Jessica Wilson
Curt Despres
VC blog posts 
Yossarian
Geeks of the World... Re-live 1993 With ThinkGeek’s New Super Famicom-Inspired Wii Controller
A Wiimote turned on its side makes for a perfectly serviceable controller when plowing through retro games from the Wii Shop Channel, and the Classic Controller isn’t bad either, but I wouldn’t call either of them an ideal solution. On the other hand, ThinkGeek’s new Super Famicom controller for the Wii manages to come pretty damned close, especially if you’re a gamer who spends your time steeped in the past. Thankfully, unlike the controller this thing was modeled on, there’s no need to plug...
TechCrunchQuikr, India’s Spin On Craigslist, Gobbles Up $32M From Warburg Pincus, eBay & More
Quikr, India’s largest online and mobile classifieds portal, announced today that it has raised $32 million in series E financing, led by New York City-based private equity giant Warburg Pincus. The company’s existing investors, which include Matrix Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and eBay, also participated in the funding. The investment is Quikr’s fifth and largest financing to date, following an $8 million raise in May 2011, led by Nokia Growth Partners, Norwest and eBay. The latest...
With A 50% Increase In Applications, The Next Y Combinator Class Will Be 80 Strong
At TechCrunch Disrupt on Tuesday, Y Combinator’s Harjeet Taggar said that the incubator’s next class will have at least 80 startups, up from 65 in the prior group. Even though Y Combinator is hosting its largest class ever, it was also the most selective class the incubator has ever had, with just a 2 percent acceptance rate. While Y Combinator grew its class size by about 20 percent, the number of applications increased 50 percent. During the evaluation process, Y Combinator conducted about...
Betaworks’ John Borthwick: VC Scene in NYC is “Pretty Busy” Right Now, But Not “Overheated” Like San Francisco
Betaworks‘ CEO John Borthwick took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York with Crunchfund’s MG Siegler this morning to discuss Betaworks’ investments and the state of the investment business in San Francisco and New York in general. Betaworks, the New York-based company behind popular services like bitly, Chartbeat and SocialFlow has also made a number of investments in other startups, including Tumblr, Kickstarter and the recent Zynga acquisition OMGPOP. As for the difference between the...
Now On Your iPhone, ReadyForZero Is Ready To Save You From Debt
YC alum ReadyForZero, an online financial service that’s trying to get people out of debt faster, is today expanding to mobile with the launch of its first mobile app. For now, the experience is designed mainly to give you at-a-glance insight into your current debt situation. However, the mobile app also uses iOS push notifications to alert you to large purchases and payments which could impact your financial goals. Says ReadyForZero CEO and co-founder Rod Ebrahimi, this feature is designed to...
Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan: Are Companies Building On Top Of Facebook Really Growing Or Just “Spam?”
This morning at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012, TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon sat down for a fireside chat with Jeff Jordan, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former CEO of OpenTable, to discuss his investment perspectives. Jordan, who took OpenTable public in 2009, shared his thoughts on the current investment landscape, including the situation with companies like Groupon, Fab, Pinterest, and others. Although many topics were on the table for this morning’s chat (check out the video), one...
Elon Musk Competing With Zuck For Best Week Ever: Announces Tesla Milestone, Launches Rocket To ISS
Last week Mark Zuckerberg took his little Harvard project public in the largest tech IPO ever and quickly followed it up by marrying his Harvard sweetheart. However, the honeymoon was cut short as the Facebook stock has yet to impress. Meanwhile, the tech world’s equivalent of Tony Stark, announced via Twitter yesterday that the Tesla cars were approved for sale to the public after passing the necessary federal crash tests. That announcement was followed up this morning with SpaceX becoming the...
Google Closes Acquisition Of Motorola: Woodside To Lead; Page Pushes Mobile Aspect
As we reported would happen yesterday, Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion. As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android...
PayLeap Attempts To Woo Startups With New Payment Referral Kickback
If you are in the business of needing to process shopping for your ecommerce startup then this is going to be of interest. If not, look away now. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York the startup PayLeap, which is a payment platform for ecommerce, is reaching out with a new program to help fund the development of applications connecting to their payment gateway platform. Whether it’s marketing spiel or not, PayLeap claims to have “set aside” $1 million in funding to cover developers upfront,...
Amazon Appstore For Android Now Lets Users Test Drive Apps Right On Their Devices
Unless an app you have your eye happens to have a free demo version to muck about with, there’s little one can do to try out an Android app on a device in advance. Sure, you could buy the app straight from the Google Play Store and get a refund within 15 minutes if you’re not satisfied, but Amazon has a new solution in place that helps take the friction out of that testing process. The latest update for the Amazon Appstore Android app packs a welcome surprise — instead of being stuck Test...
Larry Page Spotted Wearing Google Glasses In England!
There hasn’t been a whole lot of news coming out of the Google Zeitgeist event taking place in a posh hotel on the outskirts of London this week, but Google’s making some other news in England: its CEO Larry Page has been spotted wearing Google Glasses. The pictures of Page wearing the super-funky augmented reality eyewear are possibly the first — although his Google co-founder Sergey Brin has also been seen wearing them in the wild. Today’s pictures come courtesy of Google employee Jason...
Sonos Launches The Sonos Sub (Woofer, Not Sandwich)
Sonos has just gone really deep (get it?) with their new Sonos Sub, a wireless subwoofer that connects to any Sonos system and adds just a bit more oomph to the musical proceedings. The sub costs $699 and offers (according to the press release) “thick layers of bottomless sound that let you hear and feel the weight of every chord, kick, splash and roll.” The woofer connects with the AMP, ZonePlayer 120, ZonePlayer 100, the PLAY:5, and PLAY:3. It doesn’t work with the CONNECT/ZP90/ZP80. The Sub...
ooVoo Rolls Out Video Chat Apps For iPad And Facebook
Consumer video chat provider ooVoo, which has more than 46 million users worldwide, is rolling out new applications that will make its service even more attractive. And the service, which is popular among kids and young adults, will remain free on all those platforms, with monetization provided primarily through advertising served up to web users. ooVoo allows customers to create chat rooms with up to 12 participants which can be accessed through a number of different platforms and devices. The...
TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day Two! #TCDisrupt
Welcome to Day Two, folks. If Day One wasn’t enough for you, then you’re in for a real treat. We have a special product announcement at 11:20, Design Office Hours and an incredible list of Day Two Battlefield contestants. If you’re wondering what happened yesterday, you may want to check out this, that and this! And don’t forget to follow along as we unveil a brand new batch of Startup Alley contestants. Follow the team’s coverage here. If you’re unable to attend don’t worry, you can join the...
With Ex-Yahoo CTO On Board, Yottaa Nabs $9M For Affordable Mobile, Web Acceleration Services
Yottaa, the Boston-based startup that offers cloud-based web performance monitoring and optimization services for small businesses, is today announcing that it has closed a $9 million series B financing round. Each of the startup’s existing investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Stata Venture Partners and Cambridge West Ventures, re-upped for Yottaa’s series B, joined by additional undisclosed investors. Yottaa’s new round brings its total funding to $13 million and will be primarily...
Booting Up: Is Our Children Interneting? Edition
(Photo: Facebook) Facebook closes down at $34 [Washington Post] Did the timing of Zuck's marriage have to do with a pre-nup? The Times turns gossip rag [New York Times] Facebook deletes a woman's photos of her baby, who has a birth defect [Fox News] Is social media hurting children? [CNN] Pakistan blocks Twitter for a few hours because of blasphemous tweets [Washington Post] Hooray, multiple monitors just got easier [The Inquirer] "Picturephones never worked because the reality of two people on...
BetabeatCable Operators Do A Nice Thing, Kinda, Team Up to Offer Free Wifi
Hey, look: The cable companies all went in together to get something nice for you. The Wall Street Journal reports that Comcast, Time Warner, Cable Vision, Bright House, and Cox are banding together and opening their Wifi hotspots to each other's customers. That means more than 50,000 hotspots around New York, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia. Nor will users have to remember umpteen different brand names; providers will now take the marvelously generic "CableWiFi" as their network...
These People Love Facebook So Much They Made a Creepy Music Video About It
An ancient sound from the annals of your past streams abruptly from your computer speakers: it's the sound of dial-up! And it's coming from this terrible video about how much these crazy people love Facebook. Overlaid atop the nostalgic sounds of a modem circa 1995 is a rallying chant: "w-w-w. F-a-c-e-b-o-o-k. c-o-m." Yes, they are actually spelling out the entire Facebook URL, cheerleader-style. We wish we could tell you it gets decidedly less corny from there, but we are journalists, so we're...
Juniper Networks Invests In Video Conferencing Startup Vidyo, Bringing Total Funding To $97M
Video conferencing startup Vidyo announced Tuesday that it has received a strategic investment from Juniper Networks as part of the network equipment vendor’s Junos Innovation Fund. The funding comes alongside existing Vidyo investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, and Four Rivers Group. Vidyo makes video conferencing software that allows organizations to very efficiently and effectively make and receive video calls across any number of connected...
Salesforce Chatter To Add Instant Messaging and Screensharing
The team behind Salesforce.com’s enterprise social networking app Chatter is making a big push for real-time communication with two new features — Chatter Messenger and Chatter Screensharing. Chatter Product Marketing Director Dave King demonstrated Messenger and Screensharing for me earlier today and, well, they look like instant messaging and screensharing, just, y’know, in Chatter. King admits that there are other enterprise IM tools out there (there’s part the TechCrunch team uses HipChat,...
Wishpond Launches Mall360 To Bring Your Local Shopping Mall Online
Like Milo before it, Wishpond launched in late 2010 to build a local search engine that aggregates realtime inventory and product listings from brick and mortar retail stores — from big chains to mom and pop shops. The startup has since focused its efforts on developing social commerce solutions for retailers, launching tools like Social Store, which allows any business to quickly create and deploy a storefront for their businesses on Facebook. While Wishpond, like so many others, is looking...
Disrupt NYC Day 1: Your Startup Battlefield Companies
Our very first day of Disrupt NYC is over and the conference started off with a bang. We had memorable chats, dove into fashion for a bit, hung out with the Startup Alley companies and witnessed 15 startups launch their products in our first day of the Startup Battlefield. Even though we will have brand-new companies launching tomorrow while fighting for the ultimate prize of $50,000 and the Disrupt Cup, we wanted to take a moment to highlight all that we saw today. There were some brilliant...
Babelverse Is Out To Democratize Translation
Babelverse won the opportunity to appear at TechCrunch Disrupt from the Startup Alley and with little notice ended up giving a slick pitch. Essentially this is a solution for universal speech translation, powered by a global community of human interpreters: it means anyone can be an interpreter. We covered its launch back in January but here’s a quick rundown. Machine translation, as we know, is not reliable. So what we’re looking here is a marketplace for translation. People practice to...
Sprint’s EVO 4G LTE Has Cleared U.S. Customs, Pre-Orders To Be Filled As Early As May 24
Sprint’s launch plans for the HTC EVO 4G LTE were ruined last week when shipments of their shiny new Android handset were held up by United States Customs, but we’re hearing that they may been hitting doorsteps and store shelves sooner than expected. According to Sprint, the devices are now currently sitting safely in Sprint’s warehouses and are expected to start trickling out into the world “on or around May 24.” And rest easy, you faithful pre-orderers — the world from on high is that you’ll...
Professional Nerd Uses Scam to Buy More LEGOs
The "Computer Programmer" LEGO minifigure. (lego.com) It's not always sunny in Legoland, guys. NBC Bay Area reports that Thomas Langenbach, a VP at ERP software company SAP Labs in Palo Alto, has been arrested for stealing LEGOs. Mr. Langenbach, who likes to go by "Lord LEGOs" (okay, not really), used his computer expertise to create new bar codes, which he stuck overtop of regular Target bar codes in order to purchase LEGOs at reduced prices. Target caught Mr. Langenbach on camera switching...
Citi Field Counter-Protestors Say Forget the Internet, Fight Child Abuse
The counter movement to last night’s “Jews Against the Internet” rally was pretty difficult to find. Outside of Citi Field, I had to ask two cops if they knew where it was—one of them didn’t. When I finally did find the 30 or so demonstrators, near Roosevelt Avenue and 126th Street, they said their protest amounted to a disagreement with how Orthodox money should be spent. I asked three male protestors to elaborate and they directed me to Ari Mandel, a sort of unofficial spokesman for the...
Engineers from Foursquare, OMGPOP and Facebook Make the Case for NYC as an Engineering Hotspot
TC Disrupt NYC 2012 After a Southern-inspired lunch of sloppy joes, potato salad and cornbread, the attendees of TechCrunch Disrupt NYC filtered into the auditorium of a spacious pier building on the West Side Highway for another set of panels. Jason Kincaid, formerly of TechCrunch, took the stage with Foursquare's Henry Heyman, OMGPOP's Jason Pearlman and Facebook's Serkan Piantino to discuss whether or not the East Coast is indeed the "best coast" for engineering. "It's sort of a silly name,"...
Gary Sharma’s Internet Week 2012 Highlights (Nerd Proms, Rooftop Parties, Will Arnett DJ’ing, Michael Stipe Sightings ‘n more!)
Aol's Andrea Hong, GroupMe/Skype's Steve Cheney, TechStars' Justin Overdorff, Shelby.tv's Chris Kurdziel and Lauren Appelwick, American Express' Meghan Paul, Acquaintable's Joel Rodriguez and Greycroft Partners' Alisa Richter posing at the always epic Webutante Ball @ Internet Week 2012. (Photo: Nick McGlynn / Random Night Out) This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), Founder & CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts...
Google to Provide CornellNYC Tech with Free Office Space for 5+ Years
Mr. Page and co. Mayor Bloomberg announced today at Google’s New York headquarters in Chelsea that the company has agreed to provide CornellNYC Tech with 22,000 square feet of free office space while the Roosevelt Island campus is built. The mayor joined Google CEO Larry Page, Cornell President David Skorton and Technion's director Craig Gotsman at a press conference this morning to make the announcement. The value of the space is over $10 million, said Mr. Page. According to the press release:...
Ultra-Orthodox Jews Take a Hard Line on the Internet at Rally of 40,000 Men (And Me)
The Internet asifa at Citi Field. On Sunday, 40,000 mostly Hasidic Jewish men in black hats and black suits gathered at Citi Field for a series of speeches concerning the corrupting influence of the Internet. The talks were broadcast to the JumboTron, betwixt the oversized bottles of Cholula censored with a white cloth over the label, which shows a woman. The 7 train from Grand Central had become packed with men in black, all in a fine mood, before we poured out at the Mets-Willets Point train...
As Stock Disappoints, Facebook Dominates Future of Media Panel
Wall Street traders sweating Facebook’s flaccid opening should have stopped by I Want Media’s fifth annual Future of Media panel Friday afternoon. In a television studio above Cooper Square, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti and other media futurists paid lofty and often metaphorical tribute to the social media site’s publishing power.Read More
Strategy vs. Process Improvement: What’s More Important?
Strategy Formulation vs. Process Improvement is like architecture and construction: they are equally important. And, wholly interdependent. One cannot be fulfilled without the other. Without a good strategic vision of the future, the business you are building may not be relevant to your market (sounds like too many enterprises we all know, right?). With a good vision but bad execution the business you build may be nice looking on paper, but certainly not performing for the customer, your...
Relationship E...After a Whirlwind Week, An Intimate Wedding
Ms. Chan and Mr. Zuckerberg (facebook.com) Priscilla Chan, a graduate of Harvard University and UCSF Medical School, married Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in an intimate ceremony at the couple's Palo Alto, CA home on Saturday, May 19th. Ms. Chan, 27, looked radiant in an ethereal Claire Pettibone gown with a lace-detailed neckline. Mr. Zuckerberg, 28, eschewed his trademark hooded sweatshirt for a clean dark blue suit. It has been a whirlwind week for the couple, who have shared a life since...
Booting Up: What Will Facebook Stock Do Now Edition
Peter Thiel. We may have screwed up a little on the Facebook IPO, admits NASDAQ [Wall Street Journal] Facebook stock starts trading in Europe [Bloomberg] The rise and fall of Yahoo's Scott Thompson [New York Times] Rovio used its $42 million investment last year to pay its owners as new investors came aboard [Arctic Startup] Peter Thiel on paying kids to drop out of college [60 Minutes] Google Chrome wins [The Next Web]
Best Tech Events This Week (TechCrunch Disrupt, Webby Awards, Database Week, NJTM, Founders@Fail, GigaOm)
This is a guest post from Gary Sharma (aka “The Guy with the Red Tie”), founder and CEO of GarysGuide and proud owner of a whole bunch of black suits, white shirts and, at last count, over 40 red ties. You can reach him at gary [at] garysguide.com. Hope everyone had an amazing Internet Week! With over 500 companies and 40,000 attendees, it was truly a celebration of New York's thriving Internet industry and community. And it was awesome to see all the innovation that's happening around town....
I Closed My LinkedIn Account
I just closed my LinkedIn account. Why? Because at least a MONTH ago, I reported a fairly simple problem: I can’t seem to add people back when they request that we connect. Oh, that would be about the 2nd primary thing one does on the site. You make a profile and then you connect. That’s about it. The connecting part has been broken. I’m done. I don’t care. Whatever. Why post this? Because I’m forever asked by people why I don’t talk much about LinkedIn. Why? Because it hasn’t done much for...
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