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Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 3 [TCTV]

Jon Orlin — Mon, 28 May 2012 04:15:37 +0000

In the last of our series of posts featuring daily videos from Disrupt NY, Day 3′s highlight was the final round of the Startup Battlefield presentations and the passing of the cup to the new winner UberConference. Wednesday also featured an entertaining hardware panel, an inspirational tech talk from the White House, and new beer that’s caught the interest of tech investors.

Day 3 highlights are below, but you can view Day 1 and Day 2 videos here and here.

Check out these posts from Wednesday to dig deeper:

Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 2 [TCTV]

Jon Orlin — Sun, 27 May 2012 20:00:09 +0000

Continuing our trio of daily video highlights from Disrupt NY, Day 2 of the conference featured talks with Andreesen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan, Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, and SV Angel’s Ron Conway. We also asked our Aol CEO Tim Armstrong some tough questions. Tuesday’s Battlefield competition included a startup trying to disrupt the dry cleaning business, a new way for musicians to collaborate and a neat 3D Modeling program in your browser.

Day 2 highlights can be viewed below. You can check out Day 1 highlights here and a Day 3 highlight post is coming soon.

More information about Tuesday’s highlights can be found in this articles:

Video Highlights From Disrupt NY 2012 – Day 1 [TCTV]

Jon Orlin — Sun, 27 May 2012 17:00:11 +0000

Did you miss some of our NY Disrupt conference this week? Or want to watch it again? TechCrunch Disrupt and our Hackathon provided more than 30 hours of demos, interviews, panel discussions, and Battlefield competition. Sure, you can spend the holiday weekend watching all of it. But, we’ve also put together daily video highlights that we will be publishing in a trio of posts today.

The player below shows some of the favorite moments from Monday, Day 1 of the conference, including some surprises from VC Fred Wilson, Fab.com and Tumblr. Monday’s Battlefield presentations included the first public preview from the Disrupt Cup winner and runner-up.

For more context, here are some of the posts from Monday:

Hackathon

All our Hackathon videos from Sunday can be found here.

Disrupt Music

Can’t get that Disrupt music out of your head? You can listen to and download the tracks below:

Our music was provided by New Zealand-based Smith and Keats.

Disrupt Photos

You can find hundreds of photos from the event at the TechCrunch Flickr Photostream.

Backstage at Disrupt, America’s CTO Todd Park is Giving Away Really Big Data

Semil Shah — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:00:56 +0000

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

If you feel there’s been too much hype about “big data” recently, check this out: the Chief Technology Officer of the United States of America — Todd Park — wants developers and entrepreneurs to build new products, services, and companies using free data provided by the federal government. In this brief discussion backstage at Disrupt, Park emphasizes that he, his team, and the President of the United States have all fully endorsed the idea that key datasets be made available to the public, and there have even been examples of entrepreneurs forming companies around free datasets, one that’s even hired over 70 employees. (For entrepreneurs interested in health data specifically, Park’s group is helping organize an entire symposium on the topic in early June in Washington DC; click here for more details.) For developers interested in big data sets, this brief discussion with Park would be quite relevant.

Gillmor Gang: Adventures in Medication

Steve Gillmor — Sat, 26 May 2012 17:00:40 +0000

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Keith Teare, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — explodes in opinions about Facebook IPO, Facebook privacy or lack of it, Facebook acquisition frenzy-to-be, and more Facebook, Facebook, Facebook. Surprisingly, this one goes on for a record-breaking hour and thirty-nine minutes, proving once again that size doesn’t matter. Except in electronic condoms.

Also discussed; Why G-Tar didn’t win the Techcrunch Disrupt grand prize, why Kevin Marks’ Target knockoff doesn’t come close, and why Keith Teare is a venture communist. No animals or Wall Street traders were harmed in the making of this film. As John Taschek implied, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Did I mention we talked about Facebook.

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kteare, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

Backstage at Disrupt, Greylock’s John Lilly on Building Apps for Phones vs Tablets

Semil Shah — Sat, 26 May 2012 15:00:02 +0000

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

If you’re building apps for phones or tablets, here’s a must-see discussion for you. We were able to corral Greylock’s John Lilly (who recently helped lead an investment in Instagram, right before it was acquired) backstage at Disrupt NYC earlier this week for a more casual conversation about the mobile app ecosystem and hardware. In this short talk, Lilly shared his views about the similarities and differences of building applications for mobile devices, taking care to point out that he sees many great entrepreneurs approaching the phone in a similar manner to how they approach the tablet. While the operating systems are similar on iPhone and other iOS devices (like iPad), for instance, the use cases, usage by time of day, and monetization opportunities are entirely different. Lilly encourages entrepreneurs to ask how to get their ideas on the homescreens of users’ phones and tablets.

Talking (And Rocking) With gTar Creator Incident

Jordan Crook — Fri, 25 May 2012 17:34:12 +0000

Sure, UberConference took home the Disrupt Cup and its accompanying $50,000 (giant) check. But it could be argued that Incident, makers of the gTar, had already won. The company’s Kickstarter project skyrocketed from $10,000 in funding before stepping on the Disrupt stage, to a current $220,000.

This is big, considering that Disrupt is a web/software conference and a hardware startup went all the way to the very end. Even Michael Arrington was impressed, which says quite a bit. But none were more impressed or intrigued than myself, which is why I wrangled the Incident guys together backstage and begged and pleaded to play the gTar.

Kindly, they obliged. I have no experience playing the guitar whatsoever, and my greatest claim to musical fame would be completing Free Bird on expert in Guitar Hero. Now, I won’t say my rendition of Blackbird a la gTar is the best in the world, but for having absolutely no practice or experience, my few moments with the hardware should be a testament to the gTar’s potential.

I also spoke with the founders about the difficulties of distribution, and more importantly, music licensing. Eventually the gTar app will come with a content store, from which you can buy different songs. For now however, this is a bare bones iteration that is sure to improve over time.

If you move now, you can get the gTar on Kickstarter for $50 off the expected retail price, at just $399.

Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera Opens Up About New Vs. Old Media

Jordan Crook — Fri, 25 May 2012 16:07:29 +0000

To any member of the tech media, Techmeme is the first site you visit in the morning, and the last site you check before bed. It’s a thermometer of today’s news, with more context per headline than any single news source can offer. This is the beauty of aggregation, which some more traditional media outlets frown upon.

But founder and CEO Gabe Rivera has been doing this since 2004, and has incredible insight into the differences between old media and the young guns. I grabbed him backstage during Disrupt NYC 2012 after his panel on the tech media to see how he felt about new media’s dependance on sources like The New York Times, the myth of objectivity, the difference between click bait and link bait (if there is one), and his personal source preference when he sits down with a cup of coffee to read the day’s news.

“In the area we cover, I think we could do pretty well without [traditional media],” said Rivera. “It’s a very artificial experiment but if they disappeared overnight, I think that the remaining tech sites would cover everything just fine. I think some of the financial stories would be the exception to that, but all these blogs would reorganize very quickly to cover that.”

But one of the most glaring differences between new and traditional media is their views on objectivity. While old media holds true to a bias-less existence, blogs offer news through the filter of an expert, injecting opinion when necessary. Rivera believes that the beauty of aggregation (also new media) is that you can offer both point A and point B almost simultaneously and adjacently so the reader has as much context as they desire.

In the interview, Rivera also discusses the difference between link bait and click bait, and how Twitter makes it really simple to disguise a story within the headline.

Rivera said that his personal preference changes based on the content itself. Some days he doesn’t read very much news at all, despite the fact that Techmeme reads just about everything. But on days when he’s consuming current events, it all depends on the story type and who’s breaking it.

“The site that has industry people as its target readership will contextualize in a way that’s more meaningful to me,” said Rivera. “That’s usually TechCrunch or AllThingsD. Once in a while, the New York Times will uncover the story and have enough exposure to the details first so that they have the best account. For the first half hour, at least.”

Watch Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Deliver Her Speech To Harvard Business School Graduates

Ingrid Lunden — Fri, 25 May 2012 13:14:01 +0000

It has been a week since the Facebook IPO, with a whole lot of drama in the aftermath about the glitch with Nasdaq (and the legal implications), and questions about how much traders have lost as a result, while the share price has fallen: from a start of $38 it is now $32.79 in pre-market trading. But in a speech earlier this week to the 2012 graduating class of Harvard Business School, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg steered very clear of these topics.

Instead, as you can see in the video we have embedded below, we got a pretty good (and in my opinion pretty inspiring) speech: quite a few Facebook references but not directly about the business itself, and a lot of talk about remaining honest, and the role of women at the highest level of business.

Sandberg, who was at HBS 17 years ago, joked about how at Facebook she gets asked for feedback when developers need the opinion of an older person for a new feature:

“When Dean Nohria asked me to speak here today, I thought, come talk to a group of people way younger and cooler than I am? I can do that, I do that every day, I like being surrounded by young people except when they say to me, ‘What was it like being in college without the internet?’ Or worse, ‘Sheryl, can you come here? We need to see what old people think of this feature.’”

And towards the end, in the four parting pieces of advice she gave to the class, the first was a joking, obligatory reference to her employer, and the business behind it:

“Keep in touch via Facebook; this is critical to your future success. And since we’re public now, could you click on an ad or two while you’re there?”

By and large, the speech was focused on Sandberg’s own back story and how it related to her wider message of what is important in the march to succeed in business.

Sandberg talked about how hard it was for her to find a job in Silicon Valley when she first moved there from Washington DC in 2001, not least because it was just after the first bubble crashed. “My timing wasn’t really that good,” she said. “One woman CEO looked at me and said, we wouldn’t even think about hiring someone like you.”

Sandberg also made a pretty strong emphasis on honesty. “More than anything else you will need the ability to communicate authentically,” she told the graduates.

There were also a few revealing moments if you listened closely. Her description of her work life was very telling in how close it is to the paradigm that seems to underly much of the explosion in social networking: “I try to be myself, honest about my strengths and weaknesses. It is all professional, and it is all personal, all at the very same time.”

Sometimes that will mean making mistakes and admitting them, such as her ability to accept that she could sometimes be a “bottleneck” for action in her tendency to want to be hands-on. “At Google it was really important for me to know everyone on my team,” she recalled. But that also meant that when that team grew from four to 100 she kept insisting on meeting them all. Yet her employees only told her this was a problem when she asked them about it directly.

“When you are the leader, it is really hard to get honest and good feedback,” she said.

On the subject of women, Sandberg pointed out that at the C-level, the number of women in roles is “stuck” at 15-16 percent, “and has not moved in a decade and is not growing…Gender remains an issue at the highest levels of leadership,” she noted. “We need to start talking about this and how women underestimate their abilities.”

Given the controversy around women in the world of VCs, quite a timely reminder that her words can and do apply not just in the world of business overall, but in tech specifically.

Video is embedded below, but there is also a pretty complete, but not official, transcript at Poets and Quants.

“In the Studio,” How Bizeebee’s Poornima Vijayashanker Fell in Love with Building Software

Semil Shah — Thu, 24 May 2012 19:00:17 +0000

Editor’s note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

“In the Studio” continues this week with an engineer who began programming at the end high school, double-majored in CS/EE in college, dropped out of Stanford’s graduate CS program to become the second employee at Mint.com, and after spending some time at Intuit (which acquired Mint), now has her own company focused on building software for the small-medium business market.

Poornima Vijayashanker is not your average engineer. Growing up in a household where electronics were regularly taken apart for fun, she started coding toward the end of high school and ended up majoring in CS for her undergraduate degree. After a brief stint as an R&D engineer for Synopsis, she wanted to dive into the Valley’s startup scene and elected to enroll in a master’s CS program at Stanford. It was there she initially met Aaron Patzer, the founder of Mint, and when the opportunity arose for her to join the small team, she dropped out of Stanford and helped build the company. From that experience, she ended up at Intuit, where she started plotting her next move, and now is the founder and CEO of Bizeebee, member manage software to help small business manage their customers, inventory, and a host of other services.

In addition to building her company, Vijayashanker manages to be extremely active in the startup community, giving back so much of her time and energy by speaking on college campuses to share her story and encourage students and why she thinks technology is a great professional choice. She is also an active mentor to students and has been blogging at her site Femgineer, which has been around for five years. But, that’s enough from me, you should really listen to all the wisdom she shares in this rich video discussion.

[Note: This discussion was originally taped at TechCrunch San Francisco on April 23, 2012.]

KPCB’s Chi-Hua Chien: The Next Wave Of Tech Disruption Will Hit Commerce

Colleen Taylor — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:51:01 +0000

Technology has helped to level the playing field across a wide range of industries, letting more individuals come to the table in fields such as publishing, entertainment and, of course, building web startups. And according to Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers partner Chi-Hua Chien, the next space ripe for a big tech-powered wave of democratization is commerce.

In an on-stage conversation with David Kirkpatrick at the TechCrunch NYC Disrupt conference Wednesday afternoon, Chien explained how tech has helped flatten a number of previously stratified spaces. The mid- to late-90′s saw the democratization of information — companies such as Google made data available to everyone, no matter where or who they were. After that came the democratization of distribution, with services such as Twitter and Facebook allowing anyone to broadcast their content and potentially attract an audience. The democratization of computing has occurred as well, with billions of people in the world now having access to computers because of the availability of low-cost mobile devices. Up next? The world of shopping and selling.

“We’re now entering an era around the democratization of commerce,” Chien said. The past, he said, has been about “mass aggregation,” with companies such as Safeway and Wal-Mart rising to the top of the commerce space by simply being the best at aggregating a suite of products into one space. These big companies also built up their own brand names to make shoppers feel secure in buying things from them. Today, though, we are starting to “see an unwinding of aggregation of commerce as technology starts to disrupt” the industry, Chien said.

“If you think about what a Wal-Mart does, it aggregates credibility and inventory,” Chien said. Credibility is the Wal-Mart brand name, and the inventory is simply products and storage. Today, credibility can be established by smaller players via social media, and real estate and inventory can be outsourced much easier.

Chien pointed to two Kleiner Perkins portfolio companies to illustrate this movement: Square, which he said is democratizing becoming a merchant, and Zaarly for democratizing the ability to do a particular job. In a short conversation off-stage, he told me that Gumroad is also one of the Kleiner-backed startups that is leading the way toward big commerce disruption.

Looking at Kleiner Perkins itself, Chien not surprisingly declined from discussing the lawsuit filed by investment partner Ellen Pao (the news of which TechCrunch was the first to break yesterday) during his fireside chat.

But, he did shed some light on the firm’s larger strategy, in particular its increasing focus on making digital investments, after a few years of being more well-known for making moves in the green tech space. “In the last five years, [Kleiner has] added four investing partners focusing on consumer digital,” Chien said.

SV Angel’s David Lee Is In A New York State Of Mind

Semil Shah — Wed, 23 May 2012 12:00:25 +0000

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil

SV Angel founding partner David Lee joined us backstage today for an informal discussion about a range of topics. Lee recently began writing on the new blogging platform Svbtle, sharing wisdom from his vantage point as a leader of one of Silicon Valley’s most successful early-stage funds. In this talk, Lee shares his motivations for blogging more, how he uses Foursquare as a search tool, and why Skillshare is important to the NYC tech community and could be a major platform. Toward the end of the video clip, he candidly reveals the most effective ways to get in touch with him and his partners at SV Angel, encouraging founders to send links to their products. With roughly a quarter of their portfolio in the NYC area, Lee and his partners are undoubtedly bullish about all the new companies sprouting up in the Big Apple.

SocialStock Wants To Turn Social Networking Into Real-World Rewards

Sarah Perez — Tue, 22 May 2012 21:44:47 +0000

What good is a Foursquare check-in if it doesn’t lead to a coupon or freebie? Why bother tweeting about a brand you like if they don’t acknowledge your undying love and loyalty? With TechCrunch Disrupt finalist SocialStock, those types of actions may now be rewarded…or at least that’s the company’s vision. The service, founded by Subbu Rama, aims to be a stock market for people and places which assigns a point value to users’ social networking actions. Mimicking the framework of a real stock market, those actions become shares and then those shares can turn into real-world rewards from participating business or brands.

What’s interesting about the concept behind SocialStock, is that it makes the idea of someone’s social capital – their “worth” in terms of their social networking actions, check-ins, Foursquare mayorships, tweets, etc. – portable. If you lose your Starbucks mayorship after moving away, for example, you could just turn around and buy “shares” of another local coffee shop that doles out rewards. All your hard work in being a loyal coffee-drinking local doesn’t have to go to waste.

In addition to earning shares for your activity, users are assigned a share value of their own, too. The system is based on someone’s social capital, which is determined using algorithms that measure things like the number of friends and followers you have, your history of check-ins, as well as the influence and importance of those who you’re connected to.

It’s a bit of a simpler computation than Klout’s Kscore, perhaps, which measures your reach and influence in more sophisticated ways, but then again, it’s a different system than Klout, too. Instead of handing out special “perks” only to those who have mastered gathering “influence,” SocialStock has users building up their virtual shares through their actions – a tweet, a Facebook post, or a check-in as related to a business or venue. Further down the road, other actions will be rewarded, too, like a Yelp review or even an Instagram photo.

By aggregating the actions, businesses and brands would have better insight into who their most loyal customers really are. In other words, SocialStock is taking a more holistic view of the social networking ecosystem.

There aren’t any launch partners teamed up with SocialStock for today’s debut – only the framework itself is going live. But, if the concept proves successful, participating brands could use the system to set the conversion rate on translating these stock market-like “shares” to real-world rewards. For example, 1,000 shares could be exchanged for a free latte or a free meal. And then, to earn the same reward again, the customer would have to remain loyal by tweeting, Facebooking and checking in some more.

Based in Sunnyvale, SocialStock is basically in bootstrapping mode with under $100,000 in funding from a few friends. The website is launching today as is the mobile app, which lets you discover people and places nearby that have spikes in social activity.

Disrupt Q&A

Judges: Michael Abbott (KPCB), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting), Patrick Gallagher (CrunchFund) & Charlie O’Donnell (Brooklyn Bridge Ventures)

(Note that the questions reflect a somewhat confusing pitch)

Q: Not sure I understand, is this loyalty thing? Why not pull up my Klout score? Who’s the target?
A: If you move from NY to somewhere else, you lose your social capital. With Social Stock, you can transfer the social stock to the new place.
Q: But aren’t you worth less because you can bring less people to that shop?
A: More about your importance – it’s a bet on that person.
Q: Do I get social capital dollars when I sign in?
A: Everyone gets capital based on their influence on Twitter/Foursquare, etc. Buying and selling like stock market.
Q: How are you picking social networks/how algorithm works?
A: If person has a lot of activity on Facebook, their value is higher. On Twitter, it looks at followers. Existing social graph + frequency of visits to shops.
Q: What’s the core reason for product?
A: Goal is take social capital and make it a platform.

Vinylmint Is A Jammin’ New Way For Pro Musicians To Collaborate

John Biggs — Tue, 22 May 2012 20:14:35 +0000

Vinylmint is a Norfolk-based startup that aims to assist musicians in creating their music. It’s essentially a recording studio in the cloud. You record uncompressed audio right into the computer, the service uploads it to the cloud, and then you can listen to and edit tunes in your browser. Think of it as a mixing board with microphones all over the world.

“Musicians can seamlessly store and manage their music projects from a single location,” said CEO Byron Morgan. “Whether it be a professional or amateur musician, Vinylmint easily fits into your existing production methods. Vinylmint enhances the creative experience ultimately providing our users efficiencies in speed, cost, and productivity.”

The service is launching today and there are plans for a freemium model that offers faster turnaround and more storage space. All of the founders are avid musicians who just wanted to make the process of jamming online a little better.

Click to view slideshow.

Q & A:

q: I think you did a fabulous job telling the story. I love that you’re tapping into trends that are out there. Collaboration is happening all around us. And the human desire to be on the internet is just as strong.

Where do you see the business in two or three or four years? Who pays you, and how do you build revenue around that?

A: First and foremost, accessing VM is subscription based. the other part is that the underlying tech allows individuals to share raw data files at a quick rate. That’s a scalable technology. Media and film and 3D modeling industries are looking to transfer raw data files as well as allow two remotely different systems to communicate and collaborate with one another.

That’s where VM sees an evolution.

Q: What are the barriers to entry?

A: Our API fits into those systems. It allows us to tap into their users so they can collaborate and then create content through that. It also functions as a repository for that content. Our API also allows individuals to customize the solutions to their needs. They can add productivity tools to the system, and other collaboration functionalities and add-ons. We then function as a project management tool.

Q: But what is the barrier to entry? If you discover a huge market and Apple says that they like the idea, why can’t they do it themselves?

Well, Apple confines themselves to their own devices. There are other tools that users are always trying and using and that’s where we lie, outside of the Apple universe. New tools continue to arise every day.

What kind of feedback have you had from musicians, and what’s most surprising?

I’m a music producer myself, and working with other music producers across the world, I’ve learned that the issue is wanting to be able to reach or access sounds in other places. Because that’s where new things develop. There needs to be a central location where people can access each other and collaborate and that’s essentially where VM built its niche early on.

We’re saying here’s a tool where you can now manage your products you’re creating with each other and collaborate in real time and overcome any technical obstacles you may be having like bandwidth speeds, etc.

Q: Is there a discovery aspect of this? If I’m in Namibia and want to connect with a drummer in Munich, can I do that on the site?

A: We’re in our early development but that’s part of an update in Version 1.

Q: You talked about this being subscription based. Are you planning on charging subs straight from the get-go or making it free and then charging subs?

A: It’ll be a 60-day trial period. From there, a user would pay for a container of 30 projects for $10. They can put as much as they can in that container until they have to upgrade.

Q: Why doesn’t the product exist now?

A: Competitors want to confine people to different recording systems called DOS. These sites are confining individuals to these DOS systems. We don’t want you to learn anything new. Use the tools you’re comfortable with to create your content. That’s where our value add is.

Q: Once someone has collaborated and created music, what tools do you provide for editing, exporting and format?

A: What’s currently in development is allowing them to render files from our platform. In the meantime, you can download tracks from the recorders. Then they can use ProTools or Reason to render the files and edit the files outside of the recorders. We give power to the users.

Q: Have you thought about helping musicians promote their music after they use the platform?

A: One of the cool things we’re interested in is using crowdsourcing initiatives and using the power of our content creation community to teach people who are using the site and help advertising campaigns to better promote them and our platform.

Q: Have you thought about distribution?

A: We’re currently in talks with digital distribution partners. There’s a supply chain there, and we’ve identified a place where we fit in the supply chain until we can continue to grow.

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha: “Entrepreneurs Don’t Appreciate When They’re Onto A Good Thing”

Sarah Perez — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:56:19 +0000

TechCrunch founder Mike Arrington sat down with Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha in another fireside chat at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2012 this morning. Prior to joining Sequoia Capital in 2003, Botha served as the Chief Financial Officer of PayPal during its sale to eBay, and today considers himself a champion of consumer web plays. He also sits on the board of hot startups like Eventbrite, Square, TokBox, Tumblr, and Jawbone, to name a few. And he’s an investor in other startups like Unity Technologies, a company helping developers build 3D games, as well as the interesting (and sci-fi-ish) Gene Security Network, which Botha describes as helping parents have healthy babies via in vitro fertilization.

Of course, Arrington then asked how close we were to being able to design our own babies, and Botha, taking the question seriously, answered that it was “feasible to some extent today,” but that there’s “just an ethics question.” (Oh you think?)

But the more interesting parts of the interview involved Botha’s vision for entrepreneurs building companies today, and his concerns that not enough are focused on the long road ahead.

Arrington asked Botha to expand on several earlier statements he’s made, where he encouraged tech founders not to sell too early. Botha had said that “people need to be more greedy, and more patient,” for example, and noted that Sequoia “loved being in business with entrepreneurs that want to build something enduring.” He openly pondered what the tech ecosystem would be like if companies like Facebook, Apple and Microsoft had sold out early, too.

Arrington also asked him to list other companies that had sold too early. Botha did say he would always wonder about what would have happened with YouTube had Google not acquired them. “Google has done a fantastic job,” said Botha, who also interestingly noted that YouTube was now profitable.

“Entrepreneurs don’t appreciate when they’re onto a good thing,” said Botha, “the long run can be speculator,” he said. Companies can even see 10x returns after going public, he added, saying that it took LinkedIn eight years to build its business to the scale it is today. Taking a note from Steve Jobs, Botha then encouraged entrepreneurs to build something that “makes a dent in the universe.”

One of the more controversial portions of the chat involved Botha’s discussion of Sequoia’s scout program which PandoDaily recently uncovered. Botha said that the spirit behind the program, which he described as “stealth” but not “secret,” was to give entrepreneurs the chance to make angel investments of their own before they’ve achieved liquidity. Sequoia even had internal discussions about whether or not to make a public announcement about the program, he said. The firm has “a small amount” of money invested in this program and dozens of scouts, but Botha took issue with claims that entrepreneurs didn’t know where the money was coming from. “We always wire the money,” he says, indicating that it would be hard for a startup founder to not know that Sequoia was behind the investments.

A Stroll Down Startup Alley: Bras, Coffee, And Lots Of Photo/Video Sharing

Jordan Crook — Mon, 21 May 2012 18:57:21 +0000

Everyone comes to Disrupt for the Battlefield. Of course, the panels are interesting, and few can resist a fireside chat between Fred Wilson and Michael Arrington, but the true gem of our massive conference is the Startup Alley. These companies are some of the most promising startups in the country, and with our Israeli Pavilion, the world.

This year’s batch, in particular, is above-and-beyond impressive. I caught up with a few different companies, and each one of them brings something totally different to the table.

Roaster Coaster, for example, is a coffee micro-brew subscription service that not only sends you various samples of different coffees, but educates you to the point of coffee connoisseur status. The idea is that you can be a coffee expert or a Folgers fan and still learn something new.

Runfaces enters the dangerous and crowded world of social, but with a little hand from something called video. Each user has a profile page, just as you’d expect, but all self-expression is done through video. The service is available on the web, with support for webcam and/or Vimeo and YouTube videos, with upload functionality coming over the next month. Runfaces also has an iOS app currently available in the App Store.

Speaking of video, LiveNinja is a video chat marketplace and monetization platform, which will basically allow therapists, doctors, teachers, or really anyone who makes money off of offering services via video chat, to be paid on a fully-integrated platform. The marketplace is fragmented for most of these people, who often use Google Hangouts and Skype and are then paid via PayPal. LiveNinja aims to solve that problem.

Another social network that has plopped itself down in our Startup Alley is all about the family. HatchedIt is a platform that allows family members to post a color-coded family calendar, complete with events and invitations. Parents can loop in grandparents and other relatives, and are also offered controls over which events they can see.

And if there weren’t enough social networks in the mix, Pictorious is looking to slip itself in between Instagram and Draw Something with a photo-sharing platform that fosters competition. So, essentially, users will create challenges like “planking” or “cats” and then friends will compete in the challenge by posting their best planking- or cat-related pictures.

And finally, Brayola. Perhaps it doesn’t sound so obvious, but it’s basically a bra recommendation platform. Little do men know, and women know far too well, that finding a good bra that fits is pretty damn difficult. Brayola lets you enter in information on bras you already own and love, categorize them (into buckets like sexy, everyday, and sport) and it generates a list of bras and sizes that should work for you. Oh, and you can buy direct.

We’ll choose one of the startups in the alley to participate in the Battlefield on Wednesday, and the companies you saw today will be replaced by a brand new batch of startups tomorrow.

TechCrunch Disrupt NYC LIVE: Day One! #TCDisrupt

Peter Ha — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:30:45 +0000

After months of prepping, countless run-throughs and all nighters, it’s time to get this party started. Welcome to TechCrunch Disrupt New York City 2012. I have a feeling this is going to be the best one to date.

Follow the team’s coverage here. If you’re unable to attend don’t worry, you can join the conversation on Twitter by following #TCDisrupt.

So here’s how the day breaks down:

Monday, May 21st

8:50am – 9:00am
Register for TechCrunch TechRecs

9:00am – 9:10am
Opening Remarks

9:10am – 9:20am
Welcome

9:20am – 9:40am
Fireside Chat with Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures)

9:40am – 10:00am
Founders Stories with Jason Goldberg (Fab)

10:00am – 10:30am
Building the NY Startup Ecosystem: Brooke Hammerling (BrewPR), Josh Miller (Branch), Alexis Ohanian (Y Combinator), David Tisch (Tech Stars), Jake Schwartz (General Assembly),

10:30am – 10:35am
A Special Product Announcement

10:35am – 10:50am
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

10:50am – 11:15am
When Will Fashion Tech Just Be Fashion?: Neil Blumenthal (Warby Parker), Ashley Granata (Fashism), Jennifer Hyman (Rent the Runway), Alexis Maybank (Gilt Groupe)

11:15am – 11:35am
Power Play with Tom Katis (Voxer)

11:35am – 11:55am
Fireside Chat with David Karp (Tumblr)

11:55am – 12:15pm
Fireside Chat with Brad Garlinghouse (YouSendIt)

12:15pm – 12:30pm
Power Play with Andrew Keen

12:30pm – 2:00pm
LUNCH and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

2:00pm – 2:25pm
Engineering on the Best Coast with Harry Heyman (Foursquare), Jason Pearlman (Zynga), Serkan Piantino (Facebook)

2:25pm – 2:30pm
How the Battlefield Works

2:30pm – 3:30pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 1: Disrupting Learning and Decision Making

Judges:
Josh Kopelman
David Lee
David Tisch
Spencer Wang

3:30pm – 3:45pm
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

3:45pm – 4:45pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 2: Disrupting Processes

Judges:
Adrian Aoun
Fritz Lanman
Dave Samuel
Michelle Zatlyn

4:45pm – 5:00pm
BREAK and BROWSE STARTUP ALLEY

5:00pm – 6:00pm
Startup Battlefield: Session 3: Disrupting Media

Judges:
Chris Fralic
Shana Fisher
MC Hammer
Ron Palmeri

6:00pm – 7:30pm
Browse Startup Alley

9:00pm – midnight
After Party hosted by Getaround
Greenhouse
150 Varick Street
Conference badge required for admission

Backstage With The Disrupt NYC Hackathon Winners: Thingscription, PoachBase, & PractiKhan

Colleen Taylor — Mon, 21 May 2012 03:40:52 +0000

The speaker schedule for TechCrunch’s Disrupt NYC conference has been set for a while now, but three brand new presenters were just added to the lineup: The winners announced earlier today at the finale of this past weekend’s 24 hour Disrupt 2012 Hackathon, Thingscription, PoachBase, and PractiKhan.

Since the winning apps were so seriously awesome — and we have a very, very small sadistic bent (most of these people had not slept for at least 24 hours at this point, so a video interview with bright lights was especially fun) — we pulled aside all three winning teams for interviews with TechCrunch TV backstage.

Embedded above you can see our chat with the people who built the Hackathon’s first place winner, ThingScription, a platform to let people get subscriptions for deliveries of potentially any consumer good.

And in the videos below, you’ll first find our interviews with three members of the five-person team that built the second-place Hackathon winner PoachBase, a web app for finding the most poach-able potential hires in the tech industry. Below that is the developer behind the third-place winner PractiKhan, an app that lets teachers create online lessons and tests utilizing content from Khan Academy.

TC/Gadgets Webcast: Live From Disrupt NYC

John Biggs — Sun, 20 May 2012 22:14:57 +0000

This week we recorded live from the show floor at Disrupt NYC. We sat through 24 hours straight of hot-rod hacking at the Hackathon and now we’re preparing for the main show and, most important, the brand new Hardware Alley where we’ll have loads of great hardware start-ups for you guys to check out.

In this episode we talk about Disrupt, the new EVO 4G LTE, and the rumors of the four-inch iPhone. We also talk about the “thumb touches anywhere on the screen” iPhone chestnut, how good the battery life is on some Android phones, the late night Nerf wars at the hackathon, and my horrible sausage fingers.

Tune in today and look for another episode next week from the show floor.

Morning, Hackers! The 24-Hour Disrupt NYC Hackathon: Coding Ends, Judging Starts Soon

Chris Velazco — Sun, 20 May 2012 14:53:45 +0000

It’s been a long, caffeine-fueled ride for the hundreds of hackers who have set up at our big Disrupt NY 2012 Hackathon, but the furious process of taking a wild idea and turning it into something real is finally winding down.

Projects were being finalized, UIs were being tweaked, last minute Red Bulls were being downed — it was a quite a sight to see everyone buckling down for those final few minutes before submissions were due.

It’s almost like a weight has been lifted off everyone’s shoulders though, and more than a few people have chosen to let off some of their stress-fueled steam by running around with the arsenal of Nerf guns we’ve left strewn about.

Oh, but it’s not over yet.

Now that everyone’s hacks have been collected, they’ll all start to take the stage here at Pier 94 and present the fruits of their hard work to our panel of judges. The chosen winners will then have the chance to present their projects at the Disrupt main stage in front of all of our wonderful attendees (but only after they get a few days to catch up on their sleep). On top of that, our API sponsors will be handing our prizes of their own, ranging from cold hard cash to a free Windows Phone.

The Hackathon finals are set to begin in just a few moments, so stay tuned for all the action!

Click to view slideshow.

Disrupt NYC is set to be one of our biggest shows yet, with returns from Michael Arrington and MG Siegler, along with a variety of big names like Marissa Mayer, Sarah Tavel, Fred Wilson, and David Lee and more. It’s going to be huge.

If you’re interested in checking out Disrupt and/or the Hackathon yourself, tickets are still on sale here and info on the Hackathon can be found here. Companies who want to join the Battleground can apply for the last remaining spots in Startup Alley. You can find the full agenda here.