![Term Sheet Gavel_thumb[3]](http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/term-sheet-gavel_thumb3.jpg?w=288 "Term Sheet Gavel_thumb[3]")
At some point in the game, every entrepreneur and startup founder becomes familiar with the term sheet. But “familiarity” can be a tricky qualifier. Even by one’s third startup, entrepreneurs are not always fully aware of the ins and outs of every term on a term sheet, or how to properly value their company. Just ask GRP Partner Mark Suster.
What’s more, there’s the legalese and the anxiety that VCs might sneak in some tricky terms — which all work towards making the process a confusing pain in the ass. No one wants to get duped, and entrepreneurs are always looking for better ways to compare term sheets with others in the space to get a sense of how founder-friendly terms are, what language should be agreed to, which should be negotiated, etc. → Read More
In case you’re still using Google+ (I kid, I kid, the other social network is doing well, apparently), the Google+ team has made it easy to “share” your Circles with friends today, by enabling an option to send other users a list of Circle members on your Google+ Circles page.
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Since we first caught wind of the HTC Vigor, things have been blurry. And I don’t just mean leaked photos — we’ve been back and forth on a few different features like display resolution, or whether or not it’ll be a Droid-branded handset.
But for a handset with such an air of mystery, our latest leak has really spilled the beans. → Read More
Last Friday, Amazon sent out invites to a press conference being held this coming Wednesday. They didn’t give away any details in the invite, but given our scoop earlier this month, everyone assumed it was to unveil the new Kindle tablet. We can now confirm this is correct. And we know a bit more.
On Wednesday morning in New York City, Amazon will unveil the Kindle Fire. Yes, this is the name Amazon has settled on, to help differentiate the product from the e-ink Kindles, which will still be very much alive and for sale. And while Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos will show off the Fire on stage, it won’t be ready to ship until the second week of November, we’ve learned. → Read More
This week the lads show off some of the latest gear in their collections including the new Logitech Harmony remote that allows you to surf TV on your iPad. We also talk about the new Kindle coming on Wednesday, Devin’s monastic cell, and the strange jumping muscle spasms that John has been experiencing lately.
We also marvel that we’ve been able to do three whole podcasts in as many weeks.
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You can call T-Mobile a lot of things, but “awesome at keeping secrets” probably wouldn’t be one of them.
This morning at GigaOm’s Mobilize conference, T-Mobile announced details surrounding two phones: the HTC Amaze 4G (which was exhaustively leaked a few weeks back), and their version of the Samsung Galaxy S2 (which was announced, but not fully detailed, last month.) → Read More
Launching this week at Health 2.0 is a startup called, WellnessFX, which offers a simple value proposition: It wants to help average people take charge of their health. As the medical industry expands daily and more and more health and wellness data is driven online, it’s become increasingly difficult for people to collect, organize, manage, and interpret their own medical data — to both make decisions regarding their health and see actual results.
WellnessFX was founded in April 2010 and raised $1.85 million in seed funding from Voyager Capital and FLOODGATE (as well as a handful of other angels) the following November. Since then, the startup has been in stealth, flying under the radar, iterating, testing, and becoming HIPAA compliant. → Read More
You may recall that two months ago, we found and leaked Facebook’s iPad app. What was especially awesome is that the entire app was buried in the code for Facebook’s iPhone app, you just had to do a few tricks to enable it. Once Facebook realized what we found, they took moves to try and shut it down. But it was too late. The app was out there, and looked pretty close to complete. In fact, it turns out it was feature complete at that point.
On his personal blog today, developer Jeff Verkoeyen reveals that Facebook’s iPad app has been feature complete since May. How does he know? He built it. He was the lead engineer on the project. He had been working on it for 8 solid months — sometimes as much as 80 hours a week, he says, to get it done in time. But Facebook’s definition of “in time” kept shifting, Verkoeyen says. And that led him to quit the social network, and join rival Google. → Read More
At Disrupt NYC in May, a startup called Meporter launched its location-based news app that enables every man, woman, and child to write, photograph, and record their own video of local news — as it breaks. Of course, recording will only take you so far. Meporter also allows users to share those very stories they cover with any Internet-connected and mobile-device-carrying person on the planet. Using Meporter, all those with iOS devices could easily use them to take a picture, make a video, and write their own story — becoming their own one-man or one-woman New York Times or TechCrunch — in a matter of minutes. Of course, we can’t recommend trying to become your own TechCrunch, but it’s theoretically possible. → Read More
We’re not exactly surprised. As we predicted in May, according to Twitter is setting up its European HQ in Dublin (in fact this is its third international office outside the Valley). The reasons are simple: money.
Following the long- tradition of US companies in Europe (joining Google, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, PayPal, LinkedIn, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel, Apple, HP and Zynga) Ireland’s 12% corporation tax, and 45 minute flight from London (where corporation tax is 28%) is just too tempting not to take advantage of. One annual board meeting later and you can be back at you Mayfair pad in one day. → Read More
“Remind me to watch the Doctor Who season finale this Saturday.”
If new reports are to be believed, then the iPhone 5′s new Assistant functionality can take voice input like that and automagically convert it into an entry in iOS 5′s Reminders app. 9to5Mac’s sources have come forward with boatloads of new details about Apple’s attempts to shoehorn voice commands into iOS, and if true, they paint quite the compelling picture. → Read More
U.S. President Barack Obama is scheduled to make a stop with professional social network LinkedIn, at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View today to chat about job creation and the economy from LinkedIn members. The meeting will feature questions from a live audience, as well as questions from thousands contributed by LinkedIn members over the past week. For the past year or so, LinkedIn has taken a number of deep data dives on the profile information of its 120 million members to highlight trends. Today, the network has developed an infographic that examines the economic opportunity and growth in industries from LinkedIn’s members over the past two years.
For example, LinkedIn says that there have been 7.4 million job changes or starts of its members since 2009. The top industries for these changes are higher education, healthcare, information technology, and marketing and advertising.
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At last week’s Facebook developers conference, f8, the company introduced the radically redesigned profile page now called the Facebook Timeline. Instead of a single column stream of status updates, shares and photo uploads, the new Timeline provides a deeper look into your past.
You navigate your Timeline through right-side navigation that lets you click into the months and years all the way back to the day of your birth. And with the new “life events” menu next to the revamped status update box, you can fill in the missing pieces of your life’s history, including marriage(s), divorce, births and deaths, job changes, moves, medical events, achievements, travels and anything else you want to record. (The latter thanks to the “other life event” option for anything that’s not already listed in Facebook’s provided drop-downs).
The end result, for those who take the time to go back and carefully document their past, is an online digital scrapbook reflecting the major moments of your life. It’s easy to do, and the results are compelling. But will you ever be able to pull that data back out of Facebook? Or will it be trapped in there forever? → Read More
Six days ago, Instagram pushed version 2.0 live in the App Store. A big time upgrade with a focus on the camera, co-founder and CEO Kevin Systrom expected signups to pick up some significant steam. But it was more like they caught fire.
Over the weekend, Instagram was seeing a signup rate of over one new user a second — roughly 75 per minute, Systrom says. This pushed them past the 10 million user milestone. → Read More
“It’s an honor to serve”, America’s Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra, told me when I caught up with him at AT&T’s gleaming new Foundry innovation center in Palo Alto last week. Appointed by President Obama as American’s first CTO in 2009, Chopra laid out for me three priorities for driving technological innovation in America. The first is building what he calls “smart infrastructure” for the digital age. The second is establishing clear “rules of road” for critical issues like security and intellectual property protection in an increasingly Internet centric economy. And the third is leaping over what he calls “the productivity gap” to create digital jobs in the future. → Read More
This is a guest post by Mike O’Neill, Technical Director of Baycloud Systems, which develops scalable cloud based systems that address privacy issues, such as CookieQ, a web application that delivers a Cookie Consent button to any web page.
The Internet, driven by technological innovation and the free market, has brought huge benefits. But freedom without responsibility or accountability simply leads to chaos and lawlessness. People are losing trust in on-line commerce as increasingly they find their personal information being harvested and sold without their knowledge or consent, and realise that the “free” services offered to them are in exchange for becoming the product, not the purchaser.
Can’t get enough of that Facebook Timeline? Want to copy it wholesale in your own Wordpress blog? Do you want to support an “Italian boy” named Julian? I bet you do.
We just got this excellent tip from Julian describing the process by which he created this very own theme, the aptly-named “Timeline-wp.” He wants no beef with Facebook and, while I find the adoption of an established megacompany’s brand and image slightly unbecoming and/or dangerous even for a private blog (and a bit shortsighted as Facebook will probably tear this design up by the time the next f8 rolls around), you can download and install the theme today at no cost to you. → Read More
Back in May, a sort of revolution started in the London tech scene. You see, London is a special place. It has massive industries in the shape of the financial sector and the media industry (like the BBC) right on its doorstep, so any fresh new talent is often attracted to these established industries and their nice cozy salaries. But in May a leading startup of the area Songkick brought together 45 startups the first “Silicon Milkroundabout”, a job fair organized by the startup community in East London. The event was a great success. And now it’s back. → Read More
Head down into the bunkers and lock the door, friends — there be flamewars a comin’.
Nielsen released a new mobile research report this morning, with at least one big landmark stat within: over the past 3 months, Android has pulled in over twice as many new smartphone buyers as the iPhone. → Read More
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