|  |  |  | | | | | TechCrunch | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Sawbuck Reality, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it. Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location and orientation as well as MLS and public records data, HomeSnap can tell you everything about a home, including how many square feet it has, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, estimated price and more. And it can do so even if the house is not on the market. More importantly, the app is actually fun to use. The company is also announcing the close of an additional $2 million angel round today, which adds to its previous $2 million round from 2009. Sawbuck CEO Guy Wolcott tells us that the company currently has MLS data for 13 of the largest metro areas across the U.S. (think NY, DC, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc.) but plans to aggressively add more markets throughout the year. By year-end, it expects to be in 30 top markets across the U.S. However, if you’re not in one of the regions where Sawbuck has MLS information on homes, the app can pull in data from public records. Currently, it has over 90 million homes in its database. But what makes the app notable is the user interface. This is not another boring real estate app. It’s actually kind of fun. “So many of the real estate apps are boring and utilitarian, explains Wolcott. “We looked at things like Shazam – things where you want to show your friends, and they say ‘how does that work?’ – and we tried to make something like that for homes.” Under the hood, the app uses the iPhone’s sensors, like the accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS, to determine where you are and what you’re looking at. Then the company’s patent-pending algorithms interpret that data to make a best guess as to which exact home you’re probably seeing. If the app can’t figure it out for some reason, it has a backup system that lets you pick the house in question with a tap. “The real idea,” says Wolcott, “is to be kind of magical. You just take a picture, and it knows what you’re looking at.”
The app also keeps track of the history of your snaps, to help you remember the houses you’ve seen. This feature serves a two-fold purpose: one, to help consumers recollect their searches, and 2) to help build up a crowd-sourced database containing pictures of homes. In the future, the app could begin using image recognition, too, thanks to these crowd-sourced photos to better recognize the homes in question. The app is clearly a competitor to industry leaders like Zillow (and its mobile app), but Wolcott says the HomeSnap app is meant to be used differently. Zillow is primarily about researching a specific home or neighborhood’s prices. HomeSnap, meanwhile, is meant more for serendipitous discovery and satisfying your immediate curiosity about a house you see. He also notes that HomeSnap’s access to real-time MLS data in particular markets is a key advantage. The new app is available for download here from the iTunes App Store.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Sawbuck Realty, an online real estate broker, has just launched a new app called HomeSnap which lets you discover information about any home nationwide just by taking a photo of it. Using a combination of mobile phone sensors to determine location and orientation as well as MLS and public records data, HomeSnap can tell you everything about a home, including how many square feet it has, number of bedrooms/bathrooms, estimated price and more. And it can do so even if the house is not on the market. More importantly, the app is actually fun to use. The company is also announcing the close of an additional $2 million angel round today, which adds to its previous $2 million round from 2009. Sawbuck CEO Guy Wolcott tells us that the company currently has MLS data for 13 of the largest metro areas across the U.S. (think NY, DC, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc.) but plans to aggressively add more markets throughout the year. By year-end, it expects to be in 30 top markets across the U.S. However, if you’re not in one of the regions where Sawbuck has MLS information on homes, the app can pull in data from public records. Currently, it has over 90 million homes in its database. But what makes the app notable is the user interface. This is not another boring real estate app. It’s actually kind of fun. “So many of the real estate apps are boring and utilitarian, explains Wolcott. “We looked at things like Shazam – things where you want to show your friends, and they say ‘how does that work?’ – and we tried to make something like that for homes.” Under the hood, the app uses the iPhone’s sensors, like the accelerometer, gyroscope, and GPS, to determine where you are and what you’re looking at. Then the company’s patent-pending algorithms interpret that data to make a best guess as to which exact home you’re probably seeing. If the app can’t figure it out for some reason, it has a backup system that lets you pick the house in question with a tap. “The real idea,” says Wolcott, “is to be kind of magical. You just take a picture, and it knows what you’re looking at.”
The app also keeps track of the history of your snaps, to help you remember the houses you’ve seen. This feature serves a two-fold purpose: one, to help consumers recollect their searches, and 2) to help build up a crowd-sourced database containing pictures of homes. In the future, the app could begin using image recognition, too, thanks to these crowd-sourced photos to better recognize the homes in question. The app is clearly a competitor to industry leaders like Zillow (and its mobile app), but Wolcott says the HomeSnap app is meant to be used differently. Zillow is primarily about researching a specific home or neighborhood’s prices. HomeSnap, meanwhile, is meant more for serendipitous discovery and satisfying your immediate curiosity about a house you see. He also notes that HomeSnap’s access to real-time MLS data in particular markets is a key advantage. The new app is available for download here from the iTunes App Store.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  If you were hoping that the blitz of iPad news would end with the device's long-awaited announcement yesterday, well, sorry. Even with Cupertino's latest tablet waiting in the wings for a March 16 release, we're all still speculating when it comes to some of the device's particulars, and now the new iPad's allotment of RAM is getting its share of the spotlight. According to The Verge, the new iPad will indeed feature double the RAM of its immediate predecessor, with a full gigabyte of memory ensconced within its aluminum frame. But why doesn’t Apple ever talk about it? That Apple would make the jump to 1GB for their newest post-PC poster child shouldn't come as a surprise. The original model launched with 256MB of RAM onboard, which made for some iffy use experiences after a few software updates. The iPad 2 debuted with 512MB under the hood, a substantial improvement to be sure, but it’s only a matter of time between new features and apps have iPad 2 users feeling the same sort of squeeze. Now I can’t speak for everyone, but my childhood in computing was spent scrounging together allowances for new RAM so my off-brand PC wouldn’t chug quite so hard. As The Verge rightly points out, Apple’s iPad line to date has never blown the tech community away with the amount of RAM they’ve included. Apple's silence on that front is to be expected — while they're always eager to talk up their processors and their cameras, Apple has historically been content to leave the some of the technical specifics shrouded in mystery. And why shouldn't they? By throwing around adjectives like "magical," "incredible," and "amazing" at every possible opportunity, consumers are left to focus more on what they can do with an iPad rather than the little bits of silicon that make those experience happen. Sex sells, and RAM is anything but sexy. Still, the fact of the matter is that RAM matters, even if Apple would prefer you didn't know about it. As apps get more complex and more impressive (as they should, considering how picky we are about them), the demands they exact on a device's hardware grow ever greater. More robust system resources means more opportunities for developers to flex their respective muscles, and the last thing Apple needs to do is displease the people who generate revenue for them. More RAM is a win for nearly everyone involved, and while some of us may never see as much as we like in our iDevices, that shouldn’t stop Apple from at least talking about it.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Over the last year or so, we’ve seen an auspicious rise in the number of startups looking to tackle those seemingly intractable problems in both K-12 and higher education. One of these startups, the New York City-based ShowMe, found some early financial validation from an impressive set of investors, raising $800K last August from the likes of Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, betaworks, Learn Capital, and angel investor Naval Ravikant. Those familiar with Khan Academy — the startup that offers an impressive web library of videos on everything from arithmetic and physics to finance and history to let students learn at their own pace — will likely find it easy to understand ShowMe’s appeal. The startup is taking a bottom-up approach to the Khan Academy model. While Sal Khan (the founder and head teacher of Khan Academy) has proven to be an incredibly skilled instructor, procuring the equipment, software, and resources that have allowed Khan Academy to thrive is difficult to say the least. Creating that depth of quality content and building a sizable user base requires a lot of time and significant financial backing. Thus, ShowMe wants to bring the classroom-flipping power of Khan Academy’s platform to the millions of teachers out there looking to share their knowledge and experience with students of every age. “We want to create thousands of Sal Khans,” ShowMe CEO San Kim tells us, taking Khan’s approach and turning into a community and P2P-based model. To do so, the startup built an iPad app (with a corresponding web platform) that transforms the device into an interactive video whiteboard, allowing teachers of all stripes to record lessons while speaking into the iPad’s microphone and drawing on the accompanying touchscreen whiteboard. Once those instructors have created a video, they can then be shared on the app or on the Web, where other users can peruse through videos, voting them up, and sharing their own favorites. Since the app debuted on the App Store last summer, it has racked up over 400K downloads (which is impressive for an educational app), and Kim tells us that ShowMe teachers have now created over 1.5 million lessons. ShowMe’s technology is also now powering Princeton Review's SAT prep app. Behind this early traction, the startup is today officially launching version 2.0 of its iPad app and Web platform, which turns ShowMe into a central hub where all lessons can be posted and searched for, bringing lessons posted from a teacher’s iPad directly into the web platform for easy searching and sharing. ShowMe initially started off as a standalone iPad app, which Kim says was a big hit among K-12 teachers. What surprised the team was how eagerly this growing community of teachers began sharing the lessons they created on Twitter, blogs, and beyond. And, again, while grade school teachers were the primary target for ShowMe’s whiteboard, with its new online content hub, the startup wants to make it clear that the technology is meant to be used by anyone who has knowledge or lessons to share — whether they be writers, musicians, artists, chefs, etc. ShowMe’s lessons are now aggregated on the Web in one place, as users can browse through featured videos, or jump to “All Topics,” to peruse by category. As to who is in charge of these 1.5 million lessons, Kim says that the community itself is the gatekeeper of the content, which crowdsources and filters the best content and groups it into categories. As to what’s up next? The CEO says that the next step for the company involves enhancing these filtering mechanisms so that it can curate and organize its content in a way that’s personalized to individual learners. Everyone has a different learning style, and with thousands of teachers producing content on ShowMe, the key going forward will be finding the best way to match those various styles with right teachers. The beauty of ShowMe is that it takes the whiteboard out of the classroom and puts it in students laps, so that they can continue to learn and practice lessons when they’re not in school, in a much more engaging and multidimensional world, thanks to the iPad. Opening up its library of lessons to the general public, and enabling easy search and discovery, is an important step for ShowMe in its progress toward bringing high quality education to the masses. For more, check out the startup at home here, or watch the video below:
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  For those unfamiliar, Trippy is a social travel web and mobile app that operates on the assumption that travel recommendations are best served on a silver, friendsourced platter. That is to say, Trippy’s platform, which ties your favorite social networks into its platform to allow friends to comment on your itinerary, feedback, and so on, advances the notion that travel recommendations and destination discovery is most effective when emanating from people who you implicitly trust. Trippy debuted in private beta at TechCrunch Disrupt NYC in September, launched open beta in October, and raised $1.75 million in November from VCs like Sequoia Capital, SV Angel, True Ventures, and angel investors including Rob Solomon, Tim Ferriss, Brian Lee, Gil Ebaz, Randi Zuckerberg, Jasom Mraz, and Rachel Zoe. Building on its first round of funding from celebrity and well-known angel investors, Trippy is today officially announcing its advisory board members, which include some familiar names (investors), with a few more travel and tech experts to boot. The slate of advisors includes investors Jason Mraz, Rachel Zoe, Tim Ferriss, Randi Zuckerberg, as well as names like Anthony Bourdain, Kevin Rose, Andrew Zimmern, Gary Vaynerchuk, Chase Jarvis, Soleil Moon Frye, Soraya Darabi, Johnny Jet, Veronica Belmont, Kim Mance, Brett Snyder, and more. Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose, for example will be advising the company in day to day operations, but the real goal of bringing this cast of characters and influencers on board is that they are all globetrotters, so, in their role as advisors, they will use Trippy to share their travel experiences to inspire and offer recommendations to other travelers. Trippy is also announcing the initial roll out of what it’s calling “Project Delightful,” the next big iteration of the app, which offers a new visual-browsing experience that aims to bring serendipitous discovery of travel ideas through photos. This new phase will clearly bring the startup into even more direct competition with fellow social,photo-focused travel site, Gogobot. The new project is live today with its first phase, and will continue to develop over the next few weeks, but as it stands, Trippy users can now view pages of travel photos, click on the places they want to go and have been to, and add travel ideas to visual “inspiration boards.” Custom boards can be created for any category, says Trippy Founder and CEO J.R. Johnson (who previously launched VirtualTourist, which was acquired by Expedia in 2008), from “Weekend Getaways” to “Top Places To Eat In San Francisco,” “Where To Travel To Get Cultured,” and so on. Each travel photo is geo-tagged to help users remember the locations of the places they’ve visited, and the collection of photos is plotted on an interactive map for easy viewing. Then, when users are ready to move from planning into action, Trippy taps into their social networks to show them which of their friends have already visited the locations they’ve chosen. Johnson says that the idea is to take travelers “from dreaming to doing” and create a personally-relevant, full-circle planning experience. For more, check out Trippy at home here.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Out of the slew of new location apps vying for users at SXSW this weekend, Highlight and Glancee are looking like the standouts. They both have subtle ways of connecting you to friends and new people via your phone, without invading your privacy too much. But there’s a royal rumble of competitors. And another one of them, Kismet, has just entered the ring with a particularly forward approach to privacy that could help it win the attention melee. It includes the background location stuff like the others, but lets you check in if you really want to declare the place you’re at. ”Walking around San Francisco, I’m unlikely to check in,” chief executive Kevin Stephens explains. “But at SXSW where so many events are right on top of each other, it’s more valuable to show which event or location I actually am in order to meet new people. It’s impractical to leave a bar to go to one next door if the line is 30 minutes long.” It also lets you do things like set up-one on-one “meetings” and ad hoc group “events” that you create and invite people to within the app. Both could be good for the conference. Here’s the privacy twist. The core social graph is built around Facebook like Highlight, Glancee and many of the others. You have to enable Facebook permissions when you first log in, and the app is built around the idea that you’re trying to connect with people you have things in common with. But unlike most of the competitors, you’ll see the exact places where people are at even if you have no friends in common with them. And by exact I mean sometimes right down to the residential addresses. But! You’ll only get exact addresses for those other users who actively check in themselves, not people who are just using the background location feature. And, the app has a unique tactic for privacy protection: it watches residential places you go to often and automatically obscures them after a few visits. The app builds location frequency into the app in other ways. “You’ll actually see a counter of how many times you’ve both been there for places both of you have visited frequently (e.g., we both went to AT&T park 5 times lately),” Stephens tells me. “This is to show what you have in common with someone. Where you spend your time says more about you than your Facebook likes.” You can also see other detailed stats about other users, including the number of meeting invitations they’ve sent and the number of chats they’ve had. Stephens intends for this feature to promote good behavior. “If someone chatted up 80 people and proposed to meet 50 of them in the past day or two,” he says, “that would send off a ‘creeper’ vibe to most women. That’s basically being the guy in the room that walks around and hits on every woman in sight. This feature is specifically to create some social pressure so people avoid anti-social behavior.” For people who have friends in common, the interface lets you scroll through to see the degrees of separation on Facebook, up to three and four degrees of separation away. One of my favorite features, and one that’s not available on most competitors’ apps, is a way to see a map of everyone else who has actively checked in. It gives you a new sense for all the activity happening right around you. Kismet is launching a little late for the buzz building around SXSW this year, but it has a strong team, an interesting product, and some room to experiment. After an incubation period in AngelPad, the company (incorporated as Meh Labs) has raised $1 million in a seed round led by Triple Point Ventures, with participation from New Enterprise Associates and angel investors including Shiva Rajaraman, Steph Hannon and Roham Gharegozlou. The app is currently only for iPhone but look for it to expand to the other platform at some point.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Last week at Mobile World Congress, Nokia unveiled wave of new handsets from its fightback strategy that cuts through both the lower end of the market as well as the high. Some of it — like the new 41-megapixel camera on the Symbian PureView — is inspiring for what else might lie ahead. But as for today, a more sombre picture, as the Finnish handset maker’s decline was laid bare in its 20-F annual report filing with the SEC. Between the many risks detailed at the beginning of the document and the declines in almost every key metric, Nokia has a tall task ahead to turn things around. In 2011, Nokia had an operating loss of $1.4 billion, compared to an operating profit of $2 billion in 2010. Sales were down to $50 million from $56 million. And earnings per share also went into negative territory. In devices specifically, net sales declined in almost every region except for the Middle East and Latin America, where they only grew one percent and nine percent, respectively. Important markets like Europe, Nokia’s largest, declined by 27 percent to a $7 billion business. And while China and Asia-Pacific once looked like they might become Nokia’s biggest markets declined by 18 percent and 19 percent; these were both each worth about $5 billion in handset sales to the company. In smartphones specifically — a key area where Nokia has now pinned its star to Microsoft — the company reported 77.3 million units sold for the year, down 25 percent from 2010. The average selling price for those devices was down, too, to $185 (less than the starting price for an iPhone out of contract). The risks, meanwhile, read like a catalog of the many articles written here and elsewhere about the challenges that Nokia faces. They cover pretty huge issues like consumer interest in the Windows Phone platform — a platform that has actually declined in market share in the last year. Another area that I think is worth pointing out are the concerns Nokia spells out about its own services, such as its investments in location and mapping, will ever kick off as a profitable and big business. The mapping division that contains Navteq has seen some layoffs in the last year and despite being one of the smallest divisions in the company in terms of revenues ($405 million in the last quarter) reported an operating loss of $1.6 billion. On the plus side, this is a very high margin business for Nokia at the moment, with a 393.8 percent operating margin (compare that to the 12 percent in devices), so if Nokia can grow this that can only be a good thing. When I met with Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO, last week at Mobile World Congress, he highlighted how important location would be both for Nokia and for mobile services in the future. I don’t doubt that it will have a massive role in mobile going forward, but I can’t help but feel that the jury is very much still out on whether Nokia will be playing, too.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  After debuting direct booking for hotel reservations, travel search engine Kayak is expanding this option to airline flights. This feature is initially only available for Air Canada but Kayak will be adding more airlines in the future. Previously if you wanted to book a flight using Kayak's search engine, you would click-through to the airline or partner site to book the reservation. Kayak would receive an affiliate fee from the transaction but the actual booking would be made outside of the search engine. Now, you can purchase the flight within the Kayak platform, exclusively for Air Canada routes. As we reported last March, Kayak added this capabilities for hotels, thanks to Travelocity. The option will be available on Kayak’s mobile applications in the coming weeks, and feature will also integrate with Kayak’s itinerary management service, My Trips. Robert Birge, Kayak’s CMO tells us adding additional direct booking partnerships will depend on each airline. In some cases, airlines offer an API, which makes it easy for Kayak to add the direct booking option. In other cases, he explains, Kayak will have to work directly with the airline to provide a direct booking experience. “We’re trying to focus on the customer experience and provide better choices and a simpler booking experience,” he says. Kayak is also adding reviews for over 1,400 hotels from Travel + Leisure and Jetsetter. A few weeks ago, Kayak added 60 million TripAdvisor reviews into search results. With the IPO on hold, Kayak has been heads down on product development and improving customer experience over the past few months, as the company battles with Google in the travel search space. In December, Kayak redesigned its iPad app and consolidated the app with its iPhone cousin. The company’s website most recently got a big UI upgrade, creating a more universal and comprehensive consumer experience across all Kayak platforms: web, mobile web and apps.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Funding for science and research is hard to come by, yet these discoveries made through research projects and lab experiments can revolutionize industries and make the world a better place. Enter Petridish, which is a crowdfunding platform for science that plans to transform the way research is funded. On Petridish, science-lovers can connect directly with researchers to help them launch new projects. On Petridish, researchers can post materials about themselves and their research, and the public can discover projects that are exciting to them. In exchange for contributing to the project, backers receive insider updates on the research, naming rights to new discoveries, and other souvenirs from the work. For example, one of the scientists on the site is offering naming rights to new species of animals. Disciplines of projects include those centered around biology, ecology, geology, astronomy and more. Scientists can apply to be listed on the site, bu co-founder Matt Salzberg tells us that Petridish really wants to put the decision making process in the greater community. Similar to other crowdfunding sites, backers don’t get equity but will receive other benefits in exchange for participating in the project. For example, one project on the site will acknowledge backers in journal articles, arrange visits to field sites, or naming rights. For each transaction, Petridish will take 5 percent of the donation. Projects will only be funded if they reach their goal before the deadline set by the researcher. Petridish is the brainchild of Ilia Papas and Salzberg. Prior to founding Petridish, Salzberg was a senior associate at Bessemer Venture Partners. Current projects range from Unraveling the mystery of gelada monkey melodies to Capturing the first sounds of deep sea creatures to a New species of ants in Madagascar.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Mobile ad network Millennial Media will be listing its offering on the New York Stock Exchange, according to a new S-1 filing. The network, which filed its original S-1 in early January, aims to raise as much as $75 million in the offering. The company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “MM.” According to more recent stats from the filing, Millennial serves ads to 200 million unique users worldwide, including approximately 100 million unique users in the United States alone. More than 30,000 apps are enabled by developers to receive ads delivered by Millennial. From 2009 to 2010, Millennial’s revenue increased 195% from $16.2 million to $47.8 million, and the company took a net loss of $7.6 million, and $7.1 million, in those years, respectively. From 2010 to 2011, revenue increased 117% from $47.8 million to $103.7 million. In 2011, the company saw a net loss of just $287,000. While Millennial’s IPO is certainly not at the scale as Facebook, it’s definitely a win for the NYSE in its war with NASDAQ over tech company listings. Last year, NASDAQ got big listings for Zynga and Groupon, whereas NYSE got LinkedIn, and Pandora. In this year’s round of IPOs, Yelp chose the NYSE, and Brightcove went with NASDAQ. We’ll see which exchange Facebook chooses soon.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Ask.com, which refocused its efforts on Q&A back in 2010, is rolling out another mobile application in the Q&A genre today. And no, it’s not that Ask.com Q&A app. It’s another one. The new app is called PollRoll, and, as the name implies, it allows you to quickly create polls on your iPhone, then post them to Facebook and Twitter. PollRoll is being pitched (of course) as a utility to help SXSW conference goers find the best food truck/panel/party/etc., but that may be selling it a little short. Unlike some of the applications that get hot at South By, you might actually use PollRoll after the conference ends…well, that is, if you’re into taking or posting polls online. Or if you have a few minutes to kill. The app competes with other mobile polling tools like iPoll, Pollbob, or Wayin, to name just a few of the dozens in the iTunes App Store, but it offers a user interface that’s a bit more appealing thanks its use of images to accompany the text. Upon first launch, PollRoll shows you a large photo and a randomly displayed poll which you can answer, comment on and then view the results of. There’s also a dashboard of image thumbnails which are used to illustrate the available polls. It makes for a more engaging experience than simply viewing a list of questions. To get PollRoll going, the database is seeded with around 1,000 polls, many of the “would you rather” variety, which ended up being strangely addictive. (Like that board game, I guess). Polls within the app are sorted into “New,” “Trending” and “Around Me,” the latter which shows you local polls – that’s the feature that could come in handy during SXSW, if enough people jump on board. But what makes PollRoll stand out are the social features. You sign into the app using Facebook or Twitter, which allows PollRoll access to your social graph. Then, as you answer polls, you can switch the results view around to see how everyone answered, how just your friends answered, or what those nearby said. Poll creation is easy, too, if maybe a little basic. The app lets you enter a title, up four responses and a photo you either snap, pull from the camera roll, or grab from the web. Pretty simple stuff. Look, I’ll be honest. I probably wouldn’t normally write about a little app that does polling, but after I found myself, five minutes later, emerging from a poll daze and dozens of questions answered, I figured this one might have some appeal. The UI makes it pretty addictive. (Also, you guys: teleportation would be the best super power, not time travel. D’uh.) You can grab the new app for iPhone (sorry Android people) here.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Despite the fact that Apple’s store was an absolute mess yesterday when it relaunched with the new iPad, it would seem people are still finding a way to get their pre-order on. So much so, in fact, that white versions of the 16GB and 64GB AT&T 4G iPads have been given a new, later shipping date of March 19. This is not even close to a surprise. In fact, we kind of expected the ship dates to get pushed back earlier than this. Black models in each storage flavor seem to still be ready to ship on March 16, and Verizon’s 4G LTE iPads are also still on track. Still, we don’t expect this to last much longer so if you’re absolutely set on having the new new iPad before everyone else, you seriously need to place your pre-order like right this second. Click here if that sounds like you. It’s also worth wondering where AT&T and Verizon stand with regards to sales of Apple devices. After hearing that Apple has sold more iPads than the combination of any given PC maker’s full line of products, it’s worth thinking about the carrier partnerships in place. AT&T has always had a leg up when it comes to Apple thanks to that exclusivity contract that was in place until Verizon got the iPhone 4. This meant that early Apple adopters, ones more likely to buy an iPad, iPad 2, or new iPad, already have a subscription set up with AT&T. With each launch that included both AT&T and Verizon, both carriers have been on a relatively even playing field. Verizon perhaps had the advantage when it comes to an unclogged network, but AT&T had the advantage of already having more iDevice owners on its network. But this time, and for the first time, the upper hand finally lands on Big Red’s side of the battlefield. Verizon’s 4G LTE network is far more built out than AT&T’s. For those who consider LTE the stand-out feature of the new iPad, this should surely play a role in the decision. Again, we really don’t expect either carrier to keep up the pace with that March 16 ship date for much longer, but people leaning towards an AT&T model should move exceptionally fast. [via BGR]
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  In recent times we’ve seen the rise of many businesses predicated on the idea that a user subscribes to an ecommerce service instead of buying a la carte. Thus, BirchBox delivers beauty product samples every month. Stylistpick sends fashion, Shoedazzle sends shoes. The list goes on. But what if you had a similar service but there was no need for shipping items in the post, plus it had wider appeal outside of, for instance, fashion? Launching in London first, Planvine is a new service which, for a monthly subscription, reserves two tickets to events based on your pre-selected interests. This solves a big problem a lot of people have – including myself. You’d like to go to something but never remember to get tickets or just can’t get organised. Planvine researched its market and found many twenty-to-thirty-somethings don’t end up actually doing things that interest them. Planvine CEO Barnaby Clark says London has a lot to offer but what’s stopping people is the time it takes “to find the cool stuff and the hassle of booking tickets.” Founders Clark, Chris Crossley and James Stillwell reckon they will end up as an aggregator for ticketing agencies who have problems reaching this audience. The startup has closed a pre-seed investment round so far from Sardis Capital, with Osman Mardin joining the board. It’s clearly an interesting market. HowAboutWe in the US takes a dating approach to events just aiming at couples, but has raised a $15 million Series B from Khosla Ventures on top of a prior $3.1 million from RRE Ventures. Techcrunch readers can get in on the best site with this link which avoids the invite process.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  As we heard last week, Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is picking up steam in the NFC world to make these payments a reality. And we know Google has made a big bet on NFC as a payments technology. But it’s still unclear whether NFC (near field communication), which allows devices to exchange data over short distances with a wave or a tap, will become a major force. But Juniper seems optimistic that NFC payments will become a huge market in the payments world forecasting that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions will reach nearly $74 billion worldwide by 2015. Juniper contends that NFC is increasingly being used for the payment of goods in-store and as transport tickets; and is already over triple the expectation for 2011. Additionally, the firm says that the use of mobile devices as an alternative to credit cards and paper tickets is one of the fastest growing segments of the mobile commerce market. Juniper’s David Snow explained in the report “Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than triple in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.” The barrier to mobile payments and NFC, says Juniper, are both real and perceived security risks. Even if one application is found to be unsecure, this could throw off the whole market. Other findings include that SMS is the key to widespread mobile banking service adoption and without interoperability mobile money transfer services will have difficulty gaining a critical mass of users. And while mobile coupons still represent the smallest mobile commerce segment, it is demonstrating the highest growth rate. Last year, Juniper forecasted that North America and Western Europe together will exceed the Far East region in under three years based on transaction value. And North America and Western Europe will account for 50% of NFC payments market by value in 2014. Slowly but surely, more companies are incorporating NFC into payments solutions, but there are still questions as to whether NFC will become a dominant technology in the mobile payments landscape of the future, especially when other companies including PayPal, Square and others seem to be shying away from making a big bet on the technology. The other missing component is Apple’s participation in the space, and it’s still unclear if the iPhone maker will be adopting the technology.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Triptrotting, a startup that connects travelers with hosts, has raised $1 million in a Series A round of funding. The company’s website promises that users will be “not just another clueless tourist.” The idea is that when you’re traveling to new places, it’s almost always better if you have a local friend, so Triptrotting tries to connect travelers with locals at their destination. If you’re a host, that can involve letting someone stay with you, or it can be more limited, like taking them on a tour or just meeting them for a meal. Co-founder Shana Zheng (who has in fact played Triptrotting host to TechCrunch office manager Greg Barto) says one of the most important parts of the service is its matching algorithm, which was developed in consultation with former eHarmony chief scientist Galen Buckwalter. Even though hosting is more about cultural exchange, not moneymaking, hosts can ask to be paid tips for specific services, like picking someone up at the airport. Obviously, safety can be a concern when you’re meeting up with strangers (or staying with them). The Triptrotting FAQ makes it clear that it’s ultimately up to “your decision and judgment,” but the company says it tries to verify that members are who they say they are. Hosts and travelers are also asked to review each other after a trip. And Zheng says Tripspotting avoided safety issues when it started out by working with universities and professional organizations. The company isn’t revealing its member numbers, but Zheng tells me that Triptrotting now has a presence in more than 2,000 cities and 150 countries. She attributes much of that growth to Triptrotting’s “ambassadors”, who sometimes promote the site through large events that can draw hundreds or thousands of attendees (a typical event will attract expatriates, international journalists, students, and more, Zheng says). Investors include Google Ventures, Mark Suster of GRP Partners and Launchpad LA, Dave McClure of 500 Startups, Bill Gross of Idealab, Safa Rashtchy, and Eric Chen. Triptrotting has now raised a total of $1.3 million.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Apple is selling its new Apple TV box for $99 in the U.S., the same price as its predecessor, but in other countries it looks like Apple is taking the opportunity to bring in new users with a discount. In a selection of online Apple stores across Europe and further afield, the company is marking down the price of Apple TV at the same time that it is introducing the new model, which has a number of new features, including a new 1080p interface (with support for movies at that resolution as well) and iCloud streaming support. Here are some of the countries where the price is changing, which also underscores how much the price varies from market to market (taking into account each market’s own particular elasticity, and taxes): In Denmark, the device is selling for 849 Kroner ($150); original retail price of 949 Kroner. In Australia, the price is now A$109 ($116), down from A$129. In Norway, it’s now 679 Norwegian Kronor (about $120), down from NOK850. In Germany, the price is now €109 ($144), down from €119. There are probably more to update here. Why the discounts abroad? We asked Horace Dediu, an Apple analyst who first brought the discounts to our attention. In 2011 he highlighted how in two countries — his home turf of Finland and Brazil — Apple TV in fact had the highest premium over the price in the U.S. compared to other Apple products (tables on that below). It’s unclear how well Apple TV has sold up to now in markets outside the U.S. but the discounts could be one way of drawing in more users to the service in these countries. One market where the price hasn’t gone down is the U.K. — my home turf. Could that be because it’s selling just fine at £99 ($157)? It could be that these markets were not that receptive to the premiums that Apple had originally set. As Dediu says, “[Apple] might be bringing the price in line with what it should be.”
[HT to @bradt, @magnusromnes, @darthniklas for noting price changes on Twitter]
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Apple is selling its new Apple TV box for $99 in the U.S., the same price as its predecessor, but in other countries it looks like Apple is taking the opportunity to bring in new users with a discount. In a selection of online Apple stores across Europe and further afield, the company is marking down the price of Apple TV at the same time that it is introducing the new model, which has a number of new features, including a new 1080p interface (with support for movies at that resolution as well) and iCloud streaming support. Here are some of the countries where the price is changing, which also underscores how much the price varies from market to market (taking into account each market’s own particular elasticity, and taxes): In Denmark, the device is selling for 849 Kroner ($150); original retail price of 949 Kroner. In Australia, the price is now A$109 ($116), down from A$129. In Norway, it’s now 679 Norwegian Kronor (about $120), down from NOK850. In Germany, the price is now €109 ($144), down from €119. There are probably more to update here. Why the discounts abroad? We asked Horace Dediu, an Apple analyst who first brought the discounts to our attention. In 2011 he highlighted how in two countries — his home turf of Finland and Brazil — Apple TV in fact had the highest premium over the price in the U.S. compared to other Apple products (tables on that below). It’s unclear how well Apple TV has sold up to now in markets outside the U.S. but the discounts could be one way of drawing in more users to the service in these countries. One market where the price hasn’t gone down is the U.K. — my home turf. Could that be because it’s selling just fine at £99 ($157)? It could be that these markets were not that receptive to the premiums that Apple had originally set. As Dediu says, “[Apple] might be bringing the price in line with what it should be.”
[HT to @bradt, @magnusromnes, @darthniklas for noting price changes on Twitter]
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Travel rewards redemption company Switchfly (formerly ezRez) has raised $15 million in Series C financing led by StarVest Partners with Azure Capital Partners and Canaan Partners participating. This brings the total capital raised by Switchfly to date to $32 million. Switchfly is a software company that develops white-label travel commerce and loyalty redemption platform and a loyalty payments engine for digital wallets. Founded in 2003, Switchfly works behind the scenes with more than 300,000 travel suppliers, loyalty programs and payment providers globally, including AirAsia, American Airlines, United Airlines, Starwood Hotels, Intercontinental Hotels, JetBlue, American Express and PayPal. The company estimates that $750 million in travel transactions spanning 100 countries are processed through this travel platform annually. The company’s back-end technology that lets you book hotels and rental cars with points and cash through various travel companies’ rewards programs. Collectively, more than 20 billion reward points are redeemed through the platform annually. Switchfly will also soon offer a new digital wallet product, in partnership with PayPal, that will allow loyalty program members to use their loyalty program points to pay for merchandise and services anywhere PayPal is accepted. And the company recently purchased Topguest, a loyalty program that rewards users for engaging with brands on social networks. The new funding will be used towards product development and to further expand Switchfly’s global operations.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  A new mobile payments startup is entering the market. Clover is exiting from stealth today as a fast, simple mobile payments technology that aims to allow consumers can checkout from a mobile site or app in under five seconds with one-tap. The company is also announcing that it has raised $5.8 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures. As CEO Bryan Lamkin explains, Clover is trying to build the fastest, simplest and most secure payment network for mobile and tablet devices. The startup believes there is still a tremendous amount of friction in mobile checkout and payments, resulting in shopping cart abandonment and low conversion rates for merchants, retailers, and developers. Today, Clover is releasing an SDK for Android, iPhone and the iPad that will allow developers to integrate Clover into their apps. Here’s how it works. In order to use Clover, consumers have to have the Clover app downloaded to their phone. When signing up they share credit card details, their mobile phone number and other billing information and then they are ready for one-click payments using the platform. On the developer side, Clover says that it has minimized network round-trips to increase the chance of successful transactions on spotty mobile networks. There’s also simple SMS-based initial authentication that is used to lock Clover accounts to a phone number and the platform employs two-factor authentication by default, using mutually authenticated SSL and a PIN. The startup says that because there’s no username and password, and because they lock accounts to phone numbers, the threat of account takeovers, which is a common problem with online payment services, is largely averted. For a developer who has integrated Clover, the payments experience will simply include a “pay with Clover” interface to checkout, and the SDK will detect those who have Clover installed. For existing Clover users, they can simply enter their phone number and or a separate mobile pin for authentication and complete the checkout experience in under five seconds. For those who do not have a Clover account, they will be prompted to download the app and sign up for the service. To encourage the user to download the Clover app (and to compensate the developer for helping the platform build the network), Clover will offer an instant refund of up to $5 on the consumer’s credit card transaction when they install Clover. And to help incentivize developers to start using Clover, the startup is announcing a $100,000 developer fund. Clover charges a 3% per transaction fee. Early adopters include Lolapps, Coupon Trade, Yorder, and When asked about the competition from PayPal, which also offers a one-click mobile payments option, Lamkin explains that Clover has been specially designed for developers who are feeling the conversion pain on mobile payments. “The design has been built around speed and security, with the native app as a gateway,” he explains. It’s definitely ambitious for Clover to take on the likes of PayPal, Google and others when it comes to mobile payments. But the company is on to something by identifying a huge problem in the mobile payments industry-simplicity and ease of use. It appears that the startup or company that can provide a fast mobile checkout experience (while also promising security and incorporating consumer behavior) will be the true winner on online mobile payments.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  At yesterday’s Apple event, CEO Tim Cook ran through some big numbers that underscored just how strongly the iPad is pacing against PCs when it comes to consumer interest. Today, Gartner released some forecasts that underscore how that story is not set to change any time soon. The analysts say that PC shipments are on track to grow by just 4.4 percent in 2012 — to 368 million units, as consumers continue to prioritize purchases of new tablets, and smartphones, ahead of buying new laptop or desktop computers. But at least this is a slight improvement on 2011, when Gartner said that shipments were essentially flat on 2010. Post-PC, in this sense, is about sales rather than actual usage: “It’s not that consumers aren’t using PCs. They are,” Gartner analyst Ranjit Atwal told TechCrunch. “It’s just that they’re using their current models and not replacing them anymore with new PCs.” Of course, if you follow that to its natural conclusion, then eventually growing sales will translate into a tipping point for usage, although that is still a far way off. Figures out recently point to only about eight percent of internet traffic coming from mobile devices like phones and tablets. Gartner notes that the fact that you can do all the basics now on a device like a tablet — email, social networking and internet access, not to mention all those apps — makes it even less of a priority to make sure that your PC is the newest and fastest of its kind. The move to more cloud services, relying significantly less on on-device storage, also takes another unique selling point away from PCs. In the realm of sales, Atwal says that the challenge has been laid at the foot of PC makers by companies like Apple — or if we’re honest, by Apple alone — which have been setting the bar for what kind of functionality people want out of their internet devices these days. Products like Windows 8 could advance the case for PC makers, and we’ve seen some interesting implementations of the OS already. (I was intrigued/bemused by the Acer device that turns a Windows 8 laptop into a Windows 8 tablet, Transformer-style.) But the question is, will that be enough to sway consumers’ attention, or as Atwal puts it, “Given all the innovation that PC vendors are promising, can they get to the front of the buying queue for consumers again?” He notes that many of the new products built on Windows 8 are not likely to make their way to the market until close to the end of this year, meaning that if PC makers are going to catch up, it won’t be in 2012. The figures over the last few years point to PCs having had a largely dry spell for sales while products like the iPad have been seeing very swift gains. Atwal says that in 2011 the market was flat no growth. PC shipments totalled 350 million. In 2010, the sector saw a “blip” with growth of 13.8 percent to 350 million units. He says that was largely due to the mini-craze around notebooks and mini-notebooks. In 2009, the market grew only 5.5 percent to 308 million. According to Cook yesterday, the iPad sold 15.4 million units last quarter — more than any single PC maker sold of its devices. HP was the nearest competitor at 15.1 million PCs for the quarter; Lenovo had 13 million PCs; Dell sold 11.9 million PCs and Acer sold 9.8 million PCs. [Image: TarynMarie, Flickr]
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  I have a love/hate relationship with CrunchBase. On the one hand it has great information about startup tech companies. On the other hand, it relies on a wiki-like structure which means it is sometime not updated as frequently or as accurately as old-style databases which used to employ people go over the data regularly. However, it’s wikiness means it can be free – pretty useful for the entrepreneur! Perhaps the real unsung hero of Crunchbase’s is its API which means third party developers can whip up new things with the data. The latest is Seedtable, a new project from Imran Ghory, a founder of CoderStack. Ghory has built a brand new interface to CrunchBase which exposes a few things CrunchBase itself can’t right now do to the limitation of its interface. And it really is very good. A quick tip: start typing in the name of a city in the search box. “I wanted to see how London was doing compared to other cities in terms of startups,” Ghory told me. In building Seedtable he realised it was also really useful for discovery, thus you could click London, then Consumer Web, then see who had backed those companies. So we can now see the ‘Most Active Cities’ (in the last 12 Months) in terms of startup funding are San Francisco, New York and London. However, there are separate figures for Palo Alto and Mountain View, which suggests Silicon Valley remains head and shoulders above the rest overall. Drilling down to a city, say London, we can see historic trends such as a big hump when many companies were founded in 2008-2011, and we can see VC, Angel and Exits tacking upwards. One anomaly Ghory found was that companies often only add themselves to CrunchBase after they have funding, which throws their founding data out of whack. If people just entered super-accurate information, and did it early, we’d see better data. (Anyone can add anything to CrunchBase). Seedtable also exposes the top Angel rankings by investment count in London. This includes The Accelerator Group, Stefan Glaenzer, Index Ventures, Eden Ventures, Seedcamp and Sherry Coutu. The same listing for most active VCs lists Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Eden Ventures, Balderton Capital and Pentech Ventures. Of course, this only relies on CrunchBase, and Crunchbase needs to be maintained and updated. When you get to places like Istanbul, Crunchbase starts to show its gaps, with far less data available, even though it’s clear the city is in a tech boom. At least the upward graph is there on founded companies. Seedtable is an example of data being made a great deal more useful via interface. I can see myself using it almost as much as Crunchbase.
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | I have a love/hate relationship with CrunchBase. On the one hand, it has great information about startup tech companies. On the other hand, it relies on a wiki-like structure which means it is sometimes not updated as frequently or as accurately as old-style databases which used to employ people go over the data regularly. However, its wikiness means it can be free – pretty useful for the entrepreneur! Perhaps the real unsung hero of CrunchBase is its API which means third party developers can whip up new things with the data. The latest is SeedTable, a new project from Imran Ghory, a founder of CoderStack. Ghory has built a brand new interface to CrunchBase which exposes a few things CrunchBase itself can’t right now due to the limitation of its interface. And it really is very good. A quick tip: start typing in the name of a city in the search box. “I wanted to see how London was doing compared to other cities in terms of startups,” Ghory told me. In building SeedTable he realised it was also really useful for discovery, thus you could click London, then Consumer Web, then see who had backed those companies. So we can now see the ‘Most Active Cities’ (in the last 12 Months) in terms of startup funding are San Francisco, New York and London. However, there are separate figures for Palo Alto and Mountain View, which suggests Silicon Valley remains head and shoulders above the rest overall. Drilling down to a city, say London, we can see historic trends such as a big hump when many companies were founded in 2008-2011, and we can see VC, Angel and Exits tacking upwards. One anomaly Ghory found was that companies often only add themselves to CrunchBase after they have funding, which throws their founding data out of whack. If people just entered super-accurate information, and did it early, we’d see better data. (Anyone can add anything to CrunchBase). SeedTable also exposes the top Angel rankings by investment count in London. This includes The Accelerator Group, Stefan Glaenzer, Index Ventures, Eden Ventures, Seedcamp and Sherry Coutu. The same listing for most active VCs lists Index Ventures, Accel Partners, Eden Ventures, Balderton Capital and Pentech Ventures. Of course, this only relies on CrunchBase, which needs to be maintained and updated. When you get to places like Istanbul, CrunchBase starts to show its gaps, with far less data available, even though it’s clear the city is in a tech boom. At least the upward graph is there on founded companies. SeedTable is an example of data being made a great deal more useful via interface. I can see myself using it almost as much as CrunchBase.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Another big move for Buddy Media as it continues to build out the services it offers as part of its social media marketing business: the company has hired sales supremo Susan St. Ledger as its new president. She is joining Buddy Media from Salesforce.com, where she had been for the past seven years in a number of key roles. They included (most recently) SVP of industry verticals, where she was in charge of relationships with Salesforce.com’s biggest clients in technology, financial services, insurance, media and telecoms. Before that, St. Ledger had been SVP of global platform sales for the company. And before her time with Salesforce.com, St. Ledger had been a sales force at Sun Microsystems, where as a VP she had helped generate some $3.5 billion in annual revenue from services for the company, at a time when the company was first starting to hit $1 billion in quarterly revenues. Buddy Media says St. Ledger’s formal role will be to lead global revenue generation and oversee the company's sales and client service teams. Based in San Francisco, she will report directly to co-founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. Experience and expertise in selling cloud-based enterprise services — not to mention those important contacts that St. Ledger made over the years — are just the kinds of strings that Buddy Media needs right now in its bow as it continues to expand the portfolio of marketing services that it offers to businesses. The news of the appointment comes just one week after Buddy Media announced that it had bought Facebook ad-buying tool Brighter Option. That acquisition means that Buddy Media can now sell Facebook ads directly to its 600+ clients — which include biggies like WPP — to run alongside the content they publish, via Buddy Media, on Facebook. [photo: WSJ]
 | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  Another big move for Buddy Media as it continues to build out the services it offers as part of its social media marketing business: the company has hired sales supremo Susan St. Ledger as its new president. She is joining Buddy Media from Salesforce.com, where she had been for the past seven years in a number of key roles. They included (most recently) SVP of industry verticals, where she was in charge of relationships with Salesforce.com’s biggest clients in technology, financial services, insurance, media and telecoms. Before that, St. Ledger had been SVP of global platform sales for the company. And before her time with Salesforce.com, St. Ledger had been a sales force at Sun Microsystems, where as a VP she had helped generate some $3.5 billion in annual revenue from services for the company, at a time when the company was first starting to hit $1 billion in quarterly revenues. Buddy Media says St. Ledger’s formal role will be to lead global revenue generation and oversee the company's sales and client service teams. Based in San Francisco, she will report directly to co-founder and CEO Michael Lazerow. Experience and expertise in selling enterprise services — not to mention those important contacts that St. Ledger made over the years — are just what Buddy Media needs right now as it continues to expand its portfolio of marketing services and looks to sign more of the world’s most notable brands. The news of the appointment comes just one week after Buddy Media announced that it had bought Facebook ad-buying tool Brighter Option. That acquisition means that Buddy Media can sell Facebook ads directly to its 600+ clients — which include biggies like WPP. With Susan on board, Buddy Media will have an easier time convincing brands of the advantages of a combined marketing and advertising platform.
| | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |  What do you do if you’ve got $625 million lying around and the ambitious goal of propelling the world faster towards the future? Founders Fund, which has invested in world-tilting companies like Facebook and Palantir, is putting some of its most recent raise towards an especially unorthodox sort of conference. Partners Peter Thiel, Ken Howery, Luke Nosek, Brian Singerman, Derik Pridmore, Lauren Gross, Bruce Gibney, Sean Parker and Toby Prosky have culled 50 of the “most-promising” engineers and entrepreneurs in the tech sector and will offer them the opportunity to hop on a 737 to a remote “5-star” destination in the Pacific this spring. For free. In addition to the partners themselves, entrepreneurs will be joined by 10 to 12 multi-disciplinary tech luminaries who will serve as mentors. Everyone involved must have a “burning desire to change the world,” parter Bruce Gibney tells me. Like Foo Camp the three-day gathering will be 95% unstructured; “The only agenda is thinking about the future and how to get there.” The event, which has no official name, is intended to be thought-provoking, though thinking for thinking’s sake isn’t the end goal — action is. Gibney likens it to a combination TED, Davos, Nobel Prize and dorm chat session all in one package. “We want to make the conversation as frictionless as possible,” Gibney tells me, “It’s a great opportunity to catalyze the future; Extremely brilliant and extremely motivated people should be given an open space for dialogue and the opportunity to translate their brilliant idea into actions.” He holds that one of the problems with the tech industry as it stands is that it’s very difficult to have macro-level conversations amidst sweating the small stuff. Essentially Founders Fund wants the event to distill the core value proposition of a conference, “intellectual exchange with out the structural nightmare that’s gone up around it.” While Gibney won’t tell me exactly where or when this will take place, he does reveal that it will be held sometime in early May, with the invites coming out this week. “The chance to think about things more broadly is extraordinarily rare,” he says, “It’s basically non-existent.” Founders Fund is hoping that the annual conference will profoundly change the world, but will also be satisfied if a bunch of smart people get together and have a great time in a tropical paradise. Invitations, which have both a virtual and physical component, start going out tomorrow. “It’s kind of strange, but that’s what’s what we do,” Gibney casually remarked towards the end of our conversation, reminding me of this sage Bret Easton Ellis quote; This is how the world changes, someone tells you something. Image via: lostgenerationofgrads
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