Eric Eldon is the Co-Editor of TechCrunch.
He was previously the cofounder and editor of Inside Network, where he managed publications including Inside Facebook, Inside Social Games and Inside Mobile Apps.
Before that, he spent a couple years covering technology and finance at VentureBeat, a leading Silicon Valley publication where he was the first employee.
While Inside Network sold to WebMediaBrands for $14 million in May of 2011, Eric also had a failed startup a few years ago. Called WriteWith, it offered online writing collaboration software.
Before getting into the tech world, Eric attended Stanford University and graduated with a degree in international relations in 2005. There, he reported and edited news for The Stanford Daily student newspaper, and ran its business for a year.
If you’re familiar with Jonathan Heiliger’s work, it’s probably because you used Facebook sometime in the last five years. He was the person in charge of keeping the site online as it grew from 35 million to more than 800 million users. Or, maybe you’ve encountered his efforts over the past decade and half when you logged online — because he helped build some of the core technologies and businesses that ran sites like Yahoo, starting fresh out of high school in the 90s.
Next time you hear about him, it might also be because of the next hot company that blows up in Silicon Valley. But this time he’ll be one of its investors. He’s joining North Bridge Venture Partners today, a firm that has quietly distinguished itself by focusing on infrastructure and enterprise startups over the last two decades. → Read More
In the annals of celebrities investing in tech startups, this one’s looking especially smart. Bono and The Edge, the singer and lead guitarist of Irish rock band U2, got into Dropbox’s $250 million second round last year, they said in a tweet today.
It’s the first individual, publicly announced startup investment for the vocalist, to our knowledge. And unlike grandly-conceived social media startups or late-stage investments that celebrities have gone after in recent years, Dropbox is still in its early days. I imagine some khakis-and-blue-shirt VCs are a little jealous of the multiples ahead. → Read More
As the dust settles after Zynga’s purchase of New York mobile social game developer OMGPOP, the company is visibly taking on a new shape. A 25% larger and more mobile one. That’s the percentage growth of its total daily active user base, when you add in the 14.6 million people playing mobile sketching app Draw Something to its existing 55 million players.
The game has gone from 1.7 million to 14.6 over the month of March, based on app tracking service AppData. Today, it’s nearly the combined size of Zynga’s two biggest hits on Facebook, CityVille and Texas Hold’em Poker.
Which means Draw Something’s share of the market is likely to grow in the coming months. CityVille was launched at the end of 2010, and Poker years before. Zynga has milked them along, and will no doubt continuing doing so far into the future. But, they’re never likely to grow significantly beyond their current sizes, based on the overall lifecycle of these games. → Read More
There are plenty of observations to be made about Y Combinator’s Demo Day. It’s the biggest ever, with 66 companies in this Winter class. It’s more diverse than past years, with many companies being led by women and people of color. And the audience, packed in at the Computer History Museum, is about as high-quality as you get at these sorts of things. It’s full of Silicon Valley elite, plus other investors and executives who have flown in from around the country and the world.
But the thing that is sticking out the most is the nature of the products being launched. Out of the 39 companies presenting on the record today, 15 are mobile-first by my count. → Read More
From the outside, Dropbox looks occupied with launches these days. It came out with a big redesign this month, then followed up quickly with a new way to share files with Facebook friends. But the company is busy with a lot of internal growth, too. It recently moved into big new offices down the street from us in the tech-heavy SOMA district of San Francisco, and has been busy hiring elite engineers (or buying them, like it did with the recent acquisition of Cove).
It also has the added challenge of bonding the team together in the middle of the action, trying to maintain its startup culture. So it took the idea of a hackathon — usually a 24-hour event where developers compete to build small projects — and turned it into a full week in early March. → Read More
Widely read designer Dustin Curtis has come up with a new blogging platform called Svbtle, that’s meant to help you take blog posts from ideas to well-presented articles. At first, it looks like a better Tumblr, based on the work he showed off on Thursday. And in fact it looks so good that a couple developers forked it within hours, and offered new versions for the world to install.
Which, in turn, sparked a big debate about the rights that creatives have over their work… I’m going to skip over all that because it’s not a new topic, and it misses the point. → Read More
Let’s say you’re in a serious relationship, but you work all the time and you’re long-distance. How do you stay close to the other person? I’ve personally had this situation for the last year and a half. My girlfriend and I use Skype, email, our phones, Facebook, and everything else we can to stay connected. We’ve even been using Instagram as a two-person social network to share photos about what we’re up to each day.
But now there’s an app to solve this exact problem. It’s called Pair, and it’s packed with the features you see in private social networks like Path, but designed for two people. → Read More
Life is painful for those of us who try to manage our daily workload in Gmail. The stars, the labels and filters, Google’s inaccurate “Priority Inbox” ranking system, the extensions… well, they all sort of help out. But my inbox is still a mess and yours probably is, too. Until someone comes up with a vastly superior communication protocol (one of those frighteningly ambitious problems), a new startup called Streak is trying to create order from the inside.
Part of last year’s summer Y Combinator class, the company is bringing customer relationship management (CRM) functionality directly into Gmail. Right now, most people who are trying to track customers are using separate systems (Gmail plus SalesForce, for example). The process of forwarding emails into these systems or replying out of them via email requires extra work on the part of the user. → Read More
The big Twitter redesign at the end of last year seemed to mean that the company was ditching power users to get more mainstream. The website and the mobile apps added “Connect” and “Discover” pages to help new users find interesting people and topics. But the unified new interface buried direct messages and other features that long-time users had grown to rely on.
However, Twitter has not forgotten about its devoted base of hardcore users. You know, the types who like to do things like DM, or make custom lists of 0ther users to track. It’s working on “next generation” mobile apps under the Tweetdeck brand. → Read More
There are plenty of companies trying to create new forms of group texting or social networking. There are far fewer who are trying to offer a messaging service that crosses the web, email and mobile devices in a seamless way. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example, but its utility is social — you might not want to use it for work, or for organizing your kids’ little league game, or for communicating with the parents of a class you’re teaching.
Enter SendHub, a startup in this year’s Y Combinator class, that has already started to get some serious traction by focusing on professionals. The company offers a clean interface for creating and organizing groups of people, and communicating back and forth with them over their desired format. → Read More
Twitter has been working hard over the last year to make photo sharing a core part of its product, taking over the photo-hosting role from third parties and gaining deep new integration with Apple’s iOS. But there’s also a big new winner coming up on top of its developer platform — mobile photo-sharing app Instagram.
New stats provided to us by social photo aggregator Pixable show how this trend played out at the South By Southwest conference in Austin last weekend. → Read More
Employees of hot web companies like Facebook have been selling shares to private investors for years, and a few firms have jumped in to take advantage of the situation.
So naturally the Securities and Exchange Commission has taken an interest, too. After a lengthy investigation into the budding industry — and ahead of a big Facebook initial public offering — it’s going after two stealthy financial groups as well as popular private market SharesPost. → Read More
Venture firms like to pull in experienced founders to become entrepreneurs in residence — people who typically come in without a clear idea of what they want to do, who may simply be tasked with thinking up a new company.
Y Combinator is now bringing this type of free-form entrepreneurialism to its seed-stage fund. With a twist. → Read More
Somewhere off in the future, there will be a mobile app that shows you all of the nearby people who you might find interesting — without you having to click a single button to check in. But we’re not there yet, as thousands of South By Southwest attendees have been discovering over the last few days.
New background location apps like Highlight and Glancee have certainly been trying hard. As everyone else has partied, the tiny teams at these startups (and their various rivals) have been working around the clock to tweak the notifications they send and the nearby people they show.
Have they been successful? → Read More
Whatever you think about Dropbox‘s place in the future of communication, the company has been on a roll this year. Following up on a big redesign last week, which cleaned up navigation, search, and photos, chief executive Drew Houston got on stage last night at South By Southwest to talk about its early days, and where it’s going next.
First, the newsy bits. The company was profitable last year, he said yesterday, even though 96% of its 50 million-some users are on the free version. And, he confirmed that it had been valued at the $4 billion valuation that Arrington had heard around when it closed its massive $250 million round last fall. While he didn’t talk revenue, he said that more and more of its free users were moving to larger storage plans and starting to pay. → Read More
There are lots of apps for finding the right people and parties at South By Southwest this year, but what about, you know, actually going to panels and sharing your thoughts about them? Well, there’s Twitter for short-form public sharing, and messaging apps like GroupMe for group chats. But HackPad has a more serious idea: actually taking notes about the panels and keynotes you go to, with other people who care.
It sounds dangerously productive for the fun-oriented event. And it is — this is one of the better live group word-processing products I’ve seen in a while. → Read More
Imagine you’re walking by your local cafe, and you get a notification on your phone that you’ll get a free bagel if you buy a cup of coffee. You walk inside, and make the purchase with your credit card — no need to take out your phone again. The bagel rings up as “free,” and you get a notification from your bank confirming you’ve received the discount.
All of this payments and loyalty interchange can happen over the cloud. A lot of companies are trying to get their arms around mobile payments. Many of them, trying to make your phone itself act as the credit card. Google with Wallet, Square, PayPal, American Express, everybody who’s experimenting with NFC. → Read More
There are a few use cases for using hot background location app Highlight, cofounder Paul Davison explains to me. You just met someone and you want them to find out more about you. You want to note that someone is particularly interesting for future reference. And, you want to see which friends are nearby, or have recently left.
The app is getting a set of updates today that should make it more useful in all of these situations. → Read More
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.” → Read More
Let’s say you want to use your phone to find interesting new people or reconnect with nearby friends — without revealing your exact location. Glancee is the app for you, particularly if you’re an Android user. And the polished competitor to Highlight is getting a big update today, ahead of South By Southwest. The changes should please the people who want what it already offers.
The most obvious alteration since I covered the app last month is a nod to location precision. The Radar feature now shows you how many “steps away” somebody is, as measured in number of feet. Before, you’d see people as either “nearby” or as X number of miles away. While subtle, the difference could make it easier for connections to happen. If you only have to walk a few feet to meet someone, you’re more likely to do it than walk half a mile, particularly if you’re in the middle of a giant party in Austin, Texas. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
