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Tuesday, May 31, 2011
LinkedIn Network Updates, 6/01/2011
Hoang Truong wants to be friends on Facebook.
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The Latest from TechCrunch
The Latest from TechCrunch |  |
- Software AG Buys Metismo To Expand Enterprise Mobile Offerings
- iCloud, YouCloud, We All Scream For iCloud. But What Exactly Will It Be?
- My Book, Black Hat, Is In ePub Format And Is Free To Download
- Inspired By The Start Fund, New World Ventures Offers Chicago Excelerate Startups $50K
- Apple’s Cloud Product Officially Official And It’s Called iCloud
- Official: iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud To Be Announced Next Week At WWDC
- OpenX Secures $20 Million In Series D Funding To Fuel Growth, Acquisitions
- Watermelon Express Rebrands As BenchPrep; Launches App Store For Test Prep Content
- Scoop: European Social Games Phenomenon wooga Raises $24 Million
- With 2 Million Downloads Under Its Belt, Appsfire Raises $3.6 Million Series A
- Disrupt Backstage Pass: Google’s Marissa Mayer Talks Serendipity (And Dodges The Apple Question)
- Twitter Close To Acquiring AdGrok
- The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook’s Code Right Now (But We Can’t See)
- Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service
- Pew: A Quarter Of American Internet Users Have Placed Phone Calls Online
- Silicon Milkroundabout: How London Startups Took Hiring Back Into Their Own Hands
- (Founder Stories) Reddit’s Ohanian: What Competition? (TCTV)
- Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation
- Behind The Scenes: Making Spotify More Convenient Than Piracy
| Software AG Buys Metismo To Expand Enterprise Mobile Offerings Posted: 31 May 2011 08:16 AM PDT
Founded in 2007, Metismo provides a platform for the design and development of device independent mobile apps. The company's write once – run anywhere software Bedrock platform for the development of mobile applications converts Java source code to native source code for different mobile devices. Metismo’s tools and systems allows for data from mobile devices such as GPS, audio and video can be integrated within business applications. Currently, Metismo;s technology is integrated with apps for iOS, Android, Nokia Ovi and BlackBerry devices. Software AG says that the integration of Metismo’s technology will lead to the total "mobile office" for the company’s customers. According to the company, the availability of process-driven mobile applications is a major step towards the fully, real-time "digital enterprise".        
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| iCloud, YouCloud, We All Scream For iCloud. But What Exactly Will It Be? Posted: 31 May 2011 07:42 AM PDT Next week, Apple will unveil its much-anticipated iCloud service at its annual developer conference, WWDC. Apple even put out a press release this morning pre-announcing the service—something it almost never does. Details began leaking out in March, and then the name was pretty much confirmed when Apple bought the domain iCloud.com. Yet for all the talk and speculation, we still don’t know exactly what iCloud will look like, or what services it will include. Here is what we know so far (or at least what we think we know):
It isn’t too difficult to imagine other cloud services, some of which already exist as part of MobileMe, such as being able to back up and share photos or personal videos in the cloud, but done better. It is no secret that Steve Jobs was not happy with the initial launch of MobileMe three years ago. A recent article in Fortune describes how Jobs dressed down the group responsible for the initial debacle:
Even Walt Mossberg, Apple’s “friend” in the press, hated the first version of MobileMe. The service was fixed, but it never was never able to rise to the level of Apple’s other products. Now with iCloud, Apple might finally be ready to rethink the whole experience beyond the simple syncing and sharing of data to full-fledged apps with online components. What does that mean? Well, for starters it could mean that Apple software on the iPhone, iPad, and desktop such as iTunes, iPhoto, and maybe even iMovie will also exist as Web apps. Or at least certain features will be available in the cloud. At a minimum, you should be able to access your collection in the cloud and share it with people online. Right now, all those pictures, songs, and movies are locked in people’s Macs and iPhones, and it is still a hassle to get them off your device and onto the Web. But that is just Step 1. Remember, Apple is choosing to announce iCloud at its developer conference, presumably so that they can start developing their own apps for iCloud. If iCloud is baked into iOS 5, perhaps it will be more than just a set of Apple services. This is complete speculation on my part, but what if it’s a framework for developing iPhone and iPad apps with storage and software functions in the cloud instead of on the device? App developers could then choose to enable certain functions in the cloud. The storage limits of the device would become less of an issue as well. Of course, this line of thinking raises a whole host of other questions. Who would host all of these cloud apps—Apple or the developers themselves, with Apple merely defining how the services must work? Once apps exist in the cloud, will it be easier to create hooks in between them? How will Apple charge for its own iCloud apps, as a bundled yearly subscription ($99/year) or a la carte? Will any of them be free? How will developers be able to charge for iCloud apps? Will Apple use iCloud as a way to bring over the subscription model for online publications to apps? Other than the name and a few spare details, we know so little about iCloud. Hopefully, Apple will have answers to these questions next week. What do you think iCloud will look like? Photo Credit/Flickr/Kevin Dooley        
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| My Book, Black Hat, Is In ePub Format And Is Free To Download Posted: 31 May 2011 07:42 AM PDT
The book is 7 years old and is nearly out of print. It is about spammers, hackers, and viruses and I wrote it for a general audience like my dad who may or may not be all that technically savvy. It’s not a How-To as much as an exploration of the personalities in hacking. According to Bookscan I sold 0 copies in the past few months and rather than allow it to molder, I’ve decided to give it away, with some caveats.        
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| Inspired By The Start Fund, New World Ventures Offers Chicago Excelerate Startups $50K Posted: 31 May 2011 07:32 AM PDT
Excelerate, which launched its incubator last year, will now offer its entrepreneurs $50,000 in convertible debt from New World Ventures, with no discount or cap. The money is available for Excelerate’s 2011 class of ten startups. Roughly one-third of the money is available for draw down during the Summer and the remainder is available after Demo Day in August. Similar to The Start Fund, terms are company-friendly (no discount to the next round, no warrant coverage, and a below market interest rate). Plus, the nature of the convertible debt provides the companies with access to capital without locking in valuation terms today. New World partner Adam Koopersmith tells me that the model created by SV Angel and Milner for Y Combinator made a lot of sense for the fund. New World had invested in two of Excelerate’s first class of startups (EduLender and GiveForward) and believes in the strength of the program. Excelerate is also announcing for the first time its limited partners who have funded the program, which include a who’s who of the investment community in the Midwest. Partners include Lightbank, New World Ventures, I2A Fund, Sandbox Industries, Hyde Park Angels, DFJ Mercury, OCA Ventures, Brian Hand, Fred Hoch, Bob Fealey, Andrew Razeghi, Dan Ratner, Kevin Willer, Tim Draper, Sam Yagan and Troy Henikoff. New World’s new offering is bound to be popular amongst the startups in Excelerate’s program. As we saw with the Start Fund, almost all of the Y Combinator startups in the recent Y Combinator class accepted the fund’s money. Of course for Excelerate, the promise of $50,000 in funding for every startup makes the startup incubator program more appealing than other incubators. On top of the New World funding, Excelerate’s startups receive $25,000 in seed funding for 6 percent of the common stock. Now that there are incubators in nearly all major cities in the U.S., it’s competitive to attract talent to these programs. Excelerate will be able to promise entrepreneurs more money and funding than most other incubators. The fact that the Start Fund is now inspiring similar ventures in other incubators and programs makes me wonder if the model will eventually be a part of all incubators in the future, including other popular programs such as TechStars.        
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| Apple’s Cloud Product Officially Official And It’s Called iCloud Posted: 31 May 2011 05:55 AM PDT
In a short release, Apple confirmed the existence and name:
We’ve been hearing about the potential cloud services for months now and it seems the stars have finally aligned. The MobileMe service recently received some considerable upgrades to improve performance and stability and there has been oodles of talk about a potential music service in the cloud similar to Rdio or Spotify. That we now know it’s called iCloud, officially, is just icing on the cake.        
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| Official: iOS 5, OS X Lion, and iCloud To Be Announced Next Week At WWDC Posted: 31 May 2011 05:41 AM PDT
It was already generally accepted that the two operating system were going to debut next week, but it’s rather strange that Apple would take to the wires with a pre-announcement. Please correct me if I’m wrong, save a teaser image showcasing a roman numeral and a large feline, the company hasn’t done this in recent history. The presser is after the break but it’s more of an advert for the developer’s conference. This pre-announcement either means Apple doesn’t have that much to show, or, hopefully, there’s so much that the company had to announce some ahead of time to make room in Steve’s keynote.        
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| OpenX Secures $20 Million In Series D Funding To Fuel Growth, Acquisitions Posted: 31 May 2011 04:59 AM PDT Digital advertising technology company OpenX has scored $20 million in its fourth round of financing, provided by the venture capital arms of strategic partners such as AOL and SAP, in addition to Asian investors Mitsui & Co and Presidio Ventures (Sumitomo). Previous backers Accel Partners, DAG Ventures and Index Ventures also participated in the round, which brings OpenX’s total funding raised to $50 million. The additional capital will be used to further the company’s growth, particularly in Asia (Japan and China to be more precise), where the online advertising market is still relatively nascent. In addition, the money will be used to accelerate the adoption of OpenX’s Enterprise solution. OpenX CEO Tim Cadogen tells me the proceeds may also be used for strategic acquisitions of smaller firms in the near future – they’re basically interested in technology companies that can complememt them in areas where they foresee expansion (mobile ad exchanges, for one). SAP Ventures led the investment and will take a board seat.        
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| Watermelon Express Rebrands As BenchPrep; Launches App Store For Test Prep Content Posted: 31 May 2011 04:56 AM PDT
The company’s Android, iPad, Web and iPhone apps now include a marketplace where users can purchase study content across dozens of subject matters from a variety of publishers, including McGraw Hill. The virtue of using one of BenchPrep’s apps is that you can start a practice test on your iPad and finish it on the web. Users also can access customized progress reports and can chat with other users in real-time who are studying the same subject. Via BenchPrep, users can also post public notes to others users, set a study schedule, post questions to other users and more. As we’ve written in the past, BenchPrep apps cost around $25 each, which is a drawback in some ways for students. Users have to pay separately for apps on different platforms (i.e. a web app vs. an iPad app). BenchPrep plans to expand to new subjects in the neat future, including law, medicine, physical sciences and project management.        
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| Scoop: European Social Games Phenomenon wooga Raises $24 Million Posted: 30 May 2011 11:29 PM PDT Exclusive - Wooga doesn’t get even half the attention that’s been given to its closest rivals in the social games space, namely Zynga and EA. But the European games developer is taking off big time, and it’s no surprise to see venture capitalists jump on the opportunity to invest before everyone starts taking notice. The Berlin, Germany-based startup has raised a huge Series B round of financing, TechCrunch has learned – $24 million, to be more specific, bringing its total capital raised to a healthy $31.5 million. The round was led by Highland Capital Partners, with Tenaya Capital and previous backers Balderton Capital and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures participating. Wooga has been on a roll lately, recently reaching 30 million people who play its games (which include Diamond Dash, Monster World, Happy Hospital and – wait for it – Bubble Island) per month. The extra capital will be used for the production of more Facebook games. As you can see on AppData’s excellent leaderboards, the aforementioned number puts wooga (“world of gaming”) in the same league as Zynga and EA in terms of reach on the Facebook platform, and ahead of familiar names like Playdom, Crowdstar and Digital Chocolate. Wooga was founded in 2009, starting out with just five employees and growing to 85 people today. The company has ambitions of hiring two more employees every week going forward, to reach 150 employees in total by the end of this year. Fergan Mullen, who heads Highland’s investment activities in Europe, will join wooga’s board. A former director of NASDAQ-listed VistaPrint, he’s also on the boards of other fast-growing European technology companies such as Privalia, Spartoo and PhotoBox.        
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| With 2 Million Downloads Under Its Belt, Appsfire Raises $3.6 Million Series A Posted: 30 May 2011 07:02 PM PDT There are literally hundreds of thousands of iPhone, iPad and Android apps to choose from, and yet finding good apps is far from easy. App discovery and recommendations is a fertile niche where a few startups are fighting for mindshare. After being downloaded more than 2 million times, app discovery startup Appsfire closed a $3.6 million series A, led by French VC firm IDinvest. (Appsfire is based in Paris and Tel Aviv, and was co-founded by Ouriel Ohayon, who used to be the editor of TechCrunch France). Appsfire crossed 1 million downloads in February, and then the 2-million mark in May. Ohayon says its various apps for the iPhone, Android, iPad, and kid’s apps is generating 3 million leads to app developers each month. Appsfire lets you share your favorite apps with your friends via the web, your mobile device, or Facebook. Previously, in February, 2010, company raised a seed round from a group of French angel investors including Marc Simoncini (CEO of dating site meetic.com), Jacques-Antoine Granjon (CEO of Vente-Privee.com), Xavier Niel (CEO of French ISP Free), and entrepreneur and angel investor Jean-David Blanc, as well as Lerer Ventures.        
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| Disrupt Backstage Pass: Google’s Marissa Mayer Talks Serendipity (And Dodges The Apple Question) Posted: 30 May 2011 04:47 PM PDT Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, Google VP of Location and Local Services Marissa Mayer took the stage for an interview with our own Michael Arrington, where they discussed everything from Google’s mobile growth to Mayer’s investment strategy. A few minutes after the interview, I had the chance to ask her a few more questions about Google’s approach to mobile and local. It’s only been a few weeks since I interviewed Mayer about Google’s two pillar approach to local, but I still had plenty of questions. The first thing I asked: what happens if and when Apple decides to swap out the Google Maps application that ships with every iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad in favor of something that it built in-house (Apple has confirmed that it’s working on an improved traffic database, and has also quietly acquired some mapping-related startups). Unsurprisingly, Mayer mostly skirted the question — instead she pointed out how huge Google Maps’s audience is, with some 200 million active users on its Mobile products alone. She also mentioned some of the innovations that Google has made recently with Maps, including the new vector-based tiles that require 1/100th the data (the iOS version of Maps doesn’t take advantage of this feature). Next, I asked if there were any technologies coming up that would help phones more accurately determine your location. Because while the Wifi/GPS combo works pretty well in most places, reliability takes a nose-dive whenever you’re in a dense city like NYC. Mayer says that the Wifi hotspot database that Google has been building out will help with this, because it will improve over time. This is one reason why Google is going to be pushing users to explicitly check-in using Latitude — in addition to providing a new channel to engage with consumers, these check-ins also help Google improve its database. The system may not know your exact GPS coordinates, but if if someone with the similar signals previously checked in at In-N-Out Burger, there’s a good chance that’s where you are. Mayer likens the system to the powerful spell checker that often pops up in Google search. Finally, I asked about serendipitous suggestions on mobile phones, which Mayer has previously said she’s excited about. Mayer says that she thinks we’ll see these “inside of a two year horizon”. The UI for what these suggestions will look like is still TBD, but it sounds like initially they’re be pronounced rather than subtle.        
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| Twitter Close To Acquiring AdGrok Posted: 30 May 2011 01:17 PM PDT
AdGrok itself automates the process of bidding on contextual keywords on Google AdWords; Perhaps Twitter could find some use in this for its own Promoted Trends/Tweets? Twitter seems to be in acquisition mode, most recently dropping $40 million on pro-client Tweetdeck. Fun fact about this particular grab: The last person Twitter corporate development executive Jessica Verrilli followed on Twitter was AdGrok co-founder Argyris Zymnis. Co-founder Antonio Garcia-Martinez has yet to return my calls. Status update: It’s complicated. Garcia-Martinez has changed his title on his Facebook profile to Product Manager at Facebook. I have no idea whether this means Facebook won some acquisition battle or that Garcia-Martinez left the rest of the AdGrok team independently. In any case we’ll find out soon enough.        
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| The Next 6 Months Worth Of Features Are In Facebook’s Code Right Now (But We Can’t See) Posted: 30 May 2011 01:04 PM PDT
As Facebook engineer Chuck Rossi details around minute 23:00 in the video, Facebook has a tool they call “Gatekeeper” which allows them to be in control of who can see what code live on the service at any given time. As Rossi points out, right now on Facebook.com there is already the code for every major thing Facebook is going to launch in the next six months and beyond! It’s the Gatekeeper which stops us from seeing it. And I do mean “us”. While some of the Gatekeeper parameters are obvious — filter by country, age, data center — one is really interesting. “One of my favorite ones is an ‘everyone except people from TechCrunch can see this’,” Rossi says. He’s serious. What Facebook has done is likely just put all of our personal profiles on a list of people never eligible to see hidden code. Of course, that doesn’t always work. But it’s also the same type of feature that allowed them to “launch” a new faxing service with us, even though no one else could see it. Funny stuff. We appreciate Facebook’s attention to detail in keeping us out of their code. Of course, now they’re really asking for it. Do they really think you can’t make a fake account on Facebook? Sure… Stay tuned for the next six months of features coming from Facebook… The whole talk is excellent and worth watching, we’ve embedded it below. [thanks Almir]        
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| Twitter Is Launching Its Own Photosharing Service Posted: 30 May 2011 12:33 PM PDT Twitter has been completely emphatic about where developers should stake a claim, with Twitter Platform Lead Ryan Sarver warning the ecosystem to stay away from building “client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” Well if Sarver stays true to his word the Twitpics and Yfrogs of the world can just give it up now. According to multiple sources, Twitter is on the verge of announcing its own built in Twitpic competitor. Like tomorrow, if things go according to plan (naturally this post might change that). This shouldn’t really come as a surprise to anyone, as photosharing is the next logical step of Twitter expanding its in app experience. It’s basically grabbing at low hanging fruit. Twitter is flinging money around; It just spent $40 million on power user client Tweetdeck which represents 13% of its userbase. It’s only natural that they would spend more resources on photosharing, especially considering how much money is being poured into the white hot space and that images were the crux of the success of competitor Facebook. I’ve got no details on what exactly the photosharing URL shortener will be if any (Twitter has owned Twimg.com for a long time) or what the Twitter for Photos product will look like. Just that it’s coming, soon. And if they’re smart they’ll put ads on it.        
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| Pew: A Quarter Of American Internet Users Have Placed Phone Calls Online Posted: 30 May 2011 12:24 PM PDT Pew Internet, a think tank that regularly publishes research reports about technology, has released a new study today showing the steady growth in using VoIP and phone services online. According to the organization’s report, a quarter of American adult internet users (24 percent) have placed phone calls online. That amounts to 19 percent of all American adults. On any given day 5 percent of internet users are going online to place phone calls, says Pew. And Pew says that usage has grown significantly from a few years ago. For example, Pew found in February 2007 that 8 percent of internet users (6 percent of all adults) had placed calls online and 2% of internet users were making calls on any given day. At various points during the 2000s, Pew held similar surveys and found that at most about a tenth of internet users had ever used the internet to place calls and the daily figure never rose above 1 percent of internet users. Pew also broke out its findings by demographic as well. Internet users between the ages of 18 and 29 years of age had the highest percentage of users who made calls online amongst age groups, with 27 percent of the age group reporting that they’ve made calls online. In terms of household income, 37 percent of users whose household income is above $70,000 have made a phone call online, compared to 13 percent for users whose household income is less than $30,000. Considering Google’s presence in the market, and Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype, we know the big players see strong potential in the market. But it’s certainly interesting to see data on just how common internet calling and VoIP services have become.        
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| Silicon Milkroundabout: How London Startups Took Hiring Back Into Their Own Hands Posted: 30 May 2011 11:02 AM PDT This is guest post by Ian Hogarth, co-founder of Songkick, relates how 45 startups in London’s East End got tired of being over-shadowed by the financial sector in London and created their own event to lure wanna-be startupers. Sunday 15th May was a significant event for the London start-up community. 45 start-ups from across London gathered in one room with a single purpose – preventing banks and consultancies hiring the best UK engineering and computer science talent. In the Bay Area the biggest recruitment challenge start-ups face is how to stand out from the crowd, with so many start-ups and a hiring boom. In London the start-up ecosystem has a different problem – developers aren't aware start-ups exist. Most UK graduates in computer science assess their options via the 'Milkround', a giant careers fair held every year on university campuses across the UK. Banks, consultancies, Google, Microsoft and others spend tens of millions advertising to graduates and without the density of Silicon Valley, smaller start-ups are drowned out.        
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| (Founder Stories) Reddit’s Ohanian: What Competition? (TCTV) Posted: 30 May 2011 10:08 AM PDT In this episode of Founder Stories with host Chris Dixon, Reddit Founder, Alexis Ohanian takes Dixon back to his college days at the University of Virginia where he and co-founder Steve Huffman bonded over video games and began plotting ways to avoid taking a real job after graduation. Not wanting to be holed-up in a cubicle for 50 years, they submitted an idea to Y Combinator, the idea got rejected, they got accepted, and together began building around the concept of “people deliberately trying to find and share new and interesting stuff online” says Ohanian. Joking about “competitive analysis” Ohanian tells Dixon he wasn’t even familiar with Digg until “about a week or two after we had launched” and says interestingly enough, “it was this classic example of alright, you’ve launched, it turns out there is someone else who is in your space, who has already got a significant advantage, and you know, that is not time to quit, that is just time to keep doing what you are doing.” The boys kept on doing, and did quite well. Less than two years after launching they sold Reddit to Conde Nast and Ohanian says Reddit is currently tallying “1.3-billion page views per month.” Make sure to watch the full episode for additional insights. In the below interview, Ohanian offers thoughts on the future of Reddit from his vantage point as a consultant and tells Dixon how Reddit makes money. Past episodes of Founder Stories with such leaders as Fred Wilson, Perry Chen and Lauren Leto are here.        
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| Airbnb Has Arrived: Raising Mega-Round at a $1 Billion+ Valuation Posted: 30 May 2011 09:41 AM PDT
That’s a big increase from the company’s last funding round of $7.2 million, which included Sequoia Capital, Greylock, SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher and Youniversity Ventures (Kutcher broke the news that he’s an investor in AirBnB at TechCrunch Disrupt last week). The company, which launched via Y Combinator, has raised just $7.8 million to date. No surprise, it was a hotly contested deal. The service has exploded, growing more than 800% last year and booking 1.6 million night stays in other people’s homes to date. On any given night in New York there are more people staying in homes via Airbnb than there are rooms in the biggest hotel in Manhattan. Airbnb has become the sleeper hit of the startup world. It’s one of those companies plenty of well-heeled investors passed on in the early days, because they thought no one would want to open his or her home to strangers. Out of twenty angels he pitched in 2008, founder Brian Chesky said half didn’t return his emails and most of the others told him it was an awful idea. Even Paul Graham hated it, but he liked Chesky and backed him hoping he’d change the company. TechCrunch’s own hotel expert Paul Carr was a cynic too. Now, the fear of missing another Airbnb is palpable in the Valley, and one of the reasons GetAround became the darling, audience choice and winner of our Disrupt conference this week. Earlier in the week, I sat down with Airbnb founder Brian Chesky to talk about this reversal in fortune and how the business is going, although at the time we hadn’t heard the details of the deal he was busy negotiating. Check it out below.        
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| Behind The Scenes: Making Spotify More Convenient Than Piracy Posted: 30 May 2011 09:40 AM PDT
And it all started with one main business idea: make a music service that’s more convenient than piracy. That’s one of the highlights from a presentation given by Spotify engineer Gunnar Kreitz at KTH Royal Institute of Technology last month (many of Spotify’s engineers came from KTH). Unfortunately I’m not seeing a recording of the presentation anywhere online, but Kreitz has posted the slides to his website, which you can find embedded below. The slides outline some of the key technical attributes that make Spotify what it is, many of which revolve around one key factor: speed. According to the slides, Spotify has a median playback latency of only 265 ms, which Kreitz says “feels immediate” and avoids Spotify’s forbidden word, “Buffering”. Only 1% of songs streamed have buffering issues. In other words, the Spotify player is every bit as fast and reliable as, say, iTunes, and it’s a hell of a lot faster than finding the latest album release on BitTorrent. Here are some of the interesting datapoints from the presentation:
       
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After 
I wrote a book in 2004 about hackers, spammers, and other nerds and I thought I’d like to share it with the world. It’s currently available on 
Earlier this year, 
Pop over to 
There goes all the fun rumors and wild speculation. Apple just released a press release detailing what’s coming next week at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. Apple pre-announced something — iOS 5 and OS X Lion to be exact. Oh, and something called iCloud, too.
We’re hearing from multiple sources that Twitter is in talks to acquire Y Combinator-backed key word bidding platform 
A few days ago, 
According to several sources 
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