TheFunded, a website that rates venture funds based on first hand experiences from readers, is shutting down on April 2, according to a notice posted on the site today.
This very well may be an April Fools joke, although founder Adeo Ressi has not returned our email requesting comment. The fact that the service isn’t shutting down immediately also suggests this is fake.
The site has been controversial from the start, and many investors have never been pleased with TheFunded. Last August the company was involved in a lawsuit brought by a venture capitalist trying to track the identity of an anonymous commenter.
TheFunded recently opened a new section of the site listing banned investors – that part of the site is no longer live.
We’ll update when Ressi confirms its real or a joke. The last part of the message, below, is so rife with sarcasm that I’m leaning towards it being fake.
The message: → Read More
Earlier this week YouTube launched a new feature for non-profit organizations called “Call to Action”, allowing these organizations to place special overlay ads on their videos free of charge. These overlays can direct viewers to the non-profits’ homepage, where users can elect to donate money, sign up for mailing lists, and interact with other members in the community. And unlike typical ads on YouTube (which video uploaders don’t generally have control over), non-profits can specifiy exactly which page they’d like to redirect to.
To pilot test the feature, YouTube placed a video supporting charity:water on its homepage last Sunday, featuring an overlay encouraging YouTube users to donate money to the cause. In that one day, charity:water received a whopping $10,000 from YouTube viewers. Granted, the fact that the video was featured on the homepage clearly had a huge impact on the turnout, but the success of the new Call-to-Action ads is likely going to be a boon for many non-profits. → Read More
Sheryl Sandberg, the COO of Facebook, has joined the board of directors of Starbucks, her first public company board position.
Sandberg, who’s generally shy of press (she’s done just one video interview since she joined Facebook a year ago), is going to be getting a lot of credit in the future for driving revenue growth at Facebook. Prior to Facebook she was the VP Online Operations and Sales at Google and one of their first 300 employees. She was also previously with McKinsey & Company, the Chief of Staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, and an economist with the World Bank where she worked on eradicating leprosy in India. And she’s not yet 40.
The Starbucks job comes with a $280,000 annual salary. But, absurdly, the job doesn’t get her free coffee. → Read More
RebelVox is a voice communications platform that aims to makes your voicemail function more like email. The technology is not yet available for consumers, but it will soon be shopped around to developers who may want to incorporate it in other apps. RebelVox’s technology will allow you to leave a voicemail for someone without actually making a call to the person. RebelVox’s mobile app will let you make a voice recording that is delivered as a message to your contact both through a mobile application and their email account. Your contact will be able to respond via another voicemail message, text message or email. You will be able to pick up a voice message from a friend while they are leaving it and speak to them live as well. RebelVox also has linking software built for the PC and Mac which will allow users to control the messages through their computer as well as their mobile phone. RebelVox’s technology can be woven seamlessly into most email accounts, including Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL and Outlook.
Basically, RebelVox wants to let consumers interact with voicemail much like they would an email. Currently packaged as software, RebelVox is still exploring how it wants to sell the licensed (and patented) software and how much it would like to sell it for. The company’s co-founder, Tom Katis, says that RebelVox is in talks with both mobile phone companies and third party mobile application. The service contains features similar to Google Voice, SpinVox, and PhoneTag, especially the ability to control the interface through your computer. RebelVox is certainly no replacement for Google Voice, but offers some features that could be a nice add-on, such as the ability to send voice messages without making a call. → Read More
DiiFii, an energetic man-child of indeterminate age, reviews GTA: Chinatown Wars on the Nintendo DS with even more arm flailing and karate chopping than usual, which is quite an accomplishment in and of itself. → Read More
No LaVie (pictured), Hello Kitty, full flat or any other NEC computers for Non-Japanese anymore. The Tokyo-based tech giant will completely wind down its PC operations outside Nippon within the year and focus on the Japanese market instead. → Read More
Few things are are captivating as the various machinations of European politics, what with the countless measures, motions, proposals and whatnot. The latest one to interest us: the passage of a report that rejects the use of so-called “three strike” anti-piracy schemes, like the one currently being considered by France. The report, which passed the European Parliament (which sounds a lot more important than it really is, if I remember correctly—see the “democracy deficit”), says that while securing the Internet is cool and all, Europe shouldn’t do so at the expense of its citizens’ rights and freedom. → Read More
Refurbished, schmeburbished. Pick up a free BlackBerry Bold and slap the $5-per-month insurance on it if the idea of not having a brand new phone makes you queasy. The phone normally runs for $299 new or $199 refurbished with a two-year contract. Looks like the deal’s good for new AT&T customers today only. FREE BlackBerry Bold(TM) Refurb Package [AT&T via BGR] → Read More
Pretty good deal over at Amazon on a 20-inch TV for the rumpus room. The Samsung T200HD normally sells for almost $250, but a $50 mail-in rebate good until March 31st brings the price to $194.99. The TV itself has two HDMI inputs, DVI and VGA inputs, and a 1680×1050 resolution. Samsung T200HD 20-inch Touch of Color LCD HDTV [Amazon.com via dealnews] → Read More
Are you a Digital Collaborator? A Media Mover? Or maybe you’re a fearsome Ambivalent Networker? No idea what these phrases mean? (Good!) They refer to the level of technological integration in a person’s life. Someone’s who’s a Roving Node is really adept at using one piece of technology in their life—this is the type of person who e-mails all day long, and knows how to do nothing else. At the highest rung of this ladder, the Ambivalent Networkers, there is plenty of doubt about the wisdom of relying upon technology so fiercely. They’re sad clowns. → Read More
If you love your Canon EOS 5D Mark II with EF 24-105mm f/4L IS USM – and I mean really love it – why not get yourself a miniature replica of it that doubles as a 4GB USB drive? → Read More
Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children? We all had a good, nervous chuckle when Japan’s Mouse Computer released a netbook with an optical drive but remained calm, knowing that it’d never come to the US. Now it appears, however, that an ASUS Eee with a built-in optical drive will be hitting the market next month. → Read More
Online streaming music startups are in one very sorry place. On demand streaming rates range from .4 cents to 1 cent per stream – this is what the startups pay to the labels every time they play a song for a user. Add bandwidth and storage costs on top of that, which aren’t trivial for services that want to stream music quickly on demand. The result is hundreds of millions of dollars flowing from venture funds to startups to labels. Little of it makes its way to artists, and advertising revenues only cover a tiny portion of the fees.
The labels don’t care if the startups make money, lose money or go out of business. All they want is to make enough money to extend the ultimate surrender date as long as possible. That’s when we’ll finally see the economic reality dictated by the Internet impose itself irrevocably on the music industry. Unless draconian laws are created and enforced that put people in jail, or worse, for file sharing. And even that probably won’t work.
Anyway, these crazy economics are making the music startups skittish. MySpace Music, the biggest player in this space, may be spending $2 million or more per week to the music labels based on their own statistics that they’re streaming over a billion songs a week. Their streaming rate is likely to be the best in the industry, and it almost certainly isn’t lower than .4 cents per song. There is no way that they’re making that much in advertising revenue.
The hope is that downloads, ticket sales, merchandise and ring tones will make up the difference, but what we’re hearing is that very little incremental revenue is being made from these other revenue sources.
That means there’s no chance for these startups to work until the labels reduce, significantly, the streaming rates they’re charging. Or agree to radically different business models. There’s no sign that is happening any time soon.
These crazy economics are making startups do odd things. I emailed one startup recently to suggest a post here on TechCrunch noting that they seem to be doing well – recent setbacks with partners didn’t hurt traffic as much as it may have, and I wanted to note that. The startup flat out asked me not to post, because they didn’t want positive press to impact their negotiations with labels. They had to present as desperate a situation as possible.
Read that again: streaming music startups don’t want more people using their service, because they lose money from every one of them, and the perceived success from having more users makes it harder for them to plead with the labels to give them better deals. → Read More
When news came out earlier this week that mobile payments company Obopay raised another $70 million, effectively doubling its total funding raised to date, some observers were surprised at the sheer size of the round. While others expressed skepticism that mobile payments would ever really take off, at least in the U.S.
But the bigger opportunity for Obopay and mobile payments in general is not in the U.S. It is in India and other parts of the world where a large portion of the population don’t have bank accounts. These are the so-called “unbanked.” There are billions of them and their relative spending power is on an upwards trajectory. → Read More
A profanity filter that replaces swear words with baby laughter? Wholly tone-deaf happiness filter? A viral video designed to convince a demanding public that LG is actually trying? All this, and more, are available in this lumpen video from LG’s marketing department. → Read More
If the thought of turning your G1 90 degrees to the left and THEN sliding the screen up to reveal the keyboard has you chomping at the bit for an alternative input method, you’ll soon be able to use your sweaty, greasy finger to write out simple words – just like a real business man from the 1990s except you’ll be using your finger, not a stylus. → Read More
Check it out before it gets blown off the interwebs: Fizy is probably the simplest, most powerful and fastest music search engine I’ve ever seen, and that’s saying a lot. Seemingly designed for mobile browsers rather than traditional web browsers, it lets you dig up virtually any song you’re thinking of and stream it in a heartbeat.
It’ll even display an associated video if it can detect one, and you can easily share songs – which come with dedicated URLs – on a wide variety of social networking services.
That’s about all it does and it does that pretty well; I was even able to find songs from one of my favorite bands, Blackbox Revelation, which is not always the case with these types of new services. Fizy claims it can pull up about 75 billion MP3s thanks to access to over 50 different APIs, and the speed is probably the most amazing thing about it and also the main differentiator compared to the plethora of similar services. Bonus points for setting up the service with an international audience in mind: Fizy supports nearly 30 languages to date. → Read More
Intel’s new Nehalem chipset allows for hugenormous amounts of high-speed RAM, a selling point companies like Dell and Cisco are now touting in their latest high-end server systems. Microsoft Vista flavors can support up to 128GB of RAM. → Read More
Teens In Tech, a blogging network founded by 16 year old Daniel Brusilovsky, has acquired the Youth Bloggers Network (YBN). YBN consists of a network of over 100 young bloggers, and was founded by Patrick DeVivo, who is also a young entrepreneur. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but given how similar the networks are I suspect that if there was any monetary exchange it was very small – it sounds like the two networks are banding together to help establish traction.
Teens In Tech is meant to offer teenagers a simple way to blog their thoughts in an atmosphere that is both safe and receptive to their ideas. The site launched back in August in a private alpha, and has yet to open signups up to the public (Brusilovsky says that the gates will temporally open this weekend, but that it will become private once more after that). While the company had initially planned to open to the public last winter, it is currently exploring building its own CMS, and is also working to establish an advertising program for its publishers. → Read More
Hello Kitty, the cutest cartoon cat in the world and dream of millions of (mostly) Asian teenage girls, celebrates her 35th birthday soon. Reason enough for Sanrio, the Japan-based company behind Hello Kitty, and luxury brand Swarovski Crystal to produce a Hello Kitty figure of a very special kind. → Read More
