We’re coming close to the one year anniversary of my first article that made the front page of Bitmob. It was about my bromance with Garrus Vakarian in the Mass Effect trilogy. At the time, I was excited to share my favorite moments from Mass Effect 3. The article was the deciding factor in my wanting to begin a career in games journalism, but it’s also my most cherished article because it came from the heart of an innocent gamer. I hadn’t then been exposed to the greater gaming community.

A lot has happened since last April. I’m sure I don’t need to recap all the events for you; this isn’t that kind of retrospective. I’m more concerned about the video game community itself.

A year ago, I was pretty naive about our community. I thought it was filled with a bunch of passionate gamers who liked discussing their favorite hobby over the Internet. Bitmob itself was a great place — maybe too great. It truly was a shelter from the legions of trolls that infest the Internet. Eventually, the more I invested in Twitter, the uglier the conversations became, the more websites I visited, and the more bickering that went on.

Why would anyone want to be a part of this industry? I’ve asked myself this question a lot recently. Everywhere I turn, I see arguments about violence, sexism, and bigotry. I wish I could go back to last April, when I decided to write about video games. I would tell my former self to just enjoy the hobby and not try for a career in it.

I always feel awkward when someone asks me what I want to do for a living. Whenever I reply, “I want to write about video games,” I feel an awkward chill run down my spine. Recently, I realized that chill isn’t because most people view video games as childish but because I’m ashamed to associate with our community. Video games are no longer a children’s toy, but gamers sure as hell still act like children.

Last year, Electronic Arts was voted the most evil company in America, and it looks like it will be receiving that title once again. Really? How about the companies that skyrocket prices on pharmaceuticals or create a monopoly off blood diamonds? There is a laundry list of companies out there that treat humans and the environment like garbage, yet a software publisher is voted the most evil company in America because a bunch of gamers didn’t like the ending of Mass Effect 3. No wonder I’m ashamed to associate with this crowd. It’s pathetic; it’s disgusting.

I know I’m coming off as pessimistic, but this is coming from anger. I’m angry that women are treated terribly from all angles in this community. I’m tired of seeing the trolls get more attention than those who are actually trying to add value to conversations. However, every once and awhile something great happens — something that revitalizes my love for video games. Two recent dates come to mind: February 20 and March 26, or the reveal of the PlayStation 4 and the release of BioShock Infinite, respectively.

On the day of the PS4 reveal, Twitter was vibrant and optimistic. Everyone was sharing their favorite PlayStation memories, and there were great discussions about predictions and what Sony needed to reveal. From the early hours of the morning to late at night, after the two-hour presentation, it was a great day to be a gamer — not because a new console was announced but because everyone put down their weapons for a day and shook hands in excitement.

On March 26, an amazing video game came out: BioShock Infinite. The Internet was abuzz once again. Everyone was enjoying common experiences in Columbia. A week later, great conversations are still being had — another example of trolls and white knights alike dropping their issues and sharing something together.

These significant events show how great our community can be. Sadly, it seems it can only sustain such greatness for a single day.

A lot has happened since last April. I’ve made great friends and played some fantastic games, but that feels overshadowed by a colossal community filled with pettiness. As long as the web is the main method of discourse for this industry, it will never get better.

I wish I had some answers, but I don’t. Remember, my first article was written only a year ago. I have no influence in this industry, but maybe one day I will, and I’ll have some answers then. Until that day comes, I think we should all ask ourselves one simple question: why would anyone want to be a part of this industry?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Started a health-tech company? Apply for the Innovation Showdown at HealthBeat 2013 in San Francisco by April 19.

Facebook and Twitter are not the appropriate venues to share that your back is feeling achy or that your bowel is acting up.

Launching today, HealthKeep is a place for people to post about their everyday aches and pains and ask the community about potential symptom relievers. Unlike Facebook, it’s completely anonymous (rightfully so), so you won’t need to hide the gory or embarrassing details.

“People love to share about their health, but because of privacy issues, they shouldn’t use Facebook,” said founder Lyle Dennis (pictured, above) by phone. Sign up for a profile, and you’ll be asked about previous surgeries and procedures, as well as your date of birth, but your name will never be requested.

The site was founded by Dennis, a physician, a neurologist and self-described technofuturist. Dennis has been developing the site with a technical cofounder for over three years, so its database is fairly extensive: The site has profiles for every practicing physician in the country, which those physicians can “claim.”

Once a physician claims their profile, they can use the site to interact with patients and share resources, including medical discoveries and relevant articles. HealthKeep plugs into about 50 mainstream news sources, so it’s easy to share information.

For patients, it’s a means to interact with a community with similar health issues and keep a record of symptoms. If you post that you’ve developed a rash, this will remain on your “health timeline” and might be useful for your primary care physician to track.

HealthKeep’s user community is still small, as the founders haven’t done much marketing, but the company hopes to eventually compete with WebMD or HealthTap, which offers tips and advice from physicians.

I ask Dennis whether he envisions the site being used by hypochondriac types who obsessively monitor their health. “The majority of people assume they have cancer, no matter what the symptoms are,” he observed. “The site might help to allay these fears.”

In the future, Dennis plans to make money through targeted advertising. The site is a self-funded effort, and he hopes to close a seed round of venture or angel financing in the coming months.

Would you use something like this to share information about your health? Leave your feedback in the comments section below. 

Recent events in the video game business once again give the DeanBeat a wealth of material to analyze. And we see this lesson hit home again this week: The community matters. If you make games the community likes, if you deliver authenticity and transparency, you’ll win. If you fail to execute, the community will roast you alive. We visited this subject in October when the gamer social network Raptr shared its own analysis of the benefits of treating the community right in games such as League of Legends, Portal 2, and the ARMA II DayZ mod.

But it’s time to hammer the point home again.

A tale of two launches

With the launch of StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, Blizzard Entertainment teamed up with Twitch and delivered a live launch that treated the die-hard fans right with an in-person event and then let the large audience salivate over a live broadcast. Livestreaming of matches played by professional gamers showed fans just how exciting a Heart of the Swarm match could be. Fans had to log in and authenticate themselves on Battle.net. But if they owned StarCraft II already, they could immediately start playing Heart of the Swarm at the stroke of midnight.

With SimCity, EA witnessed the consequences of letting down the community and then angering it. EA launched a single-player game that required an always-on Internet connection. The megapublisher argued that it had to do it that way in order to give players the experience of creating a city amid a region full of cities belonging to friends. But EA failed to execute, as it didn’t have enough serves on hand to handle demand. Players who paid $60 — or more for special editions — couldn’t log in (sometimes at all) for days. EA endured ridicule and skepticism from people who believed the company had only wanted the always-on connection to defeat pirates. Fans believed that EA didn’t have their interests at heart. EA’s Lucy Bradshaw, the general manager of the Maxis Label (the developer of SimCity), admitted that underestimating demand was “dumb.” Bradshaw’s posts were perhaps the saving grace in preserving EA’s reputation.

Interpretation of good community and bad community

The lessons of these two launches are clear when it comes to the community. To interpret these events, I turned again to our game community expert, Dennis Fong [right], a former pro gamer and chief executive of Raptr.

“On the flip side, when you are not authentic, and you stumble, the community will be extremely vocal,” Fong said.

The problem for EA was that it didn’t seem to learn from server problems it had with the launches of Battlefield 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic. SimCity was a very different kind of game, built by a different studio. But EA should have learned, as Blizzard appeared to do after the fiasco of the launch of last year’s always-connected game Diablo III.

“When you don’t provide a bunch of community tools that distract the users, and you have an always-on game where the servers get overloaded, that’s when the community goes crazy,” Fong said. “They clearly haven’t learned. EA is a big company and it is not easy to steer the company where the community wants it to be.”

(We do expect to hear more from EA about its own postmortem on SimCity, and we’ll update this piece as we do. EA has begun to do a good job of being more transparent with its SimCity blog, and it is offering a free game to SimCity purchases as penance). [Update: In a blog post today, Bradshaw said that the always-connected feature did not come as a mandate from corporate].

Fong is heartened to see the direct results Raptr’s own campaigns, where its targeting of rewards to like-minded fans helped the online game Rift achieve a 470 percent improvement in daily active users and 58 percent longer play sessions. It costs money to do that, and the traditional view of community support is as a cost center. But those additional players will help spread the word about the game, bring in more people, and effectively do the job of advertising without incurring the costs of advertising. In that way, the community gives a return on investment.

Livestreaming is authentic

We were pleased to see Sony, which Fong criticized as lacking in community support over the years, add a “share button” and livestreaming as built-in features of the upcoming PlayStation 4. PC gamers have long had access to such tools, but Fong said the inclusion in the consoles and the growing popularity of Twitch — which had 28 million unique viewers in February — is making livestreaming easier than ever. Twitch is also being built into online games made by Sony Online Entertainment, Activision, and EA.

It is becoming brain-dead simple to do livestreaming.

“What Twitch has done is made it more universal,” Fong said. “Having 600,000 people broadcasting their own content in a month is a big milestone. The fact that people know how to do that is new. I’m staggered at how quickly it has grown.”

What makes Twitch community-friendly is that it is authentic, Fong said. (For a view on authenticity, see our interview with gaming academic Jesse Schell). A livestream doesn’t lie. Gamers may get tired of reviews, trailers, interviews, and staged videos that are filtered views of games. But a livestream delivers what the unfiltered gameplay looks like, albeit when it is played by some of the best gamers in the world. When you watch a livestream, you get an authentic and transparent view of how the game really plays. If you recall the sexy, beautifully illustrated covers of comic books, you probably remember the disappointment you found when you opened them up to see the lower-quality paper and hurried art on the pages in the middle. A livestream is more like showing the gamer what is behind the cover — so you know exactly what you’re paying for.

This may help explain the growing popularity of e-sports. If you see a game being played the right way, you’ll have an easier experience as you play it yourself. Games are being designed for the e-sports community, making them more fun to watch as spectators. And the community’s feedback makes the games better, enabling the developers to improve the games on the fly. Livestreaming and e-sports are becoming part of the core strategy of games such as Call of Duty: Black Ops II, which draws players back over and over.

The other thing that makes a livestream more authentic is the “shoutcasting,” or play-by-play commentary by expert broadcasters. Those shoutcasters can convey the excitement of the game to the players, but those shoutcasters have to be authentic enough to know their stuff and describe the fast-action game play to the audience.

“They know the nuances in the game that the audience cares about,” Fong said. “They can convey it with fidelity and respect.”

The future of community

I’ve focused on this week’s events. We can applaud Blizzard and scold EA, but at least they are engaged closely with users. But there are other issues that matter to the community, as the game industry matures, moves on to new consoles, and moves deeper into the digital revolution.

Valve, which is reportedly working on a Linux-based Steam Box living room console, is carrying the flag for the community on openness. Open versus closed is a familiar debate, as we’ve seen with Android versus iOS in mobile devices. The community favors openness. But the advocates of closed cite a better user experience and security. You can close off your platform, but if you don’t deliver on that better user experience and you get hacked (ahem, PlayStation Network), then the community will once again show you no mercy — and maybe move on to a better platform.

As the console makers complete their designs and business practices, they would do well to remember this. Their machines should be designed to be community-friendly. You could build a console with no disc drive or discs, convincing gamers that they don’t need to own a physical copy of their digital games. But if the player’s downloads disappear from the account and the cloud access doesn’t work, people will be pissed. As social and mobile games become more focused on multiplayer experiences, the makers of those games should focus on community satisfaction and engagement. And this does not necessarily mean that game companies need to fleece consumers with microtransactions at every turn.

“Community should be part of the core strategy of a company,” Fong said. “In a year or two, we’ll be talking about that for mobile games.”

It would be great if someone could come up with a ranking of community-friendly game companies that also make the best games. I’d like to know which of those high-ranking, community-smart companies are making the best return on investment. That’s the company that I would bet on as a big winner in the future of games.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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We are working with UK Trade & Investment to showcase the United Kingdom's thriving start-up and investment scene through a series of posts and video interviews at SXSW. Check out all of the coverage here. As always, VentureBeat is adamant about maintaining editorial objectivity.

AUSTIN, Texas — At South by Southwest, every party had long lines of people waiting to get in, sometimes stretching the length of a block.

Every party except one, that is. I walked down the street last night past a Microsoft Windows event, which not only had no line, it was so empty that a staffer was standing on the sidewalk urging us to come inside.

Maybe Microsoft needed to hire a more exciting band. Half a block further down, and the sidewalk was crowded with young folks hoping to get into a party sponsored by some technology company. I’m pretty sure the headliner wasn’t Robert Scoble.

SXSW is an interesting mashup of a music festival, a film festival, and a geek fest. This was my first year attending, and I was a bit nervous, given that everything I’d heard about it made it sound crowded, noisy, and uncomfortable. But I’m leaving impressed.

Short version: Yes, SXSW is crowded and in many ways a dysfunctional event. No, there’s no real news. But it’s a great experience.

I did almost everything wrong, but found that this was, perversely, the best way to attend SXSW. I went to just one keynote (by Sir Tim Berners-Lee — he made an impassioned and inspiring case for open web standards). I went to just a handful of panel discussions. I spent almost no time on the exhibition floor. And I skipped most of the parties, which were too crowded and too loud to make conversation possible.

But what I did was spend time hanging out various places: The lobby of the Hilton, the bar at the Four Seasons, and Capital Factory (a well-situated coworking space with dozens of startups, excellent Wi-Fi, and a giant bean bag). I met people I had known before only through Twitter. I ran into people I knew only in passing and spent hours getting to know them better. I met excitable young entrepreneurs burning with a desire to change the world, not just make a pile of money.

In short, it was an inspiring, intense weekend of talking to people and building connections.

One friend joked that SXSW was the best place he knew to spend time with his friends from San Francisco. It did seem like San Francisco was unusually well-represented among the attendees, but, as he pointed out, when they come to SXSW, these people put aside their daily grind. They give themselves permission to ignore their email inboxes, and that means you can have a sustained, uninterrupted conversation.

SXSW is like a microcosm of the startup community.

A session on startup-community building crystallized the whole experience for me. The speakers were Lesa Mitchell, of the Kauffman Foundation; Marc Nager, CEO of Startup Weekend; Charlie O’Donnell, founder of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures; and Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos. They talked about the challenges and techniques involved in building not just a single startup but a whole ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, whether in Brooklyn, Las Vegas, or anywhere else.

At one point, the musician Amanda Palmer stood up from the back of the crowd to ask the panel a question about crowdfunding and whether it had changed the nature of startup communities at all. She’s an expert on crowdfunding, having funded an album through Kickstarter, and she recently gave a very well received TED Talk.

The question energized the speakers, who talked about how crowdfunding has helped decentralize and democratize the funding process. But more importantly, crowdfunding has given people a chance to participate in something bigger than themselves. You can’t successfully raise capital from a crowd of supporters if it’s just about the money — there has to be something more.

The same thing goes for startup communities.

“If you can inspire your employees through a higher purpose, something bigger than themselves … you can accomplish so much more as a company,” said Hsieh, who did exactly that with Zappos. “And I think the same thing is true about community.”

At SXSW, I saw that firsthand. Nobody came here to talk about how they were going to make money. It’s all about changing the world. That may be idealistic and unrealistic. But it’s a refreshing change from everyday life in Silicon Valley.

Top photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

Nextdoor, a private social network for neighborhoods, has secured $21.6 million in new funding from Greylock Partners. This round closely follows the $18.6 million Nextdoor raised in 2012, meaning it has raised over $40 million to protect homes in less time than it takes to build one.

In addition to the funding, the company announced its 2.0 version and revealed some impressive numbers surrounding its growth.

When VentureBeat spoke with founder and CEO Nirav Tolia in July, Next Door had 3,600 communities on the platform. Today, Nextdoor is active in 8075 neighborhoods in all 50 states and launches in 40 new neighborhoods a day. Tolia connects the rapid adoption to technological and cultural shifts happening across America.

“There are trends enabled by the intersection of social media and local content,” he said in an interview. “People want to come together to create safer neighborhoods, whether it is to track down a lost dog or warn neighbors against suspicious activity. We are helping neighbors help themselves when it comes to crime and safety.”

Nextdoor is an online place for real-world neighbors to connect. People use the site for anything from discussing crime concerns to asking for babysitter recommendations. The overarching goal is to bring communities together. Tolia cited reports from the Pew Data Institute and Harvard Professor Robert Putnam which found that 30% of Americans do not know their neighbors by name, and yet the strength of a community is linked to the overall wellbeing of its inhabitants.

“Unfortunately, in America we have lost touch with our neighborhoods,” Tolia said. “Everyone lives in a neighborhood and wants it to be stronger. Safety is a universal concern.”

The updated platform focuses on crime and safety. Based on user feedback, Nextdoor funneled more resources into security tools such as urgent alerts pushed to mobile devices and integrations with police and fire departments. These features help form virtual neighborhood watches, where residents can collectively keep watch, communicate, and mobilize when necessary.

Another new feature is the ability to connect with nearby neighborhoods. Privacy was, and continues to be, a foundational principal of the network. People won’t post personal information or trust the site unless they believe it is protected. Membership to a Nextdoor neighborhood is only allowed after establishing proof of residence, and members only have access to their specific community. However, certain scenarios call for broader communication. For example, as a resident of the Mission, a string of robberies in Potrero Hill affects me. The redesign allows for expanded sharing in cases like these.

Even though 8,000 communities is an impressive accomplishment, Nextdoor won’t stop until it has a deep presence in neighborhoods around the world. Most of this hefty investment will expand the platforms and create dedicated mobile apps on iOS and Android. It will also fuel international expansion.

Greylock Partners is the lead investor of this round, contributing $15 million of the $21.6 million. Managing director of Greylock David Sze will join the board, and Tolia said this is the largest investment Sze has made in his 13 year career. Benchmark, which led the first round, is contributing along with fellow existing investors DAG Ventures, Shasta Ventures, Allen & Company and Pinnacle Venture. New investors Bezos Expeditions and Google Ventures joined this round as well. Nextdoor is based in San Francisco.

Once upon a time, a hacker built a product. Then he sold it to a company that treated it poorly. Now, another company bought it back and promises to treat it right.

The product, Forrst, is a small but fascinating community of designers and developers. Its members post bits of UI and code in a simple, social interface, filling a set of needs somewhere between communal problem-solving and social narcissism. And last year, design site Colourlovers acquired it; Colourlovers also has tools for designers to post bits of their work.

It was a wonderful exit for a passion project from an all-around excellent hacker, one Kyle Bragger — or so we thought. Less than a full year after the acquisition, Forrst has been handed off to a third owner, Zurb.

Zurb is a web shop, plain and simple. You can think of it as a stable of top-shelf product people who come in and help you overhaul your website or mobile app or whatever.

So, what would a product shop want with a design/developer community? And why did the seemingly perfect marriage between Colourlovers and Forrst lead to such a speedy breakup?

First, we talked with Zurb. While the Zurbites didn’t want to discuss why the Colourlovers deal went sour, a company rep did tell VentureBeat via email, “We plan on keeping Forrst on http://www.forrst.com. The community and product will actively be maintained.

“In its current state, we don’t find the interface very compelling. We were intrigued by the existing community of designers/developers on the site, and the opportunity to evolve the interface into something great.”

For starters, that means improving the feedback loops built into the service, increasing opportunities for collaboration, and cranking out a mobile web app as soon as possible, Zurb stated in its official announcement of the acquisition.

Currently, the site has more than 50,000 accounts; no one will say how many of those accounts are active (Forrst was founded in 2009 and saw a lot of media/hacker love in 2010; traffic of late has been declining, according to various analytics tools).

Next, we talked to Bragger. The young builder-of-Internet-things went over to Colourlovers during last year’s acquisition. At the time, he told us that while it was weird to have to answer to a “boss” after working as an entrepreneur, he was excited about the deal and happy with the Colourlovers team.

But in another email today, he told us he’s much happier to be back on his own, working on a new product (more on that in a moment).

“I was definitely in a rut for a while there,” said Bragger. “I think Zurb will be a good home for Forrst. Hopefully, this time around it gets the attention it deserves.”

Forrst under Colourlovers had two updates in the 10 months it lived under the same roof, metaphorically speaking. First, there were some tweaks to the sharing of code and design snippets. Second, it enabled private member-to-member messaging. But any grand goals the Forrst Rangers had about growing their community or ramping up revenue were decidedly not realized in the new regime.

We do know that Colourlovers was the one to call it quits; the company approached Zurb (and possibly others) about buying Forrst. What we don’t know is why, exactly.

We’ve reached out to Colourlovers and will update this post when we hear back from that company. In the meantime, we can only look forward — forward to Forrst’s future at a shop that seems to see its potential, and forward to Bragger’s next release.

Bragger, who is now part of product-hacker collective Elepath, is working on Sets, a lightweight tool for making lists (or, if you will, sets) of links. It has the soul of Pinterest without all the thumbnails — a design element Bragger said he finds distracting. And it’s already gotten a Hacker News thumbs-up from Delicious creator Joshua Schachter.

“Sets is my take on what a curated bookmarking service should look be,” he said. “I used to be a pretty avid Pinboard user, but I started realizing that my own usage of the service was very much write-only; I’d drop links in and literally never read them again.” He said he had approximately the same relationship with Twitter: no consumption, write-only.

“Anyhow, I realized that there’s an interesting continuum that exists, where on one hand you have pure utility services, like Pinboard, and on the other hand, you have very social/broadcast stuff, like Twitter. Sets aims to exist in the middle — it’s useful to me as a way to track interesting URLs, but it also works well in helping me to share those with others who may find them of value.”

Sets is currently in an invite-only beta, but you can register your username now and wait for updates as they roll out. Bragger is currently putting the 1.0 spit-and-polish on the product, which he said won’t see any drastic changes between now and its public launch.

Bragger’s experience with building Forrst, selling it to a company that might have wanted to shutter it, and then watching it escape to what is hopefully a better home has been difficult. We asked him if he’d ever sell Sets or another product to another company.

“No, I can’t say that I would, at least at this juncture,” he replied.

And don’t expect to see him as part of an acqui-hiring deal anytime soon, either. “I’ve worked my ass off to hone my skills as a creator, and I’m very confident in own abilities, so that makes it easier to accept the risk that comes with working in early-stage companies,” he said.

“Having the creative freedom to work to my full potential is the only way I’ve ever felt truly fulfilled. I don’t feel like I have a ‘job,’ and I’d hate to look back on my career and wish I’d taken more risks.”

Simon Walker is an entrepreneur from Melbourne, Australia. From Down Under, he struggled to find fellow innovators, venture capital dollars, and the kind of support he needed to get a startup off the ground. As the story of Mark Zuckerberg and other young Silicon Valley success stories wafted his way, he began to wonder if these tales were real. Is it really as simple as showing up to an investor’s office with nothing but a hoodie and an idea, and walking away with millions?

Walker decided to set out on a journey to uncover the truth about the American entrepreneurial ecosystem. He partnered with Startup Stay, a global community for traveling entrepreneurs, and Shoestring Media, a publishing company based in Sydney, to embark on the Leeap Project, a 10-city, 20-day tour. He would stay with local entrepreneurs, interview local influencers, and create comprehensive videos that reflect “the DNA” of each startup community.

“This project is about the realities of startup life, with the hope of creating an unbiased opportunity for entrepreneurs around the world to build an educated and informed understanding about what the grass roots of the entrepreneurial world actually looks like,” Walker said. “With no hidden agenda or preplanned storyline, the Leeap project is truly a raw, open and honest depiction of the realities of each local startup community and culture.”

His first stop was Los Angeles. He spoke with entrepreneurs, event organizers, accelerator founders, and asked them questions about the L.A. startup scene, how it has changed, its advantages and disadvantages, and their vision for the future.

Check out the this video about the startup community exploding in the Hollywood Hills:

The mission behind the organization is to promote continuous learning and innovation in software. Comprised of 35,000 members, Skills Matter holds training and events where developers can improve their programming skills, collaborate, and make connections. It produces workshops, talks, meetups, hackathons, and training courses, as well as videos and a quarterly open source journal. Subjects include a range of technologies, including HTML5, Android, iPhone, NoSQL, Scala and F#, Java, .net.

Founded a decade ago, Skills Matter seeks to establish the UK as the “#1 place to learn and contribute to software innovation.” London has a burgeoning startup scene, and this announcement comes tandem with the unveiling of the Prime Minister and Mayor of London’s plan to spend £50m building a co-working and startup space. Skills Matter has over 2000 events planned for 2013, and this investment will contribute to spurring London’s technology community, as well as nurturing more engineering talent which is in high demand these days.

The investment was led by Beringea, an international growth capital firm with offices in London.

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Wikia’s mission is threefold. It is designed to unloose the power of knowledge as influence, enable personal and collective creativity, and distribute rich, original content. Although founded by the creators of Wikipedia, Wikia is a separate business dedicated specifically to lifestyle topics and pop culture. And unlike Wikipedia, Wikia is a for-profit enterprise that makes money off advertising.

The platform powers over 200,000 wikis with millions of pages of content. The Wikia Video Games hub is the largest network of gaming sites in the world. It contains more than 65,000 game wikis and 2.48 million pages of content. The company cites The Elder Scrolls, Call of Duty, Mass Effect, Fallout, and Runescape as the most trafficked titles. The entertainment section is also growing fast, with “super communities” coming together around A Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, and The Hunger Games.

Today, alongside closing an $11 million deal, Wikia announced that the forum feature is now available, which will facilitate discussion on the sites. The investors on the fielding are Jeffrey Blackburn of Amazon, which led Wikia’s Series B of $10 million in 2006. Also listed are previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Institutional Venture Partners. Angel investors in Wikia include major Silicon Valley names like Marc Andreessen, Ron Conway, Reed Hastings, and Mitch Kapor.

This brings Wikia’s funding to $25 million. Wikia is based in San Francisco. Read the SEC filing.

The internet has woven instant gratification into the fabric of American existence. With just a finger tap, anything can be delivered to your door. Shared economy startups are cropping up left and right, filling the streets with Postmates, TaskRabbits, Execs, and Uber drivers ready to respond to our beck and calls.

Another startup launched today, backed by venture funding, to match individuals with needs to people eager to fulfill them. Rewarder is a social marketplace where people can solicit advice, expertise and resources from the community in exchange for rewards. It essentially gamifies the now familiar shared economy platform.

On Rewarder, users post requests for anything from crafting a customized diet plan to finding a rare collectible item. They also offer financial incentives, and members have the opportunity to respond and win money. It differentiates itself from the errand-centric sites mentioned above, which focus on local and time sensitive tasks.

“One of the reasons we are so excited about Rewarder is that it recognizes the unique knowledge and expertise each person has and rewards them for sharing it to help others,” said Kendall Fargo, Rewarder founder and CEO in a statement. “We believe that by mapping the world’s expertise, Rewarder will offer a more personally meaningful e-commerce experience.”

While in beta, Rewarder has acquired more than 100,000 active users that have posted $10 million in collective rewards. Now it is available to the public, so anyone can search for a specific item of clothing, for ask of help finding a job on a cruise ship.

Its early traction helped Rewarder secure $7 million in its first round of funding. The investment was led by Granite Ventures and Radar Partners and includes participation from angels Ron Conway, David Lee, and Kenny Lerer.

The team is based in San Francisco.

HouseTrip, a British clone of Airbnb, has raised $40 million in its third round of funding.

Like its American doppelganger, HouseTrip is community-driven marketplace for accommodation. Residents post their property on the site as available to rent, along with a profile, price, and reviews. Travelers looking for a place to stay search through the listings and book a rental for their trip. This model benefits the host, who can generate extra income, as well as the visitors who stand to gain more meaningful, personal travel experiences.

“We empower thousands of property owners to make money from their homes and investment properties,” said founder and CEO Arnaud Bertrand. “In Europe, this is of great importance as the economic crisis has impacted so many lives across the Continent. HouseTrip also empowers guests to travel to destinations where they can fully immerse themselves in local culture by literally living like a local, and we reduce the cost of their experience by providing better value.”

Bertrand started HouseTrip after he struggled to book a rental for a getaway to Scotland with his wife. The available options for finding and booking accommodation were inconvenient and outdated, consisting mostly of classified ads and requiring phone calls and wire transfers.

Since then, HouseTrip has built up a selection of 130,000 properties in 15,000 destinations, and the company expects by the end of the year to have helped book more than 3 million nights’ sleep. It has focused its efforts on Europe, and has options ranging from Italian villas to New York apartments.

The investor team also hews closely to European roots. This Series C was led by Accel Partners, with previous investors Balderton Capital and Index Ventures also participating.

“We are a European centric business,” Bertrand said. “Europe is the largest market globally for vacation rentals, and 60% of Europeans travel within Europe. This is the first time Europe’s three largest VCs have come together to back a European player.”

While many Airbnb user list their primary residence, Housetrip targets properties that are consistently available to rent. The team also offers management and calendar tools for the hosts, so they can keep track of their bookings and offer a reliable alternative to visitors.

“Booking entire properties requires the same traveller to scour multiple niche listings sites or to call travel agents, real estate companies and even homeowners directly,” said Accel Partner partner Sonali De Rycker. “Often the same guests have to send a substantial deposit before they even have sight of the property with little guarantee or recourse if the property is not as advertised. The better the service HouseTrip offers to guest, the more likely they are to make a booking which in turn means better business for the hosts – these network effects only reinforce themselves as the company scales.”

This investment will be used to fuel the company’s international expansion. This brings its total funding to almost $60 million, following a $17 million Series B last November.

HouseTrip is based in London, with offices in Switzerland and Portugal.

$15 million is a lot of cash to invest in a rap lyrics site, but Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Rap Genius is the start of something much, much bigger.

Founded in 2009 by a trio of Yale University graduates, Rap Genius is a community-driven site dedicated to explaining and providing the context behind the lyrics to rap songs. Rap Genius says its serious, academic take on rap lyrics will help elevate the genre to the level of poetry.

It’s a noble approach, sure, but Andreessen Horowitz is investing in more than just a singular rap site. There’s real platform-level potential here, Andreessen says; potential that will allow the Rap Genius model to be extended to whole new languages, music genres, literature, and texts (think of a BibleGenius or Star TrekGenius).

And it goes deeper.

Andreessen says a Rap Genius-level of annotation was supposed to be built into Mosaic, the seminal web browser that Andreessen helped develop in the ’90s. But due to time and scaling constraints, that functionality never appeared.

As a result, the investment in Rap Genius is the culmination of a vision two decades in the making.

Filed under: Deals ]]> http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/03/andreesen-horowitz-invests-15m-rap-genius/feed/ 0 Andreessen Horowitz invests $15M in hip hop Wikipedia Rap Genius rbilton rap-genius http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/26/are-12-year-olds-too-young-to-start-a-business-not-according-to-kidworth/ http://venturebeat.com/2012/07/26/are-12-year-olds-too-young-to-start-a-business-not-according-to-kidworth/#comments Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:37:25 +0000 Christina Farr http://venturebeat.com/?p=497793

Would you invest $5 in a company with a preteen for a CEO, and services on offer like playing nice with a younger sibling or taking out the trash? On Kidworth, a Los Angeles-based startup, parents are funding “startup” ideas …

Would you invest $5 in a company with a preteen for a CEO, and services on offer like playing nice with a younger sibling or taking out the trash? On Kidworth, a Los Angeles-based startup, parents are funding “startup” ideas like these, and entrepreneurially-minded kids are pocketing some extra cash in the process.

I use the term startup loosely here, as many of the ideas featured on the site involve kids hustling to increase their allowance, in exchange for performing household chores or actions, such as ‘liking’ a brand’s Facebook page. Rudy DeFelice, Kidworth’s founder and interim CEO, said these are “suggestions” or “simple business ideas” and still have merit as a learning tool.

“Would I consider that entrepreneurship?  Absolutely,” he said, in an email interview with VentureBeat. This week, Kidworth launched the beta version of the site and announced plans to turn one million children into entrepreneurs.

The mere existence of the site begs the question, how young is too young to start a business? You could argue that kids with strong negotiation skills are more likely to become business leaders later in life. DeFelice, a former corporate lawyer turned investor, told me he developed the site after realizing that youth today aspire to be the next Zuck or Jack Dorsey.

“All their business heroes were startup guys – kids in their 20’s with their shirts untucked changing the world,” he said.

The process begins when parents open a master account for their children on Kidworth. In minutes, the kids can build a virtual storefront to sell goods or services. Products can be marketed to the local community on Facebook, and kids can create custom business cards (“a favorite feature!”) on the site, which are handed out in local stores.

Company ideas featured on Kidworth

Kidworth has addressed potential privacy concerns by building a secure system where adults can stand guard while their kids build companies. DeFelice told me that kids can develop the products and perform services, but parents screen all orders and correspondence they receive.

The site features a wide range of ideas, and most are approved by parents. Some are a bit more viable than others. DeFelice’s favorite success story is a kid who used Kidworth as a platform to sell his anime art.

Granted, there might be exceptions to the rule, but in my opinion, any teenager who attempts to charge a parent $5 to mow a lawn by calling it a “startup idea,” should not be encouraged.

I’ll never forget that summer my brother and I made a small fortune ($42 to be exact) by selling lemonade on a hot day. It didn’t even occur to my mother, the cheerleader and lemon supplier, that her children might now grow up to build a publicly traded company. I learned valuable skills that summer, but I would not consider the lemonade stand to be my first foray into entrepreneurship.

Is Kidworth taking it a step too far by incentivizing middle schoolers to build businesses? You decide.

Kid Computer Image courtesy of Flickr

Filed under: Business

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The site provides a trusted and protected online space for neighbors to engage with each other, with the overarching goal of making communities across America safer and stronger.

Nextdoor is a closed network that members can only join after verifying their home address. Once they have gained access, members can communicate with their neighbors on local issues like crime concerns, public spaces, and babysitting recommendations.

The idea for Nextdoor arose after founder Nirav Tolia learned some startling statistics about the state of the American neighborhood. In an interview, he referenced a poll conducted by the Pew Data Institute in 2010 that found that approximately 30% of Americans do not know a single one of their neighbors by name. He also referenced a book published by Harvard Professor Robert Putnam titled Bowling Alone, which examined the clear benefits of strong communities and the threat weak communities pose to the overall wellbeing of their inhabitants. These two discoveries together inspired him to create Nextdoor.

“Unfortunately, in America we have lost touch with our neighborhoods,” Tolia said in an interview with VentureBeat. “A giant part of our identities is where we live, and while there are plenty of social networks to help us connect with people far and wide, I couldn’t find anything to help us connect to people at our front door.”

The task of creating an online community where people feel comfortable posting sensitive and personal information like their childrens’ schools and details about their homes comes with significant challenges. Tolia listed three issues that were crucial to executing his vision successfully: privacy, user acquisition, and utility.

Privacy may be the most important. In order for real community bonds to be forged, people must have complete faith that they are as secure sharing things online as off. Users must provide proof of residence before they can join Nextdoor. No information on the site will show up in search engines or be visible to anyone outside of the network, not even residents of the same city or school district.

The second challenge was how to create a cohesive community online when it does not exist in the real world. How can you invite neighbors to the network if you don’t know their names, much less email addresses? Tolia addressed this by adopting offline engagement techniques like flyers, postcards, and paper invitations using the good old US Postal Service. Nextdoor pays for all the printing and shipping expenses, and residents are prompted to join by an actual piece of mail that explains the Nextdoor concept and provides sign-up instructions.

Finally, Tolia was adamant that the product is a utility, not a forum for gossip, status updates, or posting photos. Nextdoor is a place to discuss crime and safety, exchange local recommendations, express grievances, and create meaningful dialogue between community members.

So far, 3,600 neighborhoods are on Nextdoor. The company spent an entire year in stealth mode testing out the product in hundreds of communities across America to make sure it appealed to people in all parts of the country, in rural and urban areas, and spanning the breadth of the socioeconomic spectrum. Since its launch last October, Nextdoor has experienced explosive growth and now exists in over 3,600 communities. Twenty-two new neighborhoods are activated every day.

“Everyone lives in a neighborhood and wants it to be stronger,” Tolia said. “Safety is a universal concern. I don’t know too many other internet companies that facilitate safer places to live.”

He embarked on this project after founding a sports startup called FanBase that never got off the ground. Tolia decided to switch gears, take the $11 million he had raised in venture capital, and create a company that would positively impact peoples’ everyday lives.

“The more users communicate using online mechanisms, they more likely they are to communicate in person,” Tolia said. “If you use Nextdoor to get to know your neighbors, you are way more likely to walk outside the door and meet them in person. Ultimately, we are trying to get people to meet in the real world.”

This recent round of funding is the first explicitly invested for Nextdoor and was led by Benchmark Capital, where Tolia served as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence, as well as DAG Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Shasta Ventures. It currently has 30 employees and is based in San Francisco. The money will be used to scale the network, which Tolia believes should (and will) be present in every one of the 20,000 communities across the US.

Community news sharing site Reddit is now restricting its users from submitting links from a handful of high-profile web publications, including BusinessWeek, The Atlantic, Phys.org, GlobalPost, and ScienceDaily.

The ban has also caught at least one high-profile Redditor as well.

Reddit claims these sites, among others, are guilty of artificially promoting their content to make it appear more popular. In other words, they were cheating.

“Banning is not something we take lightly. It’s really a last resort,” Reddit General Manager Erik Martin told VentureBeat.

The question is whether the news sites themselves were cheating, or whether they were taken down because of their association with overzealous individuals who happened to submit and vote on links from those sites. In other words: Be careful who likes you; if they go overboard, you could be guilty by association.

Reddit is an ultra-popular content aggregation site that generates over 2 billion monthly page views and attracts more than 35,000,000 monthly unique visitors. People can quickly and easily submit a link to thousands of “subreddits” (sub-categories with a central theme, idea, or topic), which the community then votes on for quality and general interest. The more people vote for your submissions, the more “karma” points you accumulate, giving you more clout for future submissions and votes.

In theory, this system surfaces only the best content to Reddit’s highly-trafficked home page, thus bringing lots of inbound traffic to the website where the submitted content is hosted. Sometimes this “Reddit effect” can translate to hundreds of thousands of page views. For news websites, that means higher advertising revenue. As a result, there’s a powerful incentive for publications to try and get their stories onto the home page of Reddit. Many sites (VentureBeat included) employ social media marketing professionals or on-staff employees to help promote their best stories on Reddit, as well as other news-aggregation sites like Digg and Stumbleupon. However, with the current ban, Reddit is making a powerful statement that it believes these sites have taken unacceptably aggressive self-promotional tactics.

Collateral damage?

The ban appears to have been extended to include at least one user as well as specific website URLs.

VentureBeat recently spoke with a Reddit power user, who is among the most popular submitters in the site’s history and who is also a paying member of Reddit’s premium subscription service, Reddit Gold.

About two weeks ago, this user, who asked to remain anonymous, was banned by Reddit management without warning. This is an interesting development because the user’s most frequently submitted domains were from The Atlantic, Phys.org, and ScienceDaily — all of which are now currently blacklisted by Reddit.

“I contacted the company to find out why all of my accounts had been banned, but they couldn’t give me a straight answer,” the Reddit user told us. “I finally spoke with Reddit’s General Manager who said ‘I think we both know why you were banned’. But really, I had no idea.”

The user also pointed out that he/she wasn’t intentionally trying to game up submissions, and as such, didn’t feel the need to avoid the perception that he/she was cheating the system. Those who are maliciously gaming up their submissions are probably harder to spot, which is undoubtedly why Reddit is going after the domain rather than a relatively untraceable individual.

Reddit’s new ban hammer

The existence of a Reddit domain blacklist isn’t new, but as of Monday it is more visible, Martin said.

“Reddit has always had domain bans from the very beginning,” he explained. “What we did recently is change how those (bans) work.”

Previously, people could submit a link even if the URL was blacklisted. That submission could be seen by the user who submitted it, but wouldn’t appear anywhere else on the site. Reddit’s old system was built to catch blatantly spammy submissions from domains like “CheapCaribbeanVacationTravel.com,” but there is a grey area beyond that, Martin said.

Now, when users try to submit a link from a blacklisted domain they are met with a message informing them that the domain has been banned, and are unable to complete the submission.

“The recent change to how we treat spam/cheating submissions is to let people know that we have taken action against a certain domain,” he said — meaning Reddit is making an example out of The Atlantic, Phys.org, and other cheaters. “We want to show that this behavior isn’t OK instead of keeping the banned domains secret.”

Domains that appear on the blacklist have been added on a case-by-case basis, and some of them were given plenty of notice to stop cheating well in advance, according to Martin. For instance, The Daily Dot reports that The Atlantic Magazine’s social media editor Jared Keller was intentionally cheating to get his publication’s content more votes on the site.

We reached out to The Atlantic regarding the recent developments, and a company spokesperson replied with the following statement:

“Reddit contacted us earlier this year with concerns that a member of our staff was submittingAtlantic stories in violation of Reddit’s guidelines for content promotion. We took steps to address the issue. Reddit informed us Tuesday that what they consider to be irregularities have recurred, and, as a result, the site is temporarily banning submissions with The Atlantic’s domain. We take this issue seriously and are looking into it further.

We at The Atlantic remain big fans of Reddit and the kind of Internet it represents.”

Prior to the current ban, Reddit had also dropped the ban hammer on Village Voice Media for gaming the site.

As for a public list of blacklisted domains, you won’t get it from Reddit itself. The company hopes that over time, it’ll be able to remove domains from the ban list if once domain owner/web publication changes its practices (a.k.a. stops trying to cheat). Reddit users are also keeping track of banned domains on their own via a new subreddit.

Skepticism over Reddit’s domain blacklist

While news of the banned domains is still being hotly debated by Reddit users, there are plenty of people who aren’t crazy about it.

“I’ve been a redditor from nearly the very beginning, and I have to agree that this move is not something I like,” wrote Reddit user farra in a recent comment thread. “If reddit is being gamed, change the game, don’t start broadly censoring domains unless they are truly malicious (ie- viruses, etc.).”

“Changing the game” as farra said, is much safer than assuming you know how and why a particular organization or user is supposedly cheating when it comes to making their submissions more popular. That said, Reddit’s current plan of attack is flawed because it’s difficult to determine if a particular domain is just extremely popular with Reddit users (or a particularly active group of Reddit submitters), or if it’s legitimately being gamed. Reddit user accounts have very little distinguishable personal information, such as affiliation with employers, publications, etc. They’re also extremely easy to sign up for, and don’t even require an e-mail address to start participating.

In terms of how the banned publications were cheating the system, Martin declined to comment because it could allow others to figure out new ways to cheat without getting caught. However, he did state that Reddit’s former parent company Conde Nast had zero involvement in the decision, nor did any other organization outside of Reddit’s management team.

Still, the situation does underline an important point: if Reddit thinks a particular domain is cheating, it’ll get banned.

Artwork via War/nComment

“Community” online marketplace Etsy is going global, despite already being global. Using a new $40 million round of funding led by Index Ventures, the company is trying grow even more by focusing on its thousands of sellers.

“With all the talk about how far we have come, it is tempting to think of Etsy as “big” now,” said Etsy chief executive Chad Dickerson in a blog post. “When I look at Etsy, though, I see a tiny seedling.”

Dickerson has been the company’s CEO for only nine months, though he joined in 2008. He explained that since his early days at Etsy, the vintage and handmade goods marketplace has grown dramatically — making $525 million in sales last year — but it’s not big enough. To grow the number of buyers, inherently you’ve got to improve the community of sellers. It seems that’s what this round is focused on: the businesses that live within Etsy.

Etsy’s 875,000 sellers are from all over the world, but the website doesn’t operate in their languages. Dickerson prides himself on the community feel that Etsy provides, saying that “we don’t think of it as Etsy becoming more like the rest of the world, rather the rest of the world becoming more like Etsy.” So the company will be using its new funding to create international websites, and bring that community feeling abroad.

Indeed, Etsy has already begun that process. The company has launched German and French sites, but that doesn’t account for the other 147 countries where sellers live.

The funding will also go toward building new tools for sellers. Etsy recently launched a number of those tools including the iPhone app and direct checkout. It has also acquired artisanal online marketplace Trunkt, which should bring in a new class of sellers and buyers looking for those finer goods.

Etsy is also focusing on the female community, encouraging female developers to participate in its newly announced Hacker Grant where a group of these women will head to Etsy’s Brooklyn headquarters for a summer of coding-honing.

Dickerson assures that as the resources come in, we will see Etsy start to move faster on these improvements, perhaps even acquiring other companies. Etsy has around 300 employees and 15 million registered users to date. The company sees 42 million unique visits to the website a month.

Index Ventures led this round with existing investors Burda, Union Square Ventures and Accel Partners all contributing.

hat tip The New York Times

The news sharing site, which gets over a billion page views per month, harbors an abundance of small subreddits — which are sub-sites within Reddit based on one unifying subject, like cities, states or colleges. The local subreddits have a much smaller following (2,000 to 9,000 subscribers) compared to mainstream subreddits like Offbeat, Funny and Gaming. However, the local communities can be just as active.

Yesterday, Reddit announced a campaign to give local businesses free advertising targeted at those localized subreddits. Each local business will get one of Reddit’s self-serve ads, which runs at the top of each subreddit page. Users can both vote and comment on the ad as if it were a regular submission to the site. That ad will run for three days, which is a value of about $100.

“We’ve seen a few local businesses use it, but we wanted a few more people to try it out to see what works, what doesn’t, the overall performance, how we can improve (the experience) or even just to create best practices,” Reddit General Manager Erik Martin said in an interview with VentureBeat. “Also, it’s in our best interest for local businesses to realize that there are local subreddits for almost every city and large town in the country.”

In addition to raising awareness, Martin said the company is running the new campaign to get more feedback on how local businesses can use its self-serve ad platform.

“Owning a local, private business is like having three jobs and a new baby all at the same time — especially when you’re first starting up,” Reddit wrote in a blog post announcing the campaign. “It’s easy for a local business in a specific community to get lost in the advertising crowd.”

This isn’t the first time Reddit has decided to give out free ads. Last month, the company held a campaign inviting non-profits and charities to run free ads on the site. About 250 ads (valued at over $27,000) ran during the two-week campaign.

L.A. isn’t just a mecca for film and video game studios. In the past three years, the Los Angeles tech scene has evolved from a small cadre of social media-happy party animals to a legitimate and sustainable tech community to rival Silicon Valley.

“Los Angeles is a town that spins a million stories every day,” says local technophile Sean Percival. “It’s the perfect backdrop for a techie looking to tell his or her own story.”

Percival is at once a gossip and a godfather in the community. A MySpace exec, he and his wife, Laurie, also became loved and feared in earlier days for their hilarious interpretations of L.A. tech life on Lalawag, a colorful blog about the local scene. Percival now characterizes the current SoCal vibe as “a lot more company-building and a lot fewer poolside mixers.”

Back in 2008, the L.A. tech scene was in its party-filled, boozy heyday. Every night of the week, Twitter advocates and wannapreneurs could be found gathering at an array of networking events. The town was crawling with social media enthusiasts, but the scene wasn’t yet the kind of primordial soup that leads to healthy young startups.

“After some big hits like Overture during the first dot-com boom,” says Percival, “the space had been somewhat dormant. At this point, we were mostly using new technologies like Twitter to help build the community and find one another. Lots of ideas were being tossed around and connections made, but not much building.”

Even so, tech in L.A. circa 2007 and 2008 was more than just empty enthusiasm. The area had MySpace going for it (and back then, it was still a strong contender among social networks). Huge entertainment companies were beginning to look toward the web more, and they were tapping local digital experts for help. A handful of thought leaders were also working on projects like Twiistup, a homebrewed startup competition.

But what’s going on in Los Angeles today is a far cry from what was happening there four or five years ago. The parties have died down, and angel investors and smart business minds are getting to work.

The city’s tech scene is a few years more mature, more realistic, more productive — and it’s making headlines for its entrepreneurial atmosphere. Meet the new face of L.A. tech.

Why Entrepreneurs Love L.A.

Paige Craig, L.A. entrepreneur & investor

One of the most prominent figures in — and advocates for — the new school of L.A.-based entrepreneurship is Paige Craig. A former Marine from the East Coast with a background in defense contracting, Craig now runs startup BetterWorks and typifies the “Silicon Beach” CEO: In the de rigeur uniform of hoodies, shorts, and flip-flops, he brims with sun-drenched charisma.

“We’re a diverse lot,” he says of L.A.’s tech scene, “but more than San Francisco/Silicon Valley startups, we have a very healthy work-hard-play-hard balance.”

Joey Flores is the dreadlocked co-founder of Earbits, a Y Combinator startup that’s making its mark on the music industry. “I love L.A. as an entrepreneur,” he tells us, “because I think it’s incredibly important to create work-life balance, and you can’t beat Los Angeles for that.

“My partners and I work extremely hard, but every other day [Earbits EVP] Yotam [Rosenbaum] and I discuss work as we walk to the beach and get some sun on the boardwalk,” Flores says. “When I’ve had a rough day, I can hit Main Street and go to one of a dozen bars, where I often run into other entrepreneurs I know. If I want to go see world-class music or stand-up comedy, I can do it on any night of the week.”

Beyond the colorful nightlife and perfect weather, Craig defines what is, for him, the crux of Los Angeles’ entrepreneurial community: a connection to average consumers’ needs and the all-important hustle.

“There’s a very ‘real’ culture here,” Craig says. “Most of us are building businesses that solve real problems and drive real revenues. We don’t have the luxury of a tech bubble down here, so we all have to figure our business models out quickly, deliver value and make the bucks.

“We’re a city of hustlers… We know how to sell, and we can put sizzle on the burger.”

Grubwithus co-founder Eddy Lu, who spent time in the Bay Area as a UC Berkeley student, echoes these sentiments, saying, “We chose to be located where our customers are (and where the sun is!). Also, we’re going to be an operations heavy company, so why compete with Facebook, Google, Zynga, Twitter, etc. for ops talent when we can have L.A. all to ourselves?”

Craig says that since he moved to Los Angeles in the fall of 2008, he’s seen a tenfold increase in the number of startups in the area. He also noted “the emergence of early and successful founders investing in and advising the new crop of companies.”

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From January to May 2011, the site has seen a 37 percent increase in unique visitors (13.7 million to 18.8 million) and a 25 percent increase in page views (999 million to 1.228 billion), according to Reddit General Manager Erik Martin (a.k.a. Hueypriest), who added that the average time a person stays on the site remained an impressive 15.5 minutes.

Martin said he attributes the steady growth to members of the Reddit community scoring mainstream news attention and the creation of new sub-Reddit communities, which are sub-categories of the main site that focus on a specific topic.

Condé Nast, which owns the site, also made good on its earlier pledge to give Reddit the resources it needed to manage the insane growth. The post announced that three new programmers have been hired to join the team: Logan Hanks from Google, Keith Mitchell from Oracle and recent graduate Brian Simpson.

“Thank you to everyone in the reddit community who made these new hires possible — be it in the form of submissions, community moderation, brand sponsorship, t-shirt-ownership, adblock-not-doing, sponsored-link-buying, or reddit-gold-subscribing, Martin wrote. “It’s a very exciting time here at reddit HQ, and we are extremely grateful for your support.”

With the addition of the new programmers, Reddit’s engineer staff now has a total of five employees, which seems luxurious compared to earlier in the year when the departure of Mike Schiraldi left the site with only one.

Not outsized valuations, that is, but visual bubbles. Bublaa, which launches Wednesday, organizes discussion topics as graphical bubbles. Each bubble has a discussion forum and tools for sharing.

Users can create their own topics, or bubbles, and invite other users to participate. The bubble grows as the number of participants goes up.

Bubbles can be open to anyone or private. Users can also create a bubble that allows the use of aliases. That enables you to participate pseudonymously in social communities without risk to your real-life identity.

Bublaa plans to generate revenue through premium services and sponsored bubbles. Bublaa starts as a browser-only social media service. iPhone and Android applications will be available later this year. People can join Bublaa through their Facebook or Twitter accounts. The service is now available in the U.S, United Kingdom and Finland, and will be available in 75 countries in November, 2011, the founders say.

The company behind Bublaa is originally from Finland, but they have already launched a U.S. company to run operations in this country.

Bublaa’s plans are very ambitious.

“We want to have three million user after the first month. In 2012 we will have 100 million users,” said the CEO, Juho Kyröläinen, when I met with him earlier this year.

As a way to introduce the service to users, the company will give $10,000 to the user who creates the largest bubble before 10 AM PST on June 15.

The company has 17 employees. It has raised $300,000 dollars from its founders. Chief executive Kyröläinen has previously created a successful dating site www.deitille.fi in Finland.

We all spend a lot of time on web search. While every other online activity seems to have gone social, searching remains solitary, but maybe not for long. Google has said it will be adding a “social layer” to its products to combat the rise of Facebook, and several startups are tackling the problem, too. HeyStaks, which launches publicly at DEMO (previously in closed beta), is one of them.

HeyStaks wants to make search more efficient by pooling search results from your community. According to search engine marketing firm iProspect, a typical knowledge worker spends 16 hours a month searching for information and 50 percent of all those searches fail. HeyStaks’ founders claim that 1 in 4 of those searches are repeats of your own past queries and 2 out of 3 of searches have already been executed by someone else in your social network.

HeyStaks is built on the notion of a Stak, which synthesizes the best shared search results of a group of users on a particular subject. Each user has a default Stak of their own searches and can start or join other Staks. A Stak might cover startup advice or travel in San Francisco, for example. As a user, you choose your preferred Staks and who you want to collaborate with to get better search results. You might have one friend who has great insight into the design scene but knows nothing about high-tech startups, for example.

HeyStaks provides browser plugins for Firefox and Chrome as well as a mobile application. Once you have installed the plugin, relevant HeyStaks community search results start appearing in your Google, Yahoo and Bing search results.

The results to the left are from a search for “hard rock reviews”. The searcher is a mountain biker who is looking for reviews of Hard Rock mountain biking gear. Google thinks that the user is looking for the Hard Rock hotel or hard rock music, so its default results are not relevant. Since this user is a member of a mountain biking Stak, HeyStaks anticipates that the user is more likely to be looking for mountain biking results and makes suggestions accordingly.

HeyStaks is based on technology developed by a group of researchers in search, data mining and personalization. The company’s CTO is Barry Smyth, a prominent expert in personalization whose previous startup, ChangingWorlds, was sold to Amdocs for $60 million.  HeyStaks CEO, Jonathon Dillon, was previously a VP at Yahoo.

The HeyStaks social ranking and relevance engine takes 10 different types of user behavior into consideration. These include behaviors like how often a user selects a page and whether they tag it, share it or post it on their social networks. Results to date suggest that HeyStaks recommendations can be up to 50 percent more relevant that the vanilla search engine results.

Heystaks’ main competitors may be  the search engines themselves, but the founders claim that many of the HeyStaks community-preferred results would never appear on the main search engine result page, because they are a blend of head and tail content, based on community votes, and therefore are not manipulable by content farms or SEO experts.

Anything that improves search results is relevant to advertisers. HeyStaks’ business model will extend the social relevance algorithm to community ranking and filtering ads. However, the ad features will not be launched until later this year.

HeyStaks was founded in 2008, has 12 employees and is based in Dublin and San Francisco. The company has seed funding of $1.4 million from NCB Ventures.

TextPlus

The company claims to be bringing a more social atmosphere to group texting, including adding features like “search” – which will help users find other users based on gender, age, email and others. According to a company representative, TextPlus has already seen a 45 percent increase in community messages since the updated app went live (that’s very early data).

With increased community engagement, TextPlus may see even better numbers than what the company has already shared, including adding more than 50,000 new users a day.

Rival group texting service GroupMe appears to be doing well with estimates of 200,000 texts going through its system every day, according to Mashable.

Marina Del Ray, Calif.-based TextPlus, founded in 2007, has raised a total of $13.2 million in funding. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers participated in both rounds.

Yakaz is a pretty simple concept in that it allows users to choice their location and then aggregates ads from a host of outside classified and auction sites, like eBay and Craigslist. The benefit is knowing that whatever it is you’re looking for, whether a car or sofa, is in your area. If you’re interested in posting a product or service, you’ll be allowed only 280 characters and the company will categorize it by keywords automatically.

The company isn’t just interested in providing users with ads, a “discussion” and instant chat feature has been added to allow users in a specific area to easily engage and make transactions. The features are also beneficial for asking questions about potential products or services from other users.

Ooodle’s Marketplace app on Facebook is probably Yakaz’s biggest competitor. The service is very similar in features, allowing users to see posts by location as well as chat with each other. However, Oodle’s Marketplace only shows ads from Facebook users, so customers won’t see ads from outside sites. That makes Yakaz a slightly more robust offering.

The Paris-based company, founded in 2005, secured a first round of funding for around $640,000 back in 2006 and currently has 15 employees.

BlockChalk

BlockChalk, first covered back in January,  is a location-based mobile service available to iPhone, Palm and Android devices that lets users anonymously leave messages in different areas of a community or neighborhood. These messages can be anything from reporting crime to confessing your love for a neighbor. According to the company website, BlockChalk is in over 128 countries, 10,514 cities and 16,652 neighborhoods.

While it might seem that leaving anonymous messages in your neighborhood could get out of control, the company has set up a list of guidelines. Some of these guidelines including keeping your messages locally appropriate and be respectful of others opinions.  BlockChalk also reserves the right to ask you to leave (just the application, not your actual neighborhood). Things that will get you booted include spamming, criminal activities or porn.

A number of investors joined the first round of funding, include Battery Ventures, Founder Collective, Harrison Metal Capital, Delicious founder Joshua Schachter, Lotus founer Mitch Kapor, Josh Stylman, Tom McInerney and David Liu.

The San Jose-based company was created by Stephen Hood, the former product team lead for Delicious, and Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design.

Competitors include EveryBlock, a startup purchased by MSNBC.com, and Facebook application Neighorhood.