Erick Schonfeld is the Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. He oversees the editorial content of the site, helps to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produces TCTV shows, and writes daily for the blog. He is also the father of three adorable children.
He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving media property.
Prior to TechCrunch, he was Editor-at-Large for Business 2.0 magazine, where he wrote feature stories and ran their main blog, The Next Net. He also launched an online video series with CNN/Money and hosted regular panels and conferences of industry luminaries.
Schonfeld started his career at Fortune magazine in 1993. In 1999, he won the prize for best information technology submission at London’s Business Journalist of the Year Awards, and in 2001 he won the prize for best space submission at the Aerospace Journalist of the Year Awards in Paris. In 1996 and 1997, Schonfeld was recognized in the TJFR Business News Reporter’s list of the best and brightest financial journalists under the age of 30.
He appears regularly on CNBC, CNN, and NY1, and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences.
Schonfeld graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University in 1993.
Earlier today, Barry Diller introduced Aereo, a company backed by IAC, at a press conference in New York City. Aereo streams broadcast TV to your browser and provides a DVR in the cloud by miniaturizing TV antennas and packing them in equipment that sits on the network. In the video above, which we took at the event, you can see Diller’s opening remarks and part of CEO Chaitanya Kanojia’s presentation. At the end, I grabbed Diller on camera to ask him how does this expand beyond just broadcast channels to cable and beyond. → Read More
Silicon Valley thrives on change. At TechCrunch, we chronicle change, honor it, and, lately, we’ve been living it. As we rebuild TechCrunch, it’s the talent of our writers that sets us apart. We are adding two new names to the editorial staff: Ingrid Lunden starts today as a TechCrunch writer and Colleen Taylor will soon join us as our TechCrunch TV reporter.
Lunden is an American writer living in London. She was most recently at PaidContent, which was just bought by GigaOm. In fact, the GigaOm deal went down the same day Lunden signed on with us. I can tell you that made for interesting negotiations. → Read More
Barry Diller always enjoys riling the media industry from which he sprang. A few minutes ago at a press conference at IAC headquarters in New York City, Diller introduced a new startup IAC is backing called Aereo that is building a DVR in the cloud that broadcasts live TV to your iPad, computer, or TV. Diller has always believed that Internet TV would be a healthy counterweight to “media concentration” as media companies increasingly want “to protect that closed system.”
The problem with Internet TV so far, says Diller, is that “there wasn’t a lot to watch” other than “cats swinging from chandeliers.” → Read More
Shares of Apple (AAPL) closed above $500 today for the first time, ending the day at $502.60. Apple, the world’s most valuable company, now boasts a market capitalization of almost $470 billion. That is up 9 points from yesterday’s close, and up more than 80 from where the stock was the day Apple announced its impressive quarter on January 24th. Everybody was blown away by the numbers.
The $500 mark is a psychological milestone. But many Apple bulls have been predicting it. What you need to look at really is the market cap. → Read More
British video search company Blinkx saw its stock spike briefly this morning, following an announcement that it will power AOL’s video search. AOL is one of the largest video destinations on the Web, with about 450 million video views per month according to comScore.
Blinkx will also incorporate AOL’s premium videos in its own search engine. (Presumably, that will include TCTV videos, since we are owned by AOL). Blinkx itself attracts 55 million U.S. video searchers a month. AOL’s video properties are watched by about 40 million unique viewers (comScore), so the deal could significantly expand blinkx’s reach. → Read More
Two weeks ago at the Crunchies, Dan’l Lewin, Microsoft’s top executive in Silicon Valley, came up to me and handed me a Nokia Lumia 800 Windows Phone. It was out of the box, fully charged, and ready to go—alive in my hand. It’s a beautiful phone. Thin, solid, bevelled, and bright. Later that evening, I pulled it from my pocket and I’ve been playing with it ever since. This is not the first Windows phone I’ve seen, but it is the first one that’s made a lasting impression. → Read More
The News Corp. phone-hacking scandal continues to spiral out of control, sweeping up more and more of the companies employees and executives. In the UK, 8 people were arrested, including five News Corp journalists, in the broadening scandal, which may embroil deputy COO James Murdoch—Rupert’s son and heir-apparent. A paper copy of a deleted email found in a crate ties James Murdoch directly to the events under investigation, which involved the routine and illegal hacking of phone voicemails on behalf of a News Corp publication.
This email evidence would never have been found if it wasn’t printed out because News Corp, like many corporations, regularly deletes archived emails. It is standard practice, but the technical reasons given for deleting emails are usually not the real reason they are eliminated. The only real reason to destroy old emails is to avoid liability and future lawsuits. → Read More
It’s February, which means Toy Fair in New York City. Every year, Mind Candy CEO Michael Acton Smith comes to town to peddle his little monsters. Those would be Moshi Monsters, one of the largest social game sites for kids 6 to 11, with 10 million monthly visitors. It’s huge in the UK, and this year Smith is going to make a major push into the U.S.
And it’s not just online. Moshi Monsters are finding their way into all sorts of kids merchandise, including collectible toy figurines (more than 20 million sold in the UK alone last year), plush dolls, games, the No. 1 kids magazine in the UK, mobile apps, and even temporary tattoos. → Read More
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason just finished his first post-IPO earnings calls with Wall Street analysts. (We covered it live and looked at the numbers). “We believe we are on the cusp of a sea change” in behavior, he noted. “We’re about to see what technology can do for local commerce.”
Listening to the call, I’d say his performance was mixed. He sounded a little nervous at first, but warmed up to the task just as he did during the IPO roadshow, joking with the analysts that one of the most requested features Groupon hears from customers to “stop sending me pole-dancing deals.” → Read More
Groupon just announced its first earnings report after going public last October (it missed, read our liveblog of the earnings call here.). For the full year, Groupon’s revenues were $1.6 billion, up 419 percent. The daily deal company, however, lost $350 million, most of that attributable to its very aggressive international expansion (7,000 out of its 10,000 employees are overseas). In North America, it turned an operating profit of $22 million, which was counteracted by $137 million in international operating losses.
For the quarter, revenues were $506 million, up 194 percent. The net loss was $42.7 million, which at least was down from $379 million quarterly net loss the year before. We’ll be doing our liveblog of the earnings call here. → Read More
Before big data was a hot investing theme, Roger Ehrenberg was one of the first seed investors to focus almost exclusively on startups using data as a competitive edge. His NYC-based fund, IA Ventures, has backed companies such as Billguard, Coursekit, DataSift, Next Big Sound, Simple, ThinkNear, and Yipit. His first fund, raised in 2010, was a $50 million seed fund. Now, IA Ventures just raised $105 million to double down on data plays in Fund II. → Read More
Blip.tv is going through some changes, with founder Mike Hudack gone and a search for a new CEO still ongoing. But the company raised a $6 million C round from its two main investors in December, and now just added to that with another $6 million credit facility from Silicon Valley Bank. There is also a new logo, and the company is now called just Blip.
So how is the indie Web video distribution service doing? “We essentially doubled revenue in 2011,” reports COO Steve Brookstein. → Read More
Yahoo has its new CEO, Scott Thompson, and founder Jerry Yang stepped down from the company and the board a few weeks ago. But all along, people have been asking when is the rest of the Yahoo board going to resign?
Well, that day is today for four more directors, including chairman Roy Bostock. He was sticking around to try to oversee the disposition of Yahoo’s Asian assets. It doesn’t look like that is going so well. Today, in his letter to shareholders, Bostock disclosed that he would not be standing for re-election to the board, and neither would 3 other directors. Meanwhile, Yahoo elected two new board members: Maynard Webb and Alfred Amoroso. → Read More
Brands love marketing across social media, but it is a little like TV advertising in that it is hard to measure how effective it is. Sure, you can count retweets, likes, and Klout scores, but how does that translate into real engagement with a brand or actual spending? SocialFlow is trying to answer these questions, and in the process is growing like crazy.
“I don’t know who put the call out to put money into social media, but it is out there,” says CEO Frank Speiser. A year ago, Socialflow had two employees. Today, it has 34. “We have 5,500 leads active and qualified,” says Speiser. “I just need people to work the phones.” → Read More
All the major map apps like Google Maps, Bing Maps, and Mapquest have walking directions as a standard feature, but the folks at Lumatic don’t think they are good enough. It is creating mobile maps designed for pedestrians, cyclists, and people who use public transit. Originally a TechStars company called Omniar, serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer (MyBlogLog, Lookery, Mashery) joined as CEO a year ago.
He recently raised a seed round of $800,000 from Joi Ito’s Neoteny Labs, 500 Startups, Chamath Palihapitiya, Allen Morgan, Ted Rheingold, and other angels. → Read More
Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion.
Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. → Read More
Following in the tradition of “Shit Silicon Valley Says” and other Shit ______ Says memes, August Capital’s David Hornick has made “Shit VCs Say.”
There are some gems in here, including: → Read More
Yammer grew like crazy last year. How crazy? Product VP Jim Patterson just tweeted out the Yammer 2011 Year in Review infographic below with the comment: “Pretty much everything tripled.”
Paid seats went from 300,000 to 800,000, total users went from 1.6 million to 4 million (2.5X growth), and employees went from 80 to 250. Also, all told, 200,000 companies are using Yammer, including 85 percent of the Fortune 500 (and TechCrunch). → Read More
We learned a lot of things about Facebook today from its IPO filing. But there is one detail that sticks out for its improbable exactness: The $1.000 billion in profits Facebook reported for 2011.
The number wasn’t $998 million. It wasn’t $1.003 billion. It was $1.000 billion right on the dot. → Read More
Facebook just filed its IPO registration (SEC doc here) and its financials are off the charts. Facebook’s IPO document provides the first peek at its financials.
The company did $3.7 billion in revenues in 2011, and $1 billion in profits. That’s right. Net income was $1 billion. Profits grew 65 percent last year from $606 million in 2010. And revenues grew 88 percent. → Read More
