Ed-tech accelerator Imagine K12 announced that it will increase its initial funding for startups from $20,000 to $100,000.

This additional funding is available from the newly established “Start Fund,” backed by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham, Yahoo co-founder David Filo, Angela Filo, LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, NewSchools Venture Fund, and GSV Asset Management.

Imagine K12 is focused on helping entrepreneurs develop technology for students from kindergarten to high school.

In just two years, Imagine K12 has established itself as one of the most well-respected programs in part because of its efforts to reach teachers. Thirty-nine startups have graduated from it, and these have gone on to raise approximately $30 million in funding.

Each startup accepted into the program will receive a $20,000 check from Imagine K12 and $80,000 from the Start Fund.

“The funds will give entrepreneurs enough time to get the right market fit so [they] can take root in the educational system,” said Imagine K12 founder Tim Brady by phone. ”And our startups have built products that are used in hundreds of thousands of classrooms.”

Brady claims that the accelerator’s alumni have launched products deployed by 10 percent of teachers. Some of the most well-known graduates from previous batches include behavior management software ClassDojo and open-data startup LearnSprout.

Interested in applying? Applications are now open for the official program, which begins in September in Palo Alto, Calif.

photo credit: @Photo. via photopin cc

DataHero, the startup that would do away with Excel, has just launched its free product to the public.

DataHero’s tool can spin up a data visualization in a matter of minutes. Anyone who’s been tasked with creating a pesky pivot table for work will breathe a sigh of relief.

“We have a lot of intellectual property around making sense of the data before the user has to do anything — way before they ask a technical person for help,” cofounder Chris Neumann (pictured above, left) explained in a phone interview.

Register for free, and you’ll be invited to peruse sample data sets, or upload your own data set. The technology integrates with Excel — so you can upload a CSV file. Then you can use the tool to create nifty visualizations that will knock the socks off your colleagues and boss.

DataHero will initially offer a free service to consumers. However, businesses that require integration with existing business tools, such as Stripe, Dropbox, and Salesforce, will need to pay a fee. The payment model is not yet concrete — Neumann said the company will soon be introducing an enterprise subscription service.

DataHero’s competition includes Tableau Public, Microsoft’s Excel, and business dashboard Chartio, but Neumann believes it is one of the few startups designed for individuals with little or no technical expertise. “We see ourselves as data visualization for the 99 percent of people who don’t work with statistical queries everyday,” he said.

Thousands of people have used the beta since it was released last year. The Palo Alto, Calif. startup has grown to a team of five (all designers and engineers) and has raised a seed round of less than a million dollars in funding. DataHero intends to raise an institutional round of funding this year and is hiring engineers as it preps for growth.

Still in stealth mode, DataHero made our 2012 list of the hottest “big data” startups. Check it out here.

The winner of Best Demo Pit is Nano Satisfi, a space and data imaging platform that offers affordable and convenient access to space. The data collected has possible applications in science educate, weather analysis, and for governmental or military purposes.

The winner of the Diamond in the Rough award is Addicaid, “a new kind of treatment for addicts by addicts.”

The hardware award goes to Cube Sensors, which are small, cordless and connected devices that continuously measure temperature, humidity, noise, light, air quality and barometric pressure for every room in a house. Twenty-five percent of all companies on stage this year were hardware and this is the first year (of many to come) that this award was given out.

Forty percent of the companies at Launch came from outside the United States. The Best International Startup award goes to Instabridge, a Swedish startup that makes it easier to use and share wi-fi networks.

Enterprise 1.0 was awarded to Synata by Don Dodge. Synata helps you ‘find the needle in the enterprise haystack.’

The Best Presentation award went to Knowyo, which helps you “never forget a name.”

The winner of the Best Business award went to AdStage, a platform lets medium-sized businesses easily create cross-channel ad campaigns across at the same time and track and tweak all of them from one dashboard.

TripTease won the Best Design award. TripTease has built a beautifully-designed travel review site that make travel reviews “worth sharing.”

Best Technology award went to a company solving deep technology problems. Navisens‘ motionDNA technology locates personal and mobile devices indoors and underground with no infrastructure.

The jury could not pick just one startup to win Best Overall Startup in the Launch 2.0 competition, so they divided the award into two categories- enterprise and consumer.

Zillabyte won the Best Enterprise 2.0 award. Zillabyte’s technology helps businesses find the most relevant sales leads to help and become better prospectors, by finding the right people.

The winner of the Best Consumer 2.0 award is Jawfish Games, which the judges anticipate will make “a lot of money.”

And the prize of Best Overall Winner in the 1.0 competition went to Boxbee. Boxbee simplifies physical (as opposed to data storage). The company will pick up items you need stored, and bring them back to you when you want them back, all managed from an easy-to-use mobile app. The 1.0 contest focuses on completely new companies that have never had any press, public demos, and whose services are in closed alpha or beta.

The winners were picked by the Grand Jury, a panel of judges consisting of Harvey Allison, president of Attractor; Brian Alvey, CEO of CrowdFusion; Steve Chen, angel investors; Don Dodge, developer advice at Google; Jay Levy, partner at Zelkova Ventures; Alfred Lin, partner at Sequoia Capital; Mark Pesce, CEO of Moores Cloud; Adeo Ressi of the Founders Institute; and Jonathon Triest, a managing partner at Ludlow Ventures.

Launch Live App

Interestingly, the top three startups in the Launch Live App also won Grand Jury awards. Using the Launch live app, attendees could express their interest and excitement about presenting startups in real-time with simulated crowdfunding.

The five companies with the most votes were:

• Zillabyte, which offers ”Pandora for sales leads,” is the crowd favorite with 992,00o points.
• Jawfish Games, the real-time, multiplayer tournament games for mobile devices, came in second with 862,000 points.
• AdStage, a “single ad campaign manager to rule them all” took the bronze with 861,000 points.
• Flyer.io, a company that brings real estate fliers into the modern age, racked up 759,000 points.
• HomeDine.in, which connects people to dine out in other peoples’ homes, raised 621,000 points.

Is one of these companies the next billion dollar startup? Only time will tell.

There are the core companies that use Launch as an opportunity to break out of stealth mode and snag their 15 minutes of fame. Some are looking for exposure, others for investors, and many, of course, are looking for both. Others are simply here to soak up the scene, eat free sandwiches, and mingle with their fellow startup friends who are inevitably present as well.

Flyer.io presented yesterday afternoon and quickly shot up to the top tier of the leaderboard. The company takes real estate flyers to the next level with a well-designed, video-centric interface. Rather than creating old school flyers or holding regular showings, brokers can take footage of the space they are renting or selling to create a dynamic, information-packed ad. CEO and founder Isaac Herrera said that the real estate is a 500 billion market that still relies primarily on Google Docs, PDFs, and worse, and he trying to evolve it into modern times.

“I think we got such a response because we are one of the few companies that has a way to make money,” he said at the Flyer.io booth at Launch. “Even being based here in San Francisco, it takes a long time to network with the right people, it is like a social club. While we were here, we accomplished in three days what it would take months to do. Some of the people we tried to contact in the past who never responded and reached out to us, now that they see the product in the market.”

Other companies are not actively fundraising or presenting on stage, they are primarily here for marketing purposes.  Tealet is a marketplace that connects tea drinkers with tea growers with a high-end tea subscription service. The company participated in 500 Startups and presented at 500 Startups Demo Day. Founder Elyse Petersen said she is at Launch in an effort to reach her target audience, 20-40 year old men making over $100,000 a year.

“At 500 Startups Demo Day, we polished our pitch and presented on stage to investors,” she said. “Here, we are looking for geeks and gamers who are obsessive tea drinkers because thats who are our first adopters. They are the people who want to have everything before it becomes cool who are interested in niche connoisseur products. If we were trying to launch a mobile app for a feature that was the same as six others, the crowds would be difficult, but for us, the more the merrier.”

Tealet’s table stands between banners for boring-sounding (but sexy!) enterprise software and ads for dating apps. Down a small flight of stairs, you have a massage “digital detox” area. In another, robots. Walking through the hardware section of the teeming room is a landmine of self driving cars, furry educational smart toys, and even little light-up robotic balls that are guided with an iPhone.

Amidst all the gadgets is Nomiku, a device that raked in over $580K on Kickstarter and is the highest funded project in the food category.  The Nomiku is an at-home sous-vide device that costs just $355, as opposed to the couple thousand dollars of other market options. Founders Lisa and Abe Fetterman were relaxing on their couch one night watching Top Chef when they decided to build their own emergent circulator. Considering Abe is an astrophysicist, this was actually in the realm of possibility. The couple built a prototype, headed to China to participate in an accelerator program and get to know their supply chain, and returned home to get married and roll out a Kickstarter campaign that ended up being extremely lucrative.

“Everyone is so ready to make perfect food,” said Lisa as she fed me sous-vide pears. “Why waste your life eating shit food? Life is so short eat well, its so easy. Put your food in a freaking bag and let exact science take over.”

Hardware and consumer-facing startups are popular with attendees, attracted by tag lines like “travel reviews worth sharing” and “eat out, feel at home”, and names like “My Cute Friend” (where every guy comes recommended). Business-to-business startups are also doing well however,  as this tech-savvy crowd responds well to phrases like “data-driven lead generation” from Zillabyte and “cross-channel, data-driven  ad campaigns” from AdStage.

Many of the attendees are not pitching themselves, but work for more advanced companies that are here to check out the competition and look for potential partnerships. Alex Kouts is the director of product at Razoo, a crowdfunding platform for non-profits. He spent three days at Launch listening to presentations and talks, making partnerships, and picking up ideas about user-experience and design.

“Launch felt like it was put on by the startup community, as opposed to for it,” Kouts said after the pitches were done. “Every event is the product of the startups they can get to come to it. Some of the startups are really strong, but there is also a lot of chafe. Overall, it felt very entrepreneur-friendly.”

At large demo events like this, the pitch presentations often run together in a muddied stream, which is why I was initially skeptical of impact launching a startup here could have. However, after three days of talking with people from all sides of the tech community, I understand that the value is not what happens on stage, but rather what happens off. Whether it is expanding your professional network, exploring potential partnerships, selling your product to early adopters, or receiving constructive feedback, there is something to be said for being one of many in a crowd, when the crowd is this entrepreneurial.

Since the conference began yesterday, only four have passed the 300,000 threshold. Here are the top three startups that have presented at Launch, according to the laws of crowdsourcing.

Zillabyte

Zillabyte easily has the most points, with a total of  651,000 toward the end of Tuesday afternoon. Zillabyte bills itself as “Pandora for sales leads.” Built off a database of wto billion pages and 11 million unique companies, Zillabyte’s engine helps businesses search for prospective customers.

“The technology connects buyers and sellers more efficiently in the business-to-business space,” said founder and COO Roger Huffstetler in an interview at their booth. “I used to work in sales for Twilio, and I know cold-calling sucks when you are selling technology. We are taking an anecdotal understanding of sales and making it analytical.”

The site first prompts visitors with the question “Find me more companies like… .” It then prompts sales professionals to answer “yes or no” to potential clients to create a list options, based on the input. These results are further filterable by geography, size, and so on. Huffstetler said that the really exciting feature, however, is the alert system that notifies businesses when a new customer is found that satisfies their criteria. Zillabyte is based in Palo Alto.

Jawfish Games

Currently in second place with 546,000 Launch dollars is Jawfish Games. This startup claims to produce the world’s first real-time, multiplayer tournament games for mobile devices.

“There are currently 135,000 games in the app store, and none of them are as fun as these,” said CEO Phil Gordon. “Live tournaments are really hard to do technically in terms of scaleability, latency, bandwidth, and all the back-and-forth. Many of the big gaming companies are not great at complex software engineering. We are a complex software engineering company that is good at making games.”

Jawfish partnered with “casual” gaming company BigFish to produce three games. Players join the game and compete against each other in 3- to 4-minute tournaments that ultimately yield one winner. They are quick, simple, and apparently a hit with the audience at Launch. Jawfish Games is backed by $2.6 million, led by Founders Fund. It is based in Seattle.

Instaradio

With the bronze medal is Instaradio, which turns smartphones into personal radio stations.

“Instaradio lets you broadcast from your own phone to any device in the world and anyone can listen in real time,” said CTO Andrew Opala. “This is not an easily bracketed application. It is a voice platform that is open-ended and can be used in many different ways, like Twitter.”

Use cases include a parent wanting to read a bedtime story to their child from afar, a garage band sending new music out to their fans, and for emergency situations. It is also useful at an event (like Launch) where people can stream live audio from interesting speakers to people who are not there. To activate, users press a button and start talking. People on the other end receive a notification via email, Twitter, SMS, and so on about the broadcast and tune in. Instaradio currently has 352,000 in Launch commitments.

AdStage

AdStage got off to a hot start, racking up 327,000 within hours of presenting. AdStage is a “single ad campaign manager to rule them all.” The platform lets medium-sized businesses easily create cross-channel ad campaigns across at the same time and track and tweak all of them from one dashboard.

“A lot of advertisers think it is bad practice to post the same ad on multiple networks, but why not kill multiple birds with one stone?” said founder Sahil Jain. “We allow you to fine-tune the ads and targeting per network. We are not targeting agencies or the enterprise. We are a mid-market tool that is great for online tech businesses. Everybody at Launch is thinking about how to get more users. We make advertising super easy and it is fun to use.”

In addition to campaign creation and editing tools, AdStage also offers analytics so businesses can see how various ads are doing, what are the top key words, and also recommends budget allocation shifts based on the findings. AdStage also announced that it has raised $1.4 million in seed funding from Freestyle Capital, Quest VP, Dave McClure/500 Startups, Digital Garage, XG Ventures, Mark Mullen, Stewart Alsop, John Battelle and Rich Lefurgy.

Stay tuned tomorrow for more coverage of Launch, a three-day pitch event where 50 stealthy startups present their products to an audience of thousands in the hopes of gaining exposure, funding, and momentum.

To help sort through the noise, Launch partnered with peer-to-peer lending platform MicroVentures and SourceBits, an app development firm, to release a live crowdfunding app that tracks the excitement surrounding the companies as they emerge out of stealth mode.

“The idea is to let the crowd indicate interest in companies in real time,” said Tim Sullivan, the CEO of Microventures, in an interview with VentureBeat. “It will be a leaderboard onstage and highlight certain companies getting more momentum than others. Hopefully, it will fuel interest in those companies and enable the attendees to focus more on the companies and less on the chaos. Just because somebody is not an accredited investor doesn’t mean they are not knowledgeable or don’t understand the space really well. Their voice is just as meaningful.”

The way it works is that every attendee receives 10,000 Launch dollars (accredited investors get an unlimited amount) to ‘invest’ in startups they like. These investments are not actual money but rather “commitments” that create a buzz barometer. This means that people who are not accredited investors can also contribute their feedback.

“People are excited to use it,” said Mark Chatow, SourceBits’ head of marketing. “It brings a passion and people are much more engaged in the conference because you feel like you are playing along. It will be interesting to see the correlation between the leaderboard and who ends up winning.”

Even the startups that don’t win the grand prize still stand to win offstage by raising capital. The hope with the Launch app is that theoretical dollars turn into actual dollars by providing a link between accredited investors and promising young companies.

“I think the best use case is for expressing interest in a follow-up meeting,” said Adam Draper, the founder of the BoostVC accelerator and incubator program. “No one will write a check after meeting someone quickly, but this is noncommittal. It says, ‘I am interested in you this many points,’ but nothing is being signed. I don’t need to meet you, but can express interest right away.”

Even though crowdfunding for startups is not yet legal, the app is an experiment to see how it could work once the crowdfunding provisions of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act) Act take effect. It also helps journalists, investors, and interested people within the tech community get a quick grasp on the buzz in the room, which is no mean feat considering the size and scope of the conference.

Launch was started six years ago by Jason Calacanis, a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and blogger who wanted to provide stealthy startups with a place to publicly (and dramatically) release their products into the wild. Unfortunately, Launch itself now feels like the wild. Like all massive demo events, the opportunities for exposure are offset by the chaos. Over the next three days, it will be interesting to see how Launch’s app acts as a guide.

You just got hacked. What happened? How could you have prevented this? The obvious questions only come after the deed has been done. Security firm Cylance wants to put an end to reactionary security, and focus on the prevention of attacks. The company got $15 million in its first round of funding today led by storied venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.

Cylance was started by former McAfee executive Stuart McClure in 2012. The company has since been in stealth mode, though it has previously talked about some of its products. It officially announced its board members today, including Stewart Baker, formerly of the National Security Administration, and former chief information security officer for the CIA Robert Bigman.

Fairhaven Capital also participated in the round.

The company formally announced its first service called Presponse in December. Presponse, or pre-response, is an auditing service performed by Cylance that looks at a number of your attack vectors, assesses your risk, and gives you a plan of action for protecting yourself.

Presponse first looks at the “critical infrastructure” your company uses, such as connections to the smart grid and connected water systems. It then looks at other smart devices such as Internet-connected thermostats, healthcare devices, and more. It then looks at your business, what kind of information you might store, and how valuable that information is. In the end, it shows you how at-risk you are and exactly where an attack might try to attack.

“If you can secure the very fabric of our society and economy – critical infrastructure and key resources (CIKR) – you can secure anything,” said Mark Hatfield, Partner at Fairhaven Capital in a statement. “The security industry is ready for an overhaul and Cylance has the vision.”

Cylance image via Cylance

The founders of Squeeze1 are pledging to get tattoos of their company’s logo if 15,000 people signup before the launch date on February 24th.

Squeeze1 is a social platform to crowdsource support for ideas. People or companies post non-official petitions called ‘limes’ to gauge whether an endeavor is worth doing, and the community shows its support through ‘squeezes.’ The two founders created a tattoo lime in an effort to attract users. 

A statement issued by the company said Squeeze is a mix of Kickstarter, 9Gag, and Change.org, designed to “bring your ideas to life.” There is also a Crowdtilt component, but no matter how many components of other successful startups it cobbles together, Squeeze still seems like a highly unlikely business proposition. Furthermore, incentivizing people to sign up by promising to do crazy things doesn’t bode well for user acquisition down the road. Surely, there can’t be enough people interested in other people’s body art to sustain this kind of a strategy.

With so much noise in the startup scene, it is not uncommon for entrepreneurs to resort to gimmicks to get noticed, like sending out boxes of branded chocolates or wearing a crazy outfit at a demo event. My general sentiment is that if your product can’t stand up on its own, you have a bigger problem than getting noticed. Users that are only interested due to hype or incentives probably won’t stick around. Entrepreneurs should spend more time building their product and focusing on what customers really want, rather than attracting fleeting attention to something sub-par.

Perhaps we can chalk up this sort of behavior to youth. Founder James Billingham is 18 and claims to have started multiple businesses in his short life. I am sure his parents are thrilled at the prospect of a lime with a face on it being tattooed on his body for all eternity.

As for me, I may submit a lime to encourage Billingham not to get a tattoo of anthropomorphic citrus.

Ziplist, the startup that makes it easier to share and discover recipes, has launched its first set of features since being acquired for a reported $14 million by Condé Nast this April.

The company, which operates independently from Condé, claims to have grown its user base to over a million people. Ziplist lets you browse recipes and assemble shopping lists, which you can sync to an iPhone and Android phone. It has strong appeal for publishers and food bloggers too, who can download a free Ziplist plugin that helps format recipes for SEO purposes.

It has partnered up with food-focused blogs as well as lifestyle and entertainment brands — notably, Martha Stewart Living and the Food Network — to populate its database of over 500,000 free recipes.

The company hits on a new trend for tech startups to bridge online and offline worlds. With Ziplist, if you see something delicious at the grocery store (but would prefer to make it from scratch in your own kitchen), you can scan the item’s barcode and convert the ingredients into a handy shopping list.

Since the acquisition, the company has also worked to build out an algorithm. The new feature set boasts personalized recommendations so you won’t have to browse thousands of recipes to find one that appeals. Updates to the app include:

• Personal recommendations: A new “recipes you may like” feature provides recommendations based on recipes that you’ve saved.
• Shopping list suggestions: An “Items you may need” grocery list based on your most popular selections, like milk or eggs.
• Recipe of the day: The trending recipe  – save it to your recipe  box or add items to your shopping list if you decide to give it a whirl.

Geoff Allen, Ziplist’s founder and chief executive said these “intuitive grocery list suggestions and personalized meal recommendations” make it easier to help users shop. With this new direction, the company faces competition from startups like Foodily, a recipe networking site, and Gojee, which targets users with personalized recipe recommendations.

However, with Condé on board as a publishing partner, Ziplist may have the best shot at reaching a broader audience. Still, I’m not convinced that the core market (people that pour over recipes and painstakingly plan meals) are digital natives. Foodies, do you break out the old recipe book, or do you routinely turn to your smartphones for culinary tips?

Image via Shutterstock 

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

If you haven’t yet heard about the latest iPhone release, then you, my friend, can officially change your name to Patrick the Starfish, because you’ve been living under a rock.

Since Apple established the annual release cycle of its iconic smartphone, it seems like rumors about the next iPhone pop up only months after the latest launch. The mystique keeps us guessing, and the public sure is happy to keep the momentum alive. Over the last year we’ve heard of different iPhone lengths, the materials it will be made from, thinner casing, new battery, smaller charging dock, larger screens, new chips, and a lot more.

What do we know for sure? The latest operating system iOS 6 is in production and has some nifty new features for the next line of Apple mobile devices. These include a new maps application, Facebook integration, and Siri integration for the iPad (did we mention the iPad mini rumors?!). Some apps may be missing from iOS 6, however, such as the Google-owned property YouTube.

All signs also seem to point toward a launch date of September 12 with a ship date of September 21. It looks like both Verizon and AT&T blocked out employee vacation days during that time period, presumably so they can keep staff on hand for a big event like an iPhone launch. Sprint also cut its iPhone 4S pricing from $200 to $150 and offers free activation for purchases made online. Apple followed suit with its iPhone 4S pricing, but only if you ask for it at purchase.

Check out the infographic by MobilePhoneFinder below for all the rumors we’ve heard to date:

Produced by MobilePhoneFinder.com.au

Top image photoshop via Meghan Kelly

The founders of the social network once touted as the “anti-Facebook” have a new creation for you make that new silly LOLcat you found or crazy celebrity pic go viral.

Makr, a newly-launched image remixing website, is the creation of two of the original founders of Diaspora, Daniel Grippi and Maxwell Salzberg. When hopes were high, Diaspora raised $200,000 on Kickstarter and was recognized for its high-minded ideals of open web standards and user privacy. The four founders frequently lambasted sites like Twitter and Google in the press for giving away users’ personal data.

“For some strange reason, everyone just agreed with this whole privacy thing,” Daniel Grippi, one of Makr’s creators once pointed out in an interview with the New York Times.

Users can sign up to Makr via Facebook to upload photos, add captions, and publish content to friends’ news feeds. The site is targeted to those who like to “lolz” a lot on the Internets, you’re encouraged to compete on who can come up with the most hilarious image captions.

The founders say they’ve been using the site to have fun with friends, but they explain on the company blog that they hope it will spark a creative conservation on the web. The idea came a week after the founders learned the tragic news that their cofounder, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had committed suicide.

Salzberg and Grippi describe their new startup as an open-source ”sister project”, and say they will continue working on Diaspora. Makr is part of the current class at Y Combinator, the highly competitive startup accelerator that will host its highly anticipated demo day next week.

In his own words, this is how Salzberg describes the differences between the two sites:

Makr is us playing with a problem we discovered as we worked on D* (Diaspora) codebase the last two years; that people don’t really understand what their data means. We actually started working on the core of Makr inside of Diaspora, and when came to YCombinator they recommended that we pull it out and let Makr be it’s own thing. 

At our core, Diaspora is about giving people ownership of your data, in any way necessary. Something like Makr is important in giving people a tool to be creative and care about what they are doing online, and think its a vital step towards us being the change we want to see in the world.

Remember that time Napster founders Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning launched a chat app in a glitz- and glitch-studded press conference?

With $33.3 million in funding, Airtime seemed sure to make a big splash. And it did, with a launch event in June that included high-profile celebrities such as Snoop Dogg, Jimmy Fallon, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Unfortunately, Parker and Fanning’s latest venture has done almost nothing since then.

Actually, that’s not strictly true. The company put up a blog post on June 6 (its most recent), and in July it released a promo video featuring MC Hammer.

How’s that for return on investment?

Airtime was billed as a way to meet new people through serendipitous video chats. It’s sort of a better-designed, better-funded, and ostensibly less icky version of Chatroulette, the briefly-popular website for chatting with completely random strangers and occasionally viewing their private parts. (Historical side note: Fanning was helping out Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy in 2010, a year before founding Airtime.)

Airtime keyed in to the addictive zaniness of Chatroulette and positioned itself as a super-fast, browser-based video chat tool.

But as of yesterday, only 101,969 people were using Airtime’s Facebook app, according to the information that Facebook publishes (see screenshot). Since it’s only available through Facebook, that means this is the entire user population for Airtime. It also means investors have poured $330 into the startup for every user it’s managed to acquire in its first two months.

The user total reported by Facebook lines up nicely with numbers from app usage tracker AppData, which estimates that Airtime has 100,000 monthly active users now, down from 190,000 monthly active users on July 7. (AppData’s figures were reported by the New York Times and Inc.)

I asked Airtime to clarify the user numbers, and a company spokesman told me, “We’re not commenting on anything right now.”

Despite the bad news, or perhaps because of it, people on private-market trading tool SecondMarket seem quite interested in Airtime. It had the largest quarterly increase in total “watchers” on SecondMarket, which means rapid growth in people who are following the company, possibly with an eye towards buying shares on the private market.

To be fair, Airtime as a company is only about a year old, and it’s only been two months since the launch. The user experience, when it worked, was pretty good: VentureBeat’s Devindra Hardawar praised Airtime for helping him make “a legitimately good connection that I wouldn’t have made otherwise.” So it has potential as a tool for finding new friends, in addition to chatting with your existing friends.

And it was clear from the string of errors during the launch event that Airtime wasn’t a fully-cooked product. The team is probably busy fixing holes in the code, nailing down the security, and making sure that it’s a more reliable experience. You shouldn’t expect them to spend money on marketing or user acquisition until the product itself is ready.

But if it wasn’t ready, you might ask why the team even bothered to launch.

If there’s one silver lining to Airtime’s slow start, it’s that the company doesn’t have millions of disgruntled users, so if it needs to pivot, it can do so without worrying much about an existing customer base.

The company needs to get on the ball, and soon. And when it does, may we suggest spending your money on engineers instead of comedians?

Photo: Sean Parker’s Facebook profile photo, with D.A. Wallach and Daniel Ek.

Boutiika, a site that thousands of fashion-conscious San Franciscans and New Yorkers already use to find boutique stores in their neighborhood, is launching its public beta today.

Boutiika’s cofounders, Mohith Julapalli and Ruchika Kumar

On the eve of the launch, I caught up with the founding team, the unlikely combination of a Stanford-educated corporate lawyer (pictured, left) and a British-born fashionista (pictured, right).

Ruchika Kumar, Boutiika’s cofounder, told me that she was inspired to develop a directory of boutiques when friends visited from her home town in Northern England and asked about local gems. Boutique stores are dotted all over hipster-filled cities like New York and San Francisco, but for Ruchika and her friends, they proved difficult to track down.

“My friends weren’t talking about 5th Avenue,” she said. “They wanted to get under the skin of a city and feel like a local.” Boutiika, a directory of thousands of stores in its initial incarnation, rapidly developed to become a full-time project for the founders.

Kumar told me how thousands of these stores are starving for foot traffic and struggle to reach smartphone-wielding youth. She signed up one boutique in San Francisco’s Mission District en route to our interview by stopping in for an impromptu chat. The founders have recruited several hundred boutique stores in a similar manner. It hasn’t been a tough sell.

Cofounder and technical lead, Mohith Julapalli is a former lawyer and developer. He told me he saw the merits in the site after realizing that a number of boutique stores within a few blocks of him sold his favorite Ray-bans, but he was frequently shopping online rather than supporting those local businesses.

“People will shop in real stores if it’s efficient and convenient,” he said. Julapalli said he’s fascinated with the technical challenge of building a site to bridge online and offline worlds.

Users can search Boutiika by new arrivals or by browsing categories, including eco-friendly, locally made, bridal, vintage, and men’s (yes, men shop). The founders said the next step is to include a reviews feature or integrate with Yelp, so you’ll be able to browse feedback from fellow shoppers.

Boutiika’s competitors include Shoptiques and Farfetch, which offer directories of boutiques and function as fully fledged e-commerce sites. Kumar told me Boutiika has no immediate plans to incorporate a buying and selling platform on the site.

“We want to stand out from the crowd,” she said. “The real challenge we want to solve is to use our site to enhance the real-world shopping experience.”

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When users first arrive at SmartAsset, they are prompted with a series of questions about their income, deductions, assets, geography, expenses, and more. Based on the responses, the technology generates personalized advice on what is affordable and why, how a purchase will affect cash flow, tax consequences, and a prediction of the investment’s evolution over time.

Right now, the company focuses on home buying, but there are 23 other decisions in the pipeline that deal with issues such as retirement and education.

Founder Michael Carvin focused heavily on user experience while building the product, striving to make it as easy to understand and interactive as possible. He was inspired to bring a higher level of transparency to home buying after experiencing how confusing and frustrating the process could be and witnessing the collapse of the real estate market.

“I had been working in finance for a while and what I thought would be straightforward, particularly for someone with my background, was far more complicated,” he said. “Realtors told me one thing, brokers and banks another, and the information was wrong or biased. All the advice I found online was static or anecdotal — nothing was customized to a specific problem set.”

As every individual or family has a unique set of circumstances, building an engine that could generate personalized and accurate advice is the core of Carvin’s endeavor. He initially built a system to help himself make the best possible decision about a mortgage, and then shared the model with family and friends. The positive and gratified reaction gave him proof of purpose and he began searching for a technical cofounder.

Together with Philip Camilleri, Carvin spent seven months building out the back-end platform and researching the market. The two raised a seed round in the first week of May and have tested the product on thousands of users to make sure the visual language is clear and helpful.

Users input their personal information, but external factors such as federal, state, and local tax codes, transaction expenses, and dynamic property values are included as well.

“No-one is incentivized to tell you about things like transaction expenses until you are already committed to a purchase,” Carvin said. “This practice is called shrouding and allows vendors to have more sway. We give people all the information they need and tell them what is actionable.”

Since the financial crisis, consumers have expressed a desire for greater control over their finances. They trust major financial institutions less and feel more cautious when it comes to budgeting. Carvin describes home ownership as the tip of the iceberg and plans to launch dozens of verticals over the next couple years. Ultimately, his vision is for SmartAsset to become the first point of reference for anyone about to make important personal finance decisions.

SmartAsset currently has five employees and is based in New York, although Carvin is currently doing a three-month stint in Mountain View for the Y Combinator program.

Brooklyn-based entrepreneur, Mason Levey, has never had much of an affinity for punctuation and grammar, a shortcoming that has held him back in his academic and professional life.

With a shoestring budget and a desire to help others conquer those pesky semicolons and punctuation marks, Levey created a service called Comma. The startup, launching today, is the product of $12.99 in capital investment — the cost of a domain name purchased on GoDaddy.

Levey, the company’s only full-time employee, contracted a team of 50 virtual editors who are on standby to fix minor errors in all your personal correspondence, including emails, tweets, and blog posts.

How does it work? Just send a request to edit@getcomma.com, and your content will be polished and returned to you. For subscribers, it costs $59 per month for 30 edits, or you select a pay-as-you-go model. One edit will set you back $2-$5, depending on the length of the content.

“In today’s digital and social-media world, text-based content is king. People in the younger generations, such as myself, need to be able to write perfectly,” Levey told me, when asked about the need for the service.

The idea has merit, although Levey faces strong competition from established services like Grammarly, Odesk, and Elance. The four-hour typical turnaround time may also be a stumbling block to the site’s success, given that it claims to specialize in short form, fast-paced social media content, like Tweets.

More interesting is that entrepreneurs like Mason Levey are starting companies for less than the cost of a movie ticket. Anyone can bring an idea to fruition without the support of the full army of usual suspects: angel investors, advisors, engineers, and cofounders. We can try and fail, and try again — without losing funds or reputation in the process.

Levey said he later used a suite of tools that negated the need for an engineering and sales team: SquareSpace to build and design the site, Paypal to accept payments and subscriptions, Work Market to post and pay for editing tasks, and Desk.com to manage customer requests.

Comma brings bootstrapping to new heights and is an inspiring lesson for all you non-technical entrepreneurs.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Co-founders Mikaal Abdulla and Mathias Helleu created 8 Securities after working at E*Trade’s global division. They took their online investing knowledge with them from E*Trade and created a competing product that they feel is easier to use than other services out there.

8 Securities wants to make investing easier for people who don’t have a stock-trading background. Account holders are given a customizable space in the app (shown above) with widgets that display trading information, graphs, videos, and stock tickers. From your space, or “financial dashboard” as the company calls it, you can watch stock trading prices, research trading techniques, and purchase or sell stocks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, New York Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, and American Stock Exchange.

The dashboard is cutesy and simple, to not overwhelm the average person trying to get into investing. 8 Securities also offers an open API to encourage developers to create new widgets and integrate other services into the service.

Beyond investment information and trading, 8 Securities is trying to inject social media into its service. You can connect with friends and other investors through Facebook, Twitter, and Google Chat. The hope is that you will connect with other investors near you and get advice on investment decisions.

Because the company is based in Hong Kong, it has a special focus on Asian investors. According to the company, investing in Asian stock markets can be difficult for the average person because there are a lot of barriers to overcome, so its tried to make it as easy as possible for the average person to buy and sell stock.

8 Securities use of the number eight is also a nod to its focus on Asian investors. The number eight is related to prosperity and wealth in Chinese culture. Its uses the number eight in its name, charges an 0.18 percent fee for trading Hong Kong stocks and an $8.88 fee for U.S stocks, and has raised $8 million in funding.

8 Securities is hoping to be a simpler alternative to the more complex investing portals currently out there that cater to savvy investors. The company competes with other online investment services such as E*Trade, StockTwits, and Scottrade.

The company closed an $8 million dollar round from Velocity Capital B.V. and Full Global Investments in January 2012. 8 Securities debuted at TechCrunch Disrupt in October 2011.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s third-generation iPad drew the expected crowds for its big public debut on Friday. The hubbub started a minute after midnight, when select Best Buy and Walmart locations opened their doors to customers. There were lines at some third-party resellers, but the bigger throngs of diehards went straight to the mother ship, the Apple Store, which started selling iPads at 8am local time.

Protesters from Change.org also made their presence known at the launch lines, after reaching over 250,000 signatures in their online petition demanding ethical treatment for Apple workers. VentureBeat’s Sean Ludwig caught sight of some protesters holding a large sign (see gallery) at the flagship 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City. Protestor Charlene Carruthers told VentureBeat she wanted Apple to ‘think different’ about worker treatment. At the downtown San Francisco store, a dozen protesters handed out fliers. Protester William Winters said they wanted “an iPad or iPhone that doesn’t have blood in it.”

Some customers camped out the night before, and, as always, a few cheaters paid stand-ins to handle the tedious waiting part. At the front of the 5th Avenue store line was Greg Packer, a retired New Yorker who was in line since noon on Monday. Packer told us he was sponsored by the company Buy Back World to stand in line, and he wore a T-shirt for that company.

“I’ve been sleeping here in a chair since Monday,” Packer said. “I’m most excited about the new iPad’s MiFi abilities and better pictures.”

In San Francisco, rain dampened a bit of the excitement. Outside the Market Street Apple store, the line went half-way down the block to an empty parking lot where customers were served free coffee and water. Most of the people in line showed up that morning and only had to wait an hour to get an iPad. A block away at the Verizon store, there were iPads in stock but no customers. In order to buy an iPad from Verizon, you have to sign up for a Verizon iPad data plan. A few doors down, the Radio Shack had pre-sold all its stock the week before. The AT&T store had three people waiting outside, but didn’t open its doors until 9am.

The new iPad isn’t a radical departure from its predecessor, the iPad 2, but it is a solid upgrade that’s getting great reviews. The form factor is almost the same, but the new iPad is slightly thicker and heavier. The device’s big selling point is a stunning new Retina display, which packs in four-times as many pixels as the iPad 2 (for 3.1 million pixels total). The device has a dual-core A5X processor to keep up with the heavier graphics processing and an improved 5-megapixel back-facing camera. Customers who opt for the Wi-Fi + 4G version will enjoy zippier 4G LTE speeds on Verizon or AT&T.

Here are some photos of iPad lines from VentureBeat’s outposts in New York City and Nashville, Tennessee:

Photos and additional reporting by Sean Ludwig, Tom Cheredar

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

With the app, from South Korea-based VCNC, two people can connect with each another to share private photos and secret messages. The private “chat” function includes support for emoticons, so you can dress up your sweet nothings with as many smiley faces, winks, and hearts as your sweetie can stand. In the future, the network could support coupons or other offers, enabling marketers to reach the desireable demographic of young, happy couples in search of romantic experiences and adventures.

“We want to build a global couple platform,” VCNC’s chief executive Jaeuk Park told VentureBeat.

Between launched on March 7 at the Launch conference in San Francisco. Park and “value innovator” Edward lee visited VentureBeat’s offices to demonstrate the app, which runs on both iPhone and Android phones — and to show off a picture of Israeli president Shimon Peres checking out a demo at the conference (below).

Perhaps the nicest feature of Between is the ability to view previous communications and photos in an album view called the Memory Box (much like Facebook’s Timeline). With the passing months, this will gradually become an annotated photo album documenting your relationship. I can’t think of an easier way to create a romantic history of a relationship, and it’s considerably less narcissistic than gazing at your own personal Timeline. Of course, for some people, it might turn into a rather racy documentary — but that depends on how you and your S.O. use it and what kinds of pictures you like to send each other.

The app is free to download and use. The company plans to add for-fee services soon that will enable it to generate revenue, starting with printed photobooks. Later, the company may offer other premium services, such as high-resolution image backups, the ability to upload video, and more.

Additionally, Between is looking for partnerships with companies that want to offer special deals to the couple in its network. For instance, a travel company might want to offer a weekend getaway, or a restaurant might offer a 20 percent off coupon for a romantic dinner. Those offers will appear in the app in the future.

Between sounds like a strange sort of social networking service, but actually cuts straight to the heart of what we use network technology for: To connect with one another. Even Mark Zuckerberg recognized this, in his letter to shareholders published in Facebook’s recent document filing for its initial public offering: The biggest social network starts with something very small, the relationship between two people. Between merely takes that thought to an arena where it really matters, your love life.

“Our company vision is to enrich real and offline relationships through emotional communications services,” said Lee.

Plus, as anyone who has ever used social networks will know, it’s all to easy to @ message someone instead of sending a direct message, or accidentally upload a private photo to a public photo album. If you have a social network that’s restricted to just you and your loved one, there’s no risk of those sweet nothings slipping into the public sphere and causing great embarrassment.

Between launched an open beta on November 22, 2011. Since then, the company has updated the app no less than 11 times, and has gathered more than 350,000 users, 54 percent of which use the app weekly. The founders brag that they’ve spent nothing on marketing, and admit that the app has no network effects (since each pair of users is isolated from the rest of the network). The growth has been entirely word of mouth.

Most of the app’s users (78 percent) are in South Korea, but 9 percent are in Japan, 6 percent in China, and 4 percent in the U.S. The company is looking to open a U.S. office soon, in order to expand its presence here and forge locally-relevant marketing relationships.

Of course, I had to ask if it was possible to create Between “networks” with more than one partner. For instance, suppose you’re on a dating site, and still shopping around. Sure, the founders told me: All you need to do is register with a different e-mail address for each partner.

As for polyamorous people or polygamists, I think they’re out of luck. Between is strictly one-on-one for now.

Between is based in Seoul, South Korea. It has raised $1 million in seed funding from Softbank Korea, and employs 15 people. You can download the Between iOS app and the Between Android app for free.

Shimon Peres checks out a demo of Between at LAUNCH, in San Francisco, March 8, 2012. Plus: cupcakes! Photo courtesy VCNC.

Source: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

VCNC Value Innovator Edward Lee (left) and CEO Jaeuk Park (right), at VentureBeat's offices in San Francisco. Photo: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat.

Dollar Shave Club, another startup from L.A.-based incubator Science, begins with a simple premise: They send all the dandy shave-oholics out there who love the idea of a close shave but hate the idea of spending a horrendous amount each month, a basket of high-quality disposable razors.

We know, we know — it sounds silly. But investors didn’t think it was so silly.

In fact, Silicon Valley fat cats at Kleiner Perkins, Andreesen Horowitz, Shasta Ventures, Felicis Ventures*, Forerunner Ventures, and a handful of well-known individuals have contributed to a $1 million dollar first round of funding.

Science companies are, more often than not, based on the very simple but very real concept of finding gaps in a marketplace. The incubator first launched Eventup, a site that helps you find cool and unique event venues. Its next launches were Wittlebee, a mom-commerce subscription service, and Dog Vacay, an Airbnb for dogs whose “parents” need to get out of town.

None of these are incredibly high-tech ideas. But for Science co-founders Mike Jones (MySpace’s former CEO) and Peter Pham (who co-founded Color), tech is almost beside the point. They’re looking for opportunities to profit, and a great idea beautifully executed is, for them, like apples of gold in pictures of silver. It fits their idea of an L.A. startup’s hustle-heavy business model.

So, for Dollar Shave Club, Science is again investing in subscription commerce for an item a lot of people need to use (and usually need to throw away and buy over and over again). We’ve seen a ton of subscription commerce models, and this is one that makes a ton of sense.

Here’s co-founder Michael Dubin explaining why it makes sense to him in an Old Spice Guy-reminiscent commercial spot that’s way more entertaining than most startup demo videos (hint: our headline came from this video, in case you were beginning to speculate that we just enjoy being randomly offensive around here):

“The shave game has gotten totally out of control, and it’s time someone brought sanity back to the price and the process,” said Dubin in a statement released today.

DSC’s prices are rock-bottom low. As a non-hairy-legged-type lady, I can vouch for that; it’s not uncommon to drop between $8 and $20 per month on razors, depending on how fancy one is feeling.

DSC packages, on the other hand, start at just $1 per month plus $2 for shipping charges. That’ll get you “The Humble Twin,” a package that includes a standard two-blade razor. The “4x” package will get you a four-blade razor, and “The Executive” is the monster truck of razors: six blades and lubricating strips with aloe, Vitamin E, and lavender. The latter packages are $6 and $9 per month respectively. Each package includes a compatible handle (heads can be swapped out), and all the heads pivot.

You can cancel your subscription or upgrade or downgrade your preferred razor package at any time.

If we have one beef with Dollar Shave Club, it’s the site’s unrelenting manliness. C’mon Dubin et al.: Guys usually just shave their faces. Most ladies, on the other hand, have so much more real estate to cover. Should your checkin button really read “real men click” when ladies have a lot more shavin’ (and household shopping) going on?

Other than that, it’s a gorgeous design and a simple plan — and DSC helps us understand more and more the DNA of a Science company.

* Disclosure: Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures is an investor in VentureBeat.

“According to tradition, the dragon embodies passion, independence, and ambition. We think it’s a perfect analogy for what we’re trying to accomplish with Guild Wars 2,” writes ArenaNet Founder and President Mike O’Brien in a blog post. “We’re a company full of MMO and RPG fans, and we’ve set out to fundamentally rethink how you deliver an RPG experience online. So this year, the Year of the Dragon, let’s usher out old thinking – the tired old quest model, stiff repetitive combat, and monthly fees – and usher in the new.”

Guild Wars 2 has been in development since 2007. Set in the fantasy world of Tyria, the game’s storyline will focus on the return of the Elder Dragons, who have seized control of the world in the time since the original Guild Wars took place. Unlike its predecessor, Guild Wars 2 will feature a persistent game world and non-human playable races: the warmongering Charr, the shape-shifting Norns, the diminutive and magical Asura, and the plant-like Sylvari. It will also feature an increased level cap of 80 and a dynamic storytelling system that ArenaNet says will allow for different experiences each time you play through it.

What could possibly be Guild Wars 2′s biggest selling point, however, is its lack of subscription fees. Unlike other AAA massively multiplayer online games such as Star Wars: The Old Republic and World of Warcraft, you won’t have to fork over $15 a month once the initial game purchase is made. The original Guild Wars also featured no subscription fees and instead earned revenue through multiple expansion packs. This helped set it apart from its competition and made it a critical and commercial success at a time when the free-to-play business model was relatively new to the Western MMO market.

O’Brien says ArenaNet recently finished its first closed beta test of Guild Wars 2 and is now ready to hold progressively larger events. It will be inviting select members of the press to participate in the beta in February before expanding testing in March and April. Anyone interested in participating can find more information soon on either the official Guild Wars 2 website, the Facebook page, or the ArenaNet blog.

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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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Andrew House, new head of Sony Computer Entertainment, told reporters on Thursday that, if anything, PS3 sales were slightly ahead of target for the financial year to date. House declined to comment on Playstation Vita sales estimates, with the new handheld device due to launch in Japan on Saturday.

SCE made its first profit since the Playstation 3’s 2006 launch during the 2010-2011 financial year, as it managed to sell 14.3 million PS3 units, while squeezing production costs of the console. Worldwide hardware sales of the PS3 console stood at 55.5M as of September 2011, compared to 57.6M worldwide sales of the rival Xbox 360 console. The PS3 has consistently performed better than its closest rival in Asia and Europe, making these regions highly valuable markets for Sony, but it still plays second fiddle to the 360 in the US.

While the PS3 is finally helping SCE to turn a profit, the impending launch of the Playstation Vita will be another big test for the company. Some industry voices doubt the sustainability of dedicated handheld consoles, given the increasingly robust challenge of smartphones and tablets as viable options for gaming on the move.

House still believes that the Vita will find a market though, through its “truly unique gaming experience” that he hopes will attract both hardcore and casual gamers. Vita sales in Japan are expected to be brisk, but Sony may face a tougher challenge when its launches the device in the US and Europe in February 2012.

The Wi-Fi only version of the Playstation Vita will cost $249 when it hits the US, which was the same price attached to the Nintendo 3DS when it launched this March. The Nintendo handheld got off to a slow start and was slashed in price to $169 within five months to help boost sales. Whether the Vita will be seen as a desirable gaming option by consumers, despite its relatively high price tag, remains to be seen.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Months after it was officially announced at Google I/O this spring, Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest iteration of the Android operating system, is having its launch event tonight in Hong Kong.

Yes, as the sun sets on Mountain View, California, and the Google campus’s brand-new Ice Cream Sandwich statue, Google executives are gearing up for a press event at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (pictured above; giant Android added for dramatic effect).

And not only Google executives are involved this time. Twitter co-creator and current employee Jack Dorsey himself was en route to the convention center one hour ago, tweeting a photo of Stonecutter’s Bridge, which lies between the airport and the Android event (thanks, Google Maps!).

Unless idle curiosity has brought the Twitter co-founder to the other side of the world, five will get you ten we’ll be seeing an interesting Android-Twitter integration at this announcement. (Update: While no Twitter-specific features were announced, Android 4.0 has a new People app that features heavy social integration, including data from Twitter. So we were about 75 percent correct this time.)

But there’s already a lot we do know about Ice Cream Sandwich. In fact, those whose memories go back six months or longer may recall that most of the important stuff, especially where developers are concerned, was laid out in great detail back in May. For example, we know to expect some cool new features for facial recognition and voice recognition with Ice Cream Sandwich.

Stay tuned for news from the launch event, which we’ll be covering in detail tonight, and in the meantime, here’s a primer on Ice Cream Sandwich for your mental refreshment.

The delicious core of the Ice Cream Sandwich OS

If there’s one specter that’s hounded Android practically since its public launch, it’s the same specter that Ice Cream Sandwich is out to ghostbust: fragmentation.

The universe of OS versions, carriers and devices has been, for some (especially consumers), a refreshing detour from the monolithic one-carrier-one-device-one-app-store approach that Apple, Google’s main mobile rival, held for years.

However, for mobile developers, the fact of having to build for a market of many operating system versions was intimidating and sometimes painful. As a result, the Android Market is full of apps that might work on just one or two models and one or two OS versions. And let’s not even get started on Android tablet apps.

Ice Cream Sandwich is the OS that’s supposed to put a damper on all that fragmentation talk. The OS will support both tablets and smartphones, so the 2.X OS for phones and the 3.X OS for tablets will give way to the 4.X OS for all Android devices.

Back in May at I/O, we were told by Google that developers building on Ice Cream Sandwich would be creating one app to function across all platforms, including smartphones, TVs, e-readers, tablets and any other devices running on Android. Apps will scale for all the form factors, and the OS will be (unlike Honeycomb), completely open-sourced.

Now, just for fun, here’s some footage of the huge Ice Cream Sandwich statue being delivered to the Google campus. Come back around 7:15 Pacific Time for more updates from Google’s live launch event.

Top film distributors in Europe stated that Netflix recently closed deals to offer its service in both Spain and the United Kingdom, according to the report.

Netflix was unavailable for comment about entering into Europe. However, this wouldn’t be the first time it set up shop in another country. The company entered Canada in September 2010 and recently announced plans to enter 43 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean by the end of 2011.

None of the confirmed international markets will offer Netflix’s DVD/Blu-ray disc rental-by-mail subscriptions, which are available only to U.S. customers. While news of the company entering Europe hasn’t been confirmed, it’s likely the company will follow suit and only offer streaming plans.

Netflix probably chose Spain and the U.K. as its first two European markets to test the waters before launching its streaming service across the entire continent.

Spain is known for being a hotbed for digital piracy, which makes it a good candidate for Netflix. The company has often been referred to as an attractive alternative to illegal streaming and downloading because of its relatively low subscription cost and enormous library of content. Also, unlike illegal streaming websites, the company can offer a quality video stream with few service interruptions.

The UK is quite the opposite. The British government provides a free streaming video of public programming through the BBC iPlayer — meaning streaming video is popular among consumers. The iPlayer isn’t a true competitor to Netflix’s Watch Instantly streaming service, but there is no shortage of competition. If Netflix does enter the U.K. market, it will be going up against Amazon-owned LoveFilm and News Corp.’s BSkyB streaming service.

That said, Netflix’s current library of content (as well as partnerships between media companies who own the rights to that content) will translate much easier to a U.K. audience than it will in Spain. It’s unknown if the  licensing from the company’s U.S. and Canadian content library will carry over.

The news of Netflix entering Europe makes sense since the company wants to derive the majority of its revenue through streaming subscriptions. It’s also trying to transition the U.S. market away from the DVD-by-mail subscriptions, since shipping costs eat into profits.

Netflix is understandably slower to enter Europe because operating costs in those countries are likely to be far larger than in the America region. The move also jibes with past comments made by Netflix CEO Reed Hastings.

“We think the international opportunities for us to build profitable businesses may be quite large, but the rapid expansion will lower global operating margins as long as there are additional markets in which we can wisely invest,” Hastings wrote in response to the company’s long-term future growth back in December 2010.

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A Spotify spokesperson declined to give any details about the U.S. launch when asked about the report and said the company doesn’t comment on speculation.

Spotify provides cloud-based steaming music in Europe but announced last week that it would hit the U.S. “soon.” The service currently offers three models to European customers: a free version supported by ads that allows 10 free hours of streaming per month, an unlimited subscription for €4.99 (about $7.22) a month, and a premium service, which lets customers access music on their mobile devices and costs €9.99 (about $14.46) a month. The biggest established competitors to Spotify in the U.S. are MOG, Rdio, Rhapsody, and Napster.

Sometimes an invite-only process can help fuel demand for a new service. Google+, the new social networking service from Google, currently requires people who already have the service to pass along invites to friends, family, and other connections. Google+ demand, in turn, has skyrocketed and it even had so many people jumping on to the service that it briefly “ran out of disk space.”

Are you looking forward to Spotify’s launch?

The last American space shuttle, STS-135, lifted off this morning, bringing to a close a remarkable era in U.S. technological dominance.

I stayed home and watched the launch on TV, just as I watched the very first shuttle launch on TV in 1981. Both events were deeply tied into the computer era.

In 1981, I watched the launch of Columbia on the only television in the house, which normally was only used as a monitor for my Apple II+. As a no-television house, I had to get special permission to use the monitor as a TV, tuning in to a grainy broadcast signal coming over the rabbit ears.

In 2011, I watched the launch (with my family) on an HDTV which we connected to a laptop, using the computer to display the high-definition video signal from NASA TV. In other words, we repurposed the family TV as a monitor.

Both times, the hair on the back of my neck stood up as I watched, transfixed. As BoingBoing’s Xeni Jardin commented, “This is the closest, emotionally speaking, that science gets to church.” I agree.

The space shuttle-PC connection is not just a personal thing. The arc of the shuttle program parallels the history of personal computing, and American technology, in other ways.

In 1981, the personal computer revolution was just getting underway. Tandy and Apple had successful PCs, but the most successful one of all the IBM PC, was only months away from its debut. Graphical user interfaces and the internet were known in the halls of research labs and computer science departments, but few had direct experience with either. Onboard the first shuttle was one of the first computerized flight control systems used in a spacecraft. And a few years later, one of the earliest laptops, a GRiD Compass, flew in a shuttle orbiter.

The link between the space program and the commercial technology industry goes back even farther. In the 1960s, the space program drove forward spending on electronics, since the rockets and electronics that controlled them often needed custom creations from the early semiconductor companies. That custom work helped the chip makers refine their designs and eventually ship them for commercial purposes. Michio Kaku pointed out in his book Physics of the Future that an ordinary musical birthday card has a chip in it these days that has more computing power than NASA used to put a man on the moon.

In 2011, the personal computing revolution is over: Computers are everywhere now, and no one even calls them PCs much anymore. Computing is nearly as ubiquitous as electricity: It’s in our pockets, in our cars, on our wrists and may soon even be in our clothes, shoes and cereal boxes, if near field communications and RFID tags become more ubiquitous. The new technology revolutions are focused on mobile technology, mobile payments and social media, not to mention biotech and cleantech. Fittingly, there was even an iPhone aboard the final shuttle mission.

I can’t help but feeling that this closes a door on an era of American inventiveness overall. With the end of the shuttle program, the only way for humans to get into space — for now — is aboard an aging fleet of Russian rockets. Space startups like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are pushing towards commercial spaceflight, but so far the private sector has nothing even close to the scale, power and range of the shuttle program.

And in the broader, non-aerospace field, American ingenuity no longer dominates the tech world the way it did in the 1980s. Silicon Valley has been joined by Silicon Alley, Israel, Russia, India, Japan and countless other hubs of invention and innovation. Taiwan, which was known for making cheap plastic goods in the 1980s, has turned into the dominant manufacturer of computers and technology equipment (with much of the actual manufacturing outsourced to China), and does a good deal of design and invention work as well.

The world is more interconnected, more technologically enabled than ever before, and for the most part that’s been an overwhelmingly positive development.

I just hope that Americans can hold on to that spirit of technical ambition, and continue pushing technology forward in new and ridiculously ambitious ways. I’d hate for the shuttle to be the final chapter in that journey.

Photo: STS-135 lifting off on NASA TV, as seen in the living room of my house. Photo credit: Dylan Tweney.

Got your own photos of the shuttle launch? Post them in the comments or tweet links to @venturebeat, and we’ll add them to this post!

Photo by @enaplito

Screen grab from NASA TV by Ramakanth Dorai

The feature extends the reach of original content, keeping an eye on the integrity and proper attribution of online assets.

As such, the startup removes the need to call for permission every time you want to republish an article. When the Repost.Us button is clicked, it generates an embed code for the article that can be used on all common web publishing platforms.

When a reader loads an embedded article, their browser requests the content from Repost.Us, and the site delivers a current copy of the article reformatted transparently to fit the republisher’s site.

By loading the article via an embed code, instead of copying and pasting, Repost.Us guarantees the content integrity, automatically generates updates and corrections, and ensures that search engines continue to see the original publisher’s site as the primary content source.

In doing so, it also opens up a significant and currently untapped market for content. The potential money at stake is huge — the company says an increase in page views of just 10 percent would conservatively generate an additional $300 million annually.

The Fair Syndication Consortium reports that over 75 percent of sites that copy content from other sites would be willing to pay for that content. The same study found that more than 75,000 websites have used unlicensed content at least once, with around an average usage of three times per month.

The company has plenty of competitors, including Copyright Clearance Center, the Associated Press, Vertical Acuity, Publish 2, and Amplify, all of which are looking to cash in on that same market.

But Repost.Us says it offers something those other companies don’t, saying that while wire services and rights clearance centers are available, they ignore most small- to medium-sized publishers, which represent a big chunk of the market.

The new platform, from Free Range Content, is the brainchild of CEO John Pettitt, founder of Beyond.com and Cybersource.com.

“The Internet is about democratization of information. Unfortunately, democratization has made it difficult for content creators to control and monetize their work,” said Pettitt. “Repost.Us is for everyone who creates original online content — from individual bloggers to major media companies, and it provides an actionable business model for producing quality work.”

The startup said Free Range Content is currently raising a first round of external investment.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The much-hyped Verizon iPhone is finally available for purchase today, and if you haven’t preordered or picked one up yet, there’s still a very good chance you’ll be able to snag one.

Reports of small lines and slow turnout at Verizon and iPhone stores across the country make it clear that this iPhone launch is nothing like the madhouse launches at AT&T.

The news doesn’t mean that the Verizon iPhone is a failure — especially if you consider that the carrier sold out its online preorders to existing Verizon customers in less than a day. Instead, media reports and disgruntled iPhone users on AT&T led to the Verizon iPhone becoming a savior device that could never live up to its insurmountable hype. (If you want to see an extreme example of what I’m talking about, just check out the Daily Show’s hilarious clip on the Verizon iPhone announcement.)

Verizon will still end up selling millions of iPhones throughout the year, even if it doesn’t sell out of its stock today. And come the launch of the iPhone 5, I suspect Verizon stores will see similarly insane lines as AT&T has been dealing with for years.

There are many reasons we could point to for the slow launch turnout: Verizon managed to satisfy most of its customers who absolutely wanted an iPhone with preorders last week, and AT&T customers are likely holding out until their contracts end to avoid hefty early termination fees. Also, pretty much everybody is aware that Apple will unveil the iPhone 5 in a few months, which will launch on both AT&T and Verizon.

I called several Verizon stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn today, and they all reported that they still had iPhones in stock. When I asked if I’d be able to pick up an iPhone later this afternoon, only one store out of 5 said that they were close to running out of stock. None of the stores had big lines this morning; instead, customers were mostly trickling in throughout the day.

In a small survey of 40 users, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster found that 8 percent of users waiting in line for a Verizon iPhone were coming from AT&T, while 63 percent were already on Verizon. More users came from Sprint (18 percent) than from T-Mobile (13 percent). Such a small survey likely won’t give us any insight into national trends, but I do think that we’ll continue to see more Verizon users jumping to the iPhone than others. Munster believes that Verizon will sell 1 million iPhones in its first three days of availability.

Image via Wilson Tang

Resu.me uses machine learning to match candidates and jobs the way a  human recruiter might: By Googling a person to try to find out what they read, what they write about, what they seem to be passionate about — as well as who they interact with, what they say, their open source contributions, who’s in their network and so on.

The company said it will appeal to younger users by keeping its key focus on providing all the tools and incentives required to learn daily, build a portfolio and showcase better.

That will in turn help them connect with a meaningful network and ultimately land a job.

Resu.me uses semantic web technology to analyze and understand the relevance behind what users post online on their resumes, as well as from all other online activities such as code they share, blog posts they like, articles they read, what and where they comment and so on.

The site also learns from the feedback users provide in the form of “likes,” comments and ratings on other users, companies, job postings, or other social media.

The platform is directly linked to the web-based applicant tracking system of companies. As such, Karthik said users won’t have to mess around anymore with filling out redundant forms and waiting. It’s a “1-click application”, always fresh resume with a transparent scheme to track the application’s progress.

On the flip side, companies can also provide feedback and ratings on resumes and the matching algorithm adapts to it. It also offers an RSS feed reader, which tracks all that a user reads and shares online, and a tool to showcase user artifacts using Cooliris 3D wall.

The site then offers all the tools necessary to manage all these activities from one single place.

The two-year-old company currently has four employees and is entirely self-funded.

It aims to take on four separate categories of competitors: Professional networks like LinkedIn and Xing; job search engines such as Indeed and SimplyHired; job boards like Monster, Careerbuilder or Dice; and applicant tracking systems Taleo and Bernard Hodes.

But in such a crowded space, how will resu.me compete with such well-established groups and tempt the famously fickle Gen Z users into giving it a try?

Manimaran said primarily because it is a simple, one-stop platform for managing your resume in real-time and with a host of tools that make it more flexible and intuitive than its competitors.

“We came across practical difficulties hiring talent for our groups and also finding a job for ourselves,” Manimaran told me. “We wanted a tool that could help us manage our online professional profile in a much more elegant fashion that would help companies find us faster.”