Abbey Post is a plus-size fashion marketplace and community. The company just released a totally rebuilt version of the site, which now features an internal social network and expanded inventory. It takes an Etsy-style approach where anyone, from independent designers to established brands, can sell their wares.

“I chose this model of peer-to-peer commerce specifically because I want to build community,” Schames said in an interview. “Plus-size women feel really disenfranchised, neglected, and left out of conversations about fashion. There are many people who think fat ladies aren’t sexy and don’t care what they look like, even though there are over 100 million plus-size women in the US. If you give them a platform to connect over fashion and buy clothes that make them feel good, that math adds up real fast.”

After leaving her sales job, Schames gained e-commerce experience by founding an online consignment store for luxury accessories. She is a plus-size women herself and was drawn to handbags and jewelry because they are size agnostic. As a professional in New York City, she said it was consistently difficult to find plus-size clothing because a lot of brands are pulling their plus-size clothes out of stores and moving sales entirely online. However, none of the online retailers provided particularly appealing options and none incorporated the social element that makes shopping enjoyable for many women. Schames repeatedly had conversations with women who felt marginalized in the same way and realized there was a bigger opportunity out there.

“I’m not sure who told people that size 14 and up love polyester, but it’s not true,” she said. “Plus-size women are tired of going to the mall and looking through two abandoned racks in the back. Fashion is aspirational and today’s runway model averages a size zero. That does not reflect a majority of women. The fashion industry wants to fetishize thinness and sell us this fantasy, but it’s not real life and it pisses me off. I have a daughter and I don’t want her growing up feeling bad because she isn’t like the magazine. Part of our mission is telling women it is OK to love who you are. I am working hard to bring a positive and accepting and inclusive environment to normal women.”

Social e-commerce and peer-to-peer commerce are trendy right now and changing the experience of shopping online. The e-commerce sector didn’t see too much innovation for many years — brands and retailers put their inventory online and shoppers searched for what they were looking for. Recently, a wave of fashion startups such as Wanelo, Luvocracy, Etsy, Poshmark, and Polyvore have taken various approaches to transforming this experience and finding new ways to browse and buy products online. At a recent media dinner about social e-commerce, Angel List founder Naval Ravikant (who is an investor in Wanelo) said this is the future of shopping.

Abbey Post is using these new models to target an underserved and highly valuable market. It is a passion project that addresses a widespread and unique set of needs. There are other plus-size online retailers out there like Avenue.com, Fashion to Figure, SimpleBe, Jessica London, and OneStopPlus, but Schames said her focus on high-end clothing and her social approach sets AbbeyPost apart. She also said there are products and features in the pipeline that will make Abbey Post an innovative tech company, rather than just a tech-enabled one.

AbbeyPost is bootstrapped and based in New York.

Sometimes regulation puts the brakes on innovation, and car-focused startups have learned this more than most. Now car-sharing startup RelayRides has suspended its service in New York City after the New York state’s Department of Financial Services served it with a cease-and-desist letter.

RelayRides is a peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace in which people offer their cars for daily or weekly rentals, and it recently acquired competitor Wheelz. But the Department of Financial Services says RelayRides has been operating in violation of New York insurance laws and is “putting the public at risk” with inadequate insurance coverage.

So RelayRides has shut down in New York until further notice. The company writes in a blog post:

We are actively working with the Department to address these concerns. While we’re cooperating with the Department on these changes, we will be suspending activities that it considers non-compliant.

Effective Thursday, May 16, and until further notice, renters will no longer be able to make reservations for New York vehicles. Likewise, owner vehicles listed in New York will no longer be available. Trips already in progress in NY will not be affected by this change.

New York City has become a battleground for taxi, car-sharing, and ride-sharing applications. Just a few weeks ago, the CEOs of ride-sharing service SideCar and taxi-hailing app Hailo slugged it out onstage about New York’s rigid regulations.

Broken down car warning sign via SteveWoods/Shutterstock

JOOR is an online marketplace for wholesale fashion buying. The company is on track to do more than $350 million in transactions in 2013, which is more than three times the amount from 2012. More than 580 brands and designers and 30,000 buyers use the platform including many of the biggest names in fashion. JOOR recently opened up an office in Milan and is opening one soon in Sydney.

This is a prime example of a company applying technology to an industry that is predominantly offline, and succeeding. Founder Mona Bijoor said that most transactions in fashion wholesale happen at trade shows, market appointments, and with handwritten orders. JOOR’s business platform puts the sales process online so retailers and brands can connect in a more efficient way.

“This is a highly fragmented market where retailers can only source products from places they actually go and there is limited data available about the inventory,” she said in an interview. “If online sales of clothing makes sense for the consumer world, why shouldn’t it make sense for wholesale? Our job is to make retailers and brands better, smarter, and faster.”

Bijoor spent most of her career working in fashion with brands like Chanel, Elie Tahari, Cynthia Rowley, and in the buying departments of global retailers. She experienced the pain points on both sides and saw an opportunity to “pioneer wholesale evolution.”

The platform’s core technology connects brands and retailers. Brands create a profile page with marketing materials and retailers put up pages with information about their clients and inventory. Search capabilities are available on both sides using filters like price, trend, region, product etc… and the system finds relevant matches.

Buyers have access to real-time analytics about orders, notes, fulfillment, shipping and billing, as well as lead generation tools. Retailers can look at best selling items, discover new brands, and build and place orders on the platform.

The global fashion industry generates over a $1.5 trillion dollars a year and is growing. Most of the discussion surrounding about fashion tech focuses on consumers, but consumers are at one end of a very long and complicated supply chain that JOOR is  trying to make “less archaic.” This is more important than ever as “fast-fashion” has caused consumers to expect rapid turnover.

Joor’s clients include fashion heavyweights Diane Von Furstenberg, Phillip Lim, Alexander McQueen, Rag & Bone, and Thakoon. Right now the platform is only available for women’s apparel and menswear but Bijoor said she is exploring opportunities in footwear and accessories. Competitors include NuOrder, Balluun, Brandboom, but none have the high profile clientele that JOOR does (although NuOrder raised money from Rachel Zoe).

JOOR is based in New York with offices in LA and Milan and has raised $5.5 million to date from Battery Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks VC, Landis Capital, and Forerunner Ventures.

Photo Credit: electric stove/Flickr

WunWun’s helpers can do almost anything for you in Manhattan, like snag a cupcake from your favorite bakery, recommend a great jazz bar in Soho, and even wait for the cable guy in your apartment. Now businesses have a way to take advantage of WunWun’s army of helpers for deliveries.

The New York City-based company is today launching Power, a platform for on-demand deliveries for stores that don’t yet offer any delivery service. Stores can also use Power for branded deliveries, giving customers more of a luxury delivery experience.

“[Power] kind of happened naturally, we built WunWun and sent helpers to these stores — even the people who worked there asked us to do their own deliveries,” said Lee Hnetinka, WunWun cofounder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat.

WunWun (which stands for “What you need, when you need”) is kicking off Power’s branded delivery experience with the boutique men’s style retailer Anthony Brands. Online orders made between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. will be delivered that same day by a WunWun worker in Anthony clothing.

After launching its beta in January, WunWun has carved out a place for itself among Manhattanites. While the company isn’t revealing any specific user figures yet, it’s won endorsements from celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell (who apparently needed a juicer ASAP) and has gathered a surprising array of repeat customers. WunWun charges just $15 for deliveries and $2 for every 5 minutes worth of other services.

If u live in NYC u must try this new app called WUN WUN – they will get u what u need when u need it – for 15 bucks delivered 2 ur door !!!—
Rosie O'Donnell (@Rosie) March 20, 2013

According to Hnetinka, one person uses WunWun simply to get coffee delivered every day, while another user requests help daily to move furniture at an event space.

WunWun competes with the likes of TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Exec, but Hnetinka sees his company differently from each of those. “We are not a task service or an errand service, we’re making things on demand,” he said. With the launch of Power, the company will be able to further differentiate itself from the competition.

Photo: WunWun

LocalResponse’s pitch is simple, but ingenious for the ad set: it combs social media data to better target ads on mobile devices and desktops. That means more interesting ads for you, and hopefully better conversions for advertisers (especially those struggling to figure out how to make mobile ads work).

The social focus seems to be paying off for the company, as it announced today that its first quarter revenues increased 716 percent from last year. That’s particularly notable, since its revenues for January 2012 ended up equaling its sales for all of 2011.

“There’s been this hunt for [ad] inventory that performs better and is more targeted to the end user,” said Nihal Mehta, LocalResponse’s chief executive and co-founder, in an interview with VentureBeat. “I think we are one of the few ad networks that actually really perform.”

Mehta laid out three big reasons why the company is performing so well: More brands are shifting their ad spend to digital (he predicts 2013 will be the biggest ever for digital ads); the economy is on the rebound and brands are realizing consumers are ready to spend again; and finally, consumers are more social than ever, which gives LocalResponse plenty of data when it comes to targeting.

“We make ads more relevant and more contextual through these social signals,” Mehta said. “If you tweet ‘I’m hungry,’ you could see a banner ad for Pizza Hut on your phone. If you check-in to Wal-Mart on Foursquare, you could see an ad for Target the next time you go to CNN.com.”

The company’s strong ad performance has attracted some big clients like State Farm and Best Buy, 19 percent of which are Fortune 100 companies. It also announced today that it’s opening an office in Los Angeles. In an ad campaign using LocalResponse’s Direct Intent Targeting, L’Oreal saw a 0.19 percent click-through rate — ten-times the typical click-through rate of around 0.02 percent.

LocalResponse competes with 33Across and SalesForce’s Marketing Cloud (built out of the remains from Buddy Media), but Mehta tells me it has built something truly unique. The company has upgraded its infrastructure to handle 10 billion social media signals a month (which is almost the same as Twitter’s monthly usage), and it’s also natural language processing algorithms to determine intent from social data.

Mehta felt particularly vindicated in LocalResponse’s social focus after hearing about Foursquare’s potential plans to resell check-in data to advertisers. That’s something he predicted would be huge two years ago.

three words: check-in. retargeting. kaboom.—
nihal mehta (@nihalmehta) June 16, 2011

LocalResponse’s technology enables ad targeting to carry over from mobile to desktops, but the company isn’t particularly focused on cross-platform targeting yet. Mehta revealed that the company is eventually planning to take advantage of your social media identity for deeper cross-platform capabilities eventually.

Since the company is so focused on ad targeting, I asked Mehta how LocalResponse could take advantage of something like Google Glass.

“Glass for us won’t be an ad interface, but it could be a data signal,” he said. For example, it could take advantage of the fact that you’re taking a lot of pictures of a particular place or product, or simply spending a lot of time looking at something. “We want to stay laser-focused on social signals. But I think it’s cool, I think it will have as much of an impact as the iPod had in the music industry and the iPhone had in the phone industry.”

LocalResponse was founded in 2010 and has received around $8 million in funding.

Ever felt like your favorite music app just doesn’t get you? With its latest iPhone app, Songza wants to get to know you better than ever and help find the perfect music for your mood or activity.

Songza is best known for curating playlists with more intelligence than that of Pandora or other radio services. For example, the app knows what day and time it is and pairs that with info with your current activity (working, relaxing, exercising, etc.)

On top of improving performance, the new iPhone app takes this intelligent playlist a bit further by letting you tell the app what you are specifically doing rather than it giving you pre-set options. In the App Store, Songza says:

Doing something special? From the Concierge screen on iPhone or iPod Touch, shake your device and tell Songza exactly what you’re up to; Songza will then find the right music to make it better. For example, you could enter ‘Entertaining’ and Songza will find you music to soundtrack the perfect party.

While the company has a decent web app, its mobile apps are the arguably the best way to interact and experience the service. The iPhone app has been downloaded more than 6 million times to date and has a 4.5 out of 5 rating in the App Store. It also has apps for Android and Kindle Fire.

Songza is based in New York City and was founded in 2007. The company recently raised $3.82 million in new funding, according to an SEC filing. (The company had “no comment.”)

Check out a few more photos from the new iPhone and iPad apps below.

Photos via Songza

In the blink of an eye, Facebook has quickly become a major player for  connecting with local businesses.

Taking advantage of that huge opportunity, New York City-based Yext announced today that it will now let its users synchronize their local business information with Facebook. Yext’s platform lets business owners manage their listings across sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages from a single dashboard. (Which, hopefully, leads to less inaccurate data and more sales.)

“It’s a fairly long call thing … Half of local searches occur on mobile devices, and 24 percent of the time [for most users] is spent on Facebook,” said Howard Lerman, Yext’s chief executive and cofounder, describing how he believes Facebook will inevitably become a bigger local search player over time. “So, without really trying, Facebook has kind of captured the market with their Nearby product … that has profound implications for the local discovery ecosystem.”

Facebook last year upgraded the “Nearby” feature in its mobile apps to include local businesses (previously it only showed nearby friends). Last month, that feature was renamed to the more descriptive “Local search.” Facebook also revealed that it had two billion connections (mostly Likes) between users and local businesses, along with 645 million page views.

With its new Facebook integration, Yext lets its users manage their Facebook listings for local businesses with the same dashboard that manages information for other local listing sites. You can manage comments on the pages, as well as manage your own posts.

Best of all, Yext offers business owners a simple way to manage multiple Facebook pages for specific locations — making them more visible with Facebook’s Nearby feature. Yext also compiles data from all of those separate listings — like people currently checked into different locations — as a single figure in your main brand page.

I asked Lerman if Facebook actually wants companies to have multiple pages on its site (especially since many will appear identical, aside from things like address, phone number, and business hour differences).

“Facebook is clearly committed to local discovery experience, these are the pages that appear in their local search,” he told me. “It’s not the brand page. It doesn’t make sense to see there’s a brand nearby. It makes sense to see there’s a location nearby.”

The company began work on this Facebook integration shortly after releasing its Power Listings+ product in January, a massive update that lets businesses manage information like staff biographies and store maps.

Yext has raised more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others. The company sold off its pay-per-call business last fall, and it’s now focusing entirely on local listings.

At this point, Lerman has gotten the “eccentric genius” startup founder vibe down pat. So I wasn’t surprised when he related his thoughts on Yext’s current standing through a surfing metaphor.

“I don’t surf, but I know some people who do, and I just had an image in my head of a guy on a board with no waves, swimming around to catch a wave,” he said, describing the typical situation of a startup founder. “Now there’s a giant crest — when that happens you have to stand up and not fall off your board.”

Photo: Daniel M. Silva/Shutterstock.com

Exciting public-data-search startup Enigma has won TechCrunch Disrupt NY’s Startup Battlefield amid strong competition.

New York-based Enigma just launched yesterday. It likes to peg itself as “Google for public data.” It charges a subscription to let organizations search public data much easier than they ever could before. By ‘public data’, the company means any data that’s open to public record — anything from home purchase transactions to government spending contracts to patent and SEC filings — that hasn’t been easily accessible to date.

Enigma has used a combination of web crawling and outreach to government agencies to pull together a database of billions of public records across more than 100,000 datasets.

“Currently, the world of public data is much like the world that existed on the Internet before search engines became available in the 1990s,” Enigma co-founder Marc DaCosta told VentureBeat yesterday. “Because there is no infrastructure to search and discover public data, huge sources of real important insight and knowledge about how companies, people, and places interact in the world is hidden from view.”

Engima faced stiff competition in Startup Battlefield finals. Here were the other six finalists from it had to compete with:

Floored

Floored offers a surprisingly awesome service: 3D real-estate modeling.

Floored helps businesses map commercial spaces in 3D by piecing together photography and computer models. You can add furniture to uncompleted spaces to get a better feel for what the place would look like for your company.

One recent project the company tackled was modeling floors of 1 World Trade Center, which hasn’t been completed yet. So it’s a good way to get a  feel for a potential office space you want to move into or a home you might want to purchase.

Glide

Glide is a fun new service that lets you stream video of yourself from iOS and Android phones. It also lets you watch recorded video calls later that are stored in the cloud.

Video chats can be one-on-one or with groups.

Handle

Handle offers a “priority engine” that claims to raise the bar on productivity with tools that combat email inbox overload and help you organize your time wisely.

“This is not just about getting your email down to zero,” Handle CEO Shawn Carolan told VentureBeat. “This is about finding and keeping your priorities straight and spending time on the things that matter. We all have one life to live one day at a time. There is work and there is your personal life, and all of your priorities need to be considered in one place to make decisions.”

HealthyOut

HealthyOut has iPhone and Android apps that helps users eat better or lose weight.

First you choose your preferences for what kinds of food you like. Then HealthyOut combs through many food menus in New York City and makes healthy selections that can be delivered to you Monday through Friday, becoming a personal nutritionist of sorts.

SupplyShift

SupplyShift offers a service to companies that helps manage supplier communications and gives you a better understanding of your supply chain’s environmental impact.

“The market situation changed radically in the last three years, and sustainability is becoming a key part of corporate strategy, but corporations and the government do not have the tools to address that need,” SupplyShift CEO Alexander Gershenson told TechCrunch. “SupplyShift takes care of that.”

Zenefits

Zenefits is a free service that claims to help small businesses with employee benefits and payroll.

For example, when a small business hires a new employee, Zenefits says it will do the following things:

• Get the employee to sign their agreements online.
• Collect the employee’s personal, bank, and tax info.
• Add the employee to your payroll and benefits.
• Fill out, file, and store everything online.

Zenefits also helps with the paperwork of letting employees go and helps employees with life events like getting married or having children. The service makes money by taking commissions from insurance companies that it gets quotes from.

Top photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The ongoing saga of approving taxi hailing apps in New York City is beginning to resemble a wild ride in one of the city’s taxis.

After getting the green light last week from a New York Supreme Court judge, NYC’s smartphone taxi hailing program has once again been blocked, Bloomberg reports. The program, announced in December by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, would make it possible for you to hail and pay for a taxi using a smartphone app.

This latest setback is bad news for taxi apps Uber and Hailo, which both just recently announced that they would be participating in the program. We’ve tried to get a comment from Hailo about the news, but their press representative hasn’t yet responded to us.

Several NYC taxi groups, including the Livery Roundtable and Black Car Assistance Corp., initially sued to block the hailing program in February, but their suit was dismissed last week by New York Supreme Court Judge Carole Huff. That decision was nullified today by an Associate Justice, Helen E. Freedman, who issued an emergency injunction of the hailing program, as well as a full review.

“This faux ‘pilot program’ is so fundamentally flawed and illegal in so many respects that it had to be stopped,” said Mastro, an attorney representing the livery cab companies, in an e-mail to Bloomberg. “And now it once again has been.”

We’re seeing a major struggle here between entrenched labor organizations and startups chomping at the bit to disrupt inefficient markets. The hailing program will likely get approved eventually, but expect to see a similar back-and-forth in other cities when it comes to taxi apps and other apps that significantly impact the real world.

Most startup founders fresh off raising $15 million from Andreessen Horowitz would show up at a tech conference ready to prove themselves further. Not the people behind Rap Genius.

Brooklyn-based Rap Genius offers a service for annotating such things as music lyrics, books, and speeches. In many ways, it’s a Wikipedia for hip-hop and other forms of media.

The company’s founders showed up today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY to talk about their startup and announce the launch of a new feature called News Genius. This new tool exists as a Twitter account for now, but it shows that the site’s annotation tech can also be used to give more context to current events, such as the FDA’s approval on Plan B for females 15 and up.

While the cofounders could have used today to explain why popular events and news need Rap-Genius-style annotation, the conversation on stage was a bizarre mix of observations and an apology to Mark Zuckerberg over the time he (sort of) suggested Zuck should fellate one of the founders.

Here are some of the things said on stage today by Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam (left) when he wasn’t rapping:

“The secret ingredient of Rap Genius is love. We often tell people Rap Genius was built in love on rails.”

“It’s not just a code. It’s certainly not just a business. It’s a religion. It’s a cult. It’s often called a Ponzi scheme of knowledge.”

“I was thinking Taliban Genius could be a subgenre.”

“Ben [Horowitz] is the Rap Genius godfather, you know. He’s true fam. We consider him a bro. It’s not like he’s some Uncle Moneybags. … Ben, we love you, dog.”

“We take Vyvanse sometimes to turn up, at least I do. One of the reasons is I’m allergic to coffee. But also, you take one of those and it makes you feel so powerful.”

“We would do naked Adderall. This is before Y Combinator. It was just a germ. We’d stay there the whole day and work. We’d come up with fun theories. We came up with a theory that if you got a woman pregnant while on Adderall, the baby would be smarter. But only if the woman is also on Adderall.”

“It’s not easy becoming the biggest site in the world, you know? You gotta take it step by step.”

“I’ve been working on [annotating] War and Peace. One of my goals is I’m going to explain all of War and Peace. It brings the pleasure back to reading.”

“[Saying what I did about Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett was] the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life. I love those guys. Mark Zuckerberg. Like, I met my last girlfriend on Facebook. Meeting him was such an honor.”

“I think Rap Genius is gonna be bigger than Facebook someday. But I don’t say that in a beefy competition way. … It’s all love. I’ve got nothing but respect. I’m sorry Zuck. I love you, dog.”

“We really do give a fuck. … We could sell this shit and go become alcoholics living on island. But the reason we’re doing this is to educate the kids. I consider this a tuition-free university.”

“If you wanna ball major, you gotta drink the fucking Kool-Aid.”

And here are a few quips from cofounder Tom Lehman (right):

“I never drank coffee, but then I got into it, and that’s a powerful drug. … It’s crazy and you drank it, and everyone’s pretending it’s a normal thing. And then everyone says, ‘I’ve got to run to the bathroom. I’ve had too much coffee.’ Is that peeing or what is that? I don’t know.”

“Heroku, man, ah. A lot of love, a lot of hate. Beautiful service. I’ve still got love for them. Rap Genius couldn’t have gotten off the ground without it. They pulled a little bit of a jack move. … They represented their product a certain way and it didn’t actually work that way and it made us waste a lot of time. But then we got to write that cool blog post with the graphs. … It turned into mega beef.”

Co-founder Ilan Zechory (center) seems relatively normal compared to his cohorts.

Maybe it’s all an act to get people’s attention and be more memorable in a huge sea of startups. Or maybe these guys are actually real-life Jean Ralphios.

Check out the full conversation below:

Transportation startups are a hot thing now, with Uber, Hailo, SideCar, Lyft, and others getting a lot of attention and controversy. But this space is a battleground with regulators attempting to stop innovation and some startups getting more favorable treatment than others.

The CEOs of ride-sharing service SideCar and taxi-hailing app Hailo showed that tension in a combative panel today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY.

SideCar CEO Sunil Paul (pictured, right) took a lot of shots throughout the conversation. His biggest target was New York City’s Taxi & Limousine Commission (TLC). He said the TLC is using its power to protect taxis and apps that coordinate with the industry like Hailo and Uber.

“The TLC protects the taxi industry, and I don’t think anyone can deny that fact,” Paul said. “SideCar driver shifts are voluntarily and payment is voluntary. It is the regulation of taxis that is an illegal restraint of trade.”

Paul is understandably frustrated. This past weekend, New York City police targeted SideCar drivers in a sting operation. In a blog post, the company wrote that a SideCar driver named Sandra was interrogated by police and her new car was impounded.

“People are being treated like criminals for doing something that might threaten the taxi industry,” Paul said. “Sharing is not a crime. We want to make sharing possible in New York.”

By comparison, Hailo and Uber have just received approval from the TLC to operate e-hailing taxi services in NYC. With a few taps on your smartphone, you can now have a taxi come pick you up wherever you are in the city.

Hailo CEO Jay Bregman said he was happy about the development. He took the jabs from Paul quietly but finally responded when he’d had enough. Bregman said his company was part of a “broadening” taxi industry that has begun to innovate.

He said his service had paid out “millions” to taxi drivers in cities where Hailo already operates. He praised taxi drivers for embracing innovation. Paul said he didn’t have a problem with drivers, but with governments.

“Taxi drivers are great, but they are protected by a monopoly,” Paul said.

Hailo has only been operating in cities around the world for 14 months, so Bregman also said he was pleased that it only took that amount of time before the TLC approved his service.

“You can be disruptive without being abrasive,” Bregman said.

Paul shrugged off Bregman’s comment, saying, “If you want to be disruptive, you have to be willing to piss people off.”

At the end of the panel, the two did eventually hug, but it’s understandable why they are so at odds at the moment.

Check out the conversation in full below:

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

All the developers and consumers out there who hate Apple’s iCloud might have a new favorite service with NimbusBase, a a startup that helps sync user data across app platforms.

NimbusBase debuted its cloud service today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY during the Startup Battlefield competition. Essentially, it provides a middle man service that stores your data in already existing Dropbox and Google Drive accounts. Then, when you log in to those accounts from an app, your user app data syncs no matter where you go.

NimbusBase cofounder and CTO Ray Wang [above] said it provides a lot of benefits to both developers and consumers. For developers, it claims to save them weeks or months of backend building time and potentially could save them “thousands of dollars” in data storage cost savings. For consumers, your user data goes with you no matter where you access an app.

Here’s an easy-to-understand example of what NimbusBase could do: In Angry Birds, you could beat a level on the iPhone, but when you play the iPad version, you still have to clear that level. NimbusBase can sync that data so you are always in the same place in the game regardless of which platform you want play it on.

Now you extrapolate that to all kinds of other apps — health, social, business, and so on. Theoretically, there should be a ton of developers out there who want user data seamlessly following users no matter what platform they use.

NimbusBase only works on web apps for now, but it intends to launch Android and iOS versions of its software “soon.”

Currently, it charges developers $500 a year for the service and it only requires adding a few lines of code to install it. Next up, NimbusBase said it plans to add support for Microsoft SkyDrive and other personal services in the near future.

The New York-based company was founded in August and has raised $30,000 in seed funding to date.

Top photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

NEW YORK CITY — New York VC Fred Wilson always likes to share his insights to a wide audience. Today at TechCrunch Disrupt NY, not only did he talk about why Foursquare is doing fine, but he also shared what he thinks makes a good entrepreneur — being a little crazy.

Wilson is the cofounder of Union Square Ventures and someone who has placed a lot of smart bets. He’s invested in companies such as Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Zynga, Kickstarter, Etsy, and Dwolla.

“You don’t want a psychopath, but it happens,” Wilson said. “You want someone who is crazy but mentally healthy. … To see things differently requires you to be wired a little differently.”

Wilson refused to name “pyschopaths” that he has funded, but he was willing to name a few people who fit the bill of “good crazy.” Two entrepreneurs he thinks fit that are Kickstarter’s Perry Chen and Zynga’s Mark Pincus. “They just do things differently,” Wilson said. “Perry and Mark have some common traits. … Pincus can drive me crazy.”

What not to do in a pitch session

Wilson also gave insights into things founders and entrepreneurs had done in past pitch meetings that were ill-advised. Here are few tips of what not to do:

• Don’t give a lengthy background. Get to the point. (“Going through a long backstory is a bad idea.)
• Don’t pitch something incredibly derivative. (An example of what Wilson hates: “I’m taking a Pinterest model and I’m applying it to automobiles, and there will be flash sales.”)
• Don’t demo a product that doesn’t always work. (“I had a meeting yesterday with an entrepreneur and the product didn’t work. It was a painful moment for both of us.”
• Don’t talk for 20 minutes and then show off your product. Show your product for 20 minutes and explain it.
• Don’t show 20 slides when you can show one really great slide that explains your product.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

NEW YORK CITY — All-star investor Fred Wilson has weighed in on the ongoing saga of location-based service Foursquare and whether the company is in trouble.

Wilson is best-known as the co-founder of New York’s Union Square Ventures and his popular blog A VC. He has invested in big names in tech like Kickstarter, Twitter, Tumblr, and Zynga.

As an investor in Foursquare, he certainly has an incentive to say nice things, but Wilson is also known for his honesty and insight. He believes Foursquare is fine and growing more quickly than people might expect.

“I think Foursquare is doing great,” Wilson said today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “The new version is growing faster than most mobile apps we have in our portfolio.”

He also said he has confidence in Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley to continue moving the business forward and that the business has similarities to where Twitter was a few years ago.

“Dennis has gone through the hardest thing — turning a product into a business,” Wilson said. “It reminds me of where Twitter was a few years ago. There were a lot of growing pains. But they are in a good place now.”

Crowley spoke yesterday on stage here and admitted the company wasn’t “the shiny new thing anymore.” Still, he defended his business vigorously and said this past March was Foursquare’s highest-generating revenue month so far.

“There’s a lot of perception we’re not growing — that’s totally false,” Crowley said yesterday. “A lot of folks think we aren’t generating revenue or that we don’t care about revenue. They’re wrong.”

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

NEW YORK CITY — Real estate modeling and the digital mapping of commercial spaces isn’t the most exciting concept, but New York startup Floored‘s 3D space modeling is so cool that it might change that.

Floored CEO Dave Eisenberg showed off his startup today at TechCrunch Disrupt’s NY event, and the concept connected with the audience. To my ears, it attracted the most applause of any company today.

Floored helps businesses map commercial spaces in 3D by piecing together photography and computer models. You can add furniture to uncompleted spaces to get a better feel for what the place would look like for your company. It charges an average of $.50 to $2 per square foot to model spaces. Eisenberg insists these prices are far cheaper than any competing solution. “This is a disruptively low price,” Eisenberg said.

One recent project the company just tackled is modeling floors of 1 World Trade Center, which hasn’t been completed yet. Ideally, the service walks you through 3D-modeled floors of the building so potential renters see the space without having to visit.

“People in interior design, architecture, and construction all want this software, but it doesn’t exist,” Eisenberg said.

What makes the app so fun is that is lets you walk through these spaces and gives you an immersive feel for buildings that aren’t even finished yet. Eisenberg’s demo of 1 World Trade Center showed the capability to walk through floors, see furniture placements, and even look out windows that glance over New York City.

Currently, the company has only completed projects in New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., but Eisenberg said it will likely be available in other markets later this year.

The company was founded in July and has raised $1 million from investors including Lerer Ventures, Felicis Ventures, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and Two Sigma Ventures.

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley has faced a lot of criticism recently as his company has struggled to define itself as a full-fledged business. Today, he acknowledged those negative perceptions and defended Foursquare.

“We’re not the shiny new thing anymore,” Crowley said today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “We’ve been around for four years. People are still skeptical of whether we can pull this off or not. … We’ve seen other people, like Facebook, go through this as well.”

Foursquare recently raised a $41 million loan to help keep the company growing and heavily shift its focus on helping people explore good places to eat, shop, and more. The loan generated more criticism, but Crowley said the company is growing and generating revenue.

“There’s a lot of perception we’re not growing — that’s totally false,” Crowley said. “A lot of folks think we aren’t generating revenue or that we don’t care about revenue. They’re wrong. … This past March was our highest-generating revenue month so far. We expect to see that going forward.”

One of Crowley’s most prominent recent attacks came from former Square COO Keith Rabois. Crowley said that Rabois is on the board of Yelp. Because Foursquare provides similar data, it’s clear Rabois can’t be considered a fair source.

“If I was on the board of Yelp, I’d be nervous, too,” Crowley said.

The most important thing to Crowley now is building a good product and creating the best location data on the web. Apps like Instagram, Uber, and Path all use Foursquare’s API, and more companies will likely come to rely on that data.

“People get caught up in the story and not the things we’re actually doing,” Crowley said. “Facebook has built the social layer of the Internet. We’re doing the same thing around places. … That’s one of the biggest assets we have.”

Dennis Crowley photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Prominent entrepreneur and Andreessen Horowitz investor Chris Dixon is known for being ahead of the curve, and he recently attracted headlines for investing in 3D-printing startup Shapeways. Another upcoming area he thinks will be big: Startups focused on the virtual currency Bitcoin.

“You had a first wave of Bitcoin startups,” Dixon said today on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. “Now what we’re seeing is that some of the best startup guys are looking at it. There will be a second wave.”

Dixon likes Bitcoin so much because the virtual currency lowers the friction of payments, especially on an international scale. Another reason is that, in some regards, it philosophically matches the early promise of an anonymous Internet.

“You can pay someone without them trusting you,” Dixon said. “The exciting thing about these new currency schemes is you have an anonymous payment system grafted on to an anonymous network.”

The first wave of Bitcoin startups are companies like Coinbase, Coinlab, and Tradehill. These types of companies are focused on helping people trade Bitcoins and exchange them for cash.

Dixon has only been a partner at Andreessen Horowitz for five months, but it’s easy to imagine him and his firm investing in the next wave of Bitcoin startups.

“A lot of people in California are so excited about Bitcoin because there has been a lot of frustration around finance,” Dixon said. “You see what happens on Wall St. It’s very corrupt. … Finally something interesting is happening in financial tech stuff.”

Photo via Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

New York City’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) is graduating 10 startups from its Winter 2013 class this morning, and we’re live at IAC’s Manhattan headquarters for their demo day presentations.

Today marks the end of a four-month program for the startups, which included a $40,000 investment from ERA (plus potential for follow-on funding), coworking space, legal advice, and an extensive network of more than 200 NYC startup mentors.

The companies each tackle a range of different topics — one aims to evolve affiliate marketing, while another simply wants to make it easier for restaurants to hire employees — but they’re all eager to contribute something significant to NYC’s startup scene.

Acquaintable

The Pitch: Makes it easier to meet new people, especially friends of friends.

Funding: Raising $500,000 with $200,000 already committed.

“I started Acquaintable because I gave up on online dating,” said co-founder Joel Rodriguez.

He pointed out that only 20 percent of single adults actively use online dating. When he investigated why, he discovered that it was because many people found it difficult to meet quality dates. On the other hand, 70 percent of people end up finding their significant others through friends. The need for an online dating site focused on friends of friends seemed clear.

In a beta test with thousands of users, Rodriguez said 15 percent of users returned daily (on par with top dating sites). Acquaintable also saw 20 percent more women using the site when compared to other top dating sites.

Cognical

The Pitch: Improves the accuracy of financial underwriting.

Funding: Raising $800,000 with $200,000 committed already.

“We help lenders identify the borrowers who will pay them back,” said Cognical co-founder Brandon Wright. The company’s “AI” engine can increase profit for lenders by 25 to 75 percent, he noted.

One of Cognical’s current users has managed to reduce loan defaults from 15.7 percent to just 2.9 percent after just one month. In particular, the company’s technology could make lenders make better decisions for payday loans, which account for 21 percent of loan defaults, even though they make up only 3 percent of all loans.

Consigned

The Pitch: Improves the affiliate marketing model by making anyone an online retailer.

[Check out our full coverage on Consignd.]

Instead of dealing with an online retailer’s affiliate program, Consignd lets you create your own storefront to show off cool products. You can also easily pin items from your storefront to your Pinterest account (no surprise there as Pinterest is incredbly popular for e-commerce).

By cutting out the online retailer middleman, Consignd lets both brands and their influences earn more money. The company now has more than 500 stores open by its users, who have a reach of more than 10 million people.

Co-founder Neil Parikh noted that Consignd now sees more pins on Pinterest than well-known brands like Warby Prker and Bonobos.

Easy Pairings

The Pitch: Streamlines the hiring process for restaurants and similar businesses.

Funding: Raising $500,000, with $190,000 committed so far.

With annual turnover rates for restaurants at more than 50 percent, and 13 million people employed by the food service industry, the time has come for a better solution for restaurant hiring than Craigslist, according to co-founder Darren Wan. The company’s service can lower hiring times from 18 days to just three days.

As Wan describes it, Easy Pairings’ technology can also apply to any industry with high turnover for entry positions.

Monaeo

The Pitch: Uses data analytics to make tax compliance easier.

Monaeo has developed a SaaS platform targeting the $10 billion market for location-based taxes, according to co-founder Anupam Singhal. The company’s software keeps track of where employees have been, which is crucial for tax compliance.
110 CPAs helped shape Monaeo’s software, and they’re also helping to beta test it.

The company also announced that it has formed a partnership with Expaticore, a company that helps businesses manage employees all over the world, giving it access to several Fortune 1,000 companies

TheSquareFoot

The Pitch: Simplifies commercial real estate leasing by bringing landlords, brokers, and tenants together.

Funding: Raised $400,000 so far, looking for additional strategic investments.

After launching its platform seven months ago, TheSquareFoot has helped more than 50 companies sign leases worth millions, according to co-founder Jonathan Wasserstrum.  The company doesn’t just help businesses find new offices, it also hooks them up with moving services, furniture setup, and telecom setup.

TheSquareFoot now has 75 percent of Houston’s commercial real estate in its system, Wasserstrum announced today. By the end of the year, the company expects to have all of the markets in Texas listed, and it will begin rolling out its service in New York City.

Startist

The Pitch: A platform for creative people to get together to collaborate on projects. Think of it like a Kickstarter for projects, instead of products.

“What if Mick Jagger never met Keith Richards?,” asked Startist’s co-founder and CEO Danny Oh. While Craigslist has been helpful, he pointed out that simple text-based listings aren’t very useful to creative types.

Startist lets creative people create rich media resumes, which lets you vet creative talent similar to how LinkedIn works for resumes.

“Creative people need to express themselves, and that expression often is an interchangeable medium,”  he said. “Writing about how good a dancer you are is like dancing to prove you’re a good fuckin’ accountant.”

Suitey

The Pitch: A tech-focused real estate brokerage to simplify buying, selling, and renting homes.

Funding: Raised $400,000 so far.

David Walker, Suitey’s co-founder, announced that it has completed transactions in every Manhattan neighborhood. Brokerage fees alone reached $60 billion last year, making it a ripe market for a startup to take advantage of.

“We are bringing transparency to online listing search,” Walker said.

The company has developed an elegant interactive map to browse its listings, and it also lets you start the home-buying process right on its site. Walker also noted that Suitey’s agents can complete three transactions in the time it takes a traditional broker to finish one.

Trendalytics

The Pitch: Support software for brands and retailers to keep track of merchandise trends.

Funding: Raising $800,000.

Big data meets fashion: Trendalytics software lets retail buyers know if they’re too early, too late, or right on time for choosing specific fashion trends.

Typically, apparel retailers end up marking down 50 percent of their merchandise, leading to $128 billion in lost value annually, according to co-founder Karen Moon.

VocalizeLocal

The Pitch: Offers marketing tools for companies to manage their online customer reviews, local directory information, and mobile presence.

Funding: Raising $700,000, currently has $350,000 committed.

83 percent of all purchases are now influenced by online and mobile revenues, VocalizeLocal’s founder Philip Krimz pointed out. So local businesses need a service that helps them manage the new digital world. VocalizeLocal is offering a solution that’s simple, affordable, and

Krims notes that businesses can increase their revenue 5 percent to 9 percent a year simply by adding one star to their online ratings. One local moving business that’s been using the service has seen 450 new customers and a 3X increase in local directory inquiries.

VocalizeLocal is already profitable and is seeing an annual revenue run-rate of  $400,000, Krims said.

Admit it: You’ve thought about dabbling in affiliate marketing. After all, who wouldn’t want to make an extra buck by sharing a few products on their blog or Twitter?

But unless you’re an Internet superstar, chances are you won’t end up making much from traditionally low-commission affiliate programs. Amazon’s program, for example, starts at just 4 percent for purchases (you can earn more with digital download commissions).

New York City-based Consignd believes it has a better solution. Instead of dealing with an online retailer’s affiliate program, Consignd lets you create your own storefront to show off cool products. You can also easily pin items from your storefront to your Pinterest account (no surprise there as Pinterest is incredbly popular for e-commerce).

Much like Fab and other online shopping sites, Consignd has drop-shipping relationships with companies and their brands, which means orders come directly from the manufacturer. The big benefit to that: Higher commissions for you.

“By taking the retailer out of the equation, we never hold any inventor risk,” said Luke Sherwin, Consignd’s cofounder and operations head, in an interview with VentureBeat. Since it took out the middle man, Consignd sees a surprisingly high margin of 40 to 45 percent with a typical brand relationship, which lets it offer its users commissions between 20 and 25 percent.

Consigd is a member of Enterpreneur Roundtable Accelerator’s most recent class of startups in New York City. Sherwin and the rest of the Consignd team are feverishly prepping for ERA’s demo day, which is being held tomorrow.

Consignd has certainly come a long way since my initial chat with Neil Parikh, cofounder and head of business development, a few months ago. The company was initially focusing on smaller sellers, like people who offer products on Etsy or sell at local flea markets. Now it’s aiming for “Etsy graduates,” as Sherwin described them, and bigger brands.

Since launching its beta five weeks ago, the company has nabbed 55 brands, including Braun, Soul Bicycles, and WeWod, and has accrued a waiting list of willing partners twice that size. It’s also attracted three of the top 20 Pinterest users, according to Sherwin.

Consignd is currently raising a $750,000 seed round.

New York City’s one billion subway riders are about to get a pleasant surprise: more cell phone service underground.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, along with Transit Wireless and the four big carriers, is expanding its cell phone service project to 30 more stations, including massive hubs like Times Square and Rockefeller Center.

“Every service that we’ve come to expect above ground will be enjoyed and expected below ground,” MTA acting executive director Thomas Prendergast told reporters during the announcement this morning.

Along with cell phone service, commuters will also be able to take advantage of Boingo’s sponsored Wi-Fi service.

The rollout, which is expected to extend to all subway stations by 2017, has been a slow and difficult one for Transit Wireless, which has had a tough time adapting new technology to New York City’s 110-year old subway system.

“One of the challenges we face is figuring out how to incorporate technology into a system that wasn’t even built for it. A lot of things just take time here,” Transit Wireless CEO Bill Bayne said.

But while the MTA and carriers were quick to talk about the security benefits of the cell phone service project, what was most telling was what they didn’t talk about: the terrorism question. Is the MTA aware of the possibility that terrorists could use the cell phone service to remotely detonate explosives?

Thomas Prendergast’s response wasn’t particularly illuminating.

“We work very closely with the counter-terrorist task force in New York City and any decisions we make about any communications medium in the subway are run through those channels,” Prendergast said, dodging the question.

The concern, while a tad sensational, is understandably on everyones’ minds, given that remote detonation was the method used in the Boston Marathon bombing last week. While the MTA left the question unanswered today, it’s certainly one that will pop up frequently as the company continues to expand cell phone service in subways.

Another significant — but slightly less pressing — concern is whether the increase in cell phone service will increase the number of devices stolen from subway riders. Prendergast’s response? Use common sense.

“I think proper care should be taken, as you do with your wallet and things like that, but beyond that, this service is something that you should use when you use the system,” he said.

Photo: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

This ain’t your typical summer school: New York City’s Lerer Ventures today announced Summer School VC, a new program that will show students what it’s like to be a venture capitalist.

Applications for Summer School VC are being accepted until May 24, after which the firm will choose 15 to 20 students to participate. It’s a month-long program — running from June 25 to July 23 — at Lerer’s New York City offices.

Max Stoller, the Lerer Ventures analyst heading up Summer School VC, describes it as an “intensive training program for venture capitalists.” Students will learn about the day-to-day operations of a VC firm and gain an insider’s perspective on the mysterious world of the people bankrolling startups.

“If you want to be a part of the next round of VC analysts or associates, it’s a great program for you,” Stoller said in an interview this morning. “[Similarly] if you’re a student thinking about starting a company and raising capital.”

The firm has been thinking about running a summer program for a while now, and the task fell to Stoller after joining Lerer Ventures in January. Upon completion of the program, he told me, students will also be able to take advantage of the firm’s contacts within the VC and startup community.

Once Summer School VC is over, Stoller says, Lerer Ventures may end up open sourcing some of the teaching materials. NYC’s ff Venture Capital also recently announced the ff Fellows Program, its own summer program for budding entrepreneurs.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Tumblr’s CEO David Karp has been in the spotlight as of late, especially in the blogosphere. A little over a week ago, he published a blog post announcing the killing of Tumblr’s Storyboard, and subsequently, the end of the only 1 year old Tumblr editorial team.

There was clear backlash in the media world, including a certain piece satirizing Karp’s post. Today was the first time he has been able to speak freely and publicly.

Speaking at GigaOm’s paidContent Live conference in New York City, Karp said the following regarding the Storyboard team: “It’s not a knock on that team. We hired a team of journalists as an experimental marketing initiative to report on our community. It wasn’t the right tool in our toolbox.”

When pushed further on why exactly it wasn’t the right tool, he said frankly, “It wasn’t working in the ways we had intended for it to work. My hope was that we were going to surface the incredible stuff that’s going on on Tumblr, stuff you had no idea existed. Storyboard was our take on the Tumblr beat. Like many creative ambitions, this didn’t work the way we wanted.”

In a bit of a contrast to Karp, Aria Haghighi, CEO of Prismatic, and Zite CEO Mark Johnson sang the praises of personalization in content consumption, and how their services are helping users and readers curate and expand the content they are recommended. It seems that Karp has killed the first product to help readers curate the massive Tumblr ecosystem (as of today, the platform has 90 million posts created/day by 100 millions bloggers, totaling at 45 billion posts), but this doesn’t mean it’s Tumblr’s last attempt.

He then spoke about Tumblr’s view on monetization for its creators, making some contentious (although brave) comments, this time against Google and YouTube’s model.

We’ve left the thing wide open. Compare that to a YouTube and their partner program. They’ve built a brilliant, but single model for some creators. My concern is that it reminds me of what Google did with the blogosphere–it was wide open with a huge diversity of stuff that people were creating in the blogosphere.

If you remember when AdSense came along, the blogosphere started to homogenize to get a buck. In the same way that AdSense had a strong effect on the originality, creativity and diversity of the blogosphere, my concern is that with networks like YouTube that are big and wide open, when you look at the tools, already you can see the YouTube creators lining up behind the one business model.

At Tumblr, we want to keep the network wide open and never prescribe anything.

But what does an open, non-prescriptive network mean?

Karp thinks it means success through other platforms. He announced that by today, there have been 70 book deals, and by two months ago, the platform had 3 creators get TV deals.

He’s also keen to see what some of the emerging platforms are allowing. Using self-publishing, how can Tumblr users monetize their audiences? Or for performers, who are building audiences through Tumblr, how they are selling out shows through the likes of products like Songkick?

Clearly, Karp has a long road ahead of him. What we do know is that he’s not afraid to experiment, and he’s not afraid to stick by his decisions. What we don’t know is where Tumblr will be in a year, or even six months.

What we bet we can expect is the continued growth of the platform, and hopefully more of its users being able to monetize their audiences and their creativity.

Photo: Satya Murthy/Flickr

NEW YORK — Executives from News Corp. and CBS raised eyebrows when they threatened to turn their broadcast networks into cable channels if the NYC startup Aereo wasn’t shut down — but Aereo’s CEO isn’t sweating that outcome.

“They’re independent businesses, they can choose to do what they wish to,” said Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia (above) at the Ad Age Digital conference today.

He went on to point out that broadcast networks built their businesses on a “public right,” referring to broadcast spectrum that anyone in the U.S. can freely access. That broad exposure led broadcast networks to gain a significant amount of  mindshare among TV viewers, which inevitably brought on a wealth of ad revenue.

Ultimately, Kanojia doesn’t believe that broadcast networks will make the move to cable because he doesn’t think they’ll give up the reach they have right now, which includes 54 million people who access their networks over TV antennas. “It’s such a large audience, I don’t see how those customers aren’t going to get served,” he said.

“Can you disenfranchise over 54 million people over what they can rightfully do today?,” Kanojia asked. It’s a question that consumers and policy makers will have to consider if the broadcast network threats become more legitimate.

“There’s not a single cable channel that holds a candle [to broadcast networks],” he noted. Indeed, that’s something CBS and News Corp. executives are likely thinking about as they consider moving to paid models.

When I asked Kanojia about how exactly Aereo plans to scale, he pointed out that the company’s current tactic is actually pretty efficient. The company has to roll out small antenna farms in local markets to deliver its service to local customers, but he pointed out that a a standard server box could server around 10,000 users.

“The approach has been very much a cellular-like building — metro to metro,” he said. “The advantage we have is that this is a single cell site.”

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

With an extensive summer internship program, New York City-based ff Venture Capital hopes to help its portfolio companies and budding entrepreneurs alike.

The early-stage VC firm is today launching the ff Fellows Program, which will let current undergrad and graduate students spend the summer at one of the company’s portfolio companies, or at its NYC main office.

“One of the biggest challenges most companies have these days, definitely including ours, is finding talent and engineering help,” said ff Venture Capital associate Ryan Armbrust in an interview, who’s heading up the internship program. The firm hopes that interns could eventually land full-time positions at their respective companies — or at least gather enough real-world experience to help launch their own business.

The program will be split into two tracks: the ff Technical Fellows, who will work with ff portfolio companies across the country, and the ff Acceleration Fellows, who will help out at the ff offices in NYC. Compensation for the internships will depend on the individual portfolio companies, according to Armbrust.

In many ways, the internship is an extension of the hands-on support ff Venture Capital offers its portfolio companies after cutting them a check. The firm provides a variety of “acceleration resources” to help its companies succeed, including an extensive mentor network, recruiting help, and process improvement.

“Going forward for us, I think this [the hands-on help] is going to be really pivotal,” Aishwarya Iyer, ff VC’s new communications head, said in an interview. After spending more than three years at SecondMarket, she joined ff VC primarily because she believed its strategy can build better businesses.

The VC firm has invested in more than 60 companies since 1999, and its current portfolio includes Klout, Indiegogo, and 500px. It currently manages around $60 million worth of assets.

Photo: The Internship/20th Century Fox

Filed under: Business, Entrepreneur, New York ]]> http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/15/looking-for-a-summer-startup-internship-ff-venture-capital-wants-you/feed/ 0 Looking for a summer startup internship? ff Venture Capital wants you devindrahardawar The Internship Movie http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/12/sonic-notify-uses-sound-waves-to-push-content-to-your-phone-nabs-a-patent/ http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/12/sonic-notify-uses-sound-waves-to-push-content-to-your-phone-nabs-a-patent/#comments Fri, 12 Apr 2013 17:48:40 +0000 Devindra Hardawar http://venturebeat.com/?p=715366 What if your smartphone was actually smart enough to know the exact product you're standing in front of in a store, without any help from your part?

What if your smartphone was actually smart enough to know the exact product you’re standing in front of in a store, without any help from your part? Or what if it could automatically receive offers related to what you’re watching on TV?

It’s possible to do those things today, but it requires more work than most brands want to deal with. New York City-based Sonic Notify thinks it has the best solution for marketers and consumers alike.

The company has developed a way to embed content within high-frequency audio, allowing your smartphone to receive relevant offers and notifications simply by “listening” to the sound around you. Sonic Notify also announced today that the U.S. Patent Office has awarded its audio watermarking technology with Patent No. 8,401,569 (it’s currently waiting for two more patents to clear).

“[Our technology] lets companies talk to consumers right at the point of interaction,” said Sonic Notify chief executive Jonathan Glanz in an interview with VentureBeat.

So, for example, a store could have Sonic Notify’s signal running through its PA system to push a welcome message straight to your phone when you walk in (assuming you’re running the store’s app). Once you’re in an aisle, Sonic Notify’s tiny devices can also send you additional content as you’re deciding between different brands of cereal. The company’s technology can also be embedded within TV commercials or shows to push offers, or to simply note that you’ve seen a specific commercial.

It’s sort of like Google Analytics for the real world, Glanz tells me. Brands will be able to track how consumers interact with their marketing and products right from the beginning (e.g., an ad during prime time TV), right up until the point they buy the product. And of course, it unlocks a wealth of data in between those two interactions as well, like telling brands if you’ve actually scoped out their products within stores.

“We can now show the entire pass of the consumer’s ad user experience,” Glanz said.

I know, it sounds terrifying. Especially since it’s well-positioned to be adopted by retailers, since it costs only $150 to outfit a store with Sonic Notify’s technology, compared with around $10,000 for Wi-Fi consumer tracking solutions.

We’ve already seen similar in-store marketing efforts from companies like ShopKick, which uses in-store devices to deliver offers to your phone. But since Sonic Notify’s core technology spans more than just the retail experience, it could potentially offer brands a wealth of information about consumers.

Glanz promises that the offers and notifications will be “extremely targeted” and a “really controlled experience,” and he noted that the company is working with the North American Privacy Commission to prove it’s using consumer data in good faith.

The company has been talking about its technology for more than a year now, but now that it has its first patent locked in, we’ll likely see it popping up in many more locations. Ganz hinted that some deals were in the works with some popular apps and retailers, but he wasn’t able to talk about anything specifically. Not surprisingly, the company is also building up its own ad network, as well as well as a variety of analytics offerings.

It’s not hard to imagine how this sort of technology could be used outside of simple marketing. Ganz tells me that the company was also working on implementing it inside of New York City’s buses, which could ultimately be used to give us a crowd-sourced, real-time map of the bus system’s performance. That project never got off the ground, but expect to see even more creative uses of the company’s tech down the line.

Sonic Notify launched in 2011 and has so far raised around $4.25 million from Raptor Group, A-Grade Investments, and others. Glanz also poured $400,00 of his own funds to get the company off the ground.

Filed under: Business, Media, Mobile, New York ]]>

Join Venturebeat this Sunday to find out who will be crowned the king or queen of New York ping-pong at the Big Apple Smackdown. Arguably the best golden era hip-hop producer of all time, DJ Premier of Gang Starr, will be laying down the battle beats.

Sponsored by NativeX, along with co-sponsors Xtreme Labs, Movile, VSCpr and LeagueApps, some of the biggest names in the NY tech community will converge for a night of beats and bounce. You can check out the attendee list here.

Sunday April 14th
6-10 PM @ SPiN NY (23rd St and Park Ave S.)
80 person tournament for a charity cash prize

To request an invite please email team@nysmackdown.com.

Prollie is a social search platform that tracks how “well” people use social media platforms and makes connections with others who share the same interests and passions. The technology does not evaluate users on metrics like the number of followers or retweets. Rather, it focuses on the “Interest Graph” to qualify people based on their social output.

“Right now, social analytics sites measure ‘influence,’ not the quality and ability of people online, and social search is based around the content itself (tweets, updates, posts) not around the people making it,” founders (and brothers) Mike and Red Fabbri said in an email. “The new trend for consumers and marketers is moving towards the Interest Graph, linking people by what they love, not by who they know (i.e. Facebook Social Graph Search), and we stand to be the only analytics tool and search site to really tap into this trend. We evaluate people based on quality and let you search for them based on your passions.”

The Fabbri brothers founded Prollie to address their own pain points. They both had careers where they made heavy use of social media. Mike worked as a social media strategist for luxury brands like Ray-Ban, and Red headed up social media strategy at NBC Universal. They said they wanted to make a tool that helped them find people based around topics, rather than the “friend of a friend” model, and they left their jobs to build a better social search. Unlike startups like Klout, Kred, and PeerIndex which measure ‘influence,’ the Fabbris  put Prollie in the realm of Google, Bing, and Ark, because it centers on interest-based search.

“Social media shouldn’t just be about the number of people who follow you, or the quantity of reblogs you get,” they said. “It’s about you, no matter who you are. It’s about your personal mastery of the medium, the emotion you put into it, and the passions that you want to trumpet to the world.

Prollie is still in beta mode, but the brothers took me through how the technology works. Once users connect their social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, LinkedIn, and Foursquare) to Prollie, the algorithm analyzes all the activity to determine what topics they are talking about and interacting with while online. Each person is assigned a letter grade per network to show to what extent they know and take advantage of the tools provided by each network. Then they are shown their four top “passions” and an example from their social output for each. The data is also used by their search, which has modifiers and qualifiers for factors like passion, location, network, and grades, to generate a suggested list of users to friend and follow.

I will be the first to admit that I could be more active on social media. I only post things on Facebook that I am really excited about (as opposed to sharing my minute-by-minute feelings) and only signed up for Twitter once I started working at VentureBeat and realized that tweeting was part of the job. Accordingly, my Facebook grade is an A- while my Twitter grade is a C. Ouch. Prollie also pegged my interests pretty well. It has me down for interest in technology, startups, health & wellness, and food and drink.

Prollie is based in New York City and has raised $500,000 from angel investors, including Jetblue and Kohl’s chairman Frank Sica and Allen and Elizabeth Cutler, founders of SoulCycle.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I am off to compose my next awesome tweet.

Photo Credit: Prollie

In a surprising move today, Boxee has rebranded its flagship set-top box from Boxee TV to simply “Cloud DVR,” GigaOm reports.

The change is a clear effort to focus on the $99 device’s most unique feature: storing unlimited television recordings on Boxee’s servers. Boxee is also adding a new free tier to its Cloud DVR service, which makes the device’s core feature usable (albeit in a very basic way) for people averse to any sort of monthly fees. Now you’ll have access to five hours of DVR playback and 90 days of storage without paying a dime instead of paying $10 a month for the unlimited Cloud DVR.

Boxee believes the rebrand will help its set-top box stand out from other media players from Roku and Apple, GigaOm notes. That’s probably a wise move — as I mentioned in my review, the Cloud DVR simple didn’t hold a candle to existing media players. It was slow and surprisingly buggy at times. And even though the Cloud DVR feature is cool in theory, it’s not as easy to use as typical DVRs (for example, you can’t fast-forward or rewind content easily, and you can’t pause live TV).

The rebrand will likely help Boxee side-step much of the negative press around the initial Boxee TV launch. Aside from my review and Popular Science‘s (both incredibly negative), there aren’t any other in-depth reviews of the Boxee TV online. That’s because Boxee still hasn’t kicked off its official review program even though we’re now five months past the device’s launch.

In a conversation around my review in December, Avner Ronen, Boxee’s founder and chief executive, mentioned that the company was purposefully waiting on the review program until all of the device’s bugs were ironed out. With the rebrand, I have a feeling we’ll finally see more reviews rolling out soon.

It helps that “Cloud DVR” reviews will be ranked completely differently from Boxee TV reviews on search engines. Having both scathing Boxee TV reviews on the very first Google search page probably didn’t help sales much (Boxee hasn’t discussed any sales figures yet). I also noticed that neither negative review is on the first page of Google searches for “Cloud DVR” or “Boxee Cloud DVR.”

Boxee hasn’t yet responded to my requests for comment, and without hearing its side of the story, I don’t want to declare anything truly malicious. But it’s hard not to notice just how much the rebrand helps Boxee when it comes to wiping away negative publicity.

This is the latest in a series of VentureBeat stories about startup culture. This week, our reporter spent time with ZocDoc in New York, a stark contrast to several San Francisco startups we’ve covered.

New York City health startup ZocDoc is best known for helping Americans easily book doctor appointments online. That simple premise helps attract more than 2.5 million unique visitors to ZocDoc’s web and mobile apps each month.

ZocDoc’s appointment booking service (and extras like online check-in) is in more than 35 major metropolitan areas, and it covers 40 percent of the U.S. population. It doesn’t reveal its number of bookings or the number of doctors using the service, but a cursory look at listings in cities like Chicago or Boston shows hundreds of medical professionals, who each pay $300 a month to use ZocDoc.

But there’s a lot more happening inside ZocDoc that’s helping the company push forward. ZocDoc promotes a specific culture to attract the best employees and enable those workers to do their jobs effectively.

In the picture below, you can see the seven values ZocDoc focuses on promoting: “patients first, great people, speak up, own it, us before me, work hard, make work fun.”

“Health care is the biggest problem facing our generation,” CEO and founder Cyrus Massoumi told me. “To change that is very ambitious. … To accomplish it, we try to have ‘humble ambition’ or ‘hum-bition.’ And that permeates everything we do.”

After touring the office and talking with several ZocDoc employees, including Massoumi, I noticed a few ways that ZocDoc is creatively approaching problems like growing pains and subordinate employees. Here’s what I took away from the visit.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

The values ZocDoc emphasizes.

Great people

Recruiting has become one of ZocDoc’s the most pressing issues. ZocDoc has more than 400 employees in offices in New York, Phoenix, and India, and it plans to keep hiring like crazy to keep on growing. On top of revenue ZocDoc generates from its customers (doctors), it’s also tapping the $95 million in funding it has raised from DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Khosla Ventures, and others to keep the engines pumping. Its newest office is in the Phoenix area and the company claims it will hire more than 60 more people for that office alone before the end of 2013.

ZocDoc’s space in New York has gotten crowded enough that employees are now flooding over into the fourth floor of its SoHo-based building. (It also shares that building with other major NYC startups Foursquare and Thrillist.)

“We’ve been in the same space for three years, and we started out with a quarter of this floor,” Karsten Vagner, ZocDoc’s director of people and its third employee, told me.

A hallway in the New York ZocDoc office contains a row of seven rooms, all dedicated for interviewing new employees in person, by phone, or via Skype. When I viewed the office, the rooms were nearly empty, but multiple employees said that was unusual and on the majority of weekdays applicants fill most or all of the rooms.

Massoumi says he chiefly looks for people that will care about fostering the community of his workers, and he’s willing to look anywhere for these employees.

He uses a story to show how serious is about this. Early in ZocDoc’s history — about three years ago — he was visiting Chicago for business. At a pizza restaurant, Massoumi liked the waitress that was helping his group so much that he asked her to interview with ZocDoc. Massoumi said that she put customers first and dealt with their problems more effectively than most waitresses he’d ever seen, so he had to see if she’d come work for the company as its office manager.

“We hire for intrinsics over experience,” Massoumi said. “We need them to share our values more than anything else. … Every employee we have is better than the average employee.”

She is still ZocDoc’s office manager in New York.

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Mike from Monsters Inc. with a ZocDoc hat.

Speak up

Clearly, ZocDoc is trying hard to recruit and fill a lot of key roles. But to get those employees on board, Massoumi believes you have to give those recruits an unusual incentive: the freedom to tell bosses — sometimes loudly — that they are wrong.

“If you want the best people, you have empower them to speak their minds,” Massoumi said. “You can speak your mind here without your job being in jeopardy.”

The call to “speak up” is so prominent that people are criticized if they ever admit later to thinking another approach would have been better but did not say anything.

“Part of your job is to say what’s wrong,” Vagner said. “I don’t want people on my team who just nod along.”

Additionally, employees are able to book time with Massoumi to discuss issues or ideas. That’s made his schedule a bit hellish (it took more than two weeks for me to get him on the phone), but he cares about his employees’ thoughts enough that he’d rather be busy than not have the time to talk to them. “Office hours” sessions vary between 15 minutes up to two hours.

Massoumi also has an initiative to do lunch once a week with the newest New York employees. “I need to know every member of my team,” Massoumi said.

Staying lean

While employees speak their minds about things, something that they don’t question is the operation’s leanness. Even with the $95 million in funding, the company still acts like an early-stage startup.

ZocDoc makes employees share hotel rooms, pushes the boundaries of its office spaces, and only buys used furniture.

Massoumi illustrates this by telling me about the chair he has for guests in his office. The chair’s nickname is “Bouncy” and has a broken piece that makes it sink when people sit down in it.

“It’s been broken for four years,” Massoumi said. “It used to surprise people, but I think they’ve come to appreciate it.”

Source: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

Diet Coke cans stacked in a hallway.

Soda love

Outside of pushing values, another thing that seems to be helping fuel ZocDoc’s growth is the staff’s love of soda. Like many startups, caffeine helps drive employees who work long hours, but there seems to be a special affinity for the stuff; it’s a guilty pleasure among employees driven to make other people’s lives more healthy.

While water and coffee are the most popular employee drinks, the office is also well stocked on soda. When I toured the office, empty Diet Coke cans were stacked at the end of one hallway. I found it humorous that one of the most prominent health-tech startups consumes so much soda, and I pointed that out to Massoumi. (Admittedly, I’m a soda addict myself, so I wasn’t trying to judge.)

“We’re a health startup, I know, and we do our best to reflect a healthy lifestyle,” Massoumi said. “We do have one member of our exec team who drinks a lot of Diet Coke, but I haven’t had a drink of soda in 10 years.”

The company also offers beer and wine to employees on Fridays.

‘Unlimited vacation’

Finally, the last thing I took away from speaking with ZocDoc employees was the sense that they could actually take time off without getting a hard time from management. Startups have such a fierce mentality that taking time off can be a negative — and taking too much time off could get you fired.

“I think unlimited vacation is unusual, but it’s also valuable,” Massoumi said. “It taps into ownership. It’s our job at ZocDoc to improve health care in America, and our people understand that.”

ZocDoc head of communications Allison Braley took two-and-a-half week break in Sri Lanka when she started, senior PR manager Jessica Aptman just took a 10-day vacation to Taiwan, and Vagner said he recently took a two-week vacation to Fiji.

“I worked a lot to make sure everything was covered,” Vagner said. “There’s a clear expectation that you do your job and do it well. We believe taking time off doesn’t have to interfere with that.”

Check out more photos of ZocDoc’s office below.

All photos by Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

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HealthBeat 2013 is a new conference showcasing how technology is transforming health care. We'll explore how IT is driving out inefficiencies on the hospital, practice, and patient levels. Check out full event details here, and register here.

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TechStars NYC just announced its latest class of startups, and it seems to be the most diverse collection of companies we’ve seen for the popular accelerator.

The group of 11 startups was chosen from almost 1,700 applicants, and it includes companies focusing on social outreach for religious communities, collecting customer data for stores, and bringing pet owners together. Eugene Chung, the new managing director for TechStars NYC (replacing David Tisch, who left the role last year) noted that the acceptance rate for this class was just 0.6 percent.

Chung will be co-managing the spring class with TechStars’ Nicole Glaros, who served as interim managing director for TechStars NYC since Tisch’s departure.

“More than ever, our applicant pool reflects the global reach of TechStars and the infusion of technology in the cultural zeitgeist of societies around the world,” Chung wrote in a blog post. “The movie The Social Network has become the Wall Street of our generation. This is true not just for America but for the world at large. Some of the brightest minds of our era are choosing to become entrepreneurs.”

Check out the TechStars NYC spring 2013 companies below:

• AdYapper: Transparency and analytics to cut wasted ad spend.
• Dash Labs: Connected car platform.
• FaithStreet: Social outreach platform for faith communities.
• Jukely: 2-tap concert concierge.
• Klooff: Uniting pet lovers around the world.
• Placemeter: Smart in-store sensors capturing customer data.
• Plated: Redefining the way we eat.
• Sketchfab: Publish, share, and embed interactive 3D models.
• TriggerMail: Intelligent ecommerce emails.
• Validation Board: Quantifying innovation and testing ideas for enterprises.
• weeSpring: Community for new parents built around the people they trust most.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat