wallets these days, as a new way to enable the purchase to the cash. But this is just one of many cases of possible uses for technology that can also support things like file sharing and media between devices, advertising, ticketless deals and much more. It can even be used to perform an action in a NTT DOCOMO TAP "follow" offer, which allows two Twitter users to each other simply by clicking the phone.

The idea is to use the Tapit NFC for use in marketing campaigns, working with agencies, brands, handset manufacturers and carriers. Marketing services include mobile commerce, coupon distribution, ticket sales, surveys and reviews, content delivery, contests and social community (e.g. tap here to "like" us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter).

The company is already involved in several campaigns this year – one for a group of radio Nova Australian radio network billboard JCDecaux and another for Australia's channel 10 TV show "LATVIA" and the third with NFC-based sales in shopping malls.

Says director Jamie Kaninghèm Tapit, speed, which was closed in this round is the approval group Tapit, and business models that we have created around our unique NFC technology. All whom we meet likes the idea of Tapit, it is addictive.

NFC, indeed, will step up from the now ubiquitous barcode scanning technology, which involves the use of Smartphone applications to scan QR codes via camera phone. Unfortunately the NFC usually requires accompanying chip, built into the phone itself. Due to this requirement, it is now back, a limited number of supported phones.

Nevertheless, analysts bullish on NFC in the future, with ABI, predicting 35 million phones to 2012, and Frost & Sullivan, assessment of about 868 million by the year 2015.

Tapit conditions in seed investment were not disclosed, but the Fund normally invests sidecar Angels Sydney between $ 100 K-$ 500 K in its portfolio companies.

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Russian giant Yandex search gets social news startup Tweeted times»

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Yandex, one of the leading Internet companies in Russia, has acquired a startup enterprise "Times" Tweeted that lets people create custom online "newspaper" of their Twitter accounts. Financial terms of the purchase were not disclosed, but ESPN Sports said it aims to continue to offer social news service and that the whole team "Times" Tweeted to join search engine company.

Tweeted once co-founded Maxim Grinev and Maria Grineva, computer scientists at ETH Zurich, Switzerland and others.

Its users include celebrities like Snoop Dogg Alyssa Milano and Lance Weiler.

Yandex, which became public in May and is currently estimated at just shy of 10 billion dollars, plans to use the technology acquired from The Times, Tweeted to increase its search and content services with information from social networks.

This is the third Company Yandex acquired in the past nine months – his most recent purchases include single sign-on plugin maker Loginza and WebVisor in technology of analysis of behaviors and commands.

Tweeted once, formerly called the Twitter times competes with social news curation service Paper.li, which itself has raised more than $ 2 million in funding.

Another company operating in this space — Summify.

Yandex is an Internet technology company that operates in Russia and CIS countries. This is the largest Russian and seventh largest in the world of Internet searching. "Yandex" is an acronym for. ..

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Mobile ad network millennial MEDIA saw about 50 million dollars in revenue in 2010 year

Leena Rao is currently working as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school Medill School of journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007 she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney advocacy and community relations in New York. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where it was ... ? Read More

We know that mobile ad network millennial MEDIA has more than tripled revenues in 2010, 2009, and achieve profitability. But we did not know how many in the mobile advertising network brought in until now. In 2011 the last Millennial Inc. 500 list saw 47.8 million turned out in 2010, income, more than 3000 percent from 2007, $ 1.5 million in revenue. And although we don't know what the Millennial net income, we know that the company is profitable.

Millennial is one of the largest remaining independent ad networks Google bought AdMob, and Apple has acquired Quattro. There is no doubt that many technology companies through the eyes of the Millennial goal acquisition, but the company has managed to preserve its independence in spite of increased consolidation taking place in the mobile ad space.

In addition to Millennial in independent ad network company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple applications and sites, essentially the power of self-service ad network for these companies. And the millennial deals with "prominent Internet media company" (but declining to name the company), which is fully running mobile advertising at the millennial.

On the basis of comparison, AdMob reportedly had 100 million dollars in revenue, run course, when it was purchased in the year 2009, which could put his actual revenue in the $ 40 million (AdMob Division revenue 60/40 with publishers). It's unclear if the Millennial in 47.8 million in 2010, income is post-split.

I hope we will see more detailed information on financials Millennial when a company files S-1 for public offer in the coming months. CEO and founder Paul Palmieri had ambitions of taking public companies, and the timing may be right, considering that this seems to be the year of tech companies IPO. In may, Bloomberg reported that Millennial talked to bankers on the IPO, which could come in the autumn or early 2012 and valued the company at a whopping $ 700 million to $ 1 billion (AdMob was sold to Google for $ 750 million).

Given how most companies refuse to disclose the exact financials when they are private is always interesting to see revenue numbers pre-IPO.

Millennial MEDIA is the leading independent mobile advertising and data. Millennial MEDIA commands an impressive share of the mobile display advertising market. The company's technology, tools and services ...

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Joint brings group chat for Twitter

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

About a month ago, Tom Anderson (Myspace Tom, if you prefer) wrote a post on his new favorite social network, Google +, offering a few bits of advice for Twitter. Although many of us enjoy good Twittering now and again, Anderson pointed out that there are several simple features, Twitter could consider if it wants to improve the overall quality of its users. The thrust that could improve social experience Twitter were company to add a "discussion" or chat feature that will, in Tom's conception, to give the Viewer provides a space for you to leave a comment and discuss easy tweets without flooding followers streams from one part of the conversation continues.

Well Tom may simply be interested in a new startup launching today, is called the joint. Okay, well this is not an exact copy of Myspace founder idea, but it attacked the same point the pain of long-discussed Twitter users: in desperate need of better platform to facilitate real-time, private and longer form conversations. Of course there are some differences among users over whether Twitter should be one offering this function, or whether it should remain simple, just like this.

Says joint founder Ethan Gahng (and I tend to agree) that Twitter is better served by staying simple in terms of its user interface and instead allows third party startups and developers to add additional social and chat features from the outside world. (And Twitter in the past few years seems to be largely in line with this philosophy).

To achieve this objective, the joint essentially turns any Twitter hashtag in IRC (Internet Relay channel)-as a chat room, which is integrated with real-time hashtag stream from Twitter. Check it out below. This combo box allows users to participate in a number of different social interactions, including front and center real-time Group chat, which fills with live hashtag channel in the right sidebar.

Users can pull hashtags directly in group chat, or invite people who posted tweets in group chat, right from the chat, or just go and enjoy the synchronous chat, watching as Twitter stream fills. Compared with Hootsuite, Tweetdeck and other third-party applications that let you track hashtags, being able to watch someone Tweet outside and bring them in and chat away this thin borders and differences by joint, what really makes a big difference.

If you're trying to engage in conversation with someone on Twitter, that goes beyond a few @ replies, "you either have to DM or the conversation of other countries. Sharing allows users to easily join group chat, and also to discussing major or popular hashtags. For example, in recent times "# irene" became used as hashtag as Hurricane Irene ready to hit the East Coast. The joint could be a very useful resource for those who want to easily gather and discuss the current situation, such as hurricanes, protests or events, live, from anywhere.

Another cool joint in the aspect that it should function as an informal conversation environment for Twitter users means that if I have a conversation with someone and a third person joins a chat room, they will not be able to see the current conversation. It says, is intended to ensure joint Gahng group chat more interaction in the real world.

That joint in cases of alleged use Gahng said that it is easy to connect to other people on Twitter, but it's hard to really get to know them, so that through the joint, you can meet someone on Twitter that you want to play Starcraft, with many of your followers do not wish to join in on the fun. Which is why open standards Warrior Chris Messina offers a hashtag in the first place, but certainly not so many people regularly follow hashtags in their day-to-day use of Twitter. Joint looks at this change, making it easy to search for different hashtags, discuss and follow them synchronously in real-time. As an example, check out Starcraft feed here.

Not to speak of the fact that, because tweeting with hashtags means that your tweets get archive and live eternally in search engines, etc., many people feel uncomfortable about the availability of public conversations (more private matters, especially) on Twitter. We've all had to delete a Tweet or two and often too late. Giving Twitter users who added benefit social flexibility, joint hopes to give yourself a leg up on other third-party Twitter apps.

And finally beyond just the ability to monitor the hashtag groups, joint also informs the user when a new user in chat room, offers search descriptions and enables users to view main catalogue or even start their own hashtag channel.

Joint solves major pain point, often faced by Twitter users and from my experience at chats and poking around the site, the user interface is simple and chat is a fast and easy to use. A multidisciplinary team of three people working on this since January and run the initialization at the moment, but if the platform can be scaled and continue to work in real-time without glitches, this seems like something that can definitely legs.

Joint and his team is not affiliated with Twitter in any way, but I wouldn't be surprised if social networks comes knocking at the door at some point down the road.

For more check the joint houses here.

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Native or Web site? Bizness application adds HTML5 platform for small and medium-sized businesses create their own applications — to both

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Bizness Apps launch, which gives small businesses the means to quickly and easily create a mobile application that launched in October 2010, and is growing like gangbusters, reaching more than 1000 applications that 10 languages and more than 20 countries in less than 9 months. She also recently teamed with WuFoo to give small and medium-sized businesses the ability to create and seamlessly add contact forms, online surveys and invitations for their applications. Startup also has interesting founding story that provides useful lessons for your business. Check out our April coverage here.

Bizness Apps value proposition is simple: run wants to make mobile applications available, customizable and easy-to-small business owner. Thus starting offers DIY iPhone, iPad and Android application platform that enables SMB to create, edit, and manage mobile applications without any programming experience required. You start with a template, customize them to meet your business and then Bizness Apps makes them native apps and distributes them on iTunes and the Android market.

Run is not without competitors in this space as iSites, SwebApps and mobile Roadie are targeting similar endpoint. But real Apps Bizness advantage that this product is easy to use, well designed, yet remains accessible. Price for use iOS or Android platform-$ 39, while those who want to create Android applications and iOS are paying $ 59. This accessibility is very appealing for small business, wants to take advantage of the mobile business without having to fork over thousands of dollars to do so.

Native apps are great and all, you could say, but what about this should HTML5 revolution? Where is my Web applications? Accelerated, the fact that heated debate whether the app developers should go to HTML5 or native apps (as evidenced by mg on the post titled back in February), the Bizness Apps founder and Executive Director Andrew Gazdecki said that he thinks that the best approach is to place a bet on mobile as a whole — not one or the other.

That is why the launch today announces the launch of HTML5 version of the platform for their DIY mobile applications for small businesses. With this new Web feature service, users now have the ability to create almost identical mobile experience for every mobile platform, including iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and so on — they can go native HTML5, or both. For an additional $ 10 per month.

Within the framework of the launch platform for HTML5 Bizness Apps built QR code enabled mobile marketing template to provide a simple and affordable way to market their mobile applications for clients small and medium-sized businesses. Image template, as shown above, is automatically generated (with the possibility of printing) with one click from within the platform for HTML5.

The idea here, said Gazdecki, is to help direct business customers for the relevant applications based on what type of mobile device they are using. For example, if a user has an Android phone, they scan the Android themed QR code assigned to business Android app.

Another important piece of the puzzle in the establishment of a development tool agnostic application platform for small and medium business is the existence in the mother and HTML5 and accessibility and the new possibilities of mobile marketing, Bizness Apps became an interesting platform and is well-positioned to weather the native vs. web apps debate.

Startup offers a coupon code for 25 free apps for readers, TC, which you can check by signing up here. Coupon code "techcrunch".

For more check the video below:

Bizness Apps makes iPhone and Android applications, accessible and simple for small businesses. We have DIY iPhone app platform that allows small businesses to easily create, edit and manage ...

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Sending Turntable.fm ShortForm demonstrates VJ video participants (with Custom TechCrunch social)

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Turntable.FM is so hot right now. In fact when it comes to tweets, synchronous social music platform can even be more Klout than Pandora or Spotify. With the growing popularity of gramophone records, it is quite natural that the video curation platforms will be ready to take a cue from the site by dance music and bring the disco video.

Two weeks ago, we reviewed starts cold, which is almost a direct analogue of the concept Turntable.fm for video, except that in the case of the chill, there's "Salons" as opposed to a DJ turntable rooms. Stretch, I know. Of course when it comes to social video experience, there is Socialcam and Google + that allows you to watch videos with your friends online, but there are a lot more potential here for interactivity, as shown on the turntables.

ShortForm, a year and half old start running help video fanatics create personalized channels of Web video content also recently adopted the synchronous, social video experience, as he recently started his Live video of participants of integration, which allows video jockeys for broadcasting video content to a live audience.

When we first told ShortForm back in March, running only crossed the million visitors milestone and continues as ShortForm Director Nader Ghaffari told me that in July alone, run attracted 1 million unique visitors.

This is a key leg up for ShortForm entering hot space, its new feature video party was built on the basis of thousands already curated video feeds from sources such as YouTube, Vimeo and almost every other video platforms out there.

As ShortForm had already begun to make it easy for their VJs mix video with these platforms in their own personalized channels, broadcast back-to-back format as the TV viewing experience. Thus ShortForm VJs can play their own curated video channels for their audience or choose from thousands of other VJ channels from the Channel Guide to run.

Of course, until now, the launch VJs were viewing video content asynchronously, but with the beginning of the video, ShortFormers can now view curated video content simultaneously with hundreds of other friends and communicate with other visitors, while they watch, both turntables.

The neat thing about ShortForm in approach is spotlights profile photos of all viewers in live video party lead in this additional level of social interactivity between spectators and VJs. of course when it comes to playing what video, VJ host controls the party and shown. However, the host may, at any point transfer "deleted", so to speak, any spectator, making it the viewer in a new VJ. If the original node is not like what they see, they can always snatch the remote back from violator VJ and regain control over play what cat video.

"Big vision I see here," Ghaffari said: "this is the first wave of stars in the online video content creators. Now with so much content is produced daily, it is possible to create a new generation of stars. These stars are VJs, anyone can curate this content in feeds that tell amazing stories and share these links with friends and spectators around the world. Live video of the parties to give these VJs social and interactive way to tell their stories. "

Live video Party really have the potential to be exciting and interesting experiences, especially via live chat, as viewers can discuss in real time what they see or take-off and start their own party. The fact that users are able to pass the baton around too and give power VJing to other users, goes a long way to building a truly interactive video platform.

To give readers a taste of the TC party video experience, ShortForm created custom instalment focuses on the TechCrunch brand experience, in this case specifically Chris Dickson "founder stories." Viewers can join each other, as well as ShortForm staff to watch an interview with concurrent flow Dixon. Of course the host usually can take remote control for other spectators, but in this case, this is the founder of the history, all the time. This is a good example of how you will be able to customize their pages and their video experience to grab the eye views and maybe even $ VJs, brands, etc.

Check stories founder party here.

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Monetate gives control consumer experience back to the marketing of new testing and targeting tools

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Earlier this month Monetate, a platform that provides marketers with testing and orientation services for their websites, announced that it closed a $ 15 million series b round of financing led by OpenView Venture partners, which is added to $ 5.1 million series a round, the company raised in December, first round capital and gateway. With more than 20 million dollars on the shore of Monetate develops new platform that gives marketers more control over messages and actions on their Web sites, as well as testing, targeting and personalization tools.

As we reported a few weeks ago, the coolest part about Monetate platform is that it can be installed using one line of code. The latest version of the launch of its cloud-based platform allows marketers to integrate customized content and functionality of Commerce Server and the site visitor's browser.

"One of the unfulfilled promises from the early days of e-commerce was that marketers can deliver the right customer the right message at the right time," says CEO David Brussin Monetate. "With Monetate, we added a new level of flexibility in eCommerce, marketing experience, giving marketers the ability to make educated decisions campaign that will directly help to increase conversion.

Moreover, as marketers and marketing team so often on the move, Monetate 11 enables its customers to test, target and personalize their websites for the iPad, giving users this additional layer of functionality to mobile devices. Another bonus: all current users of Monetate will be automatically upgraded to a new version of its platform.

11 Monetate, like its predecessors, aims to cut the mediator IT by controlling the creation and measuring marketing campaigns and serving to customize your user experience for marketers. They just type "who, what, when, why" campaign dashboard Monetate and platform takes care of everything else, offering users the possibility to use the clone campaigns, labelling and filtering.

Marketers will also be able to do automatic A/B test vs. control group, track results in real time, so that marketers can quickly see the effect will have their new campaigns. Users will also have the added advantage of new targeting options, including geo-targeting for your messages and promotions to visitors to a particular place, on the basis of Weather targeting and behavioral targeting.

Monetate customers now will also have the opportunity to test and deploy their own HTML and JavaScript, the purpose of the recommendations are based on complex business rules and access to all the data they need traffic segments and buying patterns make informed decisions about promotions, messages or other materials, they deliver to consumers through its analytics and reporting.

Monetate-really no-brainer for marketers, eTailers and ecommerce. This is an excellent solution, and together with the infusion of new capital, the launch of the new version may very well have legs. In the end, the platform has already attracted brands like Petko Urban Outfitters, sports authority, QVC, casual male, Dick's sporting goods, the use of targeting and testing services for their e-commerce platform — and Brussin told us that the company added hundreds of millions of collective income for these enterprises, eliminating the need for enterprises to hire specialized groups and reduce bounce rates and shopping cart abandonment.

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XYDO, Web social network for news, brings daily, custom sticky notes to your Inbox (invites)

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Where do you get your news (TechCrunch, of course)? Some of you may be familiar to the tactile experience of newsprint, ink on my fingers, but chances are that your news consumption is largely online — or on a mobile device. But thanks to content fire hose, which is the Internet, there are a lot of irrelevant junk floating around out there, and thus focus digital readers and content distributors has improved filters, aggregators and readers of this channel noise in the signal.

Whether your go to resource for real-time news will be Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, or TechMemes the world we all are looking for simple, curator, and social, way to use content from the sites we believe — as we would like to, but not so frequently visit.

XYDO, run, which began in May and raised $ 1.25 from EPIC ventures and many of the angels in June, hopped in the space of social news, user experience, which combines the best parts of sites like Digg, and Hacker News in an effort to serve you with relevant, curator and social news from top content houses.

XYDO met with early success (over 750000 unique visitors in August only) from this very idea: he wanted to be news, which effectively prioritizes content that really matters to you. Firstly, it does so through its Web platform. But what if we don't want to click over XYDO.com each time we want to get the latest news?

To expand its mission news personalization and try to hit the user with a virtual version of rolled up newspaper directly at home, launching today announces the launch of XYDO brief, which seeks to deliver a personalized and relevant news based on the user's social interactions, networks, and traces all email, place they may constitute at least once a day.

News by email? And this is nothing new, you might say. And you'd be wrong. But XYDO hopes to offer a value proposition and an opportunity to rethink that position, combing your social network to ensure a truly just and real-time Web method to get the news through the Inbox. A brief XYDO uses the same social, sourcing mixed with actual human curation techniques that it uses its flagship product.

Each piece of content that enters the system (from more than 100000 content sources) is scored based on the recommendations of its launch 2 million + contributors and curators. Using the secret sauce of social network aggregation and prioritization, mixed with crowdsourced Conservancy, XYDO serves its users in between personalized News 10-12 in each email is passed these guidelines have been tested to ensure social news you get in your Inbox you want to see news.

The default value for the XYDO a brief — one message per day, but users can navigate to and select the different categories of explosions (whether "technology" or "policy"), they would get, as well as how many of these notes they wish to receive, and what time of day. For those who live on the wire this seems very similar; This e-mail version widely available.

Thus, for those of us who in one way or another to spend all day in our mailboxes, being able to tinker with a simple service, which you configure in an attempt to provide a simple way to read news without having to go look for our social networks and favorite content sources — is of paramount importance.

Also note: XYDO provides readers with TechCrunch with 500 exclusive (and free) should check their new product. To test the service for yourself, click here. Then come on back and let us know what you think.

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Vizibility raises $ 1. 3 M, makes you look good when people Google you

Robin Wauters is currently staff writer for TechCrunch and lead editor of Virtualization.com. In addition to its activities, professional blogging, he is an entrepreneur, the organizer of the event, from time to time the Council consultant and an angel investor, but most importantly champion full launch. Wauters lives and works in Belgium, a tiny country in Europe. He can often be found from his home or ... ? Read More

Vizibility, a provider of personal branding platform for individuals and companies, today announced that it raised $ 1.3 million people in more than $ 1 million for seed funding.

Enterprise Group Launchpad Boston led round and was joined by additional investors from Angels Boston Harbor, New York Angels and Angels tie, as well as a number of independent investors from North-East and Europe. Previous backers also participated in the round.

Vizibility was founded in 2009, and is headquartered in Manhattan, New York.

The company offers online identity management platform for individuals and companies, which allows them to the priest and share their online identities, including personalized Google search results, professional profiles, contact information, and much more.

SearchMe's buttons, links, and QR codes can be shared and posted on websites, blogs, business cards, marketing materials and whatnot. Its services are distributed primarily in the form of an integrated function of social networking sites, including job search, online reputation management and Executive profile hubs as well as dating sites.

Vizibility as "Google Me" button for career professionals. Through a simple wizard Vizibility service allows people to quickly create an optimal search Google for themselves based on ...

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Ness serves up their first personal search app to open a restaurant

MG Siegler at TechCrunch to write for the 2009 year. It covers web, mobile, social, big companies, small companies, almost all. And Apple. A lot. Prior to TechCrunch it covers different technologies beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, mg attended the University of Michigan. He previously lived in Los Angeles, where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where ... ? Read More

Last night I went out for lunch. But I didn't get where I was going, Ness did. Location was good. Only one for Ness.

We previously covered Ness calculations in July, when talking about technologies that will power their possible applications (as well as their funding). Today, the first such app has gone live in the App Store, called simply, Ness. This is a personal search engine, meals in restaurants. And that's fine.

While most of the food and restaurant recommendation apps focus on ratings from the general population, Ness adapted around social, as well as your own taste. Others have tried this before as well, but Ness seemed to have nailed it thanks to a ton of data they've been pulling up the app even started.

They can do this because they hook into Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter (as well as several other smaller sources) find signals some of the restaurants. People tweeting about liking them? Users check out there much? These sorts of things. This helps determine which restaurants Ness must show you within an application.

When you first load up the app, you are asked to assess ten places you have visited. This helps calibrate points "Likeness" of the key recommendations. Those scores likeness appear as probability percentage that you like the restaurant shows. This, together with the proximity and social data to determine what restaurants are provided to you.

But the application from a search engine in the more traditional sense. You can easily search for different types of food, whether General or specific. And you can choose to search in other cities. Or you can change the search options to limit your search by price and weed out the more circuits, for example.

When you find your favorite place you can go deeper to get hours, phone numbers, website, etc. you can also save space to return later. And you can share restaurants with friends with the click of a button.

They key to app, though, is the ease of use and data accuracy. I constantly find similarity ratings were roughly correct what my actual rating be for restaurants, I was in and the system will only get better, how do you appreciate more space.

The appearance of the application is also beautiful. I said that we can thank the initial team member iPhone Apple previously and now with Ness, to do so.

Remember that restaurant recommendations just step one of Ness hopes to offer. Next steps will indicate similarity engine to shops, music, nightlife and entertainment. All that can be done in one killer, subjective mobile search system.

You can find the Ness in the App Store here. Unfortunately, it is only for United States at the present time.

Ness mission – to make calculations of personal search. Combining an understanding of human nature on their experience in search, recommendations, and social networks, the company can deliver the experience ...

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Ustream partners with Telestream to broadcasters of all stripes live video production tools

RIP Empson-writer at TechCrunch. He did not find friends here, he is here to win and you don't forget it. You can contact him at rip [at] techcrunch [dot] com ? more

Last month, Ustream has launched its streaming service on the iPad video. As Jason in that time, the application allows users to view live and recorded streaming content via the Internet and even upload their own images directly from their iPad 2s.

This step was a big step forward for live streaming video on a tablet device, especially that last function allows users to be couch videographers. Of course since last year, Ustream, there are a number of applications that give users additional value features that can make the sofa videographers in the Pro video creators for video editing.

Today Ustream announced partnership with Telestream, creator of digital media and solutions for workflows that will bring Telestream Wirecast live video production technology for all subscribers of Ustream and add another layer of Ustream and video editing solutions.

Last year, Ustream started the first product in its line of "manufacturer of Studio", whose purpose is to make the user's computer in live video production studio with editing tools that add professional video watch custom streams. Since its initial launch in 2010, the Ustream producer products attracted over 600 thousand downloads. Today Ustream and Telestream has jointly developed the version 2.0 of its family of desktop applications, streaming media, which adds a bunch of updates for all producers and sees Kit, expanding to a total of three flavors.

Sorting now includes Ustream producer, which can be used by anyone free of charge, Ustream producer Pro, more complex applications, available for $ 199 and new Studio producer, an application for the pros, starting from $ 549.

Each version of Ustream producer will include recently renovated "the leading desktop, which allows the users desktop screencast any computer within the LAN in broadcasts. Version 2.0 also adds audio feature that enables leading desktop, for example, as a client for Skype web talk show who are likely to be of particular interest to those involved in growing gamecasting space.

The manufacturer uses the new h. 264 codec MainConcept, as well as built-in bandwidth meter, which works to ensure transmission in high quality video. In addition, some cool new features new Studio Ustream producer include audio mixer with delay, synchronization, native support for HDV and IP cameras integrated scoreboards for sport fans, which can be viewed on the air, and the lower third of the new catalog to help make the gears a bit more professional look.

The best part is that now the amateur and professional videographers will use streaming content that includes music, pictures, transitions, and picture-in-picture capabilities with a few clicks. The inclusion of Telestream Wirecast in architecture in Ustream product now will provide users with the tools for scalable, high-quality video production on both Mac and PC — and to create custom productions, regardless of their level of knowledge.

More on Ustream producer visit producer demo here, or check out the live demo below:

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