Tag | silicon-valley
Jajah Now Powers Low-Cost Long Distance For German O2 Subscribers
Less then seven months after it was acquired by Telefónica Europe (aka O2), for $207 million, VoIP service Jajah is launching its first integration with the large European carrier. O2 subscribers in Germany will now be able to designate up to five friends abroad as their Global Friends ; Jajah will assign each of those friends local numbers, allowing you to call internationally from your mobile phone at local rates. The product will be powered by Jajah, but customers will be seeing the O2 brand. This is interesting for a few reasons. First, it’s obviously a fairly speedy integration given the size of O2. Jajah CEO Trevor Healy also says that this marks the first time that a global carrier is offering a VoIP-powered service to its subscribers — he explains that O2 is willing to embrace the ‘Silicon Valley approach’ to digital communications, as opposed to holding steadfast to tradional voice services. Here’s to hoping the US carriers follow suit. O2 says it will be rolling out further Jajah-powered features in the next few months (presumably including a rollout of Global Friends to countries outside of Germany). O2 has 54 million subscribers across Europe. CrunchBase Information Jajah O2 Information provided by CrunchBase
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Jajah Now Powers Low-Cost Long Distance For German O2 Subscribers
Here Comes Apple Earth. Map Startup Poly9 Reportedly Snatched Up By Cupertino
The days of Google Maps as the default mapping app on the iPhone may be coming to an end. Apple is beefing up its Geo team, reportedly acquiring Canadian 3D mapping startup Poly9 Group . The company was funded in 2005 and was completely bootstrapped, with no venture money. Its employees have now gone quiet. Its corporate Website is down and nobody answers the phones. Poly9 made a browser-based 3D globe like Google Earth, which powered apps such as the NORAD Santa Tracker and this Skype Nomad blog. You can still see it on this product page for Poly9 Globe . It is a lightweight, browser-based, spinning globe that only takes up 303kb of memory—perfect for an iPhone. So far Apple and Poly9 have not confirmed the acquisition, but French-Canadian reporter Pierre Couture of cyberpresse.ca (via Google Translate ) reports that all but two of the employees are now relocated in Silicon Valley and that they are zipped up due to non-disclosure agreements. This wouldn’t be the first mapping app to be acquired by Apple. Last September, it bought Placebase , another mapping startup, which adds layers of data on top of maps. It is hard to speculate what Apple’s Geo team is brewing. Most likely these were more acqhires where the talent was being bought more so than the underlying products. What do you think Apple Earth will look like? CrunchBase Information Poly9 Group Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
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Here Comes Apple Earth. Map Startup Poly9 Reportedly Snatched Up By Cupertino
[TechCrunch TV] Andy Kessler: “The future is a Furby with a GameBoy up its ass”
It’s a rare “All Star” hedge fund manager and technology analyst who can also design both computer chips and write software programs. But what about a successful ex Morgan Stanley semiconductor analyst and president of a $1 billion hedge fund with five years of experience as a chip designer and programmer at AT&T Bell Labs who is also the author of four well received non-fiction books, a recently published science fiction novel about robotic intelligence and a regular Wall Street Journal and New York Times columnist? Is this itself science fiction or can a mere mortal really cram as much achievement into a fifty two year life – and still have a wife and four sons? Even for Silicon Valley, Andy Kessler is a sickeningly accomplished guy. Moving out to San Francisco in 1993, Kessler co-founded Velocity Capital where, between 1996 and 2001, he transformed $100 million into $1 billion. Not satisfied with being filthy rich, Kessler then went onto becoming famous – publishing four non-fiction books between 2003 ad 2006, including his highly entertaining short history of digital technology, the personal computer and the Internet: How We Got Here: A Silicon Valley and Wall Street Primer . And now Kessler has just come out with his first published fiction, an irreverent novel about artificial intelligence called Grumby which Michael Lewis called “deliciously naughty”. So who better to talk about productivity, technology and investment than Kessler, a guy who knows better than most how we got to where we are in Silicon Valley, Wall Street and Main Street. In coming into our Techcrunch studios, Andy Kessler not only proved that he existed, but also confirmed that he has a highly controversial take on technological innovation, smart investment, job destruction and how entrepreneurs really create of wealth. Part One: Kessler on How We Got Here Kessler crunches through the entire history of technology in five minutes (and even correctly predicts Spain winning the World Cup) Part Two: Kessler on The World Economy Kessler on why the global economy is still in the dumper and how technology can save us. Part Three: Kessler on Productivity Kessler on why pure market competition will create innovation in the broadband and mobile sectors. Part Four: Kessler on The Next Big Thing Kessler on the next technology interface that will change everything (clue: “take a Furby and shove a Game Boy up its ass”) Part Five: Kessler on Where To Invest Kessler advises investment in entrepreneurs who “eat people” – especially lawyers and doctors. Watch previous episode of Keen On here .
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[TechCrunch TV] Andy Kessler: “The future is a Furby with a GameBoy up its ass”
Fortune Tech Reporter Jon Fortt Replaces Apple Fanboy Jim Goldman At CNBC
CNBC is getting a new technology correspondent and losing a controversial one. Jon Fortt , a senior writer at Fortune , will be joining CNBC on July 19th in its Silicon Valley bureau. CNBC’s current tech reporter, Jim Goldman, will be leaving to pursue a career in PR . Some will find this an appropriate career shift for Goldman, who has often been criticized in the past as being a mouthpiece for Apple , a company he covers that helped make his career. To be fair, Goldman is also very good at what he does. Being on TV is harder than it looks. I spoke with Fortt today (disclosure: we used to work together at Business 2.0 magazine back in the day). He says he had no idea Goldman was leaving until today, and was “sad to hear that.” I put Fortt on the spot and asked him if viewers can expect any change in Apple coverage from CNBC once he starts. His says he is going to call it like he sees it: “I covered Apple for a while, it was my first beat at the Mercury News . No journalist wants to be perceived as having undue bias. With Apple, you are perceived as either being a fanboy or a hater.” We think opinions are fine as long as the reporter tells his audience where his bias lies. Goldman was most definitely an Apple fanboy. That meant he usually came down on the side of Apple, but also got a lot of Apple scoops. As long as you knew that as a viewer, you were fine. Of course, Fortt has his own biases and to pretend otherwise is doesn’t do anyone any good. I suspect that secretly he is an HP fanboy , but maybe is too embarrassed to admit it. But we will soon find out. As he does already, Fortt expects to continue blogging when he is not on camera.
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Fortune Tech Reporter Jon Fortt Replaces Apple Fanboy Jim Goldman At CNBC
Time Magazine Reminds Me Of Some Of My Fickle Ex Girlfriends
In 2008 Time Magazine really liked TechCrunch and yours truly, putting me on the Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world. I was on the verge of becoming a “cybermogul!” But things went downhill from there. In 2009 TechCrunch was no longer relevant to, well, anything. TechCrunch was named one of the most overrated blogs. “Stick a fork in this one — it’s done,” said Time. Ouch. But we’re back, baby! Despite absolutely zero editorial or other changes after our 2009 death, 2010 is a new year, and Time loves us once again. We’re one of their essential blogs: Michael Arrington may be as cocky as ever, but it’s with good reason: his tech blog remains the essential destination for the inside scoop and analysis on what’s going on in Silicon Valley and beyond. Arrington and his team of bloggers have enviable access, getting exclusives and access from Apple to Zynga. Plus, for those in search of the next big thing, no one covers startups better than the Techcrunch gang. (And fosters them now, too — the blog’s Techcrunch Disrupt conference this year brought together some of the smartest minds in tech to look at some of the best up-and-coming new ideas.) I’m pretty sure I know what’s coming in 2011: she loves me not, and another breakup. And I’m sad about that. But 2012 is going to be a good year, methinks. I’ve heard Time has already written the blurb about our big comeback from the 2011 flatline. CrunchBase Information TechCrunch Information provided by CrunchBase
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Time Magazine Reminds Me Of Some Of My Fickle Ex Girlfriends
Product Guru Eckart Walther Goes Free Agent As EIR At Accel Partners
One thing Silicon Valley doesn’t have enough of are solid product visionaries. The problem is the really good ones tend of start their own companies. Or whoever they work for locks them up so tight that no one can pry them loose. But there’s one guy I’ve kept my eye on for the last few years, Eckart Walther , who seems to be in play. I wonder for how long. I first met Eckart when he was at Yahoo as a group vice president of product management for search – that was back in the day when Yahoo was still the no. 2 search engine behind Google and had no plans to relinquish that title. Prior to Yahoo he was at Tellme ( acquired by Microsoft ). And way back in the day, at Netscape. Most recently he parked himself at LiveOps doing God-knows-what. He’s left LiveOps and has quietly taken a position at Accel Partners as an entrepreneur in residence. That means he’s being paid to sit around and think a lot, and occasionally join a meeting or two. I randomly saw this on his Facebook feed this evening and haven’t had a chance to talk to him about his plans. But he’s likely to either be starting a new company or looking for his next job at a startup. Keep an eye on whatever he does next, it’s likely to be something worth watching. Follow him on Twitter at @eckartwalther . CrunchBase Information Accel Partners Eckart Walther Information provided by CrunchBase
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Product Guru Eckart Walther Goes Free Agent As EIR At Accel Partners
Russian President Medvedev Sends His First Tweet At Twitter
Today at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev stopped by. To say security was tight here is putting it lightly. I had to go through a process much more stringent than any airport I’ve ever been to just to get in. There are snipers here. Not kidding. So why was Medvedev here? To send his first tweet, of course. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams kicked things off by welcoming everyone (there is a ton of foreign press here). Co-founder Biz Stone then took the mic and said that this was “ one of the most special days in the history of Twitter .” “ We believe that the open exchange of information can have a positive impact ,” Stone went on. “ We hope you’ll consider us your friend, ” Stone said to applause. Medvedev then stepped up to the computer and sent out his first tweet (in Russian, naturally). It translates roughly in English to “ Hello everyone, I’m now on Twitter and this is my first message .” (And it includes a typo — the “6″ — very appropriate for a tweet.) He then sent a second one, noting that Silicon Valley was beautiful, and that he’d be visiting companies like Apple, Cisco, and Yandex (a Russian IT company) as well on his trip. Not surprisingly, Medvedev’s Twitter followers are surging. When I first loaded up his account he had 2 followers — now he has 1,500 just minutes later. President Medvedev is in the U.S. to meet with U.S. President Barack Obama tomorrow in Washington. He’ll also be meeting with Google CEO Eric Schmidt. San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was also here at the event today. [photos: flickr/ twitteroffice ] CrunchBase Information Twitter Information provided by CrunchBase
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Russian President Medvedev Sends His First Tweet At Twitter
Evernote Opens Office In Tokyo, Adds Japanese Character Recognition
Apparently information capturing and management startup Evernote is seeing quite some early success in Japan only three months after the release of its Japanese-language version. Already, Japan is its second largest market after the United States, Evernote says, representing nearly 15 percent of the service’s daily traffic. Furthermore, over 50,000 books about Evernote in Japanese have already gone over the counter. This popularity is in part due to a number of partnerships with leading Japanese tech companies like Sony, Canon, Fujitsu and more, the company says. And Evernote is keen on capitalizing on the current momentum it is enjoying in Japan. Much like Twitter did early on, Evernote is going to focus a considerable amount of resources on growing its business in Japan. The company is today announcing that it has formed a wholly-owned Japanese subsidiary, Evernote Japan, and opening an office in Tokyo. In addition, Evernote is also announcing that its image recognition technology now supports Japanese characters. The objective of the new company is to better serve Evernote’s rapidly growing user-base and its local technology and developer partners in Japan. The Tokyo office will have a full-time local staff focused on support, marketing, community engagement, and product development, we’re told. The subsidiary will be headed by Takeshi Nakajima, vice president of Japanese Operations. Prior to joining Evernote, Nakajima had a management role within the VAIO Business Group at Sony. Evernote Japan has also appointed Hitoshi Hokamura, a veteran of the Japanese IT industry, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former marketing director of Apple Japan, as chairman of the Japan subsidiary. Coinciding with the launch of the new company, Evernote is also announcing that its image recognition technology now supports Japanese characters. As from today, new images added to Evernote containing printed Japanese characters will be indexed and made searchable for those with Japanese set as their recognition language. Evernote Premium subscribers can have all of their old notes re-indexed. Evernote is backed by over $25 million in venture capital. Recently, Evernote CEO Phil Libin gave a presentation discussing some of the startup’s key revenue numbers and strategy – you can watch the video of his talk below. CrunchBase Information Evernote Information provided by CrunchBase
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Evernote Opens Office In Tokyo, Adds Japanese Character Recognition
Chatroulette Enlists Shawn Fanning In The Fight Against The Masturbators
Russian website Chatroulette , founded by Andrey Ternovskiy , is perhaps most well known as a place to watch men expose their genitals. But that hasn’t stopped up to a million people a day from visiting the site. And it has been featured on both the Daily Show and South Park . And wow has Ternovskiy been courted by Silicon Valley and other investors. SGN founder Shervin Pishevar helped bring him to Palo Alto and get set up in an apartment. In May the New Yorker talked about how Russia’s DST was having him followed when he first visited the U.S. And we’ve heard rumors of angel investors and venture capitalists circling Ternovskiy like a hawk. The problem is the site is quickly losing its appeal as more and more people are turned off by the sheer number of people exposing themselves or worse on the site. The brand is becoming permanently associated (with help from those Daily Show and South Park features) with the more disgusting parts of humanity. Can Chatroulette become something more? Look for feature changes soon that will try to send all those penises to the background. The service may add software that can quickly scan video to determine if a penis is being shown. And users that are consistently quickly skipped over (presumably because they are exposing themselves or otherwise being disgusting) can be flagged as well. With those and other changes Chatroulette may be able to put people who actually want to talk to each other in touch much more often. And that’s where real growth might happen. “There just isn’t anywhere on the Internet for you to meet new people anymore,” says one investor that wants in on Chatroulette. “The potential for online dating, which is largely what pushed early Facebook growth, is unlimited.” But Ternovskiy’s caution may doom the site. He has rebuffed most offers for help, say our sources, and investors and advisors are starting to give up. “If he doesn’t make a dramatic move soon to clean up the service, the brand will be permanently tarnished,” says another interested investor. One person that Ternovskiy does seem to trust is Napster founder Shawn Fanning , who is currently hard at work on his most recent startup Path . Fanning is an advisor to Chatroulette, he confirms, and has been working closely with Ternovskiy for the last month or so. “I’m fascinated by Chatroulette and Andrey,” he told me yesterday, “and I want to help him any way I can.” Fanning stresses that the advisory role is informal, uncompensated and that he works with a number of other entrepreneurs as well. It isn’t clear yet what happens next for Chatroulette. Ternovskiy will either push on independently and try to grow and clean up the site on his own, or he’ll embrace the Silicon Valley ecosystem and get other people and investors involved. It’s clear that people are fascinated by the concept of talking to strangers from the relative safety of their computer screens, and Chatroulette satisfies some basic human need to connect to others. But sadly it also satisfies the basic human need of some people to show the world their penis. And that parade of penises is driving everyone else away. Chatroulette needs to decide what it wants to be when it grows up, and it needs to decide soon. Otherwise it will be nothing more than the punchline of a joke, and even that will grow old quickly. Watch our interview with Ternovskiy here . CrunchBase Information Chatroulette! Andrey Ternovskiy Shawn Fanning Information provided by CrunchBase
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Chatroulette Enlists Shawn Fanning In The Fight Against The Masturbators
Can Indonesia’s Ciputra Prove that Great Entrepreneurs Are Made, not Born?
I’ve long argued that great entrepreneurs are born not made. I emphasize the word “great” for a reason. A hot market can convince someone to become an entrepreneur but such fortune-seekers are rarely the ones who build lasting, billion-dollar companies. What about those who say they never intended to start a company but circumstances lead them to success? I’d argue that they may not have always realized they were entrepreneurs, but if you asked their friends, parents and siblings, they would describe them as having always been the kid with the lemonade stand, the kid working an angle, the kid creating something where there was nothing. Like a cylon, something just switched it on later. Seeing an idea through to become something huge is too hard. You simply have it or you don’t. One person has made me question this—a bit. I met him in Indonesia and like Madonna, he’s mostly known by one name—Ciputra. That name is on universities and city subdivisions the country over. (That’s him to the right in front of a large painting from his impressive modern art collection.) If Ciputra is the Indonesian Donald Trump, Jakarta is his New York—a city that quite literally has his fingerprints all over it. Now in his late 70s, Ciputra has lived every painful chapter of Indonesian history from colonial times to Sukarno to Suharto and finally to what the country hopes is a stable democracy. And that ride has taken him from obscurity to success to bankruptcy and back to success again. Ciputra is an architect who describes his aesthetic as “grand.” Most of his properties have huge statues of horses, caught mid-air in granite galloping wildly with all their might, nostrils flaring. That, or statues of buxom women who look a bit like the painting at the beginning of “Good Times.” He started his first company—a development consultancy—in architecture school but he was frustrated not controlling a project from start-to-finish. Soon after he started developing buildings himself, he grew weary of that as well, moving onto developing whole streets. But that still wasn’t enough. He started developing cities within cities. Now,he has 50 under his belt, spanning several continents and some 25,000 hectares. Since his 70th birthday, Ciputra has been thinking even bigger. He wants to redesign the country. And he wants to do it by creating thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs. Right now, his team has estimated that Indonesia—a country of nearly 250 million people—has just 400,000 entrepreneurs who build scalable, innovative companies. That’s less than 1% of the population. Compare that to 13% for the United States and 7% for nearby Singapore. Ciputra isn’t greedy; he figures his plan could change the country if he could help encourage, create and mentor 4 million entrepreneurs or 2% of the country’s population. How do you do that? Not with venture capital, but by changing the country’s mindset, Ciputra says. Here’s where the born v. made debate comes in: Ciputra says in Indonesia universities don’t train entrepreneurs—they train people to be employees. He wants to train people to create jobs, not apply for them. He thinks a change in a university’s mindset can change who comes out of it. He started by opening up a university for entrepreneurship in Surabaya called Universitas Ciputra . The university follows the national accreditation guidelines, but every Wednesday the curriculum is all about how to start high-growth, innovative companies. It was a $10 million dollar investment, and he says he’s already ready to open a second one. He calls this the best kind of philanthropy for a country like Indonesia that was held down under colonial rule for a whopping 350 years. The University has some nods to Silicon Valley, with role models like Google, Amazon and Yahoo splayed on the walls of the IT department. And its student housing is in a building called Berkeley, so kids can tongue-and-cheek say they’re at UC (as in Universitas Ciputra) Berkeley. But like other Ciputra developments, this is a huge project that includes not only a school but housing, a hotel, a golf course and one day, a waterpark just behind the school– to beat that brutal Surabaya heat I suppose. (The picture at the top is part of the complex’s model in the lobby.) The school can influence several hundred new students a year, but that’s not enough for Mr. C. That’s why he partnered with the Kansas City-based Kauffman Foundation to help train the people who train entrepreneurs. (More on the collaboration here . Disclosure: Kauffman also partially funded the book I’m writing.) Those trainers train other trainers and suddenly the country has thousands of people teaching kids how to be Western-style, high-growth entrepreneurs. This year, he convinced the government of Indonesia to send about a dozen university teachers from colleges outside his purview to Kauffman’s six-month training course that entails trips to Boston, Silicon Valley and other American entrepreneurial hot spots. I visited the university in Surabaya during my trip to Indonesia a week ago, and was impressed at the students’ enthusiasm. I got peppered with questions about monetization and motivation not only in Silicon Valley but around the world, and afterward one kid told me confidently I’d be writing a book about him one day. The university is about to graduate its first class and out of 166 kids, more than 100 have started companies. More surprising: Nearly 50% of the students are women. “We select people with passion,” Ciputra says. “Don’t come here if you don’t want to be an entrepreneur. I told them at my first lecture to get up and leave if they wanted to be an employee.” But back to this question of whether entrepreneurs are born or made. As Ciputra told me about his grandkids and his friends’ kids who started mango stands and cake stands in Indonesia, I asked him whether he thought most kids were naturally entrepreneurial and whether a societal fear of failure—which is more pronounced in some places than others—somehow beats it out of us. He nodded. But he added that if that were true, kids need either a parent, a society or a school to encourage that feeling. Because all universities in Indonesia require government accreditation, school is the one of the three that can be centrally fixed, by fixing the curriculum and the teachers. “Ah ha!” I said, having read that Ciputra grew up in a poor, remote Indonesian village. “If that’s true, what explains your success?” Ciputra says his father—a shopkeeper—instilled the entrepreneurial spirit in him when he was young before he was captured by the Japanese during the country’s occupation of Indonesia. But he adds he wished he’d had more encouragement. “Who knows? If I’d gotten it from school, I might be 10 times bigger today,” he says. “The richest Indonesians have maybe $5 billion. Bill Gates has $50 billion.” In a country of 17,000 islands and 240 million people this is hardly a small job. But Ciputra clearly feels this is his legacy. He’s got the money, determination and influence that few others in the country have—or would be willing to spend– on this vision. It’s a project only a man bored with building cities could dream up.
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Can Indonesia’s Ciputra Prove that Great Entrepreneurs Are Made, not Born?
