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Spotify Brings Free Access To Music On Facebook

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 19:11:11 +0000

Spotify will be deeply integrated into Facebook, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced at the f8 developer conference today. As part of its larger entertainment initiative, Facebook will launch a music dashboard, which will display music-specific notifications and updates, and also show which songs are currently popular within one’s network of friends.

The service will be free, but Spotify hopes that this new level exposure to Facebook’s enormous user base will help drive paid subscriptions.

Spotify CEO Daniel Ek in a blog post to announce the integration said: We’re very excited to have been asked by Mark Zuckerberg to showcase this new experience at the f8 conference in San Francisco today. You’ll now start seeing new music posts and play buttons all over your newsfeeds. Hit a play button and the music starts. Right there. Spotify fires up to give you a new soundtrack to your social life. Check out your new Music Dashboard and your real-time ticker to discover the music that’s trending with your friends.

He further stated that: This integration with Facebook will help everyone to discover more free music than ever before. Thanks to our unrivalled, truly free service, users can just hit play to enjoy the music, no hassle, no gimmicks; month after month after month.

Zuckerberg Unveils Timeline, The Revamped Version of The Facebook Profile

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:16:28 +0000

The popular Facebook f8 conference is ongoing in San Francisco. Facebook is unveiling huge changes and features to your Facebook profile. Zuckerberg has just announced a brand new feature at its F8 Conference called “Timeline,” a visual representation of your entire life.

With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff.

Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here.

As you scroll down past your cover, you’ll see your posts, photos and life events as they happened in time. You choose what’s featured on your timeline. You can star your favorites to double their size or hide things altogether.

Timeline also works with apps, which fill little “gadget” boxes inside your timeline. It’s easy to add an app somebody else has to your own timeline.

“We’re more than what we did recently,” Zuckerberg explained to the audience. “It’s fun and easy to fill out your timeline,” Zuckerberg said.

Stay tuned, features are still unfolding.

All 10 Winners of Mobilize 2011 LaunchPad Competition

Thomas Oppong — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 23:19:54 +0000

GigaOM, a business and technology media company, today announced the 10 winners of the GigaOM Mobilize 2011 Launchpad, a high-profile competition that recognizes the 10 most promising mobile startups. The Launchpad winners will present on stage at GigaOM Mobilize 2011, a mobile industry conference, set to take place September 26-27 in San Francisco. Mobilize 2011 is a conference that explores the conjunction of mobile computing and cloud-based services via engaging panels, interactive debates, and headline keynotes.

The winners of the Mobilize 2011 LaunchPad competition are:

B Labs – provider of deep technology virtualization software that enables work and personal life separation in mobile devices
Flixlab – a social video platform that automatically makes great movies from the videos and pictures on your smartphone, and even your friends’ smartphones
Localmind – a real-time, location-based Q&A platform that leverages social check-in services, so you know what’s happening around your city right now
Mobiflock – provides smartphone management and safety services for parents, individuals, and businesses that fill the mobile security gap
Parse – Heroku for mobile apps; Stop writing server code and instead, power your mobile apps with our cloud platform
Quantance – offers unique power management products that dramatically improve mobile data speeds and applications connectivity for tablets, smart phones, and other popular data devices
RightScript – a mobile medication management system that links patients with their doctors and health plans
Tackable – location-aware mobile software that connects people to information, ideas, and things they’re looking for; simply post a tack to get started
VoiceBeam – provides a communication accelerator that lets users ‘beam’ their voices to others, circumventing voicemail and phone calls, and modernizing push-to-talk for the smartphone era

Top 15 Mid-Week Venture Deals

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 11:00:12 +0000

San Francisco-based venture capital investor Industry Ventures closed on Industry Ventures Fund VI, a $400M secondary fund.
Symantec Corp. announced today that it has completed its acquisition of Clearwell Systems. Clearwell was venture backed by DAG Ventures, Redpoint Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. The deal was worth $390M.
ClipSync, a social TV viewing startup, scored a strategic investment from RealNetworks. Financial details of the investment was not disclosed.
Google acquired Punchd, a provider of mobile loyalty card software applications. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. Punchd was backed by 500Startups.
Softagon Corporation, a developer of software for hedge funds, investment management firms, and other companies, were acquired by Pariveda Solutions. Financial details of the deal were not announced.
Metrics scored $3M in a new funding round, and renamed itself Zettaset. The firm, which develops data analytics and warehouse software based on the open source Hadoop stack, said the round was co-led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and EPIC Ventures.
AddToAny, a developer of widgets for WordPress and Drupal for social sharing, was acquired by Seattle-based Lockerz. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Cupertino-based Cloud.com, a provider of software infrastructure for cloud computing providers, was acquired by Citrix Systems. Citrix did not disclose financial terms of the deal.
Ingite Game Technologies, a developer of auto racing games, raised $7.5M in a Series B financing round. The round brings its total raised to $12.2M.
Astrid, the developer of a to-do list and productivity app for Android, scored a seed funding round, the firm announced Tuesday. The round came from Google Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, as well as angel investors.
Jawbone, the maker of Bluetooth headsets, wireless speakers, and other devices, scored $70M in a new round of funding from J.P. Morgan Asset Management.
Electronic Arts acquired PopCap Games, in a deal worth $750M plus earnout. EA said it would pay $650M in cash plus $100M in shares of its common stock, plus unspecified earnout for PopCap.
Omek Interactive, a developer of gesture recognition and body tracking technology with offices in San Francisco, raised $12M in a first close of its Series C funding round. The firm said the round was led by Intel Capital.
San Jose-based electronic design automation firm Cadence acquired Santa Clara-based Azuro, a developer of system-on-a-chip design tools. Financial term sof the acquisition were not disclosed.
CloudFlare, a developer of web site optimization and security services, raised $20M in a funding round. The round was led by New enterprise Assocations, and also included Venrock and Pelion Venture Partners.

Rock Health: The Seed Accelerator Exclusively For Health Startups

Thomas Oppong — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:49:19 +0000

Rocket Health is a seed accelerator exclusively for health startups providing capital, mentorship, operational support and office space in San Francisco. The program’s mission is to enable and empower an entrepreneurial cure for the relative lack of innovation in the health sector.The world of patient care and healthy living is foreign to the technological creativity found in social media, games and other verticals. Rock Health directly targets the gap between these ecosystems, enabling high-impact innovation.

Startups partake in an intensive multi-month program, turning ideas into products and businesses. They recently selected 11 startups for this first term.

What Rocket Health Offers:

$20,000 startup grant to each team
Support from the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation, Harvard Medical School, and Cincinnati Childrens Hospital
Mentorship and workshops from experts in design, health policy, lean startup methodology, financing, and more
Office space in San Francisco
Office hours with startup counsel lawyer Michael Esquivel and legal workshops with the Fenwick team
PR strategy and resources from Ballou PR
Support from our in-house staff
A passionate community of like-minded individuals solving meaningful problems

21 Early-stage Startup Incubators World Wide You Should Know

Thomas Oppong — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:13:59 +0000

Founder Institute - San Diego, Brussells, Berlin, DC, NY, Houston, Paris, Boston, Bay Area – founderinstitute.com (this is a paid course)
Y Combinator - San Francisco, CA – Ycombinator.com
AngelPad - San Francisco, CA – angelpad.org
Kicklabs – San Francisco, CA – kicklabs.com/
Rock Health – San Francisco, CA – rockhealth.com
TechStars – Boulder, Boston, Seattle, NYC – techstars.org/apply/
Seedcamp – covering London to Tel Aviv - seedcamp.com
Startupbootcamp Spain / Tetuan Valley-Startupbootcamp Spain / Tetuan Valley
DreamIt Ventures - Philadelphia, PA – dreamitventures.com/
Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund- Propeller Venture Accelerator Fund
LaunchBox Digital - Durham, NC – Launchboxdigital
Excelerate Labs – Chicago, IL -exceleratelabs.com/
Capital Factory – Austin, TX – capitalfactory.com
Bootup Labs – Vancouver, BC, Canada
Startupbootcamp Denmark-Startupbootcamp Denmark
HackFwd – Europe – hackfwd.com/
Startupbootcamp – Europe – startupbootcamp.org/
Springboard – Cambridge, UK, Europe – springboard.com/
Openfund – Greece, Europe – theopenfund.com/
Startmate - Sydney, Australia startmate.com.au
NDCR Launchpad-Ireland-ndrc.ie/launchpad/

21 Things Your Startup SHOULD Copy From Airbnb

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 14:49:06 +0000

Airbnb a short term rentals company is a classic Silicon Valley story of bootstrapping, rejection and eventually success. Brian Chesky and his co-founder, Joe Gebbia, decided to start a company, and they moved to San Francisco. There were just two little problems: They didn’t really have a startup idea and they didn’t have the rent money. There was a design conference in the city, and there were no hotel rooms for rent.

Joe and Brian thought, it would be cool to rent air mattresses to conference visitors and make enough cash from that to make rent. Three people bought into the idea. That little idea turned into what is now AirBnB. Today Airbnb has over 110,000 unique listings available in more than 13,000 cities and 181 countries. The company has raised $7.8 million from Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners and recently received $100M in Unattributed funding.

Here are the things I think you should copy from Airbnb. Brian Chesky, Founder/CEOof Airbnb.com shared these lessons in various interviews.

Being broke brings an incredible amount of discipline and focus.
What your company does in its childhood has a big impact on its future.
In solving your own problems, you solve problems for other people, and through this, an opportunity often arises.
Don’t give up when you reach a pivotal success/failure point in your company’s life.
Preserve your company’s culture by hiring similarly passionate, ambitious people.
Don’t give up when you experience your trough of sorrow moment.
For Airbnb, it was all about figuring out how to make the experience less awkward.
You don’t have to be a programmer to make it big in the Valley.
What makes Chesky succeed is his drive to create the perfect user experience and his ideology that every problem has a creative solution on the other side of it.
It’s one thing to technically build our web site—that’s the easy part. Get the marketplace going, get traction, and build a community—that’s the hard part.
Go out and meet your users. Talk to them, understand them.
It just seemed a very good sign to me that these guys were actually on the ground in NYC hunting down (and understanding) their users.On top of several previous good signs- Paul Graham
We literally would fly to New York every Thursday or Friday during Y Combinator. We did this every week and we would be there throughout the weekend.
There were a myriad of tactics we used—we went as far as knocking on people’s doors.
Because of the Democratic National Conventions, some people were using the site in New York and listing places. What we would do is reach out to the very few people we had and basically talk to them, get to know them, figure out what products they needed and what we could offer them.
We tried to build loyalty knowing that if we did that, they would tell their friends.
We’d host parties and meetups and all sorts of different things. We’d just visit all of our users, we’d go to their homes and talk to them and do interviews.
Through that process, they’d get very excited and tell their friends about Airbnb. It was mostly about generating as much buzz and excitement to get them to tell their friends about us.
Press was always the number one tactic for us. The press would spark another group of users, then we’d go visit those people and talk to them and get them excited. It was a pattern that repeated itself.
We have an open floor plan. We have a weekly product meeting and a weekly engineering meeting. There may be daily meetings, but those are impromptu for a few minutes where you just huddle together over a computer and call that a product meeting.
Keeping the culture—if you’re growing quickly, there’s going to be a point where a majority of the people in the room are not going to know much about your company.

Foursquare Scores Another $50 Million In Funding

Thomas Oppong — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 21:24:19 +0000

Foursquare just raised $50 Million at a post money valuation of $600 Million. Andreessen Horowitz led the round.

The CEO Dennis Crowley in a blog post said “Today, we’re really excited to announce that we’ve raised $50 million in funding so that we can keep working towards our goals. The new round, led by Andreessen-Horowitz, includes our current VCs (O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and Union Square Ventures), as well as Spark Capital. Having our current investors double down on us is a tremendous gesture of support for foursquare and for the direction we’re headed.”

He further stated that “The additional capital will allow us to move more quickly; we can hire more engineers (we’re hiring in New York and San Francisco!), evolve our merchant offerings, expand internationally, and try a ton of new things.”

In June of last year, Foursquare raised $20 million at a $95 million valuation.

GE Awards $63 Million To 10 Solar Startups

Thomas Oppong — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 21:03:04 +0000

General Electric Co., the world’s largest maker of power-generation equipment, has awarded $63 million to 10 closely held companies developing solar and renewable energy technologies.

GE is spending about $10 billion by 2015 developing environmentally friendly products across its businesses through Chairman Jeffrey Immelt’s “ecomagination” program.

Solar power companies, makers of communications equipment and software and building efficiency developers were among those recognized in the second round of the $200 million contest, Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE said today in a statement.

Winners in the latest round include San Francisco-based residential solar installer SunRun Inc., Boston-based Ember Resources Inc., a Boston software and communications provider, and Austin, Texas-based Nuventix Inc.

Awards were also given to companies that improve the energy efficiency of buildings, including VPhase Plc, based in Manchester, U.K., Project Frog Inc. in San Francisco, and solar installer GMZ Energy Inc. of Waltham, Massachusetts. Communications companies Hara, On-Ramp Wireless Inc., Viridity Energy Inc. and WiTricity Corp were also winners.

GE didn’t disclose the amount of the funds that came from its venture-capital partners.

Planetary Offers A Beautiful Way To Explore Music On Your iPad

Thomas Oppong — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:07:18 +0000

Planetary, launched in early May, generated a lot of buzz among app developers and music fans. Developed by San Francisco firm Bloom Studio, it turns users’ music collection into a 3D universe where every planet is an album.

Fly through a 3D universe dynamically created by information about the recording artists you love. Visit planets that represent your favorite albums and control the playback of your music on iPad by browsing and selecting astronomical objects.

Planetary is just the sort of science fiction experience you expect when using an object from the future like iPad. You’ll want to show your friends this beautiful app. We’ve made it even easier to share Planetary at home; it looks incredible when you hook your iPad 2 up to a big HDTV or projector using the HDMI accessory.